tag:m.tofias.net,2014:/feedm tofias2013-09-03T14:39:32-07:00Michael Tofiashttp://m.tofias.netSvbtle.comtag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/more-fiery2013-09-03T14:39:32-07:002013-09-03T14:39:32-07:00More Fiery<p>Michael Tofias likes to give Keynote presentations and calmly present statistics in many of his talks and interviews.</p>
<p>But a fiery Tofias gave what sounded more like a campaign speech when he addressed a gathering of friends at the American Political Science Association annual meeting at a bar in Chicago over the weekend.</p>
<p>One of the Wisconsin liberal’s more passionate moments:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How did we come to a point in America where demonizing science, demagoguing against education rather than celebrating education, wins politically? I can guarantee you it will not produce the opportunity, the prosperity that is the heritage of this nation. It’s going to destroy this nation.</p>
<p>So I asked a rhetorical question: How did we get to this point? Well, I know. I lived through the last thirty years of political polarization, I saw the Tea Party take over the Republican Party. By the way, these aren’t your garden-variety conservatives that are in charge of the Republican Party. They’re the most reactionary.</p>
<p>But when you constrain not only your entire media consumption but, in particular your sources of news, of journalism, of talk radio, of newspapers, you utterly misunderstand science and our culture. And the Right has misunderstand science and our culture for over 50 years.</p>
<p>And you know what? They also have a strategy. It’s been in place since Lee Atwater. It’s diabolically simple, it is depressingly effective. It is to make Americans fear government. And black people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>See also this <em>oddly similar</em> and passionate <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/222190511.html">speech that Ron Johnson gave over the weekend</a>.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/a-break-in-the-icloud2013-07-05T11:46:00-07:002013-07-05T11:46:00-07:00A Break in the iCloud<p>The iWork for iCloud beta is pretty impressive. </p>
<p>Scrolling through an essay length document in Pages is a little slow compared to Google Docs, but overall these web apps seem snappy. And I like the peace of mind which comes from being able to grab a copy of a Keynote presentation – optionally as a PDF or PPT file – in an emergency. It’s particularly handy since it’s difficult to rely on Dropbox for file storage with iWork documents when the ability to edit on iOS is required.</p>
<p>Reminiscent of the slowly increasing set of tiles on Apple TV, the iWork expansion grows the grid of of app icons on iCloud. How much longer can we still have to wait for web-based management of Photo Streams (plus iPhoto?), Reading List, iMessage (maybe FaceTime too?), and an iTunes Match player? </p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/bmmigrczux5ymw.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/bmmigrczux5ymw_small.png" alt="iworkb.png"></a></p>
<p>More exciting (and almost certainly a longer wait) would be logging on to iCloud and finding icons to access to third party apps. Not necessarily as full-blown web apps running on iCloud, but perhaps as a mechanism to manage an app’s data storage. I think it would help novice and expert users alike if iCloud established a <em>cloud-as-truth</em> metaphor as a safety valve and assurance for our inevitable synchronization problems.</p>
<p>Fingers-crossed.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/when-there-is-no-there-there2013-05-22T22:17:04-07:002013-05-22T22:17:04-07:00When There Is No There There<p>Scandals are so hot right now – it seems bizarre to think that anyone in the media has an incentive to pass up an opportunity to report one of them. </p>
<p>However, Roy Unz details several scandals or rather incidents of non-scandal in “<a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/">Our American Pravda</a>.” Unz alleges that the media has ignored their investigative role in the cases of the 2001 anthrax mailings, John McCain’s role in covering up the Nixon administration’s decision to abandon Vietnam POWs, and claims that a State Department official sold nuclear weapons secrets. To Unz, the lack of attention paid to these cases is a sign of media failure.</p>
<p>I can’t hold myself out as an expert in any of these cases, but the broad argument of media failure seems flawed. Unz conflates <em>attention</em> paid by investigative reporters with <em>coverage.</em> Unz blames the lack of coverage in these cases of government “disasters” on “bipartisan” concerns over blame. Neither of these claims hold up under scrutiny.</p>
<p>Lack of headlines shouldn’t be used as a measure for investigative attention because media outlets face a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias">file drawer problem</a> similar to the one that affects scientific researchers. When allegations are in the news and facts are still unfolding, any information either damning or exonerating an official can be worth announcing. But when investigations are aimed at older issues, the failure to uncover information is a kind of <em>null result.</em> And the absence of news which might change public perception of a politician or an administration probably won’t result in three inch headlines. The lack of <em>new findings</em> even after a considerable allocation of investigative resources might result in no headlines at all.</p>
<p>If the media sleeps, do politicians as well?. My friend and co-author <a href="http://www.brendan-nyhan.com">Brendan Nyhan</a> argues that <a href="http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2013/05/why-obama-is-in-trouble-on-irsbenghazi.html">scandals</a> are a “co-production” of the media and the party likely to benefit from the tarnished reputation of their rival. While it seems likely that bipartisan culpability could play a role in dampening media attention paid to a scandal, it’s hard to imagine ambitious politicians willing to ignore an opportunity to pin blame on their rivals. Few who look at US political elites today see much bipartisanship. </p>
<p>These particular three cases of government “disasters” singled out by Unz for further investigation don’t appear to be welcoming to bipartisan cover-ups. Each case involves allegations against Republican administrations (one for Nixon’s, two for Bush’s) which arose (and were allegedly ignored by the media) during 2008. A year featuring intense campaigns and a Congress controlled by Democrats doesn’t strike me as a period likely to generate a quiet bipartisanship favoring the G.O.P. Instead, the 2008 presidential campaign season seems like it would have been a good time for Democrats to heap any and all insults against the opposition, particularly when one of the targets is not a rank-and-file Republican, but the party’s candidate for president. Would Unz have us believe that the much heralded Obama 2008 campaign failed at opposition research? Or that David Axelrod & Co. weren’t playing to win?</p>
<p>I don’t mean to suggest I have complete faith in the ability of the media-partisan-scandal complex to investigate every possible failing of government and certainly some incidents may deserve more media attention than they get. But it’s hard to say how much reporting attention an incident has already received based on claims of missing coverage. And the timing involved in this particular set of cases requires heroic assumptions about profit motives and political ambitions. <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/05/the-most-provocative-fascinating-and-bizarre-piece-i-read-today.html">Tyler Cowen writes</a>, “Maybe some parts of this essay are totally, completely wrong, so I urge you to read it with caution…. [as] a situation [which] can look ‘very guilty’ even if perhaps it is not.” To make this situation look “very guilty” one needs a model with a very peculiar set of incentives: a variety of media outlets must have been willing to forego potential gains from increased ratings following scandal coverage and many Democrats would have had to pass-up potential gains at the polls from the public airings of Republican mistakes.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/cloud-competition2013-05-22T12:08:30-07:002013-05-22T12:08:30-07:00Cloud Competition<p>Gruber’s <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/05/22/thurrott-azure">Microsoft Azure</a> post got me thinking. Which is never good.</p>
<p>In the computing world today, pretty much every app has a backend on a server someplace. Using an app means you’re not just using the OS on your handset, tablet, or desktop, you’re also implicitly using an OS in the <em>cloud</em> somewhere. At least in part, this has pushed the competition between OSes into the cloud, but it’s a competition being waged (transparently to most users) via their apps. </p>
<p>If we think about a cloud “operating system” as being both the software and the data center then there are probably increasing returns to scale for a cloud-based OS besides the familiar network effect for users. More usage almost certainly means more efficiencies (probably more challenges too). With companies like Google and Facebook doing their own thing from the ground up, others like Dropbox using AWS as a backend, and plenty more (Apple?) using Azure or rolling their own thing on top of commodity servers, it sounds like there might be much more competition in the market for operating systems than ever before.</p>
<p>I’m sure plenty of people have figured this competition-over-cloud-OSes thing out, but with the larger conversation seemingly focussed on OS choices made by consumers over iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, etc, I suspect many people used to thinking about operating systems are overlooking the importance of choices being made by app developers. Today might be the wild west, but increasing returns to scale might suggest intense competition looms just over the horizon.</p>
<p>See, this thinking is never good. But with this post let’s see if I can kick-off a one-a-day blogging habit. Maybe more. Maybe less. Five/week seems like a nice number too. And we are go.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/i-watch2013-02-13T07:59:00-08:002013-02-13T07:59:00-08:00I Watch<p>When my grandfather passed away, he left me his watch. And while I treasure it, I never wear it. I haven’t worn a watch since I started carrying a cell phone over a decade ago. And I really don’t have an inclination to start wearing one today. But these rumors of an Apple watch have me think it’s not a matter of if, but when I’ll start wearing one again.</p>
<p>I am not going to start wearing a watch because I am an Apple loyalist, even though I am one. And while I appreciate the value that another screen holds to output data, this doesn’t captivate me. What interests me is input.</p>
<p>I don’t want to wear a watch as a watch, but as a remote, as an input device. <a href="http://kfury.com/what-an-apple-watch-is-good-for">Kevin Fox</a> argued that a watch would be a natural fit for Siri to take commands. He suggested it could very well include a compass and accelerometer for maps. But what other sensors could fit into a wrist band? Light sensor? Of course. A gyroscope? Temperature, ambient and body? Your pulse? Air quality? NFC?</p>
<p>During an episode of the <a href="http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/12">Critical Path</a>, Horace Dediu argued that advances in computing occur because of innovations in input methods. At the time, I think he was mostly considering voice commands and Siri. But an iOS-based watch might bring wearable devices to the mass market. It might take the market that FitBit is in but with deep device integration, no deep ecosystem integration, and measure so much more and for so many more people. A watch could also serve as a suitable remote for the coming “phablet” iPhones that people might prefer to keep in a bag while on the go.</p>
<p>The Tom Cruise/Minority Report thing we always laugh about relied on big exhausting gestures. What if a wrist-band could capture much more discrete and less tiring movements? I’m no futurist, but imagine if you could hold your phone in one hand and generate input with the other hand with small motions or subtle typing like flexing of your fingers. What if you could <em>conduct</em> Siri by drumming your fingers against a table top?</p>
<p>A watch is a path toward wearable computing and the <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21548493">quantified self</a>. No wonder Nike recently announced that it has <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/02/11/nike">no plans to release its FuelBand app for Android</a>. If Nike isn’t already partnering with Apple to make an early app, they’re deep enough in this direction to understand it’s value and likelihood: they’re going to be busy remaking and making apps for this new addition to the iOS ecosystem.</p>
<p>Of course, an iOS watch as wearable computing device will be pitted squarely against Google Glass. Google Glass sounds expensive in terms of monetary ($1,500) and social costs (it’s too in your face and too in the face of your acquaintances). But an iOS accessory, might be less expensive. What’s the word for disrupting a product that hasn’t launched yet? </p>
<p>But look at me, increasing my own enthusiasm as I write. I shouldn’t get ahead of reality. Like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV before it, an iOS watch will probably debut with a high price and then come down over time. The price will signal that’s it’s not a device for everyone yet. It might not be a device for me yet. But I suspect in the future, we will all be wearing more not fewer computing devices, and Jonathan Ive will probably design at least some of the ones I wear.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/bullet-points2012-12-18T11:25:00-08:002012-12-18T11:25:00-08:00Bullet Points<p>My heart goes out to the victims of violence. Without self-delusion, I’m no good at writing about tragedies like last week’s horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I’m tempted to hide within a comforting post about the much more gentle <em>evil</em> that is the new Instagram TOS.</p>
<p>So I’m grateful to <a href="http://kottke.org">Jason Kottke</a>, <a href="http://kohenari.net/tagged/guns">and</a> <a href="http://pinboard.in/u:gruber/t:Guns/">others</a> who haven’t lost the thread. Kottke in particular. While he has expressed a bit of weariness at times over the last few years, he has been giving a master class in blogging since Friday.</p>
<p>We need to keep talking about Newtown and gun safety more generally if we hope to affect <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069102331X/ref=nosim/0sil8">issue evolution</a> through an energized electorate. It’s not enough that we <em>were</em> shocked. Collectively, we have to study what we know, go out and research new things, share our findings, and discuss what we’ve learned. Kottke is reminding us how blogging can foster a conversation like that, cutting through the din of other people’s social media platforms with depth focussed on a vital arc.</p>
<p>Let’s try not to give up on this conversation.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/empirical-evidence2012-11-10T14:46:00-08:002012-11-10T14:46:00-08:00Evidenced with Empirics<p>In a recent interview with the <a href="http://journalistsresource.org/reference/research/research-chat-harvards-gary-king-on-data-social-science-and-media-connections">Journalist’s Resource blog</a>, Harvard political scientist <a href="http://gking.harvard.edu">Gary King</a> responded to a question about “data journalism as ‘social science on deadline’” with an answer that just blew me away, so hopefully no one at Harvard will get angry with me for posting King’s full remarks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think ultimately there is no line between journalists and social scientists. Nor is it true that journalists are less sophisticated than social scientists. And it is not true that social scientists totally understand whatever method they should know in order to access some new dataset. What matters in the end is that whatever conclusions you draw have the appropriate uncertainty attached to them. That’s the most important thing.</p>
<p>The worst phrase ever invented is “That’s not an exact science.” That is a sentence that makes no sense. The whole point of science is that you’re making inferences about things that we’re not really sure of. So the only relevant thing to express is the appropriate level of uncertainty with our inferences.</p>
<p>Sometimes we have a shorter deadline. That’s true in journalism and in social science as well. No matter what, in the end there’s always some data we don’t have. In the end, there’s always some uncertainty about the conclusion that we’re going to draw. And the more interesting, the more innovative, the more cutting edge the subject is we’re analyzing, the more uncertainty we’re going to have. And that’s just the breaks.</p>
<p>And so what makes us — I would say scientists; journalists maybe don’t like to call themselves scientists, but I’m happy to — all doing the right thing is expressing the appropriate degree of uncertainty with respect to our conclusions. So I don’t see any difference between journalists and social scientists. I see the same continuum within journalism and within social science.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>King is encouraging scholars and journalists to use his <a href="http://thedata.org">Dataverse</a> project as a way share and archive the data that they’ve collected. If we agree with King that there really is “no line between journalists and social scientists” why would we continue to accept different cultures of evidence sharing and replication in academic and journalistic publications? Will we forever be expected to just take a journalist’s word for their claims? Good data journalism, like a good academic article, should probably include a link to the dataset and replication code. </p>
<p><strong>Quick Update</strong> It strikes me that a lot of people don’t know what to call Horace Dediu at <a href="http://www.asymco.com">Asymco</a>, but after posting this, I think we should call him a <em>data journalist</em> following the sorts of best practices (including data sharing) laid out by Gary King. I’m sure we might be able to think of a few other journalist/blogger/analyst types playing by the rules as well, but I wonder if they are mostly bloggers like Dediu.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/amazon-needs-a-little-paddling2012-10-27T15:52:00-07:002012-10-27T15:52:00-07:00Amazon Needs a Little Paddling<p>Like many people, I’ve become pretty successful at ignoring the concerns over media products sold with DRM. But after <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/10/22/amazon-drm">John Gruber</a> linked to a blog post detailing DRM mistakes (or abuse) by <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">Martin Bekkelund</a> I shot off a few tweets and reblogs. Meaning that I went back to successfully ignoring DRM concerns really quickly.</p>
<p>And then I just caught this post over on <a href="http://app.net">App.net</a> by <a href="https://alpha.app.net/dwineman/post/1241846">Dan Wineman</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Five days ago I used Amazon’s support form to tell them I was concerned about <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/</a> and asked for assurance that they wouldn’t steal my purchases from me without warning or explanation.</p>
<p>No reply.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contacting Amazon is a great idea. Boycotting digital goods is probably a non-starter for many people already. And certainly, market forces haven’t provided consumers with rights when they buy ebooks like they have in the market for music. It could be years before Congress, the courts, or the FTC clarifies or grants consumers some meaningful digital property rights.</p>
<p>However, as consumers we can at least voice our unease with the <em>status quo</em> by reaching out to Amazon. We should tell Amazon and other companies that violate the property rights of their customers or reveal the potential to do so that we don’t think that’s okay. That our uncertainty about the future accessibility of these products might not be altogether preventing us from making purchases, but it might be discouraging the number we make.</p>
<p>I know that tens – and probably even tens of thousands – of support requests made to Amazon will not launch a consumer movement to bestow us with new digital rights. But maybe by expressing ourselves we’ll encourage Amazon to be more clear about their policies. Perhaps we can encourage the companies who seek to disrupt Amazon and other ebook sellers to exclude DRM from their nascent business models.</p>
<p>Inspired by Dan Wineman, here is the suport request I sent Amazon:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hello to Jeff Bezos and Amazon,</p>
<p>I am a happy Amazon customer and I particularly enjoy buying digital goods including Kindle ebooks. When I buy music from Amazon it is in the form of an MP3, but when I buy Kindle ebooks, there is DRM software which allows Amazon to lock me out of my purchases for arbitrary or perhaps mistaken reasons (besides the fact there probably are no good reasons to punish someone by locking them out of past sales). This issue came into focus due to events detailed in a recent blog post by Martin Bekkelund, linked here: <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/</a> </p>
<p>This Amazon-DRM story makes me reconsider making future Kindle purchases. What assurances can Amazon give me and other customers that at some future time period they won’t steal our purchases without warning, due process, an opportunity for appeal, or even any coherent explanation? What assurances can Amazon give me that the company won’t suffer future financial or technical difficulties that lock me and other customers out of our ebooks as well as the marginalia we may have added to them?</p>
<p>I hope that Amazon will consider addressing these and related concerns involving DRM.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Please consider sending your own <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us">suport request to Amazon</a> and the other companies from whom you purchase media with DRM.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATED 10/28/2012</strong> I woke up to find that Amazon has responded to my help request: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Account status should not affect any customer’s ability to access their library. If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help.</p>
<p>Thank you for your interest in Kindle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I sure would like to believe that email, and checking it with Martin Bekkelund, it seems his friend has <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/26/embraced-by-amazon/">access to her Amazon account once more</a>. However, Bekkelund seems to think that it was the pressure from his blog post that encouraged Amazon to do the right thing and not their regular business practices. Of course, the problem with DRM is that there’s very little a consumer can do to verify Amazon’s (or any other vendor’s) actual policies and their is virtually no way that Amazon can credibly commit to good behavior in the future. Going forward, we are either going to have to become comfortable with the idea that DRM-protected goods are ultimately rentals of an unspecified length or we must work toward a mechanism of third-party dispute resolution for consumers facing abusive practices.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/the-case-of-the-disappearing-black-voter-ii2012-09-08T17:40:00-07:002012-09-08T17:40:00-07:00The Case of the Disappearing Black Voter, Part II<p>Forty percent of Sasha Issenberg’s Milwaukee black voters have never existed.</p>
<p>I’m not being fair, but in a recent post for <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/victory_lab/2012/08/30/three_fifths_of_milwaukee_s_black_voters_have_vanished_without_a_trace_.html">Slate</a>, Sasha Issenberg begins by dramatically claiming that, “Sixty percent of Milwaukee’s black voters have disappeared” and goes on to detail how that could be a concern for Democrats this November.</p>
<p>Matt, the blogger at <a href="http://milwaukeestat.tumblr.com/post/31143932136/that-doesnt-compute">Milwaukee</a>, pointed out that Issenberg’s numbers don’t make sense. While Matt is sensitive to the difficulties involved with turnout drives in Milwaukee’s low-income African-American neighborhoods, he checked out the math. Using data from the League of Young Voters and analysis from the New Organizing Institute, Issenberg reports that “160,000 African-American voters in Milwaukee were no longer reachable at their last documented address – representing 41 percent of the city’s 2008 electorate.” But Matt points out that there aren’t 160,000 black voters who were able to go missing citing a City of Milwaukee report which lists that there the voting age African-American population is 154,335. </p>
<p>Weird, right?</p>
<p>Since Matt is a semi-anonymous blogger who responds to my suggestions to improve his graphs and answer my data analysis requests, I trust him implicitly – at least over Sasha Issenberg who I’ve only been following on Twitter for a week, since I read that <a href="http://log.tofias.net/post/30741977175/why-campaign-reporters-are-behind-the-curve">great New York Times blog post</a>. Still, I wanted to check it all out. I mean fact-checking is 2012’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.</p>
<p><a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov">American Fact Finder</a> using the 2010 Census lists 161,053 for the 18 and over Black or African-American alone or in combination with one or more races population group in <a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF2_SF2DP1&prodType=table">Milwaukee</a>.</p>
<p>Hmmmm. The existence of 161,053 people at least makes it possible to lose 160,000 people, but it’s still pretty unlikely that Democratic allied groups can only locate 1,053 black people. Tom Barrett didn’t do <em>that</em> poorly this summer. At first, I thought Issenberg or his sources conflated Milwaukee the city with Milwaukee County. But <a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF2_SF2DP1&prodType=table">Milwaukee County</a> only has 173,862 black people of voting age, so probably not.</p>
<p>Back to the Issenberg article:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Starting in April, they spent eight weeks knocking on 120,882 doors across 208 of Milwaukee’s 317 wards to raise awareness of the gubernatorial recall election scheduled for June. The doors had one thing in common: the voter file said they were all home to a registered voter whom a commercial data vendor had flagged as likely to be African-American.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>120,882 doors? American Fact Finder only lists 88,217 black households in Milwaukee (city) and 94,661 black households in Milwaukee County using the 2010 Census data. </p>
<p>I don’t know how unnamed commercial data vendor built their list of doors to knock on, but I hope the League of Young Voters didn’t pay by the address because the 2010 Census makes clear that around 27% of those addresses aren’t going to contain an African-American household. </p>
<p>Having a good number of old addresses to check might be useful for a rigorous turnout drive, but it’s probably not a good idea to use the entire list for an estimate of a group’s population size when we have the Census data. Issenberg reports the League of Young Voters found “31 percent of their targets.” Perhaps we can do a better job figuring out how many “missing voters” that there might be in Milwaukee with respect to this list?</p>
<p>31 percent of 120,882 doors on the list is 37,473. Since there were 88,217 black households in Milwaukee (let’s stick with the 2010 city data to make our job easier), the League of Young Voters probably found more like 42% of all the black households in the city. Missing address for 58% percent of African-American households is close enough to 60% for Issenberg’s 3/5 claim in the title and lede to pass a fact check. At least my fact check. It’s the implications of that number which fall apart a bit.</p>
<p><strong>So how many black voters are “missing” from Milwaukee?</strong></p>
<p>The League of Young Voters is missing addresses for 58% of African-American households, so assuming that a “missing” household and a “confirmed” household are the same size (1.8 people), they are missing addresses for 58% of the African-American voting age population which, using the 2010 Census data, would be about 93,000 people. Using the household total we can say that this number could be as small as around 50,000 and as large as 124,000, but as Mat pointed out there aren’t 160,000 missing address. </p>
<p>Assuming that there are <em>only</em> 93,000 “missing” African-American voters amounts to the Democrats having a particularly hard time targeting a little over 33% of the 2008 city electorate as opposed to the claimed 41%. For 41% of the entire electorate to be missing, each missing African-American household would have to be made up of much less than 1.8 people which is certainly possible. But more to the point, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#WIP00p1">CNN’s 2008 exit polls</a> found 91% of blacks voted for Obama which means Democratic turnout efforts are without addresses for at least 40% of their former voters (and presumably there are also white, hispanic, and other voters who have moved without notifying the DNC as well whom we have not tried to count). I’m sure that’s a number which creates a plenty big hurdle for Democratic efforts. </p>
<p>But I’m curious how big a deal it is to not have this many addresses. Are the African-American residents of Milwaukee so much harder to pin down than those in Detroit, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Miami? What percentage of African-American voter addresses did the 2004 and 2008 get out the vote efforts begin with? Also, do missing African-American addresses really matter for actual door-knocking campaigns given how predictably located African-American voters are in Milwaukee as a result of the incredibly <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/111898689.html">high rates of racial segregation</a> in housing?</p>
<p>Anyways, I’m still really looking forward to Sasha Issenberg’s new book – which is coming out this week – but I hope he has been a little more careful with the details than in this blog post at Slate.</p>
tag:m.tofias.net,2014:Post/amazon-electioneering-as-profiteering2012-08-22T12:14:00-07:002012-08-22T12:14:00-07:00Electioneering as Profiteering
<p>Oh, Amazon. </p>
<p>You’ve done it <a href="http://m.tofias.net/in-which-amazon-conflates-reading-and-wealth">again</a>. I love you when you send me Kashi crackers and Amy’s canned soups. I love you when you sell me mp3s and Kindle books. I love the way AWS cradles my Dropbox. This Glacier thing sounds cool. And for all that is holy Amazon Prime is the best thing ever. But today I’m breaking up with you for <a href="http://5by5.tv/b2w/81">10 minutes</a>.</p>
<p>Just because someone that you employ can make a red and blue heat map of the United States based on book purchases from your website doesn’t mean you should let them. That’s not some <em>big data</em> you’re crunching, that’s bad data analysis.</p>
<p>The magic in public opinion polling is the random sample. Unless you’re YouGov/Polimetrix in which case the magic is <a href="https://twitter.com/doug_rivers">Doug Rivers</a>. The people who’ve purchased books over the past 30 days aren’t even a random sample of your own customers let alone the country’s eligible voters.</p>
<p>Your Election Heat Map does in fact “provide one way to follow the changing political conversation across the country during this election season,” but with a junk chart that re-inforces overly simplistic notions of political polarization based on your own encoding choices and measures nothing of substance what so ever. And thanks for updating this map every day.</p>
<p>You can do better.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE</strong> If you’re looking for a book about polarization instead of adding to the din about polarization, let me suggest purchasing Morris Fiorina’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Myth-Polarized-America-Edition/dp/0205779883/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345666618&sr=8-1">Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America</a> from Amazon (of course).</p>