Oprah's political endorsement value
[via Marginal Revolution] A study on the value of Oprah's political endorsement to Barack Obama concludes that "her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama." They also note that "the results ... suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately additional 1,000,000 votes for Obama"
The paper can be read as a PDF.
I cannot tell if 1MM incremental voters is valuable, though it feels like a strong number.
My curiosity is stoked: what are the five most valuable endorsements a candidate can receive? Labor unions? Governors? Senators? Newspapers? Which ones?
Ah, youth
Having come in a night early for a morning meeting here in Boulder, Colorado, Christina and I strolled around University of Colorado campus tonight. Being around a university reminds me of the happiest time of my life, as an undergrad.
We walked into one building, saw signs for a performance, and walked out to find a play being put on in an open-air theater. I stood to watch a scene--given the many references to D'Artagnan I assume it was The Three Musketeers--then walked out with a smile on my face.
Nothing like mannered student theater acting and eating disorder brochures in the hallways to remind one of college.
Hamlet, the Facebook Feed Edition
Hamlet, the Facebook Feed Edition (via a coworker Nellis). Some highlights:
The king poked the queen.
The queen poked the king back.
Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.
Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.
Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.
Polonius is no longer online.
I'm a !@#$%*? You're a *&%$#@!
In a letter, Giles Coren excoriates the Times sub-editors for altering the last sentence of one his columns. The Sunday Times sub-editors respond to Giles with their own letter and wonder why he had to be so rude and profane.
Good points all around. Not quite a literary feud, but similar entertainment value.
On a related note, Chuck Klosterman is overjoyed by the Shaq-Kobe feud and mutual hatred.
Usage error: enamored with
Enamored takes the preposition of, not with.
From my favorite reference book, A Dictionary of Modern Usage, by Bryan Garner.
How common is this usage error?
Approximate Google search results for "enamored with": 1,160,000
Approximate Google search results for "enamored of": 877,000
Some among the usage police have come to accept "enamored with" given its widespread adoption, but to me Garner is law.
Scrabulous reincarnated
After the Hasbro lawsuit that killed Scrabulous on Facebook, the creators have resurrected it with a different look and slightly different rules as Wordscraper.
The feisty underdog still has some bite.
[via Techdirt]
Hoop Dreams
Today's entry in Hulu's Days of Summer is Hoop Dreams. Before there was the panoramic American epic The Wire, there was Steve James documentary about Chicago inner city high school basketball players Arthur Agee and William Gates. It is one of my five favorite documentaries of all time, and the first one that enlarged my view of what a documentary could be. Watching it will make you guilty for what earns the title "reality TV" today.
The scene from He Got Game where Denzel and Ray Allen face off? It's got nothing on the scene in Hoop Dreams when Arthur plays his father Bo one-on-one.
Today, Arthur Agee has a foundation, while William Gates is a pastor in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood of Chicago. Both have experienced tragedy. Arthur's father Bo was killed in 2004 after having seemingly turned his life around. William's brother Curtis was murdered in 2001.
I remember them as I saw them in Hoop Dreams, and I find it hard to imagine how, given the circumstances, any of us could have turned out any better.
"La Vida No Loca"
Well-written review of "Coldplay's expanding gas" by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker this week.
Is Coldplay warm milk or just quietly dependable? Don’t ask Martin, who has transformed the English art of diffidence into a masochistic religion: “We owe them a career, really,
MLB spam
MLB.tv is a cool product, but MLB.com does some things that really peeve me.
First of all, I received this random e-mail from MLB.com the other day.
In what way does my subscribing to MLB TV mean I want to receive Staples ads from MLB? I don't remember giving them my consent to sell my e-mail address off that way. And what's the relation of office products to major league baseball? Really not cool.
Spam e-mail is not as bad as spam snail mail, but one law I'd love to see passed for real world junk mail, like the three million credit card offers I'm sent each day, is a requirement that on each piece of snail mail the company from which the spammer purchased your name must be listed. Something like: "This junk mail is being sent to you because Bank of America sold your personal information to us."
Strike two against MLB.com? After upgrading to MLB TV Premium today, the last step in their shopping pipeline was this page:
Plenty of sites try to insert an extra step at the end of the checkout process to upsell you, but MLB not only does this but lightens the offer rejection button so it looks like it's inactive or not clickable, even though it is. Not only is that a usability no-no, but it is just evil.
It reminds me of the old Real Networks hidden links for the free version of their player. You'd have to wade through page after page of offers for the paid version of their RealPlayer until you could locate the obscure link for the free player download. Years later, that terrible and short-sighted decision associates their brand with evil in my mind, even though they now offer a really great product in Rhapsody.
Fear, God, and State
Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias writes about a fascinating article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
A stunning hypothesis from the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
"High levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and ... increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God and defense of the overarching socio-political system. A 4th experiment showed ... a challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control. ... A cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal control are associated with higher support for governmental control."
It seems we hope a stronger and more benevolent God or State will protect us when feel less able to protect ourselves. I'd guess similar effects hold for medicine and media - we believe in doc effectiveness more when we fear out of control of our health, and we believe in media accuracy more when we rely more on their info to protect us. Can we find data on which beliefs tend to be more biased: confidence in authorities when we feel out of control, or less confidence in authorities when we feel more in control?
Robot Chicken: Star Wars
All four chapters of Robot Chicken: Star Wars are online at Adult Swim. For all Star Wars fans, this is essential viewing. You will laugh. You will cry (from laughing so much). And it is better than Cats.
Did you hear me? Essential viewing. Go now. Leave. Go watch it.
Now at Hulu: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
UPDATE: Joss Whedon wrote a short intro for Dr. Horrible. It's up at the Hulu blog. Meeting Joss and now having him use Hulu in a sentence caused me to wet myself. Since those events occurred on two different occasions, that's two pairs of pants I've ruined.
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Just launched to Hulu: Joss Whedon's musical tragicomedy, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.
Joss and his brother Jed wrote all the music, and it's good, which won't be surprising to Whedon fans familiar with the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling".
Here's one of the musical numbers, "Freeze Ray", one of my favorites from the, what should we call it, web original musical? Weborigical?
Here are all three acts of Dr. Horrible, tied together into one video.
Objectified
The next documentary from the Gary Hustwit, the man behind Helvetica, is Objectified, about industrial design. Scheduled to come out in 2009, the doc features an impressive cast of designers and design experts:
Paola Antonelli (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich)
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Paris)
Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)
Anthony Dunne (London)
Naoto Fukasawa (Tokyo)
IDEO (Palo Alto)
Jonathan Ive (Apple, California)
Hella Jongerius (Rotterdam)
Marc Newson (London/Paris)
Fiona Raby (London)
Dieter Rams (Kronberg, Germany)
Karim Rashid (New York)
Alice Rawsthorn (International Herald Tribune)
Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine)
Nibblets
Facebook's profile updates are rendered in an odd tense, in a very Facebook-centric view of the world. You change your profile to married, and instead of writing, "Scott changed his relationship status to married" it reads "Scott is now married." Never mind that he may have been married for years; in the Facebook world, nothing is so until you declare it so in your profile.
What happens if you change your sex? "Fred is no longer male"? Your birthday? "Susan is no longer born July 7, 1978"?
I am going to change my relationship status to king so it reads "Eugene is now king."
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As of Friday morning rehab, I am sans crutches. This is a big moment for me, and an even bigger moment for my armpits.
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To the person who came to my website via the Google search "eugene wei the dark knight" yesterday: yes, I am Batman.
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Speaking of Batman and my crutches, I didn't buy Harvey Dent's conversion in The Dark Knight. But I can empathize with the personality-transforming power of physical injuries or deformities. Having one bad leg, not being able to exercise, has definitely made me grumpier these past two or three months.
I walk by a homeless guy, and I flip a coin. Heads, I give the guy the coin. Tails, I kick him with my walking boot.
No, not really. But not being able to run or work off occasional frustration has left me snippier. I'm like Harvey Two-Leg.
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Lebron vs. Yao Ming in the Coke ad "Unity" from Smith&Foulkes for W+K Portland.
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One of the restaurants I wish I ate at before moving from NYC is Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This glowing review with its gorgeous photos is like a megaphone for that regret.
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Cleverly written commercials for dandruff shampoo that could be done by any one who knows After Effects.
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Why read The Watchmen, which has spiked in popularity now that the non-geek masses have seen The Watchmen trailer playing before The Dark Knight? Bryan Caplan says: "The Watchmen is the Best... Utilitarian Parable... Ever."
I've never thought of it that way, but having read that graphic novel probably five times in my life, I'd have to say it makes sense.
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"Tarantino's Mind" (short film)
Steve Jobs calls Joe Nocera
Rising the charts at the NYTimes most blogged articles is "Apple's Culture of Secrecy" by Joe Nocera.
On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter
This week's New Yorker
Strong issue of The New Yorker this week. Having to fly a bit this week, I had time to read it nearly cover to cover.
Two articles which are not online but are quite good: "All the Answers" by Charles Van Doren, who was played in Quiz Show by Ralph Fiennes. After the scandal, what happened to Van Doren? In his own words.
The other, my favorite article in the issue, is a Gladwell-esque Annals of Science article titled "The Eureka Hunt: Where in our brains do insights come from?" and written by Jonah Lehrer. Though it's not online, it is here in PDF form (thanks Kottke), and I will post a few excerpts here:
The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation phase is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. Jung-Beeman said, "The problem, though, is that we're always so rushed. We've got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed and never give ourselves a chance to think." He recommends that, if we're stuck on a dificult problem, it's better to set the alarm clock a few minutes early so that we have time to lie in bed and ruminate. We do some of our best thinking when we're still half asleep.
As Jung-Beeman and Kounios see it, the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation--the brain must be focused on the task at hand--transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections. We must concentrate, but we must concentrate on letting the mind wander.
Further on:
One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight. While it's commonly assmed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to focus, minimize distractions, and pay attention only to the relevant details, this clenched state of mind may inhibit the sort of creative connections that lead to sudden breakthroughs. We suppress the very type of brain activity that we should be encouraging.
Some anecdotes:
In his 1908 essay "Mathematical Creation," Poincaré insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that "nothing good is accomplished," you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a "walk or a journey." The answer will arrive when you least expect it. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a topless bar, where he would sip 7 UP, "watch the entertainment," and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.
Two articles which are online which are worth reading are Evan Osnos's article on young Chinese nationalists who reject the West, and David Samuels article "Dr. Kush" on the medical-marijuana economy.
19 years after the events in Tiananmen Square, this is not where we would have expected a sizeable portion of the youth of China to arrive ideologically. They don't necessarily support the Chinese government, but they reject Western democracy, also. Here is the video cited at the start of the article, one that represents many of the feelings of this group.
Whatever you think of its ideas, it's hard to deny that it's a fascinating example of user-generated propaganda, and maybe the famous video ever made with Windows MovieMaker (if you count its views on Sina.
Mike Peed reviews Adour, a new NYC restaurant by one of the famous chefs of our time, Alain Ducasse.
There are people, a dwindling lot, who are secure in their mortgages and to whom the spectre of five-dollar-a-gallon gas presents more a challenge than a threat. These people eat at Adour.
And of course, there is Anthony Lane's review of Mamma Mia! which, to this male, is likely more entertaining than the movie iself.
And why is it called Bluetooth anyway?
The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute warns his staff to limit cell phone use to minimize cancer risk. While no studies have detected a link, that does not necessarily prove that there isn't a link. It reminds me of the Bill James article "Underestimating the Fog" (PDF) in which he noted that just because past studies haven't detected clutch hitting doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Cell phones and bluetooth headsets emit non-ionizing, microwave radiation. That much we know. Do they increase your risk for brain cancer? To conduct a study of that magnitude would take years and years and cost millions of dollars. It's unlikely anyone will fund a study like that.
So we're all part of a real world experiment. Here's how I see it playing out. Some people will get brain cancer 20 years from now from high cell phone use, and they will bring massive lawsuits against the cell phone companies. But one special person will gain superpowers from all that radiation, a sort of slow burn Bruce Banner. But this hero's powers will only be active in large metropolitan areas, will wane when going through tunnels or riding in elevators, and will come with some inexplicable state and local taxes.
One risk from bluetooth headsets that has been confirmed: wearing one will make you look like an idiot.
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