Amen.

I been a busy duder. Was quoted in a recent MPR story. And I released what we are calling my "opus" around the office.... a big damn report about broadband networks.

James Fallows, one of my favorite writers, penned "How America Can Rise Again" in the Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic. Having recently returned from three years in China, he asks if America is borked (it appears to be) and how we can fix it.

This snippet captures an interesting generational point of view:

“When I was growing up, these bridges and roads and dams were a source of real national pride and achievement,” Stephen Flynn, the president of the Center for National Policy in Washington, who was born in 1960, told me. “My daughter was 6 when the World Trade Center towers went down, 8 when lights went off on the East Coast, 10 when a major U.S. city drowned—I saw things built, and she’s seen them fall apart.” America is supposed to be the permanent country of the New, but a lot of it just looks old.

When I think of the space program, Challenger is more "real" to me than Neil Armstrong's moon walk. That said, anytime I think about these issues, I remind myself that every generation thinks history is coming to an end and things are worse presently than before. We tend to forget that science has kicked Polio's ass as we fixate on the lack of a cure of AIDS or cancer.

Ultimately, we need to wrestle with how many resources we want to put into being the best damn country on the planet. Clearly, we would rather imagine we are awesome at health care than actually be awesome at it. This is also true of broadband, the key utility of the future. To a certain extent, it is childish to focus so keenly on comparing ourselves to international peers - something I think Fallows deals with smartly:

But whatever their popularity or utility in other places at other times, falling-behind concerns seem too common in America now. As I have thought about why overreliance on this device increasingly bothers me, I have realized that it’s because my latest stretch out of the country has left me less and less interested in whether China or some other country is “overtaking” America. The question that matters is not whether America is “falling behind” but instead something like John Winthrop’s original question of whether it is falling short—or even falling apart. This is not the mainstream American position now, so let me explain.

First is the simple reality that one kind of “decline” is inevitable and therefore not worth worrying about. China has about four times as many people as America does. Someday its economy will be larger than ours. Fine! A generation ago, its people produced, on average, about one-sixteenth as much as Americans did; now they produce about one sixth. That change is a huge achievement for China—and a plus rather than a minus for everyone else, because a business-minded China is more benign than a miserable or rebellious one. When the Chinese produce one-quarter as much as Americans per capita, as will happen barring catastrophe, their economy will become the world’s largest. This will be good for them but will not mean “falling behind” for us.

We will do well when others do well. If China falls into turmoil, we will likely suffer more than if China surpasses us in a variety of measures. As long as people want to move here (and we continue encouraging immigration - which is how we continue to get the best scientists in the world), we will be fine.

Though we previously only found the will to invest in science when we were scared shitless of the Soviets, we can choose to invest in science again even without a boogeyman (though we could also justify it because a few Islamic terrorists have returned the right-wing to the bed-wetting tendencies it exhibited during the Cold War). Unfortunately, the larger problem we have is that our political system is failing us. The sound bite society naively believes government must shrink and operate like a business. This naive view totally fails to recognize that government and business have fundamentally different aims and that America thrived when government acted like government and businesses acted like businesses.

Today the economically important technologies include genomic knowledge, information technologies like the Internet, and the geospatial information, from the GPS network, that is built into everything from dashboard navigators to the climate-change-monitoring systems that measure the size of glaciers or extent of forests. Private companies now create the jobs and wealth in each field, but public funds paid for the original scientific breakthroughs and provided early markets.

It couldn’t have been otherwise, Atkinson says. The scale of investment was too vast. The uncertainty of payoff was too great. The risk that profits and benefits would go to competitors who hadn’t made the initial investment was too high. The difference between promising and dead-end technologies was too hard to predict—especially decades ago, when work in all these fields began. So each started as a public program: the Internet by the Pentagon, the Human Genome Project by the National Institutes of Health, and the GPS network by the Air Force, which still operates it. The government could not have created Google, but Google could not have existed without government efforts to establish the Internet long before the company’s founders were born.

Unfortunately, this naive view is vastly overrepresented in both our media and government by loud voices that are amplified by corporations all too happy to foment conflict to maximize their advertising revenues. Add to this our political system, described smartly as thus:

In their book on effective government, William Eggers and John O’Leary quote a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, Michael Keeley, on why the city is out of control. “Think of city government as a big bus,” he told them. “The bus is divided into different sections with different constituencies: labor, the city council, the mayor, interest groups, and contractors. Every seat is equipped with a brake, so lots of people can stop the bus anytime. The problem is that this makes the bus undrivable.”

What do we do about it? We need to fight for inches. To use a football metaphor, our history focuses on improbably massive touchdown runs and successful hail-mary passes. But that is a disservice to how change happens. Change happens in the inches (as my friend Jim Baller, recently reminded me) - as noted by Al Pacino:

So we need to educate ourself, our friends, and our neighbors. We need to organize. We need to win an inch.

Google is constantly peering into my life, so I was fascinated when Wired offered me a chance to peer into Google's algorithm. Want to know how it is that Google works so damn well? Constant improvement and good management. Google's continued success is actually pretty stunning when you consider how many companies lose their power and innovative spirit when they grow into a massive company.

Photographers and computer-literate people have long laughed at the cop dramas and movies where the good guys have the "enhance" button for some grainy photo. For instance, they get a photo off some red-light camera where some pass sideview mirror has a 2.5 pixels covering a key license plate. "Can you enhance it," is the question. The answer is always yes.

That just might be possible. Scary. Some math geeks came up with an algorithm called "Compressed Sensing" and it is already being used in medical imaging to improve MRI scans.

I'm not going to further spoil the story, but you read it yourself at wired.com.

Sure it has been 3 weeks since I wrote anything on the blog. I been busy - big report at work, spring sports in photography (and what a spring for it!) and wedding planning.

But I found something well worth watching in its 1 hour entirety: a great presentation by Larry Lessig. If it is too long for you, watch it in chunks of time you would have used reading my ramblings if I were posting any...

He spends a lot of time explaining how we got to where we are technologically. He details some key government interventions preventing bad behavior by companies. And he goes on to explain why the government no longer seems interested in intervening when companies screw us over and basically retard the progress of all people. It isn't _all_ about broadband.

Remember those videos showing Acorn employees openly flouting the law to encourage a pimp and prostitute to flout the law and even helping to smuggle underage girls into the U.S.? You might be surprised to find that the states who have investigated these crimes have declined to press charges. Why? Perhaps because all the video you saw on TV was bullshit - more heavily edited than primetime "reality" TV to frame Acorn employees.

Rachel Maddow has a lot of the details:

I'm waiting for Fox News to clarify that the Acorn employee who was supposedly going to help smuggle underage girls across the border, actually called the police to report an imminent crime immediately after the Republican operatives left the office. To be clear: this man was convicted on national TV for a crime he acted to prevent.

But Rachel is right, the right-wing media has totally destroyed one of the strongest advocates for poor people in the country -- by inventing a bullshit story. Who will they go after next?

I just picked up "Free the Market: When Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive" by Gary L Reback. It starts with this quote by George Will (from this column):

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores...

Bingo.

Finally process the photos from Thanksgiving last year and put them up on Flickr - if you have an account on Flickr, you should add me as a contact. I'm trying to get more into the who Flickr scene.

The Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Mother Jones has two stories that give me some hope for the future of our prison system. When it costs some $45,000 a year to lock someone up for a year in a time of budget crunches, it seems that we should be more frugal with how many people we send to prison (i.e., not non-violent drug addicts) and we should have programs that help them to mend their ways. This is not a matter of coddling prisoners but doing what it takes to prevent them from returning to a life of crime.

Too many conservatives want to cut off their noses to spite their face -- focusing on punishing the imprisoned in ways that all too often guarantee they will emerge as worse criminals with no opportunity to rejoin society. A system that focuses entirely on punishing rather than educating may appeal emotionally but almost certainly creates more problems than it solves.

The Mustang Redemption was interesting both for looking at how working with wild horses has helped several prisoners (who had committed violent crimes, sometimes against minors) to develop a sense that there was a wider world beyond themselves. The Bureau of Land Management runs a program that teaches certain prisoners to tame wild horses (they have to manage the wild horse populations on Federal lands, primarily in Wyoming). I've always been fascinated by wild horses; others might not be as interested.

The Green Mile looks at prisons that have started to teach some prisoners environmental skills - using their abundance of time to cultivate living things that are both endangered and require a lot of attention in raising. Prisons with these programs, including gardens, have seen budgetary savings while teaching prisoners skills that may help them in life outside of prison, lessening their chances of returning to crime.