George's Blog

INFO SCIENCE: The Onion, how I love thee. Check out the current headliner about W's Blog.

WASHINGTON, DC—In the interest of national security, President Bush has been asked to stop posting entries on his three-month-old personal web log, acting CIA director John E. McLaughlin said Monday.

Massive Multiplayer Online Money Making Machine

DATA:Terra Nova reports on a report forecasting the market for online games to be almost 10 billion in five years:

A research firm called DFC Intelligence has released an industry report covering the online gaming market. The Table of Contents is posted on the DFC site.



Unfortunately I don't happen to have a spare $2,995 to access it but this Media Post article reveals a few interesting tidbits:



- DFC predicts the online gaming market will generate $9.8 billion in 2009

- Industry growth will be driven by greater adoption of broadband

- Women and kids will play a big role in future industry growth

These forecasts tend to be worth the paper they aren't written on, but it's still interesting to hear where the industry could go.

Politics and Fear

INFO VISUALIZATION: An interesting visualization of Bush's approval ratings vis-a-vis terror alerts is posted over on JuliusBlog (which has no relation to this Julius).







The post makes a few claims about this visualization:

* Whenever his ratings dip, there's a new terror alert.



* Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.



* Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there's another alert or announcement (distraction effect).



* As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever.

Hmmm, most of this isn't proven by the chart at all (I could, for example, come to the opposite conclusion that Bush's ratings fall drastically because of the terror alerts, and not because of his inept leadership). Still, it's an interesting visualization. What would be interesting would be to run a correlation coefficient between the median approval rating and terror alert level. Then you might find some interesting data showing the two to be or not to be related. My guess is that you would find a near-zero coefficient which is basically random, or little relation.



However, I'm not saying Bush (by which I mean Karl and Dick) doesn't use these alerts to his advantage. More informative then a chart is simply the language these fools use when issuing the alerts.



Ridge said, while issuing the terror warning, "We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror." Later he answered criticism of his remarks by saying, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." Well, gee, that first statement did seem mildly political, no? Oh well, I'm asking too many questions. Hail the Great Leader!



(Via BoingBoing)

Subway Facts

DATA: Here are some nice New York City Subway facts to fill your Thursday afternoon with sunshine.



Some random facts from the New York City Transit Riders Council (reported on by the shrill right-wing nut-jobs at the NYPost, a beacon of trusted journalism.):

* An updated subway map was not posted at 38 percent of stations.



* Platforms and stairs were in good condition at only 66 percent of stations.



* Exposed or hanging wires were a problem at 54 percent of the stations.

Hanging wires? Yikes. One of the five worst stations is the stop at 205^th street in the Bronx, pictured below. (I can almost smell the urine just looking at it.)







Here are some light and fun PDF charts that rank each subway line on a number of factors, from cleanliness to reliability.

Overall Ranking



Detailed Results



Rank by Performance Indicator

Overall, I like the simple representation of these charts. However, I'd prefer a simple percentage to the confusing $0.00 to $2.00 scale. Yes, I get it, it's the price of a subway ride. Cute, yes. But helpful? Not really.



You have to be impressed with the D Line, traveling close to a half-million cumulative miles between breakdowns. Let's think about that. The D Line trains go 448,404 miles between breakdowns, what else could be about that long? Hmmm, the radius of the Sun is 432,164 miles. Impressive, no?



(Via Gothamist 1 and 2)

Melas Chasma

INFO VISUALIZATION: The European Space Agency has some new generated images of Mars that are quite nice.

This image of the southern part of Valles Marineris, called Melas Chasma, was obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.

Read the story, or just check out the full image.



In other ESA news:

Agency staff are planning future research into the possibility of inducing a hibernation-like state in humans. "We are not sure whether it is possible," says Marco Biggiogera, an expert on hibernation mechanisms at the University of Pavia, Italy, who is advising ESA. "But it's not crazy."

Read the full article.

Vote, or Don't Vote; But Don't Lie About It

INFO SCIENCE: Here's a great way of using information to 'encourage' people to do the right thing. An experiment is being performed in Michigan where a researcher is sending out information about who did and didn't vote to everyone in a neighborhood.

The report card will be mailed to approximately 3700 people in 2400 households, located in 188 city blocks scattered across Michigan.

The researcher is interested to find out if people will be more likely to vote if they know that all of their neighbors will know that they didn't vote once the election is over.

[R]oughly 10 percent of the eligible voters tell survey workers that they actually voted when they did not. It may be that reminding this group to vote is useless because they have developed a cynical strategy to accommodate get out the vote campaigns. They know when election is. They know where their precinct is located. They agree that voting is very important. They promise to vote. And afterwards they tell anyone who asks that they did vote. Since no one checks, they have found the path of least resistance.

The idea is to shame these liars into actually voting. I'm all for it.

Karate Mall Gunna Get Karate Chopped

INFO SCIENCE: Doh! Looks like Karate Mall isn't the best place to buy your karate gear from.



Why? Because your credit card number (and lots more information) shows up online after you order.

Bill Gates Drumming Up Boredom from Coast to Coast

INFO SCIENCE: You know, I'm just now finishing up my degree at the UW (a campus with no less then three buildings named after a Gates relative -- and don't forget Allen Hall; complete with Microsoft Atrium), and having read this article...

Gates went on a tour of major universities in the spring to try to drum up interest in computer science. During his speech yesterday, he told the university faculty that it shouldn't be hard to convince people to choose computer science over "Wall Street or something where it's just numbers, (and) you're not really changing anything."

I have to say, Bill Gates may be rich, but inspiring he aint. Seriously, if Sergey Brin and Larry Page came to my campus, geeks would crawl out of the woodwork to see them speak. When Ray Kurzweil talks, geeks come and geeks declare a major in a technology field. The same goes for Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and Linus Torvalds. These are the rock stars of Computer Science.



You want to know who comes out to see Bill Gates? The business majors. (Which makes his statement about Wall Street workers "not changing anything" a bit rude, considering they are his biggest fans. And besides, business people can be just as creative and influential as software engineers. If we learned anything from Enron, it's that even people you don't want to be creative can be, accountants for example. But I digress.) A few geeks may come out to see him, but really, Gates has come to personify all that is cold and boring in the technology fields. He represents a company that was once possibly as exciting as Google, but is now as boring and old as General Electric.



Furthermore, Gates has exactly zero Elvis quality, something all of the above folks have plenty of. Not to mention this is a guy with very little vision. (Arthur C. Clarke foresaw the Internet in the 1960's, Bill Gates missed its importance until the late 1990's.)



So, I wouldn't exactly expect to see the kids beating down the door trying to get into Computer Science programs after Bill comes to town. If he really wanted to drum up some interest with the smart kids, he'd pay for Torvalds to visit every major university in the nation. Or, more realistically, at least try to link Microsoft to something more exciting then Business Software. Last but not least, he could prove with his own company that if kids pay $40,000 to get an education, they won't have to move to India to work on Longhorn (to be released in 2009, so you still have time to get that degree and work on it). Ok, I can write no more, I'm starting to drift off myself thinking of that boring boring face of his.

Fry's Sales

INFO ACCESS: You can get Fry's Electronics Ads online now. Someone really is a trooper. They aren't just scanned but actually typed up, data-entry style.



(Via Hack The Planet)

Tivo At Mercy of MPAA; Pirates At Mercy of No One

INFO TECHNOLOGY: Wes Felter comments:

TiVo filed with the FCC to have their TiVoGuard DRM system approved so that it can touch broadcast-flagged content. My first impression of the system is that it must have cost a fortune to design and implement. But the MPAA isn't even satisfied; they demand even more control and complexity even though it won't make a dent in unauthorized copying. How many tens of millions of dollars will be wasted by the broadcast flag?

While the MPAA is giving well-meaning Tivo a hard time, Bit Torrent grows as the new channel for video distribution. Looks like the MPAA hasn't learned a thing from the RIAA's "Win a battle; Lose the war" strategy.