Kottke.org gueest blogger Sarah Pavis collected stories from readers about connections made online, especially by way of Kottke.org. Here are the results. An amazing number of the good and interesting things that have happened to me in life have been a result of the connections I’ve made online — through rc3.org, through The Well, through other people’s blogs. Every Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the Internet and the people I’ve met through this amazing medium.
From Arabesque, my favorite blog for Unix geeks. I always change the sshd port, so I’m delighted to read a sound argument against doing so.
I really liked this post by Camille Fournier, who runs the engineering team for Rent the Runway. When confronted with the problem of giving customers the confidence that the garment they rent will fit properly when it arrives, engineers tend to turn to solutions that involve 3D modeling and “virtual fit assistants.” Unfortunately, real humans are put off by these approaches. The solution they arrived at is much lower tech, but much better for customers. There are two takeaways, I think. The first is that diversity of all kinds on a team is valuable because it leads to a wider variety of proposed solutions to problems. The second thing is that this kind of problem really proves the value of experimentation as a product development approach. Try things and measure the results. You’ll probably wind up being surprised.
The New York Times ran two opinion pieces this weekend right next to each other that both stand at the intersection of the how the government and politics work and social change that results from technological change. In the first, Joe Nocera argues that the big question in the resignation of David Petraeus is whether we’re comfortable with the FBI snooping through our email on relatively flimsy grounds:
But the Petraeus scandal could well end up teaching some very different lessons. If the most admired military man in a generation can have his e-mail hacked by F.B.I. agents, then none of us are safe from the post-9/11 surveillance machine. And if an affair is all it takes to force such a man from office, then we truly have lost all sense of proportion.
The second was about what increased use of data in political campaigns means long-term. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working in the analytics world this year, so this topic is highly relevant to me. It’s also very complicated. On one hand, improving our ability to collect and analyze data enables us to better understand what people want and expect from our products, or, in the case of campaigns, our politicians. On the other hand, combining our more advanced understanding of human behavior with deeper data sets creates the opportunity for more effective manipulation in addition to more effective communication.
While the people creating big data tools may not be evil, the organizations that use them going forward may not agree to the same principles. The big question in both the Petraeus case and in the use of big data by campaigns is that regardless of our level of comfort with the government, campaigns, or companies knowing so much about us, we don’t really have control over the gathering of that information.
Dalton Caldwell looks at some recent Twitter moves and tries to predict the company’s upcoming strategy. Here’s what he argues that it’s about:
The Discover tab is the future. Rather than forcing normal users to make sense of a realtime stream, they can see what content is trending.
Here’s what I don’t get. You can facilitate the mode of usage that Twitter may envision for everyday users without hurting the power users that have made it what it is. How did celebrities and “brands” figure out how to engage on Twitter? By watching the pioneering users of the service build a following. And many of those users have become celebrities in their own right in the context of Twitter. If Twitter put me on their board (and they should), that’s the advice I’d give them. Passive users may contribute most of the revenue, but the power users contribute most of the energy.
One thing I’ve come to appreciate in the past year is the degree to which a solid math education can benefit a software developer. Google software engineer Javier Tordable surveys the math behind a number of Google products in his presentation Mathematics at Google. Inspirational.
Occupy Wall Street is raising money to buy debt that’s in collections for pennies on the dollar and then forgive it. Incredible example of hacking the system for positive change.
The main thing we learned last night from the massive success of the poll aggregators that I wrote about before the election is that the polls do accurately reflect the variables that have traditionally been thought of as beyond polling. The Republicans launched a massive legislative voter suppression effort that probably affected the results. The Obama campaign put together what was probably the greatest get out the vote effort in history. What we learned is that their impact was factored into the polls. Even the naive model used by electoral-vote.com did pretty well (their Rasmussen-free map did as well as Nate Silver). Forecasting the election by aggregating state polls is a winning strategy, at least for the time being.
Update: Here’s a list of the individual polling firms that most accurately predicted last night’s results. Good polling is critical, and this year’s polling was very good (as proven by electoral-vote.com), but the main takeaway is that there’s almost no point in looking at individual poll results when you can aggregate all of them.
Canadian writer Colby Cosh takes more advanced whack at Nate Silver today, arguing that it’s foolish to equate defending Nate Silver and defending science. I agree. He also argues that Nate Silver’s actual analytical skills are likely overrated, going back to his days as a baseball analyst. For more on that, check out the comment thread on this post at Baseball Think Factory.
This comment from that thread gets pretty close to the truth:
This piece does a good job of arguing that Silver’s baseball projections, like his political projections, aren’t notably better than the projections put together by other smart folks in the field. In 2008 and 2010, Silver’s projections did fine, but not notably better than other folks in the field. This seems like a good and important point – Silver isn’t a “wizard”, he’s a good writer with a good model that spits out results of a quality similar to the models of other folks who aren’t as good at writing.
Indeed, what we see is that Silver’s projections are broadly in line with what most people who have built statistical models of the likely results see. Here’s a summary of predictions from a variety of poll aggregators, all of whom use different models:
If you’re interested in how the aggregators differ check out this post from the Princeton Electoral Consortium.
If you want to see a fuller list of predictions, Ezra Klein also has his own pundit scoreboard.
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Against irony
Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony is one of my favorite essays I’ve read lately. Here’s her advice on performing an irony self-assessment:
I have been intending for quite awhile to write something about the dangers of irony. Perhaps at one time “hipster mustaches” were an ironic commentary on absurd facial hair, but now they’re a faddish fashion choice. Likewise, perhaps people started drinking PBR because they were making an ironic commentary on being “broke,” but now they drink it because it’s the cheapest beer most bars serve. How many people wearing trucker hats know why they’re called trucker hats?
I’ve observed the effects of overuse of irony on myself. I often catch myself unconsciously using slang that I once used to ironically skew people I see on TV. The line between irony and sincerity blurs as people repeat behavior that they began as a joke. The journey from making a joke and becoming a joke is a short one. Just ask anyone with an ironic tattoo.