Is the American Dream Over? - Opinionator Blog:
The average American works 9 weeks longer per year than the average Western European, which is insane but does mean our standard of living is higher.
As for me, I think the middle class was created by government, and I hope to see government recreate it in my lifetime.
When John Gruber linked my piece on unscientific laptop repair numbers just before Thanksgiving, traffic at tumbledry jumped significantly. It was fun to finally, truly test my homebrew website code (when Gruber links a site, the traffic tends to crash the site of interest) — I’m happy that the code I wrote can survive a decently large torrent of traffic. How large? Year over year on November 24, traffic here was up 30,000%.
It’s fun to attract that many eyeballs. One would imagine that more readers is only a good thing, but it can put you in a box. For example, I realized that pandering to the demographics of the visitors in that burst would keep a steady flow of folks stopping by. But boxing myself in to one single topic didn’t feel right at all. If I write tumbledry for my visitors and not for me, I’ll never achieve the authenticity, passion, and magnetic style of prose I’m always reaching for but never quite attaining.
I realized I’m still finding my voice. It’s been about 10 years since I began my personal website experiment, and I still don’t quite know how I want to do this. The only thing I know for sure: I’m never going to stop.
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as uptalk, upspeak or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some accents of English where statements have a rising intonation pattern in the final syllable or syllables of the utterance.
Ahhhh; much better. I’d been looking for the term for that style of speaking (where everything is a question, not a statement) for years. Listen for the HRT during any interview with a teenage girl (or guy, ok).
John Mayer: ‘You can’t make music as a famous person’ | The Guardian:
“It’s very, very difficult to want to give 14 hours a day [to making a record], to continue to choose music over a lifestyle,” he admits. “This is the part in a lot of people’s careers where they usually come in to the studio for four hours a day. I’m not a four-hour-a-day guy, but I can definitely feel the pull: do you wanna go into a room where you’re basically gonna excavate, emotionally, for 12 hours? Or do you wanna go to a restaurant where everybody gives you golf claps for what you’ve already done?
I think the phase “emotional excavation” is very very interesting.
Best use of plinky piano counter-melody: “The Brilliant Dance” by Dashboard Confessional. That album was released 8 years ago. 8. Years. Bad things have happened since then, but I can remember nothing but good things. I think that means that nothing truly bad happened. That’s interesting.
In 2003, John got a copy of “A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar” by Dashboard. I remember looking at the album art, a cassette tape ground into asphalt, and wondering what the new album would sound like. In those early days of ripping music, there were some interesting quirks. I had to remove most of the spaces from “A Mark…” to make it fit in the ID3 tags of the MP3 files. Dashboard had all these really long song names, so I’ll always think of “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most” as “The Places You Have Come to Fe”.
8 years from now, it’ll be 2017. I hope to remember only good things.
SquareTrade, a company that sells warranties for consumer electronics and appliances, recently published a summary of the failure rates of notebooks/netbooks (n=30,000). This study was then disseminated by large technology websites: Jeff Smykil at Ars Technica, Electronista Staff, Vladislav Savov at Engadget, and Danny Allen at Gizmodo.
This situation illustrates what is wrong with a large swath of online reporting.
In their “me-too” eagerness to promulgate any scrap of ersatz news, none of these tech websites pointed out that this SquareTrade study, in its current form, is completely worthless for drawing conclusions about laptop reliability, scientific or otherwise. The problem lies in the unscientific nature of SquareTrade’s research.
The SquareTrade study utterly fails to provide any meaningful statistical analysis of its numbers. It finds “the average total failure rate of laptops to be 31% over 3 years”. An average can not stand on its own: to be of statistical use, it must be accompanied by at least a standard deviation of the data from which the average was taken. (A range would be helpful, too). SquareTrade’s sloppiness becomes more evident with a closer reading.
“Apple is in fourth place in laptop reliability” was the headline used by many tech websites to push this SquareTrade study. But the graph upon which the headline ranking is based (on page 6 of the report) was created using a linear projection from TWO DATA POINTS. Here’s why this is a problem: fitting a curve that will have any prognostic capabilities requires more than two data points. More data points mean more complications. So, to handle the extra data, the researcher/underpaid intern at SquareTrade must understand curve fitting, specifically the coefficient of determination (calculated to make sure the curve fits well). When you only have two data points to model, however, two things happen: (1) you can easily model the two points with a linear curve that perfectly fits the data (R2=1). (2) Your model is capable of predicting nothing. So, the SquareTrade authors have formed an inappropriate model based on sloppy data to make fallacious projections.
Ostensibly, SquareTrade put this 3 year projection in their paper to make the reliability difference between the laptop companies they analyzed seem greater. Despite the statistically ignorant data massaging, the difference between the most reliable laptop makers and fifth-most reliable is 2.7%. There is no information to tell us if this difference is statistically significant. If SquareTrade had an interest in scientifically rigorous data, they would report the standard deviation (commonly called error bars when used on graphs) and the range of their data. Instead, they provide colorful arrangements of numbers that illustrate little, prove nothing, and distract from sloppy, unscientific methodology.
What’s more, SquareTrade is a warranty company looking for customers to purchase insurance against exactly the topic of this study: laptops/portables breaking. This obnoxiously blatant conflict of interest is only mentioned as a tiny caveat in the Ars Technica piece. But, the damage has already been done: the study has been broadcast as fact across a multitude of tech websites.
Dissemination of this type of information (too low in quality to be called factual) is a symptom of a larger problem on the internet: the quantity of information available continues to rise while the quantity of factual data grounded in scientific methods fails to keep pace.
As a result, the ratio of factual, useful research to that of generally worthless information continues to dwindle.
The “professional” blogs exacerbate the overload with their echo chamber effect.
Get Me Right by Dashboard Confessional.
I tried the acoustic and… non-acoustic version. The latter rocked aggressively. Some viciously catchy countermelodies in the final chorus.
Dental school — also known as “debtor’s prison.”
Very very strong winds and stormy weather in south England and Wales is news… of interest to me only because of this great picture by Steve Poole:
I have high hopes for John Mayer’s Battle Studies. It comes out this Tuesday, November 17.
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