Chief Wiggles reports on the s' reception (and conditions more generally in Iraq). Scroll down for the news. The top of the page includes information on how to send s, including a new APO address and addresses for mailing from the U.K. and Australia.
UPDATE: Because of the huge number of packages, the military can no longer handle delivery. The site does have information on sending funds that can be used to purchase s.
My latest NYT column looks at some interesting research that uses Usenet postings to track the effect of word of mouth on the ratings of new TV shows. As imperfect as Usenet may be as a proxy for word of mouth, the technique got results that suggest strategies for marketers. Bottom line: It's not just how much people talk, it's how dispersed out they are. You don't want your word of mouth concentrated among people who just talk to each other.
In related work, which I didn't have room to cover, Dina Mayzlin and Judith Chevalier, whose research I wrote about last month, looked at the effects of the reader reviews posted at Amazon.com and BN.com. They found reviews did make a difference, with bad reviews (which are relatively rare) significantly depressing sales. So if you like my new book, please post a nice review. And if you don't like the book, please don't waste your time.
When U.N. refugee workers placed Sudanese girls with families rather than in loosely supervised group homes like their male counterparts, they thought they were doing the girls a favor. Instead, they trapped them in hell, while many of the boys made it to the United States. Tara McKelvey tells the story in Slate:
Separated from their parents or orphaned in war-torn Sudan in the late 1980s, untold thousands of children, ranging in age from 4 to 12, left their towns and villages and walked across Africa in search of a safe haven. Traveling in small groups, they battled snakes, militias, and disease until they found temporary refuge in Ethiopia. When war broke out in that country, they set off again, chewing leaves, grass, and mud to stave off hunger as they looked for a way out of the seventh circle of hell. They became known as "lost boys of Sudan" because they, like the characters in Peter Pan who fended off crocodiles and pirates, covered a perilous terrain. Approximately 20,000 of the children eventually made it to an area in northwest Kenya that became known as Kakuma Refugee Camp. The survivors were mainly boys--with 1,000 to 3,000 girls....
In November 2000, the survivors started coming to the United States in one of the largest resettlement programs of its kind. Their journey has been documented on 60 Minutes II, in newspaper human interest stories, and, not surprising given its uplifting narrative arc, is soon to be the subject of a feature film (an "intimate epic" said Daily Variety). Yet among the 3,700 young refugees who were resettled in the United States on this program, only 89 are female. The other hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls and young women who survived the journey are still in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Many are living with so-called foster families and are being exploited as domestic servants or worse....
So why are the girls facing hardship in Kakuma while the boys are living out the American dream? Blame it on a series of blunders by the UNHCR, the agency entrusted with their protection and care. When the Sudanese children first arrived in Kakuma, the boys were placed in group homes and loosely supervised by adults. Meanwhile, the girls were placed in foster families. In theory, the foster families would provide a more nurturing environment. In practice, the girls simply disappeared.
Read the whole thing.
Want to know how your favorite obscure candidate did in the California governor's race? Here's the official tally.
A couple of rarely mentioned candidates caught my eye: Independent Nathan Whitecloud Walton (1,552 votes), a.k.a. Nate, the former captain of the Princeton basketball team and Bill Walton's son, and Republican Mike McNeilly (490 votes), whose run-ins with the mural police I recount in The Substance of Style.
Reader Robert Moss calls my attention to this article on a new service offered by the Japanese post office: producing stamps with your photo on them. Eight post offices have equipment that produce the stamps instantly, while others let you turn in a photo and order stamps using it.
By contrast, my local post office regularly runs out of stamps. Sort of like McDonald's running out of french fries.
Picking up on a story in the Register, Walter Olson of Overlawyered reports that parents in Oak Park, Illinois, have filed a class action suit against the school district for--horrors--exposing their children to Wi-Fi. Apparently they have some superstition about radio waves. He includes a link to the complaint itself. If this sort of thing catches on, you can imagine the chilling effect it will have on the spread of wireless access in public places. Offer Wi-Fi, go to court.
The school district's site is here. As far as I can tell, it doesn't include any information about the lawsuit.
Tom Brennan of Agenda Bender spots a not-so-hidden agenda in one expert's ballot redesign ideas:
[T]hen there's the paragraph that reminds you that sometimes it's a good thing bureaucracies are so rule bound and innovation averse. Slate presented the ballot design problem to a few freelance designers. Two of the three examples of the work Slate displays are indeed improvements over the one official Cali ballot that accompanies the article. Oh, but that third makeover:
Hugh Dubberly, an interaction designer in San Francisco, simplified the type treatments, arrows, and boxes in his proposed Ballot B and also moved the column in which voters mark their choice to the left side of the page next to the candidate names, arguing that their proximity would minimize voting errors. He also proposed a somewhat radical solution to the 133-name-crunch problem by only printing the names of the serious candidates--the ones who'd participated in the final debate.
Yes, that would be a somewhat radical solution. Throw 128 candidates off the ballot. Certainly solves the clutter problem, and Hugh's ballot is a hymn to soothing whitespace. Eliminate the messy (but essential) details and call it interaction design. Simplify the type treatments, and simplify the hell out of democracy while you're at it.
Cruz Bustamante still has a job, but what will Gray Davis do next? I just don't see him as a lobbyist.
Mickey Kaus explains why he voted for Arnold and includes the following:
Schwarzenegger puts to voters, in a particularly sharp way, the same question Clinton put to voters: Can you separate personal failings from performance in office. Except that in Schwarzenegger's case the dilemma is worse, because --as an LAT editorial perceptively noted--Schwarzenegger's very flaws are the very things that might actually help him perform better in office. Maybe a governor who is manipulative and mean is just the man to subdue the unions, the casino tribes and entrenched, free-spending Democratic legislators.
I'm willing to take a flyer on that possibility, given the possible upside virtues, comforted by the knowledge that, thanks to the Constitution, Schwarzenegger can't use his governorship as a steppingstone to the presidency. It's only a state we're talking about! (That's another reason the poli-sci argument against mid-term ousters of temporarily-unpopular leaders doesn't apply with much force.. We're not talking about booting Lincoln in the middle of a Civil War. We're talking about a car tax.) If Schwarzenegger flies into a fascistic, steroid-fueled rage--well, he doesn't have his finger on the button. He can't suspend the bill of rights.
Couldn't have said it better myself (and in fact I said it worse below). Votes from people like Mickey and Roger Simon go a long way toward explaining Arnold's decisive victory.
Jackson Murphy reviews The Substance of Style on Blogcritics.
Jay Manifold reviews TSOS on his blog. He wants more math. Differential equations--the sure route to a bestseller.
On Econlib, John Nye focuses on the problem of aesthetic spillovers.