Any way they wants to say it.

Thank you to John McWhorter for correcting my needlessly didactic campaign against the singular usage of the pronoun “they.”

According to McWhorter: if a linguist ran an elementary school, they would chuck the principle that singular third person pronouns can only come in the varieties “he,” “she,” “he or she,” and such ugly postmodernisms as “s/he.” How I have mistreated my students. All I can say is I hoped spare them the wrath of fellow overzealous grammarians.

He’s got further ammunition for Star Trek fans: fascination with split infinitives and sentence-ending pronouns was an alien effort to port Latin grammatical rules into English, not an effort to reflect well spoken English.

 

My blog doesn’t depress wages

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Paul Bradshaw is wrong. The argument goes like this: drive up the supply of journalists, drive down the unit price of a story. Sounds fine, until you think through the argument more carefully. It only matters that hacks bloggers are giving away drivel content for free if their competition drives wages down.

What reduces the value of something economically? Increased supply or reduced demand are two key factors. And indeed, journalism as a profession has been consistently devalued economically as a result of one of those factors: increasing numbers of people who want to be journalists and who will work for free, or for low wages. The result is that the wages of journalists are very low – a pattern which predates the internet and the rise of blogging, etc.

This is rife with the same fallacies that convinced Lou Dobbs that unskilled immigrant labor drives down middle class American wages. Bradshaw’s pseudo-economic analysis treats journalists like fungible, undifferentiated commodities, just about the same as feed corn.

There are lots of markets where giving some stuff away doesn’t make the other stuff worthless. In fact, free-beer software creates entire business ecosystems for software, hardware, and services. Strategic giveaways are good business strategy. For more on that, read Tapscott and Williams or Chris Anderson.

Then there’s the question of whether blogs and papers are in the same market. They’re not. Newspapers do the hard job of editing: screening, curating, and fact-checking stories. The whole reason that you’ll pay to read the Financial Times but not my blog is because of their hard-won reputation for excellence.

If your newspaper is printing roundups of the “Here’s what the blogs are saying about…” variety, it’s time to switch your subscription.

Open Letter to Social Science Research Network

Dear SSRN:

If any of my works exist on your server, and if you intend to exploit them commercially, I wish to negotiate for a share of the revenues. I hereby opt out of any commercial exploitation of my works, either for a fee or as a free addendum to another commercial service, subject to further negotiation.

You may use works I have uploaded to your site prior to today under a CC-BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. Details are available here. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Sincerely,

Ben Mazzotta

Cyber Shield newest mixed metaphor

This is the latest example of what’s wrong the metaphor of cyberspace for information security. Cyberspace isn’t a space. Cyber attacks don’t involve thrown projectiles or spears. A shield won’t bat them down. The meat of the policy is buried: look how little attention is devoted to the five points in the last paragraph quoted below.

If he had said that installing Norton Internet Security on every computer in America was the definition of a cyber shield, or ordering drone attacks against suspected zero-day-threat writers, or requiring American companies to write back doors for the feds into encryption, or mandating the use of federally issued firmware in critical industries….well, then that would be the definition of a cyber shield. It’s a completely empty term.

US urges NATO to build ‘cyber shield’
(AFP) – Sep 15, 2010

BRUSSELS — NATO must build a “cyber shield” to protect the transatlantic alliance from any Internet threats to its military and economic infrastructures, a top US defence official said Wednesday.

Cyber security is a “critical element” for the 28-nation alliance to embrace at its summit of leaders in Lisbon on November 19-20, US Deputy Defence Secretary William Lynn said in Brussels.

“The alliance has a crucial role to play in extending a blanket of security over our networks,” Lynn said.

“NATO has a nuclear shield, it is building a stronger and stronger defence shield, it needs a cyber shield as well,” he said at a forum hosted by the Security & Defence Agenda think-tank.

Demonstration of {estout}

I wrote a short talk demonstrating the use the R package {estout} for tonight’s New England R Users Group meeting.  NB this is not a discussion of the econometric model, but rather a demonstration of how to get publication-quality results out of R efficiently.

The basic functions of {estout} are modeled on the Stata package estout. Once the R user has a dataset and a regression format in memory, {estout} will

1. Print tables of summary statistics in CSV or LaTeX format.
2. Print regression results in CSV or LaTeX format.

All the normal bells and whistles for econometrics are in there: reporting both coefficient estimates and their standard errors, asterisks for alpha=0.10, 0.05, and 0.01 significance levels, R-squared and number of observations. Options to customize are clearly marked in the documentation.

RESULTS gets the IMF wrong

RESULTS is promoting dangerous half-truths about the IMF, and diluting its core message in so doing. I continue to support the important work that RESULTS does to improve education, public health, and microfinance around the world. I continue to support its approach to advocacy, which uses outreach to journalists and constituent requests for specific legislative appropriations. But the policy staff is out of its depth with its needless and baseless vilification of the IMF.

RESULTS’ policy staff is capable of extremely precise writing on economic and social issues. In the section on the IMF, however, value judgments, perjorative adverbs, and accusations of anachronism substitute for any concrete proof that the staff’s ideas hold true. Examples:

• “prioritized extremely low inflation”
• “policies may have seemed appropriate”
• “policies are no longer appropriate”
• “immediate consequences … included steep layoffs”
• “IMF policies have prevented countries from adequately investing in public infrastructure and workforce”
• “restrictive spending policies”
• “the inflation reductions that the IMF desires”
• “targets are so much lower than many economists outside the IMF believe they need to be”
• “unemployed nurses…because the government cannot afford to hire them.”
• “anti-growth, restrictive deficit and inflation targets”

Indiscriminate leak

Discrimination is a virtue in war. More than that, it is the law of war. The Afghan War leaks violate this principle.

This post is part of a conversation I had with friends and colleagues from the Fletcher School about the nature of the Afghan war leaks, specifically occasioned by their comments and a New Yorker article on Julian Assange from June of this year. In particular, Kate Brodock, Mark Belinsky of 4Hours, Emily Jacobi of Glean and Gleam, Patrick Meier of iRevolution, Mary Joyce, and Josh Goldstein of In an African Minute have insightful comments, mostly not (yet) available on their blogs. (All of which by the way are great. Sign up for RSS feeds.) Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has neat statistical graphics on the leaks data. Others who don’t have blogs, I won’t name here without their permission. My comments on email I wrote in haste, so I have cleaned them up a bit here. For factual summaries of the leak itself, you can find a multitude of blog posts and media.