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FoxTrot agrees: your Senator needs an iPodThe December 30th FoxTrot comic hits on the very idea IPac ran with two years ago: sending iPods to Senators. Back in February 2006, Senator Ted Stevens mentioned the iPod he'd gotten for Christmas in a hearing, and to educate Senators on the many legitimate uses of digital technology, IPac launched the Your Senator Needs an iPod campaign.
It was a stunt as much as anything, but it generated awareness of the digital divide between citizens and elected officials who barely understand the technology they are legislating. The humorous nature of the campaign was the very quality played up by Sunday's FoxTrot, in which Jason sends iPods to members of the U.S. Senate this Christmas for exactly the same reason IPac did. A small excerpt of the comic (click to read the whole thing with punchline):
 posted on Jan 2, 2008 2:26 pm (comment) Randomn3ss and L3vyThis week's episode of NUMB3RS opened with Professor Eppes giving a lecture on randomness. He showed two sets of dots, one with some clusters and some empty areas, the other with the dots fairly evenly spread out. Most of the class chose the second as the most random, wrongly. Aha, I thought, a neat coincidence that they are talking about the way humans see patterns where none exist, just a few days after I posted about this in connection with Steven Levy's iPod shuffle experience. But in this case, there was a pattern, as a few scenes later Eppes uses the very same example of the iPod torn right from the pages of the book.
Episodes take weeks or more to write and produce, so the writers likely based this one on the book, which came out six weeks ago. But it's surely just randomness that I saw the show days after hearing Levy speak. After all, if the two events hadn't coincided in time, I probably wouldn't have written a blog post about this. The fact that I did makes it noticed, and noticing coincidence makes us see the clusters all the more clearly even when they occur randomly. posted on Dec 10, 2006 5:54 pm (comment) The pattern is not in the iPod, but in ourselvesSteven Levy of Newsweek spoke at Google today about his new book, The Perfect Thing, about the iPod Shuffle. He related a story about how, when he got his Shuffle, he started to notice a propensity for playing Steely Dan songs. So he wrote a column about this, and was flooded with letters. Many people wrote that they also noticed a preference for Steely Dan in their iPods. Others observed predilections for other artists. One thought her iPod had "moods," like being bluesy on Mondays. One noticed a preference for Bob Dylan one day, and then the next, Bob Dylan songs by different people.
Those with a good understanding of statistics will immediately realize that this is an inevitable human reaction to randomness. As Levy came to realize, "the pattern is not in the iPod, but in ourselves." Human brains are wired to recognize patterns, and they even see them where there are none. This is why some people are sure that they have a "feeling" before a disaster, or believe in ESP, or luck (as Levy points out, the gambling industry is built on people's irrational response to randomness). Not having clusters where one artist's song appears four times in a row is much more unusual than having some such clusters. This is a great example of innumeracy among people in general, and why teaching statistics is so important. posted on Dec 5, 2006 12:50 pm (comment) Your Senator Needs an iPod But Senator Stevens, the 82-year old committee chairman from Alaska, surprised the audience by announcing that his daughter had bought him an iPod, and suddenly Stevens had a much greater understanding of the many ways innovative technology can create choice for consumers. Content industry representatives at the hearing found themselves answering much tougher questions than they typically receive. When I read about this in ths news, I immediately, thought, wouldn't it be great if more Senators owned iPods? Someone should give them to the Senators on the committee! Rather than wait for every Senator's daughter, over the weekend the team at IPac put together a campaign Your Senator Needs an iPod to raise money to buy a video iPod for the campaigns of Senators who work on legislation affecting technology. We're going to pre-load each one with examples of the cultural richness made possible by sharing and collaboration - public domain content, Creative Commons content, and audio messages about the importance of balanced copyright policy. It will be engraved with the words "listen to the people." And it will arrive at each Senator's campaign office with a letter of explanation and a list of all the people who helped pay for it. The campaign went up Tuesday with a link on Boing Boing, and quickly spread through the blogosphere with links on Fark, Engadget, Ars Technica, Digg, and many other blogs, especially Apple enthusiast blogs everywhere (makes sense). So far, we've raised enough for 4 iPods and are almost up to a fifth.
posted on Feb 2, 2006 7:46 pm (comment) | Blog ArchivesMost Popular Tags |
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