Quotulatiousness

December 20, 2010

Once again, correlation is not causation

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

An excellent example of what statistical analysis can and cannot show:

Do mobile phone towers make people more likely to procreate? Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast protruding from the landscape?

These questions are our natural response to learning that variation in the number of mobile phone masts across the country exactly matches variation in the number of live births. For every extra mobile phone mast in an area, there are 17.6 more babies born above the national average.

This was discovered by taking the publicly available data on the number of mobile phone masts in each county across the United Kingdom and then matching it against the live birth data for the same counties. When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.

Part of the problem is that our brains have evolved to detect patterns and relationships — even when they’re not really there:

Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth.

The problem is that our first instinct is to assume that a correlation means that one factor is causing the other. While this does not cause a problem when using pattern-spotting as an evolved survival tool, it does cause severe problems when assessing possible health scares based on a recently uncovered correlation. For the majority of cases, correlation does not indicate the presence of causality.

H/T to Maggie Koerth-Baker for the link.

September 3, 2010

Why we still need technical writers

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Eric S. Raymond has been pleased with the upgrade to his “backup” Android phone, but encountered a very common problem in technology (especially in open source projects, but still too common in commercial products):

As usual in such exercises, the hard part was interpreting the instructions. The hackers who wrote them were trying very hard to be clear, but the result was a thicket of poorly-organized details. I could follow the procedure, but I had to do it almost blind; there was nothing that gave me a high-level view of the process so that I could grasp clearly why each step was necessary and why they had to happen in the order they did. As a result, for troubleshooting I absolutely had to have live help on an IRC channel.

I wish someone would write a bird’s-eye view of the smart-phone modding process. It can’t be that complicated, and I know what’s involved in writing boot loaders for general-purpose computers. Shout to my readers: has anyone done this already, or do I need to put it on my over-full to-do list?

Much of the problem is that folks who are deeply involved in the technical details are often unable to simplify-without-dummifying their knowledge. That’s not surprising, as most are nowhere near as gifted in verbal skills as they are in their own area of technical ability.

August 25, 2010

Bans on texting while driving have not measurably improved highway safety

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

This report should come as no real surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention:

The two biggest highway-safety issues right now, as far as Washington is concerned, are runaway Toyotas and distracted driving. But what if these aren’t the most important factors driving the nation’s annual highway death toll, which averages about 100 fatalities a day?

That’s the view of Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who says the U.S. Transportation Department, Congress and the media have gotten sidetracked by issues like texting while driving.

“There’s nothing rational about the way we set highway safety priorities,” Mr. Lund says in the Insurance Institute’s Aug. 21 “Status Report” newsletter.

Mr. Lund’s organization is the safety research and advocacy arm of the insurance industry. The IIHS has been critical of the government’s highway safety policies over the past few years, usually arguing that the government wasn’t moving fast enough to require better crash-prevention technology from auto makers.

Mr. Lund and the Insurance Institute also say recent laws banning motorists from using mobile phones behind the wheel don’t correlate with a significant reduction in accidents.

“You’d think from the media coverage, congressional hearings, and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s focus in recent months that separating drivers from their phones would all but solve the public-health problem of crash deaths and injuries,” he wrote. “It won’t.”

August 11, 2010

iPhone girls are easy

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

Colby Cosh links to a dating website that actually provides useful photography information:

oh, also — iPhone users have more sex.

File this under “icebreakers, MacWorld ’11”. Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself; I’ll just say that the numbers for all three brands are for 30 year-olds, so it’s not a matter of older, more experienced people preferring one phone to another. We found this data as part of our general camera-efficacy analysis: we crossed all kinds of user behaviors with the camera models and found we had data on the number of sexual partners for 9,785 people with smart phones.

Okay, I’ve posted the funny bit. The rest of the article actually does have useful photography tips, especially if you’re a user of dating websites.

August 9, 2010

Apple execs’ worst fears coming true

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Apple has seemed almost ham-handed in their attempts to control the media “storyline” since the iPhone 4 was released. If Eric Raymond is correct in his analysis, Apple will continue to struggle:

Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.

There’s an important point that, so far, all the coverage seems to have missed. You can only see it by juxtaposing the market-share trendlines for both 1Q and 2Q 2010 and noticing what isn’t there — any recovery due to the iPhone 4. This product has not merely failed to recover Apple’s fortunes against Android, it has not even noticeably slowed Apple’s loss of market share to Android.

Forget for now the blunder the trade press has been calling “Antennagate”; I had fun with it at the time, but bruising as it was, it’s only a detail in the larger story. With the iPhone 4, Apple tried to counter the march of the multiple Androids using a single-product strategy, which was doomed to fail no matter how whizbang the single product was. As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.

As I’ve noted before, Apple had been running a very slick, very successful media image-building strategy of coolness and technological sophistication. For several years, they barely put a foot wrong in their complex dance of marketing and public-perception-influencing. When something finally did go wrong, they clearly lacked the ability to respond gracefully and recapture the wavering affections of both the reporters and the readers.

In short, the short-term effect of “antennagate” could have been limited to a one-off glitch: give the punters a free “bumper” for their phones, do it quickly and ungrudgingly, and reap the PR reward for being pro-active and showing that you care for your customers. Instead, the “smartest guys in the room” managed to squander almost all their accumulated goodwill in a few short weeks of bluster, denial, and arrogance. Nice work.

July 23, 2010

Stalkers enjoy cool new tools to pursue their prey

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Leo Hickman finds that Foursquare is a very handy tool to track down your cyberobsession in the real world:

Louise has straight, auburn hair and, judging by the only photograph I have of her, she’s in her 30s. She works in recruitment. I also know which train station she uses regularly, what supermarket she shopped at last night and where she met her friends for a meal in her home town last week. At this moment, she is somewhere inside the pub in front of me meeting with colleagues after work.

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Privacy and expectations thereof are becoming less and less realistic, but even knowing that, the merging of social media and geo-location services gives me the creeps.

I was an early user of Facebook (once it was opened to non-students) and LinkedIn and have been getting great use out of Twitter lately, but it seems like every day there’s a new social media platform being touted as the best ever. Social media is like any other form of networking: the value increases as the number of nodes goes up. The next boom in convergence will probably be cross-network liaison tools.

Update: Shea Sylvia finds the attention of a cyberstalker very unwelcome.

July 19, 2010

QotD: “Happy now, whiners?”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

On Thursday, I hoped that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would admit there’s a problem with the new iPhone’s antenna and apologize for pretending there wasn’t. I didn’t get that apology. Not even close. Instead, in a defensive press conference at Apple’s headquarters on Friday, Jobs argued that the new iPhone offers terrific, out-of-this-world reception. He blamed the media for whipping up a frenzy out of a “fact of life” that affects every phone on the market. As Jobs sees it, the only problems with the iPhone 4 are the pesky “laws of physics,” which pretty much ensure that anyone who holds a mobile phone in her hands is asking for trouble. The only reason people have been focusing on the iPhone is that blogs keep singling Apple out, perhaps because “when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down.”

Still, if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there’s a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. “OK, great, let’s give everybody a case,” he said. Happy now, whiners?

Farhad Manjoo, “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk: Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference”, Slate, 2010-07-16

July 18, 2010

Has the Reality-Distortion Field failed?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Eric S. Raymond does a happy dance over the discomfiture of Steve Jobs in the (ongoing) iPhone 4 antenna debacle:

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?

Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.

[. . .]

A day ago, we got to watch Jobs tap-dance his way around the problem. This was a first; I cannot recall any previous instance in which the Turtlenecked One, rather than effectively controlling the agenda, has had to operate in full damage-control mode. He could have manned up and said “OK, we messed up on the antenna design, we’re recalling,” but no. Instead it’s bumper cases for all and a truly smarmy attempt to claim that everyone else in the industry is just as bad.

Way to recover your damaged reputation, Stevie boy! Time was when the wunderkind’s reality-distortion field would have somehow soothed everyone into glaze-eyed insensibility, but that’s not the way it’s going down today. Instead, there’s public pushback from both RIM and Nokia, and neither company is being shy about specifying just how far his Jobness has rammed his head up his own ass.

And there is absolutely no one else to blame for this; it’s obviously Job’s fetishism about cool industrial design, the aesthetic of the minimalistically slick-looking surface above all else, that compromised the antenna design and led him to ignore the warnings. The exact quality that Apple fanboys have been telling us would ultimately win the game for Jobs turns out to be the tragic flaw instead. And now he’s reduced to telling everyone to wrap a big ugly rubber on, it, sparky! Hubris and nemesis; this epic fail could be right out of Aeschylus.

Apple will survive this, but they need to rally the damage control teams and be pro-active, or their reputation will take years to recover . . . and it’s the reputation that allows Apple to charge more than the competition for broadly comparable goods.

July 17, 2010

Does Apple have to kill the iPhone 4?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 19:31

I discussed the PR nightmare Apple has been going through since the first problems with the iPhone 4 was introduced, but I didn’t think this extreme a solution was called for:

Image is everything. And that’s why Apple must terminate the iPhone 4 as quickly as possible.

In his Friday morning news conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted the iPhone 4 is flawed, no doubt a painful admission for a proud man known for his perfectionist ways. He even offered free cases to alleviate the signal and reception problems plaguing some iPhone 4 users.

[. . .]

But none of that matters. The iPhone 4 is now tainted in the consumer’s eyes. It’s no longer a triumph of form and function, but rather a crippled device that requires protective headgear to work properly.

We could debate the merits of the iPhone 4’s antenna design all day, but that’s beside the point. Perception is reality here, and the public now views Apple’s latest offering as The Phone That Drops Calls. And no one can blame AT&T this time either.

I don’t think it’s quite that bad for Apple, although they’ve been flying so high in public perception that any glitch will seem far more significant in comparison to their reputation. Maybe Jeff Bertolucci has it right: even if you don’t re-engineer the entire package, the PR hit will be less and the re-inforced public support will be that much greater if Apple bites the bullet sooner rather than later.

July 16, 2010

iPhone 4 – that’s the fourth one she’s had so far

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:59

Melissa J. Perenson may just be unlucky, or she may be more attentive than a lot of current Apple iPhone customers:

Apple’s unprecedented move to hold a press conference regarding the iPhone 4’s antenna issues underscores the power of the masses, and the fact that the phone has serious problems. I know about the iPhone 4’s flaws first hand. Here’s what went wrong with mine.

As I write this I’m on my third iPhone 4 replacement so far. Yes, that means I’ve had a total of four phones in the three weeks the phone has been out. As responsive and friendly as the Apple Store has been through this, I really didn’t need to get to know the store so well. At this point, I’ve spent as much on cab fares to and from the Apple Store as I would have on a couple of bumpers in different colors.

One bad phone can be written off as a fluke; but three is extreme and indicates something more may be in play. I’ve come to expect better from a company like Apple. I reached out to Apple for a comment, but no response at this writing.

This is definitely a case where Apple’s traditional hands-off approach is backfiring on them: if there are hardware problems with the iPhone 4, aside from the acknowledged signal strength display and antenna issues, Apple needs to become proactive in addressing them.

July 8, 2010

How Apple created and maintains a “shiny tech” reputation

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

Trevor Pott manages to deter a newly evangelized Apple fan:

The event sticks out for me because the user was not impressed by the iPhone because it was Apple, or the phone was hip. Rather it was because at a tradeshow they caught a colleague watching the Canucks getting beat on an iPhone. The concept of being able to stream video on a cellular network had never occurred to them before this. They saw it first on an Apple, it was evangelised by an ardent fan, and thus Apple “invented” it.

In this way Apple has “invented” everything of use in mainstream computing. From being the only computer for design, to inventing the MP3 player, smartphone, tablet computer, video conferencing and now, apparently, 3G streaming. When introduced to non-Apple alternatives, the people crying loudly for Apple gear seem shocked that it already existed in a previous form. The lesson I took from this is that users don’t care about the technology. With the exception of a few loudmouths on the internet, nobody cares that this was made by Apple, Sony, Microsoft or anyone else.

Users care about what a product can do. They care about how easily that product can do it. Users care about looks, but not as much as ease of use, good documentation, presentation of features and fantastic marketing. What’s more, good businessmen care about these things too; this is what makes their company tick, and what makes them money.

There’s a reason why a lot of successful technology folks try to sell “solutions” rather than products: it’s a much better way of addressing the users’ actual needs (even if it means you don’t recommend the glitzy, whizzy, shiny new Apple iThing). If you can de-mesmerize them long enough to actually address their needs instead of their wants, you’ll be doing them a much better service.

July 7, 2010

QotD: The essence of the iPhone experience

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:59

Using an iPhone is like taking a holiday to some corrupt country: It may be beautiful and offer simple pleasures, but you’re going to pay bribes to people who shamelessly charge you for what’s free elsewhere.

Mike Elgan, “5 Big iPhone Rip-Offs”, PC World, 2010-07-06

June 16, 2010

The irritating part of “mobile computing”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow just got back from a book tour, but unlike all the other ones, he found this tour was both pleasant and productive, thanks to mobile computing:

I “rooted” my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily “tether” it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn’t have to root my wife’s matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there’s actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort’s car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop — this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author’s most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours’ worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights.

So all is sweetness and light with modern mobile computing, yes? Not quite:

. . . the fundamental paradox of mobile — so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don’t go anywhere.

One of the more frustrating parts of travelling with my iPhone has been that I have to basically lobotomize it before crossing the border, reducing it from really powerful smart phone to a PDA with a phone line: the data and “roaming” charges are so high that it’s not economical to use them for anything other than an emergency. Just when being able to get driving directions or hotel or restaurant recommendations would be most useful — on the road or in an unfamiliar city — the cost is usually too high to justify turning on the damned feature.

Yes, you can hunt down wifi connections (and I did, on my last few trips to the US), but it hardly counts as convenient. The phone companies still assume anyone travelling with a smart phone is going to be spending their employers’ money and therefore won’t notice or care about the up-front costs.

June 11, 2010

It’s not really about market share: that’s just keeping score

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

Eric Raymond thinks a lot of people are missing the point on the ongoing iPhone-Android battle:

It’s not about whether or not Apple will be crushed. It’s not about who makes the “best” products, where “best” is measured by some interaction between the product and the speaker’s evaluation of the relative importance of various features and costs. It’s about what the next generation of personal computing platforms will be. Down one fork they’ll be open, hackable, and user-controlled. Down the other they’ll be closed, locked down, and vendor-controlled. Though there are others on each side of this struggle, in 2010 it comes down to whether Apple or Android wins the race to over 50% smartphone market share; after that point, network effects will become self-reinforcing until the next technology disruption.

If he’s right — and he very well might be — then Apple’s moderately disappointing upgrades in the newly announced iPhone 4 may have handed the long-term advantage to Google. This may be bad news for Apple shareholders, but it’ll be a long-term positive for mobile computing.

May 11, 2010

Android alert!

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Apple fanboi faithful must be having mass cases of the vapours with the news that Android sales are eating everyone’s lunch:

I’ve written before that I think Google has been running a long game aimed against the telecomms carriers’ preferred strategy of customer lock-in, and executing on that game very well. Against the iPhone, its strategy has been a classic example of what the economist Clayton Christensen called “disruption from below” in his classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. With the G-1, Google initially competed on price, winning customers who didn’t want to pay Apple/AT&T’s premium and were willing to trade away Apple’s perceived superiority in “user experience” for a better price. Just as importantly, Android offered a near-irresistible deal to the carriers: months, even years slashed off time-to-market for a state-of-the-art cellphone; a huge advantage in licensing costs; and the illusion (now disintegrating) that said carriers would be able to retain enough control of Android-powered devices to practice their habitual screw-the-customer tactics.

In Christensen’s model, a market being disrupted from below features two products, sustaining and disrupter, both improving over time but with the disruptor at a lower price point and lesser capabilities. Typically, the sustaining company will be focused on control of its customers and business partners to extract maximum margins; on the other hand, the disruptor will be playing a ubiquity game, sacrificing margin to gain share. The sustaining company will gold-plate its product in order to chase high-end price-insenstive customers; the disruptor will seek out price-sensitive low-end customers.

I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming . . . I thought Google was mistaken to put so much development effort into the mobile phone market. I was clearly wrong about that.

In the smartphone market I have been expecting a disruptive break that would body-slam Apple’s market share, but I expected it to be several quarters in the future and with a really fast drop-off when it happened. Instead, it looks like Apple took a bruising in 4Q 2009 and has failed to regain share in 1Q 2010 while Android sales continued to rocket. Android hammered market-leader Blackberry just as badly, a fact which has gooten far less play than it probably should because the trade-press loves the drama of the Apple-vs.-Google catfight so much.

What actually seems to be going on here is that Android is successfully disrupting both Apple and Blackberry from below; together they’ve lost about 25% of market share, not enough to put Android on top but close enough that another quarter like the last will certainly do that.

I’ve heard several comments from folks that Apple’s iPhone sales are probably lower because of the widespread interest in the “next” iPhone model, which is likely to be announced in the next few weeks. Apple has followed this pattern since introducing the original iPhone, but there’s no rule saying they can’t break the pattern.

I’ll be interested in the announcement, as I’ll have a year left in my Rogers contract, so if the next iPhone isn’t a block-buster, I’ll be considering other options for when I’m out of contract.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress