SchneeWorld

Election Night Dumb*sses, Redux

OK, Maybe I was a bit early in my rant. Now, 10 minutes after my last post, at 10PM CST, they are saying that Obama is the winner. Score one for mathematics.

Election Night Dumb*sses

I'm live-blogging from Schneeworld Corporate HQ. We have the nerve center tuned into national election coverage. As it stands, there are 207 Electoral Votes for Obama and 135 for McCain.

Montana, Indiana,  Virgina, North Carolina and Florida are all "too close to call". Given that California is going to go for Obama (just like Texas went for Texas), that will put Obama at 207 + 55 = 262. Obama needs 8 EVs to clinch it. Probabilititically, this thing is OVER. This isn't a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment. This is pure probability. With the exception of Montana, any one of the "too close to calls" would put Obama over the top. And no one on the boob-tube has even mentioned this. Heck, Colorado has 9 EVs and is currently reporting 25% with a 56% to 42% Obama advantage.

I get probability. I understand distributions and the future isn't set in stone. But this thing is over and no one is talking about it. Even as a probability.

Dumb*sses.

Intrade

The above is a prediction of tomorrow's national election.  "Prediction Markets" tend to be a bit more accurate than polls - prediction markets have real money backing them (people can lose or gain dollars based on the outcomes) and I feel that real money removes biases more than even carefully conducted polls.

As of today, Intrade has Obama 364 v McCain 174 Electoral votes.

Update: An anoynmous commentor asks if prediction markets aren't just "polls for technocrats". That is a good question. Prediction markets (Wikipedia) are not 100% accurate, but historical evidence shows that they are more accurate than "normal" polling. In the long run, markets are 74% closer to the actual result than polling. But they are not perfect. Being a market, financial shenanigans can and do occur - there is evidence that in the 2008 Presidential Market, a trader is using Intrade to hedge bets placed on BetFair and contracts taken on the Iowa Markets.

Oh, and I don't think that Prediction Markets are restricted to "technocrats". I would guess that the users of these markets are closer to gamblers and commodities traders.

Dumb*sses, Redux

The Splurge is turning out to be not quite as bad as I feared. Rather than a bailout in which the US Gov't US Taxpayers purchase toxic assets from the banks, we're purchasing preferred stock in the banks, with an expected dividend and other financial accouterments. Not quite as bad, since the net result of this infusion of capital into the banks will provide them with the resources to begin lending money again.

However, they will lend that money to who? That's right, the US Taxpayers. You see what's going on here? We're giving the banks money that they will lend back to us, for a higher interest rate than they will have to pay (in the form of the dividend). Insert something about "selling us the rope we'll use to hang ourselves" here.

Dumb*sses

I don't get too involved in politics. I have some ideas that may someday manifest (no, I'm not considering a run for office) but I usually vote in everything I can leave it at that.

No more. Of my three federal representatives, two voted for the Financial Bailout bill. Or, as the term I prefer: The Splurge. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn both voted 'yea' for this bill; Representative Lloyd Doggett voted 'nea'.

I'm going to vote just the opposite for these politician's re-elections: "Yea" for Doggett, "nay" for both Hutchinson and Cornyn. While it happens to break this way, this has nothing to do with my political party preference. It has to do with a rash decision to vote for something, anything, to give the appearance of doing something.

Yes, America is facing a crisis. This crisis will mostly affect the people on the fringes: the homeless, the working poor. It is a big deal. I don't claim to understand it all, but do I understand that "perfect" is the enemy of "good", so I'm not advocating for a "perfect" solution. But the Splurge isn't even "good". It was flat-out evil when it was a three-page proposal from the Administration and time (and the addition of 448 pages) hasn't helped much. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my wife and mentioned that if people are concerned with money freezing up (a credit crunch) then maybe a tax-break could help with the money supply. As long as the break is paid for, perhaps out of the proposed $700 billion. And I'm not a knee-jerk tax-cutter.

Fast foward to this week and we got the tax-break. But IT IS UNPAID FOR. It did not come out of the $700 billion, which means it comes out of my children's future. Just like the $700 billion. Unconscionable. If the tax-break is an efficient means to help with the crisis, then pay for it. If it is not efficient, then DON'T DO IT. And, if the "tax-break" wasn't enough, they stuffed it with pork, to make the bill more palatable. The bill doesn't not effectively address oversight, foreclosure, executive compensation, &c. It does allow for the people who caused the problem (the FEDs) to give their buddies (the CEOs) a bunch my MY MONEY. Watch this, read this and this, and share in my outrage.

Who f*cking elected these jerks? Oh, that's right. WE DID. We're obviously the bigger idiots.

I would have liked to have a bit more time put into this bailout bill. Like ensuring that we, the taxpayers, don't get stuck with likely-to-remain worthless securities. Think about it, who knows more about the actual worth of the securities? The investment banks or the Federal Gov't? The banks are going to "sell" us the absolute worst of the securities. And Gov't talks about how this bill makes all of us "investors". If my financial investor tried to sell me this, I'd fire him. And I'm going to fire my representatives.

Fortunately for Hutchison, she has stated that she will not run for re-election (she's going to run for governor) so my lack of voting for her won't mean much. Cornyn, you lost my vote. Period. Hutchinson, don't expect my support for your future campaigns.

Yay Me

As a coda to the Photography Contest, the results are in and I did rather well.

I won the Sports & Activities category with my image of the rowers and all three of my images garnered more votes for me than any of the other finalists. That means that I also won the grand prize. As is turns out, I technically won the Abstract category with the spiderweb image, but the rules state that entrants can win only one category, so I was awarded the category that gave me the most votes. I was also awarded a rather sizable check, which will help me price my art, should I ever want to ruin this perfectly serviceable hobby by mixing it with money.

That said, soon, if you apply for a credit card offered by my company, you'll be able to select at least one of my images to decorate it.

And, our internal communications department wants to do a profile on me.

I'm so cool.

Photo Contest

A rather large financial business employs me. I'm not sure why, but it does.

The company is about to release a new batch of branded credit cards and started a contest for employees to get photographs taken by employees printed on the cards. When a customer requests a card, the customer has the option to upload their own image, select one of the employee images or select no image for background printing on the card. The call-for-images went out in mid August, right before I went on vacation. I hastily selected five images good images that I thought would make decent credit card backgrounds. It turns out I forgot to select a really good one, but I was busy. The images needed to fit into eight different categories. I submitted five (total) images into at least two categories. A total of over 6000 images were submitted. 6000! That seems like a lot to me. From the submissions, six images for each category were selected by some committee and released for voting. The winner from each category will be made available for selection by customers for the credit cards.

Of my five entries, I have three selected, two in the 'Abstract' category and one in the 'Sports' category. The ballots look like this:

And

Can you guess which ones are mine?

I have A and D in Abstract and E in Sports. I'm pretty happy.

As it turns out, the voting is run by a third-party provider, and the vote URL:

[redacted]

is open to the public. Anyone can apparently vote. Anyone. Strange. Also, the rules state that you have to vote for each category, but you can only submit one ballot. That one-ballot restriction seems to be protected by a couple of Cookies, which are presumably checked if someone tries submit twice. I'm pretty sure that the Cookies are randomly generated, meaning if someone deletes them and tries to re-vote, the system will allow it. Seems like a security flaw, but the third-party is presumably smarter than me.

Big Air

Parenting

 A couple of months ago (maybe a year ago), the family and I tooled around Austin and we found the 9th Street BMX Trail, located on 9th Street near Lamar. Very close to our house. I flagged the site as some place I wanted to bring a camera to sometime. That time was Sunday.

Not really thinking about the BMX trail, I recently set up a very small jump for Jack in our street. Very small. He went over it a few times and seemed to have some fun, but I think he enjoyed watching me more. Kathleen had the brilliant idea (no snark, brilliant) for me to take the boys to the BMX trail on Sunday for an outing. I packed my camera gear and Jack's bike and we headed out. With the boys in tow, I didn't really think I'd get the opportunity to bust out the camera gear, but wanted to have it 'just in case'.

We watched the riders for a bit while Jack screwed up his courage. He got on his bike (not a BMX) and started over the smaller bumps. That did not go too well. 30 minutes of intensive parenting later, I managed to convince Jack to stay and watch the other riders (he never did get back on the bike). I also pulled out the camera gear. We watched one guy in particular for over an hour. I think it was a good lesson for the boys to see some more "extreme" sports, since it is unlikely that I'll be catching any big air on a bike anytime. Ever. Ben was really excited, and Jack seemed to get over the negative feedback that the fall provided. Maybe next time he will get on his bike.

Photography

I noticed a woman taking photographs of a rider. He was doing some visually interesting jumps so I asked to join in the photo-fun, which would keep my boys entertained. I got a big "no problem" from Rick and Jenn and proceeded to set up everything. I found the biggest jump and took a couple of practice shots:

That image establishes the 'studio'. I  moved to the landing berm and snapped a couple of available light photos.

Compositionally fine, but the image lacks definition. The subject (Rick) should stand out more. I broke out the off-camera flash and the Pocket Wizards and took a couple of test photos (using some random bystanders) to get the exposure dialed-in. I hadn't done the off-camera thing for a while and forgot that my camera's sync speed is 1/200 - I was shooting 1/250. That mistake is the cause of the horizontal shadow in the first test image. Whoops. But it worked out OK.

Now I was ready to rock. Rick was a good great sport - he suggested places for me to stand to get the good visuals. I suspected he'd done this sort of thing before.

Artistically, the money shot is that last image.  The sun in the upper right peaking through the clouds kicks butt. However, the preceding image shows Rick much better and would work for a publicity photo. All the images are located on my Flickr stream, handily collected into a set.

"Rick" is one "Rick Wetherald", a recent transplant to Austin, TX from Durango Colorado. The woman taking pictures of him is Jennifer (I think they are sweet on each other, but I'm not sure). Rick used to race professionally and seems to be jumping into the Texas cycling scene since moving here. Of course, he has a blog.

Sitegeister, huh?

I recently mentioned something called "Sitegeister". This is a little concept I came up with back in the Spring and wanted to do something with it.

The name is a play on both "web site" and "zeitgeist", and a "sitegeist" is a summary of the topic of a site, in much the same way a "zeitgeist" is the topic of an era. "Sitegeister", then, is the actor that determines the sitegeist.

Sitegeister subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds from various websites (news aggregators, blogs, whatever) and analyzes the content of the feeds to determine the topics (topics are reset weekly). These topics are located at the bottom of the main Sitegeister page. For example, as I write this, the top topics (or concepts) on the Yahoo! most popular news feeds are  "candidate palin", "candidate sarah", "gulf hurricane", "hurricane orleans", "palin running", "running sarah", and others. Obviously, some overlap between these concepts exist.

After determining the top concepts, Sitegeister then draws the blob on the top of the main page. This is a link-map and tries to connect sites to other sites. Each blob is a Site and is surrounded by it's top concepts. Concepts from one site that are related to another site's concepts are linked via an edge. This is all good stuff and relies heavily on Latent Semantic Indexing and Vector Space Models and angles between vectors and really helped me marry my math background with my love of language.

Unfortunately, I geisted the wrong sites. Most of my sites are news aggregators and they all tend to converge on the same concepts. That means that the blob-map tends towards fully-connectedness (which means it is a mess) and really doesn't reveal anything. I need to choose other sites that may or may not be related, like various blogs. It may be interesting to determine links between blogs that advertise different topics.

Or maybe not. Either way, it was a fun excercise, and demonstrates that Google AdSense works really, really well. The FAQ at Sitegeister.com has more information.

Jelly in Austin

I got tired of my 18 mile commute FROM work. TO work isn't too bad, but coming home is always a pain in the patootie - moving south on MOPAC during rush hour abuses both "moving" and "rush". I takes me 40 minutes and I know all the tricks. So, I decided to do something else.

With three children, difficulties exist working from home - they are always underneath and it is generally not super conducive to effective work. It can be done, but takes supreme effort. I read an article in our local newspaper a few months ago about casual co-working at various venues throughout the country. An organization of sorts manages these venues - Jelly - and they have a Jelly in Austin. On Fridays, Jelly takes over Cafe Caffeine, which is conveniently located less than two miles from me, and is on an official bike route (which goes almost from my house to the Cafe).

I've only been here twice. 1st time, it was pretty uninteresting - just a bunch of people with laptops hanging out. This time, someone from Sun And Ski is filming some promotional video, trying to convince people to follow SunAndSki on Twitter. Should be available on YouTube shortly.

Distracting? Yep. More so than working in the office on a typical Friday? Nope. Net gain for me.

Yay! Tag Cloud

Wow, I got the tag cloud back. That was quite hard to debug, and I would have been lost if not for my google-fu and reading the very last bit of this 8 month old problem between MySQL Connector and Roller 4.0 (Roller is what I am using to blog).

Just to be clear, this wasn't a problem with Roller. Well, not much of one.

I recently upgraded to MySQL 5.0.x. At the time, I did not notice that my tag cloud disappeared. Turns out, I was running with a very old JDBC provider (Connector 3.0.8) which is not qualified to work with MySQL 5.x. Everything else seemed to work, but not fetching the tagclouds (with the getPopularTags method). Once I replaced the 3.0.8 version with the latest 5.1.x version, my tag cloud came back.

I know you all were dying without the cloud and are grateful for its return (and the explanation).

Schneeworld Wordle

Wordle takes a corpus of text (either as actual text or a URL pointer to something) and creates a specialized treemap of the words present in the corpus. Bigger means more frequent. Schneeworld's current wordle is linked below.

This is good stuff and it is in the same space I explored when I crafted Sitegeister.

Wishing and hoping and thinking and praying

On Saturday, August 16th, a couple got married.

The day was filled with sweet moments and emotions as the couple exchanged vows infront of their closest friends and family. The guests travelled from all over to celebrate the marriage and to wish them well.

They wore white (yeah, right) and muted tans and generally looked very elegant and relaxed after a long planning process and courtship. Yes, Ellen and Portia were quite the statement of confidence and love.

Oh yeah, Jacque and Brian got married on that day, too.

JBWedding

Apple iPhone

I did not get one this past weekend. I don't know that I will.

Apple iPod Touch

I purchased an Apple iPod Touch at the beginning of May. I enjoy music and have a nice little collection of songs from 1970 onward, but that is not why I purchased it.

I wanted the Internet in my pocket, as it were. The Touch is a little larger than my cell phone and it has one really nice feature set: WiFi connectivity and associated applications (such as a browser) that lets me make the most of the connection. I took the Touch to the eBay Live! 2008 conference that I recently attended and left the laptop at home. I knew that I didn't want to lug the laptop but wanted to still be in contact with the 'Net. I can check my Gmail account, I can use the web API to check my work email, and I can browse the web. It was really nice and fit in my pocket.

Privacy is a bit of a concern - I'd like to establish an SSH tunnel to some endpoint (or use TOR) and harden my data a bit. I could probably jailbreak the Touch and get something going, but, meh. It would also be nice to get VPN setup to my corporate LAN and/or get the Touch recognized by the corporate wireless network.

I didn't want to pop for the iPhone - a few people at work have them and they seem pretty cool, but the fees seem steep.

It is a pretty nice music player as well.

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