The Iron Yuppie

CJR November/December 2004: Blinded by Science

In contrast to my point about always attempting to show a balanced point of view, this article actually argues for eliminating the contradictory position. Well, that may be a bit broad, but the point is very well taken. Reporters responsibility (and bloggers, I'm talking to you too) SHOULD reflect reality, not equivalent representation of unfounded theory. Global Warming is happening. Abortions do not cause breast cancer. Evolution is real. Antibiotics do not "cause" autism (remind me to get into THAT doozy later). The balancing of these articles ultimately detracts from their value because you're applying equal weight to both sides when in fact the two sides are not evenly weighted by the people who know. If you have a thousand word piece and 200 words are dedicated to the pro side and 200 words are dedicated to the con side, I don't care if the 200 pro side words include the phrases "Everyone one in the world believes that" or "thousands upon thousands of people have personally confirmed" and/or the con side says "only a moron would believe that" and so on, from the reader's point of view you've done a lot more to paint an equal picture than not. The fact that the media does a poor job of identifying connections between organizations and supposedly independent sides does not help. Both add up to the fact that you're not reflecting reality, which ultimately hurts your readership and your creditability a lot more than being painted as being "biased" would.

Google Blog: "That's why we keep building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what we find. So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages. We'll keep improving that too. "

I was all set to blog about this until I got to this last line. This philosophy makes me smile more than anything else he said. Computer programs are so often engineered for unlimited flexibility with thousands of options. But, exactly as you see here, people do not want thousands of options, they want one; the one that they are looking for. Designing products to always offer that one option that people want would be fantastic, no matter how many widgets and features the product has. If they're looking at a window with a thousand buttons, the users are probably going to be a lot less happy than if they're looking at a window with two. I know that's a fairly simplistic way of looking at things, but it captures a thought process that a lot of designers would be right to heed. Of course knowing what that one right thing is key... and that's what Google has done so well here. People go to a search engine; they want to find something. Pretty cool.

EA working it's people long hours in a crunch

As an employee of a software company, I've seen this happen countless times. It never fails. I'm not exactly sure how people who build bridges or buildings or refinish kitchens do not have this trouble, but they do not. Maybe they slip, or maybe they have 2000 years of doing work to fall back on knowing exactly what will take how long. To the author, let me assure you that no company WANTS to work its people this way and software managers around the world work at getting the schedule right so that this does not have to happen. But software development of this scale is unfortunately still very new and when we get to the point in software development that we no longer have to reinvent the rivet every time we start a new project, we'll be better. But we're not there now and I'm not sure how soon we will be.

Small Business Trends: Entrepreneurship, Rural America, and Elections

Um this is a stretch. No it's more than a stretch... it's Elastagirl.

Here's the entrepreneur map of America:



and here's the voter county by county trends (USA today source I think):




The theory is that rural America is a big fan of Bush because it:

has a certain blend of economic and personal self-sustainability to which the Republican message appeals particularly.

Ok, I will grant you the following potentially logical fallacies which this theory seems to forward:

1. Farmers are not considered self-employed and/or farmers are not only located in rural areas because that is an area of the country in which they can actually do their trade
2. All counties have equal population density and therefore large red areas have more people than small blue areas
3. All people in the Republican areas are entirely Republicans (and vice versa) OR
   All Democrats in the Republican areas were not self-employed (and vice versa)
   
4. All Red areas are equivalently red, all green areas are equivalently green and all yellow areas are equivalently yellow.
   
5. Success rate of these entrepreneurs in all areas is the same

Even with all that, I do not think the conclusion the author puts forward is accurate! She basically takes a rough look at the map and makes her decision. Maybe I should not be so critical about a fairly straightforward page, but stuff like this really has a life of its own... no one ever knows how broadly it gets published.

Tim Worstall: Tim Lambert, Glenn Reynolds and Bookselling.

I thought this was a kind of cool analysis. First, I'm surprised at the consistent level of conspiracy theory that seems to permeate the blogsphere. People need to have a better understanding of coincidence and how common things are before they go nuts on how x or y is out to get me/my affiliated party/my group/etc.

Second, if it’s true, there could be any number of reasons that left wing books get more display time than right wing books: it goes in cycles, and this is a left wing cycle; they actually get the exact same amount of display and you only notice the left wing books because you do not like them as much and you have a higher emotional reaction to them, thereby improving your memory that a left wing book was displayed; left wing people are more likely to be defacers and would damage the books displayed if they were right wing; and so on. My take is because I think that publishers think that left leaning people are more likely to buy books and so are willing to pay the money to get them slotted. But that’s just my take. My real problem with this whole line of discussion is that they’ve taken a single example (someone’s observation about their book store), combined it with a fake posting and a conspiracy theory has been created. I do not even think it is accurate; wasn't Unfit for Command at the top of the NY Times Best Seller list for a number of weeks?

For all the touting that the various blog folks do about how in depth and thorough the blogsphere is, bloggers seem to forget to know anything about basic statistics and research. Maybe this is a more general human phenomenon and it is simply exhibited extremely well here. Either way, two web pages does not a conspiracy make.

The Prime Number Shitting Bear

What's wrong with me that I go back to this page and find it funny every time?

Fun With Prime Numbers

This just in, prime numbers are cool.

You know what solution I'm really looking for? I want to store something like this somewhere so that I can find it at some future date, page through it for interest, and then file it away again. I'll never actually NEED this link or, if I did, I'd probably only stumble across it in google. What I really want is something where I could just say, "have I seen anything that relates to prime numbers?" and boom, everything I've ever seen will pop up. I'm going to have to say this is a pretty unrealistic want for quite a while. On the other hand, if search engines get good enough, you could simply say "Hey <insert>, is there anything I should have seen related to prime numbers?" Now THAT would be cool.

Kong is King.net | King Kong | Peter Jackson's Production Diary

Funny thing about videoblogs (and photo blogs to a lesser degree). Much as it feels out of sorts to see the face of a person who you've heard for years on the radio, or shake the hand of a person you've only seen in pictures, video blogging feels totally weird and does not seem (to me) to lend itself to the medium very well. I remember I used to be fairly active in a set of chat rooms and at one point we discovered Internet Telephony for free (this was a while ago). So we all started calling each other. I could not have less to say to people if I had pulled them in off the street, despite rambling on at the keyboard to the very same people for hours on end. Sometimes your mind gets in a certain form of interaction with another person or group and that's how you picture them forever.

Blogging is great because I can do a thousand different things at once, I can read two other stories to verify my point, do spel checking on the fly, correct grammar, edit flow, you name it. Virtually none of that is possible through video blogging if we want to have the same kind of wild west open environment that we have today. I definitely think quality would suffer and I'm not sure people would be willing to sacrifice that for seeing 2x2 inch pictures of video clips. Who knows though, I might have said the same thing about tv 50 years ago.

Roger L. Simon: How Duranty Happened

As it is my custom, I'm continuing to comment on stories weeks after they happen. The above piece by Mr. Simon says that the Al Qaaqa missing weapons story is on the level of Mr. Duranty, the NY Times reporter, white washing Stalin and still winning a pullitzer prize. There used to be a great Usenet (yes Usenet, that thing before chat rooms and forums) saying (Goodwin's law for the curious) that the first person to mention Hitler in an argument automatically loses. The law captures a wonderful microcosm representation of human discussions. Any given discussion will continue until one compares the other side to the most evil thing known to fully demonize the other side. To bring it back to this story, let's say that what Mr. Simon says is exactly accurate... does this really equate to painting someone who is killing millions of people as a good guy? This may be a bit of an exaggeration.

The other interesting point about the above discussion is how intensely opposed to the main stream media these people are because they perceive bias in what the reporters are saying. A person has the ability to see bias in EVERYTHING and the more partisan he is, the more likely he will be able to see it. Beyond that, bloggers LOVE to tout the main stream media is dead and that blogs are the wave of the future. This has echos of 5 years ago, when people said priceline deserved to be worth more than all the airlines combined, webvan would revolutionize groceries for everyone everywhere and the front page of AOL was more valuable than all the networks, movies and radio stations put together. Look, I do not deny blogging adds a facet to the media that was not present before, but I have yet to see a story that was truly generated out of blogging, rather than just reacted to by the bloggers. I fully admit I have a limited view of the blogsphere (as everyone must, given it's size and a human's bandwidth) but this is just an aspect to the media... it's not the alpha and the omega. Please people, use perspective!

How quick was the media in breaking the missing explosives story? - Instapundit.com

Interesting pre-election story from Instapundit about some data that may have shown the explosives ACTUALLY went missing last year and the government only told us all about it now. But Ms. Althouse goes on to rail against the media and the fact that they may or may not be showing Kerry leanings.

I'm always fascinating with bias of this sort. In this case in particular, Ms. Althouse has three pieces of information that the story was not held to time against Bush in the later part of the election (the LA times story and, I'm assuming, both the CBS and NY Times who will certainly say they did not hold it). Regardless, Ms. Althouse takes away from these pieces of information and the timing of the story that the media groups MAY have in fact held it to hurt Bush. In fact she uses roughly half of the article to expound on this possible behavior and the journalistic code of ethics (if any). How can she conclude this? I am assuming it's just the timing of everything that made her decision for her, but this is a logical fallacy we all get into way too often; just because someone benefits from an event does not mean they had a cause in the event itself. For people on the other side, it parallels with "The oil companies orchestrated 9/11; look at how it's given them all this money!" Just as wrong. As far as her point is concerned, if there's any question of who showed obvious bias here, I'd have to say it was Ms. Althouse.