I just ran across a service (and downloadable application) by the name of Tableau Public which seems to be a free and easy way to visualize data sets and share them over the internet. There is a video here detailing how it works as well as a gallery of examples. Some of the examples include City Growth, US Population by Race, healthcare costs, historical unemployment, economic indicators and financial performance, and climate change.
My wife – a special education school teacher – and I have a bit of a policy disagreement regarding teacher merit pay.
Most can agree that our Education System is broken (see anything by John Taylor Gatto) and some sort of reform is necessary (even if it rankles some of the President’s core constituents). Sometimes that change can only be motivated through monetary incentives. On the macro-level, I can see the potential benefits. On the micro-level, it’s likely that her students may not ever achieve sufficiently for her to earn said bonuses.
Others have stated that the pick of Palin as VP is an overt dog-whistle to the hard-right. I don’t doubt that at all.
Karl Rove has been oft-mocked in regards to his statements of “the math” during the 2006 Election. Rove’s thesis was that the American voters were tired of corruption – this being the alleged driving force behind the Siegelman corruption case as well as the US Attorney Scandal. Rove was right, but he wasn’t necessarily correct. We know how 2006 turned out.
