All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

TEDx SIPA revisited

Education, Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAz0bOtfVfE]

Last Sunday, I posted a not entirely positive review of TEDx SIPA. At one point, I took issue with a speaker’s depiction of the Peace Corps:

Later, a SIPA student passionately critiqued the Peace Corps model, declaring, “Grateful as I am for my experience in the Peace Corps, I recognize that the developing world cannot just be a training ground for young, idealistic Americans. The problems in communities like the one I lived in are far too serious for that.” And yet he was speaking at a conference created entirely for young, idealistic (and often inexperienced) Americans interested in solving enormous global problems — the type whose very presence at TEDx signalled their personal enthusiasm for the brand of fifteen-minute bursts of inspiration in which the speaker was participating himself. Indeed, his extrapolation of his own disillusionment with his two-year volunteering effort in South Africa into an ardent condemnation of the entire Peace Corps’ allegedly flawed practices was itself a case study in misplaced idealism.

It appears I wasn’t the only one. Today, SIPA’s student-run newspaper The Morningside Post (disclosure: I am its opinion editor) ran a piece by Audrey Huse that zeroed in on the Peace Corps talk’s flaws:

I’m surprised Mr. Kortava finished his two years, and I commend him for it. But it seems he thought he was going to South Africa to singlehandedly halt the HIV epidemic, and such high expectations can lead to disillusion and disappointment. The TEDx event did not seem an appropriate venue to vent his frustrations. The TEDx  platform is intended to present innovative ideas worth spreading. If there was one in Kortava’s talk, I missed it.

Granted, Kortava’s is hardly the first critique of the Peace Corps, nor will it be the last. (It’s also not the first time he’s done it himself, either.) But I wasn’t primarily interested in discussing the specific merits of the Peace Corps in my previous post. I was bothered more by Kortava’s overly simplistic take on it, and the way in which that “quick fix” attitude permeated so many of the speeches I heard during the TEDx conference that day.

Anyway, my friend and flatmate Andres Lizcano Rodriguez — who, incidentally, runs a very cool blog of his own — took issue with some of my comments. With his permission, I’ve reproduced portions of his response here:

I think you’re being a big, arrogant ass. Of course there’s a problem in fitting everything into a 17-minute presentation. The fact is, most of the world does not consist of Ivy League grad students, and not everyone can simply digest complicated critiques or fact-based lectures and policy analysis.

I’m not sure those Krugman graphs would be for everyone. I think your critique is in large part a critique of the ascendant pop-intellectual craze, but what is the problem with making intellectuality a popular thing? TEDx conferences will never be intellectual activities, but that isn’t their goal in the first place. (I think…and I hope.) They’re meant to motivate you to start considering something that you might not have known about, or seen in the same way, before. All the “goddamn assholes” that already know all this stuff aren’t representative of the broader population.

(By the way, the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa makes a similar point to yours — not about TED talks but about culture. He keeps whining about the fact that everybody can be an artist or writer now, and that that has diminished the quality….all because he seems to feel that the intellectual aristocracy is threatened.)

Additionally, I think you’re underestimating the importance of passion and empowerment. Granted, it’s a big US-American cliché — I also despise all this “OMG that was so inspiring” stuff — but it’s not like that everywhere in the world.

You said:

There is a clear line connecting the type of thinking exemplified by TEDx and that of similarly grandiose but ill-informed ventures like the “Kony 2012” campaign. It’s not passion that’s lacking. But passion is dangerous in the hands of an institution that encourages superficial speech-giving and a daylong mutual back-scratch with an adoring audience.

But passion and self-esteem actually lack in many places. In my college in Bogotá — an elite university — we were not told all the time, like we are here, that we would be the future leaders of our country, that we could do everything we wanted, etc. etc. And thus I was often surrounded by many people — who were much smarter and more competent than I was — who didn’t dare to do anything because they didn’t feel they could actually achieve their goals. Most people had never actually considered that they could “dream big.”

Essentially, here are my points:

1. I think you’re misinterpreting the objective of a TED talk and, if interpreted differently, it could actually be of greater value to a broad audience than you’ve given it credit for.

2. I think you’re underestimating the importance of inspiration, empowerment, and passion.

After watching the above video, he summarized:

While we all agree on his points, nothing is being done about them. And I think part of the reason for this is that there are not enough people reminding us of his points. Meanwhile, there are tons of people (such as our own Office of Career Services) telling us all day long (in other formats) that we need to find a job at Goldman Sachs or the World Bank. Maybe it would be more efficient if TED opened offices at the big schools and scared the hell out of people so that they started behaving correctly. The point is that people need to be reminded of these big ideas, even if they already know them.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Are the writers still “In Control?” Sam Lim and I tackle Episode 4 of The Americans

Film/TV, , , , , , , , , ,

Jay: After last week, this episode felt a bit like a letdown. The action was good, the tension was decent, but the dialogue basically muddled through and the plot was weaker than it was in “Gregory.”

First, though, I have to get a pet peeve off my chest. Stan’s boss says of the attempted assassin, “[If] this guy’s said ‘Nyet’ once in the past ten years, we’re gonna find out when and where.” Why do so many TV shows and movies have lines like that? No one talks in such melodramatic phrases.

But even aside from a few campy moments — another one is when Elizabeth is arguing with Phil about staying committed to the Soviet Union: that debate is already getting old for me, and Elizabeth still hasn’t looked convincing while doing it yet — the plot got into weird territory at times.

claudia

First, why are Phil, Elizabeth, and “Claudia” all so willing to talk in their car openly (and even somewhat loudly)? They drop bugs all over the place — I’m guessing one was in the pin Phil gave to that nurse, most recently — but they’re not even remotely nervous that they’re being watched? Even after Phil knows for certain Stan was suspicious enough to snoop around their garage and check out their car?

Speaking of cars, it was never explained how they got rid of the security guard’s car. Dumping a body is one thing, but making a car disappear is another matter entirely. Maybe that’ll get brought up in a later episode.

Another thing: why would Nina’s boss tell her colleague to follow her? Once again, there’s really no explanation given for why all the right people are wary of all the other right people. It’s too uncanny, and too much like network TV.

Which brings me to my next complaint: remember how Nina was recruited in the first place? Because she got caught stealing caviar from the embassy. If you were her, wouldn’t you rather just confess the theft and try to find a new job, instead of risking your life running around every time the FBI calls? In defense of the show, I suppose it’s feasible that she feels it’s now too late, that even if she stopped working for the FBI they’d ruin her life (or end it) anyway. But her risk/reward calculations don’t seem that smart right now.

Side note: I don’t get what took place when Phil called that guy with a bunch of phones and asked to get to the vice president’s office. Was he figuring out who the nurse was? And who was that dude with all the phones?

One last thing: I couldn’t help but notice that when Paige went over her friend’s house to apologize, she was playing with her hands in the exact same way Dana does all the time on Homeland. Is that the universal TV representation of “awkward teenager?”

Sam: I couldn’t agree more with everything you pointed out! My biggest mistake this week: raising my expectations. Before I watched the episode, I read that this week’s episode would cover the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and for some reason, I thought it would make for an interesting episode, to say the least. I was wrong. Continue reading Are the writers still “In Control?” Sam Lim and I tackle Episode 4 of The Americans →

Reviving the art of the online conversation

Technology, , , , ,

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch brings up a point I’ve been thinking about myself lately:

Blog commenting systems are bizarre, broken and dated. TechCrunch recently switched from Facebook Comments to Livefyre – a change that, for the record, I had no say in. I’m not sure I see value. I don’t agree with some of the sentiment expressed here, which almost makes it sound like this site, and all its authors, missed the trolling days of TechCrunch Past. We don’t.

What was really missing, at least in my opinion, was the sense of community that blog comments once provided. But there’s no system alive that can bring that back, because that era of the web is over. And it has been for a long, long time…

The problem, which the Internet hasn’t solved at all, and has in fact even made worse, is that opinions are not created equal and therefore shouldn’t be considered in equal measure. The Internet has put people on such an even playing field that we now have to create entirely new systems to verify who’s worth listening to. From Google rankings to Techmeme headlines to retweets and number of followers, we’re still struggling to figure out who deserves to be heard.

I’ve been considering this problem on somewhat different terms: for me, the question is mostly how to best stimulate online conversation on my own blog. Should I switch to Facebook commenting? Use another system entirely? In general, the dropoff between number of people who’ve read a post and number who’ve commented is enormous. I’m still thinking of ways to make that engagement easier for people — and if you have any ideas, let ’em fly in the comments!

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Double talk on the sequester

Politics, , , , , ,

Jamelle Bouie cries foul on Republican attempts to portray the looming sequester as the Democrats’ fault:

A key part of the GOP’s strategy on the sequester is to blame President Obama for the fact it exists at all. One good example is House Speaker John Boehner’s op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal:

With the debt limit set to be hit in a matter of hours, Republicans and Democrats in Congress reluctantly accepted the president’s demand for the sequester, and a revised version of the Budget Control Act was passed on a bipartisan basis.

Ultimately, the super committee failed to find an agreement, despite Republicans offering a balanced mix of spending cuts and new revenue through tax reform. As a result, the president’s sequester is now imminent.

The big problem with this narrative is that it directly contradicts Boehner’s rhetoric at the time. After the deal was crafted, in July 2011, Boehner told GOP House members that “There was nothing in this framework that violates our principles.” Later, in an interview with CBS News following the House vote on the bill, he described the deal as such: “When you look at this final agreement that we came to with the White House, I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.” And, as a whole, the House GOP was fine with the deal too—it passed 269-161, with 174 Republicans voting in favor.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Editor in Chief

Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , ,
President Barack Obama works on his inaugural address with Jon Favreau, Director of Speechwriting, not pictured, in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama works on his inaugural address with Jon Favreau, Director of Speechwriting, not pictured, in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Slate highlights this photo from White House photographer Pete Souza:

The photo shows only a portion of the first page of what was a rather lengthy speech, but what we can see nonetheless largely confirms previous anecdotes that Obama prefers to take an active role in shaping his remarks, particularly for major events like an inauguration or State of the Union address…The changes you can make out if you zoom in on this particular photo range from minor grammar tweaks to some relatively heavy rewrites.

A Big Data divide at the Times

Media, Politics, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

David Brooks says Big Data matters, but perhaps not as much as people think:

Big data has trouble with big problems. If you are trying to figure out which e-mail produces the most campaign contributions, you can do a randomized control experiment. But let’s say you are trying to stimulate an economy in a recession. You don’t have an alternate society to use as a control group. For example, we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.

Paul Krugman takes a look and says, “Waittt a minute here:”

It would be lovely to live in a world in which the failure of interest rates to soar as predicted would lead Brian Riedl of Heritage and Niall Ferguson to concede that their anti-stimulus critiques of 2009 were based on a completely wrong model; in which the economic downturns that have followed austerity policies almost everywhere they have been applied would lead Alberto Alesina to concede that his work on expansionary austerity was probably flawed, and lead George Osborne to proclaim publicly that he led Britain down the wrong path. But such things very rarely happen, and the fact that they don’t happen has nothing to do with the limitations of data…

So yes, it has been disappointing to see so many people sticking to their positions on fiscal policy despite overwhelming evidence that those positions are wrong. But the fault lies not in our data, but in ourselves.

It’s a good point from Krugman, who’s also been quite busy dealing with other knuckleheads.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Beyond the Dish meter, part II

Media, Technology, , , , , ,

A week ago, I took a look at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Dish, in order to see how the implementation of a “Read On” meter had affected the content structure of his blog. I found the following:

Bottom line: Andrew Sullivan has almost perfectly inverted his “Read On” content from before to after the implementation of the meter. From January 1 to 7, he posted 231 times; of those, only 52 (22.5%) included “Read On” buttons. Of those 52 “Read On” sections, 35 consisted primarily of third-party content (67.3%), 12 mostly contained material produced by Andrew and his readers (23.1%), and the remaining 5 were a combination of Andrew/readers and third-party content (9.6%).

From February 4 to 10, however, several things changed. The number of total posts was almost identical to the January period (227), but — as he promised — there were significantly fewer “Read On” posts in the first week of the new meter (27, or only 11.9% of the total). Of those 27, 19 contained content primarily contributed by Andrew and his readers (70.4%), 5 contained a combination (18.5%), and only 3 “Read On” sections during the entire week contained content mostly attributable to third parties (11.1%, or 1.3% of the entire population of posts this past week).

For more on the methodology of exactly how I categorized Sullivan’s various posts, see the original post. The first graph below depicts the stats for January 1 – 7, a week I chose as the control group for The Dish‘s content structure before the meter:

Before the meter.
Before the meter.

This second graph portrays the composition of The Dish‘s content from the very first full week that the meter was in effect, February 4 – 10:

Just after the meter.
The first week of the meter.

As Sullivan pointed out, The Dish rolled out the meter slowly in its first week: compared to the control week in January, when 22% of all posts contained “Read On” buttons, only 12% of all posts had the button in the first week of the meter. Furthermore, the type of content behind the meter was quite different: whereas the control period was dominated by third-party content beyond the “Read On” button, in the first week of the meter the majority of “Read On” sections primarily contained content produced by Andrew Sullivan and his readers.

Because that first week under the new meter was intended to be a bit of a test run, it remained to be seen how the stats would change (or stay the same) once the “Read On” button began to be used at a more normal frequency. So as a follow-up, I’ve now conducted an identical study of the very next week, February 11 – 17.

The total number of posts was similar to that of the previous two periods (237). Of those posts, 50 (21.1%) contained a “Read On” button: note that this is almost exactly the same percentage as in the control week (22.5%). Of those 50 sections located after the “Read On” button, 22 (44.0%) contained content primarily produced by Andrew and his readers, 20 (40.0%) contained content mostly taken from third-party sources, and the remaining 8 (16.0%) contained a combination of both. See the graph below:

The second week of the meter.
The second week of the meter.

Again, I have shared the entire Excel spreadsheet here, in case anyone wishes to contest my methodology or categorization. As I mentioned in my original post:

Obviously, there is a small subjective element to the endeavor. However, this is probably much less significant than one might think: the vast majority of posts on The Dish – and this applies equally to the “Read On” and non-”Read On” sections of each post – quite clearly fall into one of the three categories specified above: content produced primarily by Andrew and/or his readers, content produced primarily by third parties, and content containing a mixture of both.

So after a pretty significant dip in “Read On” posts in the first week of the meter — while the kinks were being ironed out — The Dish‘s content has since returned to its pre-meter ratio of non-“Read On” to “Read On” posts. However, what lies beyond the meter has shifted: whereas 67.3% of all “Read On” sections before the meter contained mostly third-party content, now the plurality of “Read Ons” (44.0%) consist of content provided by Andrew and his readers (from analysis to letters to views from people’s windows). The proportion composed of third-party content has fallen to 40.0%, with the remaining 16.0% of all “Read On” sections comprised of material that contains both.

What this likely means is that Sullivan and his team have taken to heart the precautions of readers and commentators who noted that, to charge for content, the part that’s hidden to non-subscribers should tend to be more original — as opposed to a curation of third-party material.

One thing I didn’t touch on in my original post, but which I did measure, is the composition of every post before the “Read On” button — that is, the portion of each post one can see whether or not one is a subscriber. (This includes posts without a “Read On” button at all.) In the January 1 – 7 period, content was divided thusly: 67.5% of pre-“Read On” sections were primarily third-party content, 21.6% were content produced by Andrew Sullivan and his readers, and the remaining 10.8% were a mixture of both. (This was an almost identical proportion to the composition of the material after the “Read On” button during the same period.)

For the February 4 – 10 period, these numbers were: 64.8% = third-party content, 22.5% = Andrew/readers, and 12.8% = a combination. (I’m rounding to one decimal point here, so that’s why it doesn’t add up to exactly 100.0%.)

And for this last week (February 11 – 17), here are the proportions: 63.7% = third-party content, 21.5% = Andrew/readers, and 14.8% = a combination. Considering the fact that all three time periods had almost identical compositions of material before the “Read On” button, the significant changes in material beyond the button present an even starker contrast.

I believe Sullivan mentioned recently that if the pace of subscribers didn’t pick up, he may “nudge” them towards paying their dues. This could happen in one of two ways. Either he could reduce the number of monthly “Read On” clicks it takes to trigger the meter (it’s currently at seven), or he could introduce more “Read On” posts as a percentage of his total posts. As an early subscriber, it doesn’t really matter to me which one he chooses. But so far at least, the content lying beyond the “Read On” button certainly seems to justify the annual fee.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta