Month: July 2014

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer defends the practice, arguing that we “need statistical thinking for a world where we can calculate the risk, but in a world of uncertainty, we need more.” How ignoring the importance of instincts and gut feelings hurts business practices:

Gut feelings are tools for an uncertain world. They’re not caprice. They are not a sixth sense or God’s voice. They are based on lots of experience, an unconscious form of intelligence.

I’ve worked with large companies and asked decision makers how often they base an important professional decision on that gut feeling. In the companies I’ve worked with, which are large international companies, about 50% of all decisions are at the end a gut decision. But the same managers would never admit this in public. There’s fear of being made responsible if something goes wrong, so they have developed a few strategies to deal with this fear. One is to find reasons after the fact. A top manager may have a gut feeling, but then he asks an employee to find facts the next two weeks, and thereafter the decision is presented as a fact-based, big-data-based decision. That’s a waste of time, intelligence, and money.

The more expensive version is to hire a consulting company, which will provide a 200-page document to justify the gut feeling. And then there is the most expensive version, namely defensive decision making. Here, a manager feels he should go with option A, but if something goes wrong, he can’t explain it, so that’s not good. So he recommends option B, something of a secondary or third-class choice. Defensive decision-making hurts the company and protects the decision maker. In the studies I’ve done with large companies, it happens in about a third to half of all important decisions. You can imagine how much these companies lose.

In a review of The Barnes Foundation’s exhibit The World Is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne, Morgan Meis considers why the painter’s still lifes provoked outrage in the late 19th century and why they endure as “so peculiar, so specifically Cézanne-ish” today:

Cézanne liked his painting surfaces rough with paint. He generally did not varnish or glaze his paintings. He also didn’t care much for “correct” perspective. Look, for instance, at The Kitchen Table (1888-90). The left corner of the table doesn’t even match up with the right corner. And the floor of the kitchen doesn’t recede properly into space. Cézanne didn’t care. He wanted the painting to look this way. He wanted you to feel – when looking at the painting – slightly off-kilter, like the canvas can’t quite hold what is inside it and the kitchen might spill forward out of its frame.

Cézanne also liked to blur lines and boundaries within his paintings.

In Apples and Cakes (1873-77), there is a green object, probably an apple, at the back of a white dish of fruit. The apple is the exact color as the wall behind the table. So, it looks as if the wall, in the background, has simply bled into and become part of the bowl of fruit in the middle ground. In Still Life with Seven Apples and a Tube of Paint (1878-9), Cézanne has scraped at the apples with some sort of knife, mixing the colors and boundaries of the middle apple into the apples next to it. In Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl, and Orange (1879-80), the carafe barely exists, since it merges into the colors and shapes of the wall behind it and the other objects nearby. Many things seem to be merging in Cézanne’s paintings. Objects merge with one another. Background and foreground merge. Space itself seems to tighten and overlap.

It is as if Cézanne painted still lifes to show that individual objects sitting on a table are not individual objects at all. Sure, an apple is just an apple. But in Cézanne’s still lifes, an apple isn’t just an apple. It is also all the other apples. And it is the table and jug and the pitcher and the wall behind the table. Every object is implicated in every other object. To look at one object you have to look at all the others. To confront one individual thing, you have to confront a whole world.

(Image: The Kitchen Table by Cézanne, 1888-90, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nick Diakopoulos checks ’em out:

Every robot journalist first needs to ingest a bunch of data. Data rich domains like weather were some of the first to have practical natural language generation systems. Now we’re seeing a lot of robot journalism applied to sports and finance — domains where the data can be standardized and made fairly clean. The development of sensor journalism may provide entirely new troves of data for producing automated stories. …

After data is read in by the algorithm the next step is to compute interesting or newsworthy features from the data. Basically the algorithm is trying to figure out the most critical aspects of an event, like a sports game. It has newsworthiness criteria built into its statistics. So for example, it looks for surprising statistical deviations like minimums, maximums, or outliers, big swings and changes in a value, violations of an expectation, a threshold being crossed, or a substantial change in a predictive model.

Joe Pinsker isn’t too worried about robot-written stories corroding journalism:

These automated write-ups are for now filling micro-niches, such as Little League games or fantasy football drafts, that are outside the scope of information covered by journalists working now.

As Automated Insights’ CEO Robbie Allen told Poynter, “We’re creating content where it didn’t exist before.” The AP’s move has a similar underlying goal: It said that Automated Insights’ algorithms will allow them to produce nearly 15 times as many earnings reports per quarter than when they filed them manually.

While, yes, it’s true that algorithms can cram stories about vastly different subjects into the same uncanny monotone—they can cover Little League like Major League Baseball, and World of Warcraft raids like firefights in Iraq—they’re really just another handy attempt at sifting through an onslaught of data. Automated Insights’ success goes hand-in-hand with the rise of Big Data, and it makes sense that the company’s algorithms currently do best when dealing in number-based topics like sports and stocks.

On top of that, the earnings report as a journalistic form, which is what one might worry is endangered by the introduction of newsroom algorithms, is already robotically formulaic. The way the AP has been writing these reports up until now demands that human writers act like computer programs, copy-pasting the day’s numbers into their predetermined slots.

Justin Ellis spots another service employing robo-journos:

What if you could rescue your favorite saved reads by putting them into print, with one click? That’s the idea behind PaperLater, a new service that lets users create a personalized newspaper from their favorite must-reads from around the web. It’s the latest creation from the Newspaper Club, the U.K.-based company we last wrote about then it created a “robot” newspaper for The Guardian. PaperLater is a continuation of that work; the same algorithms that automatically laid out Guardian stories will now let anyone easily throw together an edition of the web’s best reads. What’s new, and what makes the service slightly more approachable to a wider audience, is a browser button for saving stories to PaperLater — and the individualized nature of single-issue printing.

Ted Trautman worries that cutting-edge taxis like Uber and Lyft will leave the handicapped behind:

[T]hough wheelchair-accessible vehicles are rare both in the traditional taxi system and through rideshare services, traditional taxi companies are required in many cities to make some of their vehicles wheelchair-accessible. Companies like Uber and Lyft have no such obligation. … These startups, which are mostly unregulated, are recruiting drivers aggressively and luring experienced cabbies who hope to earn more working for Uber or Lyft than they do in a yellow taxi. As the few taxi drivers with wheelchair-accessible vehicles abandon the medallion-based taxi system (which, as I’ve mentioned, in many cities has a mandate to field a certain number of wheelchair-accessible vehicles) to join the less-regulated startup world using their own, non-accessible vehicles, it will become increasingly difficult to find the drivers to keep accessible cabs on the road. In San Francisco, a quarter of the city’s 100 wheelchair-accessible taxis already sit idle for lack of drivers.

Recent Dish on Uber here.

Archbishop Nienstedt was Pope Benedict XVI’s kind of cleric. When he was Bishop of New Ulm,

he condemned some of the theological views of the man who had held the post before him for 25 years, Bishop Raymond Lucker, a noted progressive clergyman who died in 2001. Denouncing his predecessor’s views was an “extraordinary step,” the National Catholic Reporter noted in an article on the incident. As bishop in New Ulm, Nienstedt prohibited cohabitating couples from being married in Catholic churches. He barred female pastoral administrators from leading prayers at a semiannual leadership event. He once disciplined a priest for holding joint ecumenical services with a Lutheran congregation after the Catholic church had been destroyed by a tornado.

He also had a particular beef with homosexuals, of course. He favored barring them from speaking at Catholic institutions, and opposed even the sentiments of “Always Our Children”, a pastoral attempt to make sure that gay family members are cared for in the church. And he made no bones about it, writing in 2007:

Those who actively encourage or promote homosexual acts or such activity within a homosexual lifestyle formally cooperate in a grave evil and, if they do so knowingly and willingly, are guilty of mortal sin. They have broken communion with the church and are prohibited from receiving Holy Communion until they have had a conversion of heart, expressed sorrow for their action and received sacramental absolution from a priest.

He cautioned Catholics not to watch Brokeback Mountain:

The story is about two lonely cowboys herding sheep up on a mountain range. One night after a drinking binge, one man makes a pass at the other and within seconds the latter mounts the former in an act of wanton anal sex. This sets off a lustful passion in both men that “grabs hold of them” and which they find impossible to control. Rather than a sad symphony to a beautiful love that our homophobic society will not allow to show itself, this is a human tragedy in which their lust leads to the neglect of their work (i.e. sheep ravaged by wolves during the pair’s frolicking), infidelity against their wives (i.e. divorce, anger and grief) and the psychological harm inflicted on their children (i.e. sadness, alienation and grief).

And became quite an activist:

Before the 2010 midterm elections, Nienstedt turned his attention to the burgeoning gay-marriage movement. He recorded an introduction on a DVD opposing gay marriage, which was sent to four hundred thousand Minnesota Catholics. The same year a Catholic mother wrote to him pleading for acceptance for her gay son. He recommended she consult the Catechism. “Your eternal salvation may well depend upon a conversation of heart on this topic,” he replied. And in 2012, Nienstedt led a coalition of religious leaders pushing for an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Reportedly, Nienstedt committed $650,000 to those efforts.

Speaking of his vocation, Archbishop Nienstedt once declared: “When I was yet a boy, I fell in love with a beautiful woman who was the bride of Christ.”

So I guess you kinda know what’s coming next.

Commonweal has a good round-up of the story. The gist from Grant Gallicho:

Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis is being investigated for “multiple allegations” of inappropriate sexual conduct with seminarians, priests, and other men, according to the archbishop’s former top canon lawyer, Jennifer Haselberger. The investigation is being conducted by a law firm hired by the archdiocese. Nienstedt denies the allegations…

“Based on my interview with Greene Espel—as well as conversations with other interviewees—I believe that the investigators have received about ten sworn statements alleging sexual impropriety on the part of the archbishop dating from his time as a priest in the Archdiocese of Detroit, as Bishop of New Ulm, and while coadjutor and archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” Jennifer Haselberger, [the archbishop’s top canon lawyer who resigned in protest in 2013] told me. What’s more, “he also stands accused of retaliating against those who refused his advances or otherwise questioned his conduct.” …

“I have never engaged in sexual misconduct and certainly have not made any sexual advances toward anyone,” Nienstedt told me. “The allegations are a decade old or more, prior to my service as archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” he continued, emphasizing that “none of the allegations involve minors or illegal or criminal behavior.”

Another case of a truly fucked up gay man who over-compensated by becoming a priest and insisting on Catholic doctrine to the letter?

Or another persecuted theo-conservative who is innocent on all counts?

And the beat goes on …