Thanks to the well over 10,000 people who voted in our baby name poll, we’ve chosen the perfect name for our new baby - Athena Marie Morrison.
Those of you who have been following this story might be a bit surprised at the name choice, since Olivia was leading the poll for girls’ names. But the very, very few readers who managed to make their way through my boring (but educational) statistics posts will remember that Ann and I controlled for popularity, hoping to pick a name that was loved by our voters but still reasonably unique and interesting.
We took three names that our voters liked better than could be explained by general popularity in 2007 - Cassia, Ada, and Athena - and waited to see which name would fit her best.
Since our baby was born with her eyes open, perceptive and looking very thoughtful, we thought it was appropriate to name her for the goddess of wisdom.
Thanks again to all the family, friends, Googlers, and random internet strangers who voted.
If you’d like to keep following Athena’s first days on the planet, you can follow me on Twitter.
We’re at the hospital, so hopefully I’ll have news soon. If you weren’t on the email list from the baby name poll, or aren’t already connected to me on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll be posting updates as we get breaks:
An apology to anyone who got an unwanted invite to social networking site Bebo.
I tend to join and try out a lot of social apps as I run into them. I was signing up for Bebo when I got to the part of the process where you add friends to your account. First I saw the section I wanted, “Friends found on Bebo who are in your address book:”
Next, there’s a section, “Friends of friends on Bebo who you MAY know:” I started down this list but noticed many duplicates from the first list. Normally this kind of duplication is a minor usability issue, since it wastes some screen real estate and a small amount of user attention. But in this case the duplicates were so prevalent I scrolled back to the top and clicked the “Add Friends” button.
Had I kept scrolling, I would have seen the “Invite friends to Bebo from your address book:” section with every email address checked by default.
Every social networking site has a feature like this, and it fuels the exponential growth that some of these sites experience. But sending an in-site friend invite is very different from sending a email invite. Most of us have email contacts who fall into various categories - friends, co-workers, people we’ve bought stuff from, former bosses, friends’ parents, etc. Very few people would want to actually send out invites to every single email address in their address book, so that should never be the default behavior.
So, yeah, sorry for the Bebo invite spam.
In other news, I just sent out over 3300 emails to people who voted in the baby name poll and left their email address.
Before I go on, keep in mind that the standard disclaimer applies, and I am writing from the perspective of a frustrated AT&T customer.
My wife and I both have iPhones. I just happened to check my AT&T wireless bill online, and it turns out that AT&T has been overcharging us since March. Apparently when Ann got her phone and we went to a family plan, they added a data plan for her but removed the data plan for me. No one knows how or why. You’re not supposed to be able to get iPhone service without the unlimited data plan
Earlier I wrote about my experience on Australian TV. They’ve put the clip up on The Morning Show website but they don’t allow direct links or have an embedding feature, so I did some digging in the JS/Flash code and put it below.
They put in a photo montage so some of my family, friends, and co-workers are famous in Australia too.
If anyone wants to know how to embed videos from this site or other Yahoo TV sites, let me know and I’ll post more details. They really ought to just stick each video on it’s own URL and add some embed widgets. It’s not too hard to do, and it’s part of the reason YouTube became so popular.
I was hoping to have some exciting news about the newest addition to the Morrison family (as well as the subject of our huge internet baby name poll). Unfortunately the baby has it’s own plans and schedule. In the mean time, I thought I’d point out a couple of interesting Google-related articles and ask a question:
Google voice search is out for the iPhone, although for some reason it’s not at the App Store yet. Once it’s out, all you’ll need to do is load the app and say what you’re looking for, and Google will find it for you. Very cool. And some reporters are pointing out how cool it is that Google is still developing apps for other platforms while we have our own, the Android operating system seen on the G1.
Some sports and political figures in Argentina are suing to stop search engines from returning results for their names. That’s right - if you want to know anything about Diego Maradona, your search will return nothing but a message about a court order. This is, of course, a ridiculously backward take on copyright and publicity rights that flies in the face of logic and freedom of speech. Imagine going to a library and demanding they find and scissors-out every reference to Babe Ruth. I love Argentina, but any legal system that would let this sort of thing go on is pathetic.
And finally, here’s my question:
What the best way to send out a massive email to about 1,000 people? So many of the voters in the poll included their email address that I’m wondering if a gigantic CC: list is the way to go. Any ideas?
I played around a bit with Twitter a year or so ago, but between server hiccups and a lack of things to actually use it for, I didn’t really get into it. Now, though, I am starting to get my Twitter on. So the question is, why use twitter, especially since I gave up on it so easily a year ago?
1. Twitter fills a communication niche, one that we didn’t even know existed five years ago. It really does. There’s a whole spectrum of human communication, which can be organized from timely to timeless, from sparse to dense, from interpersonal to broadcast. Twitter falls into an interesting midpoint in that range, somewhere between instant messaging, leaving a note on the dry-erase board outside your dorm room, and heading down to the local hangout to see who’s around.
2. Twitter is a social app, so it displays classic network effects - the more people you know using it, the more valuable it is for you to use it. Working for Google and living in Silicon Valley I’ve met a lot of people over this past year who are devoted users. Twitter is good for everything from ad-hoc get-togethers to sharing in obsessive election night poll watching.
3. Twitter isn’t just an application, it’s a platform to build applications on top of. So there’s a number of apps which make Twittering more usable and effective.
The Twitterific iPhone App makes it easy for me to send out updates from my phone. Which I have on me at all times.
I’m using the Twitter Facebook app to update my status in two systems at the same time, meaning I’m more likely to make use of either.
Twitturly collects urls that people are talking about in almost real-time, creating a sort of incidental social news site.
Thanks to everyone who voted and sent us your suggestions. We’re getting very close to the due date, so I’m officially shutting down votes tomorrow. We’ve decided to make the final choice once the baby is born, just in case the kid has some suggestions of their own. Watch this space for news, hopefully soon.
In the mean time, here are a few things I’ve learned:
Spreadsheets are the next frontier in web2.0 social networking. No kidding.
Blog posts about babies are much more popular than posts about statistics.
Let random people vote on a baby name over the internet, and a few will spam the form or enter nasty stuff, but the vast majority will give you helpful suggestions. Way to go, Internet.
Here’s the form, get your vote in by end of day Friday, November 14th.
Okay, I stole the title from John Hodgman, who spoke at Google recently. And to be really fair, I should add more modifiers to the title, “briefly famous” being much more accurate.
Hodgman, who writes in the great tradition of literary nonsense, has a very entertaining story of minor fame in his new book More Information Than You Require. He has inspired me to write a a less entertaining story about the minor internet fame that our baby naming project has bestowed upon me.
Earlier today I was interviewed on The Morning Show, broadcast all across the great nation-continent of Australia. Since my kayak is in the shop, I was to go to KNTV in San Jose where the interview would be done live via satellite.
There’s another stats exercise I want to go through before we narrow down the list. We want to pick a name that people have voted for, but we’d also like to choose a name that’s not too popular. This is just a personal preference that Ann and I have, we think it’s a little more fun to have a more unique name.
Also, it would be pretty boring if the vote gives us the exact same information as a list of most popular baby names. So, how to do we choose a name that’s popular with friends and family (and in our case, random internet strangers), that’s still reasonably unique?
Based on the chart below, names that fit our criteria include Ada, Cassia, Athena, Erin, or Olivia for a girl and Nikolas, Levi, Isaac, Dylan or Alexander for a boy. Follow along and I’ll explain where I got the data and how it helps me pick names.
The graph you see above is a scatterplot of the names, showing the vote total versus the number of babies given that name in the U.S. in 2007. For example, Isaac has 1220 votes as of this writing and 10,066 babies were named Isaac in 2007.
Now you can put live results on your own blog, courtesy of Google Gadgets. It’s like Google Maps for the democratic process. Thanks to Wysz for pointing this out.
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.
They make a good argument, and I agree with them, but I find it pretty reprehensible that they are spamming blogs to make their point. If the comment is on-topic, why do I call it spamming? Grab a snippet of text and do an exact-phrase Google search by wrapping quotes around it, like this:
As of this writing there are 233 occurrences of the exact same comment slathered all over the web. It looks like they’re using an automated program to watch Technorati or Google Blog Search for posts about the Electoral College and autopost the same comment. I’m going to email them and ask that they stop.
In any event, we already looked at the fact that some people’s votes count four times as much because they live in a state with a small population. Do the NationalPopularVote.com folks have a point about swing states?
One way to look at the power of your vote is to figure out the likelihood that yours will decide the election. By this definition, it helps a little to be in a small-population state but the most important factor is how close the election is in your state - your best bet is to live in a swing state. Andrew Gelman has a great article explaining why, but it’s pretty intuitive. If you live in a safe Democrat state, for example, it doesn’t matter if you live in California or Rhode Island - your vote is much less likely to be the one to flip the state to one side or the other. The same is true for safe Republican states, from Texas to Wyoming.
It’s just two days until the U.S. Presidential election. I thought I’d talk a bit about how elections are covered with information graphics, specifically maps.
Real Clear Politics’ mapping application is interesting because it gives you to ability to run your own scenarios, switching swing states back and forth to see the result. You can also compare results from previous elections, all the way back to 1968.
But geographic projections don’t tell the whole story - Political Irony has a great map demonstrating exactly why the Electoral College is a terribly undemocratic way to choose a president - voters in some states have effectively four times the influence of voters in others:
I’m not the first person to notice this of course, so there have been many efforts to show cartograms based on electoral pull. There’s one at the Dispassionate Liberal and one at American Street, both using data from Pollster.com.
A couple of notes - Blue is safe for Obama, Red is safe for McCain. I compressed “leans” and “likely” categories into one color because it’s late and my eyes are tired. Also, I’m missing Alaska and Hawaii, I’ll try to find a base map that has them and update.
