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So much to blog about lately, especially as it relates to the BP oil spill. One piece that caught my attention was a column in the Washington Post which used the oil spill to illustrate that the debate over capitalism vs. socialism is a false dichotomy. (see: Gulf Oil Spill Offers Lesson in Capitalism vs. Socialism)

For instance, Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, normally an outspoken critic of government intervention, lately has been complaining he’s not getting enough support — “resources” in his terminology — from Washington. It seems in this case more government, not less is what’s needed.

At the same time, frustrations over BP’s inability to stop the flow of the oil led to a series of stories about the prospects of the government “firing” BP. However, talk of such a plan seems to have been largely silenced after Admiral Thad Allen observed “To push BP out of the way, it would raise a question: Replace them with what?” In other words, the government needs private industry too. In this case, without BP the prospects of stopping the flow of oil becomes even more bleak.

And so, we have a bizarre triangle. Local citizens need the government to save them from BP. The government needs BP to help them. Thus, BP is both the cause of the problem, and one hopes, part of the solution.  In other words, in the gulf we find that even a government-industry hybrid is incapable of either containing or stopping the spill. One lesson: suggestions that what the world needs is less government or less industry is to suggest that in the future we would be even less capable of responding to crises and disasters such as the spill. Of course the second lesson is largely an echo of the financial crisis. Regulation matters. And clearly different regulatory regimes are likely to result.

But in which direction should we go? Stepping back, what the BP oil spill seems to suggest is that the acid test for regulatory reform is not whether it strengthens government at the cost of industry or vice versa, but what is the effect on the entire hybrid and its configuration. Good legislation is not legislation that punishes business or rewards it, or strengthens government or weakens it. Good legislation requires reconfiguring the institutional arrangements in such a way that will strengthen the entire government-industry hybrid network. To merely trade off or shift between either government or industry as having the upper hand is to miss the point. Like the financial crisis, the BP oil spill suggests that what is needed is greater hybrid strength, resilience and coordination, not less. This is one more place where a sum zero game means we all lose, no matter which side wins.

A few weeks ago I blogged about several people who see PowerPoint as a barrier to understanding. Today, my eye was drawn to a New York Times headline proclaiming: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.”

In remarks that appear to be channeling Edward Tufte, General McChrystal has called PowerPoint “dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Others in the military agree.  According to the article, this month at a military conference in North Carolina, Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said  “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” (He spoke without PowerPoint.) At the same conference, Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, likened PowerPoint to an internal threat.

Again, consistent with Tufte’s arguments, the article reports: “Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.”

Having just spent two days at an academic conference where every session — including the one I gave — featured a PowerPoint presentation, I wonder if anyone has considered its effects on the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge…

Today one of my colleagues mentioned an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “teaching naked.”

In essence, the article argues that technology — especially PowerPoint — inhibits the learning process by promoting boredom and passivity, rather than interest and engagement. As a practical matter, anything that’s on a slide can be read asynchronously, so why waste valuable class time going over it? By comparison a real-time interactive discussion and debate about weighty issues is something that’s much harder to replicate outside the classroom, and that’s likely to be much more memorable 10 or 20 years later.

Of course, the problems with PowerPoint are well documented. One of my favorites is Edward Tufte’s essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” He shows through numerous examples that PowerPoint is simply the wrong tool for conveying all sorts of information. And while he agrees that some small part of the blame can be placed on poor presenters, he asserts:

“PowerPoint has a distinctive, definite, well-enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary to serious thinking” (p. 26).

Somewhat more humorously, some years ago Fortune published a much shorter primer on what-not-to-do entitled “Ban It Now! Friends Don’t Let Friends Use PowerPoint.” Unfortunately the online version lacks the visual punch of the print edition, in which the article’s major points were made as a series of PowerPoint bullets. It went something like this as I recall:

Slide 1: WHY BAN POWERPOINT?

• It’s a monopoly.

Slide 2: WHY BAN POWERPOINT?

• It’s a monopoly.
• It’s inescapable.

Slide 3: WHY BAN POWERPOINT?

• It’s a monopoly.
• It’s inescapable.
• It’s monotonous.

Slide 4: WHY BAN POWERPOINT? (cont.)

I think you get the idea… Indeed, since trading in my corporate career for an academic career, I have found that PowerPoint is as universal in this world as the former — both in classrooms and at academic conferences. The question is: How to overcome the curse of PowerPoint?

It’s not quite a better mousetrap, but here’s a great story from yesterday’s New York Times on “Building a Better Mailbox.”

It’s a wonderful example of the dead ends and false starts endemic to innovation journeys. Capitalizing on the failure of the “Elephant Trunk” mailbox, the founders of Architectural Mailboxes (Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos) landed on their winning idea: the Oasis and the Oasis Jr.

Some clever personal marketing to Rhys Jones at The Home Depot and a “birthday gift” to Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com didn’t hurt either.

In a recent New York Times column on “The Power Elite,” David Brooks argues:

As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

He then offers five contributing factors. Here I want to zero in on his fifth factor: transparency.

Fifth, society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.

Lately, I too have been contemplating the affordances and the advantages, as well as the limitations and the liabilities of transparency. While I agree that transparency can devolve into a panopticon (to borrow Foucault’s insight), it is not without its virtues. Thus, my only conclusion so far is that transparency must been seen as a complex and multifaceted concept. As such, singular characterizations of transparency as either on the side of angels or demons strike me as too simplistic.

Perhaps the explanation for why people are less inclined to trust the government is much simpler: having pulled back the curtain, they do not like what they see.

In Sunday’s New York Times economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argued that although “America Is Not Yet Lost… the Senate is working on it.”

His commentary focused on the Senate’s tradition of relying on “unanimous consent.” In one telling vignette Krugman writes:

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

In other words, the Senate is now “paralyzed by procedure.” As a result, “Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm — in fact, political dividends — in making the nation ungovernable.”

Two more great resources for visualizing data — this time words, not numbers.

First, is Wordle, created by Jonathan Feinberg, a senior scientist at IBM Research. I especially recommend “Word Vader.”

Second, is Many Eyes, especially their word visualizations. A nice recent example is the 2010 State of the Union in 90 Words.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured a nice visualization of President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget.

Even though such visualizations have become somewhat common, seeing it reminded me of my days at Creative Labs, circa 1996-1998. It was there that my manager first introduced me to Edward Tufte’s work on data visualization, and to Marimekko Charts.

The Mekko Chart has long been used by strategy consultants. It allows data to be depicted along two dimensions simultaneously. For example, market segments are often arrayed along the x-axis, with the width of each column corresponding to the dollar size of a segment. Within each segment/column the market share of individual brands is then displayed with respect to the y-axis. These days companies such as Mekko Graphics and think-cell offer add-ons which make it easy to generate Mekko charts in PowerPoint, or with a bit of effort you can do it yourself. An example of a Mekko Chart is below. (Curiously, as of today there is no entry in Wikipedia related to Marimekko Charts.)

Although Mekko charts are an elegant solution for depicting a handful of market segments and competitors, their usability starts to breakdown when faced with significantly more data, such as the S&P 500. And visualizing the stock market was precisely the problem Martin Wattenberg had in mind when he created the technique that ended up being used in yesterday’s New York Times budget visualization.

Starting with Shneiderman’s treemap technique (which is essentially what drives a Mekko chart) Wattenberg developed an algorithm that 1) employs both vertical and horizontal partitions at each level of hierarchy, resulting in a series of more readable rectangles, and 2) groups these rectangles based on their similarity to one another, enhancing the reader’s ability to make sense of any resulting patterns across rectangles. (For more details see his 1999 paper on Visualizing the Stock Market.)

The result was the 1998 introduction of the SmartMoney Map of the Market as a way of visualizing the S&P 500 at a glance. (Note: Wattenberg credits Marc Frons and Joon Yu as collaborators, and indicates “that several others, including Jarke van Wijk, independently invented similar algorithms around the same time.”)

Back to the budget itself, a couple things standout. First, there is the total: $3.69 trillion. Second, for all the fighting about healthcare, what’s astounding are the four bigger budgetary items that we’re not talking about: #1) national defense, #2) social security, #3) medicare, and #4) income security. These 4 items account for $2.53 trillion of the budget. Worse, if you toggle the “hide mandatory spending” button, what becomes apparent is just how few options there are for cutting the budget. Whereas virtually all of the national defense budget is discretionary, less than a quarter of the income security budget, and virtually none of the social security and medicare budgets are discretionary. In short, healthcare spending is neither the of our budget woes, nor can it possibly be the cure. We could eliminate healthcare entirely, or double our spending on healthcare, and the consequences overall would be modest, if not meaningless. To reduce the healthcare debate to a debate over economics is just that, reductionist. The recourse to economics has to be understood as essentially a smokescreen, evidence of an unwillingness to seriously engage with the issue.

Furthermore, the real problems with the budget are clearly related to national defense and social security. These two programs account for 40% of spending. And these are two programs that no one in Washington — Democrat or Republican — seems to be talking about fixing. So while I agree that we need healthcare reform, even more urgently needed are national defense reform and social security reform. For starters, the budget suggests America can no longer afford to be warmakers and peacekeepers for the world. We need to let the world fight its own battles and make its own peace. I suspect most of the world would be happy with that outcome too. Likewise, it appears that the 20th century concept of retirement and the government’s role in it needs to be entirely reworked for the 21st century. Hitting 65 years of age can no longer been seen as the magical age at which bliss and nirvana are yours by birthright. When exactly did retirement at 65 become part of the American dream, as if it were a Constitutional right? Perhaps linking the retirement age with life expectancy is a first step towards reforming social security.

The third thing that stands out is one thing we are not spending money on. The total energy budget is only $10 billion, or approximately 0.2% of the total budget. Now granted these figures do not include the Department of Energy’s $17.7 billion budget, which is grouped together with the national defense budget. But even adding in the DOE brings total federal spending on energy to just 0.7% of the total budget. Considering the well-known linkage between energy and GDP combined with the growing likelihood of a carbon constrained economy, and it seems clear that energy is vital to any U.S. recovery.