The war on data

I've been sitting on this for a while, trying to decide how best to weave it into one of our ongoing threads about the increasingly blatant attacks on important scientific research, about how the conservative movement's experiment in information management has broken down causing the propaganda and conspiracy theories intended for the foot soldiers to propagate among the generals, about the ever clearer absurdity of the establishment press's insistence that both parties are equally to blame.

But there is simply too much here. Just read it.

The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee by David Roberts

This American Life had two thirds of a great episode on marketing

Don't get me wrong. The whole episode (569: Put a Bow on It) is very good, but only two of the three segments concern branding and marketing. The first explores the process behind developing the increasingly bizarre junk food hybrids that are coming to dominate the industry.

Zoe Chace
There are a few reasons that guys like these are churning through these food mashups right now. One big one is fast food is losing market share to places like Chipotle, Panera, more upscale, healthier. So a way for fast food to compete is to go in the other direction-- downscale, greasier, sell to their core customers, 18 to 34-year-old guys. Though industry analysts told me it's nearly as many women as men.

And of course, there's money to be made in selling a sandwich that makes people want to take a picture of themselves while they eat it, but only to a point. The question is, will they eat it twice? The Double Down, you know the one where the chicken is the bun, as groundbreaking as it was, it didn't sell that great after people tried it once. Brad, Bruce, Mark, and Eric say it's too expensive to roll out a new product that you'd never order twice.

Newscaster
This is a taco that's the talk of the town.

Zoe Chace
What they want is something that food industry people say Taco Bell did better than anybody in 2012, when they released that taco whose shell was a Dorito.

Newscaster
It's what one marketing consultant calls a marriage made in belly busting heaven. Doritos, the Super Bowl brand that helped turn America into a nation of chunky chip munchers, providing a nacho cheese flavored shell.

Zoe Chace
The Doritos Locos Taco sold and sold and sold and sold-- $375 million in its first year. This is an amazing year for Taco Bell. Every sandwich that arrives on our plates here in Hardee's test kitchen, that is the goal.

From a marketing standpoint, the most interesting part was the way the experts considered both the appeal of the food and the salability of the concept.

Even more fascinating from a marketing perspective is the third segment. TAL called up the best advertising and PR people in the business and asked them what they would propose if Volkswagen had engaged them to rehabilitate its badly damaged brand. There is a Jack in the Box connection with both segments, but surprisingly it's stronger in the third (strong enough that you might want to check out the videos before listening to the episode).

Obscure comic book heroes battle (the idea of) cost disease

Before we get started, one big caveat: the piece I'm linking to seems to be based on rumors and speculation. Back in the Nineteenth Century, newspaper stories often started with the disclaimer "Important if true." For stories like this, we probably start with "interesting if true."

Fans of the DC Television Universe might have some reason to worry. While the creation of the first season of Legends of Tomorrow is underway, it has come out that the CW may have overextended themselves in regards to budget. It seems that the first season of the Legends of Tomorrow is more expensive than the network originally anticipated. Intel from Bleeding Cool is now claiming that the CW may be nixing the idea of a second season, knowing that show will likely continue to become more expensive as it grows. Yikes.

...

What is it about Legends of Tomorrow that makes it so much more expensive than its predecessor? I can only imagine the multitude of visual and special effects are what is taking such a toll on its budget. Afterall, in a show that revolves around time travel, and where each protagonist has a unique set of superpowers, the effects team must have their hands full. Maybe having one superpowered lead in both Arrow and The Flash allowed for a more budget-friendly production, rather than having to stretch funds across a baker's dozen worth of heroes.

Assuming both the rumor and the speculation are sound (and there's lots of other evidence that Hollywood has a growing problem with budget spirals), this raises some perplexing questions.

These days, the explanation de jour for cost spirals is...

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are closely tied to labor productivity changes.

If there's an economist in house, I'd greatly appreciate a knowledgeable take on this, but it would seem we should a disproportionate amount of money going to the people who have had the smallest gains in productivity.

As mentioned before, technology has improved productivity in film and video by orders of magnitude. These changes have affected every part of the industry but the biggest jump has been in what used to be called special effects. Ray Harryhausen's standard answer to the question "can you do ______" was that he could do anything if given the time and the money, and that was largely true. What has changed is mainly speed and cost.

Here's the weird part, though. The budgets are usually spiraling out of control not because studios are spending that much more on people like writers (whose productivity hasn't grown that much), but because they are pouring money into those areas where productivity has exploded.

XKCD polio

In addition to making an important point about an important world health initiative, Randall Munroe does a beautiful job satirizing the common impulse to abandon the effective for the trendy.

Argument by outlier

Perhaps "argument" is going a bit far -- the ideas don't really cohere enough to qualify for that -- but you have to grant the outlier part.

Kevin Carey has just discovered that people who stack up normal debt getting a bachelor's, then take out more loans to go to law school and don't graduate, then take out more loans to go to grad school and don't graduate (and also use student loans for other things like child care), then get a life-threatening autoimmune disease, then get screwed in a divorce and then take a string of low paying jobs and make a number of really bad financial decisions can rack up quite a tab.

We should probably stop here for now. There is nothing instructive in the case of Carey's example, Liz Kelley. The only lesson one can reasonably draw here is that people with bad luck and incredibly bad judgement tend to fare poorly in life.

Joseph and I are planning to come back to the rest of Carey's hopelessly muddled reasoning later. That's not to say that everything he says is wrong (life is not a knight/knave puzzle). The system is horrible, just not necessarily for the reasons he gives. Subsidizing higher education through student loans creates all sorts of perverse incentives, it sends too much money to undeserving institutions and it allows a few people like Kelley to spend far too much taxpayer money. It isn't difficult to argue against this system, but if the NYT Upshot wants to maintain its reputation, the paper should probably find someone other than Carey to make the case.

Kruzno -- the beta

Back when I was teaching secondary mathematics, I made extensive use of games and puzzles. In addition to building a pretty good collection, I also developed a few of my own. Of the board games for the, the one that played the best and got the most positive feedback was a hexagonal checkers variant called Kruzno.

A while back, I decided to put together a beta version of the game and see what kind of response it got. I commissioned a well qualified and quite reasonable professional to do the art. I had a local company produce a small run of boards and boxes, but I decided to forgo custom pieces and instead stick with chessmen which were available off-the-shelf (it is far easier to do a small inexpensive batch of paper products then plastic products).

The project has since been pushed to the back burner, at least until I have the time to put together a mobile version of the game. In the meantime, I decided to set up a fulfillment-by-Amazon store (which is a surprisingly low maintenance option if you want to try some small scale retailing).

I hate to oversell a beta, but I am quite proud of the game and besides, every house should have a hex board. I will be going up the abstract strategy thread again both here and at the teaching site, so if any of the upcoming discussions make you curious, drop by the Amazon page and take a look.

I haven't posted this in a while...

... which is a shame because there's a useful lesson here: even the guy with an axe draws the line somewhere.

I actually knew "Entrance of the Gladiators"

Just recently I was thinking how nice it is living in an age that has largely eradicated the nagging question. I am not talking about big, important questions like but rather trivial ones like "who said that?" or "what's the name of that song?" or "where have I seen that actor before?"

Before Google and Wikipedia and smart phones, life for many of us was a constant itching sensation of trying to recall some obscure name or fact. Of course, search engines do work better with lyrics, which is why these two lists of instrumentals are so nice.

Happy Black Friday

I got up at four in the morning just to get a drop on all of the other Black Friday bloggers.

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. .

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

Breaking news: New York Times spots naked emperor at GOP royal court

[In case you missed the naked emperor thread up until now, click here, here and here.]

As mentioned before, the establishment press, as always best represented by the New York Times, is on the horns of a dilemma. The thought of Donald Trump getting the Republican nomination for president is unthinkable for any number of reasons. Unfortunately however, virtually all of Trump's abuses and his most offensive tactics were made possible by years of declining journalistic standards at the very same institutions now decrying him. As a result, they cannot effectively criticize Trump without acknowledging their own role in his creation.

We need mea culpas and instead we get exercises in self-justification and selective memory like this recent NYT op-ed:

Mr. Trump relies on social media to spread his views. This is convenient because there’s no need to respond to questions about his fabrications. That makes it imperative that other forms of media challenge him.

I actually laughed out loud when I read that one. The asking of challenging questions has long been the exception, almost entirely reserved for safe targets. For a variety of reasons, the original three establishment GOP candidates were able to say nearly anything without danger of follow-up. Bush's 4%. Rubio's vanishing refundable tax credit. Walker's numerous scandals.

It wasn't just this paragraph. Throughout the entire piece, the rest of the GOP goes unmentioned other than one brief generic reference to the "Republican field." Someone unfamiliar with the campaign might come away with the impression that Trump is the only Republican candidate spreading debunked lies, using alarmist rhetoric, and playing on the Islamophobia of the base.

The editorial board of the NYT must be aware that Rubio (the wonky but cute one) is talking about civilizational struggles and comparing Muslims to Nazis. Kasich is "proposing a new federal agency to spread Judeo-Christian values throughout the world as a way to combat the Islamic State." Bush is for accepting refugees along as they're mainly Christian. Cruz is... oh, hell, do I even need to go there?

Institutions like the New York Times are still looking for ways to be selective in their condemnation of bigotry and dishonesty, avoiding examples that highlight their own complicity. This makes their arguments ineffective (not to mention maddeningly smug).

[typo fixed]

Bateman on the Turkey/Russia standoff

Like I said before, if you want an informed opinion...

At least Krauthammer's position on Eastasia remains consistent

We've already started a thread on the conservative media establishment actually being primarily partisan rather than ideologically conservative, resulting in, among other things, sharp turns on various issues when partisan interests shift. I've also been meaning to start a thread on the effects of feeding your party core a steady stream, not just of lies but of mutually contradictory misinformation. I'd argue that, to understand the Tea Party, you have to consider the tension and pent-up anger caused by all the resulting cognitive dissonance.

When I finally get around to making that argument, I need to remember to mention this sharp and funny piece by Jonathan Chait even though we aren't in complete agreement. What he puts down to nationalism, I see as a cynical attempt to manipulate the base. I strongly doubt that Charles Krauthammer and company "fervently believe" much of anything they say on Fox News.

Extreme nationalism, by its nature, requires its adherents to form judgments about the nature of foreign countries that are clear-cut, but also wildly inconsistent over time, as the interests and alliances of one’s own country inevitably mutate. The current state of right-wing thought has gone beyond the natural sympathy one might feel toward the people of France in the wake of the barbaric murders in Paris toward a new line best expressed by Charles Krauthammer, the leading party theorist. “If the other goal of the Paris massacre was to frighten France out of the air campaign in Syria — the way Spain withdrew from the Iraq war after the terrorist attack on its trains in 2004 — they picked the wrong country,” writes Krauthammer. “France is a serious post-colonial power, as demonstrated in Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic and Mali, which France saved from an Islamist takeover in 2013.” Those French colors don’t run.

Conservatives who now fervently believe they have always been the strongest of allies with France may need to expunge from their memory certain unpleasant events of the past. In the run-up to the Iraq War, nationalist fervor expressed itself in no small measure through intense hatred of that very same country, which represented everything they despised: generous social-welfare provisions, (alleged) cowardice, an attachment to diplomacy and international institutions. House Republicans officially changed the name of their cafeteria’s French fries to “freedom fries.” France was the heart of what Don Rumsfeld derisively called “Old Europe” and the subject of a 2004 book entitled Our Oldest Enemy, authored by a senior editor at National Review. Its essential qualities were treason and cowardice, its outsize role in world affairs a tragic relic.

The highbrow version of this theory was elucidated by Krauthammer. “France pretends to great-power status but hasn't had it in 50 years. It was given its permanent seat on the Security Council to preserve the fiction that heroic France was part of the great anti-Nazi alliance rather than a country that surrendered and collaborated,” he wrote in 2003. “Why in God's name would we want to re-empower the French in deciding the post-war settlement?” he asked. It sought to form “a French-led coalition of nations challenging the hegemony of American power and the legitimacy of American dominance,” a treacherous scheme Krauthammer traced back to Charles de Gaulle. Now France is a “serious post-colonial power,” its decades of anti-American scheming forgiven and forgotten.

Little Nemo Meets Lieutenant Kijé -- Having fun with Kdenlive

Back in the late 90s, I picked up some extra money producing a set of videotapes to accompany a college algebra textbook. They were the most God awful things you ever saw, but the publisher didn't care as long as they had some kind of media to accompany their books and the check was large enough to pay off  the last 5K on my car.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, if you wanted to make a video, unless you had a tremendous amount of money and cutting-edge equipment, you had to do it linearly. Imagine three large, professional grade VCRs stacked on top of each other, two for the source and one for the recording. Next to that would be a large pile of tapes. For every shot you needed, you would have to dig through that pile, fast forward to the part you wanted, hit the preview button, make sure you had what you expected, then hit record.

And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

That record button, by the way, represented a real commitment. This was linear editing. If you decided later to make a change at the beginning of the tape, you pretty much had to scrap all the work that came afterwards.


Now jump forward about a dozen years. You get a decent desktop computer for less than $300, spend another hundred on video editing software (or put a Linux based operating system on it and download an open source editor). You are now looking at perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude improvement in speed, cost, training and functionality. Shift your time frame a bit and you see the same jump across virtually all media.

Every now and then I do some video editing on my old computer which is currently running Windows/Kubuntu. I might put together some footage for a musician friend or just play around for my own amusement. I don't really know what I'm doing but the software I'm using -- Kdenlive (KDE Non-Linear Video Editor) -- is remarkably intuitive, so even after a year or so of inactivity, it takes very little time to get back up to speed.

As for the video above, I was looking through an online collection of  Winsor McCay's still stunning Turn-of-the-Century Nemo pages. As I was studying a couple of the winter-themed cartoons, Prokofiev's troika kept running through my head. I downloaded a public domain recording from the Internet Archive, did a rough storyboard then just started trying things.

Even among the free-software options, Kdenlive is probably not the best tool for making one of these pan and zoom videos, but it's more than adequate and it replaces what would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment twenty years ago.
I'm reasonably happy with the results, but that's not why I'm posting this.  The important point here is that what would have been a big, expensive project requiring trained specialists less than twenty years ago is now an afternoon project for a complete amateur using technology that pretty much everyone has or has access to.

We are living in what appears to be the second great media revolution. The first occurred around the turn of the last century when we actually learned how to record video and sound and how to transmit the latter (and made real strides toward transmitting the former). This is the lesser of the two revolutions, but not by that much. In terms of genuinely new functionality, it is almost impossible to beat that first surge, but in terms of cost, speed, portability and ease-of-use, we aren't doing bad at all.

This is not a post

Specifically this is not a post about Gerard Alexander's New York Times op-ed “Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness.”  Andrew Gelman just did a post on Alexander's piece over at the Monkey Cage, which is probably more attention than it deserves. For me to write another post, would require a careful rereading of the original op-ed to pick apart the rhetorical flaws and to select the most representative quotes. That's a lot of miles in the middle seat of the clown car (particularly when you aren't being paid for the trip).

So this is not a post. Instead, this is something of an unsolicited postscript to Gelman's post, especially this:

A characteristic feature of polarization seems to be the impression that one’s own side is reasonable and that all the polarizing comes from the other side of the political aisle.
I came across an amusing example of this today, ironically from a political scientist, Gerard Alexander, who, in an op-ed entitled, “Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness,” writes:

Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different.

This is just too perfect. It’s a beautiful paradox. If Alexander is right, then there is an important asymmetry in American politics, which is the thing that he’s saying conservatives don’t believe! If he’s wrong, then there is no asymmetry, which is what he’s saying conservatives believe in the first place. It’s like something out of Lewis Carroll.

And a bit later:

Also this, from Alexander:

My strongest memory of Mr. Stewart, like that of many other conservatives, is probably going to be his 2010 interview with the Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Mr. Yoo had served in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and had drafted memos laying out what techniques could and couldn’t be used to interrogate Al Qaeda detainees. Mr. Stewart seemed to go into the interview expecting a menacing Clint Eastwood type, who was fully prepared to zap the genitals of some terrorist if that’s what it took to protect America’s women and children.
Mr. Stewart was caught unaware by the quiet, reasonable Mr. Yoo, who explained that he had been asked to determine what legally constituted torture so the government could safely stay on this side of the line. The issue, in other words, wasn’t whether torture was justified but what constituted it and what didn’t.

First off, let me say that this is a horrible thing to say about Clint Eastwood, who was never involved in this:

On December 1, 2005, Yoo appeared in a debate in Chicago with Doug Cassel, a law professor from the University of Notre Dame. During the debate, Cassel asked Yoo,

‘If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?’, to which Yoo replied ‘No treaty.’ Cassel followed up with ‘Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo’, to which Yoo replied ‘I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.’

A while back we opened up a thread on the distinction between ideological and partisan ("Let's see how many people I can piss off with this one: Fox News is not all that conservative"). This is a particularly telling example, a self identified conservative upset because a liberal media figure made a fundamentally conservative argument that happened to be at odds with the Republican partisan objectives of the moment.

Obviously there is room for disagreement here, but if we take a libertarian perspective (and libertarianism has largely become the most intellectually respected school of conservative thought) there is simply no way to defend the proposition that the government can do anything it chooses and violate any and every personal liberty as long as it is protecting the common good.

You would have to feel you had a pretty good case to call someone the "Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness" in the headline of an NYT op-ed, especially if you have some kind of reputation to protect, but the only substantive example Alexander gives is of Stewart not being all that smug to someone who's not being at all conservative. 

The weird thing about this is that Stewart is openly liberal and is often brutally critical of people arguing genuinely conservative positions. I'm not saying that Alexander was right, but he could have at least made a case had he used appropriate examples.The fact that he didn't, and, more pointedly, that he so completely mixed up concepts like ideology and partisanship is another indicator of just how confused the political dialogue has gotten.