Word: ackermans
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Meanwhile, in the town of Hutto, north of Austin, the construction on State Highway 130 is a sign of things to come. Farmers no longer gather at the cotton gin, but the town's first national chain, Home Depot, has moved in. Mayor Mike Ackerman drives by the construction site every day on his way to work and is sanguine about the changing face of his town. "Anything we can do to get traffic moving north and south, we need to do," he says. The question is whether the rest of Texas agrees with him. --With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin
It’s all too easy to accept the status quo and cynically conclude that the American electorate just can’t do any better. But a recent book by Yale professor Bruce Ackerman and Stanford professor James Fishkin repudiates what conservatives like to call the soft bigotry of low expectations and proposes a radically innovative solution—a new national holiday they call Deliberation Day (which also happens to be the title of their book). Held two weeks before the presidential election, Deliberation Day would bring Americans together at thousands of sites across the country...
...their book, Ackerman and Fishkin marshal considerable evidence from past studies suggesting that introducing a national Deliberation Day along these lines may well produce powerful results. Fishkin, in particular, has long experience designing Deliberative Polls, which measure citizens’ knowledge of and opinions on key issues before and after they participate in a weekend of moderated deliberation. His research has shown that most participants not only demonstrate greater understanding of the issues after the weekend, but that that this increased knowledge leads a significant percentage, often between five and ten percent, to change their original opinions. If a Deliberation...
...realistic to imagine that we might see Deliberation Day introduced on a national scale? Ackerman and Fishkin believe it is. Alongside all the democratic theory and hard political science, the authors are careful to address the practical nuts-and-bolts problems certain to bedevil any potential implementation of their idea. For example, the cost of staging a national Deliberation Day is carefully budgeted to include everything from the $150 honorariums doled out to incentivize participation, to the cost of providing free bussing for all citizens to the designated sites. Altogether, the authors estimate that pulling off a Deliberation Day with...
...tests did in fact reveal worrisome differences and that the FDA incorrectly interpreted the data. Activists campaigning against genetically modified (GM) food want the U.S. to ban RBST outright, as Europe and Canada have. As for Maine, "we would rather be safe than sorry," says assistant attorney general Francis Ackerman, who is preparing the state's brief to intervene on Oakhurst's behalf...