In no particular order, some things I find annoying in this article:
The assumption that you must've used a car to get there, and hence you have to feed the meter all the time. Are these people so addicted to car commuting that they won't give it up even when there's no need to drive anywhere?
The lead paragraph assumes that there's something horrible about foggy days. If they bug you so much, what are you doing in San Francisco? If I didn't like cooler weather, I could still be living down in the sun fried Silicon Valley... or for that matter you could move to much cheaper central valley, e.g. around Sacramento -- got to love those 100 degree F summers, eh?
The general description of the scene: I hate places like this. Slick "cafes" full of laptop zombies on cell phones. And the reason they go to these places is for the social interaction? Their very presence destroys any social scene that might've been there.
The gosh wow brave new world tone of the article: these guys don't even have cubes to work in. Why is this supposed to be such a wonderful work environment? They have to play games to try to discourage other folks for encroaching on their space.
What I'm interested in at the moment is the ways in which
the same old propaganda machine(s) are trying to control the
new internet media.
For example, with slashdot, it looks to me like there's a
bunch postings originating from what I think of as "the
rover boys": hired-gun Republican sock-puppets that come out
of the woodwork when a subject like election fraud is under
discussion.
(I think these are usually distinguishable from real human
beings that happen to be conservative, though this is obviously
always a judgement call).
One of the things that I think is funny is that they often
have surprisingly low slashdot ids... which leaves only
two choices: (1) a bunch of the old guard computer nerds (who
stereotypically I'd expect to be libertarian or liberal) have
suddenly become a particuarly low-brow kind of conservative;
(2) the rover boys have some way of stealing slashdot accounts,
and they've snagged some of the ones that were created early and
then abandoned.
Obviously, I favor hypothesis (2), which raises the question
of how exactly they did it. Running crack on slash accounts
would presumably be a tricky business, because obviously the
slashdot uber-geeks would be watching out for such an obvious
attack. (Right?) Network sniffing would presumably be too
slow a way to go about it, because by definition you'd only
sniff passwords from active accounts, and then you'd have to
wait for them to become inactive (well... unless you went
around assasinating people for their slash accounts. But
that's getting a little too paranoid, even for me).
So what do you think? Would slashdot be crackable by the
sufficiently motivated?
Or course, one possibility would be that slashdot itself has
been infiltrated: they could've planted someone on the staff
in order to get database access. (Or possibly resorted to
bribery?)
Maybe yours is, I'm still trying to figure out what happened in
the last decade.
Give the 9/11 crap a rest.
I wish.
Clinton didn't leave any useful information, and if Gore was in office, the 9/11 attacks would have continued just the same.
Well, maybe Clinton didn't, but even if he had, Bush would've
ignored it anyway, so it's all his fault.
Two can play the counter-factual accusation game.
AFTER the attacks we can connect the dots. But before 9/11, there
was no plan left, there was no useful information left.
Oh yeah? Says who?
Some things are just unavoidable, no matter how well prepared. The 9/11 attacks are one example.
Really? Then why did ABC try to blame them on Clinton? That's
where the whole spat started, remember.
Don't forget that Bill Clinton had several opportunities to
capture or kill Bin Laden
You'll have to remind me when those were, I must've been watching
"A Team" reruns.
he declined to do so, because he thought it would look bad politically.
Well, it would've been nice if he'd refrained from doing it
because civilized countries don't engage in assassination,
but that quaint little principle went out the window even faster
than the Geneva Convention.
Easy. When you move into some broken down neighborhood slum, buy some land. When the neighborhood becomes fashionable enough for the yups to move in, sell the land for massive profit. There's your kick-back.
Yes, the thought's occurred to me (and to some other folks).
One of the reason's that San Francisco's Chinatown remains Chinatown is that a lot of the land is owned by neighborhood associations...
What am I doing hanging around slashdot? Why I'm watching it go
down the tubes, of course! Now, it could be that something else
will happen, e.g. the Masters of Slashdot could wake up to how
easy it is to game the moderation system, and start looking for
ways to fix the problem -- but at present there's no sign of
that. Rob Malda is dorking around with floating javascript
control widgets instead of addressing any of the real problems.
In any case AC, to address the substantive points buried in your post:
Aside from the obvious problem that elaborate login procedures very greatly discourage participation and are proven to arbitrarily cut your group of posters to near zero;
Yes, but once you get beyond the "toy site" level, encouraging
participation is not the problem. There's no shortage of
comments to read on slashdot -- there is however a shortage
of people who know what they're talking about. Discouraging
frivolous activity would perhaps not be such a bad thing.
As far as new sites are concerned, it could be that the solution
is to gradually ramp up the access barriers; except that then you
have to watch out for regular users feeling betrayed by changes
in the ground rules.
Others have posted reasonable analyses of the dangers of trying
to attach every post or opinion to a killable human body.
I can see how this is a concern but (1) for slashdot to know who
each poster is is different from the readers knowing this --
admittedly there would still be risks to a brave AC from government
demands for identity, for example. (2) I think that these concerns are
usually exaggerated -- our culture is drowning in fear at
present (don't give that guy who cut you off the finger, he might
have a gun!) and we really need to get over it.
It's possible that there is a compromise system that would be
workable for slashdot: currently there's a three tier system:
ACs/logged-in/logged-in-with-karma-bonus. A fourth level for
people with verified identity might be a good-enough fix that
doesn't completely do away with anonymous voices. (Note: paying
customers would automatically be in the fourth level, a point
that you'd think would appeal to the SlashMasters...)
No doubt those who love to be able to track down and intimidate
their opponents with violence wholly approve of an all-outed,
everyone-exposed forum. People who believe in truth however know
that it's often stated by the most powerless, those least likely
to attach their name. Or be most harmed if their name is revealed
by unethical types like yourself, who would probably consider it
their "right" to "protect their forum" from "anonymous trolls"
and so on.
Now now, you're letting your rhetoric run away with you. It's all
well and good to delicately suggest that I want to sneak around in
a black hood gunning down fine upstanding ACs such as yourself,
but if you start acting like you've proven the point you just end
up looking nutty.
This is an impressively reasonable looking quote, but I'm afraid it's all an attempt at blowing smoke. Try reading the Freeman and Bleifus book if you're really interested: (a) there was indeed a statistically significant discrepancy between the originally reported exit polls and the reported elction results (b) attempts at explaining it by "reluctant responder" hypotheses don't seem to hold up and hence (c) it would seem likely that there was large scale election fraud in 2004.
This is too strict a standard:
We assume no effect until one can be proven, or more technically, we assume a "null hypothesis" until we can prove some alternative. The same principle exists in law as the presumption of innocence.
This is the kind of thing that sounds impressive to Americans, but "innocent until proven guilty" only makes sense if you're talking about preferring criminal charges. If the question is "do we need to
make our elections resistant to corruption",
the possibility that fraud might occur is significant
enough, let alone the probablity that fraud actually did occur.
Lastly, he's lived in Brooklyn his whole life. Fine. I would like to point out, however, that there are many other spots where rent and living is cheaper. I know quite a few small peaceful towns in Minnesota where rent for an apartment is $200/month everywhere.
And let me point out some things. If you live in a major urban area, you're likely to spend more money on rent, but it also become possible to save money in other areas, most notably: you don't need a car. There's likely to be a wide variety of jobs available -- e.g. a struggling writer might do copy-editing or some such to fill in the gaps. Further, someone with a chronic disease like polio might actually be better off living somewhere where public transit actually works, rather than isolating themselves in a sleepy town where they need to get someone else to drive them everywhere. And finally: people are not interchangeable units that you can unplug from one place and plug into another; associations between people matter; culture matters; and hence places matter -- the idea that someone who's lived in an area all their life should just shrug and go "oh well, the yups are moving in, I guess I better bail, hm, rents are cheap in central Texas...", this is in fact a terrible idea, however "practical" and "reasonable" it may seem to you; this sort of thing is a subtle source of some very real problems in American society (a lack of group identity, and hence civic virtue, among others).
This is a pretty good summary of the present situation (though as others have pointed out the world looks different if you're a 'professional' with medical perks).
The next question would be "Why do we put up with this?" rather than go for a centralized, government run medical system. Back in my more libertarian days there were roughly three arguments that I was impressed by:
If you artificially reduce prices, demand goes out of control, and you pay for it with long lines (queues).
A capitalistic medical system leads to more varied medical research, and should help lead to breakthroughs that will ultimately save lives.
You can't reduce medical profits by fiat without reducing incentives for people to do medical work, and you're likely to end up with creeping mediocrity in the medical professions.
If you actually look at what's going on in the world -- something libertarians seem to have trouble with -- you'll see problems with all of those points. There may be longer waiting periods for some proceedures in, say, Canada, than in the US, but the problem is not so bad that the folks who live there are complaining about it. Medical research is often paid for with government funding in any case -- and then the big drug companies are allowed to patent the discoveries made on the public dime. Good people are only loosely motivated by money, and while there are certainly some brilliant doctors in the US, if you're not sure you can get access to them, they won't do you a lot of good.
Just recently I ended up leaving the country to get some major dental work done outside of the United States -- even with my dental coverage plan, it was cheaper to get the work done overseas in Bali than here (including plane fare), and it seemed eaisier to find high-quality dentists to do the work: clearly something is broken in the current quasi/psuedo capitalistic system we have in the United States.
I live in Brooklyn. It's not as cheap as it used to be. I think San Francisco is cheaper at this point.
You know, sometimes it seems like folks like myself with hipster-intellectual pretensions ought to be demanding a kick-back from the real estate industry. If they want our help making neighborhoods fashionable enough for the yups to move into, we really deserve something for it.
Yes, I was just stopping in to complain about that "first" business.
Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist/improviser/composer in the SF Bay Area, did some work with
computerized accompaniment that was pretty impressive. His "Recent Works" release
had some tracks where you'd swear there was a live pianist following the clairinet
improvisations.
Ah, and if you look under "Sounds" on his homepage, he has some mp3 samples up of the work
I was talking about... look down for the information about "claire":
claire is a virtual improviser program i wrote in hmsl. i have no control over claire other than through my clarinet playing [claire listens through a pitch-to-midi converter.] although claire can play any midi device, in these two examples she is playing a disklavier.
I also know that Carl Stone was at least trying to do some work in this direction (at one performance
he commented that in a recent attempt the latencies in the system made it sound like the
computerized pianist was drunk... I don't know if he ever took it any further than that).
And yeah, "Standardized" tests are far from the panacia some people think they are.
Of course. They're used because nothing better exists that isn't subjective.
Well... whenever someone brings up the objective/subjective distinction, you need to realize that you're now opening up a nasty little can of philosophical worms (e.g. wikipedia tries to sidestep this by embracing "neutrality" over "objectivity", with only limited success).
I think the real question is why are we trying to pretend that there's some objective standard of measuring a quality like "literary ability", when we pretty much know that there isn't one?
If the goal is to acheive a fair meritocracy, well look around a bit. Is that what American society looks like to you at present? We have a president that we have to distinguish by using his middle initial (either that or admit that we should be calling him "the second").
The SAT writing section is graded based on grammatical correctness and the logical ordering of ideas. It takes no account of whether those ideas make canonical sense, only that they were ordered in a consistent and logical manner.
I think this is key, myself. Presumably the high-scorers have some knowledge of how the test is graded
and take the time to do precisely what the graders are looking for, and no more than that.
Quality is elusive, you can't except a "standardized" test to check for quality, instead it has
to be relatively mechanical criteria, like do the topic paragraphs support the introductory paragraph;
is there a conclusion that resetates the introduction; etc.
They didn't have a written portion of the SAT back in my day, but there were "essay" questions on the New York States Regents Examination for English (a standardize test, but taken by graduating seniors in New York State only). I happened to have an odd "tough" English teacher that taught us exactly what the graders wanted to
see: I wrote grossly inane piece of crap, but aced the exam, as you would expect.
And yeah, "Standardized" tests are far from the panacia some people think they are.
And, although I like Linux a great deal, that has not exactly worked out for the best with each distro having its own kernel. Do you think web designers would be happy to support several slightly different versions of Firefox?
And how do we know that the Debian Project is not manufacturing Weapons of Mass Destruction?
But it's exceptionally difficult to measure software developer
productivity, for all sorts of famous reasons.
I thought the main reason was that no one tries to do it.
Question: how would you evaluate two methodologies if you
really wanted to? What would you need?
Answer: conduct a social science experiment using teams of
volunteers. Undergraduate CS majors might do in a pinch.
Question: who is going to do this experiment? Computer Science
professors? Ha! CS profs want to scribble equations, Design
Languages, maybe, once in a great while, they'll be willing to
write a program or two... but conduct a social science
experiment? Feh, that's some other department, isn't?
So instead we're stuck with anecdotes, religious fanatics, and
hucksters holding seminars...
About the best you can do is gather statistical data across a lot of teams doing a lot of projects, and try to identify similarities, and perform some regressions, and hope you find some meaningful correlations. But where does the data come from? Companies aren't going to give you their internal data, if they even keep that kind of thing around. Most don't; they cover up their schedule failures and they move on, ever optimistic.
Well Duh. So don't try to get the data from corporate sources.
The comparison to "fad diets" is completly unfair: there are
indeed academic sources of data on the performance of diets,
it just takes awhile for the data to accumulate, but accumulate
it does. Programming methodologies are condemned to remaining
in the realm of pseudo-science for what seems like an eternity.
Look, there's no damn way you guys have read the article yet.
This damn thing is long. Go away and come back when you've
actually read it, huh?
(Slashdot has to be the worst discussion forum in the world for
anything resembling a serious purpose -- quick and dirty always
drowns out everything else).
I dispute the second half of your premise -- I haven't found anybody who is both (1) familiar with the term and (2) associates it with Apple.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that there are plenty of people out there who think they need to buy an iPod in order to listen to "podcasts".
Myself, I found the term tremendously confusing when it was first being spread around -- at first I thought it really was some new technology, e.g. a way of distributing a playlist so that the player
would automatically buy a copy from itunes if you didn't have that track already.
I'd argue that the word "podcast" is already generic -- are there any audio blogs that don't call themselves podcasts?
Pretty much everyone has to, or no one will know what you're talking about, but myself I would try to avoid it. There are already other terms that are clear enough: "steaming audio", "audio archive", and so on; and I dislike the feeling that I'm advertising someone's product every time I use the term.
Ah, but you appear to have missed the elementary principle of the computer business:
Jobs is always right. Closed architecture machines... Look and feel law suits (they own the "garbage can" image, remember?)... The latest proprietary fork of the BSD code base... DRM audio formats... if any of this
is disturbing you, you must report to the re-grooving center to have your reality warp field adjusted.
Just to raise a contrarian point of view: is there really any need
for new channels of information? Having some locally focused radio
stations with unique content sounds like a cool idea, all right, but
in point of fact there already are quite a few of them out there.
There are a bunch of college radio stations, as well as some run by
non-profits (e.g. the Pacifica stations). Do any of you listen to them?
Do you have any idea what they do?
In practice, most people seem to be satisfied with really dumbed-down,
homogenous media (clear channel and the like).
Typically a pirate broadcast will sound more interesting to me than
corporate radio, but they don't usually sound like they really know
very much about what they're doing. They're like beginning college
radio DJs.
The first question you need to ask yourself is are you trying to create a forum that's fun to mess around with, or are you trying to create something that's seriously useful, a valuable part of the democratic process.
If you want something seriously useful, then you need to consider various scenarios that a toy site can ignore:
e.g. what happens if Karl Rove hires a few dozen people to get on your site, and pretend that they're several hundred different people, who all just happen to be presenting a similar spin?
Myself, I think the only reasonable answer is that you have to abandon anonymity. Every user account needs to
be tied to an actual person in meatspace.
(All of which means that I think both slashdot and wikipedia are essentially toy sites that are on their way down the tubes.)
Exit polls are not reliable enough. If an exit poll tells you 80% of a precint voted for Mr A, and the votes say only 40 % did, you might have a case of fraud. but if 53% said they voted Mr A and only 46% did there is less certanty. It would be interesting to investigate the discrepencies.
Sure it's interesting. Which is why I keep recommending the book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? by Freeman and Bleifuss. A nice sane, sensible analysis by some trained statisticians that carefully debunks every attempt that's been made to dismiss the evidence of the exit polls.
You're essentially just plain wrong about the statistical significance of the discrepancy. If it wasn't big enough to be meaningful, you wouldn't have had the big boys trying to explain it away with polling bias theories and so on.
Once cast, the votes are properly looked after. If it turns out they weren't, then you have proof of wrong doing. Or perhaps just an even more screwed up system. But its better than looking at exit poll discrepencies by themselves.
It would be wonderful to have some other data to look at besides exit polls, but with electronic voting systems that leave no paper trail, we're left without any other indicator. Throwing out that one indicator is not justifiable.
I think we both agree the sytem sucks and it should be improved.
Excellent. So why do you keep arguing against this point?
To learn about conspiracies, just take a look at the ones we already have JFK's assasination, Roswell, and the face in Mars, ect.. You can find all sorts of weird things about any complex event when looked at by a microscope. But you have to maintain scientific rigor. Its not that I don't think the republicans wanted to throw the results of the election, I think both parties ahve demonstrated a willingness to do that, but I don't think they are capable of doing it.
Listen: two companies between them (Diebold and ESS) are responsible for counting about 80% of the vote. They're run by two guys who are brothers. They have a history of hiring people with felony fraud convictions. Rarely does a week go by without another report of some Diebold vulnerability.
You don't need to postulate some insanely large, flawless, conspiracy to explain away the Republicans ability to rig an election.
No one was capable of throwing the elections on a national scale. This isn't Ukraine. Every idiot has a video camera ( see youtube) and there were election officials every where and lawyers for both parties.
How do you use a video camera to examine what computer software is doing?
And strangely enough, there were widespread reports of various irregularities... all of which are being shrugged off by people who don't want to believe that they're living in the world's largest bannana republic.
I just don't think the Justice League PLUS the X-men were capable of it. Besides, if they were capable of it, then why wouldn't they have fixed the exit pols as well to make them coincide with the fake vote count? I would argue that would be equally difficult.
First you complain about theories about perfect conspiracies, then you complain about the evidence of a flawed conspiracy...
Be careful of wanting to remove the party form power,just because they deserve it. Wnating to remove the Democrats after LBJ gave us Nixon.
Scum to the left of us, scum to the right of us, oh well, let's just give up and let the bastards get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
There are, however, applications written in emacs that seem to require gross amounts of memory (e.g. gnus).
For example, with slashdot, it looks to me like there's a bunch postings originating from what I think of as "the rover boys": hired-gun Republican sock-puppets that come out of the woodwork when a subject like election fraud is under discussion.
(I think these are usually distinguishable from real human beings that happen to be conservative, though this is obviously always a judgement call).
One of the things that I think is funny is that they often have surprisingly low slashdot ids... which leaves only two choices: (1) a bunch of the old guard computer nerds (who stereotypically I'd expect to be libertarian or liberal) have suddenly become a particuarly low-brow kind of conservative; (2) the rover boys have some way of stealing slashdot accounts, and they've snagged some of the ones that were created early and then abandoned.
Obviously, I favor hypothesis (2), which raises the question of how exactly they did it. Running crack on slash accounts would presumably be a tricky business, because obviously the slashdot uber-geeks would be watching out for such an obvious attack. (Right?) Network sniffing would presumably be too slow a way to go about it, because by definition you'd only sniff passwords from active accounts, and then you'd have to wait for them to become inactive (well... unless you went around assasinating people for their slash accounts. But that's getting a little too paranoid, even for me).
So what do you think? Would slashdot be crackable by the sufficiently motivated?
Or course, one possibility would be that slashdot itself has been infiltrated: they could've planted someone on the staff in order to get database access. (Or possibly resorted to bribery?)
I wish.
Well, maybe Clinton didn't, but even if he had, Bush would've ignored it anyway, so it's all his fault.
Two can play the counter-factual accusation game.
Oh yeah? Says who?Really? Then why did ABC try to blame them on Clinton? That's where the whole spat started, remember.
You'll have to remind me when those were, I must've been watching "A Team" reruns.
Well, it would've been nice if he'd refrained from doing it because civilized countries don't engage in assassination, but that quaint little principle went out the window even faster than the Geneva Convention.
One of the reason's that San Francisco's Chinatown remains Chinatown is that a lot of the land is owned by neighborhood associations...
In any case AC, to address the substantive points buried in your post:
Yes, but once you get beyond the "toy site" level, encouraging participation is not the problem. There's no shortage of comments to read on slashdot -- there is however a shortage of people who know what they're talking about. Discouraging frivolous activity would perhaps not be such a bad thing.As far as new sites are concerned, it could be that the solution is to gradually ramp up the access barriers; except that then you have to watch out for regular users feeling betrayed by changes in the ground rules.
I can see how this is a concern but (1) for slashdot to know who each poster is is different from the readers knowing this -- admittedly there would still be risks to a brave AC from government demands for identity, for example. (2) I think that these concerns are usually exaggerated -- our culture is drowning in fear at present (don't give that guy who cut you off the finger, he might have a gun!) and we really need to get over it.It's possible that there is a compromise system that would be workable for slashdot: currently there's a three tier system: ACs/logged-in/logged-in-with-karma-bonus. A fourth level for people with verified identity might be a good-enough fix that doesn't completely do away with anonymous voices. (Note: paying customers would automatically be in the fourth level, a point that you'd think would appeal to the SlashMasters...)
Now now, you're letting your rhetoric run away with you. It's all well and good to delicately suggest that I want to sneak around in a black hood gunning down fine upstanding ACs such as yourself, but if you start acting like you've proven the point you just end up looking nutty.This is too strict a standard:
This is the kind of thing that sounds impressive to Americans, but "innocent until proven guilty" only makes sense if you're talking about preferring criminal charges. If the question is "do we need to make our elections resistant to corruption", the possibility that fraud might occur is significant enough, let alone the probablity that fraud actually did occur.The next question would be "Why do we put up with this?" rather than go for a centralized, government run medical system. Back in my more libertarian days there were roughly three arguments that I was impressed by:
- If you artificially reduce prices, demand goes out of control, and you pay for it with long lines (queues).
- A capitalistic medical system leads to more varied medical research, and should help lead to breakthroughs that will ultimately save lives.
- You can't reduce medical profits by fiat without reducing incentives for people to do medical work, and you're likely to end up with creeping mediocrity in the medical professions.
If you actually look at what's going on in the world -- something libertarians seem to have trouble with -- you'll see problems with all of those points. There may be longer waiting periods for some proceedures in, say, Canada, than in the US, but the problem is not so bad that the folks who live there are complaining about it. Medical research is often paid for with government funding in any case -- and then the big drug companies are allowed to patent the discoveries made on the public dime. Good people are only loosely motivated by money, and while there are certainly some brilliant doctors in the US, if you're not sure you can get access to them, they won't do you a lot of good.Just recently I ended up leaving the country to get some major dental work done outside of the United States -- even with my dental coverage plan, it was cheaper to get the work done overseas in Bali than here (including plane fare), and it seemed eaisier to find high-quality dentists to do the work: clearly something is broken in the current quasi/psuedo capitalistic system we have in the United States.
Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist/improviser/composer in the SF Bay Area, did some work with computerized accompaniment that was pretty impressive. His "Recent Works" release had some tracks where you'd swear there was a live pianist following the clairinet improvisations.
- Matt Ingall's software: mac frontend for csound, etc
- Matt Ingall's homepage: music, etc.
Ah, and if you look under "Sounds" on his homepage, he has some mp3 samples up of the work I was talking about... look down for the information about "claire":I also know that Carl Stone was at least trying to do some work in this direction (at one performance he commented that in a recent attempt the latencies in the system made it sound like the computerized pianist was drunk... I don't know if he ever took it any further than that).
I tell you, that reality warp field he's got is amazing. If he could put that on the market he could forget about the rest of the product line.
I think the real question is why are we trying to pretend that there's some objective standard of measuring a quality like "literary ability", when we pretty much know that there isn't one?
If the goal is to acheive a fair meritocracy, well look around a bit. Is that what American society looks like to you at present? We have a president that we have to distinguish by using his middle initial (either that or admit that we should be calling him "the second").
They didn't have a written portion of the SAT back in my day, but there were "essay" questions on the New York States Regents Examination for English (a standardize test, but taken by graduating seniors in New York State only). I happened to have an odd "tough" English teacher that taught us exactly what the graders wanted to see: I wrote grossly inane piece of crap, but aced the exam, as you would expect.
And yeah, "Standardized" tests are far from the panacia some people think they are.
They didn't use exit polls back then.
It's not easy finding qualified employees with felony fraud convictions, you know.
- postmodernism
- string theory
- object oriented programming
What was it about the 80s, eh?Question: how would you evaluate two methodologies if you really wanted to? What would you need?
Answer: conduct a social science experiment using teams of volunteers. Undergraduate CS majors might do in a pinch.
Question: who is going to do this experiment? Computer Science professors? Ha! CS profs want to scribble equations, Design Languages, maybe, once in a great while, they'll be willing to write a program or two... but conduct a social science experiment? Feh, that's some other department, isn't?
So instead we're stuck with anecdotes, religious fanatics, and hucksters holding seminars...
Well Duh. So don't try to get the data from corporate sources.The comparison to "fad diets" is completly unfair: there are indeed academic sources of data on the performance of diets, it just takes awhile for the data to accumulate, but accumulate it does. Programming methodologies are condemned to remaining in the realm of pseudo-science for what seems like an eternity.
(Slashdot has to be the worst discussion forum in the world for anything resembling a serious purpose -- quick and dirty always drowns out everything else).
Myself, I found the term tremendously confusing when it was first being spread around -- at first I thought it really was some new technology, e.g. a way of distributing a playlist so that the player would automatically buy a copy from itunes if you didn't have that track already.
Pretty much everyone has to, or no one will know what you're talking about, but myself I would try to avoid it. There are already other terms that are clear enough: "steaming audio", "audio archive", and so on; and I dislike the feeling that I'm advertising someone's product every time I use the term.In practice, most people seem to be satisfied with really dumbed-down, homogenous media (clear channel and the like).
Typically a pirate broadcast will sound more interesting to me than corporate radio, but they don't usually sound like they really know very much about what they're doing. They're like beginning college radio DJs.
If you want something seriously useful, then you need to consider various scenarios that a toy site can ignore: e.g. what happens if Karl Rove hires a few dozen people to get on your site, and pretend that they're several hundred different people, who all just happen to be presenting a similar spin?
Myself, I think the only reasonable answer is that you have to abandon anonymity. Every user account needs to be tied to an actual person in meatspace.
(All of which means that I think both slashdot and wikipedia are essentially toy sites that are on their way down the tubes.)
You're essentially just plain wrong about the statistical significance of the discrepancy. If it wasn't big enough to be meaningful, you wouldn't have had the big boys trying to explain it away with polling bias theories and so on.
It would be wonderful to have some other data to look at besides exit polls, but with electronic voting systems that leave no paper trail, we're left without any other indicator. Throwing out that one indicator is not justifiable. Excellent. So why do you keep arguing against this point? Listen: two companies between them (Diebold and ESS) are responsible for counting about 80% of the vote. They're run by two guys who are brothers. They have a history of hiring people with felony fraud convictions. Rarely does a week go by without another report of some Diebold vulnerability.You don't need to postulate some insanely large, flawless, conspiracy to explain away the Republicans ability to rig an election.
How do you use a video camera to examine what computer software is doing?And strangely enough, there were widespread reports of various irregularities... all of which are being shrugged off by people who don't want to believe that they're living in the world's largest bannana republic.
First you complain about theories about perfect conspiracies, then you complain about the evidence of a flawed conspiracy... Scum to the left of us, scum to the right of us, oh well, let's just give up and let the bastards get away with it.