The Ross Writ

Alejandro at the controls

2008-07-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Testing out video on Flickr.

It seems to to work well!

The Voter Genome Project is Launched

2007-06-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

The team that cracked the human genome is now going after the American voter. They have launched the Voter Genome Project. It promises to be a full service Democratic analytics and consulting firm applying cutting-edge technology from Silicon Valley and Biotech IT to deliver the right message to the right voter at the right time.

VGP performs multi-hundreds-of-variables analysis on 200,000,000 voter records in minutes using the most advanced technology available. Here's what VGP promises to deliver:

We can find and rank the top 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 of a candidate's supporters (or potential donors) and further break those supporters down into geographic, psychographic or demographic subgroups.

We can find the independent and Republican voters who are either likely or persuadable to change their registration to vote in a closed Democratic primary.

We can find the 2,000,000 newly enrolled voters nationwide who are most likely to support a particular candidate.

We can find every person in the country whose household income is over $200,000 and who is a likely strong supporter of a particular candidate so that the campaign can do a targeted fundraising appeal to get them to max out this quarter.

We can find 500,000 unregistered voters who are likely to be enthusiastic supporters of a candidate early enough to register them to vote.

The VGP is being spearheaded by Silicon Valley veteran Ron Turiello and guru-pollster Tom Wilson (bios here), both on the project full time. Disclosure: I have been in the Voter Genome kitchen discussions since the beginning and I am proud to be a part-time adviser.

The Next Net: Will Widgets Kill the Webpage?

2007-03-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Widgets seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. This is a good primer.

FT.com - BitTorrent targets downloads market

2007-03-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

Peer-to-peer technology is increasingly being adopted by content owners as a distribution architecture: The Financial Times had this story last week:

"Michael McGuire, an analyst at Gartner, said film studios' rush to embrace BitTorrent, Joost and other startup video services reflected lessons learned from the painful experiences of music companies, who failed to embrace digital distribution models until sales of CDs had already slumped.

'The studios are realising they have to get out in front of it and create as many legitimate distribution points as they can, rather than fighting abuses all the time,' he said."

The Globalization of ConLaw

2007-02-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

The Stanford Law Review and the Stanford Constitutional Law Center will host a symposium this month on Global Constitutionalism. Speakers include the attorney general of the United Kingdom and senior Iraqi government officials who played a role in writing Iraq's new constitution.

From the symposium website:

Discourse and thought about constitutional norms increasingly transcend national borders and founding documents. Spirited debate has arisen within the United States about whether and how foreign law should be utilized for purposes of construing the U.S. Constitution, but there is no doubt that citations to foreign law increasingly surface in U.S. court decisions. Less attention has been paid, however, to the larger interplay between the constitutional norms of the U.S. and other nations. What role does the U.S. Constitution play in other nations’ interpretations of their own constitutions? To what extent is that role impacted by the perceived willingness, or lack thereof, of the U.S. to look to other nations’ constitutions? What are the constitutional benchmarks for nations constructing new constitutions and how do such nations choose between them in the face of divergence? What can nations learn from one another about common constitutional controversies—such as those surrounding security initiatives as they may impact civil liberties and larger constitutional norms? This Symposium will explore these questions, gathering prominent scholars, practitioners, and judges from the U.S. and abroad in order to do so. The unifying theme will be the manner in which constitutionalism is developing, and should develop, around the world as viewed from the perspective of the U.S. and other nations with their own proud and distinct constitutional traditions.

The Day Before

2005-09-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

"I don't think," President Bush said yesterday on Good Morning America, that "anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He would have us believe the flooding in New Orleans took everyone by complete surprise.

But in fact, "just such a potential nightmare has been foreseen by storm experts, investigative reporters, academics, and even by U.S. government agencies for years," writes Cox News reporter Julia Malone. CNN had the details of the impending disaster on August 28 (check out CNN's "Worst Case Scenario" video). So how is it possible President Bush and his staff did not?

The rest of the media should jump on this. Because the real scandal here is not how the feds have been rudderless in the days following the storm.

The real scandal is what the feds did not do the day before. "

The extent of this disaster was clear at least 12, maybe 24 hours before the hurricane hit. It was obvious to experts the city would be flooded if the hurricane hit directly.

So why wasn't the Navy deployed the day before from Mayport so it would arrive the day after?

Why didn't feds commandeer busses to get the rest of those neighborhoods evacuated?

Why was there no execute order for the national guard until afterwards?

"An Insult to High School Sophomores"

2005-08-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger Flatiron Dante wonders why talented people stay out of politics, particularly in New York:

I have to say that the politicians I have met here in NYC have been some of the most unimpressive politicians I've ever seen. To call them the Junior Varsity is an insult to High School sophomores. Is that because there aren't any talented and idealistic and charismatic people here in NY? Or is it because those people are busy doing other things? Is Barack Obama such an unusual person or is it just that he's one of the few decent people who have decided to get into politics at that level? I admit that he is immensely talented and seems like a like a decent person from my limited interaction with him, but I've met a lot of pretty amazing people in other walks of life who, although they care deeply about what is happening in the world, would never think of running for office. And that's a shame. Maybe we can do something about that.

There's a cable channel I watch that has as one of its ads a scene of a typewriter on a kitchen table. The text says something like "Jane was a lawyer who dreamed of being a novelist . . . " and the next line says "so she took six months off and wrote a book." I am hopeful that this collection of talented and idealistic and charismatic people will become inspired by all of this back and forth to write our "book." Although it seems like an enormous challenge for this small band to reverse decades of decay in the party, I think we would all sleep better if we tried.

Mock Trial for China

2005-08-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

"This case is about a bar owner, some bar bouncers he never should have hired, and a big 'ol beating those bar bouncers brought upon a boy named Jackie Junior..." In July, the Stanford Mock Trial team gave Chinese Public Television an example of American courtroom antics. In return, we got these stringy things.

Robert A. Ross

2004-10-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

1935 - 2004

My father enjoyed fatherhood – in the day-to-day sense – for as short as a time as he enjoyed marriage. A little over four years. It was long enough for him to leave me with the images of an archetypical father, the awaited giant who makes his entrance through the front door, finally, with work clothes smudgy after a long time at some mysterious but surely adventurous place called work, who squeezed me with a hug almost too hard and a stubbly kiss that seemed to leave the imprint of his five o’clock shadow on my cheek.

But one of those days he came home I wasn’t happy to see him, because I had taken one of my mother Dorothy’s favorite music tapes and pulled all the tape coil irreparably out of the thing, and overwhelmed she inflicted the severest of punishments a mother can impose: “Wait until your father gets home!’ This led to the only memory I have of my father angry at me. Which is pretty amazing, I can say now as a father myself, because I should be so lucky that my children survive childhood with only one memory of me losing my patience. But as I enjoy my fourth year of living in marriage and in fatherhood, it reminds me how unfair it is that four years was all my father got.

And ironically, his travels and adventures were to the very places where others found more lasting unions. He traveled to Sweden, presumably in search of more than Swedish meatballs, and yet the marriage that resulted was ultimately his sister’s. He traveled to Korea as a serviceman, a place where American GIs are warned to be careful because it is a place where marriage is rarely successfully escaped or evaded, and yet the person who found his wife in Korea was not my father, but his son.

It’s as if he were something of an instrument, fate’s own heavy tool, that made possible other people’s lives, sometimes at the expense of his own. So much would not be as it is, if not for his accident in Sweden. Norrudden would not be. I would not be.

And yet if he were fate’s instrument, he sure was sturdy. His body was sturdy. The accident broke him in pieces, and yet he put himself together again, and when he walked for the first time in the VA hospital, it was such a miracle that other families fought to have their injured relatives occupy his bed after he was promoted to a rehabilitation ward. He proved he could survive anything.

That’s why, despite all his physical problems through life, this casket here is so preposterous.

Not just his body was sturdy. So was his smile. His infectious happiness. He never took any detail for granted. I once interviewed him for a school project, and he once told me his philosophy of life was no matter how hard life gets, there is always a good surprise around the corner. Of course, on the way to that corner, no matter how bad things were, you have to say hello.

He said hello to everybody. Nobody was invisible. No one was a stranger. I visited him at the post office once, and he introduced me to every teller, every letter carrier, and every customer in the building. They all knew him. They liked him. Maybe the reason is he never pretended not to seem them, even if his limp might have prompted some of them to try to pretend they couldn’t see him. He would interrupt them on their private island and say, “Hello.”

I think my father, who never saw a face that wasn’t sufficiently familiar for a hello, would never say this to anyone, but his life serves as a reminder of the following: It’s right and necessary to go on journeys in life – that’s how magic happens – but as far as you go, it’s wrong and unnecessary to say hello only when you’re saying goodbye. We should say hello more often.

So to my father, I say, I love you. I admire you. I wish I had grown to be as tall as you. And I say, “Hello” to you.

Diversity & The Intelligence Community

2004-07-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

A key finding of the 9/11 Commission’s report was that overall, the Intelligence Community lacked creativity and imagination in forming their predictive conclusions regarding the terrorist threat facing the US. The commission further concluded that analysts were subject to groupthink – in essence, rather than challenge assumptions regarding the data presented to them, they collectively held many assumptions to be absolute truths, the ultimate result being flawed intelligence assessments.

As pundits across the country scrambled to assess the commission’s findings, Mr. Charles Hill of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University submitted an opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal, which stands in stark contrast to many other assessments that have been published to date. Mr. Hill makes the startling claim that a primary reason for the deterioration in quality of the nation’s intelligence product is the result of diversity programs, causing a decline in the caliber of personnel within the community.

While Mr. Hill quickly concedes that diversity has “brought plenty of smart and able people into the profession”; he then claims that they are simply not qualified because they do not possess the superior academic training gained from attendance at the nation’s elite academic institutions. As such, Mr. Hill has confused two very different variables - the problems existing within the Intelligence Community are not caused by diversity programs that afford more of the nation’s citizens equal opportunity to work within the community, but rather his assertion speaks to the decline of the nation’s education system.

Indeed, it is true that the elite academic institutions more aggressively promote critical thinking skills by forcing students to read, analyze, and write responses to scholarly works, and that the not-so-elite schools, on average, have a tendency to rely on rote methods of education. Further, this phenomenon is more the result of accountability criteria that require students to perform on standardized tests, and that preparatory courses for these tests focus on teaching students to master the system, rather than the information for which knowledge and skill is purportedly being evaluated. The implication for critical analysis skills is obvious – students are not taught to challenge information or assumptions before them, and rote education generates graduates that are more inclined to accept and agree with commonly held beliefs – a precursor to groupthink.

Diversity programs, on the other hand, work to populate the workforce with peoples of different cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences, resulting in different interpretations of constant data points. This would naturally lead to more aggressive debate and challenge - an approach that would actually produce better, more creative, and more imaginative intelligence products than a homogenous workforce ever could.

Moreover, inherent in our society is an arrogance regarding our positioning in the world; we assume that the rest of the world must “rise” to meet societal standards that exist within the US. Analyses that begin with cultural arrogance are not only built from false premises, but they are doomed to result in faulty conclusions. The homogenous workforce that Mr. Hill is promoting as a solution to many of the problems within the Intelligence Community would not alter the Western-oriented filter through which many analysts view events. Rather, lack of exposure to different peoples from different backgrounds portends badly for the community’s ability to accurately interpret data obtained from other societies and cultures, and would further limit its ability to render probable explanations regarding the motivation and actions of our enemies. Finally, Mr. Hill’s opinion only serves to support the preceding argument – despite his impressive academic credentials, his analysis is seemingly lacking in creativity and imagination - his resistance to diversity is a possible explanation for why.

*Note - I tried to find a link to Mr. Hill's op-ed, "Commissionism" from Friday the 23rd to attach; unfortunately, it is only available online to WSJ subscribers.

Lincoln's Perspective

2004-07-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

Teach your children well.

Idealism Lost

2004-07-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

American nationalism, unlike that of every other country in the history of the planet, is not based on our blood, but on a shared belief. The core of that belief is commitment to individual liberty -- the liberty to fulfill oneself in mind, body and spirit to the best of one's desires and ability, regardless of origin. To be American is to subscribe to this idea.

In the 18th century, this country was founded on this idealism. In the 19th century, Lincoln called the country to renew its commitment to this idealism. In the 20th century, FDR gave direction to the modern Liberal tradition and invested the government with new powers to expand the economic reality of this idealism.

Then the conservative movement hijacked the American ideal, took over the Republican Party, ultimately discredited liberalism and corrupted America by misreading and selectively misinterpreting of our nation's fundamental credo.

The Democrat faction in power, drunk with power at all costs, didn't even put up a fight.

The first step is answering the claim that less government means more liberty. The truth is less government means more liberty for those who can pay for it. The rest of us Americans won't enjoy true liberty until the pay-to-play system in Washington is trashed.

Conservatives misread our nation's historic tradition. They think the Founders were focused exclusively on limiting government. The truth is they were equally focused on investing appropriate powers in government as well.

It's time for the pendulum to swing back.

This Year's Cuomo?

2004-07-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago, a relatively little-known governor with a outer-borough accent (like my grandfather) transformed himself into a 800-pound gorilla in presidential politics -- the giant everybody thought would clean house if only he stepped into the fray. He created all this buzz with only a speech at the Democratic national convention. He passed on running for president 1988, but almost got on a plane to file his papers in the New Hampshire primary in December 1991. If he had got on that plane, you may never have heard of the man from Hope. Mario Cuomo could have been a contendah.

Wasn't meant to be. But it goes to show that you never know who will arise out of the usual boredom of a national political convention. Right now John Edwards looks like the exciting, fresh face of 2004. But might it turn out to be someone else?

Someone like U.S. Senate candidate Barak Obama? He evidently has been granted a prime-time slot by the DNC -- rare for a guy who hasn't even been elected yet. He is impressive -- maybe Flatiron Dante will recount his meetings with the guy in the comments -- and probably would have been destined for prominence without giving a speech in Boston. But how far will his speech take him?

forty years ago, a certain ex-actor gave a campaign speech on behalf of his party's nominee. The speech didn't win the election for Goldwater, but it did put a Ronald Reagan on the path to the presidency.

A single speech can turn a person into presidential material.

Another Reagan is set to give a speech next week at the convention, by the way. Prime time, too. But it doesn't sound like Ron Reagan has an agenda beyond stem-cell research. Not yet at least.

So in Boston next week, we look to see if Obama will have his moment. It depends on what he says. Maybe he'll eloquently express an alternative to center-right politics of the Democratic party. Maybe he'll condemn the insider corruption that consumes the hacks in DC.

Maybe.

Welcome

2004-07-10T20:39:00.001-07:00

You've found the Ross Writ - regular reflections on American life, law and politics. Our site will undergo some face lifts over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, peruse what's here, and enjoy.