The Psychology of Seating

I'm sure research has been done in this area, but I never see it reflected in conference seating layouts... probably because there is "easy" and there is "this is what best practice and research articles show."

Indeed, Google Scholar has articles on seating, but most I see in a cursory glance are about children and education, but anyways.

As you can see in the following photo from CHI 2014 in Toronto (just ended this week!), there are people who haven't gone to a seat, yet there are seats open. Why? Well that seems mostly obvious (spatial norms, seats too small, no outside aisles are just a few possibilities). But what bothered me is, given that we know a thing or two about this kind of seating and human behavior, why can't we do better?

CHI!

At CHI this week, aka the "ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems". Very exciting. Looking forward to seeing some friends and some great projects and presentations!

Facebook Is Still Not Everyone

Annoying article in the New York Times recently, one that held much promise: "Up Close on Baseball’s Borders." The authors use Facebook data to determine the boundaries of US baseball (MLB) team fan geography. Except this doesn't work, because Facebook is not everyone. Is Facebook statistically representative on this measure? We don't know. Is this only those who "like" a team, have their location entered, and have their accounts public? It appears so. That's a pretty specific group, even if it is numerically large.

Millions of [Facebook users] do make their preferences public on Facebook...

And, from our knowledge of Facebook and common sense, that means that millions don't.

We were able to create an unprecedented look at the geography of baseball fandom...

Well, no, not at all of baseball fandom, it is a look at:

1. Facebook users....
2. Who also make their profiles public....
3. Who also "like" an MLB team.

This group does not even come close to equating with baseball fandom. Does it represent baseball fandom accurately in terms of geography in the US? That is unknown. Maybe, maybe not. But to claim that it does is simply inaccurate and shows a lack of solid understanding of samples, statistics, and data of all sizes ("big" in terms of big data does not mean better).

One group of die-hard baseball fans this data does not contain, I guarantee you, is children who are baseball fans, since children are not (usually) on Facebook. Young kids can be so into their teams ("their" teams, note!). Kids' affiliations will be influenced by their geography, their friends, and their parents, although my nephew likes Kevin Durant but my nephew lives in NYC and has never been to Oklahoma, so it is not always straightforward.

Dear New York Times people who wrote this article -- you have oversold your data! You can do better!

Research Presentation: CUHK, Communities in Online Games: Tools, Methods, Observations

Part of being unusually busy lately (in addition to the typical research, deadlines, and upcoming summer conference season) included giving an invited talk at the City University of Hong Kong in the Department of Media and Communication. Titled "Communities in Online Games: Tools, Methods, Observations", it was a great opportunity to talk for 50 minutes instead of the usual 12 and so I could knit together threads and themes that usually you don't get to address at all, such as larger overarching issues for research.

I mostly focused on the importance of theory for big data, and how big data might not be as big as you think, using online game communities and a couple of data sources as examples. It was really enjoyable and the audience was great.

The slides are available online, but they make much more sense in the context of the talk itself which is also available thanks to the great AV people at CUHK's Department of Media and Communication.

How The Mightily Hyped Have Fallen

Second Life inspired a wave of hype and fear not seen since... well ok we see that kind of thing all the time, but it was like Internet Hype 2.0, which of course was another version of Digital Utopia (version number too large to count really). So, every company had to get into Second Life, even when much of it turned out to be weird and porny. They got in like there was no tomorrow, massive announcements, and then quietly left, trying to hide their embarrassment. Even Wired left their offices.

I just ran into this ad on a wiki. Wow. They've really hit bottom. Even I am a little embarrassed for them. (Google will never do text flow correctly, drives me nuts.) "YES WE ARE SLUTASTIC." Nicely done, Lindens (if it is even still the Lindens), embrace your scumbaggery.

Silver's "The Signal and the Noise"

There are some errors in Silver's (excellent? interesting? occasionally vexing?) book from a little over a year ago, The Signal and the Noise, about prediction and Bayesian theory. The two I noticed are strange, because they are very basic. (Other people have noticed these errors.)

On page 269, the book says how 20 x 20 is 4,000, when it is actually 400. This is pretty basic. Would Silver make this kind of error? Was he rushed? Did he and the editors miss it? Did someone else ghost write parts of the book? If this error is here, what are the errors that I didn't notice?

There is also an error or two with the arrows-length illusion image on page 367. For one, the description is not clear, and it seems that Silver is describing the illusion in the wrong way (that is, he says the one that appears to be longer appears to be shorter). However I measured the lines of the arrows in my printing, and indeed the one which is supposed to appear longer via the illusion is indeed longer by a millimeter. It looks like a printing error, where the lines may have been the same length, but when the arrow heads were added, they were added compactly to the "will look shorter" line but were not to the "will look longer line". The thickness of the added arrow heads is just enough to throw the whole illustration off. So not only does Silver's description get it wrong, but then the illusion isn't an illusion, one is actually longer than the other.

This really undermines the entire book, since I'm reading it to learn about things I don't know, and if Silver can't get right the things I do know then I know I have no idea if he is getting right all of the material I don't know.

Unrelated to these errors, I did like this review: http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/20/nate-silver-confuses-cause-and-effect-ends-up-defending-corruption/

Counting What Counts

(…and the qualitative versus quantitative divide.)

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

-William B. Cameron, sociologist, 1967.

℅ Anthony Towndsend's book Smart Cities.