You can hide your money, but not your swimming pool…

“The Greek authorities recently published the names of high-profile citizens accused of being tax cheats. Among other tactics, the government is trying to catch tax evaders by using satellite photos to spot undeclared swimming pools — an indicator of taxable wealth.”

Source:

AP-Greek Tourism Official Quits Over Husband’s Tax Debts, May 17, 2010

Smart Search Terms

Last week I came across the fantastic web site seolol.net where the site authors post humorous searches they stumble across while looking through search engine optimization tools such as Keyword Discovery and WordTracker.

As an homage, I made a movie of some of my favorite searches using the new google search engine movie maker.

Slum tourism continued

A street in the Uptown Tenderloin district.Thor Swift for The New York Times

San Francisco Detours Into Reality Tourism published April 11 in The New York Times describes a new area for San Francisco tourism: the Uptown Tenderloin. Includes walking tours of “the world’s largest collection of historic single-room occupancy hotels.” Just like the tenement museum in New York — except people are living there NOW! Instead of the bus tours like south central Los Angeles mentioned in the previous post, it seems like these tours avoid night time meanderings, when the “drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.”

Previous post: Slum Tourism in the U.S.

Desirée Rogers and branding

President Obama’s Social Secretary, Desirée Rogers, will be stepping down in April.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Rogers when I was a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I interviewed her for my experimental documentary- 2096: A Lottery Odyssey. The video was based on a story quoted form a Lottery Magazine, about the perils of a futuristic lottery addict.

In looking at the clips today, I find it funny that I had the nerve to bluntly ask Desirée Rogers if the lottery was a regressive tax on the poor. I am not sure  I would be so direct today.  See the clip below for some snippets (apologies for my experimental sound design, I was 21).

In rehashing her career with the Obama administration, The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes about White House staff’s displeasure in her referring to the “Obama brand” during interviews in glossy fashion magazines in the early days of her assignment.

I think Desirée Rogers was being honest, albeit opening the administration up to criticism from opponents.

Naomi Klein’s piece “No Logo Update,” in a recent issue of The Baffler descibes the top-level marketing behind the Obama campaign. She writes that for the first time corporate brands were upstaged by politics and piggybacked on Obama’s campaign (i.e. Pepsi).

Although David Axelrod scoffed at Desirée Rogers’ comments, her statements were common knowledge.

In the time since the election, the marketing wars have not stopped. The health care debate has seemed like a bad episode of Reality TV. It is depressing, but I find a voice of comfort in the last few paragraphs of Naomi Klein’s article:

Personally, none of this [branding, marketing] makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather, I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns…All of their high-priced market research had found  a longing for something more than shopping—for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. …Our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

Sources:
Obama Social Secretary Ran Into Sharp Elbows, Peter Baker, Nytimes.com, March 1, 2010

No Logo Update, Naomi Klein, The Baffler, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2010

Edward Tufte’s Presidential Appointment

The information design guru Edward Tufte will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. “This panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.”(Tufte)

Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.

As an information design instructor, my students were assigned readings from Tufte’s books when we discussed graphical integrity. His books have always been an interesting companion to read alongside writings about contemporary artists who use statistical gathering and information design  techniques in their work (such as Hans Haacke and Mark Lombardi).

In my own practice, Tufte is a sobering reminder that being expressive and representing data are not a good team.

From his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:

Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field. The assumption led down two fruitless paths in the graphically barren years from 1930 to 1970: First, that graphics had to be “alive,” “communicatively dynamic,” overdeocrated and exaggerated (otherwise all the dullards in the audience would fall asleep in the face of those boring statistics). Second, that the main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception (the dullards could not protect themselves).

Of course false graphics are still with us. Deception must always be confronted and demolished, even if lie detection is no longer at the forefront of research. Graphical excellence begins with telling the truth about the data.” (P.53)

I find this passage interesting in contrast with this quote from John Cassidy’s article about Timothy Geithner in the March 15 New Yorker:

The hardest part of the job, Geitner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may not be economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit agreement with the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry.

Be careful with those infographics!

Sources:
Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment, March 5, 2010

John Cassidy, No Credit, Timothy Geitner’s financial plan is working—and making him very unpopular. The New Yorker, March 15, 2010

Spotted “Public Art” in Willets Point Renderings

While doing research for my video about Willets Point and the area’s eminent redevelopment, I noticed some conceptual public art inside one of the renderings. As as way to memorialize 260 closed businesses and  1,711 lost jobs*  – a creative person used an allusion to The Great Gatsby as a placeholder for art that comments on the historical background.

If you look at the sidewalk in the above rendering closely (near the baby stroller), you will see the following caption from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; …where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.