Social Network As Kingmaker

Jonathan Zittrain is concerned about Facebook’s ability to swing elections:

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others’ content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant. (In that spirit, we expect that advertiser-sponsored links and posts will be clearly labeled so as to make them easy to distinguish from the regular ones.) Digital gerrymandering occurs when a site instead distributes information in a manner that serves its own ideological agenda. This is possible on any service that personalizes what users see or the order in which they see it, and it’s increasingly easy to effect.

There are plenty of reasons to regard digital gerrymandering as such a toxic exercise that no right-thinking company would attempt it. But none of these businesses actually promises neutrality in its proprietary algorithms, whatever that would mean in practical terms.

The Scourge Of Women Laughing Alone With Salads, Ctd

A reader quotes Clive Thompson:

If everyone reading this article posted their best snapshots online, we could seed hundreds of thousands of free pictures of real things and real people in the real world. The true cure for stock photography is inside your camera phone.

This theory would imply that the reason stock photography is so cliche is because photographers aren’t supplying the right photos. The problem is that advertisers are saladlooking for cliche photos. They are looking for diverse people who look happy, authoritative, or whatever other image the advertiser is trying to convey. Photographers are just supplying what advertisers want.

Even if that weren’t the case, it’s not as simple as posting your photos on Flickr and setting the license. If the photo is for commercial use, as most stock photos are, then you have to have model releases from everybody in the photo. If you don’t, then whoever uses your photos would put themselves at risk for a lawsuit from the people in the photo.

Finally, this whole concept is hugely denigrating to photographers. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to create the kind of photos you see in stock art. A random person with their phone isn’t going to be able to produce similar quality work. It would be like saying that the solution to a broken news media is for everybody to post their independent journalism on Facebook (for free naturally).

Update from another reader:

Did Clive Thompson get paid for his rant about stock photos?

If so, then I have to wonder why he’s so willing to give away photos but not give away words. He completely avoids the ethical issues raised by his suggestion.

The reason stock photos are horrible and also ubiquitous is that people just don’t want to pay photographers, and some photographers have been reduced to playing a numbers game by generating endless generic photos. It reduces photography to a numbers game and is the equivalent of being paid by the click. (I realize some places have to deal with agencies, as the Dish does, but you aren’t posting the genuinely meaningless stock photos that are common elsewhere.) I worked with photographers for years, and I think firing photographers so we can look at stupid stock photos or amateur photos from Flickr was cheap and disrespectful, and suggesting that the unpleasant outcome of devaluing their work is somehow improved by using more free work from amateurs is even more insulting. True, there are many excellent amateur photographers, but there are many excellent amateurs pursuing many artistic hobbies. Thompson says that waiting for new-and-improved-stock photos by the pros will take too long, but that’s only because so many professionals have been dumped. Hire them back.

(Photo: A non-stock image from WLAWS)

Hathos Alert

“Then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. And then I wrote a column on Hillary,” – Maureen Dowd, almost.

On a more serious note, it has long since seemed to me to be reckless to have edible candy pot so readily available. It can entice children unless it’s kept in a very secure place; dosage can be much harder to gauge; and strength impossible to predict, especially for newbies like MoDo who are dumb enough to scarf a bunch without thinking too much. I have absolutely no objections to tightening up regulation of edibles considerably.

Has Fat Gotten A Bad Rap?

A new book claims so:

[The Big Fat Surprise author Nina] Teicholz describes the early academics who demonised fat and those who have kept up the crusade. Top among them was Ancel Keys, a professor at the University of Minnesota, whose work landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. He provided an answer to why middle-aged men were dropping dead from heart attacks, as well as a solution: eat less fat. Work by Keys and others propelled the American government’s first set of dietary guidelines, in 1980. Cut back on red meat, whole milk and other sources of saturated fat. The few sceptics of this theory were, for decades, marginalised.

But the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky.

Mashable interviewed Teicholz, who argues that “we’ve shifted too far in the carbohydrate direction”:

Mashable: So, is the takeaway that you can eat as much bacon, butter and steak as you want?

Teicholz: It sounds extreme when you put it that way. What the science really shows is that a high-fat diet is healthier than a low-fat diet. So the takeaway for me is that it’s fine as part of that high-fat diet to eat meat, cheese, milk and eggs. I think if 40% of your diet is fat, that’s fine.

In an excerpt from her book, Teicholz claims that, for “the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal”:

Ironically—or perhaps tellingly—the heart disease “epidemic” began after a period of exceptionally reduced meat eating. The publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized exposé of the meatpacking industry, caused meat sales in the United States to fall by half in 1906, and they did not revive for another 20 years.

In other words, meat eating went down just before coronary disease took off. Fat intake did rise during those years, from 1909 to 1961, when heart attacks surged, but this 12 percent increase in fat consumption was not due to a rise in animal fat. It was instead owing to an increase in the supply of vegetable oils, which had recently been invented.

David Katz calls Teicholz’s arguments “nonsense.” He insists that “more meat, butter and cheese will not promote your health“:

We are flying in circles. If we had reduced our intake of meat, butter and cheese by eating more vegetables, nuts, fruits and legumes — we might be living in a Blue Zone by now. But we didn’t and we aren’t. We just started eating more starch and sugar. As we all know, America runs on Dunkin’ — tell them what they’ve won, Johnny!

So now, we can add back meat, butter and cheese (the consequences to the planet be damned, apparently) — and then what? We’ll be back where we were when we first recognized we weren’t where we wanted to be. After all, if our meaty, cheesy, buttery diets had been making us lean, healthy and happy in the first place — why ever would we have changed them?

So it’s “more meat” for the myopic, who can’t see far enough back to realize we’ve been there, done that — and it didn’t work out so well for us last time. It’s “more cheese” for the chumps who don’t recognize that the next great diet is one we’ve tried before. In fact, the title of the book by the Wall Street Journal columnist is almost shockingly like the title of Taubes’ piece in the New York Times Magazine from 12 years ago. In 12 years, our progress is nicely captured by going from a “big fat lie” to a “big fat surprise.” We fly in circles, and our kids pay the price.

Getting The Frozen Shoulder

Elias Muhanna questions Disney’s decision to translate Frozen into Modern Standard Arabic:

Modern Standard Arabic is even less similar to regional Arabic dialects than the English of the King James Bible is to the patter of an ESPN sportscaster. … Why Disney decided to abandon dialectal Arabic for “Frozen” is perplexing, and the reaction has been mixed. Many YouTube viewers are annoyed, with some fans recording their own versions of the songs in dialect. An online petition has called for Disney to switch its dubbing back to Egyptian Arabic, plaintively wondering, “How can we watch ‘Monsters University’ in the Heavy Modern Arabic while we saw the first one in Egyptian accent that everybody loved…?”

How indeed? Or perhaps the real question is: Why? Why is Disney willing to commission separate translations of its films for speakers of Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, European French and Canadian French, but is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to Arabic?

The Arabist suspects there is a business rationale:

I suspect it has more to do with the low profitability of Arabic dialect market segments (because of high rates of piracy, etc.) and the dominance of the [The Gulf Cooperation Council] market in business decisions about entertainment – and that market being used to [Modern Standard Arabic] being used as a standard for dubbing (they finance it, after all).

Blinded By Pride

Will Butler, who is legally blind, hid his handicap for as long as possible:

The cane stayed in storage. To me, it signified defeat, so I kept it out of sight at college, social events, job interviews — everywhere.

After college, I moved to San Francisco. My vision became worse, but I still took pride in faking normal — even if it caused more problems. At restaurants, I’d ask about the menu, and waiters would point to it, exasperated. I never tipped for coffee, because I couldn’t locate the tip jar. I failed to yield on dark sidewalks, terrifying fellow pedestrians. And I was tortured by my inability to recognize faces. I imagined my reputation crashing and burning as I passed acquaintances on the street, unwittingly snubbing them.

Late one night, desperate and unable to find a restroom, I ducked into a quiet parking lot to relieve myself. Voices shouted at me through the darkness. I turned to flee but couldn’t move fast enough. Soon I was sitting on the curb, staring blankly as two police officers informed me that I had urinated on their station house. They didn’t believe I was blind. (“Where’s your stick?”)

Fear The Tempest In A Teacup

Ed Yong takes note of “a simple fact with an uncertain explanation: historically, hurricanes with female names have, on average, killed more people than those with male ones”:

Kiju Jung from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign made this discovery after Screen Shot 2014-06-03 at 11.36.23 AManalyzing archival data about the 94 hurricanes that hit the US between 1950 and 2012. As they write, “changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple its death toll.” …

[The] Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity. Thanks to these biases, people might take greater precautions to protect themselves from Hurricane Victor, while reacting more apathetically to Hurricane Victoria. “These kinds of implicit biases routinely affect the way actual men and women are judged in society,” says Sharon Shavitt, who helped to design the study. “It appears that these gender biases can have deadly consequences.”

Michael Silverberg elaborates:

By rating each hurricane name on a scale of how gendered it was—the most masculine names received 1; girliest names scored an 11—the authors created what they called a “masculine-feminine index.” (Hurricane Judd would likely be rated close to a 1, while Hurricane Anastasia would come in around 11. A more androgynously named Hurricane Sam would presumably fall somewhere in the middle.)

The storms with the highest loss of life also happened to score closer to 11 on the MFI. Follow-up experiments confirmed a correlation between gender and perceived risk. In one such study, participants were asked to rate the destructiveness of a hypothetical storm given a male or female name. They consistently found Hurricane Victor much more menacing than Hurricane Victoria.

But the issue may not be so cut-and-dry:

According to Jeff Lazo, an economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, there are many factors that influence storm-preparedness decisions, from prior experience with storms to socio-demographics. “Trying to suggest that a major factor in this is the gender name of the event with a very small sample of real events… is a very big stretch,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I feel that their analysis has basically shown that individuals respond to gender. I am not sure it has applicability to hurricane response. I certainly would not base policy decisions on this study alone,” he said.

Melissa Dahl is also skeptical:

The numbers here just aren’t sturdy enough. The researchers analyzed death rates from hurricanes over the last six decades – but until 1979, hurricanes were only given feminine names. So it’s a bit of a stretch to use three decades of female-only names to reach the conclusion that storms with ladylike names caused more death and destruction. Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, expressed skepticism in an e-mail:

If you look at their archival study, you’ll see that their coefficient was not statistically significant!  That doesn’t mean the effect isn’t there, but it does mean that their sample sizes are low, and when you’re talking about hurricane deaths, you don’t have the data to say much more conclusive than that.

Moreover, as Gelman noted, there could be other reasons people react differently to the names – one of the names used in the experiments was “Big Bertha,” for example, which likely brings to mind the nickname “Big Bertha.” (Sure enough, “Bertha” was rated scarier than Arthur, Cristobal, Kyle, and Marco.)

Former National Hurricane Center director Bill Read sees other issues at play:

While the gender bias is likely real, I don’t think it plays a significant role in human response to an approaching landfall. The test conducted for the study involved people who were not under the stress of an approaching hurricane. As quoted in the article, while necessary to eke out the gender difference, it leaves me with the need to know if is this factor significant, or is it very minor in the mix of all other societal and event driven responses. My experience with Rita (massive (over) response to evacuation orders) and Ike (less than ideal response) is a point in fact. In the case of Rita (sweet female), the events three weeks earlier due to Katrina were cited as a contributing factor to over reaction. For Ike (bad boy male), the horrific evacuation for Rita was cited as a reason for under response. I used to think, and still do with caveats, that a more important driver is how strong the storm is at the time action is required. Rita was a Cat 4 heading to 5 when decision time came. Ike was a Cat 2. These two real world events had exactly the opposite response one would expect from the gender bias paper.

(Image hat tip: Alex Lobo)

Should Washington Rank Colleges? Ctd

Several readers sound off:

From inside higher ed (at the community college level), there are several problems with college rankings. First, everyone already knows which is better than what. Four-year research institutions (Duke, Stanford) are better than four-year liberal arts schools, which are equal to or better than four-year state schools, which are better than two-year schools. Our school charges $100 a credit; Temple University charges roughly $800 a credit. Why? Because they can and we can’t. I highly doubt our school costing one-eighth the per year total will rank in the government rankings as “a better buy” than Temple or Drexel, much less the University of Pennsylvania.

Second, public tax support has collapsed over the last 40 years.

Technically (as in legally and constitutionally from the founding of the college), the state and the county are supposed to provide 66 percent of our operating budget, with the school providing the rest. Currently, public funds provide less than half that. Consequently, salaries and benefits have stagnated, forcing the school to rely more on adjuncts and forcing the young and the talented to look elsewhere. Tuition has gone up, shutting out the poorest students from public education.

If the federal government is going to rate us, what about forcing the states and counties to adhere to their obligations? How well can we do with one-third of the support we’ve been promised?

Also, be aware that 80 percent of our students come out of high school without the ability to read, write, or do math at grade level. Our Reading 1 is a third-grade reading level and has 15 percent of our students. Math 1 is basic fourth grade arithmetic – 20 percent of our students are in that. We have high numbers of poor students, immigrant students, and first-generation students, and increasing numbers of special education students, all of whom are expensive to educate and many of whom would not even have been in college 40 years ago when public funding was comparatively greater. Will all of that figure in?

The third factor is that politics and money go hand in hand. Is anyone seriously thinking Harvard won’t get an A? Princeton won’t be tops in everything? Is anyone really going to say Stanford or Duke should be $10K a year? Is anyone going to force the states to fully finance their obligations? The crisis in public pensions suggests not. And even if the whiff of possibility arose – especially for highly financed politically active “for profit” charters/colleges – we have the Indiana example of changing grades to help donors. So who is it really helping? What’s the play?

Another reader:

I understand that there are predatory administrators, that there are colleges offering terrible returns on investment, and that the whole system suffers from structural inequality. These are real concerns, especially for those in the worst situations. But rarely does the conversation turn to what education is supposed to achieve, or what its goals might actually be. Despite the great hubbub about educational reform, about new techniques of education, about technology in the classroom, the underlying thought remains the same: education is what we do in order to get money.

It beggars the modern imagination to think that someone might offer up some (or even all) of their material well-being in order to get an education which does not immediately result in more material well-being. A person considering getting a liberal education, particularly in a field without firm practical applications, is considered slightly daft – or is granted a pardon on account of already being rich. But this underscores the problem. Liberal education has become a luxury of the rich, rather than a prerequisite for free people living in a free society.

I don’t have a policy recommendation or a favored author (save maybe Plato) to tout. This problem is as large as the world and as complicated as people themselves. But I do think, before we start enumerating the virtues of our colleges and, thereby, driving a stake through the heart of “impractical” liberal education, that we should stop to consider what we hold highest.

Another’s two cents:

I’m an engineering professor. I have indeed seen colleges do unwise things with funds. I am a little bit concerned, though, about university ranking systems because they can drive unintended consequences. The proliferation of fancy sports facilities, for example, was in some measure a response to the US News rankings. Universities compete for students. Those that are highly ranked get more and better students, and they can justify higher tuition. If state support is going to disappear (as it pretty much has already in some states), we have to expect universities to market themselves and rankings to drive the marketing. I cannot predict how exactly, but I know this will not end well.

Update from a reader:

In regards to the person who seemingly works at the Community College of Philadelphia, where he/she commented that they charge $100 a credit whereas Temple University charges $800, simply because Temple can.  C’mon, that’s an apples and oranges comparison. Temple is a university that can bestow graduate and doctoral degrees, is a world-class research center, has or at least had some of the top schools in the country for communications, education, art, has a medical center graduating nurses, NPs, PAs, doctors, and dentist. A law school that is ranked #2 for trial advocacy and #11 for international law. Provides on campus housing for 12,000 students, is the force behind the revitalization of North Philadelphia (it can be debated how much the local community benefits but it is vastly improving). As with other major institutions of learning it also provides for a whole range of extracurricular activities from sports programs to a radio station.

I’m not knocking CCs; a lot of student wisely choose them to knock out their core requirements at a lower cost. I doubt there is any noticeable difference between what you can learn from History 101 at Temple or at CCP. But TU (and other major institutions) charge that rate because they offer more than just History 101, they provide access to many more courses than one could get at a CC, access  to top rate research centers, professors, in the case of TU campuses in Japan and Europe, to some extent connections (TU has over 250,000 alumni), sporting events, concerts, the social life, etc. etc.

Is it overpriced and is that price set simply to cover the cost of education? I don’t know. I do think universities have bloated their administrative staffs to unprecedented levels and that payroll expense is passed on to the student base. Probably more so at the Ivies than anywhere else, you’re paying to have that name and the connections and opportunities it provides on your resume. I think you can make the argument that there’s not much of a difference, scholastically, between a Princeton and TU, but to imply that a CC and a University are on the same level except for the course fees is a bit ridiculous.

(And full disclosure, yes, I am a TU grad, as is my wife and all 3 of her siblings. But I’m not arguing specifically for TU, you could replace the schools with University of RI and RICC and the argument stands.)

The Best Of The Dish Today

Perhaps the real “scandal” in the Bowe Bergdahl affair was simply optics. The administration – including Hagel and POTUS – seemed to think a prisoner release would be unalloyed good news, without fully absorbing what servicemembers had learned about Bergdahl and the resentment his apparent AWOL and possibly deserter status had generated. Chuck Todd even reports that they expected euphoria. Allahpundit writes:

This seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding by the White House of military culture. If soldiers had reacted the way O expected, celebrating the release of a POW, it really would have tamped down the criticism of Bergdahl. For obvious reasons: If the men who risk their lives defending America are willing to forgive him and welcome his return, who are the rest of us to question him? But that’s not how the men who served with him reacted; in fact, unless I missed it, not a single member of Bergdahl’s unit has spoken up in his defense. Obama gambled heavily that both veterans and the media would keep quiet. He lost.

But that doesn’t, of course, get to the core of the issue: should the president have seized a chance to rescue the service-member or not? When you posit the alternative – leaving the guy with apparently iffy health in enemy hands for ever – you can see the POW flags flying everywhere. So, yes, on this as on many issues, the president cannot win. I’m sure he’s used to that by now.

Today, I tried to absorb the news of a mass grave of 800 neglected children in a septic tank – victims of a brutal, evil Catholic legacy in Ireland and of the sexual teachings that have so come to distort Christianity. And we explored the actual costs of curtailing coal’s damage to the planet.

Plus: shit-faced monkeys; the delights of smoking cigarettes; the college adviser who wants you to kill yourself; and Jonah Hill’s impersonation of Alec Baldwin.

The most popular posts of the day were The Palin Tendency and Bowe Bergdahl, followed by Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity.

Several of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 27 more readers became subscribers today, and we’re so close to 29,000 mark – only 31 short. Subscribe here to get us there by midnight. (And drop us an email; we always like hearing from new subscribers.)

See you in the morning.

How To Forget An Atrocity

Beijing is on lockdown as tomorrow’s 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square approaches:

Government control and interference is evident every year around the anniversary. China has referred to June 4 as “Internet maintenance day,” taking so many sites down for “fixes” that it is unclear which sites are being targeted with restrictions, reports The Washington Post. But this year, the crackdown has reached new levels.

Amnesty International reports arrests and detentions have been on the rise. Scores of activists, lawyers, students, academics, and relatives of those killed in 1989 have been detained, put under house arrest, or questioned, reports Time. Security around the public square has been so strict that tourists have had security officials bar them from the grounds, reports Time. Google services – including Gmail and translation services ­– have been interrupted since late last week, reports Bloomberg.

Lily Kuo remarks on how successfully the Chinese government has erased the events of June 4, 1989 from the collective memory:

[C]ontrary to what some activists might have hoped, the state-mandated erasure of the incident has been extremely effective. Only 15 out of 100 university students in Beijing recognize the iconic picture of “Tank Man” a demonstrator blocking the path of a line of tanks, according to The People’s Republic of Amnesia, a new book on the topic by NPR correspondent Louisa Lim. …

Scouring the Chinese internet for references to June 4 has become an annual event for the government’s censors, but this year’s efforts have gone further than ever before. All Google services in China, including gmail, are now being blocked on the mainland. … As in previous years, even circuitous mentions of June 4 on social media—including the Chinese characters for six and four together, for the date of June 4, the search term “four, open fire” or “25 years“— are being swiftly deleted by censors. China’s version of Wikipedia, Baike, has no entry for the entire year of 1989.

An anonymous Tea Leaf Nation contributor explains why the Internet has not made it any easier for Chinese youth to talk about the crackdown:

The immense interest among those jiulinghou [Chinese children of the 90s] who are in the know has not translated into active discussion, let alone action. Not all of us think it was wrong to use force against the protesters. And we certainly do not all think China should adopt Western-style democracy. But whatever our views are, we dare not openly discuss them online, in public forums, or even in private chats. And since the Internet is where my generation goes to communicate, we are essentially deprived of the chance to engage in civil discourse.

The Internet has chilled an honest reckoning with Tiananmen, not enabled it. While the web has given rise to a level of pluralism China has never seen before, and minted new, grassroots opinion leaders, it has also made everything we write, both in public and in private, more easily surveilled. Before the digital era, officials didn’t have the ability to eavesdrop on every conversation. But now, if I post something politically sensitive online, the conversation is digitally recorded. Everything becomes part of our permanent record.

But Ellen Bork suggests that “China’s communist leaders may find their efforts to suppress memory backfire”:

According to Min Xin Pei, a scholar of totalitarian transitions at Claremont McKenna College, half of China’s population was born after 1976. They don’t remember the chaotic and violent Cultural Revolution in which millions were sent to perform manual labor in the countryside, as marauding Red Guards sowed paranoia among family and friends. Might this contribute to a change of rule one day? “The basis of rule of all authoritarian regimes is one simple fact—fear,” Pei told an audience at the National Endowment for Democracy. “A psychological shift can come very very quickly.” What that shift will bring, no one can say for sure. But the world will have had at least 25 years to prepare for it.

Meanwhile, Heather Timmons contrasts the mainland’s information blackout with the scene in Hong Kong, where the event is well remembered:

Hong Kong is gearing up for its annual candlelight vigil to mark the anniversary, which is expected to attract more than 150,000 people. Local universities are sponsoring exhibitions and talks by witnesses and journalists (including the “Tank Guy” photographer). The Foreign Correspondents Club is screening a documentary featuring interviews with witnesses and journalists who covered the protests.

On a more personal scale, hundreds of groups of Hong Kong families and friends are expected to gather in their homes on the evening of June 4 to commemorate the event. That will include many people from mainland China, tens of thousands of whom have obtained Hong Kong residency since 1989. At the candlelight event, “in recent years we have noticed more people from mainland China,” said Richard Tsoi, the vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.