Tag: Donald Trump

Make America Great: The Answer is Us

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We the People

By coincidence, not design, I spent the two weeks after the election in the Bay Area, Sacramento and Washington, D.C., engaging with over 100 groups and leaders about the future of our country— bipartisan leaders in media, foundations, think tanks, NGOs, businesses, labor, technology, the academy, public service and the faith community. What I discussed with them is what we do now to move the United States forward. Is the American Dream dead? As we move beyond shock (and for many of us grieving), is there a constructive path out? Can it be bi-partisan? I believe so — it is called Progressive Federalism (a term coined by Andrei Cherny in the Democracy Journal and Joel Rogers and Richard Freeman in an important book on inequality).

The Original Progressive
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An open letter to my boss, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

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Dear Ms. Rometty,

My name is Elizabeth Wood and I am a senior content strategist within the IBM corporate marketing department, based in New York City. I have worked hard to get to this stage in my career, and have been a valued member of my team at IBM. However, I have chosen to resign, as I can no longer contribute to an organization that would ignore the real needs of its workforce.

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What I Discovered About Trump and Clinton From Analyzing 4 Million Facebook Posts

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On Facebook, headlines are often more important than the articles themselves. Most headlines are browsed, not clicked — think about your own Facebook behavior; How often do you click on links? Because of this, the headlines frame our positions on topics without even having to read the content. It’s quick, simple, and we feel informed. But with respect to politics, this news feed browsing behavior creates an electorate that can become dangerously uninformed.

These same headlines also leave breadcrumbs of the 2016 political narrative, which we can analyze. For this study, we focused on four things:

  1. Exploring media coverage frequency and bias of “Trump” and “Clinton” across different media sources (Headlines)
  2. Comparing social media attention in 2016 to social media attention during the 2012 Obama vs. Romney campaign (Headlines)
  3. Describing other topics the mainstream media brought up when describing Trump and Clinton during the 2016 election (Headlines)
  4. Quantifying the differences in Facebook audience engagement for Clinton and Trump (Facebook Post Engagement)


Analysis Setup

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If Trump Wins, Data Loses

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Gage Skidmore | Flickr

Donald Trump won the primaries by thumbing his nose at political convention, including the idea — personified by the folks who steered President Obama’s two winning campaigns — that data science can be used to optimize a presidential campaign. If Trump wins tonight, that upset would also spell a profound defeat for this data-driven mindset (Backchannel).

For one thing, the polls and prediction sites run by numbers nerds all tell us that Trump’s headed for defeat. But proving them wrong is only the beginning of the challenge to a scientific, evidence-driven worldview that a Trump victory would represent.

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Where Did the Productivity Go? Five Theories.

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After my last post on how you can blame Silicon Valley for Donald Trump, I got a lot of questions as to why productivity is stagnating. Stagnating productivity leads to people being angry with their economic well being and turning to easy sounding solutions spouted by Mr Trump. Silicon Valley is the self proclaimed world capital of innovation, but as of yet none of the Bay Area break throughs is accelerating the sluggish productivity growth.

But why? How is it possible that giving everybody in the world access to all the information in the world doesn’t show up in economic statistics? Here are five theories.

Good things will come to those who wait

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