newspeak

Obama System, ‘the Optimizer,’ Targeted TV Viewers for Support – NYTimes.com.

The history of the successful 2012 Obama campaign, and that of the failed Romney, uhm, effort, is being written. It comes down to differing approaches to “reality,” that is, the actuality of people in their milieu–cultural, social, economic. The evidence from the Republicans points to a culture of utter disregard to reality and belief in their own beliefs. But this, I’ve suggested, is simply symptomatic of the right-wing arc since Reagan, whose “morning in America” cheerfully announced that reality did not matter–a point that swirled in the cultural mind with “don’t worry be happy” like thick honey.

More interesting, and as the article I cite suggests, there is in fact an extraordinary change going on in public political commentary–and to a degree, academic, though I suspect that group has been exasperated for some time by the obtuse reticence to meet reality directly of many in the field. 

That change is the radical move away from an exegetical tactic of interpretation to a numerical analysis. The former is a kind of interpretive appreciation that invokes the critic’s experience, judgement and basic knowledge to arrive at an assertion whose truth value survived not on the basis of its falsifiability (as Nate Silver has pointed out, being wrong, really really wrong, is not fatal to the career of a pundit) as on the supposed plausibility of the account. Plausibility here would mean something like, “yes, that makes intuitive sense” to the reader. Again, not falsifiable, that is, not provable or disprovable, not even by evidence: after all, errors are always possible.

But why be wrong at all? And what does this supposed interpretation give us that is not given better by a rigorous account and rigorous methodology that provides falsifiable–right/wrong–answers? 

About the only thing that the cadre of professional pundits has to claim for itself as valuable is itself. But perhaps there ought to be a reassessment of this claim for value. Because right now, the evidence very strongly suggests that there is a lot more value in looking at the data openly, and with real accountability as to method and outcome, than in gut feelings. Who wants to be wrong when one can be right?

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Call for applications: Web-based course on Participatory Democracy, Urban Management and Crisis Capitalism.

PLOS ONE: The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009.

This is very encouraging!

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today introduces the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license on its 19 NPG-owned academic journals. From December 2012, the CC BY license will be available to authors choosing open access publication options in these journals, in addition to the two non-commercial Creative Commons (CC) licenses currently on offer. This follows NPG’s introduction of a CC BY license option on Scientific Reports in July 2012.

Effective 1 April 2013, Wellcome Trust and RCUK funders will require a CC BY license when they pay open access article processing charges (APCs). NPG intends to offer CC BY options on further open access and ‘hybrid’ journals over the next few months, in keeping with its commitment to author choice and meeting the needs of funders and the research community.

 

However….. The APCs listed are not insignificant. They are a lot. What it means is that the author pays for the privilege of having her article published in a peer-reviewed journal guaranteed to be tracked by colleagues. This means that the cost of publication and distribution (and all other processing fees) is relocated to the author and more accurately, her employer or granting office. As those tend to be in the public sector or private sector money administered by a public sector or independent body (imagine all the scare quotes you want), it refers cost back to those who are in the end benefiting from the knowledge created: us. But what this finally means is that a recognition (and thus responsibility) of the role the public plays and implicitly assumes must be foregrounded. 

And that means moving away from the illusion of the startup market funded by VCs as the source and driver of all value and a more realistic understanding of the complexity of the situation.

But the APC costs:

An APC is levied per article accepted for publication for authors choosing to make their work open access. Authors choosing the CC BY license will pay a premium APC. Full details will be available on nature.com in December and are listed below.

 

….

Press release archive: About NPG.

A Hard Look at U.S. Reactor Hardware After Fukushima – NYTimes.com.

For me, the most interesting point here lies in the acknowledged need to evaluate risk to the populace, even when that risk seems low and costly to diminish. The effort takes the need of communal intervention beyond the valuations the immediate market provides to those that are predicated on very long time scales indeed, as time measures likelihood. It’s an immensely difficult issue to deal with and one that cannot be managed only locally but must be undertaken nationally and even internationally. Thus, international organizations monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, as no one polity can do that alone, and other examples are not hard to come by.

But what about something like nuclear waste? Storing it has been a company obligation, perhaps a sub- or national one, not an international responsibility, at least not that I know of, though nuclear waste is traded, I believe. And what then about carbon waste? Or other byproducts that not only affect the region’s populace and ecology but the globe’s, if not now, eventually?

It’s the “eventually” that needs to be appreciated, for it obviously doesn’t mean status quo until then, nor that prior risk makers are not already affecting us. Just look at global warming and curse our grandparents for not having had the foresight, back when the logic started turning bleak, to prevent the present course.

But governments and communities in general have not imagined their remit has having such a long trajectory. Such future planning is not even taught in graduate schools–at least I don’t think it is. When a building is designed, when a road is paved, a subway tunnel excavated, and so on–is a future of consequence stretching decades ahead imagined? 

No.

But it has to be. It need not be a paresis of the present to do so, either. Fairly simple steps and procedures are likely all that are required, as the main point is to build in to any design the probability of its failure under duress, and to create templates of such instances of duress.

This is perhaps the most important lesson for governments. Listen to your users.

It’s not rocket science, but it bears repeating, since so few governments seem to look at how their citizens actually use their websites when redesigning them. The Code for America team in Honolulu did wonderful work prioritizing links on Honolulu’s site by connecting it to Google Analytics to help discover what citizens were actually looking for. It’s clear that using data to design and prioritize decisions sits at the core of gov.uk. This is a conversation that may make many senior public servants and politicians unhappy as their pet projects, photos and press releases get reshuffled, but it will likely lead to happier citizens that spend less time looking for online government services and more time enjoying life.

via Getting it Right: Gov.uk | TechPresident.

I know I just posted on this, but the point that Dave makes is important and bears repeating: listen to your users. This is not the same as staging focus groups and presenting sets of selected users with options, with establishing formatted personae that they must perforce identify with to exit the process. No: this is about seeing what actual users do, want; and then providing that.

Rhetoric and Reality: Comparing Obama and Romney’s Talking Points versus the Real Role that the Government Plays in Innovation.

It always bothers me that so many Americans (not Canadians or Mexicans) choose to obliviate the role that national and sub-national government has played in the post-WWII economy, especially that enriched by Cold War anxiety. But then I went to UC Berkeley, one of the greatest beneficiaries of cold-sweat money. But this and so much other funding really did make the liberal ideal of knowledge for its own sake possible. And that has, so obviously, enriched any number of ecosystems with new ideas, approaches, and brilliantly educated and inquisitive people.

La Béatrice (Beatrice) by Charles Baudelaire.

I wandered lonely as a Cloud by Wm. Wordsworth

London by Wm. Blake

In reverse chronological order, and I should start, and finish by declaring that Blake’s London is probably the greatest poem written in English, an astonishing performance of economy and simplicity, of situation and relentless affect. There is no loss of immediacy; the opposite: things are too immediate. Wandering, picked up by Wordsworth less than 10 years later, is forcibly cheerful but at what cost!: people. In Blake, the sounds the calls the sensual all of his persona ties always to people, and without metaphor or translational escape. Baudelaire, nods to  Blake, refutes Wordsworth, and all the poetic license of self indulgence, to imagine that in the sight and sound of isolated memory there were not always people.

How Profligate Was the Greek Government? « Multiplier Effect.

Worth reading, along with Yanis Varoufakis‘ works & blog on the Greek situation–which is implicitly a critique of the European project.

Why Apple doesn’t care about its competition | Felix Salmon.

I confess that I’m becoming a Felix S. junkie. He’s right about Apple and his critique of the clueless in their approach to Apple as a mere computer company competing with others is right on:

But if you look at what actual consumers are asking, it turns out that only an ultra-geeky minority is out there weighing up the relative merits of the iPad mini and the Galaxy Note. Note Nick Bilton, today:

Now that the Apple iPad Mini is here, I’m fielding one particular question from friends, family and readers: Which model should I buy?

The point here is that Apple has already done the work of persuading people to buy the iPad mini — it’s done it through many years of creating products which are a pleasure to use.

Which is why the bellyaching about the iPad mini’s pricing is very weird to me. Apple’s job, when it developed this device, was not to create something to compete with the Nook HD+. Rather, it was to build something which fit easily into the existing lineup, right between the iPod Touch and the iPad, and which would delight its customers as much as those two products do. The iPod Touch starts at $300; the iPad starts at $400. And the iPad mini, at $330, is right in between, where it belongs.

He argues a not unrelated point about Chipotle (CMG), where fool analysts (in particular, D. Einhorn) compare it to Taco Bell, in particular its higher-end Cantina. Einhorn is wrong to short CMG and even to imagine that consumers would consider as a choice Chipotle or Taco Bell, however fancier it pretends to get. The distinctions are categorical, and just because both are, to US consumers, “Mexican” “fast food” does not make them at all equivalent.

The issue is an evolution of what counts nowadays for many as a kind of class identifier. It’s not a simplistic one, but one whose thread is not easily broken and which weaves its adherents into a fabric of likes: a community of resilient consumers who rather than acting “rationally” (as Einhorn imagines it), act analytically, and seek to distinguish themselves, to prove their identity, not lose it.