Phillyist’s Math Problems
Their article on city corruption, Audit Reveals City Employees Stole $21 Million Worth Of Office Supplies, came through my feed reader, but since leaving a comment requires registration, I’ll just do it here instead:
Let’s say it’s 100 cell phones, with each cell phone costing $199. That comes out to $19,900. Now let’s say 100 employees did the same thing. That comes to $190,000. Wow!
By my math, 10^4 * $199 is $1.99M. Sorry, Don Montrey and the Phillyist, this kind of mathematical typo is simply unforgivable. It’s why “journalist” is a term that applies to someone working with editorial oversight to catch and prevent these sorts of stupid errors, and why bloggers simply aren’t there yet.
Update: I should have toned down the weekend snark, as you can see from the comments, I neglected a power of ten (wrote 10^3) in my correction, although the sum did come out ok. I guess we all need editors.
Blogging & Anonymity: The Paradox
If you’ve ever bothered to read any of the comment threads on this site which extend over, say, 30 comments you’ll realize the internet is full of idiots. And not just idiots, but all the kinds of truly disgusting people you would rather not know exist. Take the recent highly-publicized example of blogger Kathy Sierra who claims to have been harassed by death threats (we’ll set aside the legal considerations of whether the material showed sufficient intent, even though she repeatedly claims without proof that the material broke “federal law”). She articulately makes the point that the mere creation of material this offensive shows a perversion of bloggers:
It really doesn’t make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat… it’s the threat itself that inflicts the damage. It’s the threat that makes you question whether that “anonymous” person is as disturbed as their comments and pictures suggest.
The Wrong Reaction
We should be tempted to fall into despair, for human nature is evil. This is exactly what Robert Scoble has done, turning to blogo-Solipsism and taking a week off. Both strong emotional reactions and withdrawing from the blogosphere produce more harm than good. After all, if you’re affected by the cruelty present on the internet, hiding will only make it worse.
The Right Reaction
I usually read Shelly and wince, but she’s right on here:
Frankly, calmer heads are needed when responding to this event. Webloggers are not very good at maintaining perspective. I know, I’ve been one for too long.
This is not something new. People are irresponsible and rude in real life, and the situation is only exacerbated by the internet and the so-called shield of anonymity. We are living in the world of that metaphorical question “if you were invisible would you steal?”
The Irony
Seth Godin suggests that “Anonymity hasn’t made the web a better place. Instead, it has allowed some of the worst ideas ever to get published.” He’s almost right. While the Internet surely allows anonymous slanderers to publish the worst ideas that exist, those ideas are powerless without an audience. And, Kathy Sierra’s public tantrum today gave her attackers more audience than they could have ever hoped for. It’s interesting that by specifically decrying offensive material we draw more attention to it. Creators of hate speech don’t mind bad publicity.
Take It All Away
Still, taking away anonymity (Discouraging Anonymity is Key to Protecting Visibility) is not going to solve any of these problems. First, there is the wee technical problem that it’s totally impossible. Second, and more importantly, people will always exist for whom hate speech is a normal way of life. Only the broadest social reforms can decrease the incident of this kind of thought. You cannot police what people feel in their hearts, but over time you can mold it.
The Only Solution
Remember the racism of the 60s? I don’t, but having heard the stories, it’s quite obvious that incredible leaps have been made to bring black Americans to the same social acceptance level as their white counterparts. Even so, there still remains work to be done wherever racism, sexism, nepotism, ageism, etc are found.
That work will not be accomplished by stifling speech (that means you, Wordpress), but rather by changing the way we are educated, and therefore the way we think.
Social Media Is Destroying Our Youth
I was horrified to find a Cornell University student with this [censored] on their Facebook profile:
Yup, the third time’s the charm, even when you’re a graduate student in Operations Research with another graduate degree in Physics. Social media is ruining our generation.
Fair Grading in the University Setting
When taking a course graded by a large staff, you might wonder how fair the grading is. After all, no two people grade the same way, and the criteria can be interpreted differently. Some graders are tough for syntax problems in programs, while others are more interested in style. It’s impossible to know whether they’re objective or not without data.
Fortunately, a friend who works for a University happened to have the data lying around for an introductory CS course. There were 15 graders, and 437 data points, for an average of 29 assignments and tests per grader. The course, he said, enrolls about 150 students every semester, and is the gateway into acceptance into the CS major. Without further ado, allow me to present a graph of the average grade given per grader:
The average mean grade given was 78.9; the standard deviation of grades given by each grader was 5.4, indicating that the majority of grades fell on average into a 73 - 84 point spread. The data is probably complicated by the performance of students and would require complicated multi-factor analysis, of which I know nothing, to sort it out.
N Mean SE Mean StDev 15 78.87 1.40 5.43 Minimum Q1 Median Q3 Maximum 68.50 74.50 80.80 82.90 87.10
It’s mildly reassuring that the data seems to be left-skew, indicating that graders tend away from the normal distribution in favor of slightly more lenient grading. However, the spread between the averages of the worst and best graders is a whopping 18.6 points. Should a student have to bet his grade in a critical course on which grader happens to get him? No. As long as the assignment of graders is essentially random–the case in this course–which grader does which student shouldn’t affect their grades significantly if the graders follow a normal distribution–almost the case here.
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