General Disarray

I spent the whole day correcting quantitative results from an analysis that I performed. The corrections were necessary because of undocumented data coding practices such as:

A blank cell means $0. So does a cell that says $0.

Call me rational, but I would have thought that a blank cell means "I didn't answer that question on the survey," and a cell that says "$0" means "It is not worth any dollars."

It is one thing to tell me belatedly that you used cryptic unofficial standards in your data entry. It is quite another to tell me "You're data analysis is incorrect. Aren't you familiar with our cryptic and unofficial data entry standards?" You're getting billed for this, mon frere.

On a related note, both Word and Excel crashed on my about five times each today. What is this? 1998? I wonder if I can be a beta tester for Office:Mac 2007. 

Don’t you just love a song that you can figure out how to play in under a minute. Maybe that’s why I like the Long Winters. Or maybe it’s their stripped-down pop sensibilities. Who knows. Anyway, here’s some chords:

Scared straight

Verse: Ebm7 Db Bbm Ab Ebm7 Db Ebm7 Db

Transition: Db/Gb Gb (this is under the organ solo and the transition from verse to chorus)

Chorus: Ebm7 Db Bbm Ab Ebm7 Db Ebm7 Db

Cinammon

Verse: Ab Eb Db

Chorus: Ab Eb Db, but on the last one or two repetitions of certain repetitions, it goes Cm Eb Db

Updated: 19 July 06
I've long felt that there's a specific art to coming up with creative band names, and lately I've been coming up with them willy nilly. But I'm not in any bands, really, and I probably won't be, at least for a long while. But why deprive the world of my inspiration? So here's the list. And these are all open-source, so have at them. But if I become famous under one of these monikers[*], no suing, okay? I'm updating this constantly.

• Adult Peach
• Lime Juice Douche
• Three Fisted Drunks
• Torturepedia
• Long-hatted Harry and the Discursive Discuses (or just Long-hatted Harry)
• The Buttafucco Fibers

[*] Both "moniker" and "monicker" are accepted spellings. True story.

Update: I couldn't live with myself if I didn't point out that the Onion has a list of the worst band names of 2006. With a little luck, maybe one of my band names will be on the list next year.

A couple of weeks ago there was a controversy when Fox News talking head John Gibson cited statistics showing that a growing proportion of children under 5 in the US are nonwhite, ending his commentary with a directive to go "have more babies." In response to the criticism, he explained that his chief worry was not a changing ethnic makeup, but the tensions that result from immigration, a possible consequence of decreased fertility. I even defended him, since the coverage of his fertility story was in many cases unbalanced — omitting relevant snips of his argument.

But today I read a Newsweek article by Paul Samuleson ("The End of Motherhood," 29 May 2006) that shows that unlike Italy and Germany, the fertility rate in the US is 2.1 children per woman, just over what it takes to replace the population. And the by-ethnicity breakdown shows that it's 1.9 for non-Hispanic Whites, which rules out the possibility that Hispanics are responsible for the sustainable rate.

Best of all, the article ends with this quote from Adam Smith:

[The] chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved

Aw, shucks. And they call it the dismal science…

So I just popped into a local coffee house (haus, if you want to be pretentious) for my mid-afternoon enormous latte. It was unnerving. While I’m waiting for my fix, I see these:

The cell picture quality is low, but here’s the text:

By filling out this form, I agree to receive a monthly newsletter from [Realty Company]. I will also receive coupons to use at [Coffee Company].

Here’s a tip: If an offer to receive coupons is preceded by a legal disclaimer, it is not worth it.

Then, as I’m leaving the shop, I hear the caffeine professional [*] exclaim with no small amount of ebullience:

My first latte!

Shudder.

[*] I refuse to use the term “barista” to refer to the part-time employees of Starbucks and other coffee chains. According to Wikipedia:

In its most basic form, a barista by definition is one who prepares espresso coffee beverages. However, its meaning is expanding to include what might be called a coffee sommelier, who is highly skilled in espresso preparation, with a comprehensive understanding of coffee, coffee blends, quality, coffee varieties, roast degree, espresso equipment, maintenance, and performance, latte art, etc.

Coffee sommelier? I would argue that if you have ever voluntarily consumed a blended coffee drink made using powdered coffee flavoring, you have lost your right to claim to be “highly skilled” in espresso preparation.

On Turkey and the EU, trade and Brazil, Europe and Islam, Congress, xenophobia in Russia, music online, Google, Singapore's election | Economist.com

SIR – Please do not ever mention George Bush. And Winston Churchill in the same sentence again, even if you must break all the rules of grammar to do so.Steve Pettit

California

This is a real letter to the editor from the Economist! 

The random meaningless insult generator. (Hey, it’s Friday…)

Slow Cheetah is a ballad on the first disk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium. It's a nice song, and it's fun to play. I've seen a few tabs online, but they are written directly in Bb minor. If you have a really nice guitar or incredibly strong fingers, that's just fine. But for the rest of us, I have made a tab of the song in A minor, which is quite a bit easier; and with a capo, you can still play along.

Download the tab here. And as always, if you have suggestions or have found an error, please email [disinterested at gmail].

Thanks and enjoy

The Content

Itunes Music Store Says "In the event that a customers entire music library is lost, the iTunes Music Store does re-grant the purchases history. Please keep in mind that Apple does not offer protection against the loss of purchases, so this is a one-time exception.

I have some albums that I have purchased and lost, but the question is this: should I redownload now or wait until I experience a real calamity? I think I'll wait. But I'm really glad to know that iTunes offers this. I think that Apple is striking a really fair balance of convenience and property rights, even though I absolutely abhor the idea of having to "activate" anything that I have purchased, be it music, software, etc.

Lately I’ve been drinking the Kool Aid about data visualization and the graphical presentation of quantitative results. Regression results, for example, are usually presented in a tabular format. There’s nothing wrong with that mode of presentation, but there isn’t anything especially right about it either. My guess would be that it became a standard format because, before the desktop computing revolution, it was much easier to typeset a table than to include a picture. That’s no longer the case. Using Stata, R or even Excel, I can actually make a nice looking graph faster than I can make a pretty table.

Presenting things graphically can make interpretation easier. Of course, it’s important to ensure that you don’t misrepresent the data with your graphic, which is easy to do accidentally in the process of trying to get it to fit on the page. And I think that figures should still be accompanied by detailed tables, which can present data with more accuracy.

But ultimately I think it comes down to an ego thing. I think that people feel that pictures are for the weak. Real men look at tables, not charts, right? Once I got over that same prejudice when it came to mathematics, I noticed a sudden increase in my ability to solve complicated problems. And there’ s no shame in that. The work of Einstein and Feynman is littered with impromptu sketches and graphs.

Here are the pretty pictures I made today (they are regression results showing the midpoint and upper and lower bounds of the 95% confidence interval):

There are a few cool blogs about stats and data visualization. Check out Data Visualization and Visual Culture and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science for a sampling.