Depression is more than sadness

This is great.

And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

It would be like having a bunch ...

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Category bias in Wikipedia

Is Wikipedia objective?

I recall taking a class on journalism and we argued about whether or not true objectivity could ever exist. Some people pointed out that it was possible to write an article that consisted only of factual statements, and therefore such an article proved that objectivity was possible.

There were several counter-arguments: what about the factual statements that were not included? You could factually say “The nation of x invaded the nation of y and slaughtered 10,000 innocents.” That makes ...

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Why President Obama limits decisions

I think this is the only way to stay sane when you are in a fast-changing environment. Develop sane defaults and stick to them. You can not re-think every decision every day. No one has that kind of omni-directional brain power.

After reading this article in Vanity Fair on Obama, there was one piece that stuck out to me. As the author interviewed the president, he said “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down ...

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George W Bush was a genius — who cares?

What is the point of intelligence? Why should anyone want to be intelligent? Is there anything useful in intelligence? I am confused by an essay that argues that George W Bush was very intelligent. If he was, then we can conclude that intelligence is not important in a leader, and there must be some other quality that we associate with great leaders.

For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy ...

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Do intellectuals have any influence?

Paul Krugman writes:

But will any of this make a difference? The story of the past three years, after all, is not that Alesina and Ardagna used a bad measure of fiscal policy, or that Reinhart and Rogoff mishandled their data. It is that important people’s will to believe trumped the already ample evidence that austerity would be a terrible mistake; A-A and R-R were just riders on the wave.

The cynic in me therefore says that after a brief period of ...

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Why does danah boyd face more criticism than Paul Krugman when writing about personal topics?

Nothing in this post should be read as a criticism of either Paul Krugman or danah boyd. They are both writers that I admire. They both maintain blogs that I have been following for 7 or 8 years. They are both politically of the left, progressive and committed to humane values. And they both sometimes write informally academic things on their blogs, and other times personal things on their blogs. And I have the impression that danah boyd faces much ...

Sex and technology

Yet another reminder of how much sex and technology now overlap:

No one can pay attention to everyone

Therefore we must screen who we listen to. I would like a service that let me white list what other blogs could post pingbacks to my blog. I used to think that comments were very important on a blog, but now I feel that ownership must be taken for any words spoken, and therefore it would be better if everyone had their own blog and could simply ping each other.

This is good:

When was the last time you stopped scrolling ...

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile

I have a new motto

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile

Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.

Gender ignorance at a tech conference

Interesting

I’m not a lady easily upset by the silly things that happen in male-dominated cultures. When I went on stage to speak at DEFCON 19 a series of events escalated to a portion of the audience shouting for me to take my shirt off. While I was a little sad that conference security had no idea how to de-escalate that (I sure hope they teach them now) and I had to do it myself, it isn’t fair to hold a ...

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The street kids of San Francisco

Interesting:

Whenever Haight Street tourists or bar hoppers crowd the neighborhood, street kids panhandle (hold a palm out for money – resembling a pan handle) and spange (“Spare change?”). An average day of spanging brings in about $40. But with some luck and creative tactics (jumping out of trash cans to scare a group of teenagers, or telling tourists how to take the perfect picture of the Haight and Ashbury street signs), a day’s haul can break into triple digits.

This struck ...

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Heart disease was common in the ancient past

Interesting:

There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now “integrative medicine,” meant to imply the “best of both worlds.” If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it’s natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it’s ...

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Where does this man live?

Look at the screen shot. See the bit about cancer? Isn’t it sad that you can guess with great confidence what nation this man’s brother lives in? Even aside from the FMLA comment, there are not many nations where the lack of health insurance is so much of an issue.

Pre-published peer review is bad for science

Peer review imposes costs on everyone in the scientific process, but it offers no benefits

So pre-publication peer-review is not getting the job done as a filter. What about its role in improving papers that do get published? This does happen, for sure; but speaking as a veteran of 30 submissions, my experience has been that no more than half of my reviews have had anything constructive to suggest at all, and most of those that have improved my manuscripts have ...

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Female heads of state and the perception of golden ages

Shakespeare had Elizabeth. Georgia had Tamar. I find it curious that most societies despise the idea of a female head of government, but a female head of state is different: the memories of such an era are often nostalgic and remembered as a golden age.

The concept of neighborhood barely exists in the USA

Interesting:

After my last blog post about German children having more everyday freedom than their English peers, Andrea – a German-born woman who now lives in the USA – got in touch to leave a comment. She had some revealing things to say about the differences between her home and adopted countries, and has agreed to let me share them more prominently. She paints a depressing picture of car-dependence and isolation: a stark comparison with her experiences in Germany. Here is ...

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Women gamers streaming

I really, really wish it was possible to know the country of origin of the commenters who comment about women’s activities online. I am very curious if there are some nations that produce a disproportionate number of aggressive trolls. I assume some nations (Sweden?) produce proportionally less trolls than other nations (Ukraine? India?), but I am left guessing.

Here is a bit of the culture trolling that surrounds women gamers who stream their activities:

Vivyan Andrew, a 29 year old ...

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Past IQ 120, creativity is more important than IQ

This is interesting:

t’s like basketball: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about other things, like speed, agility, ballhandling skills and aim.

Bringing together people with the highest IQs and thinking that they will be the most successful group is the same as gather the highest basketball players and say they are the best team. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional ...

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Burn the witches

This is a good point. Arthur C Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Therefore those who create advanced technology are witches. And sometimes our society still feels the need to burn the witch.

The quote from ACK is of course that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Back in the day magic was (to my uneducated understanding) largely chemistry, slight of hand and showmanship.

Magic led to both fear and respect. Witches and wizards feature ...

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The emotional impact of grades on students

Interesting:

First, we must expand the criteria by which we evaluate the quality of our assessments at all levels and in all contexts. Traditionally, we have judged quality in terms of the attributes of the resulting scores; these scores must lead to valid and reliable inferences about student achievement. As a result, schools have lavished attention on characteristics of the instruments that produce such scores. In the future, however, we must recognize that assessment is about far more than the test ...

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If you can not pay your bills, then you have no independence

The numbers here surprise me. South Carolina gets the majority of its money from the Federal government, and then it complains that the Federal government is too big. South Carolina could refuse to take the money, and then the Federal government would need $8 billion less. A teenager who gets an allowance from the their parents, but then complains about parental tyranny, is an immature brat, but that is exactly what South Carolina is doing: it is dependent on Federal ...

The news is bad for you

When Aaron Swartz was 20 years old, he wrote about why he hated the news:

You’ll often hear TV critics say that CNN’s up-to-the-minute reporting is absurd. Instead of saying, “We have unconfirmed reports that—This just in! We now have confirmed reports that those unconfirmed reports have been denied. No, wait! There’s a new report denying the confirmation of the denial of the unconfirmed report.” and giving viewers whiplash, they suggest that the reporters simply wait until a story is confirmed ...

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More dirt on Dave Winer

I love any story that bashes Dave Winer. I’ve posted dozens of these on my blog (and other blogs). Here is another one that I just stumbled across:

As a 14-year-old, Swartz worked with Dave Winer and other Weblog technology pioneers to co-author the RSS 1.0 specification. The experience so scarred Winer that he wrote a blog posting (I can’t find it now) saying that he was not going to talk to Aaron anymore. This led me to remark to a ...

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Selfish

Is it necessary to say “I am selfish” when what you actually mean is “I enjoy my job”?

“I once thought that by now I’d have lots of children, but actually I’m really enjoying being able to go from point A to point B and the only worry I have is have my dogs been walked,” the American Idol runner-up says. “I’m selfish right now, but that’s how and where I should be. The thing is, work is the thing ...

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Why do teens bully?

Interesting. This guy wrote a hateful screed, way back in 1987, in which he asked some of his classmates to commit suicide, and he used the word “nigger” to describe several of his African-American classmates. He goes back and tries to figure out why he was so hateful. He also calls up the people he insulted and he asks them what they remember of the incident.

Holly Winslow (not her real name) wasn’t pleased at all. She was in Steve ...

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