Month: December 2006

Books Were the First Open-Source Software

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Here is Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia:

When you put it all together, the story becomes clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information [to a Wikipedia entry], then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

(Correcting Wikipedia’s founder, by the way.) When I visited my editor, Marian Lizzi, at Penguin, I realized that book publishing is exactly the same: Outsiders write the books, insiders edit them.

The curious thing about book publishing is similar to what Swartz noticed in a different realm: The content, the crucial stuff, is entirely from amateurs. No other industry, with the possible exception of craft shows, is like this. If I run a deli, I buy supplies and food from people who make their living selling supplies and food. If I make clothes, I buy my cloth from professional cloth makers. If I make cheese, my milk comes from professional farmers. Only book publishers endlessly deal with amateurs.

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Science Versus Human Nature

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Last weekend I saw the writer Thomas Cahill on Book TV. He mentioned his book How The Irish Saved Civilization. The real contribution of the Irish, he said, wasn’t that they saved the sacred texts, it was that they brought humor to their study. “They brought irreverence to reverence,” he said. “That was entirely new.”

This reminded me of Brian Wansink’s comments about cool data. His notion that research designs should be judged on their coolness was entirely new to me. I’m not the only one; the Wikipedia entry for scientific method says nothing about it. Using cool and research design in the same sentence is quite a bit like bringing irreverence to reverence. Once somebody says it, though, it makes sense. I remember being thanked after an interview; I replied that there’s no point doing the research if no one ever learns about it. Coolness obviously plays into that — influences the chance that other people will learn about it.

I think most scientists will agree with Wansink, that coolness matters. I think you don’t find his idea in books and articles about scientific method not only because there is so little written about research design (at least compared to the amount written about data analysis) but also because it appears undignified. “I’m important, I shouldn’t have to worry about being cool” is the (very human) unspoken attitude.

Varieties of Shangri-La Diet Experience

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The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet suggests several new ways of losing weight. As far as I can tell, they all work at least some of the time. To get an overview of the new methods, I asked users to rate them on power and ease of use. (Thanks to Brian Wansink for this suggestion.) Here are the average ratings (so far):

Power and Ease of Use of Different Ways of Doing the Shangri-La Diet

The two scales were defined as follows:

Power
5 = very powerful
4 = quite powerful
3 = somewhat powerful
2 = slightly powerful
1= not powerful at all

Ease of Use
5 = very easy/convenient
4 = quite easy/convenient
3 = easy enough
2 = quite difficult
1 = too difficult to ever do

The cluster in the top corner consists of “flavorless oil” and “nose-clipped oil”.

I like to think this little diagram predicts the future of SLD: lots of people drinking flavorless oil, lots of people drinking nose-clipped oil, fewer people drinking sugar water, etc. A friend of mine showed me a photo of her when she was 2 years old. Another 2-year-old was in the picture but I could tell which one was my friend.

I collected the data by Web. Maybe I should have used www.surveymonkey.com (as my students have) but it was incredibly easy compared to other data-collection methods.

American Haiku

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The American version of haiku, I submit, is a Priceless ad. My contributions:

The Shangri-La Diet: $15 (including shipping)
bottle of grapeseed oil: $6
additional groceries each month: -$200
not worrying where your next Yodel is coming from: priceless

Note to SLD dieters: The reference to grapeseed oil dates this. I now drink refined walnut oil and flaxseed oil (nose-clipped).

smaller pants: $60
blush I use as excuse for better-looking skin: $8
blood test for improved lipids: $80
migraine-free TOM: priceless

Short blog posts are a little like haiku.

Update (7 Dec 06): funny coincidence.

The Invisible Made Visible

Seth Roberts1 Comment

An artist, UC Santa Cruz professor of art history Mary Holmes would say, is someone who makes the invisible visible. Does that make the Internet an artist? These examples of the invisible made visible impress me:

1. Security footage of a man stealing two chairs. (Thanks to HuntGrunt.)

2. Tracking data at the Shangri-La Diet forums reveal what weight loss is like for other people.

I think the other extreme — the very visible made extremely visible — is also art. Here is an example: David Caruso one-liners. Too funny not to be art.

More Weight-Loss Data from the Shangri-La Diet Forums

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here are more graphs of the data in the Post Your Tracking Data Here section of the Shangri-La Diet forums. An overall summary of that data is:

Persons posting data for at least 1 week: 92
Total weeks of data: 930
Persons posting data for at least 4 weeks: 57
Persons posting data for at least 12 weeks: 31
Total weight change (ld): -985
Average rate of change (ld/week): -1.1

The graphs below show analyses similar to those I have done previously now divided by sex.

Weight loss slows down during the first five weeks of the diet. After that it is about one pound per week. In the beginning men lose weight more quickly than women but this difference disappears after five weeks or so.

During the first week of the diet, weight loss depends on how much you weigh: The more you weigh the more you lose, at least if you weigh more than 200 pounds. This graph compares men and women equating for weight — and when that is done there is no clear difference. The male/female difference seen in the first graph may be entirely due to weight differences: Men weigh more than women.

After Week 5 there is little difference between the sexes and little difference between people of different weights.

For easy comparison with earlier analyses see my Flickr page

The results support the popular idea that men lose weight more easily than women but also argue that this may be because men weigh more than women.

The Truth Is Out There

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I was very pleased to read this on the Shangri-La Diet forums:

Hi everyone! My name is Cindy. I’d learned of this in quite the ironic way. Killing time on YOUTHINK.com, I came across the question, “Would you ever try the Shangri-La Diet?” Having never heard of it before, I decided to google it. 5 hours later, I was sold. The recurring thing I kept reading in blogs, reviews, etc, was amazement that this actually worked.

That is a limitation of the statistics I posted today: They don’t express amazement.

On Scientific Method

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When I visited George Mason University recently, I asked Tyler Cowen, “What’s the secret of a successful blog?” Cowen and Tabarrok’s Marginal Revolution is the most successful blog I know of.

His answer: “Three elements: 1. Expertise. 2. Regularity. 3. Recurring characters, like a TV show.” By regularity he meant at least 5 times/week.

I saw I had considerable room for improvement. Since then, I’ve tried to post at least twice/week. With this post I am adding scientific method to the subtitle, which I hope makes me appear more expert. A Berkeley philosophy professor named Paul Feyeraband wrote a book that I thought is called On Method but that I see is actually called Against Method. He was at Berkeley when I arrived. I remember two things about him: 1. He gave all his students A’s. 2. He ate at Chez Panisse every night.