When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

The impact of the new technology was not lost on the news media. The Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that, “The moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the ‘Magic Wall’ to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama’s speech.” In the article, CNN’s Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, David Bohrman is quoted as saying, “Twitter is all noise, but to be able to harness it and group it and actually intelligently cluster it and derive moods and opinions from it is very interesting.”

Whatever you might think of Twitter (Jon Stewart used the Magic Wall as an opportunity to make fun of both CNN and Twitter), this is exactly the type of technology companies are starting to think about for managing their brands, conduct market research, and pre-emptively deal with customer issues. The next level of granularity that sentiment analysis vendors are starting to offer is the ability to go beyond positive and negative sentiment to look at why sentiment is the way it is. Why are people pro-Obama? What types of issues are most often related to “Obama is too liberal?” This type of analysis is available, and I’ve seen demos from some vendors that offer fairly sophisticated drill-downs. However, some people remain sceptical about the general accuracy of this capability, as well as the limitations of most systems to crunch this type of data in real-time. Maybe we’ll see this for next year’s State of the Union—I’m hoping so.

Giridharadas writes, “President Obama declared during the campaign that ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.” He notes that the Citizen’s Briefing Book, a concept created by the Administration to field ideas from the public that can be voted on by their fellow citizens, has had some disappointing results.

“In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide wi-fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.”

Giridharadas continues, “Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online ‘brainstorm’ about making government more transparent. Good ideas came; but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate.”

Giridharadas observes, “Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.”

“Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to ‘capture and impersonate the public voice,’” wrote James Fishkin, political scientist at Stanford University, in an e-mail exchange with Giridharadas.

In a telephone interview, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, told Giridharadas, “Now that it is so important, [the Internet is] actually too important not to think through the constitutional and governance issues involved.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the many lies, slanders, and, to me, outrageous views expressed on the Internet, I tend to post responses now and then when I just cannot stand silent anymore. I will continue to do so, but I have to wonder whether I am engaging in passionate, well-reasoned discourse, or am helping to chew up, word by word, the potential of the Internet to further thinking and debate? I may be no better than the very people I think are inevitably ruining the power of the Internet to share information, truth, and, I hope, judgment and critical thinking. Whether I like it or not, the Internet is, it seems, becoming a source of propaganda for all kinds of vile and detestable – not just worthy – causes and ideas.

Giridharadas sums the situation up well, in my view: “There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.”

Good question, with no good or even so-so answer as yet. This may become the dominant issue for the next few years when it comes to discussions about the value of the Internet for political discourse; it may even come down to the question: Does the Internet have any real value when it comes to political discussion? I certainly hope so, and there are excellent examples, some mentioned in Giridharadas’ column. But I also see something less noble brewing: a stew of misinformation, lies, and rabble-rousing hyperbole that does not engage or ennoble, but rather reduces people to single-issue screamers whose very volume of verbiage overwhelms attempts at cooperation, collaboration, and compromise on political matters. I really hope I am wrong. It’s hard enough to collaborate in person; I hope we don’t squander the potential of the Internet to further collaboration and thoughtful commentary.

LittleSis mixes Facebook-ish user interface with Wikipedia-like user editing to create profiles of the “powers that be” in both the private and public sectors.  Users who register as analysts can log in and add information to profiles of major figures like Barack Obama, Robert Rubin or Bill Gates.  The site focuses on 3 main factors about an individual:  Relationships (which includes Business/Government positions, other memberships, education and donation/grant recipients), Interlocks (people in common organizations), Giving (who they’ve donated to, as well as other individuals that have given to the same recipients) and the basic personal information.

Like Facebook, LittleSis also includes groups.  When I look up Citi Group, I can see their leadership and staff, but I also get a look at people and organizations that Citi has done businesses with. My favorite group feature is the “targets of lobbying”, where I learn that from ’99-’08, they lobbied the Senate and House 19 times.  They also lobbied the Department of Education 7 times between ’04 and ’07 (why would that be?)  If I go to the Department of Education group, I can follow up and see who they’ve done business with, who’s lobbied them, and which organizations have leadership and staff in common with the Department.  I can also check out which organizations have received donations from people who work in the Department.

The key to LittleSis is that it’s not Barack Obama, Citi Group or the Department of Education controlling their own profile and network.  Analysts like myself (I signed up for an account) are the ones doing the writing and editing, much like Wikipedia.  LittleSis also has a metric for determining which Analysts score the most points for making edits – a good system to (hopefully) maintain the integrity of the site.

At this point, there are a few shortcomings to LittleSis.  As I mentioned, the site is still in a Beta version, so it’s not a completed project yet.  Also, you can certainly question the accuracy of the information, and more importantly, the completeness of it.  I can read that a major CEO donated to groups x, y and z, but he may also have donated to a, b and c, with that information not yet uploaded.  As with Wikipedia, I think that a major prerequisite to a complete and successful version of LittleSis will be achieving a critical mass of users to police information and ensure the completeness of it.

Regardless of this shortcoming, I see a lot of potential in LittleSis.  Having this kind of facebook-like platform to follow donations and relationships among America’s elite is a fantastic development for public and private transparency.  Previously, we had to rely on journalists to follow the string and inform us about these relationships.  This website, if successful, allows individual citizens to see this themselves in a platform that’s very similar to the facebook sites they’re so adept at navigating.

The Sunlight Foundation is on the right track – let’s hope that LittleSis gets a strong enough user base to reach its potential.

Obama has promised that the spending authorized by the stimulus bill will be subject to unprecedented transparency and accountability. Although there is little substance yet, recovery.gov — the centerpiece of the transparency strategy — promises to be a rich source of detailed charts, maps and graphics that display where the money is being spent (including which districts and which federal contractors), how it is being spent (the specific projects being funded and their performance targets), and to what effect (including the ability to track individual project developments and assess any measurable improvements in economic performance using broad economic indicators). For a partial example of what this might look like see OMBWatch’s fedspending.org and the government’s own USAspending.gov.

The first two aspects of the proposed transparency strategy (detailing where and how money is being spent) are already routine practice. Whether they can provide that info in a timely and useful manner is another matter. As Ellen Miller at the Sunlight Foundation rightly points out:

Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data.

We also need details such as:

What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What’s the database going to look like what’s the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?

In my view, the third element (the ability to track projects in real-time and to evaluate their impacts) holds both the greatest promise and also the greatest challenge. Releasing official project-level data and providing metrics and tools for analysis (e.g, jobs created per dollar spent) would be a good first step. Open-sourcing this process as much as possible would be even better.

One opportunity is to gather more local intelligence about which projects are positively impacting citizens and the economy and which ones are wasting money. Naturally, these assessments would be more subjective, but not necessarily less reliable than the official data, which we know can be manipulated to hide any signs of poor performance.

I would expect see considerable resistance to this idea all the way down the spending chain, from the federal agencies that distribute the funds to the state and local agencies that spend it to the contractors that ultimately perform the work. Which is likely why we won’t see this kind of capability hosted on recovery.gov, but rather on a third party site like stimuluswatch.org (see my next post).

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for part three in the coming days.)

I briefly introduced the GCW in my first post.  For more details, please check out a short primer that I drafted, which discusses its high-level mechanisms, functions, and goals.  My thinking evolves by the second, and I’m talking with lots of people to figure out the nitty-gritty of how this framework would actually work.  As I do so, I’m happy to see that projects in the spirit of mine are starting to emerge.  Here are three recent examples:

1. The November / December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy spotlights Raj Kumar’s Development 2.0 project, devex.com, which allows site members to, “depending on their level of access, post projects, form networks based on common interests, browse and monitor upcoming bids, find job opportunities, and get in touch with experts on the ground…At the heart of the site, though, is its massive projects database, which currently lists more than 47,000 projects on everything from rural sanitation in Bangladesh to policing in the Palestinian territories – searchable by region, country, donor, project type, or status.  By aggregating this information in one place, Kumar says, Devex gives everyone a chance to find out about opportunities, not just the well-connected…”
2.  MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence just announced an initiative to harness “collective brainpower and computing power” in the service of addressing global challenges.  The “center is developing an online deliberation tool that allows experts in a wide range of fields to get together to share ideas.  Unlike existing online discussion forums, the Climate Collaboratorium requires users to catalog their contributions and connect them to points that have already been made.  Such ‘argument maps’ help eliminate the repetitive, unhelpful comments and tangents that render most online discussion forums unhelpful.  The researchers are also connecting their deliberation tool with computer-based climate models, so users’ suggestions about different parts of the problem can be more easily combined and tested.”
3. The World in 2009, a publication of The Economist, profiles a digital mapping project that  aims to improve how money is spent in Africa: “The kind of maps which in the past had been  held to ransom by secretive African governments will pop up in African internet café in 2009.  Many will be annotated ‘wiki’ style, with layers of information added and verified by  an online community: street names for all, distribution of infant deaths for development workers, livestock density for agricultural officials, Catholic primary schools for a local bishop, and YouTube videos on the best snorkeling spots for tourists…[by using digital maps] teams of epidemiologists working together with medical workers texting in information from their mobile phones will do a better job of tracking exotic pathogens before they become mass killers.  Similarly, aid workers in 2009 will use digital maps for real-time information on famines and conflict, starting with an acute famine in Ethiopia.”

What these undertakings, among others, demonstrate is that a GCW could be an immensely powerful tool for addressing global challenges.  For the most part, they’ve tended to focus on specific global challenges or specific countries.  We need to go a step beyond and focus on the big picture – all global problems in all countries.  

When President Obama announced last month that he’ll ask ordinary Americans to help him change America, it didn’t take long for the influencers inside the Washington beltway to ring the alarm: What happens if ordinary Americans actually come up with some new ideas to run government? Will things get out of control? Will they become bullies who will force Obama and Congressional lawmakers to bend to their will?

To me, they sound a lot like the traditional marketers who are worried that they’re losing control over their brand. Both marketers and lawmakers are struggling to adjust to a digital world where consumers and voters now have powerful tools to talk back, and even influence the brand or the policy. So let me give the Washington lawmakers the same message I have delivered to the marketers: Let go. You can’t control everything. The genie has slipped out of the bottle and she’s not coming back. And I think this is a really good thing…

Read the full post here and then join the discussion.

Essentially, anything that gives an advantage to national companies at the expense of non-national companies is trade-distorting, and thus a protectionist measure.  But during a global recession, it’s very difficult to avoid these actions.  For a simple example, take the auto bailout.  In North America, we assume that the auto industry is “too big to fail”.  But in giving a bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, we’re distorting trade – at the expense of German, British and Japanese auto companies.  Naturally, this issue has already been raised.

Now, a note on free trade.  Generally, most economists agree that free trade is good, and protectionism is bad.  Since the Second World War, regional trade agreements and the World Trade Organization have been, overall, reasonably successful in promoting global trade and lowering barriers to trade.  But let’s remember – we still don’t have absolute free trade.  Canada still has tariffs – you can read our official list if you’re that interested.  So although we have relatively “free-er” or “more open” trade than previous periods in history, it’s still not completely free or open, in any absolute sense.

Now as I mentioned, most economists will agree that we need to move towards free trade, not away from it.  Protectionism, and sometimes even bailouts, are often regarded as the “slippery slope” towards deeper recession (or even depression).

What makes this even worse, however, is the retaliatory nature of protectionism.  Just look at the “Buy American” clause in the US stimulus package, which prompted Canadian politicians to start talking about possible retaliatory measures.  Michael Ignatieff warned the US that Canada is a “force to be reckoned with”, while European leaders made open threats that this could spark a trade war.

But is this kind of rhetoric helpful?  Do our politicians really have to talk tough and make threats? 

Words like “war”, “threat” and “retaliate” all have very negative connotations.  The word ‘war’, in particular, is one generally associated with violence and malice.  Is this the kind of discourse we should have between North America and Western Europe, regions that are supposed to be close allies?  Using the term “war” angles this as state-versus-state conflict.  Is this how we want to frame this issue, at a time when global economic cooperation is more important than ever?

Politicians are savvy- they know the power of words (journalists too).  When they need to gather public support for a cause, they’ll often frame it as an us-versus-them issue – note the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” (on a sidenote, I’ve always thought that a barrier to progress on global warming was the term itself – “global warming” doesn’t sound very threatening – who doesn’t like warmth?  Why hasn’t anyone thought of a more threatening term for this?)

When the newspapers front headlines of “Trade War”, it’s likely to create public support for retaliation.  When public support goes up, it’s more likely that politicians will act on it.

So let’s go back to the auto bailout.  Was it protectionist? Yes.  Is protectionism detrimental to global trade?  Of course.  But did challenging times necessitate a bailout?  You could easily make this argument (as many economists have).  In a recession, states will do things like this, and yes, they will be trade-distorting.  But to frame bailouts and stimulus packages as acts of war is only going to make matters worse.

So let’s stop making threats of retaliation, and stop calling this “war” – this isn’t war.  Let’s not blindly assume that free trade is our ideological goal, and that any barriers to it are evil.  Instead, I’d rather see our politicians act with pragmatism, and come to new agreements on how the world can come through this crisis together.

People are already upset over the worsening economic condition.  So let’s choose our words more carefully, before the discourse of “war” causes national populations to villanize one another.

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Thanks to our friend Mathew Ingram for pointing this out. Posted on GigaPan – it is a panaromic shot made up of more than 200 separate images.

You can zoom right in and see individuals in the crowd (use the controls in the upper left of the screen –access via the link above). The artist explains how he did it on his blog.

The proclamations of “history in the making” and invocations of former Presidents got me thinking about a neat way to visually compare Obama’s inauguration address to those past. Some people may remember my visual analysis of the eight years of Bush; this is a bit different. Using IBM’s ManyEyes social media visualization tool, I’ve compiled a Wordle (stylized tag cloud) comparison of Obama’s address to those of Presidents to whom he is often compared. Note particular similarities to JFK and FDR (more visualizations after the jump).

The trick for Obama will be to lead the Netroots movement rather than be led by it. Tapscott, the author of “Grown Up Digital,” thinks there’s a real risk of backlash if the kids who supported Obama feel their hero has let them down. “If he betrays this generation, the protests of the ’60s will look like a tea party,” Tapscott says. But Markos Moulitsas, captain of the liberal blog DailyKos.com and an occasional NEWSWEEK contributor, doesn’t think Obama’s base would turn on him. “If they get disillusioned, they’ll probably just become apathetic again,” he says. “I couldn’t see disappointed supporters becoming enraged against him. “

What do you think?  Is this generation going to insist on being involved in the governing process, even if Obama doesn’t invite them to the table?

Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is to not correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.

In other words, he had to give up email. It’s quite an amazing contrast – while Obama’s team seeks to use the Web 2.0 to more closely connect with Americans, the leader of the party is being forced to pull back to to what I’d call Web 0.1 for his own communications. And why it’s Web 0.1 is that the major leap forward for the office, technologically speaking, may be having (for the first time) a President with a laptop computer on his desk.

One of the great questions here, which I’m sure many business leaders have and continue to face, is how this might affect Obama’s productivity. As the second article noted, Obama seldom had memorandums and briefing books printed for him – preferring to read and respond on his blackberry or laptop whenever he could find a spare moment. It’s a major work-flow shift to have to revert to printed documents, hand written notes, etc. I wonder, in a “perfect world” where security breaches were not a concern, how much more a President might get done if instead of reverting back to the old ways, he set up a wiki instead…

Well he doesn’t seem to be utilizing any of the web 2.0 tools that he had in the campaign.

His Twitter account has gone quite stale over the last 6 days, just like what happened with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Do you think he’ll update it? Did he ever actually update it? It looks just like an RSS feed of events that he was broadcasting live from.

Also… the blog on Change.gov looks like a mechanism for glorified press releases.

So, no signs thus far that he’s going to use any of the grass roots community building Web 2.0 tools that he used in the campaign to actually reach out and touch the American people during his presidency.

Justin makes a good point. Now that the campaign is over it would all too easy to figure that the job of engaging the public is over until election time rolls around again in 2012. But it’s also a bit early to rush to judgment so let’s give Obama a few more weeks to get settled.

In this new post I’d like to emphasize the importance of reaching outside the traditional boundaries of government institutions to leverage the skills, knowledge and resources that civic and private sector organizations can contribute to the design and delivery of public services.

Here’s the rationale: In our increasingly networked world, issues and problems easily and quickly spill outside the organizational and even geographic boundaries of governmental institutions. While collaboration technologies have evolved at an incredible rate, the application of these technologies to assist governments in dealing with problems is completely dependent on institutional and organizational learning that is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

So we’ve argued that there’s a growing imperative to seize the new function-rich infrastructure of the Web 2.0 to open-up the government’s approach to public policy-making and service delivery. Rather than have agencies manage everything in-house, public services could be provided by any combination of public agencies, the private sector, a community group, or citizens, using the Web as a mechanism for collaboration, innovation and engagement. And, rather than treat citizens as inert consumers, recipients of government services and benefits could become prosumers – shaping the policy and the structures of program, benefits and services for their individual needs. This in turn will lead to better outcomes that better map onto the needs and behaviors of the people that use them.

As my colleague Maryantonett Flumian put it, “The big question is, what roles and responsibilities will government, citizens, not-for-profits and business assume in a society where knowledge is everywhere, where hierarchies are anachronisms, and where “the state” is no longer king of the jungle, but part of an ecosystem energized by mass collaboration?”

Take education, health care and social security, for example. In most public sector “marketplaces” governments maintain a monopoly on service provision and most services are delivered one-size-fits-all. Even in the shift to e-government, many agencies have largely replicated physical world distribution systems on the Web, thus ignoring one of the most powerful implications of the Internet—the ability to create new forms of value by focusing on and transforming core competencies while creating partnerships for non-core activities. By assembling networks of citizens, private firms, non-profit organizations and other agencies on a Web-based platform, governments can offer greater innovation, choice and variety to citizens. In some areas, it could be advantageous to go one step further by offering citizens a basket of services and providers to “purchase” with their tax dollars and many other possible business models that emphasize choice in service venues, providers and options.

We haven’t see too many great examples of this in government, but the British National Health Service (NHS) recently respond to public demand for choice in health care by implementing what it describes as a “dramatic expansion in patient choice.” The introduction of free choice means, among other things, that patients referred to see a specialist are themselves able to choose where they are treated from any hospital that meets NHS standards (whether publicly or privately operated). Patient choice, in turn, introduces an element of competition that should encourage poor facilities to improve as patients seek out practitioners in the best hospitals.

Obama has called for more creative delivery strategies for public services and emphasized the importance of choice in education and health care. Give us your thoughts: Where else could choice make a difference and how could the Obama administration use the Web to enable a more collaborative and user-driven approach to service delivery?

As Obama has noted, there is a steep hill ahead to climb. Think of the challenges: renewing government and democracy; fixing the economy, education and health care; accelerating scientific discovery; fighting climate change and providing global security, to name a few. And he must do all of this with diminishing financial resources.

Obama needs to assemble a real A team of leaders and we’ll be hearing more about his cabinet choices today. But his only real hope in dealing with the tremendous challenges the country (world) faces will be to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens on a massive scale. In other words, he must enlist a level of participation in generating and acting on innovative solutions that has no obvious parallel in history.

Obama has already built a vast network of committed supporters. He has the inherent charisma and intelligence to lead. The questions now is how will Obama mobilize his supporters to affect real change? Will he “open source” government much the way thousands of dispersed Linux programmers converged on the Internet to develop one of the world’s leading computer operating systems? What mechanisms will he deploy to channel citizen input into policy-making? AND, How will he engage all sectors of society in carrying out much-needed reforms in sectors such as education, health care, energy and finance?

Over the next few days and weeks I would like to humbly offer a few Government 2.0 strategies for the Obama administration to pursue. We’ve got dozens of ideas but I would not want to spoil the fun by releasing them all at once!

So, here’s today’s first idea: Set up a series of citizen councils, organized around key policy themes, and equip users with an Ideastorm. At first these communities might look and feel a lot like Digg.com, the popular technology news aggregator. Users post policy suggestions and the community votes so that the most popular ideas rise to the top. Ideas are harvested from a broader spectrum of the population and the user-driven idea filtering process eases the burden on staff resources by harnessing “the crowd” to sift through mountains of feedback.

Dell Computer’s IdeaStorm provides a useful (albiet imperfect) template for the administration to follow. Less than a week after Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched, users had contributed over 1,300 ideas that were voted on more than 120,000 times. Many of the ideas contributed by Dell customers have already been translated into product and service innovations and customers can discuss these ideas directly with Dell’s product developers. Herein lies the critical peice. The administration will need to demonstrate that the ideas the community generates will be considered in the legislative process and acted on quickly if they receive support from democratically elected representatives. Easier said than done, of course, but there will be much more to come on this later. Stay tuned!

EA games’ director of corporate communications, Holly Rockwood told GigaOm by e-mail: “I can confirm that the Obama campaign has paid for in-game advertising in Burnout.”

This story has also appeared in The New York Times (written by Wagner Jame Au of GigaOm) and Advertising Age and has taken a life of its own and developed a viral quality – with good reason, it’s a pretty good story.

With 20 days left until the Presidential election this is a great way for politicians to reach the 18-34 demographic (although, of course, ther are many people outside of that demographic who game). According to NPD group there are 174 million gamers (in the US) who personally play games on PC/Mac or video game systems, 17 percent (or 29.58 million) of those are Console Gamers. XBox 360 alone has reached 10 million console sales in the US. When you take the time to look, those are some pretty compelling numbers.

So, is advertising in video games a good idea? Well, if companies like Coca Cola, Harveys, Nike and Burger King can advertise through these mediums, why can’t a political campaign? Clearly the placement in games is important since a political campaign may not want to be associated with, say… GTA IV. But I’d say that this ad has generated a good buzz, at least within the blogosphere and gaming community. (On a slightly separate but related note, GigaOm points to a Brandweek study conducted by Neilson Games that showed of those surved a full 11% said they’d purchased a brand advertised in a game.)

Some blogs like GamePolitics have pointed out that Obama refers to gaming in a negative light, but, to be fair (at least for kids) there’s a time to play video games (which has its set of associated benefits) and there’s a time to do homework (which, I would argue, also has its set of associated benefits).