It's crazy that in the US politicians are involved in drawing district boundaries at all. In the UK, we have an independent electoral commission who are in charge of this.
We had a long discussion on this just yesterday. I don't see the point of repeating everything again today. But I don't think your conspiracy theories are plausible -- Google were trying to get rid of spam, and may have been over-zealous, but I don't think they were deliberately trying to worsen their search results; they know that will lead to a very quick death.
PageRank is the thing shown in the Google toolbar, if you're using that. It doesn't depend on the query. But there's a lot more going on than that. They don't just look for all the pages containing a word, and then give you the one with the highest PageRank.
Every month or so, Google updates its database again, and every time, webmasters all over the world whose pages happened to go lower in the rankings complain that Google is broken and the sky is falling. This time is no different.
I agree it's no different from usual, in some ways. But on the other hand, there have been an increasing number of such stories recently. Of course, the loudest complaints come from those whose sites have sunk. But many ordinary people feel that Google search results have worsened gradually over the last few months, and the press is right to pick up on this.
My personal theory, albeit based on no hard evidence, is that Google has started to rely less on PageRank. Newspaper articles usually blame people subverting PageRank in some way, but I think they're wrong. Those papers don't realise that Google uses a combination of many methods to rank pages, not just PageRank.
What I think happened is this:
Google invented PageRank. It's not perfect, but it worked much better than anything else, and they took over the world. It's also really hard to thwart: just linking to your own sites doesn't improve your PageRank; you need high-quality links from third parties.
Unfortunately, PageRank didn't work so well when blogs came along, because of their high amount of interlinking. So Google was forced to reduce the weight of PageRank in the algorithm.
The problem is that this meant they were now depending more on traditional ("SEO") metrics, which are more easily manipulated.
So now they're chasing round trying to catch the cheats, while allowing legitimate sites through. But as the history of search engines before Google shows, this is a losing battle, and there will be complaints from site owners who have been wrongly demoted, as well as from users who are seeing more crud.
As I say, all this is speculation, but it makes sense to me.
Interesting that you should single out the map of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. That graphic was the inspiration for our web log analysis program ClickTracks. Our CEO saw it and realised that what web log analysis needed was to show data in context, rather than in long lists. We have the poster of the Napoleon map on the wall of our office.
It is acknowledged among the SEO (Search engine optimization) community that PageRank, while still in effect, is being greatly de-emphasized by google in calculating the final score.
I suspect this is why Google's results have got so much worse recently -- why searching for a product now brings up tons of vendors' product pages rather than information about the product. It was always much less easy to manipulate PageRank than to optimize the page itself. If Google are indeed using PageRank less now, they are emphasizing optimized pages more and the community's view of importance less.
Of course, I have no evidence for this speculation, but it makes sense to me. I'd already been concluding that Google had been moving away from PageRank for this reason, even before reading this post.
I recently got the 'You don't do anything romantic anymore' speech.
Have you actually asked her what special romantic thing she'd like? I don't think a thing has to be a surprise to be romantic. In fact, even bothering to ask her what she'd like to do on Valentine's Day is somewhat romantic in itself.
Oh, and maybe it's too obvious to need pointing out, but romance doesn't have to be confined to one day a year. What happens the rest of the year makes more of an impact.
Has it occurred to anyone that a space elevator could be a tempting terrorist target?
Re:Before we all start siding with the underdog...
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Phoenix To Change Name
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· Score: 2
Everyone I know has at least heard of Phoenix bios
What a strange group of friends you must have!
Re:This is actually good news in a way.
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
Well, France does. The UK doesn't.
Yes it does. Exit polls are illegal until the polls close at 10pm. And in European parliamentary elections, the UK votes on Thursday and there are no polls until Sunday evening.
"Voting for the European parliament"... is not performed by the public.
Yes it is. You're not getting confused with the Commission, are you?
Re:This is actually good news in a way.
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 1
Right. The premature release of exit polls is one of the main deficits in the American democratic system.
In some states, polls are released before the whole state has finished voting -- this famously happened in Florida in the last presidential election. But that's not the only problem. All exit polls should be forbidden by law until the whole country has finished voting. It's a fundamental principle of democracy that everyone's vote should be equal, and this doesn't happen at the moment because the people in the west usually know the result of the election before voting.
Every other democracy does this, AFAIK. (Voting for the European parliament takes place over several days, for example, and no exit polls are released until after all countries have finished voting.) It seems to us in Europe that Americans value a tiny amount more free speech above fair elections.
Tetris unwinnable against malevolent machine
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Tetris Is Hard: NP-Hard
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's also the case that Tetris is unwinnable against a malevolent machine, which chooses a nasty sequence of pieces. In the sense that even if you know the pieces in advance, you will eventually fill any tower of finite height.
I've seen two independent proofs of this (and other people have surely done it too) but I can't find an online proof. But I think that one way for the machine to win is to drop S and Z pieces in any irrational proportion.
IMHO debian should do the following.
Trim down the list of "official" packages drastically. Take only the best 100 or so packages and concentrate on them exclusively. The rest of the packaged can be treated as "add on" and should be put on separate servers. The users can choose to add them to their apt.sources or not and if they do there are no guarantees.
I strongly disagree with this. One of the biggest advantages of Debian is that every package is an official package, and has to conform to the same standards as every other package; and all the packages have to work together.
Compare that with the variable quality of Redhat contrib. The program I'm the author of had a security bug and I still couldn't get Redhat to pull the contrib packages until someone volunteered to package a newer version several months later.
Yes, you're right. Northern Irish constituencies don't count until the next morning. In addition, some very close constituencies delay the final recount until the next morning. The last non-Northern Irish constituency declared at 3.43pm, and the last Northern Irish constituency at 10.20pm.
(Source: http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/e01/dectime.htm.)
But the point is, speed of counting is not an argument against paper ballots. The election result is pretty much known in about 4 hours, and even if it took 24 hours that would be perfectly quick enough.
One very simple but important thing the USA could do to increase the integrity of the ballot would be to ban exit polls or predictions before the polls have closed in the whole country.
When I've raised this before, I've found that many Americans have been horrified. Freedom of speech is the highest goal. Suppression of the press will lead to dictatorship.
Guys, get real! Stopping the press saying one specific thing for three or four hours is the tiniest suppression of civil liberties. It's a much bigger and more basic civil liberty that the whole country should have a level playing field for voting. Most other democracies do this and haven't turned into dictatorships yet.
Three or four days to count paper ballots? Here in the UK, we count them all in a few hours.
The main advantage of paper ballots is that everyone can see the whole process, and knows what's going on. No broken machines or dodgy software -- or even allegations of dodgy software, which would be just as harmful to confidence in the democratic process.
But our government is talking about electronic voting, and even voting over the internet. They seem to think it will increase participation. It won't! The reason people don't vote is because they don't want politicians running the country, not because the voting method is old-fashioned. Instead, more people voting from home will just increase the possibility of pressurised voting.
It seems like someone has finally noticed that if you do not test your site using a wide range of browsers you do not know how your page is going to look... To most of us this problem is obvious.
To most of us, yes, but not to a large proportion of web site designers, apparently.
Well, statistically, if you can develop a good enough test criteria, you could determine the rate with a very, very small sample. This is how some of the more reputable firms can survey 250 voting American adults and usually be within 3% of what the American public will do during the upcoming election.
No, this is because of the (surprising) fact that the accuracy of the survey is dependent only on the sample size, not on the population size. 250 is not a very small sample. The fact that it's 250 out of 100 million or whatever is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
It's crazy that in the US politicians are involved in drawing district boundaries at all. In the UK, we have an independent electoral commission who are in charge of this.
Q. There were two cats on a roof. Which one slid off first?
A. The one with the lower mew.
We had a long discussion on this just yesterday. I don't see the point of repeating everything again today. But I don't think your conspiracy theories are plausible -- Google were trying to get rid of spam, and may have been over-zealous, but I don't think they were deliberately trying to worsen their search results; they know that will lead to a very quick death.
PageRank is the thing shown in the Google toolbar, if you're using that. It doesn't depend on the query. But there's a lot more going on than that. They don't just look for all the pages containing a word, and then give you the one with the highest PageRank.
My personal theory, albeit based on no hard evidence, is that Google has started to rely less on PageRank. Newspaper articles usually blame people subverting PageRank in some way, but I think they're wrong. Those papers don't realise that Google uses a combination of many methods to rank pages, not just PageRank.
What I think happened is this:
As I say, all this is speculation, but it makes sense to me.
Have a look at Tufte's sculptures too.
Interesting that you should single out the map of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. That graphic was the inspiration for our web log analysis program ClickTracks. Our CEO saw it and realised that what web log analysis needed was to show data in context, rather than in long lists. We have the poster of the Napoleon map on the wall of our office.
Of course, I have no evidence for this speculation, but it makes sense to me. I'd already been concluding that Google had been moving away from PageRank for this reason, even before reading this post.
Have you considered the possibility that they're trolling?
Did anyone else read the headline and think that Amazon was selling IRAQs? Or was it just me?
Oh, and maybe it's too obvious to need pointing out, but romance doesn't have to be confined to one day a year. What happens the rest of the year makes more of an impact.
Has it occurred to anyone that a space elevator could be a tempting terrorist target?
In some states, polls are released before the whole state has finished voting -- this famously happened in Florida in the last presidential election. But that's not the only problem. All exit polls should be forbidden by law until the whole country has finished voting. It's a fundamental principle of democracy that everyone's vote should be equal, and this doesn't happen at the moment because the people in the west usually know the result of the election before voting.
Every other democracy does this, AFAIK. (Voting for the European parliament takes place over several days, for example, and no exit polls are released until after all countries have finished voting.) It seems to us in Europe that Americans value a tiny amount more free speech above fair elections.
It's also the case that Tetris is unwinnable against a malevolent machine, which chooses a nasty sequence of pieces. In the sense that even if you know the pieces in advance, you will eventually fill any tower of finite height.
I've seen two independent proofs of this (and other people have surely done it too) but I can't find an online proof. But I think that one way for the machine to win is to drop S and Z pieces in any irrational proportion.
Compare that with the variable quality of Redhat contrib. The program I'm the author of had a security bug and I still couldn't get Redhat to pull the contrib packages until someone volunteered to package a newer version several months later.
But the point is, speed of counting is not an argument against paper ballots. The election result is pretty much known in about 4 hours, and even if it took 24 hours that would be perfectly quick enough.
We do have a denser population than the USA or Brazil, which helps us a bit, but I'm sure they could be counted nearly as quickly in those countries.
When I've raised this before, I've found that many Americans have been horrified. Freedom of speech is the highest goal. Suppression of the press will lead to dictatorship.
Guys, get real! Stopping the press saying one specific thing for three or four hours is the tiniest suppression of civil liberties. It's a much bigger and more basic civil liberty that the whole country should have a level playing field for voting. Most other democracies do this and haven't turned into dictatorships yet.
The main advantage of paper ballots is that everyone can see the whole process, and knows what's going on. No broken machines or dodgy software -- or even allegations of dodgy software, which would be just as harmful to confidence in the democratic process.
But our government is talking about electronic voting, and even voting over the internet. They seem to think it will increase participation. It won't! The reason people don't vote is because they don't want politicians running the country, not because the voting method is old-fashioned. Instead, more people voting from home will just increase the possibility of pressurised voting.