This is Anandtech’s superb visualization of how the iPhone maps cellular signal strength onto its bar meter, both before and after the change in iOS 4.0.1. Their coverage of the iPhone 4 antenna story has been meticulous, quantitative, and detail-oriented, unlike virtually everyone else’s.
via anandtech.com
First in a series.
I'll I'll it's mean
wondering
if you are going to camp
where i fall and wait
for brides
and he wearing reputational job
together.
Anyway bye.
By Google Voice, with an assist from my mom.
It’s hard to imagine the NYT knew what a coup it was getting when it signed up Erroll Morris to write about, apparently, whatever he wants. Here’s the auspicious beginning of a five-part series about people who lack the information or ability to recognize the limits of what they don’t know, starting with the Dunning-Kruger effect, and rehabilitating that thing Donald Rumsfeld said that one time, which I always thought was uncharacteristically clever.
Damn, neglected to blog this fabulous NYT infographic, depicting the debt relationships of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. It’s the sexiest pentagram I’ve ever seen.
Cleaning up unheard Planet Money episodes, I found this follow-up to Chana Joffe-Walt’s blockbuster This American Life segment, in which she went for a ridealong with an FDIC bank closure team. She interviews a couple of the principal players one year later.
Plucked at random from a list of “TED talks sorted by PageRank engagement”, her take on the statistics of HIV prevention is great on its own terms, and as an example of statistical presentation for a mass audience. Pisani runs a blog along the same lines, Wisdom of Whores.
This has been my desktop pattern for about a year. I adore it. The worst transitional problem to the fabulous new higher-resolution laptop is that this image no longer fills the screen without pixelation. Quel dommage.
via www.amusement.fr
A lovely parable about how bipartisanship plays if only one side is playing:
None of the proposals of the Bipartisan Party, on the other hand, will ever be bipartisan.
From Alan Brinkley’s review of Jeff Shesol’s “Supreme Power”, about FDR’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court, a charming detail I’d never heard before:
Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned.
Would that Obama had such low-hanging fruit to pick.
The bizarre persistence of Republican dog-whistles about Obama’s use of teleprompters, usually coming in speeches themselves delivered using teleprompters, had been bugging me for months.
An eye-popping detail from Michael Luo’s NYT article on the ACA’s effect on state Medicaid budgets:
Texas, which has some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility rules in the country for adults, currently covers working parents only if they do not earn more than roughly 20 percent of the federal poverty level. The program does not cover childless adults.
He mentions in the preceding paragraph that the federal poverty level for a family of four is $29,300. 20% of that is $5,860 per year.
So while Obamacare winds up subsidizing states like Massachusetts which have done a good job keeping people from going uninsured, it’s administering a richly deserved beatdown to states like Texas, Arizona, and California which prefer letting people die in the streets to hiking taxes by a nickel. Good for Obamacare.
Gottman is the psychologist profiled in “Blink” who analyzes couples’ interactions and predicts whether they’ll get divorced. Sadly, Laurie Abraham notes in Slate that his methodology wasn’t everything Malcolm Gladwell made it out to be:
So what does it mean to predict divorce? For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57 newlywed couples, I assumed that Gottman had, in the first instance, sorted them into three groups—will divorce, will be happy, will be unhappy but still married—based on the conflict-variables he believed distinguished marriages that last from those that don’t (contempt, little positive affect, elevated male heart rate, etc.). Then, at six years, he’d checked to see how right, or wrong, his predictions had been. That isn’t how it worked. He knew the marital status of his subjects at six years, and he fed that information into a computer along with the communication patterns turned up on the videos. Then he asked the computer, in effect: Create an equation that maximizes the ability of my chosen variables to distinguish among the divorced, happy, and unhappy.
The upshot? What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. This isn’t to say that developing such formulas isn’t a valuable—indeed, a critical—first step in being able to make a prediction. The next step, however—one absolutely required by the scientific method—is to apply your equation to a fresh sample to see whether it actually works. That is especially necessary with small data slices (such as 57 couples), because patterns that appear important are more likely to be mere flukes. But Gottman never did that. Each paper he’s published heralding so-called predictions is based on a new equation created after the fact by a computer model.
It gets worse when she tackles his accuracy rate, and its failure to account for false positives and false negatives. Bummer.
