Looking Ahead To The 2010 Elections

by: Mike Proto

A year in politics may be an eternity. As each day passes, and more and more of the radical Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda is laid before us, the wait until being able to turn the lever next November will certainly feel like it.

But just what are the prospects for a Republican takeover of Congress next year? If the Pew Research findings released yesterday are any barometer, one would have to say pretty good. In fact, the anti-incumbent sentiment uncovered by Pew Research is worse than about any time in their two decades of polling. The current climate is similar to 1994 and 2006, which should give Republicans reason for optimism. According to Pew:

The mood of America is glum. Two-thirds of the public is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. Fully nine-in-ten say that national economic conditions are only fair or poor, and nearly two-thirds describe their own finances that way – the most since the summer of 1992. An increasing proportion of Americans say that the war in Afghanistan is not going well, and a plurality continues to oppose the health care reform proposals in Congress.

Despite the public’s grim mood, overall opinion of Barack Obama has not soured – his job approval rating of 51% is largely unchanged since July, although his approval rating on Afghanistan has declined. But opinions about congressional incumbents are another matter.

About half (52%) of registered voters would like to see their own representative re-elected next year, while 34% say that most members of Congress should be re-elected. Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys. Other low points were during the 1994 and 2006 election cycles, when the party in power suffered large losses in midterm elections.

Support for congressional incumbents is particularly low among political independents. Only 42% of independent voters want to see their own representative re-elected and just 25% would like to see most members of Congress re-elected. Both measures are near all-time lows in Pew Research surveys.

Here are some key findings from Pew’s polling:

% Who Want To See Their Representative Re-Elected

• 11/94: 58%-Yes vs. 25% No
• 11/06: 55%-Yes vs. 25% No
• 11/09: 52%-Yes vs. 29% No

% Who Want To See Most Representatives Re-Elected

• 11/94: 31%-Yes vs. 51% No
• 11/06: 37%-Yes vs. 46% No
• 11/09: 34%-Yes vs. 53% No

Pew’s research also shows that Republicans are far more enthusiastic about voting next year:

…voters who plan to support Republicans next year are more enthusiastic than those who plan to vote for a Democrat. Fully 58% of those who plan to vote for a Republican next year say they are very enthusiastic about voting, compared with 42% of those who plan to vote for a Democrat. More than half (56%) of independent voters who support a Republican in their district are very enthusiastic about voting; by contrast, just 32% of independents who plan to vote for a Democrat express high levels of enthusiasm.

And the biggest problems for Democrats is how they are bleeding independents (as was the case in last week’s NJ election which saw Christie win this key group 2:1)

Public frustration with Congress may have serious electoral implications for incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Only about a third (34%) of registered voters say they think most members of Congress should be re-elected next year, which is on par with ratings during the 1994 and 2006 elections. Meanwhile, just 52% of voters say they want to see their own member re-elected, approaching levels in early October 2006 (50%) and 1994 (49%).

In November 1994, 68% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans favored the re-election of their own member of Congress, which is comparable to the current figures (64% of Democrats, 50% of Republicans). But today, just 42% of independents want to see their own representative re-elected, compared with 52% of independents on the eve of the 1994 midterm elections.

Partisan feelings about incumbents were the reverse in 2006, when the GOP held majorities in the House and Senate. In November 2006, 69% of Republicans, 52% of Democrats and 45% of independents wanted to see their own member of Congress re-elected.

As with all polls, this is just one snapshot in time. But barring a 180 degree turn by the Democrats in Washington, as well as in the economy, 2010 is shaping up to be a bloodbath for blue nation.

With that said, what do you think? Make your prediction for 2010 below.

What Is Your Prediction For The 2010 Elections?

Democrats will retain both Houses of Congress
Republicans will win back both Houses of Congress
Democrats will hold the House, Republicans win the Senate
Republicans will win the House, Democrats hold the Senate

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Here’s a prediction about the 2010 Wisconsin Governor’s Race

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Elliot

If Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker AND Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett are the two candidates, the Milwaukee area will be worse off after the election no matter who wins.

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15 Tech Predictions for 2010

Posted by Andrew G.R. under Truth

Ever notice that every boardwalk on the planet has a tarot card reader who is willing to drain your wallet for a supposed glimpse into the future? Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. Since we are all on equal footing when it comes to crystal ball gazing, Jack of All Blogs figures we’ll give this soothsaying thing a crack. Here are your tech (and other) predictions for 2010.

Dozens of ‘iPhone killers’ will be released, none will slay (especially when the iPhone comes to Verizon)

Your parents will ask you 47 times to explain this ‘Twitter thing’

Hundreds will die, millions pissed off as drivers text while driving

Taylor Swift will continue to be under-talented, over-exposed

A wrestling superstar will die

Microsoft Vista will become a relic

The number of scooters driven by adults will rise

Google Wave doesn’t turn into the tsunami many are hoping for

The video game controller continues to die a slow death, with games being controlled by our other body parts

Wolfram who?

Poor economic conditions will continue to be used as an excuse not to give workers raises, despite strong signs of recovery

Corporate suits will circulate articles from TechCrunch and Mashable to encourage management to ‘cash in’ on the social media craze

Macworld announcements fail to live up to hype, disappoint most

Online TV watching grows in popularity, yet you and none of your friends do it

A small $200 HD camera will be used to film a blockbuster film

What tech predictions would you like to make for 2010?

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2009-2010 Big 12 men’s basketball predictions

The fortuneteller is in the house

By Brent Wilson

(CU Independent/Beth Schonberger)

Editor’s note: Welcome to the CU Independent’s five-day season preview of Colorado Buffaloes basketball. Each day, we will delve into the world of CU basketball leading up to the men’s season-opener against Arkansas-Pine Bluff on Friday, Nov. 13. On Day 4, we will predict how the Big 12 Conference will shake out.

What’s more worthless than preseason college basketball predictions?

Ranks with blanks.

It’s where No. 1 has none and being last has no past. It’s a world of mush-covered nonsense, and that’s before it enters your bowels. That’s why all I really have to say is…

Let the dribble begin!

Welcome to the Big 12 Conference men’s basketball prediction headquarters. We’re the place to foretell all of your 2009-2010 college basketball stories and scores, including the answer to who will be the Big 12 champion.

The foretelling answer is Colorado will defeat Arkansas-Pine Bluff on Friday in Boulder. Is it too soon to know? Not for me, it ain’t!

But here’s what you’ve all been waiting for, so get out your dolla dolla bills and rev up your calculators ‘cause here is what the Big 12 standings will look like in March 2010.

1. Kansas – With the returning gang of Cole Aldrich, Tyshawn Taylor and of course, NBA talent Sherron Collins, everybody knew Kansas would be headed towards the top of the bunch. But with newcomer Xavier Henry added to the punch, the Kansas Jayhawks will win the Big 12. Henry has NBA talent and expect him to blow up the scoreboard by mid-season.

2. Texas – The only team who can give Kansas trouble in skipping to the title is Rick Barnes’ bunch. It will come down to Texas’ ability to score toe-to-toe with a nearly flawless Kansas offense. Guys such as forward Damion James will have to step up his offensive game monumentally to have a chance to overtake the Jayhawks. Texas’ chances? The crystal ball says, “Psh, please.”

3. Oklahoma State – Four of last season’s top six scorers for the Cowboys return. Little guy Ray Penn, at 5-feet-9 inches, is the up-tempo, explosive athlete the Cowboys need to create lots of points in a short amount of time. That’s why they say it’s the little things that win games.

4. Oklahoma – Sophomore Willie Warren will lead the Big 12 in scoring and Oklahoma will be dancing in March. Warren said he welcomed the pressure of becoming the face of the Sooners with the departure of Blake Griffin. I’ll say it once, I’ll say it twice and I’ll say it 10 dang times: Never, ever compare yourself with the prettiest girl in school, especially when she’s giant and can destroy you.

5. Missouri – This was an Elite Eight team last year and has the ingredients to play with anyone in the league, minus Texas and Kansas. This team was noted for their defense last year. Now, all they need is to rekindle their offense and you’re looking at a major threat in the NCAA Tournament.

6. Kansas State – A great recruiting class will get the Wildcats as far as midship in this Conference, but it doesn’t mean they are not a Top 25 team, ‘cause they are. Denis Clemente will lead this team as far as K-State’s talent can take them, which is No. 6.

7. Texas A&M – The Aggies have too many holes to be any better than seventh in the Big 12. They lost guys such as Chinemelu Elonu, who was as equally fun to watch play as it was to say his name six times fast, and three-year starter Josh Carter. Both guys will be missed and there is no sign the Aggies have enough weapons to make up for those losses.

8. Iowa State – Craig Brackins? CRAIG BRACKINS?! Funny you should ask about him because here’s a no-name who was the second leading scorer in the Big 12 last year. He also ripped down nearly 10 boards a game and no one knows this guy. But by year’s end, we all will.

9. Baylor – Tweety Carter is the real deal. His arrival has helped take the Bears out of the shambles in the Big 12. By year’s end, when Tweety tweets on his twitter page, will there be a NCAA tournament bid in his hand? No. But the good news is Baylor should be fun to watch.

10. Colorado – The Buffs had the most heart out of any team in the Big 12 last year. They were in most of their games and expect them to win a couple of those games this year. Cory Higgins should be the rally horse for this bunch and expect him to be the breakout player of the year, unofficially, in the Big 12.

11. Texas Tech – They allowed 79 points a game last season. You would think your team would be able to play defense when one of your best player’s last name is Singletary. Ah yes, that was a simpler time, though.

12. Nebraska – Cookie Miller, Nebraska’s starting point guard for the past two years, has transferred to Miami (Ohio). They had enough trouble scoring last year with Miller, so a betting man would say losing your starting point guard isn’t a good way to fix things.

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What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” – Peter Drucker

So let’s do some predictions, shall we? True, I dislike the entire business of prediction, close cousin that it is to guessing. Which I hate. But James’ excellent thoughts on what we might see in the year ahead got me thinking about what I’m anticipating.

Maybe we see over the hill imperfectly, but the following assertions are not without their substance either. Feel free to take them with a grain of salt, several grains, or not at all. We’ll see how we did a year from now.

One thing to keep in mind about our predictions: we’re looking a bit further out than, say, Gartner. Where they are predicting that cloud computing will a strategic technology for 2010, then, we instead consider that a given. So if you’re looking for predictions like, “open source will be a mainstream option,” you’ve come to the wrong place: we figure you know that already. It doesn’t mean that Gartner’s wrong, of course; merely that we’re having an entirely different conversation.

Cloud API Proliferation Will Become a Serious Problem

When I meet with cloud providers these days, the default answer to questions about the openness or lackthereof with respect to their software is “we have an open API.” But this is, unquestionably, the wrong answer for customers. It’s not that open APIs are bad, individually: far from it. You’d rather have one than not. But how are customers to manage them as they multiply? Cloud providers should be considering Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Unsurprisingly, however, they are not. Which means that cloud API proliferation will reach new, frightening heights in the year ahead. Or maybe you want to individually review and compare the APIs as they iterate. Watch the Deltacloud project for traction as a result; platforms with an API compatibility story like Eucalyptus should benefit as well.

On a semi-related note, I expect IaaS to remain more popular than PaaS for 2010.

Collaboration Will Never Be the Same

Google Wave was quite a splash when it landed; Mozilla Raindrop far less so. Or so says Google Trends. But both will play an important role in the fundamental reshaping of the interfaces – and in the case of Wave, infrastructure – that we all use to collaborate in the year ahead. Nor will the impacts be limited to the early adopter market those products are aimed at. As James noted, Lotus sold 1M licenses of its Connections product in two weeks to six customers. The appetite for next generation collaboration toolsets is strong, whether we’re talking about Rogers’ innovators or laggards.

But all of that may end up being the least interesting trend we see from collaboration in 2010. Of potentially greater impact are those that go beyond the interface. Github, for example, strongly incents social coding and cross pollination in ways that change the way development is done. Offerings like Gist and Threadsy, meanwhile, take a business intelligence-like approach to email, attempting to both consolidate multiple streams and process the content algorithmically according to its inter-relation. Message from your boss? Important. Someone you hear from once every two months? Less so. Neither are ready for primetime, by my testing, but they point the way forward.

And collaboration will never be the same.

Data as Revenue

I’ve written about this fairly extensively already, so I won’t belabor the point. But we’re going to see datasets increasingly recognized as a serious, balance sheet-worthy asset. Twitter pointed the way with its Bing and Google deals, and then Infochimps reinforced that value by making available, commercially, data they harvested from everyone’s favorite micro-blogging service.

This will continue. I’m fully in agreement with IBM’s Steve Mills when he says that we’re “moving into an era of information led transformation.” As margins slim and economies continue to stagnate, enterprises of all sizes will increasingly turn their eyes to data based assets, both for their latent commercial value as well as for improved decision making.

As a result, fear and concern over the privacy implications will spike.

Democratization of Big Data

Yes, Facebook and its 24 terabytes of new content per day is an outlier. But what about the individual developer that wants to make sense of the 1.7 GB Twitter dataset that Infochimps is making available? OpenOffice.org, as I can personally report, doesn’t want anything to do with it.

Fortunately, the democratization of big data is well underway. Hadoop puts MapReduce within reach, Pig puts Hadoop within reach, and with the Cloudera desktop you even have a nice, shiny browser based GUI. Throw in Amazon, and you have as many machines as you could possibly want. We’re still a little light in the front end space, with the ability to visualize the data lagging far behind the ability to process it, but that will come. Maybe in the next year, maybe not.

But either way, the ability to work on big data will increasingly be available to any business, large or small. Democractization of Big Data, commence.

Developer Target Fragmentation Will Accelerate

Between cloud fabrics, programming language proliferation, mobile application development and the spike in development framework popularity, development targets have been fragmenting for several years now. We are more or less in full retreat from the one time promise of write once, run anywhere as an industry. I see nothing on the horizon that will throttle or even slow this trend; if anything, the increasing volume of cloud platforms and the surge in interest in mobile development will accelerate this trend.

This has significant implications for purveyors of middleware, application development tools and cloud platforms, but also for those charged with setting enterprise technology standards. The CIO’s job is going to get harder in 2010, because picking a winner from the myriad language, framework and platform options will be much more difficult than picking a safe option.

It’s All About the Analytics

Flowing Data, a blog run by PhD candidate Nathan Yau, is one of my favorites. The visualization of data is as much an art as a science, and there are few practitioners more talented. The challenge of taking data and hammering it into a form that conveys meaning and supports conclusions is, of course, an age old challenge. But the tools at our disposal are getting better, fast.

Consider the simple analytics that are available, for free, to virtually anyone today: Google Analytics for the web, Feedburner for feeds, Bit.ly for links, About:Me for the browser, Flickr Stats for pictures and so on. Emerging services like PostRank will even extend that value by consolidating various streams into a meaningful, single glance assessment of performance.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that only what can be measured can be managed – open source, in particular, belies that claim – but there’s no debate that metrics can be immensely important in maximizing returns, and to an extent, profits.

We’re going to see analytics become, as James said, ubiquitous to the extent that they’re not already. Two projects to keep your eyes on in this space, both from IBM: the chronically underleveraged ManyEyes, and the Hadoop-backed M2. Both could – should, in my view – be important at advancing the state of analytics forward in the next year.

Marketplaces Will Be Table Stakes

Why has it taken so long for the idea of marketplaces to catch on? Don’t look at me; I’ve been banging on about them since 2006 or so. The equation has long seemed like a no brainer to me: developers and ISVs get a centralized channel and wider audience, platforms get a wider ecosystem, and customers get a more efficient discovery and acquisition process – at a minimum.

Whatever the initial reluctance, that’s over. Two plus billion Apple iTunes store downloads later, mobile players are falling all over themselves to roll out marketplaces to compete. Canonical, sponsors of the Ubuntu project, are moving towards their own software store (though, regrettably, it still doesn’t include developers as I’ve hoped for). Amazon, meanwhile, has most of the pieces it would need to sell apps, and a sustained rate of innovation that is more or less unmatched in the industry at present.

What does 2010 hold, then? Marketplaces, and a lot of them. Mobile is quickly becoming staturated, web apps and the desktop are probably next, and data marketplaces may ultimately eclipse them all. If you want to play next year, bring your marketplace. Or go home.

New Languages to Watch

Seems like we have a new hot programming language every year. Some are in it for the long haul, some fade away, and some linger in between like the undead. I’m not prepared at this point to call the winners for the next year, but two that a.) might lend themselves well to cloud and cloud-like environments and b.) are receiving disproportionately more attention relative to their erstwhile competition are Clojure and Go. The former is essentially Lisp reborn on top of the JVM, while Go borrows from C syntaticly but adds in modern language conveniences such as garbage collection without taking too much of a hit performance-wise (Go is 20-30% slower than C/C++, reportedly).

It seems unlikely that either will make significant inroads at the expense of the currently popular compiled languages such as C#/Java or the dynamic alternatives (PHP/Python/etc), but the level of attention – and the people paying attention – distinguish them from other languages aimed at concurrency like Erlang and Haskell.

NoSQL Will Bid for Mainstream Acceptance

Maybe the NoSQL label is a misnomer, and maybe Michael Stonebraker is right that NoSQL has nothing to do with SQL. Either way, I am not ready to predict that the NoSQL moniker will retired in favor of, say, AltDB.

What I will claim, however, is that projects in this space will individually and collectively make serious bids for mainstream acceptance. Cassandra, CouchDB, InfiniDB, MongoDB, Riak, Tokyo Cabinet and the like – different as they all are from one another – will position themselves not as relational replacements but complementary technologies that solve a different set of problems.

While I don’t believe the bid for mainstream acceptance will be successful generally – enterprises are too wedded to the RDBMS model, the tooling for the NoSQL projects is generally weak, etc – they will find a fertile ground in areas illsuited to the traditional relational, row-based model.

So that’s my nine. As a bonus, five predictions for free and open source software:

FOSS Predictions

1. Usage of dual licensing will continue to decline, in part because of the Oracle and EU dispute over MySQL
2. FOSS advocates will increasingly turn their attention from licensing to the related mechanisms of copyright and trademark
3. Permissive licensing will continue to gain at the expense of reciprocal licensing, albeit slowly
4. The value of project code will be eclipsed, in a few cases, by the data the project generates
5. Open source, building from its mainstream acceptance, will emerge as the most credible alternative to proprietary cloud and mobile platforms

But that’s just what I’m seeing. What are your predictions for 2010?

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