Slate has an interesting explanation for why train systems in the US look the way they do:
The existing rule, sadly, evaluates proposals almost exclusively on the basis of how much time a new rail line shaves off commutes. But taking a train station-to-station rather than driving a car door-to-door is guaranteed to be slower unless traffic jams are severe. This has biased new mass-transit construction in favor of a very particular kind of project: First identify a highway that’s already extremely congested and where widening it is either politically or logistically impossible. Then build commuter-rail tracks in the highway median. Put the stations far apart from one another so that trains can cruise at maximum speed for a long time. Surround the stations with parking lots. Driving your car to a park-and-ride station and taking the train downtown is now cheaper and perhaps faster than the average trip on the congested highway.
Mass transit vs. highways: The Department of Transportation rule that is killing American cities. - Slate Magazine
Interesting piece from Mediaite on Buzzfeed Politics: “Buzzfeed’s coverage of the Presidential race is deliberately non-traditional, and likely wouldn’t work as well with an issue that couldn’t presume the same baseline of knowledge from its audience. Nor will it take long for other outlets to mimic what they’re doing; campaign coverage moves and evolves quickly. But Buzzfeed has a head start – smart reporters, savvy infrastructure.” I haven’t spent too much time there yet, but the concept certainly sounds different.
What BuzzFeed’s New Politics Team Is Doing Right | Mediaite
Good perspective on why posts like “it’s time for Congress to learn about the internet” aren’t actually helpful. “If Congress is complaining that they don’t know about something that you care about, the right answer isn’t to tell them to go get educated. The right answer is to educate them. Congress mentioned the word ‘biologics’ 75 times in a month because a lobbyist spent a long time doing their job: educating members of Congress on the needs of its industry.” Generally I like these sort of things because it’s easy to spout off about how things should change, but more interesting to understand how to actually change them. But there’s something else here I really like: When someone doesn’t understand something you should try to make it easier to understand, not lambaste them for not getting it. Not that I think Congress doesn’t need to brush up on some web stuff, but we, as the web, also need to brush up on our explanations of why it matters and how it works (without all the hyperbole normally attached to it).
Information Diet | Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works
I’ve been taking some time over the Thanksgiving break to catch up on my Instapaper queue, so I’ll probably be posting links to some older articles over the next few days. The first comes from a SocialFlow blog post about how the Osama Bin Laden death news spread across Twitter. While the particulars are interesting, I especially liked the points they made about how impossible it would have been to predict the players actually responsible for spreading the message. The post explain, “Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn’s online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow.”
They then conclude with a deeper message for how we think about social influence that I completely agree with:
As we build out digital social spaces, we must not get derailed by metrics of status affordances that have taken center stage. Just because we have easily accessible data at our fingertips doesn’t mean that we have the capacity to model and place a value tag on human behavior. Followers, friends or likes represent an aspect of our digital status, but are only a partial representation of our general propensity to be influential. Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. And with that, the perfect situation unfolded, where timing, the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.
influenceosamapoliticsSocialmediatwitterNovember 25, 2011
Just in case you weren’t sure of just how much people like congress, here’s a shortlist of the organizations, ideas and individuals that beat them: The IRS, airline industry, lawyers, Nixon during Watergate, banks, the oil and gas industry, BP during the oil spill, Paris Hilton, US going communist and Hugo Chavez. Luckily, congress can sleep tight knowing they’re more popular that Fidel Castro was in 2008. (Two politics links in a row. Crazy.)
Congress’s unpopularity in one hilarious chart - The Washington Post
Back in 2009 Obama famously choose to employ some behavioral economics strategies in distributing the stimulus to citizens. The administration choose to dole out payments in small pieces over an extended period instead of delivering it in one lump sum. The logic went something like this: “By giving people the sense that their incomes had grown, doling out the money paycheck by paycheck was supposed to make recipients more likely to spend it, thereby lifting the economy.”
Except it didn’t exactly work that way and it now looks like lump sum payments work better than the slow drip. A serious blow to behavioral economics? Not exactly …
Traditional economic theory predicts that the design of a tax credit like Making Work Pay should have no effect on its efficacy: A tax cut is a tax cut, whether it comes in a check, reduced paycheck withholdings, or, for that matter, a briefcase full of cash. How money is delivered should have no effect on whether people spend or save.
So the failure of the program actually proves that people are not perfectly rational about the way they spend, otherwise it would have made no difference. A real failure would have been if the Obama approach had the exact same outcome as lump sum.
behavioraleconomicsobamapoliticsNovember 15, 2011
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