All this stuff, will be going up on Ebay in the not too distant future (like tomorrow). If you can convince me to send it to you directly, I might just do that.
Month: November 2009
-
How Much a "But" Can Change Meaning
I’m amazed, sometimes, at the subtlety of language. For example, from this morning’s AJC:
Bells Ferry Road near Canton has reopened after a water main break. Officials had originally said the road would be closed throughout the morning commute but later said the road had not been damaged. It was reopened shortly after 6 a.m.
Not casting aspersions on the writer, doesn’t this sound somewhat accusatory? Doesn’t it imply that the Officials in question had said that the road was damaged by then retracted their statement? That’s how it sounds to me.
Read this phrasing, which is probably more accurate:
“Officials had originally said the road would be closed throughout the morning commute. They later said the road had not been damaged.”
A single “but” can have a huge impact, no?
-
Sunday Amusement
“Loofa! Loofa!”
-
Back, Ironman, Training 2010
My back is much better. Thanks everyone who’s been keeping up.
Ironman is past and gone. Too bad I couldn’t do it. I will keep that in my back pocket for some other year.
I am even as we speak (not that we’re speaking) putting together my training calendar for 2010. It begins today with a benchmark run of 1.0 miles for time. I plan to do a mile run every four weeks or so to gauge my progress toward my goal of a 5k under 21:00.
That is all. Stay tuned.
-
The Black Cat Alleycat Race
I participated in The Black Cat last night. It was an Alleycat race, which are unsanctioned bicycle races usually involving checkpoints or point gathering. Last night was a checkpoint race. At the start, we got a set of points to go to as defined by address or intersection. The objective was to register at each point, in whatever order you felt best, and get to the end as quickly as possible.At each checkpoint you had to do something different in order to earn your signoff. For example, at the first one you had to either chug a can of energy drink or do 20 pushups. At the second you were adorned with cat whiskers as shown in the photo above. At the fifth it was shots of vodka. You get the idea.
So many people showed up for this race that Pamela, the race organizer, ran out of manifests so some of us went as teams. It was a great time and took about an hour of sprinting around Atlanta.
In case you’re interested, here were the checkpoints:
- Oakland Cemetery (start)
- 274 Walker Street (Castleberry Hill)
- Luckie St. and Alexander
- 5th Street Bridge
- 13th Street and Peachtree Walk
- 15th Street and Peachtree
- Ralph McGill and Boulevard
- Ponce De Leon and Myrtle St
- The Local (end, 758 Ponce De Leon)
We did the route in this order. In retrospect, that wasn’t the best choice of routes but I had forgotten my grease-pencil map of downtown so we couldn’t chart it better. We also did some amusing cyclo-cross action through GA Tech’s campus, running up stairs with our bikes.
I’ll point to pictures when they come online. I did not personally take any except for this crappy cell phone photo.
Here’s a video of the post-party at The Local.
(Vimeo was eating my website, so here’s a link instead of an embed)THE BLACK CAT : Friday the 13th Alleycat afterparty from Drew Tyndell on Vimeo.
-
It's Awesome
I concur with zefrank, “wait for the awesome”.
-
A 10 Year Old Understands America
Will Phillips has come to the correct conclusion about America . Quoting from the article:
At the end of our interview, I ask young Will a question that might be a civics test nightmare for your average 10-year-old. Will’s answer, though, is good enough – simple enough, true enough – to give me a little rush of goose pimples. What does being an American mean?
“Freedom of speech,” Will says, without even stopping to think. “The freedom to disagree. That’s what I think pretty much being an American represents.”
10 Year old Will decided that he would not recite the pledge of allegiance in class because he does not feel that there is truly “liberty and justice for all.” He is in strong disagreement over the country’s stand on gay rights.
I applaud Will. Good job. When he runs for president, I’ll vote for him. This is truly what America is about. Not necessarily gay rights, but the freedom to disagree with each other and to express ourselves without worrying about governmental crack downs.
-
This is a test of the emergency Blackberry posting system. This is only a test. :end Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
-
Internet and Other Surveys
I hate surveys.
I hate them because you cannot trust them.
Why can you not trust them? Because generally you only see the “results” through the lens of the medium that is reporting them. Be it Fox News or CNN or the Obama Administration or (I’m not trying to pick on politics here) Habitat for Humanity or Greenpeace or whomever, they all have their own axe to grind so rarely will you be able to review the survey questions or the actual results.
Peer-reviewed work is of slightly higher caliber, but even in peer-reviewed articles it depends on the quality of the reviewers. Do these people have any education in the ethics and preparation of survey questions? Sometimes that answer is a loud, “Hell No!”
This post was prompted by two things, one lesser and one greater. First the lesser:
I had seen a blog post that was a link to a link to a link to a link that finally let me to this “study” by retrevo.com that produced some (in my opinion) questionable statistics about iPhone users (In defense of retrevo, I’m sure they did their survey to generate content and buzz, not from any deep seated need to academically refine their audience database). As I mentioned in my twitter about it this morning, I couldn’t find anything blog-worthy in it and so decided to just let it be.
That is until I read the latest posting on fivethirtyeight.com about the fabrication of poor performance by Oklahoma students by a polling research firm. This would be the greater thing.
As an aside, I tend to read items that originate in Oklahoma because over half of my direct family lives out there. Same way I tend to read new stories that come from Northern California where another portion of the family tree is at root.
As a further aside, I just discovered a bias in myself. While I will read news stories from Oklahoma and lump them in as “family affective” I will only pop up and read stories from the communities immediately surrounding Santa Cruz. Communities which do not include San Francisco, Oakland, etc. My geographic filters for “family affective” stories seems to have some skew.
Asides over. The story out of Oklahoma is about how Strategic Vision LLC likely fabricated the survey results for how well Oklahoma High School students could do on a basic citizenship exam. I say likely because an Oklahoma Legislator duplicated the study as well as possible and got entirely different results. Fivethirtyeight covers it much better than I.
Which brings me back to my original point. Survey reporting cannot be trusted, but Americans don’t think about this. How many people know that the “margin of error” reported on every poll during the political campaign season means absolutely nothing without also knowing the confidence interval used?1 How many people know that margin of error is not some “unknown voter factor” but actually a hard and fast number determined by the number of people polled and that confidence interval I just mentioned? Only people who have some background in statistics. News outlets have no incentive to educate the public, they merely want to report the polls in a way that garners the most viewers/readers/clickthroughs.
Surveys and polls too often do not allow you to research their basis: The questions, who they surveyed, what statistical methods they used, how the random sampling was conducted. Even with the best of intentions, surveys can be skewed by the order of questions, placing people in a particular frame of mind.
Do not trust survey results! At least, do not trust them over your own judgment unless you can see the guts of the work.
That is all. Off to drink less coffee.
1: I assume that most pollsters use a 95% confidence interval, but I have no real knowledge about that.