Seattle.BloggersPub

this is my first blog post on my tablet PC. It’s an interesting form factor and I’ll have to keep playing around with it before making any judgements. the handwriting recognition is actually pretty accurate.

Venus Velázquez announced today that she is running for the Position 3 seat that Peter Steinbrueck is vacating. From her press release: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Venus Velázquez sets her sights on Seattle City Council Position Number Three Candidate will focus…

MAX, Adobe’s big conference is taking place in Chicago this year September 30 - October 3rd. I’m always excited about MAX, but I think this one is going to be special. No one has said anything about this, but Apollo and Flex 3 are supposed to be released second half of 2007 and that lines […]

Hey, this is a test post to see how IE7 handles inline Flash objects. Also, HappySlip vids are pretty funny.
metadata:flash funny happyslip mac tribute video vlog youtubeflash, funny, happyslip, mac, tribute, video, vlog, youtube

I’m just getting ready to wind down for the day, but I wanted to talk about how great it’s been. This was a fun event for a lot of reasons. There were definitely some bad speakers, but overall I think Adobe customers really shined. My favorites were Scrybe, Virtual Ubiquity and yourminis.
The other fun thing […]

Great to see the Zags take home another WCC Championship last night with a big win in San Diego. It’s sure been interesting and I thought it was great to see coach Few so excited about the win last night and handing out hugs to his players.
Lets get two more this weekend, […]

Via TSK comes this announcement of a major national emerging church conversation called Emergence 2007. It’s organized by Zondervan, which just released the book “Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches.”
The book, edited by Robert Webber, features Mark Driscoll, John Burke, Dan Kimball, and Doug Pagitt, and is included with the $49 registration fee for […]

Are you a young professional? The Chamber of Commerce Young Professionals Network is hosting a panel discussion tomorrow with Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis. We encourage you to go and ask him about the surface/transit alternative and what the mayor plays…

A couple of hours ago, US stock investors finished taking a bath — the worst since 9/11 — precipitated by a collapse in the Shanghai market. And front and center on its home page, the New York Times already has up a minute-by-minute chart showing today’s progress for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (Hint: it’s mostly down.)

Fair enough, I suppose. Measurement is important. And if the stock market ever deserves media attention, today is the day. But I have to confess that I’m baffled by a couple of things.

First off, the DJIA is a terrible indicator of general stock market performance. It’s an antiquated relic based, in part, on a fear of long division. We’ve already gone into this in some detail, so I won’t repeat it all now.

Second, why do we insist on clocking and and endlessly discussing every movement in stocks in a way that we do for little else? Are there no other important economic benchmarks? Or is it just that we’re collectively obsessed with shiny new numbers, no matter how irrelevant they may be?

Want to know about trends for middle class incomes in your state? The most recent data are 2 years old. And you can’t break it down by household size, so it lumps single-income households in with two-earner groups. The data have a number of other problems too.

What about poverty? Nope, sorry. The only reliable data for poverty and child poverty are also 2 years old. And the best analysis of those outdated numbers showed poor Americans heading off a cliff like the Dow did today. Too bad we won’t know what happened in 2006 until sometime next year. And even when we get the new numbers, they’ll be based on several specious assumptions.

There are many more examples, but I’ll spare you for now. I simply think it’s worth noting that what is measured well, we obsess over, and we try to improve. It would be nice, then, if what we measured well reflected the values and priorities of all of us – not just the highest-earning 1/5 of Americans, who own 90 percent of all stock market assets. And not just whatever bright new numbers happen to be readily at hand.

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