Comment Re:Apple Maps (Score 5, Insightful) 279
Yeah. Apparently Apple has finally figured out that killing your customers isn't good business.
Works out pretty well for the tobacco industry.
Yeah. Apparently Apple has finally figured out that killing your customers isn't good business.
Works out pretty well for the tobacco industry.
I agree that it would be much more sensible and fair if you were always judged by what you know and not by what title you have, but unfortunately that is not always the case.
I'd also like to judge people on their ability to think, to listen to others, research existing knowledge, to appraise and weight up ideas, and this is a large part of what college teaches. This goes beyond 'knowing stuff' and 'people skills' (although these are undoubtedly important).
Which is all well and good until the first asteroid miner brings home a literal gigatonne of gold.
It occurs to me that there's really only three fundamental commodities: Time * People = Happiness. Anything we can produce requires an investment of time by one or more people, whether it's six people spending eight hours sweating away over a forge or one person spending one second pushing a button in an air-conditioned office, and everything we do in life affects our happiness.
This used to be true (ie every cost is really a labour cost) but with increasing scarcity of food/energy/water/real estate etc and and over-supply of labour and machines to do all the work I don't think time*people is your real commodity any more.
One planet is almost entirely sugar, and there's some sort of nebula that is basically alcohol..
Somewhere there is an astronomer with his telescope the wrong way around trying to work out the orbital trajectories of the remnants of his lunch.
The damaged reputation argument is, of course, laughable given money will, of course, soothe hurt feelings.
If you've got a better way to punish a corporation than by fining it, I'd like to hear it. As it stands, fining a company, and therefore making the bad activities less profitable is about the only thing we have for an entity that cannot be imprisoned nor be killed.
You could make them post an apology on the front page of their website.
And they only found a total of 395 tweets which will lead to appalling precision in any of their findings.
Yet from a totally anecdotal perspective, their results look remarkably accurate.
Its a good point - I did wonder about this. I suspect there's a kind of bias going on whereby any result other than that with the face validity of this one would not have been published (the authors would have discarded it on the basis of their poor method). It's not possible to know how many combinations of searches and calculations were done before they arrived at this one. If that sounds cynical then it is, but I'm an (honest) statistician and I do have to work very hard to stoo myself falling into that trap sometimes. On the other hand, they could just have lucked out, or the sheer volume of positive tweets eminating from the blue states could have been resposible for the relative lack of racist tweets in those areas, which would have produced the same result regardless of possibly differing underlying levels of racism across states.
I can't believe how much of my weekend I've wasted thinking about this.
Random people on the internet seem to not do well at statistics either...
In this specific case, the total sample size of 395 tweets could easily be enough, especially if they came from a couple states and different accounts. However, what is more damning is looking at the actual number from each state (someone else above says they only had one each for some of the states they rank as racist), and the issue that it could be a single poster in each state making a lot of tweets. So no, it is not the total number of tweets that is appalling, but the actual details.
Can you show me any situation where less than 400 samples is enough to estimate fixed effects across a variable with 50 factors? This is in fact what was done, whether on not the guys doing the calculation realised it.
I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.
You are right but this means that the peer review filter is even more important so that what gets out to the media and beyond has at least some chance of being right. Also, having been through the process a few times I'd say academics are at least as guilty of overstating their findings as journalists. We want the headlines and the 'impact' as much as journalists to.
The floatingsheep page specifically says, "we are measuring tweets rather than users and so one individual could be responsible for many tweets and in some cases (most notably in North Dakota, Utah and Minnesota) the number of hate tweets is small and the high LQ is driven by the relatively low number of overall tweets." It's not their fault that the author of the Atlantic article left out those details.
It is their fault for publishing crap that they know will be headline grabbing, no matter how many caveats they put in.
BTW, I just checked out a sample size calculator. For a 95 percent confidence level with a +- 5% confidence interval, and a population of 400 million, guess what your sample size needs to be.
384.
Now this calculation for a survey is a little different from what the researchers are doing here, but it illustrates my point. You can do a lot with small sample sizes if the differences between groups are large.
That's if they're only trying to estimate a grand rate. To make state-by-state estimates they need this number *per state*.
With only a couple of days work this isn't bad. But it's not science, it's interest and a proof of concept for doing actual research.
I accept they didn't work very hard on this but in that case its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand the (immense) limitations of the method. It's slightly irritating that as far as the general public is concerned this kind of back of the envelope calculation is indistinguishable from proper science. I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published. But then maybe I'm old-fashioned (and maybe this is why I don't have an academic blog)
How did they account for multiple racists tweets from one "tweeter"?
One racist sending 100 racist tweets is not the same as 100 different racists each sending one racist tweet each.
Reading the article it doesn't look like they bothered. And they only found a total of 395 tweets which will lead to appalling precision in any of their findings. Sadly 'information scientists' don't always appear to be the best statisticians.
I liked Anathem a lot. The housekeeper and the professor is also really good. Then we have the last theorem by Clarke and pohl which is strange but engaging. Some say the dispossessed counts, but I don't know. The difference Engine by Gibson and sterling is a must read. If you get a chance to see Proof it is well worth it.
Came here to also recommend The Housekeeper and the Professor. It reminded me why I used to like maths.
As I understand it from reading a few other articles, there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light. Perhaps there will be found a way to tunnel past it, but I expect that while all the math may work neatly, actually breaking through is going to be nearly impossible. Then there's the problem of slowing down which means tunneling back through the other way.
Much as I've been warned off by the articles that claim the paper to be fairly impenetrable to non-mathematicians, I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.
If you want the paper then email the authors for a pre-print. They will send it to you.
NASA should be doing pure science, and that should be reason enough to excite Joe Public. I mean hell, I can't get over the fact that I can see detailed images of Mars from the comfort of my own living room. If someone had told me that when I was a kid, I would never have believed it. Yet, there we are - humanity is there through its machines. It should blow people's minds!
I dunno.. when I was a kid there was images from Viking and they don't look that different to me.
The science is way more advanced sure but in terms of public wow factor there's not a whole lot more to get excited about.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
