Notes from the Nexus

Turnaround in Ohio voting systems

Ohio, the center of much controversy in November's voting, has made an announcement that the State will implement paper-based optical scan systems for subsequent elections.  Instead of the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic - good FAQ here) voting machines that had previously been mandated, there must now be systems in every precinct in the state with a paper trail!  While there are numerous benefits to electronic voting systems, creating a voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) is impossible on nearly all electronic systems in the market.  And with no paper audit trail, there is no possibility of a true recount.

This is good news for democracy.  If Secretary of State Blackwell of Ohio realizes that every vote must be counted, there is hope that all fifty states will implement systems that provide this assurance to every voter.

But we're not quite there...

My seven-year old seems to be thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr. the most.  A while ago she mentioned "if it wasn't for Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn't be here!"  (My wife is Asian, I am Caucasian - our daughter had learned about the miscegenation laws in school.)

This morning at breakfast she asked "why haven't we had a black President?"  I did not have a good answer for her.  I hope that in my lifetime we do have an African-American President, I hope that we soon have a female President.

Thank you, Martin Luther King, Jr.

It struck me today that while ostensibly we have holidays to honor important people, groups or events, we rarely take the time on these holidays to reflect on the impact these people have had on our lives.  For too many of us, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day becomes just another three-day weekend, a good occasion to go skiing.  Independence Day, Memorial Day, Presidents' Day - how often do we take these days to truly honor those before us who have sacrificed immensely, so that we can enjoy our freedoms?

I include myself in this group, I did not set aside much of today to reflect on a great man who did much to improve our lives.  Luckily, our kids' curriculum included lessons on Dr. King, and that led to some meaningful conversations between my wife and I and our children.  About segregation, about miscegenation laws.  About how blessed we were to have had Martin Luther King, Jr., and others in the civil rights movement take up a cause and effect changes in our country.

Thank you, Dr. King, for the wonderful and necessary changes you helped bring about in our society.  The US, and the world, is a better place for the work you did.

Bezos's description of the long tail

There is much being written about The Long Tail, including a good article in Wired a while back.

Buried in the back of January 2005's Wired is an interview with Jeff Bezos, where he describes the essence of the long tail:

If you think about the marketing of products, it's easy to see polar extremes.  At one end you have Super Bowl ads selling Coca-Cola or Budweiser; at the other, you have a sales force pushing an expensive product to 500 companies. What's difficult to sell is the "hard middle" - marketing an inexpensive product, where the gross profit per sale is low, to a small group. A very successful, profitable, midlist book might sell 15,000 copies. In the old world, finding the right 15,000 people to buy that book was ridiculously expensive. This is something that Amazon.com and the Internet in general have really helped with.

A great short description of the influence of the internet on commerce.

Help me conquer the world!

Spotted this on  Andy Merrett's  blog, looks like a fun way to waste a bit of time...
Click on the map (on land, not the oceans) and you'll help me conquer the world!

Blogging on Blogging

A fellow blogging friend, John Furrier has posted Bob Cargill's Top Ten Reasons why blogs are relevant in the world of PR and marketing.

Tip of the hat to John!

Counting our votes - truly

The issue of verified voting is a critical one for our wonderful democracy.  It is imperative that every voter know that their vote is counted, that it is counted as they wished it to be, and that this result is verifiable.

Great efforts on this issue are being made by the California Voter Foundation and the Verified Voting Foundation.

Congressman Rush Holt's (D, NJ) statement in the joint session of Congress that verified the electoral college results are worth reading.   The entire session's transcript is available in The Congressional Record for January 6, 2005.

Mr. Speaker, this debate is not frivolous. This is not about sour grapes. This is not about conspiracy theories. This is about the central act of democracy.
  Here in the House of Representatives all members have been elected.  Some of us have been elected in recounts.
  What are recounts? They are independent checks of the tally.
  Reliable knowledge is verifiable knowledge. As my colleagues know, I am a scientist. It is a principle of scientific thinking that one person's claim must be subject to independent confirmation or correction.
  I agree with Senator John Kerry. We should today award Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush. I believe President Bush got more votes in Ohio then did Senator Kerry. I believe it. I cannot confirm it. No one can confirm it.
  Consider electronic voting machines. If there was an error between the voter casting the vote on the touch screen and the recording of an electronic signal in a memory bank, no one will ever know. It might be a software error; it would not necessarily be a malicious conspiracy. But if the vote is recorded incorrectly, no one will ever know.
  I ask my colleagues, can anyone say he or she knows that the actual vote is what has been presented to us? The answer is no. None of us can say this knowledge has been independently verified. It is not reliable knowledge unless it is verified knowledge. This is not a philosophical fine point. Americans don't want to and should not have to take the results simply on faith. The electronic machines used in Ohio and most other States are not designed to be verifiable. Recounts are meaningless.
  Self-government works only if we believe it does. A loss of confidence in our system is fatal to a democratic republic such as ours. That confidence has been eroded over the years and has taken some body blows in recent years.
  We need a major effort to shore up our democracy.
  Americans are a trusting people, but we demand evidence. We demand verification.
  We are also a pragmatic people, and so we in the House will not upset the apple cart today. Without doubt we will endorse the electoral votes presented to us today. But we should not be satisfied. Republicans should not be satisfied. Democrats should not be satisfied. The reason is not that President Bush got more votes. The reason is that the knowledge of President Bush's majority is unreliable knowledge.
  Anything of value should be auditable. Votes are valuable. Each voter should have the knowledge that the vote is recorded as intended. We are talking today about the heart of our democratic republic.

Podcasting and the Long Tail

Scott Loftesness has a great post on Podcasting and the long tail. 

Brief descriptions:  Podcastings are downloadable audio broadcasts that can be played on a portable MP3 player (iPod + broadcast).  The long tail is a description of the phenomenon of markets being created on the web by aggregating the multitude of lesser-known works (books, music, movies, etc.) and other items for sale.  Much of Amazon's , Netflix's and eBay's profits come from the large number of sales at this long tail of demand - not the mega-hits that drive sales in physical stores.

Leave it to Scott to pull together these two critical emerging trends!

Amazing Blog

Grace Chow was a 32 year old with an extremely rare type of tumor at the base of her skull.  She began blogging in late November, and passed away on December 6.  Her blog, Dying Is... is a wonderful example of a person sharing their thoughts and feelings in their last days. 

Reading her words as she approaches and accepts death helps keep things in perspective – what’s important, and what’s actually quite trivial.  While I’m not one for formal New Year’s resolutions, I do use this time of year to reconsider priorities.  Grace’s blog helped remind me of the really important things – living life to its fullest, spending time with those you love and doing things that bring happiness to you and those close to you.

Rest in peace, Grace.

Thanks to my friend Stuart McFaul for pointing me to Grace's blog.

Diving into TypePad

Like many bloggers before me, I've been spending my evenings learning how to tweak TypePad - how to change the title to an image (I'll be using the image below from my soon-to-be relaunched website, but want to first insert the title into the sky), showing comments, adding links, etc.

I'm feeling that the next content post needs to be of some weight, and therefore haven't posted anything since my first posting!  I'll soon get past this silly writer's block, and begin to post regularly.  Actually, my writing time for the past few weeks has been devoted to my new website, stay tuned for its launch!