Month: November 2012

I was told that I serve enough booze at my parties to be an honorary Punjabi, and I’m also from the “dance like no one is watching” school of thought. Hence this.

For no reason other than it’s a great pairing of Asian Awesome, here are Daniel Dae Kim and George Takei, taking a break from shooting an episode of Hawaii Five-0.

Dean Chambers has an action hero name. A manly name. He felt that Nate Silver’s data pointing to an Obama win on his site FiveThirtyEight was wrong, so he did what any real man would do in response to Silver’s pansy-ass predictions:

• He created UnSkewed Polls, which also used poll data but employed weightings that better fit his worldview, and
• he made sure that you knew what kind of a faaaaaaag Nate Silver was. Faaaaaaags may know interior decorating and musical theatre, but leave the math to us real men, okay?

(And seriously, dude, running your site on ColdFusion only perpetuates the stereotype that Republicans have no idea what to do with technology.)

The money quote for the second point comes from a rather catty article by Chambers published on October 25th, with the tinfoil hat titled The Far Left Turns to Nate Silver for Wisdom on the Polls. Rather than let the data speak for itself, Chambers saw fit to resort to that classic schoolyard bully tactic: ad HOMOnem…

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Let’s put aside the petty personal attacks and look at the data, which is what a real man would do, shall we?

Here’s Chambers’ final prediction, predicting a Romney/Ryan win over Obama/Biden, 275 electoral votes to 263, with 270 needed to win. He got a number of states’ results wrong:

Here’s Silver’s final prediction, predicting an Obama/Biden win, 313 electoral votes to 225:

Here are the actual results. Silver’s electoral votes are closer to actual than Chambers’ — 303 electoral votes for Obama/Biden and 206 for Romney/Ryan, plus he’s 50 for 50 on predicting which way each state would go:

A real man would admit he was wrong, and also apologize for his pointless, unworthy, ungentlemanly cheap shots at Silver. We’ll see if Chambers is such a man.

Posted without comment, but with this set of close-ups:

…Nate Silver, who used data and did the math to accurately call the election. It all sounds very Star Trek-y: using a mathematical model that took in poll data, weighting each data source according to how accurate it’s been in the past, and factoring in other conditions that will affect the result. The talking heads in the media who cover the politics beat will have a harder time dismissing “cold equations” in favour of “warm human intuition” — as if mathematics wasn’t as equally human as “that gut feeling”.

The recent high-profile understandable-by-Joe-Average examples of how “doing the math” can pay off in real life — first Moneyball, now this — might spark a short-term interest in statistics and math in general. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a CNN anchor explaining the differences between mean, median and mode to an audience that has trouble calculating a tip (I’d see it as a good start), but perhaps we might see more news features on how a little math can help improve your life, such as a piece on The Quantified Self, visualizing how much sugar is in that soft drink or the incredible power of compound interest. We don’t face threats that capture the American imagination the way that Sputnik did in 1957 and started the STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) boom, but there are such threats to which greater STEM knowledge can lead us to solutions. A success story like Silver’s election prediction is just the kind of thing we need.

Macleans columnist Colby Cosh, one of my more seemingly unlikely internet friends, is one of Silver’s more reasonable critics. He’s taken some drubbing from Silver’s true believers (he refers to them as “Silverbacks”), but I think he makes a good point. While Silver’s method is arguably more “scientific” than a pundit’s gut instinct, he hasn’t done one thing that all good scientists and mathematicians do: he hasn’t shown his work. While we know the broad strokes of his model, the precise details are secret and thus the model is not falsifiable (a science term that’s often confused by laypeople — it means that if the model is false, there is a way to prove that it is so; this is a cornerstone of the scientific method). In a math exam, you don’t get full marks if you don’t show your work, and for this reason, Silver shouldn’t get full marks either (a decent mark, yes, but not a perfect score). There’s also the matter that like any predictive model, it won’t be correct all time, as Colby points out in this recent piece. Pure, blind faith in Silver’s model, just because it’s tagged with the impressive labels of “scientific” or “mathematical” is no different from believing the predictions of a psychic or a deck of tarot cards — you’re simply following a different mysterious force that you don’t really understand.

I’ll close with this: from one guy who juggles symbols for living to another — congratulations, Nate Silver!

On the results of the US election: The Accordion Dude abides.

Update

Reader Chris Charabaruk stated in the comments that he prefers this image:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Last night, TechCrunch came to town and invited 1,000 people to come and mingle at the Steam Whistle Brewery. Anitra and I attended the event, which was packed solid. Even with 1,000 free tickets available, there were still a large number of people waitlisted.

The photo above shows the party floor as things were winding down. At the start of the party, the place was packed solid, with local tech startup people watching demos put on by startups who managed to pull together the $1,500 sponsor fee, catching up with each other and trying to meet new co-founders, collaborators, funders and employees.

A good number of the Usual Suspects were there, including Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Rob Tyrie, pictured above. Also present were some of my former colleagues at Shopify, including Blair Beckwith, Brian Alkerton and Mark Hayes, Shoplocket co-founders Katherine Hague and Andrew Louis, Anna Starasts from Grossman Dorland, James Woods from Shifthub (I worked with him at Tucows, along with Greg Frank, who was also there), Julie Tyios (who I cracked up with my Ford Canada interview), Vahid Jozi (whom I met while in Ottawa), Austin Ziegler, Jon from Venio, Rohan “Silver Fox” Jayasekara, John Gauthier and Jean-Luc David, to name a few. Special out-of-town mention has to go to Greg “Gregarious” Narain.

John Biggs and Yours Truly at TechCrunch Toronto.

My moment of the evening: when John Biggs, TechCrunch’s East Coast Editor saw me and asked “Is that the Accordion Guy?” It turns out that’s he’s been a reader of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for some time! I’ve been following his stuff since he was Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo, so the recognition made me feel like a rock star — a very nice birthday present!

Events like this are good for our local startup ecosystem. The chance meetings and exchange of ideas at shindigs like this have led to all sorts of things: friendships, collaborations, partnerships, employment and even getting some funding, but most importantly, they lend that sense of cohesiveness necessary to creating an environment where little businesses built on big ideas can thrive. My thanks to the folks at TechCrunch, the sponsors and all who came for making this event a fun and productive one!

You can read the TechCrunch summary of the event here.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.