Meanwhile, back in reality, half the time I see a story on Slashdot about a country adopting FOSS it's an autocracy (eg, here, here, and here). Of course plenty of democratic governments (eg, the city of Paris) use open source software and good for them, but it's the silliest kind of naive techno-utopianism to equate FOSS with democracy.
Maybe so, but what he's saying is consistent with the academic literature on social networks and social movements, some of which he cites. I know this literature very well and Gladwell's argument is consistent with the academic consensus that a lot of weak connections are good for spreading information and could promote low-cost activism, but you need strong ties in a dense clique to promote high-cost activism. For example:
Centola, Damon and Michael Macy. 2007. “Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 113:702–734.
Centola, Damon, Robb Willer, and Michael Macy. 2005. “The Emperor’s Dilemma: A Computational Model of Self-Enforcing Norms.” American Journal of Sociology 110:1009–1040.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-1380.
McAdam, Doug. 1990. Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
Not only that, but sales of cultural products are radically stochastic. The best research on this is by Salganik and Watts on pop music and Art DeVany of films. thus even more than usual causal inference in any one instance is essentially impossible.
the other problem with just referring to lists of interests rather than recent publications is that there's a big difference between someone who lists a field as their interest and someone who is actively doing good work and supervising students in that area. even the best departments will have some deadweight. i've been on PhD admissions at two top departments in my field and in both cases we got a lot of admissions packets where the statement of purpose said something like "I'm excited to come work with [insert name of deadweight faculty member who has published nothing of consequence in 20 years]." such a statement is not exactly convincing to the admissions committee and were the student to be admitted they might actually get stuck with this useless person as an advisor.
There are two legal issues here: 1) This is a straightforward application of the Supreme Court precedent in Eldred v Ashcroft. Lower courts are bound by SCOTUS precedent and so this is an easy call in terms of case law even if you think (as I do) that it's bad policy and Eldred was wrongly decided. 2) It's not a First Amendment issue but an Article I, Section 8 issue and in particular if you read the clause "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" as meaning that Congress can only grant IP rights when such rights are likely to incentivize creativity (which would exclude retroactive grants).
>Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"?
The short answer is no, but it's understandable. The 11.6% figure probably is a lowball figure precisely because people tend to underreport illicit or stigmatized behavior and so it was good of the researchers to report this. However they should have just said "this is a lowball figure" because putting a number on it implies more precision than you really have. It's possible they had more than a hunch but even if they were doing some kind of fancy adjustment the adjusted figure should not have been reified by appearing out of context.
btw, the several people who have mentioned that inference from n=1000 is just fine are absolutely right.
(I'm not a statistician per se, but I am a quant and I teach a graduate statistics course)
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, back in reality, half the time I see a story on Slashdot about a country adopting FOSS it's an autocracy (eg, here, here, and here). Of course plenty of democratic governments (eg, the city of Paris) use open source software and good for them, but it's the silliest kind of naive techno-utopianism to equate FOSS with democracy.
Saturday Night Fever is an amazingly good movie if you realize that there's a lot more to it than disco and really ugly suits but rather there's lots of stuff about working class masculinity. Roger Ebert includes it in his 100 Greatest Movies http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990307/REVIEWS08/401010357/1023
Not only that, but sales of cultural products are radically stochastic. The best research on this is by Salganik and Watts on pop music and Art DeVany of films. thus even more than usual causal inference in any one instance is essentially impossible.
the other problem with just referring to lists of interests rather than recent publications is that there's a big difference between someone who lists a field as their interest and someone who is actively doing good work and supervising students in that area. even the best departments will have some deadweight. i've been on PhD admissions at two top departments in my field and in both cases we got a lot of admissions packets where the statement of purpose said something like "I'm excited to come work with [insert name of deadweight faculty member who has published nothing of consequence in 20 years]." such a statement is not exactly convincing to the admissions committee and were the student to be admitted they might actually get stuck with this useless person as an advisor.
There are two legal issues here:
1) This is a straightforward application of the Supreme Court precedent in Eldred v Ashcroft. Lower courts are bound by SCOTUS precedent and so this is an easy call in terms of case law even if you think (as I do) that it's bad policy and Eldred was wrongly decided.
2) It's not a First Amendment issue but an Article I, Section 8 issue and in particular if you read the clause "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" as meaning that Congress can only grant IP rights when such rights are likely to incentivize creativity (which would exclude retroactive grants).
>Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"? The short answer is no, but it's understandable. The 11.6% figure probably is a lowball figure precisely because people tend to underreport illicit or stigmatized behavior and so it was good of the researchers to report this. However they should have just said "this is a lowball figure" because putting a number on it implies more precision than you really have. It's possible they had more than a hunch but even if they were doing some kind of fancy adjustment the adjusted figure should not have been reified by appearing out of context. btw, the several people who have mentioned that inference from n=1000 is just fine are absolutely right. (I'm not a statistician per se, but I am a quant and I teach a graduate statistics course)