Rob St. Amant's Open Salon Blog

Why vote?

Wed, 30 May 2012 06:05:37 -0400

Is it worthwhile to vote in the Presidential election this coming November? I think so. Every four years, usually in the fall, you can read economic and decision theoretic arguments about whether voting is a rational act.¹ Those arguments are fine for the mathematically inclined, but I'm going to offer a few simpler encouragements.

Your vote has value. How do we know this? Because people treat it as if it has value. We have historical examples in the women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement. This year, Governor Rick Scott has directed Florida's Division of Elections to purge 2,600 potential non-citizens from the voter rolls. This is just the starting point; the state has a list of 180,000 names it's looking into. The cost of cross-checking databases will run to $90,000 or more. (Value can be real money.) A number of citizens with full voting rights, including a WWII veteran, have already turned up on the list, incorrectly. Why doesn't Governor Scott trust the existing voter rolls? "People lie," he says. Despite the high probability that some citizens will be denied their right to vote, Scott is pushing forward. Other states are on board with new requirements for exercising the franchise. If your vote didn't have some value, people wouldn't be trying to take it away.

Throughout the world, voting is a social norm. Voter turnout for the 2008 Presidental election was slightly above 60%. This is very low--voting even in lower house elections is above 80% in many other countries. Of course, we Americans are proud of our exceptionalism. We're happy not to have a national health program, even if in comparison with other industrialized countries we pay twice as much for worse outcomes (such as higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy), because... umm... freedom, I guess. And if our level of income inequality is exceeded mainly by third world countries, that's... exceptional opportunity. And simultaneously having the largest military and the largest prison population in the world? (Okay, I got nothing.) Hmm. Taking a hint from elsewhere with respect to voting would be exceptional, in a way.

If you don't vote, my vote has more value. How many people does each U.S. Senator represent? It depends. If it's Wyoming we're talking about, it's about 280,000 people; California, almost 19 million people. Senators have hugely disproportionate power in their votes. The same thing is true, though to a much lesser extent, for ordinary voters. Those who are most likely to vote are the ones most deeply invested in the political process, perhaps the people who turn up at rallies and town hall meetings. If their interests are aligned with yours, fine. But if not...

You can vote for anyone you like. I'm making assumptions here. In my state, there's a write-in line for President, and I imagine it's the same in other states. If I think I'm the best person to represent my own interests, I can even vote for myself. Of course, I'd have only the tiniest chance of being elected. But the probability isn't zero. The chances of other, listed candidates being elected are much higher than mine. Do any of them have views that match your own? Maybe increasing their probability of getting elected, even by just one vote, would be worthwhile. Think of it as a lottery with a potentially enormous payoff for everyone.

It's your right to vote (in general). It's not a privilege; nor is it a requirement. On balance, it's something I'll do.

¹ For example, Ira Carnahan, in 2000; Jim Holt, in 2004; Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, in 2008; Andrew Gelman again in 2011.

The magic of writing

Mon, 28 May 2012 12:05:09 -0400

When I was much younger I loved to read books about how to do magic. Not real magic, of course; mainly card tricks.¹ I practiced doing passes, side slips, palms, and other basic sleights for hours on end. Today all that's survived of whatever skills I learned is a few card flourishes. I can manage one-handed shuffles and fans, and if the deck isn't too new, I can spring cards from one hand to the other. But I never performed, so I can't even claim to be an amateur. Still... on with the show.

When you're writing, you're performing. Your writing, for better or worse, is on public display. Let's see what a few of the rules for magic can tell us.

Pay attention to angles. For sleight of hand and for a great deal of stage magic, it makes a difference where the audience is and what they can see. In writing, do you want to show or tell your readers everything? In a mystery, obviously not. But otherwise? You can't show everything. You work in a limited space. (Unless you're Marcel Proust, in which case you've been dead for almost a century.) The angles you make visible can be a deliberate choice.

Make it look easy. A few magicians can pull off a frenetic act, with visible flop sweat, props apparently not working, and magic effects coming off as if by accident. But this is rare. Similarly, while I love the pyrotechnics some writers can create, I generally follow Elmore Leonard's rule: "If it looks like writing, I rewrite it."

Use misdirection when you need it. Magicians need it almost all the time, of course. In writing it's not so much misdirection as directing the reader's attention to what's important or relevant. Part of this is mechanics; in an essay, for example, a topic sentence usually comes at the beginning of a paragraph, but saving it until the end can make it more prominent. There's also pacing, diction, and so forth--and then the narrative you're laying out.

Pick a style, any style. After performing a trick, some magicians seem to be as surprised as the audience. Others show little reaction beyond, "Yeah, I did that." Some magicians engage their audiences closely, others are distant. Sometimes, in writing, a shift in style can have a useful and surprising (possibly humorous) effect. Consistency is best, though.

Learn by watching others. When I watch a magician perform on TV, sometimes I'll try to figure out how it's done. I'll do the same with a good piece of writing. (And a bad piece. What went wrong? Can I avoid doing the same thing?) Some writers have enough talent not to be readers. For example, E. B. White said, "I was never a voracious reader and, in fact, have done little reading in my life." I'm not E. B. White.

Practice, practice, practice. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, popularized the hypothesis that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field. You can practice writing by yourself (Renni Browne and Dave King's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is a good guide) or with the help of friends (two OSers have read chapters of my book, Ordinary Mortals, and one read the entire thing). I think I probably have a few thousand hours to go yet.

I'd add a last rule, which is Don't explain too much, but that's exactly what I've been doing in this post. Don't be too cute? Guilty again. I'll try this, then: When you've said all you want to say, stop writing.

¹ I attended a talk by the philosopher Daniel Dennett a few years ago, in which he pointed out the oddity that when we say "real magic" we're talking about something that doesn't exist; fake magic is all there is.

Boring stories of... (OS)

Sun, 27 May 2012 10:05:23 -0400

Last year I joined a planning committee, to replace a friend who was leaving.

"Can we still count on Frank?" asked Bill. Frank had been responsible for some of our work for the past several years.

"Yes," said Brad. "I'd like to get started a little earlier this year, so that the schedule doesn't slip."

Some of what we were planning to do was written down, but much of it wasn't, held only in our heads. That's institutional memory. Every group or association or organization we join has some institutional memory. In the working world, it might be described as the culture of a company; in a social group it might be thought of as "That's the way we've always done things;" and in an online community part of it might be contained in a Frequently Asked Questions list about how to behave--or not.

Open Salon has an institutional memory, much of it maintained and extended by its longest-standing members. designanator's posts showing past OS covers are a good example. You can see who was posting four years ago and what they were interested in. You discover that OS had a beta period, when it was an invitation-only site. (designanator is not the only beta member still around today.) Things moved more slowly in those days (one of the sidebar categories lists most-read posts in the past week; ten or fifteen minutes[!] might pass between comments), but much is the same as today: the top banner is mostly unchanged; there are still open calls; the writing is a mixture of politics, personal stories, humor, and culture.

Here's my contribution to OS's institutional memory, in the form of a list of things I remember doing when I joined the site in August, 2008, soon after OS went public. You'll see that institutional memory is a collaborative thing--I've forgotten a lot of detail. (Chip in if you care to.) My goal isn't to say, "Those were the glory days of OS," but rather to find connections between the way OS was yesterday and the way it is today. This is what I remember:

When OS was young, many (most?) members blogged under online aliases. In late 2008 or early 2009, there was a coming-out period of mutual introductions.

This overlapped with the adoption of a Facebook "25 things about me" meme.

We liveblogged the 2008 Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.

We posted reading lists.

We had running discussions (arguments, even battles) on a range of topics. Politics, of course. Sexuality. The Secret. The value/uselessness of meta-posts (like this one). In-group versus out-group dynamics on OS. Where OS was headed in the future. Who OS was for--people who care about quality writing? about writing, good or bad? about simply saying something in public? (OS hasn't changed very much in this regard.)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

An ongoing revolution... in computing education

Fri, 25 May 2012 18:05:00 -0400

These days a lot of people seem to be thinking, "Maybe I could try one of those free online courses and learn how to program." Others say, "What's the point?" (Juliet Waters, blogging here on OS about her New Year’s resolution to learn how to code, explains what the point is.) Some even say, "No! Please don't learn to code!" Fortunately, the last category holds only a tiny minority of people.

The past six months have seen a surge of public interest in computing. The UK is refocusing its pre-university curriculum on information and communications technology to focus on the science of computing. (This is good timing; 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the London-born founder of computer science.) In the New York Times, Randall Stross writes about computational thinking as a fundamental skill for everyone. When even the mayor of New York City decides to join Code Academy to learn how to program, people take notice. A minor revolution is underway in formal and informal computing education.

One of the best explanations for this movement comes from a manifesto by John Naughton, in a public letter to Michael Gove, the UK Secretary of State for Education. Naughton gives us two compelling insights:

3. We believe every child should have the opportunity to learn computer science, from primary school up to and including further education. We teach elementary physics to every child, not primarily to train physicists but because each of them lives in a world governed by physical systems. In the same way, every child should learn some computer science from an early age because they live in a world in which computation is ubiquitous...

4. Our emphasis on computer science implies a recognition that this is a serious academic discipline in its own right and not (as many people mistakenly believe) merely acquiring skills in the use of constantly outdated information appliances and shrink-wrapped software...

In other words, learning to program can be thought of, shallowly, as learning how to make a computer do specific things. In the same way, you can think of learning how to play the piano as figuring out the sequences and rhythms in which you should press the keys. But that sounds silly, doesn't it? It's hard to imagine learning to play the piano without gaining some insight into music. The same is true about programming—what you're really doing is learning how to solve problems in a rigorous way. Programming is just a vehicle. The learning isn't easy, but then not everyone needs to play Carnegie Hall (or attend Carnegie Mellon University) to find satisfaction and enjoyment in their efforts.

Further, there's real science behind the practicalities of computing. Paul S. Rosenbloom, in On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain (MIT Press, forthcoming), makes the case that the computing sciences are on par with the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences. That's interesting, in part because it's a brand new discipline, less than a century old, and there's so much yet to be discovered. Have you ever thought about making a significant contribution to physics, biology, or one of the social sciences? Very ambitious. But computing is new enough and moving fast enough that you just might be able to do it.

I'll bet you like ice cream.

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:05:00 -0400

Do you like ice cream? I'll predict that if you care enough to mention ice cream via Twitter, you're probably in favor of it, even moderately enthusiastic.

Am I just guessing? Not entirely. I used a visualization system developed by my colleague Chris Healey to produce the result at the top of this post. When I typed in "ice cream", the system retrieved a few hundred recent tweets containing that term and generated a visualization of their emotional content, or sentiment. Try it yourself, with your own keywords, on Chris's tweet viz Web page.

The visualization integrates a lot of information (details here), but I'll concentrate on the basics: roughly speaking, the green circles are for tweets that express "positive" sentiment, and the blue circles are for tweets expressing "negative" sentiment. Sentiment is inferred from the words in the tweet. For example, "ice cream and good sex!" (the text of an actual tweet, with relevant words in bold) contains "good" and "sex". Very nice. But how could ice cream be bad? Well, some people who eat ice cream when they're feeling down might tweet about it. And one tweet says it's "dangerous even in an ice cream shop! Robbery yesterday..."

We'll need a bit of theory to understand how the circles are laid out. James Russell, a psychologist at Boston College, has proposed a conceptual framework for understanding emotion [PDF]. (There have been many attempts to formalize what we know about emotion.) In Russell's framework, one important factor is valence, which ranges from unpleasant to pleasant. (This is actually what I meant by "negative" and "positive" above.) The horizontal placement of a circle is an indication of the unpleasantness or pleasantness expressed in a tweet. And the vertical placement? That's another factor in Russell's framework: arousal, which ranges from being nearly comatose to being very, very excited. So the circles toward the top are excited, with happy tweets on the right and stressed-out tweets on the left, and at the bottom they're kind of... meh. We don't see a lot of the latter; tweeting takes some effort, after all.

It's surprisingly hard to find topics where tweets contain uniformly pleasant or unpleasant sentiment. Not even for the keyword "funeral":

Some people apparently like funerals! But if you hovered your mouse pointer over different green circles to read the tweets, you'd find that some Twitter users have the word "funeral" in their names, and sometimes they tweet about happy things. (Why not filter out names? We'd lose information. For example, a query on "obama" might then ignore tweets containing only @BarackObama, which we probably do want to see.) Also, you'll occasionally find something along these lines: "Nice to see my loving family at an event other than a funeral." A loving family is a pleasant thing to have.

This last example suggests that an automated analysis isn't as smart as a person in extracting meaning or sentiment. A human being, for example, might reasonably judge that a tweet about "an event other than a funeral" isn't really about funerals. Processing natural language, beyond the level of individual words, remains a very hard problem.

I'm writing about Chris's tweet viz system for a couple of reasons. First, it's cool. Half a billion people across the world use Twitter, and 340 million tweets are posted each day. (I'm quoting one of my students, Shishir Kakaraddi, who just completed an M.S. thesis in the general area of tweet summarization.) We need good tools for making sense of all this data. Second, the project is a nice example of how research can drive software development. It's not just about what people might like to see in a visualization of Twitter data; the design of the visualization draws on psychological models of visual perception (for example, in the color choices) and of emotion (in the analysis and display of sentiment information). By building and testing systems like these, we can learn new and interesting things.

Update: Taxes.