How to make a point.

Here is a link to an interesting article by Lee Drutman entitled Is Congress getting dumber, or just more plainspoken? http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/grade-level-congress/

The premise is of the article is simple: Examine speeches using the using the Flesch-Kincaid test and see what happens. I want to point out that Flesh-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences.

According to the results at the above link Congress is speaking at a 10.6 grade level down from an 11.5 level in 2005.

MS Word includes a Flesh-Kincaid analysts in its tools. I took a few book/author samples and tested them. I grant this is a small sample but I think it has some “tough reading” in it from a diverse group of English language writers.

Martin Eden – Jack London – 3.8

As I lay Dying – William Faulkner – 4.8

Treasure Island – Robert Lewis Stevenson – 2.0

Paradise Lost – John Milton – 3.4

Ulysses – James Joyce – 2.7

Bleak House – Charles Dickens – 4.5

The Winter of Our Discontent – John Steinbeck – 2.7

Based on my sampling it looks like it might be more important to say something meaningful that everyone can understand than worry about vocabulary and sentence length.

(I wanted to slip obfuscate into my comment up there somewhere but I use Open Office now so I can't check to see if it would have helped my Flesh-Kincaid rating.)

George W. Parker

Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath

I have been thinking about John Steinbeck and his writing. I like Steinbeck. One of the questions I ask everyone who confesses to reading is “Have you read The Winter of Our Discontent ?” No one reads it. I have met two people in my entire life who have read it and one of them was in Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. And I don't understand that. It's entertaining. It's funny. It's readable and you can justify the time you spend on it.

It seems like everyone gets the Steinbeck kicked out of them at an early age. No one ever gets past The Grapes of Wrath. I was lucky that the first Steinbeck I ever read was Travels with Charley. If I had started out with The Grapes of Wrath I would never had picked up another thing by him. (If you have ever seen the John Ford movie adaptation staring Henry Fonda then you need to be sure and see the SCTV version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6O5xCRNx4g )

My son is in high school. One of the summer reading choices is, you guessed it, The Grapes of Wrath. I don't understand why they would force that book on anyone. They should be reading something they would enjoy. No wonder all he does is play Call of Duty.

You can find my review of The Winter of Our Discontent at http://georgewparkertalkingbookreviews.blogspot.com/.

George W. Parker

B. Traven and social media

The creative person should have no other biography than his works. B. Traven

How is that working for him in today's social media environment?

• B. Traven has an official website – http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html.
• Here is his Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/B-Traven/112166092128826.
• This is the Twitter page - https://twitter.com/#!/btraven (Here he is in the guise of Kenneth Sean Glade.)
• How about the blog? - http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/author/b-traven/

Today B. Traven's publisher would be working to own and manage all the above web pages to consolidate and and control the marketing of his “brand.” Speaking to us, the buying public, in a single voice.

Traven's various “beards” (aka agents) would probably have their own Internet platforms and plaster us with all kinds of insipid Tweets and posts. (Well, they are just “beards,” not B. Traven.)

The one thing that you can be sure of is B. Traven would be using a Tor browser.

George W. Parker

I am not a Travenologist. What I know about B. Traven you can find here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Traven and here - http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html. I must admit that I do agree with the opening quote.

Naivety

Here are a couple of things I hope I never come to disbelieve: “Cheaters never win, winners never cheat.,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” I realize these are a little old fashion but I still like them.

Another old fashion idea is that it is against the law to buy votes in the United States. It is against the law to buy them directly. To be successful at it you have to use a third party money laundering device. And the safest and most successful washing machine available is the US Government.

Here are a couple of recent examples , in my opinion, of vote buying. (I don't mean that the following things are wrong in themselves, just that the driving purpose behind them is suspect.)

1. During a time of deflation Congress passed and the President signed a 3.6% benefit increase for Social Security recipients. (I realize that there are many legitimate reasons behind this increase. I also realize that this group of Americans are active voters.)
2. Just last week President Obama was touting, on campuses across the US, his fight for lower interest rates on student loans. (Again, I realize there are a great many good reasons for these lower interest rates. But was this really anything thing more than an attempt to buy votes?)

Vote buying via the Washington machine goes the other direction too. In a previous blog I talked about the immense spending on Capitol Hill by lobby groups. What is a PAC or Super PAC but a way to massage money to the people, Representatives and Senators and Presidential candidates, who enact monetary laws?

It would be naive to believe that this behavior is something new in Washington. But is it naive to believe that it can be minimized? Probably, but I do plan on holding onto the possibility.

George W. Parker

Lobbyist

On PBS there is a Moyer & Company promo in which a woman laments that we (the American Everyman) don’t have a lobbyist working for us in Washington, D.C.

I did a search and found out at http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby that there were 12,655 Federal registered lobbyist in 2011 with combined expenditures of $3.31 billion dollars. (You’ll find a lot of interesting information at http://www.opensecrets.org)

Lobbies by definition are special interest groups whether they are the American Association of Retired Persons ($15 million spend in 2011http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023726&year=2011), Pfizer Inc. ($1 million spend in 2011 http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H04) or The National Association of Broadcasters ($13.9 million spend http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000000202&year=2011, and on and on and on. A lobby’s business is looking out for their own issues.

The United States once experimented with a group of multi-issue lobbyists. The thought was that one person could look after the interests of a diverse group of people. So our population was divided up and assigned lobbyists. These multi-issue lobbyists were called Senators and Representatives. Apparently that experiment did not work out as expected. But maybe it’s time to reset that idea of representing a diverse group of people.

George W. Parker

Big Data

I came across an article on BBC.com this morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17682304 that redirected my entire morning. In it Dr. Mike Lynch⁽¹⁾ stated:

“Today, thanks to technology's mass appeal and accessibility, on a daily basis we collectively produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and the growth rate is so high that 90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone. The value of this information to organisations who want to keep ahead of the curve is huge.”

Here is the part that stopped me cold: “…90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone.”  Emphasis is mine.

“…90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone.” Where in the world did that statement come from? So I went word searching

The first thing I found  was an unattributed promotional piece on IBM’s site http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/ excerpted below. (Please note that the noun “information” is “data” here. And IBM can help you with your “big data.”): 

“What is big data?

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data. “

Next up was http://bigdatalowlatency.com/ which lead to another IBM quote: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/us__en_us__smarter_computing__ibm_data_final.pdf  Here again the noun in use is “data” not “information. (And IBM can still help you with your big data.)

 

I found a few more references to that IBM 90% data statement which I won't bore you with. Nowhere else did I find the word “information” used.  If Dr. Lynch had used the word “data” instead of “information” I would never have run along this tangent as there is a big difference in my mind between data and information.

Dr. Lynch has shown us that just because you have data doesn’t mean you have information.

⁽¹⁾ Dr. Mike Lynch OBE is founder and chief executive (CEO) of Autonomy, and executive vice-president (EVP) of HP Information Management. Autonomy, part of HP since October 2011, makes software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text and web pages. From BBC.com

Required Reading, The Hunger Games?

When I was in high school our required reading included classical literature. Now it’s The Hunger Games. My son had to read it, I had to buy it, so I read it. It was okay. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I would suggest some alternative reads.

Here are some quotes lifted from Wikipedia about The Hunger Games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games

“… Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA) names the major themes of The Hunger Games as "government control, 'big brother', and personal independence".^[13]”  I would suggest reading 1984  by George Orwell. If you want to check out “Big Brother” go to the source.

“The Capitol makes watching the games required viewing.^[12] The theme of power and downfall, similar to that of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, was pointed out by Scholastic.^{[14] “}  Again I would suggest going to the source, Julius Caesar  by William Shakespeare.

“Donald Brake from The Washington Times, as well as Jessica Groover from the Independent Tribune, states that the story has Christian themes,…” If you’re looking for Christian themes then go for Moby Dick  by Herman Melville.


I want to point out that The Hunger Games is published by Scholastic, the ubiquitous school publisher. Do you think big publishing has taken a sales lesson from big pharma and are calling on the local dispensers (In this case librarians and English teachers.)  to push their wares? Schools all ready receive a percentage from their sponsored Scholastic book fairs. Are they just taking the next step?