Slashdot Mirror

The About.com site here.

The sidebar is very good, but you have to hunt for the links if you are using a CSS enabled browser and the article as a whole suffers from formatting problems. Still it is a very good article and I really liked the illustration "Procedure for Simultaneously Walking and Chewing Gum" by Dugald Stermer.

Nonetheless there really isn't much new here for us Slashdot folks. That is, other than some really good new ammunition for the next time you want to talk about stupid patents. (I really cannot believe someone got a patent for measuring breast sizes with a measuring tape!) For us Mr Gleick is preaching to the choir.

Our real hope is that everyone else wakes up and realizes the danger stupid patents (and, perhaps, software patents in general) represent to our currently flourishing 'New Economy'...

Jack

The About.com site here.

The sidebar is very good, but you have to hunt for the links if you are using a CSS enabled browser and the article as a whole suffers from formatting problems. Still it is a very good article and I really liked the illustration "Procedure for Simultaneously Walking and Chewing Gum" by Dugald Stermer.

Nonetheless there really isn't much new here for us Slashdot folks. That is, other than some really good new ammunition for the next time you want to talk about stupid patents. (I really cannot believe someone got a patent for measuring breast sizes with a measuring tape!) For us Mr Gleick is preaching to the choir.

Our real hope is that everyone else wakes up and realizes the danger stupid patents (and, perhaps, software patents in general) represent to our currently flourishing 'New Economy'...

Jack

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Dilbert_ writes "Since most dot com domains of the form www.[common english word].com are taken today, you could theoretically surf around using just a dictionary. Now you can search the web from a page that will will automatically generate a fresh load of links, based on a dictionnary. " For some reason this amuses me greatly.

... but using astalavista babe search engine i found this:
From Part IV "Los Alamos" - teller is mentioned there, but no feynman's opinion on him
atomic memories - some guy there leaves a note: teller was profesor ... (Ctrl+F and type teller :) [this is some survey or what about nuclear bombs, not related to feynman or teller directly]

seeing the content of firts link it would be fine to read the book again, maybe there is something more about teller from feynman.

maybe somebody relse emembers better?