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Monday, November 5. 2012Thoughts on the War on Nate Silver
I've been watching the War on Nate Silver with some bemusement. It's very clear that his critics don't get him or where he comes from. Probably none of them are baseball fans, or else they are fans who have no tolerance for modern baseball statistics. There are rather a lot of those.
Silver is one of the pioneers of Sabermetrics, the modern approach to baseball stats. This movement was and still is focused on using statistical techniques to more accurately describe and predict the results on the field. Little stock is placed in conventional wisdom or traditional stats. Sabermetricians will be happy to discuss the weaknesses of ERA and Batting Average in characterizing player performance, or the importance of luck. Baseball traditionalists hate Sabermetrics. Yankee fans don't want to believe that over his career, Derek Jeter has been a league average shortstop, which is what modern defensive stats appear to be telling us (consider this this article, which defends Jeter's defense by bringing up his batting average. Death of Sabermetrics? Try death of logic). Traditional baseball commentators seem to feel threatened (consider the views of former ESPN analyst Joe Morgan). Now, what does this have to do with politics and the 2012 election? Pretty much everything. There are two groups who seem to be mad as hell at Nate Silver. There are the Romney supporters who have persuaded themselves that the polls are skewed. Consider these the "Fans". They don't like what the numbers tell them, and therefore loudly declare that they must be wrong. And there are the pundits who feel threatened by challenges to the conventional wisdom they peddle on talk shows and in the printed press. Consider these the "Sportscasters". Their positions depend on the illusion of insider access and the further illusion that insider access means something. Silver's results strongly suggest that insider access may not be worth so much. Silver recently participated in a twitter exchange with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC in which he appeared to challenging Scarborough to a bet on Obama vs Romney. The NY Times public editor didn't like this. She seems to not understand that Silver was almost certainly betting on his model, not on a candidate (and Scarborough was betting on his pundithood and insider access). I think that what Nate Silver is about is validating and improving his model, and clearing the woods of worthless and incorrect conventional wisdom. That's pretty much what he's always been about, whether the subject is Baseball or Politics. Saturday, October 20. 2012OpenStreetMap: Emergency Services
This is a project I've been thinking about since I started seriously reviewing the map of Albany, NY in OpenStreetMap this summer. This blog posting is based on my lightning talk at SOTM US 2012, but expands on some things. Also, there has been some change since I gave that talk a week ago and those changes are reflected here.
I was working through the Pine Hills neighborhood and it occurred to me that responding to a fire call in Albany could be pretty challenging. There were some pretty significant issues in the Tiger 2005 data. After finding and correcting issues I discovered on the road, I would in some cases go find the corresponding area in Google Maps, and could see that they'd found and fixed some problems and not others. A good example is Helderberg Avenue. This first link is my corrected map as reflected in OpenStreetMap: Helderberg Avenue in OSM. In Tiger 2005, Helderburg Avenue is shown as one continous street, and my correction to it consists of breaking the street to reflect the two pedestrian only sections. The second link is to Google Maps; as of 10/20/2012 the Google Maps data has partially corrected Tiger 2005 -- it has one of the pedestrian only sections, but not the other: Helderberg Avenue in Google Maps. My review of the Garmin map of Albany suggest that the Navteq data being used by Garmin is a bit better, but still imperfect. But I've seen Garmin take 2 years to pick up on significant changes to the road grid; they didn't have the new bridge over the railroad yard in Rensselaer for quite some time after it was completed and opened, and that was a major alteration to traffic patterns. So the gist of my first argument is that commercial map vendors don't really seem to have the precise maps needed by first responders. The question then becomes this: Can OpenStreetMap provide such maps? Continue reading "OpenStreetMap: Emergency Services" Thursday, July 12. 2012Review: Failure in the Saddle
Savas Beatie has become my favorite publisher of Civil War history. Failure in the Saddle is a good example of why that is:
The standard narrative of Chickamauga is that Bragg's Army of the Tennessee won in spite of Bragg rather than because him. The litany of complaints about Bragg's generalship is long and colorful. But most of the literature on the campaign focuses on Bragg's failures, and the cavalry operations are given little attention. Powell is the first serious examination of these operations in quite some time (ever?). He makes a strong case that considerable blame should also be placed on the commanders of Bragg's two Cavalry Corps, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Joe Wheeler. Forrest is a challenging subject. He is deified by many, vilified by many others (Note: I'm not going to address here any of the issues related to atrocities like the Fort Pillow Massacre or his involvement in the early years of the KKK). His advocates consider him a military genius. Forrest had little military training, but a gift for independent operations. The Chickamauga Campaign exposes his flaws; as a freshly promoted Corps commander he was placed in a position for which he did not have the training, instincts or preparation. He found it difficult to stay out of low level tactical details, often didn't fully understand his role or the role of his corps, and made key mistakes in intelligence collection. This is not to say that he was consistently awful; there were a number of things that he did well in the campaign. Unlike Forrest, Joe Wheeler, who did have the professional training requisite for the job of Corps commander, was just plain awful. He was lazy, insubordinate, and sluggish in responding to orders. Failure In The Saddle examines the operations of the cavalry in the campaign fairly carefully. Chapters at the end provide assessments of both the commanders and of the historians. And in a nice touch that is becoming common in books from Savas Beatie, an appendix contains a driving tour with GPS coordinates for those who would like to go see the locations of the campaign themselves. Tuesday, June 19. 2012On Grant Cottage
I moved to the Albany area for college in 1976, and have stayed here year round since the fall of 1978. Grant has been one of my Civil War heros (along with Lincoln) ever since I started learning about the war (which my Grandfather Thomson never knew, he probably would have been horrified, or at least deeply disappointed).
But I didn't visit the Grant Cottage on Mount MacGregor until this past weekend. I'm glad I finally made the time. It is a unique place, preserved ever since Grant's death in 1885, mostly unchanged (except for new period-correct wallpaper done in the 1940s.) The furniture and fixtures are more-or-less what they were when Grant died. The flower arrangements are the actual ones sent for Grant's funeral, treated in a unique method which has stood the test of time. Though Grant only lived here for the last 6 weeks of his life, his dying presence as he struggled to finish his memoir is quite palpable. The office, where you enter the house, is the room where Grant sat with Mark Twain reviewing the manuscript. The next room, with two chairs face to face, is where Grant spent most of the last 6 weeks, sitting up because of the risk of choking to death as the cancer filled his mouth and throat. Finally, there is the deathbed in the next room, where the bed and bedspread are preserved. Grant's Memoirs are a treasure, both as a military autobiography and as a work of literature. Grant Cottage in Wilton New York is where he completed them, in his last act before he died. Sunday, April 22. 2012more on Head & Neck restraint certification stickersMonday, April 9. 2012Head & Neck restraint systems & Certification Stickers
Last November at the NEDiv SCCA mini convention, a friend of mine came to me with an issue. he'd acquired a Hutchins Device (one of the modern head & neck restraint systems) on ebay, and was concerned because the word "void" showed up on the certification stickers.
Stickers of this type have been around for around 12 years. they're designed so that when you peel them off, the word void appears. having the word void show up on a legitimate item which has not been tampered with would be a bit of a problem. discussion at the time suggested the problem was because the device was clear coated carbon fiber, and light was getting behind the stickers. on Saturday, i went to Long Island to do annual inspections for a bunch of SCCA race cars, and of course got to inspect driver gear. since the restraint systems are mandatory this year, i saw a bunch of those too. what was interested was that all the new HANS devices were matte finish, no clear coat. they did not have problems with the FIA & SFI certification stickers. there was one older HANS, clear coated, and sure enough, the word VOID showed up. we're going to have to do some training of tech inspectors on this. it's possible to tell if a sticker has been tampered with or not, you just need to think through it. when we peel off a helmet sticker, the material that fills the word void physically pulls away from the sticker. when the word void shows up on a clear coated HANS device, the shiny fill is not missing, you just see a thin outline around the word void. these latter stickers are fine. Tuesday, February 7. 2012Hiram Ulysses Grant
Keith Harris at Cosmic America discusses how General Grant got the nickname Unconditional Surrender Grant at Ft Donelson, and reminds us that U.S. were not Grant's actual first and middle initials. He is quite correct.
At birth, Grant was named Hiram Ulysses Grant. Why, then, do we know him as Ulysses S. Grant? Grant's appointment to West Point involved a bit of indirection. The Congressman for his district, Thomas L Hamer, was a former friend of Grant's father, the two of whom had fallen out over politics years before. Grant's father was unwilling to write to Hamer requesting the appointment, so he wrote to Senator Thomas Morris, who evidently forwarded the request to Hamer (the appointment was Hamer's to dispose of after all.) Hamer did make the appointment — but he didn't remember Ulysses's full name. He knew his mother was a Simpson, so he put U. S. Grant on the paperwork. When Ulysses reported at West Point, that is what was on the register. And so he became Ulysses S Grant. Sunday, January 22. 2012HOT Presentation
I did a presentation on HOT for Albany Rotary last Wednesday (2012-01-18). I just published the slides, they're available Here.
HOT is a remarkable exercise in applying modern technologies and community based approaches to an unexpected but extremely effective approach to Humanitarian aid. HOT applies the tools and methods of OpenStreetMap to humanitarian efforts, and leverages the OSM community to crowdsource the responses to disasters like the Haiti earthquake. HOT also engages with local communities in the developing world, enabling them to map their communities and take control over their own fate. HOT is a remarkable effort that (from my point of view as president of a Rotary Club) fits in well with Rotary's approach to international projects. I am planning to continue promoting and advocating HOT in the Rotary Community, starting out in District 7190. Friday, January 6. 2012new adventures in Lame Customer Service, part II
Apple generally tends to be good at customer service, it's part of the whole user experience thing which has helped bring Apple back from the dead. this fact makes my recent trip to the Genius Bar all the more disappointing.
my daughter was using her mother's macbook to watch a DVD while on vacation, and let the battery run all the way down. it appears that the battery was/is in the process of failing, and the laptop's timers/counters for tracking battery status weren't in sync with the actual state of the battery. the result was a very hard shutdown, and something got corrupted - like maybe the binary of finder, based on the subsequent behavior of the macbook. now at this point, i don't actually know that the battery is the problem. once we got things charged back up, boots were painfully slow, and logins failed partway through -- finder appeared to launch then crash. we were on vacation, so i didn't have the install dvd. two days ago, back at home, i tried to boot from the install disk only to discover it had the exact same behavior as my own macbook pro had displayed when the pro's battery was dead. note that i haven't put two-and-two together yet, i haven't yet become aware that defunct laptop batteries are the common issue. so i figure to make an appointment at the genius bar at the local apple store, but i go online and discover they apparently want me to try phone support first. that's ok, the laptop is still covered by applecare, so i request support and wait for their call. they call back fairly soon, and it turns out that they're stumped by the problem two. we spend a lot of time on it, then get a genius bar appointment set up for 2pm the next day (yesterday as i type this). i show up slightly early for the appointment, figuring to go check in right away and then kill time, except now the customer service starts to decay a little (it was fine up to now.) the guy doing the check in is no where to be found. after 5 or so minutes, he finally shows up. i get checked in, and finally someone is assigned to me at about 2:20. the guy is fairly knowledgeable. the diagnostics show a bad battery, but we agree that it's plugged in, so stuff should work. we also agree that the not booting from dvd is something that needs to be addressed, and plug in a USB drive with the install images. that works fine, and we run an install-and-archive to replace the broken copy of Leopard with a good one while preserving all the personal files and applications. it's going to take a while, so the apple guy goes off to handle another customer while the install happens. i presume after the install is verified as successful, he'll be back to look at the can't-boot-from-dvd problem. except he never comes back. the install-and-archive finishes, logins work properly. i see that he's handling a customer with a macbook of some sort that needs to be sent to the depot, i figure that can take a while. in the meantime i install a bunch of the updates to Leopard. this takes a while, and he still never comes back, clearly moving on to other customers (he actually headed behind the counter several times, carefully avoiding any eye contact with me.) finally, at 4pm i give up, and get one of the other employees to unplug the power brick from behind the counter so i can leave. so here are the issues:
i have subsequently figured out that macbooks and macbook pros with bad batteries may not boot from DVDs, this turns out to have been the case for both laptops. it's interesting to me that both apple phone support and the genius bar folks don't seem to know this. i'm 2 for 2 on it, but then small sample size does apply. new adventures in Lame Customer Service, part I
i bought a copy of Drive Genius 3 from Other World Computing when i upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro a little while back. it's been a decent piece of software, but recently has been reporting a bad block. i was having trouble booting from DVD (necessary to make repairs to the internal hard drive), so i just suffered for a while. just the other day booting from DVD became possible again (it turns out that if the laptop battery is at the point of needing replacement, DVD boots will fail.)
once i realized that DVD boots worked again, i also realized that i'm not entirely sure where the DVD of Drive Genius is (my office is, perhaps, a bit messy.) so i looked around the Prosoft Website, and figured out that apparently there was a downloadable ISO, and i couldn't find the link for it. I emailed off to support, including my serial number, and was rather happy with the quick response, an email with a link. Except the link didn't work right. there was an input field for the serial number and a submit button. i entered the number and clicked submit, and got a confusing html jumble back. i tried the serial number without the hyphens, no change. ok, i'm using Camino, which is an obscure niche browser, so let's try Chrome. same results. ok, Drive Genius is a mac product, surely the link works in a current copy of Safari. nope. so i emailed back to support. they sent back a different link to try. except this one was going to charge me $7.50 to send me a physical disk via surface mail. no thanks, guys, i already paid for Drive Genius 3 and you advertise downloadable copies of the ISO. fix your web site (please.) Sunday, January 1. 2012The Battle of White Sulpher Springs
Reviewed:
In addition to the Amazon link, copies are available for purchase from the author. Eric Wittenberg has become one of my favorite writers on Civil War topics. His recent The Battle of White Sulpher Springs is a brief book, focused on a little known action in western Virginia during the period when the modern state of West Virginia was being formed. The cast of characters alone is rather intriguing: the Federal Cavalryman, William Woods Averell (assigned to West Virginia after serving as a scapegoat for Hooker's loss a Chancellorsville), Colonel William "Mudwall" Jackson (a rather less successful 2nd cousin of Stonewall Jackson), and Colonel George S. Patton (grandfather of the famous WWII General.) Wittenberg also devotes some attention to the nearly unknown Captain Paul Freiherr von König, a German serving on Averell's staff, killed during the battle. The book focuses on a raid in August 1863, led by Averell, to seize a law library at Lewisberg, West Virginia, for use by the newly formed state government of West Virginia. It follows the path of Averell's raid until he encounters Patton's forces at White Sulpher Springs and the ensuing battle, and then covers Averell's subsequent retreat. The book is very clear, well written and well researched, and gives considerable insight into one of the smaller dramas of the sort that are frequently overlooked. Thursday, December 29. 2011Recent Acquisitions (what to read & review next?)
i have the following items in hand, recently acquired (either as gifts or because i bought them myself.) What should I read and review next?
A Glorious Army, by Jeffry D. WertDiscussed:
Saturday, July 9. 2011new wheels for old bikes
i will at some point post a narrative account of what i've done with the 1984 Trek 500. For now, though, just a fact dump about 126mm hubs & wheels:
Sunday, June 19. 2011Photographing the USS SlaterThe US built nearly 600 Destroyer Escorts (DEs) in WWII. Smaller and slower than the traditional Destroyer, these ships (originally british designs) performed a very focused mission, hunting U-Boats in the Atlantic and providing escorts for the Escort Carriers (small carriers built mostly on merchant hulls.) 20 years ago, there were no DEs left afloat in the US. An effort was made to bring a ship back to the US (many DEs were provided to allied navys after WWII ended.) The Slater was in Greek service (apparently used as a barracks ship towards the end of its Greek career), and a deal was cut to bring it back to the US. The Slater arrived in NYC in 1993, and spent the next 4 years docked next to the USS Intrepid, before being brought up to Albany NY, where the Destroyer Escort Historical Museum is located today. I recently organized a work day for members of Albany Rotary Club at the Slater. In the course of the day I got permission to come back with some camera gear and do some photography, to be shared with the Museum. The Slater is incompletely restored. The Greeks had stripped much from it in preparation for scrapping, and hadn't really put much energy into caring for it towards the end. Enormous progress has been made, but there are areas of the ship (where no tours go) that still need a lot of work. I'm interested in these areas from the viewpoint of my artistic pretensions as a photographer, and the museum needs documentation of the unrestored areas for its own purposes. So yesterday I headed over in the morning and got started. I photographed the ceremonies associated with Destroyer Escort Day, then headed down and did some work in the two unrestored engine rooms. The latter was more exploratory, as I tried to understand conditions and do some experiments with lighting. I quickly discovered that the built in flash doesn't play well with the Tokina ultrawide zoom lens, and that the lighting in these compartments is very sketchy (most of the ships overhead fixtures aren't working in these areas.) All of this can be dealt with; the light fixtures can be repaired, and there are options like light painting (where long exposures are combined with the use of flashlights to selectively illuminate interesting things.) This is a challenge, and it's going to take time and effort, but I'm up for it.
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