Building a Better Ballot Box On Thursday, professors at MIT and the California Institute of Technology announced that they plan to build a new line of reliable, secure, and modestly priced voting machines they think can become standard equipment for national elections.

News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary Bush's fiscal proposals would abandon responsibility and exacerbate class divisions. His technology policy -- which amounts to asking ""How high?'' when some tech executives say "Jump'' -- ignores a host of deeply troubling issues that will be at the core of the future economy and society.

After making millions through inheritance and old-boy cronyism, Bush surely will hum along to the hymn of pure, Darwinistic capitalism. He's a product of it, and has done well by it.

Besides, he's utterly beholden to his backers. They're the business executives and ideologues who virtually appointed him as the GOP nominee, anted up the multi-millions he needed to win the White House and then launched a scorched-earth campaign to prevent a genuine

News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary AOL's buyout of Time Warner is a net negative for consumers no matter how the Federal Trade Commission and a host of public-relations specialists from the two companies cloak the deal. We're heading toward a time when a tiny number of huge companies control the vast majority of popular culture and information, plus the means of delivering it.

Gallery of Data Visualization This Gallery of Data Visualization displays some examples of the Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics, with the view that the contrast may be useful, inform current practice, and provide some pointers to both historical and current work. We go from what is arguably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, to the current record-holder for the worst.

IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee

Forbes.com: State of the Banner State of the Banner
John C. Dvorak, Forbes Magazine, 12.25.00
One of the Web's cherished myths, that advertising will pay for content, is rapidly crumbling as one ad-supported site after another expires. One handy scapegoat in all this is the ubiquitous "ad banner," which usually appears at the top of a Web page. This form of Web advertising, now seen as ineffective and old-fashioned, may be on its last legs. Nobody likes banners, and the frequency of people clicking on them has fallen off drastically, to 0.5%, indicating that people simply ignore them.

DaveNet : They all aks'd about you Another common track -- no one wants to challenge Microsoft in desktop apps, even where Microsoft has no software. This is wrong. You don't have to beat Microsoft to have a successful product. Even a niche in one of the Microsoft-dominated categories could be an excellent market. I suggested to Dan Greening of Macromedia a long-time pet idea of mine. I want a Flash word processor. The editor renders in Flash. It's wizzy. It saves in Flash. Since the Flash runtime is so widely deployed there should be no problem rendering the text for the reader. Flash text looks so much better than Microsoft text. This is a no-brainer. Let's do it.