Blog: June 2005

If I could add one subject to the high school curriculum, it would be statistics. Yes, I know it's already the bane of many a social science major's existence in college. But developing a basic ability to critically evaluate numbers from news articles is, in my opinion, the most important tool a citizen should have. The media is rife with bogus claims that confuse correlation with causation. And without the understanding necessary to think critically about what they read, people have no way to separate truth from distortion, and then what value is truth?

Example of the day is this obviously misleading claim from a recent Annenberg survey (PDF) - obviously misleading, that is, to those who understand basic statistics. Annenberg claims:

About as many Americans consider Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show star, to be a journalist as say the same of Bob Woodward, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor who broke the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein, according to a national survey conducted for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Twenty-seven percent of adult Americans polled between March 7 and May 2, 2005, said Limbaugh was a journalist, 55 percent said he was not, and 18 percent said they did not know. For Woodward, 30 percent said he was a journalist, 17 percent said he was not and 53 percent did not know. The difference was within the poll's margin of sampling error.

Chris Bowers of MyDD points out the fallacy:

Limbaugh's name ID is at 82% in this poll, while Woodward's is at 47%, entirely accounting for the similarity this poll supposedly finds. By a two to one margin, people who know who Rush Limbaugh is do not think he is a journalist. Also, by nearly a two to one margin, people who know who Bob Woodward is think he is a journalist.

Maybe it is unreasonable and naive to want people to be able to question the assumptions behind claims we read. But shouldn't we at least try to help them do so? Or at the very least, we can hope that polling organizations and the people who write their press releases can learn how.

I'm not that into polls, but this one is fun. SurveyUSA polled all Senators' approval ratings, and Oklahomans are the least happy with their representation, as well they should be - the total nutcase Tom Coburn and his slightly more senior wingnut colleague Jim Inhofe are the 5th and 6th least popular Senators. At the other end of the spectrum, North Dakotans love their Senators - Kent Conrad is the #3 most popular of all 100 Senators, and his fellow Byron Dorgan the 6th.

This says as much about the way people in various states view politicians and respond to polls than anything else, but like I said, fun.

Gathering for a bunch of parties with seven hundred of your fellow classmates doesn't feel all that unusual when you already gather for parties with many fellow classmates on a regular basis as it is.

The reunion was great, though, with the one complaint that it was really, really hot, and I hadn't thought to bring a fan for my non-air-conditioned dorm room. The people there fell into approximately four categories: people I don't know (maybe 60%), people I already see or talk to online regularly (maybe 20%... yes, it's a lot), people I haven't seen in years (maybe 20%), and people I didn't know in college but realized I really should have (about ten such people, including one girl who works at the same company as I do, though in the Mountain View office (bringing to a grand total of eight the number of coworkers in my class (which is nothing compared to the half of Stanford they hire each year))).

I didn't get a lot of pictures, but here are a few, which include some but not all of the people I spent most of the time talking to (since I was often busy talking to them rather than taking pictures).

Unlike most colleges, Harvard has no student center. Very few places exist on campus where all students can congregate. In 1996, Harvard tried to build a social center in the basement of Memorial Hall, called Loker Commons. Loker was just the kind of place a bunch of 40-something administrators might create: it closed early, the few mediocre food vendors closed even earlier, and the whole place sported a sterile, uncomfortable, bright fluorescent interior.

Now, the administration is considering turning the place into a pub, after the success of a series of "Pub Nights". Without knowing many of the details, it seems like a good idea. There was no reason this should have taken ten years, though.

In an article in the Harvard Crimson (which doesn't seem to be posted online), Associate Dean of the College Judith Kidd is quoted as saying, "It appears that students really enjoy having a place where they can go with friends to hang out, hear good music, and have low-cost refreshments."

Wow!

Students like social spaces, music, and drinks? What a shock! I kid about Kidd, but in fairness to her, I'm sure she didn't mean it to come across that way. Actually, she has been doing a lot to facilitate more social interaction on campus through concerts, pub nights, and other events which five years ago were almost impossible to organize. And a student center in Allston may be in the works, while ten years ago, Harvard took away the student center and turned it into faculty offices.

No matter what their age, social interaction is a fundamental human desire. And everyone from colleges to conference organizers to political activists are well advised to take that to heart.

A culture and economy of innovation, such as that which grew up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and created so many great technological products, is widely touted as one of the greatest American assets. But I believe this is much more fragile than many people realize.

We had revolutionary innovation in personal computer software and on the Internet. But these were possible only because both supported anyone building anything to run on them - you could write any software for a computer without requiring permission from Microsoft or Apple, and could deploy any Web site without running it by anyone.

This doesn't exist on other platforms such as cell phones and cable set-top boxes. One can only run software on a cell phone that is approved by a carrier. And it's nearly impossible to write software to extend the capabilities of a cable set-top box - only the cable company can deploy features there. And not surprisingly, we have very little innovation. My cell phone can't display my voice mail messages in an on-screen UI, and I can't get software which remembers what shows I watched and lets me email them to my friends. The list of things one can't do goes on and on, whereas on the Internet, as soon as someone thinks up some new application, there it is.

Walt Mossberg calls wireless carriers "the new Soviet ministries." They are acting in their own best interest, but not the best interest of the consumer. Media companies love controlled "walled gardens," because it's orderly, with everything a consumer sees being determined by a set of business deals. If it makes enough money, it happens, and if it doesn't, then it's not worth the gatekeepers' while. But the small developer gets shut out of this process, and thousands of clever applications which wouldn't make a lot of money but would make people's lives better never get built.

This becomes an especially big problem when media companies lobby Congress for new laws, laws which further entrench monopolies and help the larger players while making life harder for the true innovators, or worse yet, imposing enormous legal risks. When the Induce Act was being debated, I spoke to a legislative staffer for a prominent Senator who said they were staying away from that bill because the media industry and electronics industry didn't agree. That was great in that case since it killed a terrible bill, but what happens when Congress considers a measure which big media companies and big electronics companies all support, but hurts innovation? Who stands up for innovation? Should venture capitalists band together to create a pro-entrepreneurship lobbby? What about the open source developers who don't raise venture capital - who will stand up for them?