Sep

24

Statistics and political rhetoric

Filed Under News, Random Thoughts | 1 Comment

Lincoln recently put a link on his blog to a post on EdWired about computer visualizations of text. Actually the site that does these visualizations will do them for nearly any data set. One of the highlights I found quite interesting was the visualization set for the recent party conventions.

I decided to try something. I pulled up a word tree of Obama’s convention speech and one of McCain’s speech. I then searched for the word “I” in each speech.  The results intrigue me. McCain uses “I” more often, but it is most frequently followed by “was” and “know.” Obama most frequently said “I will.”

Obama and McCain's use of I

Obama and McCain's use of "I"

This seems to bolster the sense that Obama can say little about his past that wouldn’t disqualify him for public office, and that McCain has had a storied past with lots of varied experience. Obama’s emphais on the future may be not only politically shrewd, but practically necessary. Further, his characterization of McCain as a relic of the past seems justified by McCain’s own rhetoric.

There is the problem, however, of politicians saying “I will” (or “I will not”). McCain will need to get away from his historical narrative at some point, but the alternative is not Obama’s grand declarations of future accomplishments. Politicians promise much during campaigns, but the return on their promises is usually pretty poor.

I think a stronger rhetorical stance for a presidential candidate would emphasize statements of moral fact. If Senator McCain wanted to highlight future policies, but do so without making promises that political necessity might later overturn (George H.W. Bush, anyone?), he could cast his ideas this way: “We should ________,” or, “We ought to _______.” By doing so, he doesn’t actually promise anything, but instead identifies the “right” course of action.

Of course, McCain may be prone to overdo this kind of rhetoric. William McGurn and John Fund both recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that McCain already tends to shoot from the hip for moral judgments. If he’s going to adopt the rhetoric of moral principle (as opposed to Obama’s “ruthless pragmatism“), he needs to decide what he thinks–or at least what he wants people to think that he thinks–and stick to it.  I think he would be much more convincing.

Sep

22

Making the Help Desk happy

Filed Under Random Thoughts | 2 Comments

I had a funny experience today at work. I was trying to do some work in Excel but when I would copy or paste a cell, I would get an error saying “Unable to empty Clipboard” or something like that. Google revealed that others have had a similar problem, but none of the forums I read had any particularly good solutions. Everyone seemed to have different symptoms and different solutions/workarounds, but no one knew why it happened. In fact, one forum thread was open for over a year and without any solution (it was active for much of that time too).

One of the common symptoms, however, was the Remote Desktop Connection. Since my computer at work exists largely on the network, I figured that might have something to do with it. I finally emailed the Help Desk in Greensboro.

In my email, I included a verbatim description of the error message, a description of what I was trying to do when I got the error, a summary of my Google search results, and a 4-point list of the things I had tried to do (from clearing the clipboard in Excel to running the clipboard application from Start Menu > Run > clipbrd.exe).

About 30 minutes later (after I had gotten Excel to work again), I got a call from the Help Desk. This is the conversation:

“Hi, I’m from the Help Desk.”

“Hi, I’m glad to hear from you.”

“I’m having a hard time figuring out what the problem might be. Can I remote connect to your desktop?”

“Well, the problem seems to have fixed itself, so I’m not sure that would do any good.”

“Oh. Ok. Great…You know, dude, your email was awesome. Usually we get emails like ‘My Excel isn’t working.’ Yours was great.”

Moral: 90% of computer problems are between the keyboard and the chair. If you can quickly convince the Help Desk that your problem is in the 10%, and actually do about half their work for them, they’ll love you forever.

Sep

13

Hurricane predictions

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Price per gallon today at Hess: $3.55. Line: 4 cars.

Price per gallon today at Citgo: $3.54. Line: 1 car.

Price per gallon today at Chevron: $4.19. Line: You must be joking.

I will laugh if the price per gallon doesn’t rise much because of the hurricane. Nonetheless, I did fill it all the way up today (I needed some anyway), just in case. I’m not one to succumb to media hype, but this one could be pretty rough.

Ike from the ISS

Ike from the International Space Station

I’ve always been fascinated by hurricanes. Suprisingly, I’ve managed to miss being notably near one, even though I’ve lived in the Florida Panhandle. Ironically, during the 2 1/2 years I lived there, Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston and came up through Greenville. Since we moved back to Greenville, Pensacola has had its fair share of tropical cyclones.

At the moment, I’m watching all sorts of live data about Hurricane Ike. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is chartered to provide current, relevant, and accurate weather information to the public free of charge. The result has been that the many commercial weather providers — like Accuweather, The Weather Channel, Intellicast, etc. — have to provide even better data. In my opinion, they don’t. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) provides very good, current data. However, much of their more interesting data requires a good bit of interpretation. If you’re willing to do the research into the various map legends, computer models, and forcasting philosophies, you can collect a lot of fascinating raw data in near real-time.

IKE near landfall in Texas

IKE near landfall in Texas

However, these data sometimes come in large, obscure tables or with only basic visualizations (there are, of course, notable exceptions). Among the computer and weather geeks of the world, a substantial industry (hobby?) has developed to provide better graphical interpretations of ordinarily inscrutable data. Frankly, even the forecasters use expensive computer modeling systems to interpret the raw data.

The several sites I’m watching now provide good, helpful information. I will pass them along for your enjoyment.

1. NOAA has several satellite pages. You can find the basic one by clicking the “Satellite” link on the NHC homepage. I recommend the GOES floater images. Find your storm and pick one of the images. The loops run in Java and seem to do quite well. The best bets for intelligible image are Visible, IR AVN, and IR RGB. If you can understand Dvorak, great. Other interesting NOAA satellite sites are NESDIS and OSEI (the former is better for hurricanes).

2. Weather Underground has a very nice tropical page. Jeff Master’s blog on the same page can also provide extra information. He doesn’t just parrott the NHC like so many others. The site has lots of intelligent graphs and very current data. It’s usually a good bet to read the NHC Discussion on the forecasts. You can also find the discussion on the NHC website, but in either case, the forecasters are very good writers and can offer a lot of information about how hurricanes work and how to think about them.

3. Tropical Atlantic has some of the coolest tools for data interpretation. The best are their .kml files for Google Earth. You can actually download LIVE aircraft reconaissance data into Google Earth. They also have more Google Earth overlays than you could count.

4. It can be hard to find coherent information about storm surges. Several places will give you generic predictions, but they tend to hedge quite a bit. NOAA has a nice Tides and Currents page that lists active events and includes relevant sea surface information. You can look at nearly live graphs of sea levels in a storm. At the moment, I’m watching a station in Galveston and one in Sabine Pass, TX.

5. Finally, for general education about how hurricanes work and how forecasters predict them, Wikipedia is a fine resource. Wikipedia includes an entire portal dedicated to tropical cyclones.

If you have any other nifty sites to add, please do so.

Sep

4

They don’t get it: More musing on Sarah Palin

Filed Under Ideas, News, Random Thoughts | Leave a Comment

The media was doubting whether Sarah Palin would actually appeal to women. They failed to realize how effectively she could appeal to mothers. In the typical modern feminist mindset, women are not mothers, at least not primarily. But Mrs. Palin demonstrated last night that she can be a mother and a vice president — that in fact it would be good for American mothers if she becomes VP.

Sarah Palin with family (TimesOnline UK)

Sarah Palin with family (TimesOnline UK)

I think there were at least a half dozen specific references to “motherly” issues in her speech last night. But they didn’t seem forced or invented the way you’d expect from someone like Hillary Clinton or even Cindy McCain. Her comment about special needs children probably won the Republican ticket a few hundred thousand votes on its own. But to reinforce her comments about motherhood, her family played their parts perfectly. Her youngest daughter is delightfully cute, but did you see how she followed her mom around on stage after the speech? And that her mom actually paid attention to her? I don’t think people should worry about her ability to be a mother and a VP.

Daniel Henniger of the Wall Street Journal had a great piece today that addresses some of these issues. Mrs. Palin is far more convincing as an American mom than nearly any other woman in politics.

An MSNBC show this morning also included some talk about her appeal to mothers. Generally, the “oracles of political wisdom” thought she’d appeal very strongly to moms. Of course, if they had said otherwise, they’ve have lost what shreds of credibility they still have.

Populism

It’s nearly axiomatic in American politics that in order to get elected, you have to play the “average Joe” card frequently. Read more

Sep

3

Republican Convention Wednesday

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I discovered tonight that I can watch the Republican National Convention live from their website without the hassle of commercials and insipid commentary. How nice.

Of course, not very many speakers tonight were nice–at least not when they were talking about Obama. Actually, is it unkind to tell the truth about someone’s public record when they are aspiring to the highest political office in the land? Maybe they were being nice by not mentioning houses in the Chicago suburbs and brothers in Africa.

I can’t wait to see tomorrow’s media commentary. I thought the media reaction to Tuesday night was intriguing.

Huckabee impressed me. His speech was very thoughtful.

Guiliani actually squeezed some relevant policy discussion around his sarcastic pot shots at the Democratic ticket.

Palin’s speech. Very nice. More subdued than I thought it would be, but that was probably a good thing. She moved nicely from the revivalist preacher mode into a serious explanation of her own record (read: accomplishments), then into a fairly coherent discussion of policy1. Of course, she generously peppered her comments with sniper shots at the Democratic ticket–the comment about being a mayor vs a community organizer was great. When Obama picked Biden, the word was that the latter would be the “attack dog” for the Democratic ticket. I would caution him against underestimating his Republican counterpart.

Some bloggers have already claimed that her speech was like a high school speech. Great. That’s what we need: a clear, concise, direct statement. Skip the “nuanced” approach. Try communicating. Amazingly, there are a lot of high schoolers out there who are far better speakers that most political types. And they write their own speeches. And they deliver them without teleprompters. So it sounded like a high school speech. Great. That means it sounded genuine.

A genuine person in high political office. What are the odds?


  1. Discussing difficult things like public policy never plays well on TV, and, as much as we hate it, candidates have to play to the TV. Palin did a nice job. back↩