Wednesday, January 14, 2015

2016 Colorado Caucus-- Will it be killed?

The Denver Post a few days ago printed a guest editorial from two political science (what an oxymoron, remember scientific management, in politics the ivory tower has maintained the term) profs from local institutions on the topic of killing our Colorado Caucus.

You can read the misguided diatribe, but no comments please, not on the Denver Post's website, they cut off comments because they were so adverse towards building the momentum the newspaper was clearly intending to build for it's editorial that came a few days later endorsing the misguided idea.

So the Denver Post is manufacturing news. This wasn't some grassroots groundswell. But read them both here, the editorial and the poly sci profs party-killing proposal. Then comment here or even better fire off your comments to the Denver Post and encourage them to open up the comment threads on these two pages so this can be nipped in the bud:

Poly Sci Profs Party-killing Proposal
http://www.denverpost.com/Opinion/ci_27245174/Imagine-a-mailin-presidential-primary-for-Colorado

Denver Post Call to Kill the Caucus
http://www.denverpost.com/Opinion/ci_27262576/For-2016-bring-back-Colorados-presidential-primary

Monday, January 12, 2015

Brainstorm vs. Brainstorming


Brainstorm vs Brainstorming
The History of the Words.
The word "brainstorming" did not appear in Webster's Dictionary until the 1954 edition. Previous editions, how far back has not been determined but the 1934 edition for sure, carried the word "brainstorm" but it had a far different meaning than brainstorming as we think of it and as it is defined today.

First used in the late 1800's "brainstorm" originally referred to an extreme mental disturbance. That meaning changed after Alex Osborn, the O in BBD&O the New York advertising agency started using "brainstorming" as a creativity technique. Now the original meaning of brainstorm has been lost, it now means an insight or good idea.

Here's the frequency of use of the two words in the books on Google, which is thought to be a representative sample. (For more about this word frequency technique and to use it on words you are interested in researching, see https://books.google.com/ngrams/info)