McFreedom

CNN reports that CNN.com - Starved N Koreans eating grass to survive. The opening sentence is "A severe shortage of food aid is forcing hungry North Koreans to scrounge for grass and seaweed, the United Nations says."

Um, no. A brutal dictatorship that micromanages food production is forcing hungy North Koreans to eat their shoes. Blaming this on a lack of aid is like blaming a murder on the passerby that didn't call the police. Yes, there's aid to be supplied. But the perpetrator isn't the passerby - it's the murderer. In this case, Kim Jong-iL.

As many of you may be aware, since April of 1998, I've been EMusic.com's Executive Vice President of Technology. Back in July of that year, I put together EMusic's first system (the original ancestor of the system in use until June 17, 2002). We had one track available: "All My Ghosts," by Frank Black and the Catholics. Frank Black was with the Pixies, an influential early proto-alternative band. I have to confess that I'm too square to have heard of him, but when I told my youngest brother - then involved in college radio - that we had our first new artist, and he was Frank Black, he replied, excitedly, "From the Pixies?!?"

On June 17, 2002, they threw the switch, and transfered control to Vivendi Net USA; the old technology team for mp3.com is now responsible for EMusic.com, and I'm not, for the first time in a long time. Jason Woodward - one of the first people to help me on the site - and I went down to San Diego (where they and many of the old EMusic employees are now based) to wrap up a few things. We also got to go to the closing party. Frank Black played, with an acoustic guitar (it was decided it wasn't worth the expense to fly all of the Catholics along). In his set, I was very happy to hear "All My Ghosts," a song I'd listened to over and over back in July of '98 when I'd been writing the site. I remember that you purchased it by "putting it in your shopping cart," but we didn't actually have a shopping cart per se. It was all just static HTML that looked like a shopping cart - why bother writing a full-blown shopping cart if there's only one item you can buy on the whole site?

After the show, I got to meet him, and asked him if he knew that "All My Ghosts" was the first track we'd sold on EMusic. He didn't, but replied that he "really liked that song," and it always seemed like he ended up playing it wherever he went. I know it's my favorite of his music.

Jason and I said our goodbyes, and decided to hit P.F. Chang's China Bistro on the way to the airport for dinner. We both had the Kung Pao Chicken, extra spicy, and it was very good. After the meal, the waiter brought me the last dinner check that I'll ever put on my EMusic corporate Amex, and two fortune cookies. Mine read, "YOUR TROUBLES WILL CEASE AND FORTUNE WILL SMILE UPON YOU".

CNN is reporting that the House is making progress on a bill to allow some airline pilots to carry guns. Glad someone is thinking out there...

I just finished Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics. It's a pretty enjoyable overview of how bad statistics get created and passed along, and it's a short, fast read. His coverage of the main types of statistics errors you see in politics is a useful introduction to thinking critically about statistics, but the real entertainment in the book are his anecdotes of his research into mutant, or just plain bad from the beginning statistics.

For example, he relates how gay activists claim that 1350 gay teens commit suicide each year - representing 30% of all teen suicides. Since the rate of homosexuality in the population is much lower than this, gay activists have tried to use this as a rallying point to try to illustrate how difficult life is for homosexual teens, that it drives them to commit suicide in such large numbers.

Best's first point is - how in the world would you figure this out to the begin with? First of all, getting suicide numbers is hard, to begin with, because many suicides are classified as homocides or unknown cause deaths. Secondly, how would you learn the sexual orientation of the deceased? The coroner doesn't put it on his report; the police don't put it in their report. In fact, the activists themselves claim that this includes a large number of teens still in the closet - which any study, by definition, would miss.

In fact, that number was created by activists. Using the widely-discredicted Kinsey study figure of a 10% rate of homosexuality in the population (a number still widely claimed by gay activists despite the fact that every study since has shown a number in the range of 3% - 6%) as a starting point, they then took the number of teen suicides in the country annually (4500), and then multiplied that by 3 - since another "widely known" stat is that homosexuals commit suicide at 2-3 times the rate in the normal population. Of course, that is in itself another stat which is very suspect, since it's very difficult to study for the same reasons the teen rate is difficult to study. Regardless, this chain of bad statistics leads up to 4500 * .1 * 3 = 1350. Having then derived these numbers from unrelated, uncausal sources, activists then try to claim that something should be "done" about the problem of homosexual teen suicide - but one has to wonder how we would know if such policies were effective, since the percentages are derived from populations that are not teens to begin with?

More simply, he gives the case of anorexia nervosa. This became a popular topic in the press some years ago, with many alarmist stories being written. Someone at one point estimated that 150,000 women anually exhibit symptoms of anorexia nervosa. This statistic was pretty suspect to begin with, as it was an estimate, and undoubtedly is the largest number the originator - an advocate of greater intervention for anorexia nervosa - thought he could get away with. However, someone at some point claimed that 150,000 American women die of anorexia nervosa every year. This statistic was much more impressive, and once it had the imprint of approval (by being stated on television and used in the papers and books), it took on a life of its own. Never mind, of course, that this would make anorexia nervosa the second-most common killer of women in the US. The real figure looks to be something more like 70.

I've found that, once you start thinking critically about things like this, you start having a "nose" for when a stat (or story - these spread and mutate in ways very similar to urban legends) is wrong. This book is a good place to start, and he is absolutely right when he reminds us to apply that critical thinking to all the numbers we see, not just the ones whose politics we disagree with.

So, it appears that Jose Padilla, the fellow accused of plotting to build a "dirty bomb," was born in New York. I personally believe he should be charged with treason and espionage, both capital crimes, and that the government should persue the death penalty. While I am normally opposed to the death penalty, American citizens who work for Al Qaeda make life much more difficult for the overwhelmingly vast majority of natrualized citizens who are loyal Americans. Al Qaeda has been making a concerted effort to recruit American citizens, and we need to make it very clear that aiding and abetting this enemy will bring the harshest possible penalties.

In this article, Glenn Reynolds comments, "Bloggers have biases -- but they're usually right out in the open. And bloggers don't pretend to be objective professionals."

To me, this is one of the big strengths of bloggers. You'll see the best of them (including Mr. Reynolds) say things like, "This is the way I think it is, but reasonable people could think otherwise." When do you see that sort of thought about objectivity in the mainstream press?

But the real issue I have with the mainstream press is the hidden biases of the individual reporters. I'm sure a lot of the time it isn't even conscious. Let's think of a hypothetical reporter, John. John is a liberal, who is in favor of gun control. John covers politics. As a person whose job it is to follow politics day-in and day-out, John has probably read a lot on the subject of gun control in his personal and professional life. Like most of us, he doesn't spend a lot of time reading polemics he doesn't agree with - much as someone who thinks the 2nd Ammendment is a good thing is going to read a lot of John Lott and not much in the way of press releases from HCI, someone who thinks gun control is important to improve the quality of life in America is going to be spending his time over those press releases, not with More Guns, Less Crime.

The reason this is important is that the modern journalistic concept of "objectivity" involves, essentially, speaking to the PR representive of the two groups who espouse the most mainstream views on any topic. In a gun-control story, for example, you might try to get quotes from Sarah Brady and a spokesperson for the NRA. I think this is a pretty weak form of objectivity, myself (as opposed to actually trying to get to the bottom of things and discover some, you know, truth or something), but so far it's not harmful. The issue is that the the reporter controls the interview, and very rarely do we get to see his questions. Since John already knows Sarah's best-sounding arguments, his questions to her are going to be softballs - "So, how many criminals have the Brady laws kept from getting guns since they were passed?" Since he's unfamiliar with the NRA's arguments (even if he is honestly trying to be "objective" and not paint one side as the correct one), his questions to the NRA are going to be more along the lines of "Sarah Brady says the Brady law kept guns out of the hands of criminals 700,000 times last year, do you dispute that?" The NRA spokesperson is then going to reply, "Well, that figure includes people who were incorrectly denied initially but were allowed through on appeal." The resulting line in the story? "Sarah Brady of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence claims that the Brady Law has kept 700,000 criminals from getting guns since it was enacted, a number which the NRA disputes."

It's "objective," because he asked both sides. But what has asked both sides has a lot to do with how truly objective the story ends up being. He never asks the NRA, "Is it true that states which have enacted easy concealed-carry laws have reduced violent crime?" because he's never really read that, and if he did, he didn't trust it, anyway - it's just NRA propaganda.

Bloggers, of course, generally wear their biases on their sleeves. I've long been of the opinion that I'd rather know what your bias is than have you be "objective" - since even a superman can't truly be objective with the deadline and commercial pressures facing the media. Of course, conventional news outlets want to appear to be objective, since overt lack of objectivity will annoy some number of customers, who will flee to other outlets which don't rub them the wrong way. Bloggers don't much care who they annoy, since for many (most?) of them, publishing is a cost.

I was glad to see this BBC piece about how China's country-wide filtering hasn't completely blocked "dangerous" (to the tyrants in charge) ideas from making their way to the Chinese people. In part it seems that they're seeing the rise of things like message boards and chat rooms, which are enabling people to build their own dissident momentums from within China, thus reducing the importance of the country-wide firewall (as an aside, Sun's supplying of the hardware for that venture really proved to me how morally bankrupt they are).

I'd always figured that even the Chinese couldn't stop the great tidal wave of information that is the Internet. Especially since they have to depend on techs to do it for them. I remember when I was at PGP, Dave DelTorto told me about one such tech he met at a conference, who confided that they'd managed to convince their superiors that PGP was an image format and didn't need to be blocked. With people that brave working on the firewall, I figure it's just a matter of time before the free exchange of ideas begins to erode the foundation of that oligarchy. And good riddance.

A stupidly small time after 6 o'clock, this morning, my wife and I were lying in bed with our two-year-old son, who had just woken up. I'd retreived him from his crib, but the adults were huddled under blankets, trying to deny that we were, in fact, about to have to get out of bed, already.

I turned on NPR, which was playing "Weekend Edition." They were running a story about the end of recovery efforts at Ground Zero. As many of the stories I heard or read on the event, this one highlighted the ceremonial ringing of the firehouse bell, in four sets of five. It was explained how this was the traditional signal given at every firehouse when a firefighter is killed in action. At the end of the story, they played the twenty bell rings with no other sound.

"Can you hear the bell?" I asked. "Yeah," he replied, with a big smile. "Ding! Ding! `Ding Dong' says a bell!"

The bell stopped. "More!" he requested.

"Well...I hope not," I told him.