Check out this interesting and informative article on Stewart Brand, the environmentalist icon behind the “Whole Earth Catalog” who now is promoting “heresies” that are based on science, not romantics. Among these heresies: nuclear power is good; megacities are good; genetic engineering is good.
I hope he’s correct in his optimistic prediction that science-based ideas will become the accepted mainstream of environmentalism within the next 10 years, but in my experience, it’s hard for a person with a life-defining religious conviction to make that kind of reversal. He’s also clearly an innovator who seeks out change and not a conservative, the way most people regardless of their political affiliation (including most environmentalists) ultimately are. But maybe a focus on the empirical realities of the situation will become common enough among those with the drive and wherewithal to make a difference that they will carry everyone else along – forward, not back to some mythical past.
I wasn’t aware that Brand was also an early cyberculture guru who organized the first Hackers Conference and uttered the famous words: “Information wants to be free.”
My favorite Brand quote from the article: “The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Rocket Dog
At Christmas, I did quite a bit of clothing shopping with my mom. (I find shopping by myself kind of boring and there's only so much I think it's reasonable to make Robert go along with, so I often delay shopping outings until I see my mom.) And as many of you know, I am crazy about shoes. It's fortunate that I have no use for or interest in high heels and other often expensive, extremely uncomfortable shoes; this is the only thing that keeps my shoe supply down to a plausibly reasonable level. (I cannot easily estimate how many shoes I have now and I am afraid to count.) At one store, I saw this wonderful pair of deconstructed plaid sneakers and went absolutely gaga for them immediately. I was initially like, wow, if I were 17 years old, I would totally buy these shoes. But then I realized, wait, I can buy them even at my advanced age of 33 if I want to. (I have a somewhat older friend RB who is constantly referring to various 28-35 year old women as being "terribly young" - this cracks me up but at the same time is sort of reassuring.) So I tried them on, fell in love, and bought them.
One of the advantages of my job is that it's a pretty relaxed environment dress-wise. (Surprisingly to me, it's not actually as casual as at my previous job, where I wore pajamas on Holloween, which was the first Friday I worked there, and told people, "Oh, this isn't a costume; it was just the only thing I could find to wear on casual Friday that was actually a step down from how everyone dresses during the week.") The range of dress is very wide and often related in complex ways to what division people work in and what their position is within the division. (A middle-level manager in revenue and budget will wear a suit while a division head for a resource division will wear jeans and a polo shirt with the agency logo. Our previous executive director was the strangest dresser of all; my favorite outfit was when he gave an agency-wide talk wearing cowboy boots, chinos, a button-down shirt, a bolo tie, and a puffy ski jacket.) My outfits range from a silk shirt, a jacket, and dress pants (very rare) to jeans and sneakers. I typically wear a fitted t-shirt, a cardigan, cotton pants, and comfortable mary jane or mock moc shoes. I try to save the jeans for Fridays, but this week, I just had to wear them today. (I think this was partly in reaction to dressing up ever so slightly for my presentation to executive management on Monday and partly because any week, like this one, when we have Friday off is always kind of unreal and a good excuse to deviate from personal norms.) So I wore them with my killer Rocket Dog shoes. Are they just the cutest or what.
Ignoring Base Rates
One irksome thing I encounter in my job is somebody getting unduly excited about a statistic that they’ve read, like that “participation in kayaking doubled in the last 10 years and is now the fastest growing recreational activity in the country” or “female participation in hunting is up 70% from 1990,” that basically comes down to growth from a small base. It’s very easy for something to be up in percentage terms when the original number is very low. But it’s not as exciting to report “in 2000, 5% of the US adult population participated in kayaking, up from 2% in 1990” or similarly unimpressive percentage point increases. [Please note that I made up all these numbers.]
The situation is worsened by the fact that frequently, given a reasonably high sample size, small differences between two high or two low percentages are statistically significant. And people have real trouble understanding that statistical significance and substantive significance (or meaningfulness) aren’t the same thing. Statistical significance can tell you how sure you can be that the difference exists, but not how large the difference is or whether it means anything. For example, if I could talk to every single adult in this country and find out that 64% of women like dogs and 65% of men like dogs, I could say with assurance that men are more likely to like dogs than woman are, but the difference is tiny and what would be the implication of this difference? Probably nothing.
So next time you hear a statistic reported like this, remember, it might not mean much of anything at all, despite how impressive the numbers sound. Base rates matter. For the number of football players majoring in electrical engineering at American universities to double may only require one more guy doing it.
The situation is worsened by the fact that frequently, given a reasonably high sample size, small differences between two high or two low percentages are statistically significant. And people have real trouble understanding that statistical significance and substantive significance (or meaningfulness) aren’t the same thing. Statistical significance can tell you how sure you can be that the difference exists, but not how large the difference is or whether it means anything. For example, if I could talk to every single adult in this country and find out that 64% of women like dogs and 65% of men like dogs, I could say with assurance that men are more likely to like dogs than woman are, but the difference is tiny and what would be the implication of this difference? Probably nothing.
So next time you hear a statistic reported like this, remember, it might not mean much of anything at all, despite how impressive the numbers sound. Base rates matter. For the number of football players majoring in electrical engineering at American universities to double may only require one more guy doing it.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
The Hunter - Who is He? (And where is the rest of his body?)
As a continuation of my literature review on hunter retention, I came across a 1961 paper ("The Hunter - Who is He?") covering an early survey of hunting license purchasers in Ohio that contained many oddities from a 2006 perspective.
“The result was a printed booklet… containing 200 questions on 23 pages… In timed tests, it took most people between 20 and 30 minutes to complete the questionnaire.”
There is no chance whatsoever of getting any reasonable response rate at this point on a 23 page, 200 question survey of hunters. (You would also very rarely see a modern methods section that contains as much detail as this one did. I suppose at the time, the detailed information was useful to people without very much research experience.)
“Coding for machine punching takes about 5 minutes for each booklet, while the key-punch operators can completely punch the data on two cards in about 2 minutes. The information was condensed on the cards by using combinations of multiple and addend coding.”
A two-minute data entry per survey seems pretty fast to me, though obviously not as fast as using optical scanning technology. I don’t even know what multiple and addend coding means.
“A cost accounting of the project is not complete since we are still in the process of receiving returns and tabulating data. A rough estimate based on an expected return of 4,000 questionnaires amounts to about $1.00 for each questionnaire. This estimate includes processing the data on punch cards, but does not consider any cost for machine analyses.”
Wow, a time when “machine analyses” had a variable cost?
“The first portion of our questionnaire was devised to identify the individual hunting license buyer and to determine whether he has belonged to what the psychologists call an ulstrith group (Toops, 1948).”
What the hell is an “ulstrith group”? From context, it could refer to just about anything. “Ulstrith” brings up a single hit on google, for an Edward Toops journal article written in 1959 on personnel psychology. (Needless to say, the UT electronic databases do not go back as far as 1959, so the content will remain a mystery.) Toops and the author of this 1961 wildlife paper were both from Ohio State. Kind of makes you wonder, were they friends? Did this guy include a reference to Toops’ work as a favor to a squash buddy whose new typology just wasn’t catching on? There isn’t any evidence that this terminology was even briefly popular. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to write “what one psychologist calls an ulstrith group.”
“Only one of about every 100 license holders reporting was a huntress.”
Huntress? That’s a funny and very outdated term. (Yes, I can figure out what it means by applying straightforward linguistic principles, thank you.) A quick google search reveals Huntress to refer commonly to a comic book hero, a British consultancy, an airplane, and a TV show. It seems related in my mind to the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, as well; maybe I have heard it in that context before. Only 1% of their hunters are goddesses, the rest are mere mortals. Oh well.
“Six percent of the hunters admitted that they sometimes discard the game after reducing it to possession.”
I was not familiar with the term “reduce to possession” but it appears to be a common legal term when dealing with public resources, including fish and game, but also natural resources such as coal. Apparently, reducing to possession refers to acquiring a right in property that you did not previously have; it removes the specific animal from the wildlife resource that is held in common ownership by the people.
“No one was interested in shooting a walrus.”
There’s a shocker. Really, though, I would have expected at least one person to have answered yes even to something this ridiculous. And what if their survey had revealed a huge unmet demand for walrus hunting? Yes, the Ohio fish & game department is going to get right on THAT. This is one of those absurd, unactionable survey questions that I love.
But best of all are the amazing figures that accompany the section we often call the “hunter profile.” I have never seen this taken quite so literally.
First, check out the blind-folded huntersaurus depicted on the top left. Oh yes, it is totally aiding my intuitive understanding of the data to look at a drawing of a decapitated head with differently shaded strata. Then we have the hunters with various degrees of leg amputation; and here I would have thought that this kind of disability would interfere with one’s hunting abilities. Glad to have been straightened out on that! Somewhere out there, Edward Tufte is sitting in a restaurant right now, feeling mildly irked without knowing why.
“The result was a printed booklet… containing 200 questions on 23 pages… In timed tests, it took most people between 20 and 30 minutes to complete the questionnaire.”
There is no chance whatsoever of getting any reasonable response rate at this point on a 23 page, 200 question survey of hunters. (You would also very rarely see a modern methods section that contains as much detail as this one did. I suppose at the time, the detailed information was useful to people without very much research experience.)
“Coding for machine punching takes about 5 minutes for each booklet, while the key-punch operators can completely punch the data on two cards in about 2 minutes. The information was condensed on the cards by using combinations of multiple and addend coding.”
A two-minute data entry per survey seems pretty fast to me, though obviously not as fast as using optical scanning technology. I don’t even know what multiple and addend coding means.
“A cost accounting of the project is not complete since we are still in the process of receiving returns and tabulating data. A rough estimate based on an expected return of 4,000 questionnaires amounts to about $1.00 for each questionnaire. This estimate includes processing the data on punch cards, but does not consider any cost for machine analyses.”
Wow, a time when “machine analyses” had a variable cost?
“The first portion of our questionnaire was devised to identify the individual hunting license buyer and to determine whether he has belonged to what the psychologists call an ulstrith group (Toops, 1948).”
What the hell is an “ulstrith group”? From context, it could refer to just about anything. “Ulstrith” brings up a single hit on google, for an Edward Toops journal article written in 1959 on personnel psychology. (Needless to say, the UT electronic databases do not go back as far as 1959, so the content will remain a mystery.) Toops and the author of this 1961 wildlife paper were both from Ohio State. Kind of makes you wonder, were they friends? Did this guy include a reference to Toops’ work as a favor to a squash buddy whose new typology just wasn’t catching on? There isn’t any evidence that this terminology was even briefly popular. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to write “what one psychologist calls an ulstrith group.”
“Only one of about every 100 license holders reporting was a huntress.”
Huntress? That’s a funny and very outdated term. (Yes, I can figure out what it means by applying straightforward linguistic principles, thank you.) A quick google search reveals Huntress to refer commonly to a comic book hero, a British consultancy, an airplane, and a TV show. It seems related in my mind to the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, as well; maybe I have heard it in that context before. Only 1% of their hunters are goddesses, the rest are mere mortals. Oh well.
“Six percent of the hunters admitted that they sometimes discard the game after reducing it to possession.”
I was not familiar with the term “reduce to possession” but it appears to be a common legal term when dealing with public resources, including fish and game, but also natural resources such as coal. Apparently, reducing to possession refers to acquiring a right in property that you did not previously have; it removes the specific animal from the wildlife resource that is held in common ownership by the people.
“No one was interested in shooting a walrus.”
There’s a shocker. Really, though, I would have expected at least one person to have answered yes even to something this ridiculous. And what if their survey had revealed a huge unmet demand for walrus hunting? Yes, the Ohio fish & game department is going to get right on THAT. This is one of those absurd, unactionable survey questions that I love.
But best of all are the amazing figures that accompany the section we often call the “hunter profile.” I have never seen this taken quite so literally.
First, check out the blind-folded huntersaurus depicted on the top left. Oh yes, it is totally aiding my intuitive understanding of the data to look at a drawing of a decapitated head with differently shaded strata. Then we have the hunters with various degrees of leg amputation; and here I would have thought that this kind of disability would interfere with one’s hunting abilities. Glad to have been straightened out on that! Somewhere out there, Edward Tufte is sitting in a restaurant right now, feeling mildly irked without knowing why.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Ironically Enough...
It took me about 45 minutes to get the previous post, in which I claim that I do not have problems with computer software, to go up such that all the text was the same size and spacing. Of course, this means that everything is tiny and scrunched and looks basically terrible. What the hell? I didn't realize there was any way to screw this up using the Blogger software. Is it something about my photograph? I didn't have any problem when I uploaded other images. Anybody out there know anything about this kind of thing?
I am very curious now whether this entry is going to be posted in all caps, italics, or with an automatic translation into Swahili or something.
I am very curious now whether this entry is going to be posted in all caps, italics, or with an automatic translation into Swahili or something.
Sally's New Camera ... Case
I have now successfully taken and downloaded my first photo with my new camera, a Canon PhotoShot SD600 Digital Elph. I actually made several attempts to photograph the camera itself in the mirror, but that didn't turn out very well. So instead, I am showing you my camera case which the camera just fits inside (and no, I did not pick this particular camera because a spiffy red leather case was available; that was just fortuitous). The camera is small, but not so small as to be a real pocket camera in my opinion (nor will it function as a Mission Impossible/007/"his bowtie is really a camera" spy camera); however, for carrying around in my purse, it should work fine.
Getting a new piece of technology is kind of a mixed bag for me because I hate having to learn the new system. (I don't have this reaction to computer software, however; it's really about a physical object that has knobs and switches and settings and things that can break and confusing menus and unclear labels and so forth.) So far, this machine has been pretty intuitive to use as I set it up and played around a little bit with the various options.
Getting a new piece of technology is kind of a mixed bag for me because I hate having to learn the new system. (I don't have this reaction to computer software, however; it's really about a physical object that has knobs and switches and settings and things that can break and confusing menus and unclear labels and so forth.) So far, this machine has been pretty intuitive to use as I set it up and played around a little bit with the various options.
The starter's manual was fairly good, but I did love the fact that only after it told you how to insert the memory card with a drawing and a few steps did it then say "Ensure that the memory card is correctly oriented before inserting it in the camera. It may damage the camera if inserted incorrectly." OK, thanks, if I just broke my camera, now I know how that happened. This is a crazy idea, I know, but ... shouldn't they put these warnings first? One thing I did appreciate a lot was that they included separate Spanish and English language manuals; I hate it when they give you this one huge manual that includes both languages. [Note to self: accidentally pushing Ctrl-S instead of Shift-S will cause your post to spontaneously publish itself whether you're ready or not. Avoid this in the future.]
When I was showing Robert the case photo on the camera, it did this weird thing where it suddenly switched the orientation of the photo for a split second and then switched it back. Of course when I tried to show Robert this bizarre phenomenon, it didn't happen. But then I made it happen again and was able to show him. He said that I must be pushing some button somewhere and I tested pushing around on various parts of the camera but couldn't make it happen. Finally I asked Robert to look it up in the real manual, that has all the details and everything, but right after that I realized that the camera was responding to the angle at which I was holding it and adjusting automatically. And Robert indeed identified that the camera has an "Intelligent Orientation" system for this. We got a good laugh out of that one. No doubt there are more laughable Sally mishaps to come. At least it doesn't have a lens cover that I can accidentally leave in place.
Roger Ebert on Gone With the Wind
Tam's momm recently asked in the comments section whether I managed to watch Gone with the Wind to the end and was it worth my time. In all honesty, I thought the movie was a hell of a lot of fun. The view of the Old South portrayed in it is obviously morally objectionable, sentimental crap. You can't take it at all seriously (I mean both in the sense of "can't take it seriously and not feel ill" but also that it's just not possible to do). But I found the (melo-) drama of the story quite engaging, and the Scarlett/Rhett relationship ludicrous, sexy, and bigger-than-life in a good kind of way. It's like the greatest trashy romance story ever.
You know how some movies (or books) are hard to get into? That you have to be in the right frame of mind to deal with its difficulties or strangeness, and you struggle with it for a while, but that eventually you reach a point where everything clicks for you and you start enjoying it? Gone with the Wind is not this kind of movie. If you have tried to watch it a couple of times, and it didn't do anything for you, I doubt you're going to like it any better any other time. For pop-cultural literacy, it's good if you have at least seen a bit of the movie and are thus generally familiar with its characters and style, and everybody should be able to recognize the origin of its famous lines (not giving a damn, needing to be kissed by somebody who knows how, birthin' babies, never being hungry again). But this isn't a movie that is good for you, that improves your mind, or anything like that, so don't force it, I say.
I have always liked Roger Ebert's review of Gone with the Wind and his observations the movie is very much a creature of the 1930's and an embodiment of widely held ravishment fantasies.
You know how some movies (or books) are hard to get into? That you have to be in the right frame of mind to deal with its difficulties or strangeness, and you struggle with it for a while, but that eventually you reach a point where everything clicks for you and you start enjoying it? Gone with the Wind is not this kind of movie. If you have tried to watch it a couple of times, and it didn't do anything for you, I doubt you're going to like it any better any other time. For pop-cultural literacy, it's good if you have at least seen a bit of the movie and are thus generally familiar with its characters and style, and everybody should be able to recognize the origin of its famous lines (not giving a damn, needing to be kissed by somebody who knows how, birthin' babies, never being hungry again). But this isn't a movie that is good for you, that improves your mind, or anything like that, so don't force it, I say.
I have always liked Roger Ebert's review of Gone with the Wind and his observations the movie is very much a creature of the 1930's and an embodiment of widely held ravishment fantasies.
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