Monthly Archives: September 2005

Dutch Treat: Personal Database from Cradle to Grave

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AP:

The Dutch government will begin tracking every citizen from cradle to grave in a single database, opening a personal electronic dossier for every child at birth with health and family data, and eventually adding school and police records.

As a privacy safeguard, no single person will be able to access someone’s entire file. And each agency that contributes to the records will maintain its own files as well.

But organizations can raise “red flags” in the dossier to caution other agencies of potential problems with children, said ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer. Until now, schools and police have been unable to communicate with each other about truancy records and criminality, which are often linked.

Farmers Market Activism

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Nancy suggested that I summarize some of the activists present at this morning’s Dane County Farmer’s Market. The observation of those leafletting the Market’s four corners provides an interesting glimpse into the City’s political thinking. Today’s leaflets included:

  • Uncompromising Courage, an exhibit of Falun Gong Art at the State Capitol Rotunda through 10/9/2005. The backside included a link to the Epoch Times and a wish that the Chinese Communist Party might collapse soon.
  • The Madison Rep was actively promoting their New Play Festival which runs from 9.17 to 9.25.
  • A Pro Madison Bar Smoking Ban Group was active across from L’etoile

The Changing Value of Shakespeare

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Tyler Cowen takes a quick look at William St. Clair’s new book: The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. This book, so interesting on many levels looks at:

During the four centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could be carried across time and distance, everyone engaged in politics, education, religion, and literature believed that reading helped to shape the minds, opinions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions, of readers. William St Clair investigates how the national culture can be understood through a quantitative study of the books that were actually read. Centred on the romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranging across the whole print era, it reaches startling conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. St Clair provides an in-depth investigation of information, made available here for the first time, on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives. He offers a picture of the past very different from those presented by traditional approaches. Indispensable to students, English literature, book history, and the history of ideas, the study’s conclusions and explanatory models are highly relevant to the issues we face in the age of the internet.

  • The first study of actual reading using quantification and economic analysis
  • Sheds new light on aspects of reading and its effect on the nation
  • An indispensable resource for scholars working on literature, reading, and the history of publishing and printing

Ansel Adams’ Autumn Moon Arrives

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Ben Margot:

As the moon rose in the evening sky, a crowd gathered at Glacier Point to relive an iconic scene captured by photographer Ansel Adams more than 50 years ago.

About 300 amateur photographers, astronomers and other spectators came Thursday to watch conditions align to repeat the scene in the famous Adams image “Autumn Moon.”

Astronomers nailed down the exact time and date that Adams snapped the photograph in Yosemite National Park in 1948 — and determined that the sun and moon would return to the same positions Thursday.

LAB: Wisconsin Voter Registration Evaluation

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Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau [PDF]:

We found that statutory requirements are not consistently followed. Among our survey respondents:

  • only 85.3 percent of municipalities removed the names of inactive voters from their voter registration lists;
  • only 71.4 percent sometimes or always notified registered voters before removing their names; and
  • only 54.0 percent reported removing the names of ineligible felons.

Because of such inconsistencies, registration lists contain duplicate records and the names of ineligible individuals. For example, when
we reviewed more than 348,000 electronic voter registration records from eight municipalities, we identified 3,116 records that appear to show individuals who are registered more than once in the same municipality.

Greg Borowski and Stacy Forster have more:

Among the 348,000 electronic voter registration records checked were 105 potentially improper or fraudulent votes including:

  • Ballots cast by 98 ineligible felons, including 57 in Madison.
  • Two people who appear to have voted twice.
  • Four cases of voters whose absentee ballots were included in official election results even though they died in the two weeks before the election.
  • One instance of a 17-year-old in Madison who apparently voted.

House Floats New Broadband Bill

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Grant Gross:

The 77-page draft legislation, released to generate discussion from broadband providers and other stakeholders, would also require broadband providers to allow subscribers access to lawful content, even though some broadband providers have suggested a so-called ‘Net neutrality requirement isn’t needed.

Representatives of Verizon Communications and SBC Communications in the past have said a ‘Net neutrality requirement could prevent them from cutting off service to bandwidth hogs or customers posing a security risk.

Bill Steinberg on the Katrina Debacle

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My good friend Bill Steinberg has published, via business partner Mark Baker a very useful look at the leadership vacuum that is the Katrina Response:

so for the mayor, the governor, the president and how many of the president’s men, those so-called law-makers on the hill, what goes around, comes around, we’re still left with the same unanswered question, how could you be so ___ stupid? all will ask ‘what happened?’ only so long as it takes them to find out who’s to blame – then they’re done learning anything from it that will give us a different outcome the next time it happens. and, as someone once said, doing the same things but expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. welcome to ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.’ keep everyone sick, it’s easier to get them to do what you want them to do that way.

Marotta Moves On and Leaves a Few Comments Behind

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Governor Doyle’s top aide, Marc Marotta offered up a few comments as he left that post for private law practice (and help raise money for Doyle’s re-election campaign).

*Although Marotta said he found “a lot of good, dedicated” employees in state government, he said the most frustrating part of his job was the “tremendous inertia” that buries every decision — large and small — in bureaucratic quicksand. “Every little issue has its own political world,” he added.