Politics & Controversy

Apparently Nate Silver’s book on people being wrong is filled with errors:

• The text and chart are contradictory, and other errors in the comments.
• NCAR’s computers are water cooled, not fanned with oxygen.

On the future of media, at The Awl:

Of course a website’s fortunes can change overnight. That these fortunes are tied to the whims of a very small group of very large companies, whose interests are only somewhat aligned with those of publishers, however, is sort of new. The publishing opportunity may be bigger today than it’s ever been but the publisher’s role is less glamorous: When did the best sites on the internet, giant and small alike, become anonymous subcontractors to tech companies that operate on entirely different scales? This is new psychological territory, working for publishers within publishers within publishers. The ones at the top barely know you exist! Anyway, internet people, remember this day in five years: It could happen to you, whether you asked for it or not.

Because, on the future of MetaFilter:

Unfortunately in the last couple years we have seen our Google ranking fall precipitously for unexplained reasons, and the corresponding drop in ad revenue means that the future of the site has come into question.

Ironically, from a Facebook executive:

Please allow me to rant for a moment about the state of the media.

I wade into this topic wearily, but I do love my new city, even in the moments where it drifts from critically self-aware to navel gazing. Ian S. Port’s July 17 review of the media coverage of the gentrification debate included this nugget discussing Ilan Greenberg’s angle on the topic:

[W]hat’s happening here isn’t gentrification at all, but merely middle-class residents using the word to conceal discomfort over richer people coming in and ruining their good time. Greenberg argued that neighborhoods like the Mission are already long gentrified, and that the Againsts are a simply bourgeois class with access to the media, who are ignoring the plight of the genuinely poor out of worry for themselves. “In San Francisco, anti-gentrification is a progressive cause to save financially viable people … from losing their lease on a rental property in an already gentrified neighborhood,” Greenberg wrote, with the emotional detachment of an outsider. “In the best of times, it’s hard to envision a lot of people shaking the rafters for this one.”

In a city that has long enjoyed significantly higher median household incomes than the rest of California and the nation, this has a ring of truth to it.

What happens to voting data after the election is over? What happens to all those certified results by polling place? How is it that there’s so much coverage leading up to and on the night of the election, but this guy seems to be one of the few sources of historical voting data? Amusingly, I found it linked on the Library of Congress’ website!

There’s some very old sources from E. Bowditch J. McConnel, who wrote some papers on voting patterns up to the 2000 election. The Census Bureau reports in detail on who registered and voted (including age, race, education, sex, marital status, veteran status, and more), but not how they voted, and not by geography.

OpenSecrets.org has political contribution stats by zip code (interesting: my last ZIP Code in NH contributes considerably less than my current zip code). Their data is based on the disclosure files managed and distributed by the Federal Election Commission.

Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong place to find party aggregated registration information or vote histories by county or ZIP code?

Mick Jagger to BBC:

[P]eople only made money out of records for a very, very small time […] if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Via.

Thanks to Kathleen Seidel, a fellow New Hampshire resident and blogger at <neurodiversity.com>, I now have what appears to be a good example of a motion to quash a subpoena (even cooler, she filed it pro se). I’ve also learned that NH is among the states that allows lawyers to issue subpoena in civil cases without prior approval of a judge.

Take a look and prepare yourself for some law talking.

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash minces no words in its conclusion:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.[…]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Scott Smitelli uploaded a total of 82 test videos and received 35 Content ID emails in the name of science: testing YouTube’s Content ID system. He reversed the audio, shifted the pitch, altered the time (without changing pitch), resampled (pitch and time), added noise, messed with the volume, chunked it up into pieces, and fiddled with the stereo fields. In the end, he found both amusing and frustrating results.

He did his tests about a year ago. Google appears to have caught on and disabled his YouTube account, who knows if they’ve addressed some of the holes in the system he found.

From the March 2002 Newsletter of The North Texas Skeptics:

In the madrasa, the religious school, I watched and listened as the instructor related his view of the world to the students and the others present. Politics, personal relationships, nations, and the physical world were interpreted in the light of the speaker’s religious teachings. Hinduism and Buddhism were lumped together with that quaintly American religion called New Age. Pagan symbols invoke demons to do dirty work for cultists, and evolution is the root of much of this evil, the students were told. The speaker eventually got around to the Muslims. They, too, were worshipping a pagan god. Muslims! What kind of madrasa was this?

The author, John Blanton, apparently showed up for a special lecture by Richard Stepanek of the Alpha Omega Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado.