numbers

Correcting wrong info reinforces false beliefs

education, history, politics, science / /

From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):

We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that’s actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

This sort of misinformation isn’t hypothetical; in 2003 a study found that viewers of Fox News were significantly more misinformed about the Iraq war, with far greater percentages of viewers erroneously believing that Iraq possessed WMDs or that there was a credible link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein than those who got their news from other outlets like NPR and PBS. This has led to the rise of websites like FactCheck and SourceWatch.

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false belief is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction. In the studies, volunteers were shown news items or political adverts that contained misinformation, followed by a correction. For example, a study by John Bullock of Yale showed volunteers a political ad created by NARAL that linked Justice John Roberts to a violent anti-abortion group, followed by news that the ad had been withdrawn. Interestingly, Democratic participants had a worse opinion of Roberts after being shown the ad, even after they were told it was false.

Over half (56 percent) of Democratic subjects disapproved of Roberts before the misinformation. That rose to 80 percent afterward, but even after correcting the misinformation, 72 percent of Democratic subjects still had a negative opinion. Republican volunteers, on the other hand, only showed a small increase in disapproval after watching the misinformation (11 percent vs 14 percent).

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Amazon’s infrastructure and the cloud

business / /

From Spencer Reiss’ “Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today” (Wired: 21 April 2008):

Almost a third of [Amazon]’s total number of sales last year were made by people selling their stuff through the Amazon machine. The company calls them seller-customers, and there are 1.3 million of them.

…

Log in to Amazon’s gateway today and more than 100 separate services leap into action, crunching data, comparing alternatives, and constructing a totally customized page (all in about 200 milliseconds).

…

Developers get a cheap, instant, essentially limitless computing cloud.

Amazon’s infrastructure and the cloud Read More »

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

politics, technology / /

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:

Thought y’all would find this interesting – from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:

“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Obama’s January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details. It was the first report to confound basic database programs since 2001, when the Federal Election Commission began directly posting candidates’ fundraising reports online in an effort to make political money more accessible and transparent to voters.

By March, the reports filed by Clinton, a New York senator who attributes Obama’s victories in several states to her own lack of money, also could no longer be downloaded into spreadsheets using basic applications.

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton’s cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.”

Interestingly, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has the same limitation. OpenOffice.org 3 will expand the number of columns to 1024, according to http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html. No idea about how many rows. Anyone know?

OK … looked it up … it appears that the row limit is STILL in place, so you can’t use OOo to open Obama’s or Hillary’s spreadsheets. Of course, you could use MySQL …

Oh yeah … and here’s one more note, from the same Salon article quoted above:

“In a revealing insight into the significant fundraising disparity between the two Democrats and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, it is still possible to download his reports with plain-old Excel.”

Ouch!

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1/2 of all bots are in China

law, security / /

From “Report: China’s botnet problems grows” (SecurityFocus: 21 April 2008):

Computers infected by Trojan horse programs and bot software are the greatest threat to China’s portion of the Internet, with compromises growing more than 20-fold in the past year, the nation’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CN-CERT) stated in its 2007 annual report released last week.

The response organization found that the number of Chinese Internet addresses with one or more infected systems increased by a factor of 22 in 2007. The report, currently only published in Chinese, estimates that, of 6.23 million bot-infected computers on the Internet, about 3.62 million are in China’s address space.

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Language shapes thought

science / /

From Celeste Biever’s “Language may shape human thought” (New Scientist: 19 August 2004):

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study. 

…

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps.

Language shapes thought Read More »

USA owns 74% of IPv4 addresses

tech in changing society, technology / /

From Stephen Ornes’s “Map: What Does the Internet Look Like?” (Discover: October 2006):

The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China’s stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.

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Info about the Internet Archive

business, commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology / /

From The Internet Archive’s “Orphan Works Reply Comments” (9 May 2005):

The Internet Archive stores over 500 terabytes of ephemeral web pages, book and moving images, adding an additional twenty-five terabytes each month. The short life span and immense quantity of these works prompts a solution that provides immediate and efficient preservation and access to orphaned ephemeral works. For instance, the average lifespan of a webpage is 100 days before it undergoes alteration or permanent deletion, and there are an average of fifteen links on a webpage.

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Corporate consolidation reigns in American business, & that’s a problem

business, law, politics / /

From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):

It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America’s century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in a world dominated by immense global oligopolies that every day further limit the flexibility of our economy and our personal freedom within it. There are still many instances of intense competition — just ask General Motors.

But since the great opening of global markets in the early 1990s, the tendency within most of the systems we rely on for manufactured goods, processed commodities, and basic services has been toward ever more extreme consolidation. Consider raw materials: three firms control almost 75 percent of the global market in iron ore. Consider manufacturing services: Owens Illinois has rolled up roughly half the global capacity to supply glass containers. We see extreme consolidation in heavy equipment; General Electric builds 60 percent of large gas turbines as well as 60 percent of large wind turbines. In processed materials; Corning produces 60 percent of the glass for flat-screen televisions. Even in sneakers; Nike and Adidas split a 60-percent share of the global market. Consolidation reigns in banking, meatpacking, oil refining, and grains. It holds even in eyeglasses, a field in which the Italian firm Luxottica has captured control over five of the six national outlets in the U.S. market.

The stakes could not be higher. In systems where oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, competition itself is transformed from a free-for-all into a kind of private-property right, a license to the powerful to fence off entire marketplaces, there to pit supplier against supplier, community against community, and worker against worker, for their own private gain. When oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, what is perverted is the free market itself, and our freedom as individuals within the economy and ultimately within our political system as well.

Corporate consolidation reigns in American business, & that’s a problem Read More »

1% create, 10% comment, 89% just use

business, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Charles Arthur’s “What is the 1% rule?” (Guardian Unlimited: 20 July 2006):

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.

The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads – which as Antony Mayfield (at http://open.typepad.com/open) points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload – and 20m unique users per month.

That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days yet …

50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).

Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that much the same applies at Yahoo: in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups,” he noted on his blog (www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5) in February.

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Just how big is YouTube?

business, social software, technology / /

From Reuters’s “YouTube serves up 100 mln videos a day” (16 July 2006):

YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said on Sunday viewers have are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its “snack-sized” video fare.

Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, YouTube has come to hold the leading position in online video with 29 percent of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market, according to the latest weekly data from Web measurement site Hitwise.

YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online, the company said. …

In June, 2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube, which is based in San Mateo, California and has just over 30 employees. More than 65,000 videos are now uploaded daily to YouTube, up from around 50,000 in May, the company said.

YouTube boasts nearly 20 million unique users per month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, another Internet audience measurement firm.

Just how big is YouTube? Read More »

What kinds of spam are effective?

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Alex Mindlin’s “Seems Somebody Is Clicking on That Spam” (The New York Times: 3 July 2006):

Spam messages promoting pornography are 280 times as effective in getting recipients to click on them as messages advertising pharmacy drugs, which are the next most effective type of spam.

The third most successful variety is spam advertising Rolex watches, 0.0075 percent of which get clicked on, according to an analysis by CipherTrust, a large manufacturer of devices that protect networks from spam and viruses.

What kinds of spam are effective? Read More »

Patenting is hurting scientific research & progress

business, law, science, technology / /

From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006):

Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been affected by such difficulties. In contrast, only 35 percent of academic bioscience respondents reported difficulties that affected their research.

Of the 72 respondents who reported that their work had been affected by the technology acquisition process, 58 percent of those reported that their work was delayed. Fifty percent reported that they had to change their research, and 28 percent reported abandoning their research project as acquisition of the necessary technologies involved overly complex licensing negotiations.

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OnStar: the numbers

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From PR Newswire’s “OnStar Achieves Another First as Winner of Good Housekeeping’s ‘Good Buy’ Award for Best Servic” (3 December 2004):

Each month on average, OnStar receives about 700 airbag notifications and 11,000 emergency assistance calls, which include 4,000 Good Samaritan calls for a variety of emergency situations. In addition, each month OnStar advisors respond to an average of 500 stolen vehicle location requests, 20,000 requests for roadside assistance, 36,000 remote door-unlock requests and 19,000 GM Goodwrench remote diagnostics requests.

OnStar: the numbers Read More »

How doctors measure what percentage of your body is burned

commonplace book, science / /

From Daniel Engber’s “How Much of Me Is Burned?” (Slate: 11 July 2006):

rule-of-nines.gif In the 1950s, doctors developed an easy way to estimate the ratio of the area of a patient’s burns to the total area of his skin. The system works by assigning standard percentages to major body parts. (Most of these happen to be multiples of nine.) The skin on each arm, for example, covers 9 percent of a patient’s total surface area. Each leg comprises 18 percent, as do the front and back of the torso. The head and neck together make up another 9 percent, and the last bit (or 1 percent) covers the genitalia and perineum. This breakdown makes it easy for doctors to estimate the size of a burn in relation to a body—a burn that covered half the arm would add 4 or 5 percent to the total figure. …

Another method uses the size of a patient’s palm as a reference. As a general rule, the skin on the palm of your hand comprises 0.5 percent of your total surface area. (For children, it’s 1 percent.) A doctor can check the size of a patient’s hand and compare it with the size of a burn to make a quick guess about the percentage.

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Who was saved in the storming of the Bastille?

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “French Revolution” (5 July 2006):

On July 14, 1789, after hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor, Marquis Bernard de Launay, and several of his guards. Although the Parisians released only seven prisoners; four forgers, two lunatics, and a sexual offender, the Bastille served as a potent symbol of everything hated under the ancien régime.

Who was saved in the storming of the Bastille? Read More »

Napoleon’s losses in the invasion of Russia

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “Napoleon I of France” (5 July 2006):

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River (November 1812) to escape. In total French losses in the campaign were 570,000 against about 400,000 Russian casualties and several hundred thousand civilian deaths.

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Why airport security fails constantly

law, science, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Airport Passenger Screening” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns, and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. …

The failure to detect bomb-making parts is easier to understand. Break up something into small enough parts, and it’s going to slip past the screeners pretty easily. The explosive material won’t show up on the metal detector, and the associated electronics can look benign when disassembled. This isn’t even a new problem. It’s widely believed that the Chechen women who blew up the two Russian planes in August 2004 probably smuggled their bombs aboard the planes in pieces. …

Airport screeners have a difficult job, primarily because the human brain isn’t naturally adapted to the task. We’re wired for visual pattern matching, and are great at picking out something we know to look for — for example, a lion in a sea of tall grass.

But we’re much less adept at detecting random exceptions in uniform data. Faced with an endless stream of identical objects, the brain quickly concludes that everything is identical and there’s no point in paying attention. By the time the exception comes around, the brain simply doesn’t notice it. This psychological phenomenon isn’t just a problem in airport screening: It’s been identified in inspections of all kinds, and is why casinos move their dealers around so often. The tasks are simply mind-numbing.

Why airport security fails constantly Read More »

DIY worm kits

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Jose Nazario’s Anatomy of a worm (Computerworld: 15 September 2004):

Now imagine a world where worm attacks frequently occur because hackers and rogue developers have access to “worm kits” or development tools that provide the basic building blocks for rapid worm development.

Historically, worms were basic clones of one another that didn’t change after their original development. Simple mechanisms were used to propagate them, such as mass-mailing worms using a single subject line.

Today’s worms are more sophisticated. They have the ability to mutate after development based on knowledge of how to thwart new security processes. For instance, an early worm, Code Red, attacked only Internet Information Server servers. The Nimda worm, which came later, expanded to include at least three additional attack methodologies: mail-based attacks, file-sharing-based attacks, and attacks against the Internet Explorer Web browser.

The potential for this worm-a-day nightmare comes from several factors: the dozens of vulnerabilities that are ready to be exploited, the availability of worm source code, recycled exploits and the ease of editing existing worms.

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