Small Sample-Size Theater

Free Parking Comes at a Price (Tyler Cowen, NYT)

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:57:00 -0700

Free Parking Comes at a Price (Tyler Cowen, NYT):

The economic distortions of legally mandated parking minimums are really interesting. This is a good layman’s introduction to the effects, which are huge, but largely escape notice until you start fnording for them.

Hans Zimmer Borrows a Note (NYT)

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:09:00 -0700

Hans Zimmer Borrows a Note (NYT):

Dave Itzkoff gets Hans Zimmer to comment at length on the derivation of Inception’s signature musical cue, which turns out to be a clever re-use of the Edith Piaf song used repeatedly throughout the movie as a signal that things are about to get complicated and/or blow up. This is the first time I can recall seen a big-time news story prompted by a YouTube video, at least one which wasn’t covering a fad.

James Fallows' "How to Save the News"

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:06:00 -0700

James Fallows' "How to Save the News":

Long Atlantic story from last month about Google’s journalistic enterprises. Worth reading if you didn’t see it the first time around.

Triceratops Retconned

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:59:26 -0700

Triceratops Retconned:

Beloved childood dinosaur revealed as mere juvenile torosauruses. Or is that torosaurs? I don’t know, I’ve never heard of them before today.

To Enhance Flavor, Just Add Water (NYT)

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:36:00 -0700

To Enhance Flavor, Just Add Water (NYT):

Harold McGee on the odd circumstances in which adding water causes flavors or aromas to increase instead of dilute. Now I need a refractometer.

This is Anandtech’s superb visualization of how the iPhone...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:41:00 -0700

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

"This project is doomed." (Three Panel Soul)

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:11:04 -0700

"This project is doomed." (Three Panel Soul)

How to Lose Time and Money (Paul Graham)

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:15:06 -0700

How to Lose Time and Money (Paul Graham)

Poems by Google Voice

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:16:41 -0700

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.

The Anosognosic's Dilemma

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:41:00 -0700

The Anosognosic's Dilemma:

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...

Fri, 14 May 2010 11:55:14 -0700

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.

Word of the day: enthymeme

Mon, 10 May 2010 13:04:32 -0700

Word of the day: enthymeme:

It’s like a syllogism with a concealed-weapon permit.

After the Flood (Planet Money)

Sun, 09 May 2010 11:03:10 -0700

After the Flood (Planet Money):

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.

Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get rational (TED)

Fri, 07 May 2010 08:22:00 -0700

Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get rational (TED):

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....

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:14:00 -0700

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

Partisan/Bipartisan (Crooked Timber)

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:42:00 -0700

Partisan/Bipartisan (Crooked Timber):

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.

Court-packing

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:02:00 -0700

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.

Adam Serwer explains the Obama teleprompter meme

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:34:14 -0700

Adam Serwer explains the Obama teleprompter meme:

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.

Texas

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:42:00 -0700

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.

John Gottman

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:01:09 -0700

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.