Greg Palmer

This is fascinating - the sequence of digits in provincial vote tallies may be a signal of vote tampering in Iran.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others...

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

There's more - click thru to the Washington Post for details. I'm loving this analysis by political scientists (yay!) Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco.

"There's one place that's still printing news the old fashioned way... on paper."

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I've hit a bit of a block lately - usually, I feel really inspired to create and add to the world around me outside of the confines of work, but lately it's been just the opposite. So, my question to you, what happens when you feel inspired but have a tough time translating that into action, words, and projects?

Ha! (via Business Insider)

I was perusing Mashable the other day and came across Sharlyn Lauby's advice about corporate social media policies. As someone who has a bit of input into that sort of policy at a large organization (135,000 employees strong), I'm more than a bit taken aback by Lauby's advice, particularly the legal advice she solicits from attorney Eric Meyer:

1. Employers need to be upfront with employees that they have no right to privacy with respect to social networking. "Employers reserve the right to monitor employee use of social media regardless of location (i.e. at work on a company computer or on personal time with a home computer)."

I've got to call bullshit here. I don't think my employer (or any employer) has the right to monitor pretty much anything I do on my own personal time, including my online presence. But I suppose that's not accurate enough - they can certainly monitor anything about my public or semi-public life, but I'd argue that they don't have a right to hold it against me if it doesn't affect my work performance.

Lawyers and HR folks like to over-analyze everything. Some form of social media policy is probably worthwhile, but letting your legal and HR department write it is a mistake - it inevitably will stifle the creativity of your employees and the company may look like an overbearing asshole. That's because HR people want to sanitize everything and lawyers try to claim as many rights for their client as they can possibly imagine (see recent Facebook debacle). Both are too extreme. So, in that spirit, here are my proposals for some important points of a social media policy:

1. Joining social networks and/or having a blog is an important and developing form of communication and society. It's inevitable that you and other employees will intersect on social networks.
   
2. If you talk about work, make sure it's clear you're not speaking for your employer. You have the right to your opinion, but you don't have the right to publish confidential or private materials that are the property of your employer.
   
3. Things you say on social networks, even (or maybe especially) personal things, may change your co-workers' (including your boss's) opinion of you. You'll have to live with the consequences, so manage your online reputation just as you manage your real-life one.
   

(via TPM)

I think a lot of people wake up every day striving for perfection - the perfect job, the perfect spouse, the perfect home, the perfect body, the perfect day. But what do we mean by that? What is perfection?

When we talk about perfection, the common ground we generally have is to think of a time and a life with no problems. Utopia, in essence. But perfection doesn't mean a place with no wonder, no mystery; those are the very things that make perfection possible. So what we forget is that we're in utopia already; a state without wonder, mystery, and longing isn't perfection, it's hell.

When I think about perfection, I don't think about a particular state, but about the journey. Today isn't perfect, but no day or object or person or concept ever will be. I find perfection along the way - in fond memories, in good friends, in great experiences. At the time, we rarely recognize these things as perfect, and in one classic sense, of course they aren't. Everyone, everything is flawed. But experiencing joy despite the flaws - that's perfection.

And that's the paradox of perfection - we're striving for something that we don't really want, and that doesn't really exist.

In between drafts of this post, I was walking through The Strand and picked up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country. As usual, he captures things far more poignantly than most anyone else can:

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, "What is life all about?" ... I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Yup.

I think this is one of my favorite things ever:


But what I didn't realize is that there are so many of these on Youtube! (via David Maddox)

After reading Atul Gawande's essay in the New Yorker, I'm convinced that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual. It wrecks the psyche of many prisoners and leaves them unfit to ever fully reintegrate with society:

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn't handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn't generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California's Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners "begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind--to organize their own lives around activity and purpose," he writes. "Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving," becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with "irrational anger," compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.