Joe Duck

DARPA – the advanced technology research wing of the US Military – is always coming up with the most fun research and today’s Red Balloon social media experiment is no exception to that rule.

Ten huge red weather balloons were launched this morning at 10am EST and DARPA will pay 40,000 to the first team or person that can identify all the balloons by number and latitude / longitude.

Now, in my view as a social media expert (aka a web surfer), DARPA’s payout of 40,000 is distorting the experiment in a confusing way, encouraging secretiveness and deception rather than cooperation.    That may be intentional, but I think they wanted people to “really try” and wrongly felt this was the best way to do it.    All of the serious efforts I’ve seen so far are actually  *discouraging* people from using the power of social media to find the balloons, instead asking them to email or phone in sightings and then in some cases share in the proceeds, in other cases promising to give them to charity.

DARPA should consider repeating this experiment as a TWITTER crowdsource where there is NO money offered and each report is posted at Twitter where the crowd can sort the fakes from the real data.    I think that task would likely only take minutes rather than the hours the current project appears to need to get a complete result from the secretive teams.

Here are more stories  about the DARPA Red Balloons:

Wall Street Journal: Spot 10 Balloons, Win $40,000

Gizmodo:  DARPA’s Giant Red Balloons Officially at Large

CNN’s got a promising new effort to involve people in what is likely to become one of the two key discussion points over the next 3 years:  The growing US War in Afghanistan (the other is obviously the US / Global economy)     Here’s the Afghanistan war blog

In my view it is very hard to comment wisely about details and policy without a lot more of the “secret” military information – threat assessments, probabilities, estimates of deaths.    Without this it is simply not reasonable to attempt to evaluate the complex international military strategies of Obama or any president.

If, for example, there is good reason to believe that the terrorists have a good chance of destabilizing Pakistan and taking over intercontinental nuclear missles the stakes are very high indeed.   If that is extremely unlikely it changes the game considerably.

It is odd to me how people who argued Obama was “a communist / marxist”   refuse to grasp the obvious reality of his moderate policies.   Few Marxists or far left folks (outside of China! )  supported Obama.  They will call this a simple extension of US imperialistic power.   For many moderates the hypocrisy is also glaring.     They called Bush was a “war monger” but now seem very comfortable with Obama’s very similar military directions.    I’ve spoken about this with several who remain generally supportive of the President’s international efforts.   It is as if they are more interested in how we talk about war than how we prosecute these wars.

Lost in the details of the military aspects of the strategies is the calculation that addresses the single most important concern – do the benefits of US security and help to the Afghans outweigh the losses they and we will endure over the next three years?

I can’t second guess our leaders on this, but I’d sure like to see the numbers.     Like others I’m waiting anxiously to hear the president’s speech tonight but I doubt it will shed much light on how many people will die, even though these estimates are a critical part of the strategic process at the Pentagon.

Although I believe you can make a case for war in some cases, it’s absolutely immoral to fail to adequately determine if the benefits outweigh the massive human costs.     I know Obama tried to do this, but he should tell us what went into the calculations.    These are not simple calculations, but contrary to what many assert you *must” place values on lives whenever deaths are going to happen.    Do you try to do this directly (with numbers and specific assumptions) or indirectly with vague or general assertions and assumptions.    The government will maintain the pretense of thoughtfulness even when indirect and vague policies are driving things forward.

Governments often do many types of comparisons that shed a lot of light on how to move forward.      Transportation and Environmental agencies do this type of thing all the time when deciding how much to spend on safety / health / etc.   In those calculations lives in the USA are each worth about two to five million dollars.    It’s about time we started publishing a lot more information about the rationale for these numbers, and publishing the military rationale for the massive numbers of civilian casualties in our wars.    People don’t like to know their life has a very finite value to agencies of the  government (as it should by the way), but as we move into the challenges we’ll face from countries where lives are effectively valued by their leaders and governments  in  ”hundreds of dollars” rather than “millions of dollars” as here in the USA.

This is a cross posting of an article I wrote over at Technology Report about internet marketing:

One of the cornerstones of good internet marketing is knowing your statistics, and you’d think with all the elaborate, inexpensive and free measurement and analytical tools everybody would have a great sense of how their sites stack up to the competition.

But you’d  be wrong.

In fact even many large companies are struggling with high quality analysis even as the tools get better and the measures s-l-o-w-l-y are reaching some level of standardization.     For most small companies metrics are, literally, more misses than “hits”. Webmasters routinely report or misinterpret or misrepresent website “hits” as viable traffic when hits often are simply a measure of the number of total files downloaded from the site.    Graphics or data intensive websites can see hundreds of hits from a single web visitor.

Even when the analysis is good the reporting is often opportunistic or manipulative, and it’s often done by the same team that is accountable for the results.     This is a common problem throughout the business metrics field.  Executives are well advised to have independent auditing of results by unbiased parties for any business critical measurements.

Consider learning and using analysis packages like Google Analytics – a brilliantly robust and free tool provided by Google to anyone.

A while back Peter Norvig, one of the top search experts over at Google (also a leading world authority on Artificial Intelligence), published a little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics were with regard to website traffic.  (Thanks to Matt Cutts for pointing out the Peter paper.

The results here demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

Although this is just an anecdotal snapshot indicating the problem, and perhaps Alexa is better now, I’d also noted many problems with comparisons of Alexa to sites where I knew the real traffic.   50x seems to be a spectacular level of error for sites read mostly by technology sector folks.   It even suggests that Alexa may be a questionable comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you probably don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A larger, and excellent comparison study by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons.  Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Fishkin told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with the log files he reviewed.  My own experience with Analytics have not been extensive but the data seems to line up with my log stats and I’d continue to recommend this excellent analytics package.

Jumping down the rabbit hole of the Climate debates is always very interesting but it’s also very frustrating to watch many brilliant (as well as stupid) and well-informed (as well as ignorant) people avoid each other because the blog environments are not civil enough to encourage quality discussion of really intriguing issues.    Great examples of the challenge of discussing science in blogs are my two favorite “watering holes” for the active discussion of climate science:   RealClimate.org and ClimateAudit.org

At both, intelligent and provocative posts often lead to “supportive” commentary from the allies of the blog but also ferocious attacks on critics of the initial post.   This makes for interesting comments and reading if you can handle the emotional / intellectual heat, but I think the overall chases away the two very  important groups who participate in blogging:  the huge number of casual observers  looking for answers to complex questions and the small number of authoritative voices who study a particular complex topic.

Even as a seasoned blogger who rarely wants to back down from discussion points I find it very frustrating to bounce back and forth hoping my reasonable comments will not be moderated (a major problem at RealClimate, and not much of a problem at ClimateAudit)  and hoping that critics will be treat researchers with the basic respect they deserve  (lack of respect is a huge problem at both ClimateAudit and RealClimate, where PhD science authorities are routinely accused of incompetence (mostly at ClimateAudit) and reasonable criticisms are dismissed casually as “nonsense” simply so they do not need to be addressed properly (mostly at RealClimate).

Increasingly blogs moderate reasonable comments because they don’t fit the political agenda of the blog and I still think this is anathema to quality discussion.  Others (like Joe Duck) pretty much allow any comments that are not obscene, spam commercial, or racist so a single person can wind up dominating the conversation, chasing others away.

I’m rethinking my policies about how to manage commentst because it’s good to hear from more pe0ple.  Howevert I’m not going to be snipping or moderating anybody anytime soon.    I think Steve McKintyre of Climate Audit might have the right idea which is to push some comments to “unthreaded” if they are off the topic of the post.   This leaves free speech intact while keeping a few people from dominating the whole comment show.

Final note is that I prefer to err on the side of giving everybody their full voice and I plan to continue doing that here.