You have to read Chip Gibbons' annotation of Bush's budget.#

Jakob Nielsen writes about online surveys and Keep It Short Stupid!#

One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they're likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey).

It doesn't matter what you "learn" from a survey; you can't trust the data if it doesn't represent your users.

Tibor Machan writes about how upsetting it is that one cannot mention the personality of the poor with respect to "solving" poverty.#

Yet, in nearly all the studies of this phenomenon of extreme poverty, scholars tend, in the main, only to search out impersonal factors that impede development, factors such as climate, terrain, disease, ignorance, and so forth. What doesn't seem to find a place in the thinking about world poverty is that people themselves sometimes — even often — are responsible for how they fare. This is clearly evident to us when we consider our own friends, neighbors, acquaintances, so why should it not be so with people in far off lands? (We even know people who are poor deliberately — ascetics and ones who have taken a religious wow of poverty!)

Probably we shy away from considering the poor's own complicity in their poverty because we don't know those far away well enough and we tend to avoid explanations that have a normative component. Instead, scholars tend to rely on general models which invoke causal variables of an impersonal kind, so as to explain poverty. Studies of the phenomena, influenced very much by the tradition of value-free analysis in the social sciences, do not make reference to the merits of the beliefs and conduct of the individuals who experience the poverty.

Related to this is the story that Doug Miller linked about the African villages refusing healthcare because they thought it would help demons possess them or something. If you don't want to be helped, don't complain when we don't.

Update on 2004/02/04: Doug Miller linked me to the story in question.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about emergent democracy and how the Internet can be involved, but with great skepticism.#

When Joi and Jim talk about action emerging from online community organizing, I get the most skeptical. In many developed nations, especially the United States, the greatest enemy of activism is apathy. Grassroots activism may turn out to be a powerful weapon to fight apathy and encourage engagement. But apathy may not be the problem in other nations. In nations with a high deal of political repression, the enemy of activism may be threats to personal safety. In these situations, transparent public debate leading to action is likely an unwise path to political change. Can we expect democracy to emerge from Internet communities in countries where political activity is constrained and the Internet is censored? Or are we assuming that these democratizing technologies are only applicable in places where democracy and accompanying rights of free expression are already well protected?

Dave Winer writes about breasts. Oh my.#

For the record, I missed Janet Jackson's breast because I was writing something at halftime yesterday. Women's breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that all women bare their breasts if they want to when they're on television. It should be a choice thing. I'm pro-choice. It might be more comfortable. It's unbelievable that Michael Powell is having a hissy fit over this. More breasts, not less. That's my opinion.

Lance Arthur writes about the "Stupor Bowl."#

Janet Jackson's tits are real. I would have said that this was all a publicity stunt and it was meant to happen, because how could Justin "accidentally" tear off her breast cover? He reached right over, and she let him, and he grabbed it and pulled and look, nipple! And, better even than that, nipple hardware! And then he's all "sorry about the wardrobe malfunction, yo," and MTV is all, "well, (shrug), we didn't know that was going to happen," and CBS is all "hey, they did it! not us. it was them" and shit and whatever and like, okay, so let's throw a hissy fit. And then America is all, "Hey, boob!" and the FCC Chairman is all "I am highly offended and deeply aroused," and Janet's all, "I have a new album coming out and my new single drops on Monday and how can I get some free publicity?" and I'm all, "Wait, what? Was that a... that was her... am I in fucking France or something?"

Sure it's a tit, but it's a celebrity tit! On the most widely-watched spectacle on TV! In Prime Time! And it's a Jackson! So, that's all important to remember. And also: So, what was supposed to happen? Justin was going to reach over and grab her breast cover and pull and it reveals a diorama in support of our troops in Iraq as he sings "you're gonna be all nekkid and shit when I do this, yo," (I think he says "yo" all the time) and her chest heaves and cannons fire and skywrite 'marriage should be between a man and a woman's right breast' and she goes on to sing another fucking medley of her hits from two years ago?

James Joyce tells you to delete your fucking blog.#

You are all pretentious twats

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

Halley Suitt writes about the Howard Dean campaign and movement.#

Removing Joe Trippi from the Dean camp was all about that realignment -- away from "the movement" and back to "a campaign". It was a fearless 360 degree turn and it remains to be seen if Dean can decouple from that runaway freight train of democracy and ride the rails to a simple nomination as the leading Democratic nominee. I hate to rain on any social software parade, but I think the operative word of the two is SOCIAL, not SOFTWARE. When you think software is the important part of any radical change in the way people live -- no matter how exquisite and elegant that software may be -- you're focusing on the wrong story.

Chip Gibbons links to Walter in Denver who writes about North Korea's concentration camps.#

Once the philosophical determination has been made that the needs of society outweigh the sovereignty of individuals, anything goes. North Korea is a miserable place, and if these prisoners are impeding the progress of the country then they should be eliminated from society. That's what it means to put society ahead of the individual. The only remaining point of contention is the severity of the punishment.

There is another option, of course. Instead of using government and the criminal justice system to protect the needs of society you could reserve the use of those institutions strictly to protect the rights of individuals. That would mean prosecuting and punishing only those who directly violate the rights of others. Even the U.S. and other freer countries don't do that.

Death camps are the inevitable result of a powerful state.

Harry Brighouse writes about conservatives, values, and gay marriage.#

Rather to my surprise, reflecting on issues about the family has made me think that the state should make some, limited, assumptions about what constitutes a flourishing human life, and that conservatives are right to assert the value of one aspect of procreation, even if they do so in entirely the wrong way. Neither Macedo nor Mansfield distinguish between child bearing and child-rearing. I assume that procreation is supposed to include both. Think first about childbearing. This is just obviously not necessary for a perfect or complete human life: no (biological) men can do it, so if it is possible for a man to live a perfect life, childbearing is not necessary for it. If no man can live a perfect human life anyway, then the impossibility of childrearing is irrelevant to the case against (male) homosexuality and homosexual marriage.

But, child-rearing is different: I think it is a necessary part of a fully flourishing life for many, if not most, human beings. But child-rearing can be done by homosexual couples, if society allows it. So, there's no problem with homosexuality on this front.

AKMA is curious about what will happen when Google's Googliness kicks into Orkut.#

But let's remember, this project has backing from Google. And Google attained its present search-engine pre-eminence through. . . . tracking and measuring real connections among websites.

My uninformed guess is that the present flaky rating program will turn out only to have provided a rough seeding base, and that Orkut turns out to have in reserve a Pagerank-like algorithm for measuring the online association between people, so that instead of crude characterizations such as smileys and ice cubes, and even hearts, we'll see some characterizations based on measurable linking/citing behavior. That will, in turn, have weaknesses of its own, but it'll be a great deal more interesting and less trivial.

Matthias The Correction writes about religious ecstasy.#

It is beautiful to hear stories of God's grace, and they are lovely things to consider. But in the end, they don't mean much to anyone other than the individual who experienced them. And even for those people, such experiences do not remain fresh. The mind has a way of paving over the extranormal, whitewashing all experiences to fit in with our understanding, smoothing out the wrinkles in our already-complex worldviews. The shower pushed me along a path, but it no longer sustains me. It cannot; its work has been done.

But we need not look to the heavens for miracles. We need not look beyond our own backyards for outpourings of God's love. Some people, more devout by half than I will ever be, have never had any kind of religious ecstasy at all. And yet they believe. For some, the witness of the saints is enough. For others, the graceful cant of a butterfly in the air is enough.

David Madore writes about some problems with Orkut.#

Everything is way too US-centric. I'm not even talking about having to enter one's height in feet and inches when every single other country in the world uses SI units. It's the location field that annoys me most: it's only by zip code, and if you don't live in the US or in Canada it won't make sense of one. This is plain stupid. They should be storing a longitude and latitude instead: convert US zip codes to geo coordinates, and have a database of major world cities for other people, or let the user explicitly enter his coordinates if he prefers to. That way they could even display a world map with little dots showing the density of registered users; or one could easily find the list of users living within this-or-that distance from oneself. Please: how hard is it to obtain a list of the world's 10000 largest cities, by country, with precise coordinates? There's simply no excuse for not having done this. Also, I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure all times are expressed in US Pacific time: ever heard of Universal time or about letting the user pick his favorite time zone, guys?

Ryan Overbey links to anti-Islam propaganda.#

I really hope all those American evangelicals itching to save souls in Iraq don't rely on this trash. They'll get their asses kicked. Missionaries do better when they stick to their strengths: bribing people with food, medicine, and education.