From MAKE: Blog: Neal Stephenson Answers Our Questions:
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers, in their cubicles waiting to have that ‘big idea’ for the next great novel?
Just keep writing. The big mistake is to write something and then stop for a long time while you try to sell it. Don’t ever stop. If you stop, you get out of practice. And writing is like cabinet making or soccer playing, it’s all about practice.
As part of my poll-obsessing, I finally checked out fivethirtyeight, recommended to me by Alex. Short version is that Nate Silver, the author of the site, is also a leader of Baseball Prospectus. He is credited with creating the very powerful PECOTA system, which rethinks baseball statistics — mostly through pure intelligence, but there is some math that exceeds the AD&D level — and in the process creates a much better explanatory and predictive tool. (It also played no small part in helping to create fantasy baseball’s popularity and even help baseball make a comeback when people thought the fast-paced, pre-felonious NBA was going to surpass America’s pastime.)
fivethirtyeight is, and I don’t think this is oversimplifying, doing for political polling what it did for baseball stats: finding truths by refining, critiquing, and improving simplistic polling data. Today’s post on the site was one of those aha moments:
I have gotten an increasing number of questions about the GWU/Battleground Poll, which presently gives John McCain a 2-point national lead, even as essentially every other current national poll shows Barack Obama with a lead of at least 5 points.
Just because a poll is an outlier doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s doing something wrong. Pollsters may have legitimate reasons for having a different perspective on the election, and they may also occasionally produce odd results due to chance alone.
In this case, however, the poll seems to be making a relatively fundamental mistake: it is not weighting by age.
For months, I’ve been wondering why the hell some polls have been reporting a neck and neck race, while others show Obama steadily gaining ground. (Even stranger, why on earth is the always admirable John McCain pulling such silly stunts, throwing hail Marys, if it’s a dead heat?) Finally, someone explains it, and oh how bizarrely simple it turns out to be.
For those who are curious, here’s the weighting of the battleground poll in question:
18-34 17%
35-44 12%
45-64 40%
65+ 31%
Compared to the US Census/2004 election data:
18-34 26%
35-44 17%
45-64 38%
65+ 19%
Pretty clear. This poll massively overrepresents older voters who, at a local polling level, have been averse to Obama for a variety of reasons, and massively underrepresent the younger voters who Obama has targeted in campaign activities and who are likely to respond to the post Baby-boomer voice he’s cultivated.
So simple, no math. Can’t tell if I’m impressed at the baseball-stats freaks or disgusted at the innumeracy of the media, or even literate newspaper reading people.
“Angels”, according to Bedouin wisdom, “a gift from God.”
From this week’s Nation, I learned the word prosopopeia:
One such device is prosopopeia, a rather literary term for what happens when the Pillsbury Doughboy persuades you to buy a bread product by giggling so charmingly after that poke to his puffy little tummy. Prosopopeia is the personification of an abstraction. As theorist Barbara Johnson says in her book Persons and Things, “A speaking thing can sell itself; if the purchaser responds to the speech of the object, he or she feels uninfluenced by human manipulation and therefore somehow not duped. We are supposed not to notice how absurd it is to be addressed by the Maalox Max bottle, or Mr. Clean, or Mrs. Butterworth.”
This is, of course, a fun, left pomo way to talk about Sarah Palin (and the Mrs. Butterworth reference is priceless). The article, which has some interesting cultural stuff in it, highlights the fact that Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech had been written weeks before she was even a serious choice for the VP slot. The article argues that the speech was waiting for someone who could personify it — Sarah Palin.
While I’m not enjoying the cheap shots being taken at the Dems, and I like even less the condescending way Dems are talking about how dumb she is and how dumb, by extension, her supporters therefore are, there is another interesting nugget in the column if you look past the ‘recall’ gag:
In the few weeks since Sarah Palin has become a household name, she’s often been glibly compared to a Barbie doll–and certainly her lack of knowledge of the Bush doctrine, or her comments about not knowing what the vice president does, make me wish she’d been recalled as fast as that talking Barbie who complained that “Math class is tough.” But I think the analogy is more apt when thinking about how Palin has been mass-marketed. As Barbara Johnson says, “The packaging is part of what the consumer buys: not only can Barbie not stand without the box, but in it she is positioned for maximum effect. Some dolls come in boxes that almost function like mirrors: the commodity is surrounded by a gleaming aura that adds glamour to its appeal.”
Leaving politics aside now, there is an interesting thing about the packaging support the product, or the packaging being the message, which covers public figures and even some of Apple’s appeal.
Anyway, it’s a nifty word.
Anyway a nifty word.
It pains me to read books about presentations, and the cute title “slide:ology” is a pretty high barrier to overcome, but raves prompted me to 1-click it, and, about 30 pages in, it’s already pretty good. Even the cute puns — the title (rhymes with ideology if you want, slideument, death suislide) — are starting to work for me.
Some nice points thus far:
- graphic design is completely under-represented among presentation professionals (7% according to one survey)
- recognition that powerpoint is a tool for presentations not documents and a reminder that there are word processing programs for documents
- slides should support communication, not be the communication
- the presentation ecosystem should be seen as message, visual story, and delivery
The most important piece, and the one that is least asked or addressed, is also painfully obvious. And for all its neglect, the most in need of repetition:
Before beginning a presentation, it’s important to ask yourself questions about your audience. Who are they? What are their needs and how can you address them? How can the information you have make their lives better? What do you want them to do after the presentation is over?
Either as a participant in presentations, or as a person frequently asked to help with a presentation visual, I have asked, I think hundreds of times, “what point are you trying to make?” I am usually able to ask it as a purely informational question — tell me your point here and I can make you a graphic, or tell me your point and I can tell you if the slide works — but it’s almost never that simple. The question makes people defensive, condescending, or worst of all, kicks them off into a stream of boilerplate.
Probably more important than the questions, which have been asked a hundred ways by various experts, is how do you get people to answer them well? Possibly more to the point, the question might be how do you get people to think clearly? Or the real problem, at least with people who are brighter than their slides, how do you get that person to have the confidence to just say what he thinks. It’s not always sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy communication, it can also be a failure of nerve.
White Roofs for a Green Planet | EcoGeek | Roofs, White, Enough, Heat, Buildings
“if the 100 biggest cities painted all their roofs white, and switched their road materials to lighter colors (concrete instead of asphalt) it would reflect enough light and heat back into space to entirely offset the warming of the last few decades.”
… can be found here. It’s a nice encapsulation of stuff that I really liked about his fiction and non-fiction. Still can’t believe it.
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [”thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
I’m almost afraid to promote this article. Bruce Nussbaum allows that innovation may be responsible for the current financial crisis:
I’m reminded of the criticism I heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that innovation is responsible for this mess. A European banker came up to me and and said, “isn’t innovation at the root of all our problems?” “All those new financial instruments failed, right?”
He’s right. So what went wrong? I’ve talked to a lot of folks and the answer lies in the innovation process that took place on Wall Street.
He then goes on to make some interesting points about the lack of testing, the lack of iteration (the MFA really is the new MBA!), and the lack of transparency. All interesting points, and probably fair (what the hell do I know about financial instruments), but I can hear my wonky number-fetish friends now: see what happens when innovation isn’t tested? nothing should be launched until validated! hell, nothing should be conceived without prior testing!
My (totally ill-informed) thin slice assessment is that there are valid points about testing and transparency, though I would frame them up as “vetting” and “regulatory approval”. I’m not sure markets can be used for iterative testing, but surely there can be the equivalent of peer reviews within a company and it’s possible to force groups to reveal the mechanics and some of the thinking behind the instruments without creating competitive problems. Pharma might be an interesting model. Anyway, I do seriously love the idea of shaking innovation-fetishists by the lapels with this argument.
Nussbaum did get my kindle crackling this morning, with a book reco for Numerati. I’m sharing an image of it, cuz all my blog entries recently have been text.
Cool article in today’s NYT about Mandy Patinkin taking on the role of Prospero in The Tempest. Patinkin is up there with Gary Oldman as my most admired/envied performance polymaths — he does music (which I’m not crazy about but respect), TV, film, stage and ranges from comedy to tragedy to Shakespeare. (Gary Oldman played the beginning of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto while filming Immortal Beloved, no hand double, it was him, with the LSO.)
Anyway, some interesting observations about the craft of acting:
Mr. Kulick and Ms. Tichler were “tirelessly campaigning for me to come back to the theater,” Mr. Patinkin said. “They kept asking me to read things. I read ‘The Tempest’ several times, and I couldn’t really get it. I have to have Shakespeare translated into English I can understand.”
Memorizing the role, Mr. Patinkin said, was another challenge: “It took 10 weeks, three to four hours a day, walking all over the streets and in the park and the gym. Finally, I had the part of Prospero in my brain. And then I spent three months just walking around and thinking about it.”
Even for someone who’s been doing Shakespeare for over thirty years, a translator is still needed. Even for someone who has been doing TV, it can take six months to get into a character that has been around forever.
I just put together a series of pretty successful brainstorms — good work, happy designers, lots of deep thinking that is continuing even after the pitch it was for. One of the keys to the success, at least in my mind, was that the brief was (brief and was) presented a day in advance of the actual brainstorm. The second key was that there were subsequent brainstorm sessions. Grokking new ideas takes time, re-aligning thinking requires unconscious and conscious work, and concepts take hold at deeper levels and in parts before bubbling up in an expressable form.
My piano teacher gave me a student assignment book (I could never keep track of what I was supposed to do) and the little note in the front seemed in line with my recent ‘no silver bullets’, ‘no acts of divine inspiration’ ‘creativity is a habit’ screeding:
I blogged this before, emphasizing 1) break it down; 2) master the components and add it together; 3) clean it up & go deeper; 4) make it sing.