With just a month left until the election, polls indicate that Barack Obama has a healthy lead in both the popular vote and electoral college projections, and the Democrats in Congress are looking strong as well.

After 2004’s disappointment, I don’t want to put too much faith in the polls, but I am feeling cautiously optimistic.

But this week’s question isn’t about predicting the election. Let’s suppose hypothetically that Barack Obama does win next month. Let’s say that the election maintains a Democratic majority in the House, and Democrats wind up with 60 seats in the Senate (enough to block a filibuster).

This would basically put the Democrats in control of the agenda for at least two years, longer if the voters are pleased with the results.

So, the two questions I pose to my mostly liberal readership (but also my few conservative and moderate readers as well) is this:

If the Democrats were to take control, what would you like to see happen? What would you expect would actually happen?

The word of the week is smarter.

That links to the word “smart” but I deliberately chose the comparative form. Here it is in context:

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

Forgetting that the show in question tests knowledge and not intelligence, it may seem at face value to be a very silly question to ask in the first place. I would, however, argue that it is completely nonsensical, based on what we now understand about human intelligence. Making glib statements about who is smarter than whom ignores the wide range of ways that people can be smart.

In 1905, Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, created a diagnostic test to identify students who needed extra help in school. It was the misapplication of this test that led to the highly-flawed concept of IQ. Over the past century, the IQ has been used for purposes that range from merely misguided to downright ugly. For more on that, read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.

We really need to get past the idea that intelligence is something that can be ranked in a linear manner. In his landmark 1983 book Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner makes a case for the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, the theory that there are distinct and identifiable areas of intelligence that exist in the human mind, that are “independent of one another, and that … can be fashioned and combined in a multiplicity of adaptive ways by individuals and cultures.” Gardner identifies seven such intelligences, though he allows for the possibility that there may be others, and the conversation surrounding various other possible intelligences continues today. His original seven — Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, and the two personal intelligences commonly referred to as Interpersonal and Intrapersonal — have gained wide acceptance among learning theorists and educators in the field.

And yet, as a system, we still judge student achievement solely from test scores in literacy and math, and cling to IQ as a meaningful measurement of a person’s intelligence.

After everything we’ve learned about the human mind, we should be smarter than that.

I invite my readers to take this awareness test and discuss in the comments:

President Bush now has a job approval rating of 19 percent.

How bad is that? Even sugared gum was signed off on by one out of five dentists. That’s 20 percent.

His job approval is only 14 percent on the economy. The remaining 5 percent who gave him a thumbs-up overall must have been dazzled by the undeniably admirable job he’s been doing managing the Iraq situation.

It’s been a while since I’ve really written anything, but I’ve been busy with a number of things, mostly work related. I’ve also been working on a new resource for this website which should be available shortly. Watch this space!

Last weekend, I attended a social studies conference that I’ve been meaning to write about. One of the speakers was Phil Gersmehl, who discussed the latest research in spatial intelligence. It seems that there are now believed to be eight different types of spatial intelligence, each housed in a different section of the brain. He suggested that geography education, at an early age, could help to strengthen these abilities. I say, it’s never too late.

Via The Media Dude, here’s a geography game that will help you practice your map skills. His brother, The Boy Wonder, points us toward an old Nintendo game called Warehouse 18, which is less about dexterity and more about using spatial thinking to solve visual puzzles.

And yeah, I’ve been pretty busy with these, too.

Yesterday on This Week, George Stephanopoulos cited a “stunning” statistic from the Congressional Budget Office:

From 2003 to 2005, the increase in income for the top one percent exceeded the total income of the bottom twenty percent.

Turn that over in your mind for a moment before we move on to the Question of the Week, which comes to us via the Hoover Institute, a conservative think-tank at Stanford University.

How much does the gap between rich and poor matter? In 1979, for every dollar the poorest fifth of the American population earned, the richest fifth earned nine. By 1997, that gap had increased to fifteen to one. Is this growing income inequality a serious problem? Is the size of the gap between rich and poor less important than the poor’s absolute level of income? In other words, should we focus on reducing the income gap or on fighting poverty?

It’s a fair point. Do rising waters raise all ships? And if so, does it matter if the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer? Or is income inequity really the problem, and a bigger slice of the pie for the rich means less for everyone else? And is it okay to mix ship and pie metaphors when talking about economics? I guess what I’m asking is this:

Does the income gap matter?

From the American Research Group:

November 13, 2007 - Impeachment

A total of 64% of American voters say that President George W. Bush has abused his powers as president. Of the 64%, 14% (9% of all voters) say the abuses are not serious enough to warrant impeachment, 33% (21% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but he should not be impeached, and 53% (34% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses and Mr. Bush should be impeached and removed from office.

The respondents didn’t specify whether they were specifically referring to the administration’s policy on torture. They didn’t say if they were talking about how they cherry-picked intelligence to justify a wrong-headed war, or how they compromised national security by outing a covert CIA operative, merely as retribution for her husband calling them on their lies. The respondents may not have been specifically responding to warrantless wiretapping and secret military tribunals. They may have simply been thinking of how the administration handed over all government regulation to the industries being regulated. The data doesn’t say. All they were asked was if President Bush abused his power, and 64% said he did. The data also doesn’t show what the other 36% were thinking.

When you look at the data, though, something else is striking.

I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that so few people gave Response 2. Imagine a graph of this data. Usually a distribution like this would slope up, slope down, or rise in the middle like a bell curve. That this data set has such a sharp dip in the middle is a testament to just how polarizing this president has been. 64% of Republicans feel that President Bush has not abused his powers as president at all, while 50% of Democrats feel he should be impeached for it.

Also, more than one-fifth of respondents in general felt that his abuses had risen to the level of an impeachable offense, but that he shouldn’t be impeached. Isn’t that being soft on crime? Or perhaps we just remember the last time an opposition Congress impeached a sitting president, and are unwilling to go through all of that again, even if it’s warranted this time.

Because for 36% of the population, warrants are sooooo 20th century.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you only have room for 650? Enter “Content Aware Image Resizing” or the retargeting of images:

This is truly amazing, another step in the ongoing campaign to make images as dynamic as text in the XML Internet.

It does raise some questions about the medium of photography, though. This isn’t the first time images have been digitally altered to be sure, but there does seem to be a difference here. To begin with, a photograph should not be mistaken for reality. Photographers make choices, and a photograph is a selective representation of the world. A resized photograph, I would argue, is basically the same photograph. A cropped photograph is not, but it can be considered another photograph, as it is a different selective representation of the real world. A digitally altered photograph can no longer be considered a photograph in the same way, but it remains a visual representation of an imagined world.

What, then, is a retargeted image? It is a new concept for a new world. Take the example of the image of the two figures on the beach (about 46 seconds into the video). Resizing the image would make it hard to see the figures. Cropping the image would lose one of the figures. Retargeting the image keeps both figures in their current size, and loses only the beach between them. This may seem like an ideal solution, but what is lost is the distance between the two figures. That is a major element of this photograph. It was deleted, not for artistic or functional purposes, but for practical purposes, to help it fit better on the page. The thousand words represented by a picture can now be cut down to just the verbs and nouns. And one imagines this being one day automated, even built into Web browsers of the future - a future where everything is as adjustable as Quick Text Shakespeare, and with similiar nuance.

Even the phrase “Content Aware Image Resizing” gives me the willies in the same way that the term “content provider” seems to imply that the content is just one of many elements that make up a deliverable product. Under this system, Shakespeare was a content provider. And the process described in the video is not aware of content. For that, you still need a human.

I know I’ve blogged favorably about the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and many of them are inevitable, but others are not, and we have a responsibility to keep up with the changing definition of information literacy. Now we have one more question to ask ourselves when we see a photograph online.

I was originally posting this because I thought it was way cool. But I don’t want us to be so dazzled by the new technologies that come out that we stop asking the critical questions.

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across.

You can view the high-resolution image and more on the NASA website.

I know this blog has been overly focused on politics lately, but I’m really bothered and I need to vent yet again.

I’m not bothered that the President failed to disclose a serious medical condition to the American people for a year. If that was the worst thing he did as President, he’d be Jed Bartlet.

I’m not bothered when right-wing commentators call for another 9/11 to “save America” from spirited debate over policy issues and return to a more unified time when everyone was crazed with fear and ready to do whatever the President wanted. Fear is what these people do best.

I’m not bothered by a member of the current administration’s Civil Rights Commission pondering a return to Korematsu. It’s not like he was advocating it, after all.

I’m not bothered that the Secretary of Education would rather read Harry Potter than Shakespeare. Shakespeare can be difficult, and I’ve heard good things about the Harry Potter books. Even the Shakespeare Teacher likes to relax with some lighter fare every now and then.

No, gentle readers, the Republicans aren’t bothering me so much anymore. I think by now we all pretty much know what to expect from them.

It’s the Democrats who totally caved on warrantless wiretapping that are bothering me:

Buckling in the face of familiar scare tactics - and looking to go on vacation - Congress caved on domestic surveillance this past weekend. It handed the White House temporary authority to monitor, without warrants, Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail.

Which brings me to Al Gore. In my opinion, Al Gore is the only person in the country who 1) gets it, and 2) has a strong chance of winning the Presidency.

Because of this, he has a moral obligation to run. He has laid out the most serious challenges facing us today and we have listened. But he may be the only person who can be the change he wants to see in the world. He can’t honestly think that giving a Keynote presentation on climate change can compare to actually being the President. So what’s going on? Is he biding his time, allowing all of us to beg him to run, rather than entering the race now and becoming a target? Or is honestly not planning to run?

I’m bothered by the current state of politics in this country. I’m bothered by the abusive Republicans and the enabling Democrats. And you know what? So is he. So I’ll wrap up this post by linking to rundammit.com, because I’m sick and tired of being bothered by this sorry excuse for a government we have failing to run this country.

It’s time, Al. Step up.