June 2009 – Page 2

Month: June 2009 (page 2 of 3)

Positive deviation

Yesterday I posted a link to Atul Gawande’s commencement address at the University of Chicago Medical School. It’s a must-read on the subject of health insurance, but he makes a point in the middle that I think is worth calling out and discussing on its own.

He discusses a charitable organization that worked to improve childhood nutrition in Vietnam:

They went to villages in trouble and got the villagers to help them identify who among them had the best-nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what Jerry Sternin termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing.

Just that was revolutionary. The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways—feeding their children even when they had diarrhea; giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet-potato greens to the children’s rice despite its being considered a low-class food. The ideas spread and took hold. The program measured the results and posted them in the villages for all to see. In two years, malnutrition dropped sixty-five to eighty-five per cent in every village the Sternins had been to. Their program proved in fact more effective than outside experts were.

This is an incredibly powerful message for everyone. Observe your peers who are achieving better results than you are and imitate them. If you don’t understand what they’re doing, ask them. It’s a big reason why pair programming can be a good thing. It’s why screencasts are a good way to learn.

The trick is making sure that the people you’re imitating really are positive deviants. In college I had a roommate who was so smart that he could make perfect scores without any studying beyond cramming. Imitating his study habits didn’t serve me well at all.

Links from June 17th

June 18, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Telegraph (UK): US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive. I appreciate the realistic approach to dealing with the massive shrinkage some cities have undergone.
IE6 denial message for Momentile.com on Flickr. Brilliant.
Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address. This is the argument that naturally flows from his important article on health care costs. Look for a separate blog post on positive deviants.
Economix Blog: What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems. Single payer, nationalized health care, and a public health insurance provider are all very, very different things.
Financial Times: First Person: Frank Ahearn. Former skip tracer advises people on how to disappear.
Smashing Magazine: Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs. Who doesn’t love fonts?
James Fallows: Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general. A short explanation of how Obama differs from other politicians.
Anil Dash: The End of Fail. Anil Dash really is the conscience of the blogosphere. The comments on this piece are really telling.
Roger Ebert: The O’Reilly Procedure. A damning critique of Bill O’Reilly.
Matthew Bass: Auto timeout sessions in Rails. I hate this feature but some applications demand it.

Naked self interest

June 18, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I’ve been watching the big fight over a brief the Department of Justice filed in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. During the campaign, President Obama promised to support the repeal of the act, but the Solicitor General is defending the law in the face of a legal challenge. This has led to much drama.

Here’s the thing. When President Bush was in office, liberals were rightfully outraged at the politicization of the Justice Department. The Bush administration regularly broke the law and defied convention in its dealings with Justice, which relies on its independence from the White House to operate effectively. Now we see some of the same critics attacking President Obama because it’s their ox being gored. When President Bush is putting political pressure on the Department of Justice to provide legal cover for a torture program, it’s bad. When President Obama fails to pressure the Department of Justice to abandon its duty to defend laws he doesn’t like, it’s also bad.

Here’s another example. Conservatives like to talk about the evils of judicial activism and the folly of using empathy as a judge but then they attack Sonia Sotomayor for hewing to the law as it is written and failing to empathize with a firefighter who was denied a promotion in Connecticut.

It’s worth differentiating between this phenomenon and rank hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is when one adulterer calls on another to resign. This is about the exceptions we’re all willing to grant ourselves when whatever we want is really important. Civilization is about putting the emphasis on the means rather than the ends. Let’s not punish people for being civilized.

Your 2009-2010 NBA Preview

June 15, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

The Wages of Wins blog has some bad news for most NBA fans:

Here is an interesting factoid about the NBA Finals. Since 1978 (the first year we can calculate Wins Produced) no team has won an NBA title without one regular player (minimum 41 games played, 24.0 minutes per game) posting at least a 0.200 WP48 [Wins Produced per 48 minutes]. Only one team – the 1978-79 Seattle Super Sonics [led by Gus Williams with a 0.208 WP48] – managed to win a title without a regular player crossing the 0.250 threshold. And only four other champions didn’t have at least one player surpass the 0.300 mark. This tells us – and hopefully this is not a surprise – that to be an elite team you must have at least one elite player.

Okay, now let’s connect this factoid to the draft. Since 1995, no player who posted a below average college PAWS40 [Position Adjusted Win Score per 40 minutes] his last year in college managed to post a career WP48 above the 0.200 mark (after five seasons, minimum 5,000 minutes played). So although college numbers are not a crystal ball (and really, college numbers are not perfect predictors of what a player will do in the NBA), it does seem like players who don’t play relatively well in college are not likely to become superstars in the NBA.

In short, if your favorite team doesn’t already have a truly great player, they’re highly unlikely to win a championship. And the odds are that they won’t find the great player they need in the draft.

This article also makes an important point about synthetic stats. PAWS40 is a stat that the Wages of Wins people made up. Its value is solely in its correlation with more tangible measures of success. Many people who are suspicious of quantitative analysis hate stats like these, but the proof is in the pudding. When you have a derived statistic that correlates this closely with something useful to measure (like championships or wins), that statistic carries more value than any of the more organic stats, like rebounds per game, or shooting percentage.

Links from June 12th

June 14, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Change.org: Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter. A homeless person explains why one might rationally choose sleeping on the street over going to a homeless shelter.
Ken Kuhl: My Weekend with the Electric Mini Cooper (Mini-e). Mini has provided a few prototypes to regular people in New York and Los Angeles to get their feedback.
Matthew Yglesias: China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software. Really smart comments. China’s market power is such that they can demand concessions to authoritarian censorship that other countries cannot. However, those other countries can then take advantage of the anti-liberty “features” that were created for China’s government.
Jake Tapper: Ex-Gitmo Detainee Lakhdar Boumediene Details Tortures. While in Paris covering President Obama, Jake Tapper took time to do this interview.
New York Times: How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit. Everybody already linked to this article, but it’s a must read.
Alex Moskalyuk: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Who doesn’t want to be more persuasive?
Ruby Best Practices: Quack Attack: Making Your Code More Rubyish. It’s my goal to speak every programming language I use like a native.
Language Log: Obama’s Imperial ‘I’: spreading the meme. The recent claims that Obama says “I” more than other Presidents is wrong.
GitHub: whenever. A Ruby wrapper for cron.
Tim Bray: On Carving Your Initials. More engineers should be invited to give commencement speeches.
James Fallows: Departing questions. A comparison of the rendering of Beijing’s CCTV tower and what was actually built. The concept is much more impressive than the execution.

The rigged Iranian election

June 13, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The question the world is asking today is, “Was the election result in Iran legitimate?” Juan Cole has a list of reasons why we should question the results that bears paying close attention to. And the conduct of the Iranian government in the immediate aftermath certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that they have nothing to hide.

We all knew before their election that in the end, the ayatollah is the one who’s really in charge. It remains to be seen whether the Iranian people are going to do something about that.

What people were cooking in 1922

June 9, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve seen several links today to The Stag Cook Book, published in 1922 with the subtitle “Written for Men by Men.” I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

The book’s concept is simple — famous people of the time were asked to supply recipes and short essays. It has a recipe for waffles from Warren G. Harding, Houdini’s deviled eggs, and Charlie Chaplin’s steak and kidney pie. Rube Goldberg supplied a funny article about hash. Montague Glass provides a recipe for bouillabaisse that’s a timeless piece of food writing. Frank Ward O’Malley’s article on Rum-Tum-Tiddy captures its period better than an entire season of Mad Men.

There’s something fascinating on every page. How differently did people eat in 1922 than they do today? A quick trip through the book provides the answer. S. S. McLure’s instructions for cooking an omelette stand the test of time. Douglas Fairbanks’ bread tart will not be made in any kitchen we’re likely to visit.

This book illustrates why long copyright terms are such a poor idea. This book is out of print, and even if it weren’t, nobody would buy it. But at the same time, it’s a fascinating historical artifact and I’m ecstatic that it’s available online. You should be, too.

How essential are smart phone keyboards?

June 8, 2009 / Rafe / 9 Comments

John Gruber says people who’ve never used a smart phone with a keyboard won’t miss them. Tim Bray differs.

I’m not sure where I come down in this debate. I like keyboards — I use one all day, but I’ve only had an iPhone, and I don’t regret not having a physical keyboard. It could be that I just don’t know what I’m missing, but that’s Gruber’s point. There are a lot of people who won’t know what they’re missing. I do know that I love the fact that the iPhone is remarkably thin and small and has a huge screen, and I am sure you’d have to give that up to some extent to have a keyboard. I’m willing to remain ignorant of the physical keyboard advantage.

Links from June 8th

June 8, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Salon: The Learjet repo man. Just an entertaining article.
Dahlia Lithwick: Guantanamo is the least of America’s prison problem. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
Marginal Revolution: Why U.S. health care policy is especially egalitarian. Guaranteed to undermine at least one thing you believe to be true.
crontab2english. Stop trying to wrap your brain around cron configuration.
McClatchy: Why’d Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic. Make of this what you will.
MySQL Performance Blog: A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes. Helpful.
Ruby Best Practices: Reading Ruby’s Standard Library for Fun and Profit. Solid article on reading code.
WoW Insider: Beware of Blood Elves selling mounts. A complex phishing and identity theft scam in World of Warcraft. They used to say that all Web innovations begin on porn sites. I think you can look to World of Warcraft to see tomorrow’s fraud today.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed. Google’s version of YSlow.
O’Reilly Radar: TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker. Tracking changes to the terms of service from popular sites.
Elder Game: Yes, the MMO Industry Really is That Bad. Cautionary tale on working in the MMO industry.
Monica Youn: Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place. Useful context for the "wise Latina" speech.
YouTube: R.E.M. 10/10/82 The Pier, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Old footage someone dug up. For more information on the Village Subway, see this excellent post from Goodnight, Raleigh.
High Performance Web Sites: Using Iframes Sparingly. The performance of iframes is really bad.
O’Reilly Radar: Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search. Particularly interesting in light of the recent release of Wolfram Alpha.

Improving my blogging workflow

June 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.

Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.

I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.

So here’s my workflow these days:

Compose a post in MarsEdit and publish it.
Go to the WordPress application on the server and navigate to the new post so I can copy the short link.
Open my Twitter client and write a new tweet, then publish that.

The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.

It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.

More later.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held