Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Ever since I decided, some time ago, that Wikipedia had serious problems in accountability and transparency in their meta-editing process, I’ve derived a certain sour satisfaction from articles like this:

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia | The Register
Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

But this is a clear case of confirmation bias. I’m looking for information that confirms my low opinion of Wikipedia admins, while mostly ignoring the plentiful articles on how Wikipedia is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will change the world (in fact, at the moment every wikipedia page has a banner add that reads “You can help Wikipedia change the world!”).

If I were a journalist, a student, or really anyone whose job required taking notes on what people say, I would be all over this.  As it is I’m kind of wishing my job actually did require it, just so I could play with it.

Livescribe :: Smartpen

The Livescribe smartpen revolutionizes the act of writing by recording and linking audio to what you put on paper. Tap on words or drawings in your notes, and the smartpen replays recorded audio from the time you were writing. Transfer notes to your PC to backup, replay, and share them online.

The pen contains a computer and recorder that can record up to a hundred hours of audio at a time, and a little optical sensor that tracks the position of the pen against the tiny dots printed on special paper that you take notes on (according to at least one account I’ve read you can print your own paper with a laser printer, as well as buying it fairly cheap from the manufacturer).  It uses those dots to synch the audio recording against what you were writing at the time, so that clicking on the notes lets it replay the audio from around that time.  It’s no help if your note-taking (like mine in many of my college classes) consisted of just staring off into space or drawing random doodles, though I guess you’d at least still be able to listen to the lecture again, but if you’re at least semi-diligent about putting something as a mnemonic trigger on the page, this is so brilliant I can’t stand it.

By the way, the book that finally taught me how to take useful class notes was The Study Game: How To Play and Win with Statement-PIE.  Long out of print, it’s still remembered fondly (at least by me and five reviewers on Amazons) for its simple, concise, and practical approach to learning how to listen actively in order to organize your notes into paragraphs consisting of Statement, Proof, Information, Examples.  Most of the time, what a student needs is not a complete transcription of what the teacher said (the production of which generally takes up so much attention that there’s little left over to actually process what’s being said), but a summary of the key information.  Unfortunately, at least some of that time you really do need an accurate transcription, particularly of complex ideas that are new to you and so are hard to summarize.  That’s where being able to replay just that portion of the lecture with LiveScribe would be incredibly useful.  Yes, good teachers will do more than just rattle it off, and can provide a number of ways to convey and reinforce the crucial points, including including it in class handouts, writing it on the board…but honestly, even at (or is it especially at) the college level, good teachers are few and far between, and even they are not generally bringing their A game to teaching Intro Calc at eight in the morning.

There are days when I just don’t get xkcd (at least until I Google).

Today was one of them.

Urban Dictionary: rickroll
To post a misleading link with a subject that promises to be exciting or interesting, e.g. “World of Starcraft in-game footage!” or “Paris Hilton blows Busta Rhymes’ dick” but actually turns out to be the video for Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. A variant on the duckroll. Allegedly hilarious.

Of course, it might help to have the slightest idea who Rick Astley is in the first place….

Transterrestrial Musings

Thoughts On Objectivity

In both science, and journalism.

The notion that journalists are, or should be, or can be “objective” is perhaps the profession’s most fatal conceit. As Virginia Postrel says, what’s important is to be fair, something that they often don’t even attempt, as demonstrated by CNN and its performance in the debates.

I’m dubious. Even granting that “objective” is something of a term of art among journalists that doesn’t quite correspond to what a philosopher or scientist might mean in terms of attempting to avoid prejudice, bias, or wishful thinking, I don’t see how you can aim at fairness without first being able to assess what parts of your reporting might be unfair. And to do that, it seems to me you have to try to be objective…unless you’re just going to reduce everything to a procedure, as in “he said; she said” journalism.

From my point of view, the problem isn’t that journalists try to be objective where they should be trying to be fair–it’s that they’re so damn bad at objectivity. And it doesn’t reassure me that fairness over objectivity would be an improvement when the biggest critics of objectivity as a journalistic goal (e.g. Chomsky) want to downplay it precisely so they can hide their biases and better achieve their agendas. “Fake but accurate” is exactly what that approach is trying to legitimize. It is unfair that the journalist can’t present what he knows to be true based on his expert judgment, just because there’s no actual “objective” evidence. But because journalistic standards still require objectivity, he supplies fake evidence (and maybe even believes it to be true because of his biases), and with luck gets caught out. I say that if you believe that the journalist is obligated to provide the actual documents for other people to examine, and not just assert that they exist, you believe in objectivity not fairness; you believe that there is a truth of the matter that can be gotten at through examination of the evidence*, and not just a requirement to announce your biases.

Rand Simberg’s post above is in reference to a Virginia Postrel post on Objectivity. I haven’t read the book, but to infer anything about the appropriateness of objectivity as an epistemic virtue from a discussion of its history is to commit the genetic fallacy. I’m not at all sure whether the Daston and Gallison, the authors of Objectivity, would agree with Postrel’s take-away that “Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making,” but I am sure that it is a core epistemic virtue for journalists to start by simply recording the data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. As the folks at Language Log have demonstrated over and over and over again, if you want the truth you have first accurately record what really was said. That doesn’t mean that you end there, and the journalist’s job is just to faithfully transcribe and then print it–but it has to start there.

* if it can be gotten at at all…

Unlocked Wordhoard: Beowulf Review Round-Up, Part II: Wiglaf’s Revenge

Professor Richard Nokes, medievalist, has been all over the new Beowulf movie.  I’ve got to say, with each new project he undertakes my respect for Neil Gaiman’s talent drops further.

Grousing about losing my access to the online OED (and a sleepless night due to a head-cold) led me to give another go at installing the CD-ROM version, and this time I discovered some helpful information on the Oxford University Press site, namely that the symptom I was seeing (launching and immediately exiting with no error message) was caused by a Microsoft security patch. Figures. Fortunately, MS had developed a hot-fix for this, and the OUP had a link. I installed it, and wonder of wonders, it actually worked and I had my lovely OED CD-ROM working on my desktop again.

So that’s the w00t.

The sort-of is because in the process I discovered that they’ve released two new point-releases of the CD-ROM since I bought it, which among other things allow it to download updates from their site, fixes the printing problems, and removes the stupid, stupid relicense-every-ninety-days restriction. Which would be great, except there doesn’t seem to be any upgrade path from the v3.0 2004 disks that I have to the the v3.1.1 2005 disks. So it appears that unless I want to buy it again, I’m stuck with the original retarded DRM. I’m going to dig around further, but at least in the meantime I can once again bask in the glory that is the OED.

update: It turns out there is an upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1.1 for $70, so I’ve ordered it.  Just never having to re-install the license is worth that to me, plus it appears that the 3.1.1 version is necessary to run reliably on Mac OS X under an emulator, which would be my ideal way to do it.  Pretty much the only thing I use my Windows machine for is to play City of Heroes and run a couple of other programs that only like Windows (until MS broke it, the OED CD-ROM was one of those).  Being able to carry the OED around on my Mac laptop would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Initially I misread the announcement and thought that the Kindle came bundled with the OED as its built-in dictionary. I would happily have paid $399 for the complete contents of the OED in something that weighed less than a paperback book that happened to also be able to wirelessly download 80,000 other books and store up to 200 of them at once, particularly since the OED on CD-ROM goes for about $236 (and if my experience is any guide will just stop working round about the 3rd license update). Unfortunately a second read reveals that it’s the far less exciting New Oxford American Dictionary that ships with the Kindle. The NOAD is the dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, which is fine and all, but without the quotations and the date chart, it just isn’t the same. sigh

Marginal Revolution: Why Most Published Research Findings are False

There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. - John Ioannidis

The argument is from a paper by John Ionnidis, but Alex Tabarrok gives a much easier to read analysis of the fairly simply Bayesian reasoning behind it. Essentially, this is the classic problem of false positives vs. true positives when the condition being tested for is rare in the population (e.g. presence of AIDs in non-high-risk groups, or in this case the truth of a hypothesis).

It might be tempting to argue that the case of a hypothesis under test being true isn’t typically as bad as the general assumptions being made to drive the argument, since the researchers presumably have some thought or intuition that drives them to pick a particular hypothesis to test (they’re not just throwing darts at a board), but consider that works both ways. Despite the common complaint that this or that study is “just another case of science proving what everybody already knows (and so a waste of money)”, I suspect very few researchers deliberately pick hypotheses that are widely believed to be true, particularly if there’s a lot of evidence and research backing up that belief. That’s not, generally speaking, believed to be the way to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge. But in that case, the sample is biased in the other direction–a random hypothesis to test would include already-known-to-be-true hypotheses in the same proportion that they occur in the population of all hypotheses, so the hypotheses actually attracting attention are less likely to be true than random chance would dictate. Whether the scientist’s intuition towards selecting true hypothesis is a bigger bias than the elimination of all the ones believed to be true is something you can’t really be sure of, so I’d be really cautious about asserting that P(hypothesis is true) must be a lot better than Ionaddis’ calculations allow for.

Of course, the tool this came from gives no indication whatsoever of what method it uses to determine readability, and sneakily inserts a link to an advertiser in the html they give you to copy, so caveat lector.

Update: After Googling around a little, my guess is that the tool uses the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability test, both because it delivers the results in categories that roughly correspond to grade level, and because it’s a test that’s simple enough to calculate with a tiny program.  The formula (from the Wikipedia article) is:

 

It’s my infatuation with sesquipedalian verbiage I tells ya.

Here’s the result of a poll I took on one of the boards I frequent (a board for a group of City of Heroes players). Comments on the poll were disallowed, to try to prevent people from influencing each other’s views, though many eagerly shared their opinions with me via private message. It’s interesting how well this matches up to the 146,000 vs. 49, 300 Google Hits observed on Language Log.

You’ve got another X coming
Which sounds right? >You’ve got another thing coming [ 37 ] [78.72%] >You’ve got another think coming [ 8 ] [17.02%] >Both sound right to me [ 2 ] [4.26%]
Total Votes: 47