Strange Policy from Bad Science - Part One

I despise the misuse of statistics. I'm a firm believer in the axiom, "statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics."

It is unequivocally true that you can use statistics, bent, folded, spindled, and manipulated, to prove nearly anything. Time was, however, that most people knew when a statistical abuse was at hand, and dutifully ignored. These days, however, where mathematical education and critical thinking take a clear back seat to whatever politically correct curriculum is in vogue, the ability to recognize and refute such abuses is diminishing daily.

A classic case in point arose just this week, when our beloved Government rode to our rescue and told the masses to stop using Zicam Nasal Gel, because it was "linked" to incidents of loss of smell.

Now that, on the surface, sounds pretty serious. If something out there is causing people to lose their smell, we ought to know about it. But a review of the data beyond the hysterical news headline reveals a much less hysterical reality.

The FDA based its admonition the basis of 199 cases of lost smell, or anosmia tied to the use of Zicam over a ten-year period. Although I could not find hard statistics on the number of actual Zicam users in that period, one news site reported the number to be in the "millions."

Let's say that, for the sake of argument, that establishes at least a minimum number of Zicam users at 2 million. And the FDA is suspending sales of the product based on 199 of those users. Assuming a 100% causal relationship, that means the chances of a Zycam user experiencing anosmia as a result is, at best about 1:10,000.

What the FDA, nor the media, didn't bother to tell us is how many cases of anosmia are found in the general population from all causes. What if we were to discover that the general incidence rate for anosmia was no more than 1:10,000? Or significantly lower? Or significantly higher?

The point is we don't know. Maybe Zicam really is causing a problem. Maybe it isn't. I'm not here to debate the efficacy or risks of Zicam, but to take our media and our government to task for failing to report the entire story, one with the information necessary for the reader to draw their own conclusions - conclusions based on fact and data, not hysteria and innuendo. The omissions are conspicuous, driven by a variety of motivations - some financial, some political.

We're going to explore this topic further next week, with a discussion on how pharmacetical companies (and political pundits) neglect to explain the difference between changes in absolute risk versus relative risk, and leverage that ignorance into a multibillion dollar industry that plays no small part of our current health care problem....

Pixar magic lifting us Up, Up, and Away in new film

It has been said that those who observe literary times claim there has never been a "Great American Novel." While I would not presume to debate such topics, I would offer that, to the extent a film narrative can be equated to a literary excursion, that the "Great American Movie" has been made - and from an entirely unexpected source - the Disney/Pixar Studios in its wonderful new film, "Up."

"Up" tells the tale of Carl Fredricksen, and it is in that tale that Pixar immerses us an astonishingly introspective and unyieldingly human story of youth, age, love, hope, loss, and adventure. The first ten minutes of "Up," which ironically holds the least dialog, carry us through a diorama of Fredricksen's life, from an adventure-seeking youngster, to a hope-filled married man, to a widowed and seemingly curmudgeonly elderly man.

Accompanying him on his elder-stage life is young Russell, an overly eager Wilderness Scout desperate to claim one final achievement badge by offering assistance to a senior citizen. Wasting no characters, Up gives us a glimpse into Russell's young life as a child of divorce, providing a common bond of loss that ultimately unites him with Fredricksen in their adventure.

Few films that aspire to comment on the human condition can claim to have drawn on so many elements that will resonate with so many people, which is precisely why "Up" is destined to become one of Pixar's classics. We see Fredricksen's crossed-heart promise to take his love Elly to South America, yet see the dream slip away unwittingly as time and life intervene. We share their pain as hopeful images of babies in the clouds turn to disheartening medical realities. We feel Carl's sadness as we see Elly's health slip away before he is able to make good on his South American promise, and understand that the external curmudgeon is facade for the guilt of a promise unkept, for adventures unexperienced. And we wish Elly's "Adventure Book" did not stop at the page entitled, "Things I'm Going To Do;" fortunately, as Carl's adventure nears its end, we find those pages not so empty afterall, with a gentle reminder that life's greatest adventures are often realized in the unplanned mundane rather than the orchestrated spectacular.

But make no mistake - "Up" is no turgid tale of sadness or melancholy. Mixed with the human tale is a delightful fantasy of Carl's life as a balloon salesman, with his cache of unsold floaters serving as the engine to launch his home skyward, on a course to South America, with Russell as his unwitting stowaway, along with a irresistable canine buddy they encounter along the way that younger children (and many adults) will want to take home instantly.

UP is another creative masterpiece from the artists at Pixar, once again demonstrative of the decided superiority in animated storytelling they hold. Pixar's hardly secret advantage is not in the astonishingly credible electronic realities they create, but in the wonderful characters that inhabit them, and in the ways those characters resonate with each of us. Who else could mix an old man, a little boy, and a house propelled around the world by helium-filled balloons, yet make it an introspective, touching, and still humorous adventure? Certainly, only Pixar.

And that is the grand gift we all enjoy.

Who flipped the pop-culture snow-globe??

I think someone has seriously messed with my head. Because what I'm seeing in this early summer wave of pop culture makes me think someone has moved me to an alternate universe.

Why? Well, I just left http://www.boxofficemojo.com/, which just advised me that the #1 movie in the United States for 2009 to date is....the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek. To the tune of $210 million, thank you very much.

Huh??

I grew up as a big fan of Trek, but as more movies came out, had to be solaced by the fact that Trek just wasn't "mainstream." For a Star Trek movie to reach "blockbuster" status was pretty darned rare. And given the relatively abysmal, but still somehow underrated "Nemesis" as he unintentional sendoff of the previous "Next Generation" crew, the last thing that seemed in the offing was more Trek; and, yet, Paramount threw $160 million at Abrams, told him to go for it, and he did. And what he did is simply dynamite, with Trek still playing beyond its fourth week in over 3,500 theaters. Somehow, J.J. Abrams has actually managed to make Star Trek cool.

America's entertainment industry is in a bit of a creative void, and as a result, dips into the pool of the known have made franchise reboots such as Dark Night, James Bond, and re-hashed music popular, with mixed results. I must admit, however, that this particular reboot is a delightful treat. In a world where "reality" TV offers us neurotic, self-absorbed psychoparents, hostile cake-bakers, and tattoo artist documentaries, this respite into TV's simpler time translated anew onto the big screen is welcome.

Live Long and Prosper, indeed.

A Blog Reborn, but because of the Gosselins?

It was about three years ago that I opened a blog account here, with a recognition that it served as much vanity as it did any purpose to improve the human condition. Life, work, kids, and exhaustion all conspire in their various ways to keep such projects subdued, but once again the muse has struck and this blog finds itself being revived.

I can't honestly say it was coincidence that the notion to restart this blog was in the same week as Jon and Kate Gosselin renewed their trek into willful voyeurism on TLC. I find myself curiously compelled to The Gosselin Zone in the same cruel way drivers slow down near a car wreck, yet avert their eyes to avoid seeing anything too gruesome.

After last night's season premiere, the whole thing is hard not to see as gruesome, and in so many ways.

Although I have watched arguably more than half its episodes, I won't call myself a "fan" of their show. Being a "fan" necessarily implies some sort of enthusiasm for what's being conveyed, and I rarely find myself in that position. I have found myself astonished to see Kate toss more harsh, cutting words at her husband in 30 minutes of carefully edited television than my own wife has tossed my way in nearly 15 years of marriage, and I won't pretend to understand how a constant tone of belittling (at one extreme) to conscious humiliation (at the other) finds itself anywhere in the spectrum of an appropriate way to treat one's spouse. Yet Kate is fine with it. Sadder still is that Jon has so little self respect that he, at least until recent events, tolerated it.

Sadly, though, the weekly travails of the Gosselin's unusual brood have gone beyond the basics of how spouses should treat each other. The living Brady Bunch that has become the spectacle of cable television has now turned into a bizarre mutation of gladhanding, self-aggrandizement, and vulgar self-promotion, with accusations of mutual martial infidelity hitting the tabloids just weeks before their season premiere. For TLC, its a free publicity dream. "This started six months ago," now claims Kate, losing sight of the fact that it really started five years ago, when the presumed subject of their lives - their sextuplets - were born. Now, these poor kids are nothing but a sideshow to what is rapidly become a freakshow of televised excess.

Wth the premiere now comes Kate and Jon's mutual disdain for the media, and Kate's particular dislike for "the paparazzi" which she now claims have started following her everywhere. Their marital issues aside, its impossible to escape the reality that the couple exhibits either ludicrous naivete or astonishng disingenuity at their sudden "discovery" of the photohounds, oblivious to the notion that those hounds have been following them with open checkbooks in hand from the good folks at TLC for the better part of their kids' lives. For Kate, now, a "paparazzi" is anyone with a camera in one hand that doesn't hold out a trip, gift, or speaking gig in the other.

What do we know about the Goseelin's marriage problems? Honestly, nothing. We know only rumor, rumor mixed with the speed and hyperbole of the Internet. where barely every fifth byte is credible information. We do know that, whatever their issues, Kate enjoyed the role of Solomonesque monarchy over her domain in the season premiere, giggling like a schoolgirl over issues she would easily have found to be Jon's fault in any other season.

Lost in all the shuffle and commotion amid the speculation about the Gosselins' future are the lives of eight little children who asked for exactly none of this fishbowl world, who seem in some way still blissfully unaware of the lives of notoriety their parents have chosen for them.

Sadly, for them, only time will tell how that side of the story unfolds. And I wonder if anyone will be paying attention.

When something easy becomes something hard...

I don't know exactly what day it happened, or even the month, but at some point in time some evil, sinister thing happened to the Internet. This thing, worse than a virus, is one that has transformed the Internet and its wonderful access to limitless volumes of information into an arcane mess of perpetual indirection, mandatory registration, clunky interfaces, and unwanted content.

Despite the fact that I've made my living at the heart of the so-called information revolution, I have no use for the extraneous fluff that has made complicated what was originally the so simple. Searches on Microsoft's Developer Network for simple debugging or language information renders list upon list of garbage on technology whitepapers, details on future products, and links to broken pages. A simple desire to find the score of a basketball game on ESPN's website leads you through a dizzying array of menus, submenus, javascript errors, overwrought Shockwave presentations, and pictures before you get close to anything resembling anything as simple as a score. Even the sports crawl on ESPN itself can't be happy with just delivering scores; it's compelled to give pointless, inane in-game statistics for each game; pitchers; at-bats, points, rbi's, baskets, pets, hobbies. Most infuriating of all is the trend of some websites (ESPN comes to mind) to push some idiotic canned videos to your browser without even the courtesy of a request for permission.

And, if nothing else, that's a practice that's got to stop.

I'm a pretty simple person. I love the simple and efficient interfaces on www.dictionary.com and www.whitepages.com, where you provide a simple piece of information, and get simple information back. I have no doubt that, one day, even these models of simplicity will eventually be wrapped in "helpful" "value-added" features that will turn them into useless constipations of technology, a vague memory of how things should have been before someone decided they need to be "cooler."

If I were involved in marketing, I'd wonder if anyone even tried to find out what customers want in websites from places like ESPN or their local TV station. I think an entirely separate group of media junkies is selling another group of media junkies that all this extraneous garbage being poured onto every website in the world is something we, the users, actually want, without bothering to ask us.

Am I wrong? Do you like the convoluted interfaces of ESPN or FoxSports? Or do you appreciate the simplicity of websites like www.dictionary.com that allow you to control the agenda? Moreover, do you like ESPN shoving its video content down your browser's throat?

Let me know what you think. I think I already know the answer; but, unlike ESPN and their contemporaries, I'm going to ask you what you think first.

-David

Cell Phones and Emergencies Don't Mix

As the latest in this year's hurricane parade splashes its way through Florida, one ugly reality about our regional and national emergency infrastructure has emerged.

Our wonderful, how-did-we-live-without them, never-out-of-touch cell phone networks are all but useless in wide-scale emergencies. And our increasing dependence on these wireless marvels are exposing a huge gap in one of the most fundamental elements of disaster recovery: communication.

Emergent scenarios present the existing cell network with the two realities it was least designed to handle: high call volume and the need for proximal distance access. The former is simple; cell subscribers outpaced the growth of the cell network, and its attendant capacity. When users in concentrated locations all start using their phones simultaneously, the bandwidth-limited network seizes up, and calls don't go through. The latter is more subtle, but only now being appreciated by more localities - cell networks don't necessarily route 911 calls to the presumptive local authorities, assuming 911 on a given cell phone goes anywhere at all.

That belies the fundamental problem with the cell network: it was never designed to operate under the stress of emergent situations. Cities and cell providers are only now beginning to work out after-the-fact the issues that will allow them to integrate traditional land-line 911 emergency access in their wireless networks. And while even land-lines have their capacity limitations, it doesn't take but a fraction of the corresponding volume to ball-up most cell networks. Worse still is that cell phone problems aren't always as simple as finding a snapped cable; the complex routing mechanisms that get a call from cell phone "A" to cell phone "B" can make failure diagnosis one part science, and one part black magic.

The weaknesses present mutually paradoxical risks. Even if cities were able to flip the technical switches necessary to turn on cell-based 911 access tomorrow, capacity problems would inevitably result in the saturation of a cell network with emergency calls, with reams of frustrated cell users would find their calls going nowhere. Conversely, an infinitely capable network is of limited usefulness in an emergency if no 911 service is available.

These two problems say nothing of the universal issues of dead spots, coverage holes, and other glitches that seem to plague the general cell phone community. For most of us, such failures are minor annoyances we learn to live with. In an emergency, however, such problems may prove to be far more than annoying. We've come to allow ourselves to think of the cell phone as a substantial replacement for the traditional land-line, but overlook the fundamental differences in the technologies that make these capacity and connection problems so real. Land-lines don't have dead spots, don't have coverage holes, and do have nearly a century of real-world experience as their legacy. With cell phones, we're very much learning as we go.

What's the solution? There really isn't one. Cell technology certainly isn't going away; we've engaged in a long-term relationship with our cell phones, marrying our mobility with our inherent desire to be connected 24x7 to...anything. Cell towers are popping up faster than ever, in more locations, and in more forms (checked out that apartment complex's flag pole lately?) to accomodate increasing cell density. Some users are actually abandoning land-lane phones entirely. That means the problem will only get worse.

Will the practical necessity of emergency communications catch up with the torrid pace of cell deployment? Only time will tell. The good folks in Florida emerging from Wilma's aftermath might like to tell us their experience, but it seems their cell phones are still down....

For a change of pace...file copy problems in XP?

The first week of this blog was mostly rants about the MSM not covering the University of Oklahoma bombing. Now, we're going to take a drastic turn toward the techie side.

Looks like there's a particularly annoying bug hiding somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft Windows XP operating system, particularly manifesting itself when two XP boxes (or, apparently XP- to Server 2003, or even XP-to-Win2K) are attempting to copy large (typically in excess of 700K) files over a network. Sometimes, it can involve copying to USB flash drives, or drives in external enclosures. Whatever the source, the problem is apparently unique to XP, and is causing more than a few people frustrations.

Apparently, after a time, the copy hangs, and eventually the source system will report "Cannot copy : The path is too deep." This has led some to check the actual lengths of file names and paths, but this is a red herring; ultimately, there's a lower-level problem occuring during the copy, and the problem gets bubbled up the system with the "path too long" error, but that's rarely if ever the answer.

Unable to offer any conclusive answers here, I thought I'd post a few possible solutions others have tried with varying degrees of success. Warning, there is no silver bullet - at least so far.

This is a very cursory listing of possible solutions. A great source of more detailed info is available here

1. Be sure all NIC's and switches are set to *either* 100Mb/Full duplex, or 10MB/Full Duplex, but NOT AutoNegotiate. Autonegotiate is the bane of many an otherwise unexplained network problem.

2. Check to ensure any 80-pin cables are absolutely sound; replace if possible.

3. DON'T start renaming files or shortening diretories; the "Path is too deep" is almost never tied to this actual problem.

4. Check/replace network cables.

5. Unregister the AVI preview DLL (shmedia.dll).

6. In the registry, set the TcpAckFrequency to 1, per MSKB article 328890

For the best discussion on this error, check the link listed above. Anyone with other possible solutions are invited to reply here and share the wealth!

-soonerDave

It was all a hoax...now, back to the news?

So it was all a hoax.. There was no plot to bomb the NYC subway, no terrorist plan, nothing, just another "informant" giving us garbage, watching officials react and the press trip over itself to cover nothing, whle he laughs at our own ineptitude.

Perhaps now the media will return from covering the non-existent and start covering and investigating what's real...

-soonerDave

Is the media finally interested?

Ten days ago, Joel Henry Hinrichs killed himself as he detonated a bomb some 100 yards west of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, a venue packed with 84,000 football fans watching the Sooners take on Kansas State. After almost no national media coverage of the event, two other incidents, one today, involving explosive devices at UCLA and Georgia Tech may be prompting renewed media interest in the Oklahoma University bombing.

Considering that Hinrichs is known to have attempted the purchase of ammonium nitrate fertilizer the same week he concocted his homemade bomb, it strikes me that the national media's interest is long overdue.

This doesn't say that the media must find some smoking gun. It does say they have an absolute duty to investigate, and that's a duty they've sorely failed. Fortunately, the situation may finally be getting attention at CBS.

-soonerdave

Terrorism: Media vs Reality

Time more or less suspends itself within the confines of a football stadium, passing only as ticks on scoreboard clock or first downs on the field. That's probably why I can only tell you it was a few minutes before halftime of the game between Oklahoma University and Kansas State University when I heard it, a thunderous "BOOOOOOM" that rumbled through the west side of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, and caused about 10,000 people in the west-side upper deck where my son and I sat to rise in unison for something other than a play on the field.

Thunder from an unexpected storm, I thought? No, the evening was warm and clear, and what bits of rain dotted the state were to the east, and had moved on long ago. An inadvertent blast from the guns of the RufNeks, an intense OU spirit squad that blasts their guns as part of its pregame ritual? Nope...this "boom" was behind us, west of the stadium, possibly from the parking garage. Nope, this was a "boom" that had bad written all over it, but no one knew exactly what. Only the scattering of Oklahoma Highway Patrolman out of the stadium in that same general direction alluded to anything out of the ordinary.

The "boom" turned out to be the explosion of a bomb either tied to or being prepared by a student named Joel Henry Hinrichs, a figure of fact, fiction, and myriad opinion as someone who either chose to end his life conspicuously, only a few hundred feet away from a stadium of 85,000 people, by blowing himself up; or, as a mistake-prone cohort of individuals with a broader objective of causing harm to those same 85,000 as part of a failed terrorist act. Only the FBI knows for sure, and it's a virtual certainty they're not sharing all they know with the rest of us, at least not publicly.

I thought surely this would be the beginning of an entirely new run of negative, frightening national publicity for Oklahoma, forever immortalized as home to the "Oklahoma City Bombing," unwitting conduits for one or more terrorists involved in 9/11, now the possible focus of yet another but larger-scale terrorist attempt right at the heart of one of Oklahoma's most loved pastimes - football.

One week later, however, nothing. Absent a few passing blurbs on FOX, some reports on what some might term "fringe" websites, and a passing reference on even The Drudge Report, the national media has taken a pass on this one. From one perspective, that's not so bad; Oklahoma doesn't need the publicity, at least not that kind. From another, I can't help but wonder, "Huh??"

The sense of wonder doesn't get any more curious than when the news of last night is peppered with reports about a potential bomb plot along the New York City subway system. One terrorist in one location reports that someone who might be plotting something just might be in the US, and the media's typewriters and video cameras can't start rolling fast enough to record and take pictures of -- absolute normalcy. Headlines crossfire about who and what might be involved; about who disclosed what and to whom; and that a soda can prompted an evacuation of the Penn Central station.

In the midst of it, I can't help but be struck by the irony; the national media in an all-too-predictable frenzy over the potential of a terrorist event in New York, but almost completely absent from the story of the actual detonation of an actual bomb within striking distance of 85,000 people in Oklahoma! And when you add to that the fact that local media outlets discovered that Hinrichs attempted to purchase of multiple bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer - the same base component used in the Murrah building bombing ten years ago - and that Hinrichs apartment was apparently chock-full of explosive components, and that Hinrichs apparently attempted to enter Memorial Stadium twice (but was refused when he would not allow his backpack to be searched) and it would seem you have all the ingredients for a story the national media would trip over each other to cover.

Nope. They're sitting this one out.

I, for one, loathe conspiracy theories. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I think we really did land on the moon. But I can't help but wonder why a story so rich in potential for the investigative journalism that is presumably held so dear by our fourth estate is given a free pass. If Hinrichs had, somehow, made it into Memorial Stadium before blowing himself up, he would have found himself in the midst of a halftime-throng of hungry, thirsty fans he could have taken out with him; men, women, and children of all walks of life - like me and my son -doing nothing more than waiting for a Coke or a corn dog. I guess that would have attracted media attention.

Our national media - all of them - have dropped the ball by ignoring this story. The sad truth is they didn't really ignore it; they just chose not to cover it.

And that is to their shame.

-soonerDave

The Inaugural Post

Welcome!

After having given it much contemplation (about five minutes), and taking into consideration the cost (none, so far), I opted to join this strange world of online narrative and create a blog. This raises the obvious question, "Who the heck are you?"

I go by the handle of SoonerDave, and I frankly don't yet know the ultimate direction this little blog will take. It may be a place for me just to vent, to post my unpublished writings, or to just blather. Who knows. I'm a software developer by trade, a Christian by faith, a husband by vow, and a parent by...well, you fill in that. :) I'm an American conservative, unapologetically so, a college football fan, a would-be writer, and woodworker. So posts to this blog could take any one of those or myriad other directions.

If somehow you've found your way here, welcome. Once we've started the ball rolling with some more specific topics or selected blatherings, your responses will be welcome and encouraged.

Thanks for stopping by.