Obsidian Wings

To Serve You Better: A Google Cookbook

by Doctor Science

Action Alert: Must be done today!

If it's not March 1st where you are, you're going to want to dump your Google histories *today*, before they get attached to the profile Google is building to track you all over the web.

This "privacy policy" is really a lack-of-privacy policy, as far as I'm concerned. For lack of time, I'm just going to quote from arduinna's comprehensive guide.

Under the new policy, Google will be able to track and connect your movements across a pretty wide swath of the web if you're logged in to even a single Google service; e.g., if you're logged into Gmail in one tab, Google will know what YouTube videos you watch in other tabs, even if you don't have a YouTube account. It will also connect any searches you make through Google to your Google profile, if you're logged in to your Gmail (or YouTube, or Google Reader, or Picasa, or Blogger, etc.) account.

It's not just big sites, either, or things you got to via a Google search; if you're logged in to a Google account and you go to a page that has a Google AdSense ad, or a Doubleclick ad, or uses Google Analytics, Google will know you were there, and will connect that information to your profile in its logs.

It's also going to assign one name across all your accounts -- presumably this is based on the base contact email you provide when you sign up for things (note: that's a guess on my part). So for instance if you signed up for Gmail using your ISP-provided email addy as a contact/alternative address, but picked a user/display name of FanGirl238, and signed up for Picasa using that same ISP-provided email as RealName15 so you could share photos with your family, Google will either turn your Gmail display name into RealName15, or turn your Picasa display name into FanGirl238.

Yeah.

It's worse on smartphones and tablets ...read more

Here's what you need to do TODAY:

Purging your Web history:
1. Log in to your google account
2. Click on your name in the upper right corner of the screen, then "Account services"
3. Under the "Services" section, look for "View, enable, or disable web history" and click on "Go to web history"
4. You'll be asked to sign in again; do so
5. Click on "Remove all web history".
6. This will also pause your web history, which means Google will stop storing your web searches. The pause will hold until/unless you turn it back on, so you've effectively disabled it.

(The EFF offers an illustrated guide to removing your google search history.)

...

If you have multiple Google accounts, you'll need to do this for each one.

Purging your YouTube viewing and search history:
1. Log in to your YouTube account
2. Click on your name in the upper right corner of the screen, then "Video Manager"
3. Click on the History tab in the left column
4. Click "Clear all viewing history" to clear all the videos you've viewed.
5. Click "Pause viewing history"
6. Click "Search history"
7. Click "Clear all search history" to clear all the searches you've made
8. Click "Pause search history"

(The EFF offers an illustrated guide to removing your YouTube histories.)

Again, you'll need to do this for any YouTube account you have.

NB: For both regular and YouTube search, this doesn't stop Google from collecting data going forward, and it doesn't erase your existing searches and viewing history from any databases. It just means that Google won't store your information permanently; after 18 months, some of the information associated with it will be anonymized. It can still be used for Google's own internal purposes, and can still be subpoenaed.

I'm still working through arduinna's suggestions about dealing with Google's culinary plans, debating which things are necessary or not, but purging your history has to be done NOW, no waiting. For instance, I didn't think I was signed in on YouTube recently, but there were a lot of recently-watched vids in my YouTube history.

DO NOT DELAY, DO IT NOW

A Private Wave, by Polish painter Jacek Yerka.

Dante in Japan

by Doctor Science

I'm finishing up a work project, so I don't have time to write about anything where I might have to monitor the comments closely. So you get culture.

On Tuesday we trained in to NYC and I went to the Met. I didn't get all the way through the exhibit on Storytelling in Japanese Art -- I hope I can get back before it closes in May.

These pictures are from the first set of items in the exhibit, the Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine handscrolls.[1]

Here the Buddhist monk Nichizo, guided by a friendly demon, sees the eight-headed monster guarding the gates of Hell.

More pictures under the cut ...

Your Eucharist friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Sort of. Santorum's Catholicism (and his lack of catholicism) came up when we were talking about Romney and Mormon support of immigration, so I'm pleased to share this pic that I took yesterday in Fukuoka's Hakata center.

This is wine that is supposed to be suited for particular bloodtypes. It's common in Japan to believe that blood types (sans Rh factors, which were discovered after these sorts of theories were promulgated) explain personality traits. So an open thread for blood types, but not for the bloody minded among you.

Did McCain-Feingold Have A Pervese Effect?

--by Sebastian

Apparently I will be continuing my recent trend of riffing on Kevin Drum's posts.  He points to this fascinating chart:

Kevin notes the surprisingly stable Presidential campaign costs from 1964-2000.  I was especially surprised by 1992.  I would have thought that a three way race with the closest thing this country has had to a third party in almost a century would certainly have skyrocketing costs.  But it turns out they didn't.  He goes on to note that the costs skyrocketed for 2004 and 2008.  The thing that immediately struck me about that time period is that those were the only elections which were 'restricted' by the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. 

Why did campaign expenditures skyrocket in the only elections where outside spending was supposed to be sharply regulated?  I don't know, but I'll throw out some factors that come to my mind, and what I think about them.

1.    The parties thought that with a lack of outside spending they could get much more bang for their buck.  I'm not sure this would explain why they didn't spend much more in previous years but it might be a factor.

2.    The parties were able to raise more money because other political spending outlets were closed (or were perceived to be closed).  I might buy this one.

3.    The parties felt they had to raise more money because the loopholes in McCain-Feingold were so big that they didn't actually rein in any spending by groups outside the campaign.  This one is interesting.  The history of spending through 527 organizations suggests that it wasn't ridiculously difficult to get around McCain-Feingold if you wanted to (though both Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org got hit with fines for failing to register).  But this raises an interesting question, what about 2000 (or 1996)?  Was McCain-Feingold somehow worse *even by its own standards* than the regulations that came before it? 

4.    Those two elections were hotly contested with a very fired up base, so more fund raising/spending was possible. This is a very plausible candidate.  Bush was already a well hated president by 2004, and by 2008 the Republican party was looking like a complete mess in the aftermath of the Bush years.  But this would suggest that spending should go down soon, which doesn't initially seem to be the case (ask again after the election).

It is possible that McCain-Feingold is unrelated to this chart.  But it seems very odd the skyrocketing costs took place in the only two elections where the law was in force. 

Romney and the Mormon Church's position on immigration

by liberal japonicus

This is really interesting to me.

While stressing the Mormon faith's historic connection to converting immigrants, Latino Mormons point directly to immigration stories in the Book of Mormon and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' recent statements against policies targeting immigrants. They also view Romney's stance against proposals giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship as hypocritical since Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, who had five wives and 30 children, sought refuge in Mexico after passage of an 1882 law that barred polygamy.

"We view immigration as a God event," said Ignacio Garcia, a history professor at Brigham Young University and a Sunday school teacher at his Mormon ward. "The book says no one comes to the Land unless they are brought by God."

Those stories in the Book of Mormon, Garcia said, give Hispanic Mormons a powerful religious argument to use, especially since most believe they are descendants of the Lamanites, an indigenous group in the Americas described in the Mormon sacred text. According to the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites lived in the present-day American Southwest, traveled south and face years of hardship, and are prophesized to eventually return to the Promised Land.

It's not that I'm pleased cause I don't like Romney (I don't, but that's not want interests me). What interests me is how different this would be for someone who was a member of a mainstream Christian religion. Is it right to hold Romney more strictly to what his church believes? It also has me wondering if Mormons are natural Republicans, or if something like this is a deal breaker. Anyone know?

 

A what does Jeremy Lin mean post

by liberal japonicus

This is probably a bit too heavy for a Friday open thread, so we'll push that back a few days, cause I'm quite interested in this. But maybe you aren't, so it is below the fold. Join me, if you dare...

About the Privacy

--by Sebastian

While I'm on Kevin Drum day, he makes a great post about the general unease he has with the semi creepy dossier that Target gets on its customers:

Charles Duhigg has a fascinating story in the New York Times Magazine this week that's all about the way retailers use data mining and microtargeting to sell you more stuff. Among other things, he tells the story of how Target exploited a pile of clever statistical relations to predict when women were pregnant so that they could send out coupon books full of items that pregnant women might want to buy. As it turns out, Target was unamused by Duhigg's curiosity about how this all worked. When he asked Target to comment, they refused. When he offered to fly out to company headquarters, they told him not to come. When he did anyway, a security guard escorted him off the premises. Quite plainly, Target was concerned that their customers would freak out if they discovered just how much Target knows about them and how accurately Target can aim its marketing bazookas in their direction.

And it turns out Target was right: pregnant women did freak out. So they fine-tuned their coupon books to contain a bunch of random stuff (lawnmowers, videogames) among all the pregnancy-related items. Women who got those coupon books just figured this was the stuff on sale at Target this week and had no idea that it was more than a coincidence that half the offers were for diapers and onesies.

Even more disturbing Slate reports that Romney is doing the same type of thing:

This year, however, as part of a project code-named Orca, Romney’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about religion to send it only to voters with whom canvassers have personally discussed religious views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Romney’s views on the issue.

From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did. There will not be a major innovation that seems to herald a new era in electioneering, like 1996’s debut of candidate Web pages or their use in fundraising four years later; like online organizing for campaign events in 2004 or the subsequent emergence of social media as a mass-communication tool in 2008. This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Romney's headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Orca would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizen—the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteer—into a single, unified political profile.

Yikes!

A Great Issue for Federalism

--by Sebastian

I read Kevin Drum almost every day, and today he hit a bunch of issues that I think are worth thinking about.  One of them is this one.  It talks about Obama's vexing about face on medical marijuana.  In light of recent discussions, it strikes me that this is a perfect area for federalism.  The federal government could choose to take itself out of the field and let states deal with it.  It is a highly contested area, with lots of possible solutions.  Why not let different states try different things?  If you want to live in a marijuana-free state, fine.  If not, also fine.  Is marijuana really so important that we need a broad national strategy to deal with it? 

Instead, look what is happening:

As fear of federal prosecution lessened, more states began adopting or considering medical marijuana laws; where the practice was already legal (as it was in California), there was a boom in the marijuana trade. Operating in a grey market between the federal prohibition and untested state rules, dispensaries of all kinds operated without much supervision.

....Though law enforcement officials could not point to any commensurate increase in crime, all that activity made the federal government uneasy: It realized that tacitly allowing states to regulate medical marijuana had far-reaching consequences that it wasn’t entirely comfortable with

Now isn't that interesting.  The feds couldn't find any evidence of the alleged purpose for regulating marijuana (crime) but nevertheless they felt that letting it out of their control made them uneasy.  So....the Obama administration decided to reassert their authority and crack down.  That is a classic centralized government fear and a classic centralized government response.  It doesn't have to be that way.  We could have states that decide they don't want marijuana and other states that decide they don't care.  Like many things, marijuana just isn't important enough to require a national government response.  You could have your opinion on it, and I could have mine, and different states could have legislation that dealt with it differently. 

That is the vision our United States was founded on, and we could probably use a little more of it. 

Anachronism by commission and omission

by Doctor Science

Ben Zimmer of Language Log noticed some anachronistic expressions in Downton Abbey [may include slight spoilers for Season 2]:

 
On YouTube.

Detailed analysis of the phrases here.

Grad student Ben Schmidt decided to bring anachronism into the 21st century:

[Zimmer's method] resembles what historians do nowadays; go fishing in the online resources to confirm hypotheses, but never ever start from the digital sources. That would be, as the dowager countess, might say, untoward.

I lack such social graces. So I thought: why not just check every single line in the show for historical accuracy? Idioms are the most colorful examples, but the whole language is always changing. There must be dozens of mistakes no one else is noticing. Google has digitized so much of written language that I don't have to rely on my ear to find what sounds wrong; a computer can do that far faster and better. So I found some copies of the Downton Abbey scripts online, and fed every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English Language, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.

In addition to the anachronisms Zimmer spotted, Schmidt's analysis uncovers a number of others, from "realistic prospect" to "black market".

Every episode has dozens of lines that are just slightly off, and it's in these that the patterns really look funny. In addition to the 60 phrases above, there are another 260 that are at least 10 times more common in the 1990s than in the 1910s. These are phrases like "at long last," "from scratch", and "act fast"--maybe a few could be spoken in the teens, but all of them together?

Schmidt's work is a good way to pinpoint anachronisms of commission, but it makes me wonder about the more difficult issue: errors of *omission*, expressions people of the period would have used but which you, the writer, didn't think of.

From time to time I beta (=edit and critique) fanfiction, and I've done a fair bit with stories set in eras before the present, especially the 19th and 20th centuries. Catching specific anachronisms like the ones Zimmer noticed is difficult enough, but the really hard thing is when the prose as a whole just sounds ... wrong. Sometimes it's the choice of words -- Schmidt points out that

Characters in Downton Abbey say "I must" 24 times, three times as often as they say "I need to." Books from the period, on the other hand, say "I must" three hundred times as often; going by the printed literature, the Abbey's residents should "need to" do something about once every ten seasons, not once an episode.

But sometimes it's the sentence structure or rhythm, and I don't always know how to even convey that to a writer I'm editing. Or, as in my review of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, it's hard to move beyond "it feels wrong".

Works like "Downton Abbey" have an extra degree of difficulty, because they are showing different social classes which would use different vocabulary, slang, and sentence structure, as well as different accents. Frankly, I suspect that an authentic depiction of the servants' speech would be occasionally incomprehensible to a modern audience, between their accents and their slang. You could also show the servants code-switching in an entertaining and interesting way.

So, make suggestions about historical novels that have particularly good language. Better yet, what do you think are a useful techniques for writers? I generally recommend, if the writer has time, that they soak their brain in novels of the period, especially very popular ones. Reading through newspapers might be useful, too. There are still real problems, I think, when you're writing about people in the less-educated classes, whose speech is likely to be "cleaned up" by the wealthy & educated people who leave records. I don't even know where I'd look to get the flavor of how the housemaids in "Downton" would have talked to each other when no-one they wanted to impress was present.

The Kensingtons at Laventie by Eric Kennington. Movies and TV shows almost never show war as realistically *dirty* and tiring.

Your 2 sports stories Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I'm following two stories that I will put below the fold, but this is an open thread, so anything else that catches your fancy is welcome as well.