Moving

I'm consolidating my blogs. As such, I won't be posting here any more. Instead, I recommend you try my new personal blog or if you're only into the political stuff the Ames DFA blog.

Jimmy Carter to Chair Election Reform Commission

Thank you, Jimmy Carter.

Boston.com / News / Nation / Washington / Jimmy Carter to Chair Election Reform Commission: "March 24, 2005"

gladwell dot com: Blink

I have been reading an interesting book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell discusses the nature of what our brains can do in the blink of an eye, the "first impressions," judging a book by its cover and so on.

One particularly interesting point in the first chapter concerns doctors, whose likelihood of being sued in a malpractice suit can be deduced in a few seconds of looking at him/her talking. Essentially, the difference between doctors who get sued and those who don't is not what they say but how they talk to their patients, and we can identify their style very quickly, even at a first glance.

It is suggested (by me) that another possible approach to rising costs of malpractice suits might be improving doctors' ability to spend quality time with their patients. Patients who like their doctors will not sue them, another point made in this chapter. Hmm.....

VR / Divestment campaign / reaction

RAW STORY has a good article about the VR campaign to change voting systems in America through threat of divestment by its proponents. Of note here is a number of responses of a variety of voting system manufacturers.

Brown & Cole vs. Wal-Mart

Will it ever end?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Washington grocery chain to sell 8 of 31 stores, cites Wal-Mart: "THE ASSOCIATED PRESS"

Union loses Wal-Mart vote - Note here that basically they intimidated these people into voting against a union. Add into it the recent deal with the store in Quebec and you've got a serious issue here.

Velvet Revolution, continued

VR is really getting going... check out the list of affiliations they have now! My goodness!

VELVETREVOLUTION.US : VR's Divestiture for Democracy Campaign

They went straight at the 9 major American voting machine companies. Send them an e-mail of support! Send your own mail requesting that they shape up or ship out!

A Corrupted Election

A Corrupted Election: "Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right"

A good article again examining the question of why the exit polls were so far off of the actual tallies and how it is so odd that the same thing happened in the Ukraine and it was assumed that there was election fraud, whereas here the assumption is there is something wrong with pollsters. Crazy people!

Audioscrobbler / Last.FM

If you haven't seen Audioscrobbler yet, you might want to look at it. It's quite an interesting service...

"Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations."

And Last.FM "is a personalised online radio station that plays the right music to the right people. Songs spread from listener to listener.
You get your own online radio station that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to find users who are similar to you. With this information Last.fm can play you new artists and songs you might like."

Upheaval

Since just doing a progressive blog thingy didn't really attract any interest (as far as I can tell), I decided to just turn this into a personal blog. I'm still not going to mingle this with my other blog which is just for pictures basically of Simon and a few other things, but there's something anyway.

I've also redesigned the template. Hope you like the looks of the way it looks for at least the next while until I feel like changing it again!