Too long, too short, or juuuust right?

I was recently talking with a friend about the lengths of some blog posts, and it’s made me think about mine. My friend noted that many people turn off when they encounter long posts, for an obviously varying sense of “long”. I agree. Certainly, it depends upon how interesting the subject is, and how engaging the writing is — and my own tolerance may be more than that of some — but, yes, I’ll sometimes give up on a too-long blog entry, news article, or whatever.

It made me wonder about these pages, where I don’t tend to be brief. What I write is certainly not as long as some, but it usually goes to the long side. To an extent, that’s intentional: it feels... unsatisfying... to only write a few lines. There are exceptions, of course, and sometimes less really is more. But, in general, if I don’t have more to say on the subject, is it worth writing? Is it worth reading?

So I thought I’d ask my readers. Clearly, not everyone is interested in everything I write — I know there are some who come for the political stuff, some who wish I’d stop that and stick with the computer things, and some who glaze over at anything to do with computers or mathematics. But for the bits you read, does my post length seem too long, too short, or about right?

If I haven’t already talked with you about this outside of these pages, please leave a comment here and tell me what you think.

Anti-studies

In the issue dated 10 October, Science News reports on a study that suggests that peer reviewers prefer positive results:

Peer reviewers for biomedical journals preferentially rate manuscripts with positive health outcomes as better, a new study reports.

Now, at first blush this might seem like a “Duh!” moment, but it’s not. We obviously would like to see positive results when we’re studying a new medicine, but there’s a great deal of value in publishing negative results as well. It tells us what medicines don’t work. It tells researchers what direction to take, exposing some of the blind alleys. It’s critically important information, and that’s true in other fields, as well.

Consider studies of acupuncture, of astrology, and so on. There are a great many people who think those work — certainly enough to warrant a serious look with controlled studies. And controlled studies have been done. They show that astrology doesn’t work at all. They show that acupuncture works as a placebo: “fake” acupuncture is as effective as “real” acupuncture. These are useful results.

Consider herbal remedies: we know that herbs do have active substances in them, but there are lots of claims and we’d like to sort them out. Does Ginkgo biloba help with dementia? Does Echinacea reduce cold infections? Is Valerian effective as a sedative? Does St John’s wort work against depression? Studies say no, no, maybe, and yes, respectively. And the “no” results are arguably just as important as the others.

But it’s not just in medicine that we see a preference for favourable results. It’s true in computer research, as well. In fact, while it would be quite important to see, say, methods of spam filtering that seemed like good ideas but fell flat, we rarely see people submitting them, and I’m quite certain that reviewers would lean toward rejecting them in favour of “more interesting” papers with “better” results.

Probably one significant reason for the lack of submissions is that people aren’t eager to document “failure”. That means that it’s incumbent upon the review and publication system to actively encourage the publication of good ideas that didn’t work out. The “good ideas” part of it is key, of course: there’s plenty of work that went nowhere, but that wasn’t promising to begin with. There’s limited value in publishing that stuff.

On the other side, reviewers should be looking at the value a study has for teaching or for directing future work, and for confirming or overturning common theories. A paper that shows definitively that something we expected to work doesn’t... is arguably more important than one with a partial result in the expected direction.

That which is, is

Let’s see: when was my last rant educational post about spelling or punctuation or usage? I think it’s time for another, and today’s is about restrictive clauses and non-restrictive clauses. Or to put it more simply, it’s about whether or not to stick commas in certain places.

A restrictive clause is a clause that’s necessary in order to determine which thing a sentence is talking about — it restricts the set of possibilities to a particular item or subset. Consider this:

The car that I bought in 1976 was yellow.

I’ve bought four cars in my life. The restrictive clause, “that I bought in 1976”, tells you which of the four I’m talking about. But here, since we know we’re talking about cars I’ve owned:

My Datsun B210, which I bought in 1976, was yellow.

This tells you that I’ve only bought one Datsun B210, in 1976. This time, “which I bought in 1976” is a non-restrictive clause. It adds information, perhaps useful information, maybe very important information. Yet, you could remove it, and you’d still know which car I’m talking about — the Datsun B210.^[1]

Now, note something about how the clauses are written into the sentence. The restrictive clause is introduced by “that”. The non-restrictive clause is introduced by “which”, and, more importantly, is set off by commas. We’ll look at both of those points.

First, the commas: non-restrictive clauses are set off by commas. Restrictive clauses are not. Remember it this way, perhaps: if I could remove it from the sentence and the item I’m talking about would still be well defined, put in the commas (it’s non-restrictive). Otherwise, no commas. That doesn’t mean you’d want to remove the clause; it might be critical information, but it’s still non-restrictive.

Here’s a good example: I have a friend with three siblings, called Alice, Greg, and Larry. My friend can correctly say these three things:

My sister, Alice, lives in California.

My brother Greg is a scientist.

My brother Larry doesn’t like vegetables.

Because there’s only one sister, her name, in the first sentence, is a non-restrictive clause. So we put in the commas. The names of the brothers, on the other hand, are restrictive. Without them, you wouldn’t know the scientist from the vegetable hater. No commas.

But if she said, “My sister Alice lives in California,” you might be inclined to ask about her other sisters. I sometimes jokingly do that when someone talks about “my wife Jane.” I’ll say, “As opposed to your other wife, Carol?” For some reason, people don’t seem to find that as funny as I do. Go figure.

And note that there are two commas, always, unless it ends the sentence (think of the closing period as eating the second comma). One could say, “I’m going to visit my sister, Alice.” One would never say, “My sister, Alice lives in California.”

The other thing we noted was the use of the pronoun “that” to introduce a restrictive clause, and “which” to introduce a non-restrictive one. That’s the customary usage, and many editors will insist on it. And the use of “which” (or “who” or “whom”, in cases of people) is required for non-restrictive clauses; I can’t say, “My Datsun B210, that I bought in 1976, was yellow.” That’s always considered wrong.

On the other hand, “The car which I bought in 1976 was yellow,” is not considered wrong (though it does look odd to me, and to others who are picky about this point). “Which/who/whom” can be used in restrictive clauses, but “that” is preferred in most cases. It’s good to switch to “which” in a sentence that would otherwise have too many “thats”, and necessary to switch if the clause is introduced by a preposition. Of course, the rule about when to use commas doesn’t change, even when we switch to “which”:

The car in which I drove to college was a yellow Datsun B210. [restrictive]

My Datsun B210, in which I drove to college, was yellow. [non-restrictive]

 

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^[1] I wanted a 240Z, but, well....

Carnivals!

Highlight from President Obama’s recent appearance on David Letterman’s show:

[They’re talking about how the president’s young girls spent the summer.]

President Obama: ...so they, basically, just goofed off all summer. Which, uh, I couldn’t do.
[Laughter.]

David Letterman: Others have.
[More laughter.]

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #120.
• Carnival of the Liberals #97, including “The anti-Obama bigotry”.
• Carnival of Mathematics #58.
• Math Teachers at Play #16 (mis-numbered as 15).
• Carnival of the Godless #126.

And the Carnival of Education, dead since May, has been resurrected as EduCarnival V2. I missed the first three weeks of it, so let’s catch up here:

• EduCarnival V2 #1 (26 Aug).
• EduCarnival V2 #2 (2 Sep).
• EduCarnival V2 #3 (9 Sep).
• EduCarnival V2 #4 (16 Sep).
• EduCarnival V2 #5 (23 Sep, mis-numbered as 6).

Congratulations to Thom and Jeff

In a few hours, Thom — an old a longtime friend, who has commented here on occasion — and his partner, Jeff, will celebrate their wedding, near their home in California. They planned this pre-prop-8, and saw no reason to change plans on account of a bunch of right-wing party poopers.

And a grand party they’ve planned! I wanted to be there, but can’t. Happily, I did get to see them just a few months ago, so that, and this post, will have to serve as my joining them in celebration.

[Raises glass.]
Congratulations, and many more years of happiness!
!מזל טוב
[Clink!]

Verbing product names

In the After Deadline blog, New York Times editor Philip Corbett talks about language issues in the newspaper, once a week or so. He goes over things like misuses, homophonic challenges, and wording that’s unnecessarily confusing or ungrammatical. And it shows that even the professionals never seem to learn, making the same errors time and time again.

Of course, if you’ve stared at these pages for long enough, you’ll guess that I must read Mr Corbett’s column regularly.

In his latest, linked above, he addresses the use of trademarked company and product names as verbs:

The folks at Adobe Systems Inc. remind us that “Photoshop” is a registered trademark referring to Adobe’s “digital imaging software products and related services.” It is not, they note, a generic term, and should not be used as a verb to describe the general process of digitally manipulating photographs.

Mr Corbett notes that we commonly do this also with “Twitter” and “Google”.^[1] And, indeed, that’s worldwide: a couple of years ago, a Japanese colleague told me that the Japanese word for searching on the Internet is “guguru”, a Japanese pronunciation of “Google”.

At IBM, naturally, we had our own set of those. I’ve not heard people use “Notes” as a verb (though I’m sure that some do), but “I’ll PROFS it to you,” was certainly the vernacular of the Oliver North era. And, where those outside of IBM verb “IM” (for instant messaging), everyone in IBM instead says, “Sametime me the URL.” (Lotus® Sametime® is IBM’s instant messaging product.)

There are lots of older, more esoteric ones, as well. My favourites, which the old-timers will recognize, are APAR and DASD.

An APAR (pronouned AY-par), for “Authorized Program Analysis Report”, was a bug-report against mainframe software. By extension, it also came to be applied to the fix for the bug — more properly called the “APAR fix”, which would comprise one or more PTFs (Program Temporary Fixes) — and, as a verb, to the act of making the report. “Call IBM support and APAR yesterday’s abend.”

DASD (pronouned DAZ-dee), “Direct Access Storage Device”, was the verbose IBM term for disk storage for the mainframes — what we call “hard drives” on PCs. A computer room, in those days, might be filled with quite a lot of DASD. But the term also became a verb: there was a utility program called IEHDASDR,^[2] which was used to initialize (what we’d now call “format”) a disk pack, and we’d commonly say things like, “You have to DASD the pack before you can use it.” Less commonly, people would talk about writing any sort of data to disk as, “DASDing the data.”

Many years ago, now-IBM-Fellow Mike Cowlishaw put together an “IBM Jargon” dictionary (gee, almost 30 years ago now; the first version was in 1980, and the last, the tenth, in 1990). It’s an amusing read, which includes many of Mike’s notes that give a view of the history of this stuff. (And Ray, a frequent commenter in these pages, is acknowledged in the preface.) If you check it out, you can look up “abend”, which I used above — its not the German word for “evening”.
 

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^[1] He also mentions “Tweet”, but I’m sure I usually see that in lower case, and I don’t think “tweet” is trademarked. The rest of what he says, about the informal feel of it, is certainly still true.

^[2] Therein lies another story. Different subsystems of the operating system were given three-letter prefixes — IEB, IEF, IEH, and so on — and all programs associated with a given subsystem used the same prefix in their names. IEBGENER was one of the most well known and frequently used, and IEFBR14 was a program that did nothing at all, used purely to cause the job setup to run.

Carrier pigeon vs Internet Service Provider

Via BoingBoing, we hear about some wags who had a bandwidth race between DSL and a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won, but, as Cory points out, that’s not surprising, given the constraints of the test:

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

Of course, that wasn’t the point in the first place, but it’s always fun to analyze these things and run the numbers.^[1] One thing it points out to us is how technology has changed, particularly with respect to data density. Who could imagine fitting about one and a half terabytes in about 2 ounces of weight... ten years ago?

Now, neither Cory nor the BBC article mentions the pioneering work that precedes this test by almost 20 years, the famous RFC 1149, from April first, 1990: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. Befitting the technology of the time — memory sticks didn’t exist then — David Waitzman’s proposal has us put the data to paper:

The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram’s edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.

Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form.

David Waitzman updated this with Quality of Service information on April first, 1999 (RFC 2549), but, as Cory says: the latency is killer.
 

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^[1] Actually, while we’re analyzing: the BBC article first incorrectly says that “the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles,” and then later says that only about half that time was due to the pigeon: “The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.” An hour to transfer 4 gigabytes from a memory stick? That sounds bizarrely long.

Barking, birthing insanity

Insanity may sometimes be sneaky, hiding under a veneer of rationality. And some people we might think of as insane are merely misguided. But once in a while, someone comes along for whom there is no doubt of the diagnosis.

Orly Taitz is one of those.

In case you’re not aware of who that is: Orly Taitz, sometimes derisively referred to as “the Israeli woman” (she’s originally from the USSR, and came here by way of Israel), is a dentist and lawyer — an interesting combination — who lives in California, and who has emerged, in recent months, as a sort of spokeswoman for the “birther” fruit-bats, the people who maintain, against all evidence and sense, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and is, therefore, not qualified to be President. Taitz, as quoted in the New York Times:

Obama is completely illegitimate as a U.S. president for two reasons — not only because he did not provide the place of his birth, but also because both parents have to be U.S. citizens. His father was never a U.S. citizen. He was in the United States on a student visa.

As the Times immediately points out, “That, of course, is not true. Both parents do not have to be citizens of the United States for their child to be a citizen.”

Of course, getting a fact wrong, even a very basic one, is not evidence of insanity. On the other hand, one can argue that simply sitting on the bench with the birthers is, given the ample evidence that they’re wrong. In the beginning, it was a fair question, despite the motivation for asking it. But it’s long been settled, and no one with any credibility will give these imbeciles the time of day, at this point.

But with Orly Taitz, it goes beyond the time of day — far, far beyond it. Apart from taking the microphone for the cause, she has taken also to litigating for it, and in a most bizarre way: she’s the lawyer for some birthers who’re in the military and who won’t report for duty because Taitz says, on their behalf, that they ultimately report to the Commander In Chief, and the person currently claiming that position is illegitimate.

Right.

After the cases have been summarily dismissed or bucked around for a bit, U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land — a Bush appointee, by the way — issued a 14-page order denouncing Taitz as the nutjob she is, and telling her to stop wasting the court’s time. Judge Land has ordered Taitz to show cause why he shouldn’t fine her $10,000 for filing frivolous motions.

Talking Points Memo talked with Orly Taitz, and reports Taitz’s response to the order:

In an interview with TPM just now, Birther evangelist Orly Taitz fired back at Clay Land, the U.S. district court judge who tore apart Birtherism and threatened Taitz with sanctions in an order today, saying that “somebody should consider trying [the judge] for treason and aiding and abetting this massive fraud known as Barack Hussein Obama.”

“This is so outrageous what this judge did — it goes in the face of law and order,” said Taitz, reached at her office in Mission Viego,[sic] CA. “Not every judge is as corrupt as Judge Land. Some judges believe in the Constitution. And some judges believe in the rule of law.”

And then:

“Oh absolutely, absolutely,” she said. “Listen, Nelson Mandela stayed in prison for years in order to get to the truth and justice.”

And Taitz brushed off the possibility of sanctions. “I’m not afraid of sanctions. Because I know this is not frivolous. I know this is extremely important — the most important issue in this country today.”

“Judge Land is a typical puppet of the regime — just like in the Soviet Union,” she said.

That is the evidence that she is completely, totally, off her tree. Not only does she consider President Obama a “fraud”, but she has delusions of being a Nelson Mandela, in her fight for what she sees as justice. She imagines the U.S. as her native Soviet Union, and Judge Land as a treasonous “puppet”. She’s paranoid and delusional, and, so, particularly suited to being the mouthpiece for the birthers. The Wikipedia entry on her lists a number of other loony claims she makes about President Obama and beyond.

Even Judge Land implies that she’s certifiable, with a reference to Alice in Wonderland.

On the good side, TPM reports that a complaint has been filed against her with the California bar. With any luck, she’ll soon be disbarred — by more puppets of the regime, I guess.
 

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Update, 24 Sep: Want more? Read this article in Esquire, particularly the part where Taitz talks with Kentucky’s Commissioner of Criminal Investigations.

Smart houses

A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or other thing (it could be a car, say, or a sensor, or a computer system; the presence people call it a “presentity”). Location is the most obvious piece of context information. Other examples are ambient temperature and sound level; heart rate, blood pressure, and other medical information; number of people nearby; “busy” state (how busy are you right now, and are you interruptible). One’s calendar can be a good source of context information.

The idea of context-based services is that a computer can collect context information about you, and can then perform services for you based on your context. A context system can automatically mute your mobile phone when you’re in a meeting or at the theatre. A context-aware house can automatically adjust the temperature and lighting. Your alarm clock and coffee maker can be adjusted for you based on your calendar. Medical monitoring can be automated, having the computer system take action while help is called.

I have a thermostat at home that can be programmed over the Internet, and we did some experiments with that. Infer from my context that I’m on my way home, and the house temperature can be adjusted to be ready for me. Perhaps the computer could start dinner, as well, though there’s a trick there: the consequences of guessing wrong are more serious. If the air conditioner is cranked up an hour too early, we just use a bit of electricity we didn’t need to. If dinner is in the oven an hour too early, it’s overcooked or cold by the time I get to it.

Lots of researchers have worked on “smart house” and “smart office” concepts. Georgia Tech’s Greg Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt have done notable work in this area, particularly in the Aware Home Research Initiative. My alma mater, the University of Florida, has its Gator Tech Smart House project.

New Scientist recently looked at new research on smart houses, work being done under Diane Cook at University of Washington in Seattle.

A major point of the UW research is to have the system learn the contextual patterns, and infer appropriate automated behaviour from that. We had done preliminary work in that area with the Internet thermostat, but this goes a long way beyond that. A problem with it, of course, is what I noted above: it’s easy to guess wrong, and the consequences of a wrong guess can be serious. Some patterns are more clearly fixed: it’s pretty safe to assume, for example, that when the resident gets out of bed in the morning and goes into the shower, you should get the coffee brewing. Other patterns come from chance or convenience, and might often be changed for reasons that would not be clear to the computer system.

On the other hand, computers are very good at noting such variations, developing confidence levels, and adjusting for changes over time. The system can be set up to give varying degrees of help, depending upon the confidence in the patterns and the desires of the users. It can turn the oven on for you, or simply remind you to do it yourself. It can offer to do it remotely, with a text message to your mobile phone, but then wait for confirmation through a reply message.

There are people who fear automation “taking over”. Science fiction stories have given us a lot of entertainment by posing possibilities of haywire or aggressive machines. But they’re fiction; the reality is that we’re very, very far from developing machine sentience at a level that could enable scenarios such as those.

In the meantime, I’ll be very happy if computers can make coffee for me, and keep the temperature in my house comfortable while optimizing energy usage.

Wherever the heck that is!

A friend and I were having dinner recently, in a nice restaurant. At the next table were three older women, who got their desserts as we were ordering our food. When they finished their desserts, a Latino man came to clear away the empty plates, and they exchanged a few words with him.

After the expected exclamations of how tasty the desserts were, one of the women asked where the man was from. He said he was from Mexico, and added the name of the place — I think he said it was Oaxaca, but he was speaking quietly, so I’m not sure.

“Wherever the heck that is!”, exclaimed the woman who had asked.

My friend and I looked at each other.
“Did she just say...?”
“She did.”
“But... how rude is that?”
“Mm, hm.”

The employee just briefly gave a little more information — something like, “It’s in the south of Mexico,” and perhaps that it’s a beautiful place — and then excused himself to go about his job. And I’m sure the ladies thought they were being nice to the help.

Oy.

More tasteless adverts

For last Saturday’s Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, I took the Metro-North commuter train into New York City. As we passed the new 153rd Street station, the one at Yankee Stadium, I saw that the platform was peppered with advertisements for a Tex-Mex fast-food chain. The ads all depicted a foil-wrapped burrito, and each had a different blurb.

The blurbs mostly connected to baseball in some way. One had, “We have a great farm team,” tying together the idea of farm-fresh ingredients in the burrito with farm teams in baseball. Silly, but appropriate.

Another of the ads said this:

Stop licking the foil
and put it in already!

Is it just me, or... well, it’s a burrito. It’s long and cylindrical. This just seems wildly inappropriate, far more a sexual reference than a baseball one.

Think of the children!
 

Man taking Rorschach test: Why are you looking at me like that, doc? You’re the one with the dirty pictures.

A shortcut to mushrooms

I did a hike the other day in the Michael Ciaiola Conservation Area (formerly the Walter G. Merritt County Park), in Putnam County, NY. The land was once owned by Mr Merritt, and the park was renamed in 2002, to honour Mr Ciaiola, who used to be President of the Putnam County Land Trust, and was very active in the preservation of open spaces and the environment.

It was a longer hike than planned: we wound up taking a wrong turn on the trails — more accurately, failing to take a right turn — and going the long way around, having a 5-hour hike instead of a 3-hour one. But it was good to have a longer hike, and that trail gave us a good view toward Connecticut. And the way was just full of many varieties of mushrooms and other fungi. I took lots of photos.

I’ve posted my favourites of the mushroom photos in a Picasa album, and here’s a montage for readers who just want the executive summary (click to enlarge):

Public misunderstanding of studies

Over at Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer agree with Language Log’s Mark Liberman in his admonition against the use of “generic plurals” in science reporting. Language Log:

This would lead us to avoid statements like “men are happier than women”, or “boys don’t respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls”, or “Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do"” — or “the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us”. At least, we should avoid this way of talking about the results of scientific investigations.

The reason? Most members of the general public don’t understand statistical-distribution talk, and instead tend to interpret such statements as expressing general (and essential) properties of the groups involved. This is especially true when the statements express the conclusions of an apparently authoritative scientific study, rather than merely someone’s personal opinion, which is easy to discount.

The problem, in case you don’t see it from what’s quoted above, is this (I’m going to make some details up, just to give an example):

Suppose some researchers do a study in which they ask people how happy they are, on a scale of 1 to 10. Suppose that they ask 50 men and 50 women, and the average happiness rating for the men is 7.3, while the average score for the women is 7.1. Now suppose that the study is reported in the news with the statement that “men are happier than women.”

Or let’s be even more straightforward: suppose the 50 men and 50 women are simply asked, “On the whole, are you happy?” 37 of the men and 36 of the women say, “Yes.” And the newspapers report that, according to a recent study, “men are happier than women.”

Of course, George reads that over his morning coffee, and says, “Hey, Martha. It says here that I’m happier than you. Ha! I always knew there was something wrong. Maybe you need some of that Prozac stuff.”

But we can’t generalize a finding based on average aspects of a group... to particular individuals in the general population. Martha may be far happier than George, and the study doesn’t say otherwise. George just doesn’t understand.

Of course, the problem isn’t limited to generic plurals with no statistics behind them. We could report that a study shows that “men are 50% more likely than women to get into traffic accidents,” but that wouldn’t mean that I am 50% more likely, just because I’m a man. There are other reasons, which the study might or might not go into, that are the causes of the difference, and the study just shows one correlation.

So it’s important to word these reports in a way that doesn’t invite that sort of misinterpretation. It’s important for a number of reasons:

• The media already often get the details wrong in reporting scientific studies. It makes it worse to compound that with confusing reporting.
• The media often highlight the wrong bits, in efforts to get catchy headlines and “interesting” copy.
• Readers don’t understand statistics, and misinterpretation is likely even when the stats are there. Don’t make it worse by eliminating them.
• Readers are prone to generalize results beyond what’s valid, and they’ll likely apply a group trent to specific individuals, as in the example above.
• Readers don’t understand the limitations of studies. Reporters should try to talk about one or two key limitations.

The first two are nicely demonstrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph. Back in June, they reported on work done by a student, Sophia Shaw, at the University of Leicester. The preliminary findings, according to Ms Shaw: “We can see from the results that sexually experienced men are more likely to coerce women in sexual situations; even more so if they believe the women to be sexually experienced.” But the Telegraph reported (the article has since been removed from their web site after the criticism of it, but you can read discussion of it) that the work “found that the skimpier the dress and the more outgoing the woman, the less likely a man was to take no for an answer.”

In The Telegraph’s competition, The Guardian, Ben Goldacre seemed to enjoy tearing the former’s report apart:

Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped? “This is completely inaccurate,” Shaw said. “We found no difference whatsoever. The alcohol thing is also completely wrong: if anything, we found that men reported they were willing to go further with women who are completely sober.”

We often say that the public needs to be better educated with respect to science and critical thinking. This is a good place to start... and the news media need to be among the educators.

Teabaggers

I’ve just been led to this site, which we’ll call “LATFT” for short — it stands for “Look At This Teabagger”^[1], and it’s a site full of photos of “Tea Party” protestors and their signs.

Of course, as this is a view of how the other half protests, those of my political persuasion will think them loony, loopy, and ludicrous — not to mention paranoid, because it doesn’t alliterate with the others — and will apply the f-shaped obscene participle to them. But there really is more to it than that.

Look at the pictures, and look at other pictures of last Saturday’s Tea-Party march on Washington. These are people sporting treasonous emblems (Confederate flags); asserting their rights not just to own guns, not just to carry guns, but to threaten people with guns; and saying completely wacky things that have no basis in reality.

My favourite bit in that last regard is their fuming about the “czars” that our current, Nazi president has appointed. They worry that we’re creating real czars in this country — in the true sense of kings, emperors. Some say “More Czars than the U.S.S.R.” Well, that wouldn’t be hard: they had no czars in the U.S.S.R.: part of the point of the Russian revolution that created the U.S.S.R. was to depose them. One sign says that czars are Russian kings, and adds that “Jesus is my king.” They worry that they don’t know who these czars are responsible to, and what power they have.

But they’re serious about this idiocy. They actually, truly don’t seem to get that “czar”, here, is a title used metaphorically, and that no one has created any kings in the U.S. government. They don’t get that the first use of that title was in the Reagan administration, and that George Bush appointed several. They don’t get that these “czars” act as presidential advisors, and have no power beyond that. These czars will not be dismissing congress and starting systematic executions.

Their signs say that “Obama is the Anti-Christ”. They depict the president with Negro caricatures, and with a Hitler mustache. When they’re not calling him a Nazi (or a “Natzy”) they’re calling him a Fascist, a Communist, a Marxist, or a Socialist. (Hm, which is it? They think they’re all the same.) They threaten civil war; they say they came unarmed “this time.”

And now here’s the funny part:

They’re implying that President Obama will preside over “1984”, a totalitarian state in which the government conducted unreasonable surveillance and exerted complete control over the populace. They quote Ronald Reagan as saying, “Man is not free unless government is limited.” They say they will defend the constitution “by any means necessary.”

So, to paraphrase Barney Frank, “On what planet did they spend the previous eight years?” Who was defending the constitution then? Who was defending free people against unlimited government and unfettered surveillance then?

Not the Teabaggers; they were happy. Go figure.
 

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^[1] In much the same way as “RTFM” stands for “Read The Manual”.

Peter, Paul, and...

Mary Travers has died.

If you miss the train I’m on,
You will know that I am gone,
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.
A hundred miles, a hundred miles,
A hundred miles, a hundred miles,
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

On being a skeptic

Having written about the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism the other day, I’ve found myself thinking more about the “Why is it So Difficult to Be a Skeptic?” segment, and the part about explaining skepticism to others. And I thought I’d write some of those thoughts down.

At the core, it falls into the explanation that I cited in the other day’s post: a skeptic is someone who considers the evidence before making a decision or believing something. That points to no particular ideology, no specific political party, and no predetermined point of view. A skeptic can be left-leaning, right-leaning, or straight down the middle. A skeptic can be a Democrat, a Republican, or a Libertarian. A skeptic can be an atheist, or a skeptic can believe in God — but the skeptic makes that choice after considering the evidence.

It’s certainly true that skeptics strongly lean toward atheism, and tend to be more left than right politically. I would say that the tendency is because that’s where the evidence leads, rather than any other reasons. Of course, everyone starts with some set of world views, and a skeptic is no different. The skeptic adjusts his world view as he analyzes the input.

When someone comes forth and says, “I have a new cure for diseases,” the skeptic does not say, “Bullshit!”, though that may be the image many people have of us. No, the skeptic says, “Do you? Show me,” and then the skeptic looks at what’s there. “A friend of mine says it worked for him,” might get a response of, “Mm, hm. What else?” Data from a controlled trial will wield more power, and may elicit a nod, and an “Ah, good!”

We will, naturally, compare what you’re offering with things we already know, and that’s where it might look like we’ve decided in advance. We haven’t, though: we’re just noting that your idea is very much like something the evidence has already shown to be wrong, so it will be that much more difficult to convince us — you have to get past the evidence that’s already there. A new homeopathic “cure” that’s substantially the same as all the others isn’t really new.

We’ll also bring in what we know in general, and use it as part of our skeptical analysis. If we can see how your idea might work, we could start with a more positive view of it than we’d have if the idea doesn’t seem to make sense with respect to what we know about medicine or mechanics or physics, or whatever. If you approach me with a perpetual motion machine, you’ll have a steep hill to climb to convince me that it works, because I know something about, say, the combined effects of conservation of energy and friction.

When someone says that the positions of the moon, stars, and planets at the time of one’s birth determines significant things about one’s life and personality, the skeptic does not say, “Bullshit!” — not the first time. The skeptic looks at the evidence. And evidence shows that astrology does not work.^[1]

A skeptic will look for alternative explanations that fit the evidence. If we know that someone moved from one place to another without leaving tracks in the sand, one explanation may be that she flew. But that doesn’t mesh with what we know of how things work. Is there an alternative explanation? Perhaps wind took away the tracks. And if we have no explanation that’s both consistent with what we already know and explains what we’re seeing, we’re willing to accept that we don’t know the answer. If it’s important enough, we’ll keep looking until we find an answer that works.

Skepticism doesn’t only apply to things that are “fun” to deride. We’re not just skeptical of alternative medicine, paranormal activity, and pseudoscience. When someone says that human activity is causing damaging global climate change, we have three things to be skeptical of:

1. The global climate is changing.
2. Humans are causing it (or making it worse).
3. It’s damaging.

We don’t say, “Bullshit!”, and we don’t say, “It’s a scientist saying it, so it must be true.” We look at the evidence. As I see the evidence, it says “yes” to all three points above. So I accept it, but, as a skeptic, only after examining the data.

But we know better than to reject anything new out of hand, without examining the evidence. After all, at one point Louis Pasteur said, “I have a new cure for diseases,” didn’t he? And then he showed them to work.

Evidence.
 

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^[1]There are a number of studies showing that astrology has no predictive value, and that any effects appear to come from confirmation bias. For example, there’s a study published in “Nature” in 1985. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, but it’s worth a read if you can find someone with a subscription, or if you’re willing to pay for the article (I have a printed copy).

Is it art?: Distorting photo colours

If you browse people’s photos on any of the online photo-sharing sites, you’ll see a lot of pictures where people have distorted the colours. I did it to one of my photos, as an example: the picture on the right is a shot I took last Sunday of the Empire State Building in New York City (click it to see the original and the altered one side by side).

Some people do the distortion just because they think it looks cool, but some clearly do it to get an “artistic” effect. And that, of course, raises my frequent question:

Is it art?

I certainly do think that fiddling with the colours and contrast of a photo was art in the days of darkrooms and negatives. You needed a feel for the technique in order to get the effect you wanted. You had to try a number of times, perhaps many, to hit what you were looking for. There was skill and patience involved.

There was no “undo” button.

It’s different now, though. To make the effect on the right, I used the Mac Preview program, got the “Adjust Color” pane, and pulled a few sliders around. That one involved shoving the contrast and saturation all the way in one direction, and the tint all the way in the other. Poof.

Maybe you think it looks cool; maybe you think it doesn’t. But is it art?
 

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Update, 12 Oct: This xkcd cartoon seems like a perfect fit here.

No more Dirty Dancing

Patrick Swayze has died.

Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism

The first (intended to be annual)^[1] Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism was held on Saturday, sponsored by the New England Skeptical Society and the New York City Skeptics. The conference was meant to present the views and opinions of some skeptics — including comments on what it means to be a skeptic — and to give skeptics a venue to get together, meet, and talk. They cutely gave it a name that they could abbreviate as NECSS and pronounce “nexus”.

The conference was mostly very good, with a few slow spots. For the most part, the speakers were engaging and interesting. These were the best bits, to me:

• Dr Paul Offitt, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, talked about how the media covers the anti-vaccine folks, and the “controversy” about whether vaccines are harmful. His talk was excellent and interesting, as he discussed the recent Dateline NBC program, “A Dose of Controversy. Because that program ran recently, it came up throughout the day, in much of the discussion.

  Dr Offitt talked about controlled medical studies vs emotional appeals, the difficulty in dealing with the media in this regard, and his experience with appearing on the program.

• Continuing in that vein was a panel discussion of skepticism and the media, moderated by John Rennie, until recently the editor in chief of Scientific American. The panelists were Dr Rachael Dunlop, an Australian medical researcher who is part of The Skeptic Zone podcast; John Snyder, Chief of the Section of General Pediatrics at Saint Vincent’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College; and Howard Schneider, the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University.

  Mr Schneider had a different perspective from the others, holding the view that the media cannot be blamed for how the public interprets what’s reported. The media, he says, has a responsibility to report what’s happening, and the public needs to be educated to think critically about it. There clearly are controversies about some of these things that we consider to be settled facts — such as the vaccine/autism connection and evolution/creationism — and the media must show that.

  My rebuttal to that, as I said on the microphone in the Q&A period, consists of three points:

  1. The media choose what they cover, and they make those choices every day. They don’t have to put it on the news every time someone stands up and says something about not vaccinating children, or about the president’s not being American-born. The disproportionate coverage of that stuff is a choice the media make.
  2. I agree that the media have a responsibility to tell us about these controversies, but they also have a responsibility to make it clear that they are social controversies, not medical or scientific ones. They have a responsibility to be clear every time that there are ample studies that show no connection between vaccines and autism, for example, and no credible studies that show a connection. They are not making this point clear at all.
  3. The media have a responsibility to report facts, and at some point, things become established facts that transcend opinion. It isn’t necessary to bring out a source to say these things, making an appearance of competing opinions. The media needs to be putting these facts out every time, and being clear that they are facts.
• Following that panel was another, addressing the question “Why is it So Difficult to Be a Skeptic?” Michael De Dora, executive director of the Center for Inquiry - New York City, moderated this panel, and the panelists were Professor Richard Wiseman, professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire; Kaja Perina, editor in chief of Psychology Today; and Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Lehman College. Dr Pigliucci is on the NYC Skeptics board of directors, writes the blog Rationally Speaking, and has spoken to the NYC Skeptics group several times before. Professor Wiseman specializes in research into unusual areas of psychology, including deception, luck, and the paranormal.

  This was an interesting panel to have, because it’s hard to explain to people what it means when you say you’re “a skeptic,” or when you tell people you’re going to a “skeptics’ conference” (which, as I noted before the meeting started, is rather like telling people you’re going to a dorks’ conference). Some of the answers to the basic question posed to the panel include these:

  • People don’t understand what a skeptic is. Dr Pigliucci said that the best explanation he’d heard was that a skeptic is someone who considers the evidence before making a decision or believing something, and I certainly agree with that explanation.
  • People think of you as an egghead, or, worse, an unemotional automaton, always analyzing and never feeling.
  • There’s actually a premium put on “faith” in our society; belief with no evidence behind it is often considered praiseworthy. Inversely, refusal to believe something without evidence is often derided.
  • News media and popular culture support credulity and downplay skepticism, usually portraying skeptics as dorks, nerds, misfits, or all of the above.
  • Perhaps most importantly, critical thinking is little taught in schools. Unless children are exposed to it at home, they’ll become adults who have not been trained to question.
  An odd aspect of this is that, often, people who rely on faith, magic, or pseudoscience do actually question things... but what they question is the bits that are based on evidence, reality, and science, often questioning everything except what they should be questioning.

It was a good day, and the venue worked well — it was easy to get to, comfortable, and well laid out for this sort of event. If they have NECSS again next year, I’ll be attending again.
 

Update, 5 P.M.: Here are Jake Dickerman’s comments about NECSS, on the NYC Skeptics blog.
 

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^[1] They just say “first annual”, but, well, it wouldn’t be skeptical to accept that without evidence, would it?

Carnivals!

I recently saw a bumper sticker that I’d first seen a few years ago, and liked at the time. I still like it:

(Click the image to see where you can order one.)

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #119.
• Carnival of Mathematics #57.
• Math Teachers at Play #15.
• Carnival of the Godless #125.

I know why the cricket sings

Last week, NPR covered a project that’s called the New York City Cricket Crawl (and see the New York Times article on it). It’s a joint project of the American Museum of Natural History and other groups, and they’re asking New Yorkers to go out and listen for the sounds of specific species of crickets and katydids, and to report them. They want to, you see, determine if certain species are still in the area, and how prevalent they are. And it’s been postponed until tonight, owing to yesterday’s inclement weather.

They’re suggesting that people record the sounds on their mobile phones, which prompts NPR’s Richard Segal to ask about the quality of such a recording. AMNH’s Louis Sorkin admits that mobile phones are optimized for the human voice, so, indeed, “they’re not one of the better ways to do it.” He adds this:

But if people do their homework, go to the Cricket Crawl web site, look at the pictures of the common katydids and crickets that will be most likely found, and listen to their vocalizations, then they’ll be prepared to go into the wilds of New York and listen.

The “wilds” of New York [City], indeed. He-he-he.

But, um: vocalizations? Here’s the definition of “vocalization” from Britannica Online:

vocalization

Any sound produced through the action of an animal’s respiratory system and used in communication. Vocal sound, which is virtually limited to frogs, crocodilians and geckos, birds, and mammals, is sometimes the dominant form of communication.

Now, crickets and katydids make their sounds by rubbing together external body parts, not by using their respiratory systems in any way. They don’t “vocalize”, and Mr Sorkin certainly knows that quite well.

Do we think he was just trying to use a fancier word for “sounds”? Ah, yes, we do.

Sometimes, the simpler word is also the right one.

Memories from eight years ago

Double Check (1982), by J. Seward Johnson, in Liberty Plaza Park...
just after 9/11

It’s a rainy morning here in the New York City area — not at all like the bright, cloudless day of eight years ago.

Of those affected, back then, by the events of the day, many were friends and co-workers of people who died. Today I want to tell a story about one of those.

Tony used to work with me at the T.J. Watson Research Center. I was his manager when, one weekend in the late ’90s, I got a message from our purchasing system that he’d ordered a book about web page design. I thought that odd, considering that our research group wasn’t working on anything related to that, and I made a mental note to ask him about it on Monday.

Before I got a chance to ask, Tony came to me. He’d accepted a job with a Wall Street firm, doing web services stuff for them, and he’d be leaving IBM. He thought it a good opportunity, and I was pleased for him: I knew he wasn’t completely happy at Watson, and maybe this would fit him well.

After he left, we kept in loose touch, exchanging a few email messages here and there at rather protracted intervals. I heard about a bit of travel he’d done, and that sort of thing. And he liked his job; he had a level of satisfaction that he hadn’t been getting with us.

Then, on a Tuesday morning in 2001, a colleague and I came out of an early meeting and went to the cafeteria for a cup of tea. The conference rooms adjacent to the cafeteria were overflowing with people watching something on the screen. “What’s going on?”, we asked. Someone said the World Trade Center buildings were in flames. We quickly got our tea and went out to the main area of the cafeteria, where the television screens confirmed what we’d heard at the conference room. Our meeting had finished at 9, and we’d just missed seeing the second plane hit. We watched, stupefied, as the towers collapsed, and we eventually went back to our offices. I put a video feed in the corner of my computer screen, as I tried to get some work done.

And I thought about Tony. I wasn’t sure what building he worked in. I knew he was in lower Manhattan, but I didn’t know exactly where. I sent email to him. Four hours later, when I got the “unable to deliver mail for four hours” message, it was clear that his company’s servers were down. That wasn’t a good sign, but it didn’t mean anything directly. I wondered.

It was Sunday when he responded. He said he was OK, but hadn’t been able to get online until then.

He had been running late on Tuesday, Tony told me — running, literally, as he ran to catch the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan, and missed it. He waited for the next ferry, and watched the planes and the buildings from the water before they turned the ferry around and returned the passengers to Staten Island.

He worked, he told me, on the 98th floor of the north tower. Had he caught that ferry he ran for, he’d have surely died. As it was, he lost his personal laptop, which he’d left in his office when he left on Monday — the reason he hadn’t been online since — and, far more importantly, he lost hundreds of his co-workers. Hundreds, who had made it to work on time that morning.

The company would soon be temporarily setting them up in a midtown office, so they could get back to work, but....

I understood the “but”, indeed. How can you cope with hundreds of your colleagues going to a fiery death, and not... not have your view of your work changed fundamentally?

I also marvelled at how things had worked out for Tony. Perhaps, I mused, he was late for his ferry because he’d been buying a cup of coffee. Perhaps the barista hadn’t been particularly snappy that morning, and, just maybe, that slow barista, whom Tony had likely cursed at the time... saved his life.

We exchanged another few messages then, and our next correspondence was a couple of years later. He’d left his computer job, and was selling real estate in Manhattan. Changed fundamentally, yes.

I wonder how he’s fared through the recent mortgage and financial crisis. Selling real estate doesn’t seem to be quite the thing now, but one never knows. I should check in again.

Giving due credit

I just put a selection of photos from the Grounds for Sculpture up on Picasa.[1] As I was doing the captions for the photos, which identify the sculptures in each photo and their artists, I also looked around at other people’s photos from the park. And I noticed something:

Most people don’t care about identifying works of art and giving credit to the artists.

Most of the photos I found were entirely unidentified — no title or caption at all. Most of the others just said things like, “sculpture”, and “another sculpture”. A few put obvious descriptive phrases on them, or whimsical names the photographer made up. Philip Grausman’s “Leucantha” would be called “Woman’s Head”. J. Seward Johnson’s “First Ride” was “Bike Sculpture”, and his “On Poppied Hill” got labelled “The lady on the hill.” Johnson’s “King Lear” was called “Jesus” in one photo, and someone called Bruce Beasley’s “Dorion” a “Space Age Bug”.

Occasionally, when someone did label the photo with a proper title, it was misidentified — one photo had Alexander Liberman’s “Entwined III” labelled as the nearby “Shiva” (by Larry Steele) — but that’s understandable, because the map you get is too small, and when you’re going through it afterward it’s often hard to exactly peg each piece. At least that person tried.

Yes, it’s some bit of trouble to do the labelling, and to get it right.[2] But it’s important. The artists deserve the credit for the work they did, and if you like it enough to put it on the Internet, the artist should get the props for it. Also, when people see your photos and like what they see, a proper caption helps them find other works by the same artist.
 

On a related note, the morning DJs on a local radio station occasionally have call-in contests, wherein the first caller to answer a question wins tickets to some event. One morning, some years ago, the quiz was to identify a song lyric. The caller correctly named the song as “Reason to Believe”, and the DJ added, “Yes, by Rod Stewart.” I sent email.

If you play a clip of Rod Stewart singing the song, saying it’s Rod Stewart is quite proper. If you quote the lyrics, though, Rod had nothing to do with it: the songwriter was the late Tim Hardin, who also wrote the well known songs “Don’t Make Promises” and “If I Were a Carpenter”. Hardin lived a hard enough life, and a short one, and, to honour his memory, he deserves the credit for what he wrote. Too often, we mis-attribute the words to the singer, especially these days when so many songwriters do sing their own songs.

Let’s try to give due credit.
 

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[1] Here’s the GfS offical site, and my earlier blog post in these pages.

[2] And, yes, I posted one photo that’s not identified, because I couldn’t identify it. I will do on my next visit, which will be soon, and I’ll update the Picasa album then. There’s a second one that I don’t think I ever will identify: it was part of a temporary exhibit. I’m going to see if the park has a list of the temporary exhibits in the past, and can identify the piece for me. Of course, if any readers can name either one, please leave comments here.

Labor Day fireworks

The U.S. Military Academy band plays their final outdoor concert of the season at West Point on Labor Day weekend. Here’s a sampling of the fireworks from Saturday’s show (click to see the full size):

And here are four images from a single sequence, showing how one unit exploded. I like the way this came out:

AT&T can’t handle all the iPhones

Some turns of events in the technology world are truly surprising.

Who knew that a couple of guys starting up Google would hit it as big as they did? Who imagined that Facebook or Twitter would turn into sensations? Who had any inkling about how successful the iPhone would be?

OK, that last one... not so much.

From the day it was announced, the iPhone was a pre-release sensation. One didn’t need one’s finger on the pulse of technology to see how popular it was going to be, and to predict that its popularity would go beyond even what Apple, despite its irrepressible optimism, expected when they announced it. And it didn’t take a Nobel laureate to guess that the crush would continue with each new version of the phone.

It seems, though, that the planners at AT&T’s wireless division had their collective finger somewhere decidedly far from anyone’s pulse. Their network is overwhelmed by the success of the iPhone,

“It’s so slow, it feels like I’m on a dial-up modem,” he said. Shazam, an application that identifies songs being played on the radio or TV, takes so long to load that the tune may be over by the time the app is ready to hear it. On numerous occasions, Mr. Sbicca says, he missed invitations to meet friends because his text messages had been delayed.

And picking up a cell signal in his apartment? “You hit the dial button and the phone just sits there, saying it’s connecting for 30 seconds,” he said.

Now, there’s no question that these devices put a tremendous load on the communication system. There’s no question that a lot of added infrastructure is needed in order to have enough capacity to support them. It’s clear that this is a big task, and an expensive one. And, perhaps most significantly, it takes time — more time than we’d like — to go through red tape and approvals to build new cellular towers, and whatnot, however fast they might want to add more. But...

None of this snuck up on AT&T. They should have been working on building their network up for this in the time between their deal with Apple and the announcement of the iPhone in January, 2007. Failing that, they should have started when they saw how much enthusiasm the announcement generated before the release of the first phone at the end of June, 2007. They should certainly have gone whole hog on it when they realized that every man, woman, and child within a two-day drive of an Apple store was camped out on the street for a week, hoping to buy three of them.

About a year after the first phone went on sale, the 3G version came out, in July, 2008. The new, updated 3GS came out this June, and there were more than 20 million iPhones out there before the 3GS release.

And AT&T’s network is not only not ready: it’s enormously, spectacularly not ready. It’s not even close to being ready any time soon. And this despite its promises to the contrary well over a year ago, before the first 3G iPhone was sold:

How fast will the new iPhone run on AT&T’s 3G network?

Plenty fast, according to promises made by AT&T mobility chief Ralph de la Vega at Morgan Stanley’s annual Communications Conference on Wednesday [14 May, 2008].

[...]

Throughput of 7.2 Mbps would put the 3G iPhone within spitting distance of Wi-Fi speeds, which typically run between 6.5 Mbps and 20 Mbps.

But de la Vega didn’t stop there. According to [AppleInsider’s Katie] Marsal, he told the Morgan Stanley audience that sometime in 2009 the company will transition to HSPA release 7, which could deliver speeds “exceeding 20 megabits per second.”

Such life-enhancing speeds might indeed be supported by their network, if only one could convince everyone else to shut their phones off. Otherwise....

The anti-Obama bigotry

You’ve surely heard the latest right-wing insanity, which hit the news last week: President Obama has made a videotaped speech, talking directly to school children. It’s intended to be shown at schools on Tuesday. And some wing-nut parents, fired up by the conservative media, are objecting, refusing to have their kids exposed to this... this... um... this speech by the President of the United States.

According to NPR’s report, most of the school districts in the Dallas suburbs, for example, will not be showing the speech to the children. And what are they worried about?

[...] one lesson plan suggested the students write about how they might help the president to improve public education. For parents who don’t want to help the president, that sounded like indoctrination.

Oh, my heavens! How dare the president think to approach school children with the idea that they can take part in things, and can actually help make a difference! Of course, that’s not really what the objections are about; this is:

NPR: But at the bottom of it all, [parent Wendy] Carlin says she doesn’t trust the president. She believes if he’s not trying to influence the students directly, a liberal message might be subliminal.

Ms Carlin: Well, it doesn’t matter what I’ve heard he’s gonna say, he usually changes it up anyway.

You can’t trust him. He usually changes it up. He’s inscrutable. He’s not even a real American, you know.

A few weeks ago, Greg Laden had a rant over at Quiche Moraine about how this sort of idiocy about the president is thinly disguising racism, and at first I didn’t buy it. He’s seeing racism when it’s really something else, I thought. Sure, some people don’t like having a black president, but they’re a tiny minority, and what we’re seeing here is something else, I thought. But the more I thought, and the more I see this stuff happening — the lies about Mr Obama’s birthplace, the lies showing up in the health-care debate, and so on — the more I think Greg is right.

It’s not acceptable to say that a black man doesn’t belong in the White House, so they say that he wasn’t born in America, and doesn’t belong in the White House.

It’s not acceptable to say that you can’t trust a black man, so they say that he “usually changes it up”, or that he’s lying about his religion and he’s really a Muslim, so you can’t trust him.

It’s not acceptable to say that a black man can’t lead us in health-care reform, so they say he’s like Hitler, espousing Nazi policies, so we can’t accept his health-care reform.

It’s not acceptable to say that they don’t want a black president talking to their children, so they make up shit about political “indoctrination” and “subliminal” liberal messages, or compare him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il (as Mark Steyn did last week), and won’t allow their children to listen to the president.

This garbage has no basis in ideology, and no one has tried to make things like this up about other presidents, no matter how much they disliked or disagreed with them. The only conclusion I can come to, when I look at all of it and think about it for a while, is to agree with Greg Laden that it’s all a proxy for racism.

From the Times article:

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtis, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home.

“I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.”

Can you imagine parents actually refusing to have their kids watch a speech by the president in earlier years and earlier administrations? My parents would have been thrilled if my brothers and I had had a chance to see President Kennedy, President Johnson, or even President Nixon, whom they disliked, speak directly to us in our schools. They’d have been thrilled if we’d gotten the message that the president wanted our help.

Even as much as I despised our 43rd president, had I had school-age children and had that president prepared a video address to them, it would never have occurred to me to demand that they not be exposed to it. Quite the opposite: I would want them to see what he had to say, and I’d have taken the opportunity to discuss it with them afterward. It would be a learning experience, where the kids could think for themselves and, you know, learn.

But these are people who are afraid of learning, afraid to have their hatred, ignorance, and idiocy exposed. If anyone who falls outside their acceptable group should speak to their children, the children might, just might, actually see another way of thinking. They might actually understand that people other than their parents can have something worth listening to. They might actually see their parents for the narrow-minded bigots that they are.
 

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Update, 6 p.m.: Here’s the text of the president’s speech, as officially released by the White House. Of course, there’s no telling whether he changed it up on the video.

Update, 8 Sep: Here are two appropriate political cartoons, by David Fitzsimmons and John Cole. I love what’s on the guy’s t-shirt in the Fitzsimmons cartoon. [Thanks to Lisa Simeone for the pointer to the Cole cartoon.]

Religious characters

The local Methodist church’s marquee sign has changed again, and there’s another new blurb there:

WHAT DOES UR RELIGION
DO TO UR CHARACTER?

I find that one odd. I’ll give them the IM-speak “UR”, because they need to save space; it’s pushing the margins of the sign, as it is. But...

...it’s the preposition that seems wrong. What does it do to your character? I should think that for would be more apt. I mean, there’s a great difference between, “Look what that guy did to me,” and “Look what that guy did for me,” isn’t there?

But, OK, I’ll bite:

Since I have no religion, I’ll substitute “absence of religion,” instead. What does my absence of religion do to my character?

It makes me less credulous, unwilling to accept things with no evidence. It makes me question what I hear; it makes me look at what I see with an eye toward reasonable explanation and understanding. It makes me derive my moral values for myself, considering what my parents taught me, what I see around me, and what I understand to be best for co-existing in a civilized, peaceful society.

And imagine: I’ve come to the same conclusion as others have, with regard to morality. War is to be avoided, used as a last resort only. Hurting and abusing others, as with torture, is wrong. Everyone has a right to live her own life, make her own choices, take her own path, unimpeded by others. All people are equal, and should be treated with respect.

That’s what all the religious folk believe, too, right?

Um. Oh, wait. That  isn’t  how  it is  at all.

Hm.

Another church in the area has a sign, too. I saw this one a week ago at the nearby First Presbyterian Church:

THE ROAD TO
PERFECTION
IS ALWAYS UNDER
CONSTRUCTION

Yes, that seems apt.

Superstition ain't the way...

Some Americans believe that our president wasn’t born in the United States, or that his health-care plan will result in the death of Grandma. Some believe that, despite the enormous amount of evidence for evolution, scientists are uncertain and divided about the question. Some think the moon landing, the Holocaust, and AIDS are made-up fiction, and that God, angels, and the biblical account of creation are not. Some are under the impression that psychics can psych, that ghosts and magic are real, and that the positions of the stars determine one’s personality and one’s fate in life. There are those who are certain they’ve been borrowed by extraterrestrial aliens, experimented on, and returned.

Some even think Sarah Palin would make a good president.

Yes, many of us are silly and superstitious. But, of course, we have no monopoly on that.

Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of the incoming prime minister of Japan, aptly demonstrates that:

“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

“It was a very beautiful place and it was really green,” she adds.

You have to admit, she makes up more colourful craziness than most people come out with. I like the triangular shape, particularly. A fertile imagination, which her ex-husband deemed a dream. She’s confident that her new husband “would surely say ‘Oh, that’s great’.” I suppose that’s why she made the swap.

 

On a more serious note, I find the Reuters headline on that article to be bizarre:

Japan’s new first lady says rode UFO to Venus

It’s common to shorten headlines, often to the point of strained grammar and oddness, but the elision of the word “she” in this one seems entirely unnecessary, and truly weird.

Die, consummate offal!

In a comment to my recent item about plurals, Sue VanHattum had this to say:

From math class:
vertex, vertices
die, dice

The die is the harder one. I always explain what I’m saying.

My response to that said that the issue of explaining something I’ve pronounced needs a blog post of its own.

This is that.

As I said in my response to Sue’s comment, I haven’t found that “die” is really a problem: the context pretty much makes it clear that I’m talking about one of those cubes with the dots on it, and even if someone’s never heard the singular before, he’ll just look at me funny... but will figure it out.

On the other hand, “offal” is probably at the top of the puzzlement list. Some people pronounce it with a long “o”, to try to avoid confusion: OH-ful. But that pronunciation is just... well... awful. It’s correctly pronounced with the first syllable like the word “off” (as the stuff that’s been cast off), and, unfortunately, that means that when Americans say them, “offal” and “awful” sound pretty much the same.[1] Given, of course, that the latter is a far more common word, references to offal usually leave others wondering how the word can possibly become a noun.

“Balm” is tricky as well: Americans pronounce it about the same as we pronounce “bomb” — and in this case, they’re both nouns. One soothes; the other decidedly doesn’t.

“Consummate”: The verb is pronounced KON-su-mate, with a long “a” and stress on the leading syllable. But the adjective is, as is sometimes the case in English, pronounced differently: kən-SUM-ət — the “a” becomes a schwa and the stress moves to the penultimate syllable. Just about no one gets this right, but dictionaries such as American Heritage still insist on it.

There are also some where I’m the one who insists. I stay with pronunciations that I learned, and that in some cases American Heritage still lists first. But the alternative pronunciations are accepted by the American Heritage folks, and are listed as well. And in some cases, the “alternatives” are preferred, and it’s the pedant in me that stays obstinate.

One can refer to one’s long suit[2] as one’s “forte”, but please pronounce it as fort, without a final long-a sound. The word comes from French. And note that the musical term that’s spelled the same way comes to us from Italian, and is pronounced FOR-tay. American Heritage has a usage note about it:[3]

Usage Note: The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr'tā'), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.

A stern or gloomy person might be called “dour”, and that rhymes with “tour”. It does not rhyme with “sour”; it does not sound like “dower”. It comes from the Latin for “hard”, durus. But American Heritage has this to say:

Usage Note: The word dour, which is etymologically related to duress and endure, traditionally rhymes with tour. The variant pronunciation that rhymes with sour is, however, widely used and must be considered acceptable. In a recent survey, 65 percent of the Usage Panel preferred the traditional pronunciation, and 33 percent preferred the variant.

A “schism” — a division into opposing factions — is not a good thing. Its original pronunciation, though is: SIZ-əm, soft and mellifluous. Almost everyone, though, says SKIZ-əm, with that hard “k” sound. The change came a long time ago, moving the English form back to its Greek roots. I should probably change on this one, because of the etymology and the ubiquity of the latter pronunciation. Again, American Heritage:

Usage Note: The word schism, which was originally spelled scisme in English, is traditionally pronounced (sĭz'əm). However, in the 16th century the word was respelled with an initial sch in order to conform to its Latin and Greek forms. From this spelling arose the pronunciation (skĭz'əm). Long regarded as incorrect, it became so common in both British and American English that it gained acceptability as a standard variant. Evidence indicates, however, that it is now the preferred pronunciation, at least in American English. In a recent survey 61 percent of the Usage Panel indicated that they use (skĭz'əm), while 31 percent said they use (sĭz'əm). A smaller number, 8 percent, preferred a third pronunciation, (shĭz'əm).

Something that’s “short-lived” has a short life. Long “i”. So use a long “i” in “short-lived” as well, please. This one’s less far gone than some of the others: I do hear the correct pronunciation quite often, though I hear a short “i” more. Once more, American Heritage has a usage note:

Usage Note: The pronunciation (-līvd) is etymologically correct since the compound is derived from the noun life, rather than from the verb live. But the pronunciation (-lĭvd) is by now so common that it cannot be considered an error. In the most recent survey 43 percent of the Usage Panel preferred (-lĭvd), 39 percent preferred (-līvd), and 18 percent found both pronunciations equally acceptable.

 

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[1] Some of these, such as “offal” and “balm”, present no confusion to the British, who pronounce the vowels quite differently.

[2] Some people say “strong suit”; I’ve always used “long suit”. My trusty American Heritage supports that, listing the latter as the primary entry, and the former as a pointer to it.

[3] The wonderful usage notes are one of the reasons I love American Heritage so, and use it as my primary dictionary.

More privacy issues with web browsing

A couple of years ago, I talked about some of the search terms that people have used when they’ve found these pages. In the comments, Donna was amazed at the information that’s available to the web sites you visit.

My response to Donna’s comment discussed some stuff that’s available, but there are other issues too. Now, via BoingBoing, we hear about a new web site that’s trying to raise awareness about mechanisms that web sites can use to see what other, unrelated web sites you’ve visited.

You had no idea, did you, that you could come to these pages, and I could find out whether you’ve also visited, say, http://www.nytimes.com/, or http://www.schneier.com/blog/, or even https://www.bankofamerica.com/ ?

If you have visited any of those, note that the visited links show up in a different colour than the others (go ahead: click one, and see; they’re all safe, and point to the real sites). That difference is the key. The browser keeps track of which links you’ve visited, and treats them differently.

Let’s back up for a moment, to the early 1990s. It seems like just a few years ago to me, but it’s now over 15 years ago. Web pages were simpler then, oriented much more to text than to graphics, and set up so that the viewer had control of their layout.

That soon changed, though. Every business wants to control the look of its own web site, and a number of changes in HTML, the web-page language, came about. A key change, here, was the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These style sheets do things like

• set up the sidebar over there to the left;
• control the line spacing, the margins, and the paragraph indentation;
• choose the various fonts and font sizes and styles used in the text, and
• decide how lists are shown — it’s the style sheet that chooses those icons for the list bullets.

In short, the style sheets are what make these pages look the way they do.

But consider those list bullets: they’re images, specified with a URL, like this:

list-style-image: url("http://www.blogblog.com/scribe/list_icon.gif");There are lots of spots in CSS where you can use URLs. The background of the pages here — both the brown, wallpaper-looking stuff and the antique-paper look “on top” — are made from images specified in the CSS as URLs. The cool-looking divider lines under the dates are, too.

Now, here’s the trick: the CSS can define a background image for any type of text — you might want a different background image for block quotes than for normal text, for instance. You can also define a background image for visited links. And, because CSS is so flexible, you can put a bunch of invisible links into your page and give each a name. The CSS can give each named link a unique background URL, and the loading of those background URLs can tell the web server which of the links the browser at the other end considers “visited”.

Note that the mechanism I just described works without javascript; if you can use javascript, it’s even easier. But doing it without javascript means that it can’t be turned off at the browser end. You can clear your history, or tell your browser not to keep a history, but most users find that too inconvenient.

I’ll point out something that’s not clear from what BoingBoing and the “What the Internet Knows About You” web site say: they can’t download your link history wholesale. They can only probe for specific URLs. That means, for isntance, that I could see if you’ve visited specific New York Times articles, but I can’t just get a list of the articles you’ve visited.

Still, this “feature” enables quite a lot of data mining, and essentially can’t be avoided. The folks at What the Internet Knows About You are hoping that by publicizing this, they’ll get the browser makers to shut down the feature, not allowing web sites to probe the browser’s history in this way. That can be done by restricting what can be done with visited links, or by limiting when a link is considered “visited” (one mechanism they suggest is keeping track of visited links by referrer, so if you visit a New York Times article that I link from here, the same link will not appear as “visited” when you see it on, say, Bruce Schneier’s blog).

However it’s done, it seems that this privacy hole should be closed. We don’t know what web sites might be collecting information in this manner... but we wouldn’t, would we? It’s silent.