Social Science

Given the nature of blogs & their unappologetic authors. Some are selfserving, others are genuinely expertly informative. Use this as a lively list yentas in your town.

Best Hong Kong Blog

Do you want to see a cross-tabulation of Chinese in British Columbia 1884 - 1885 by surname? How about their county of origin as compiled by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association...

	周 Chow	李 Li	黃 Wong	陳 Chin	林 Lam	梁 Leung	謝 Der	馬 Ma	別姓 Others	總和 Total
Taishan 台山		219	119	64	122	25		163	446	1,158
Kaiping 開平	408	24	56			35	82		344	949
Xinhui 新會	38	123	61	33	40	21			299	615
Enping 恩平		22	19	39		32	18		361	491
Panyu 番禺	55	39	56	34	13	22	65		513	798
Hsshan 鶴山		48	41	12	45	31			125	302
Others 其他	33	48	63	68	15	39	27	8	442	743
Total 總和	534	523	415	250	235	205	193	171	2,530	5,056

Korn Show Leaves Politicians Fuming


TAMPA, Fla. - The volume of a concert by the heavy-metal band Korn left Hillsborough County commissioners fuming and briefly had them considering getting a court order to halt future concerts at the amphitheater that hosted the group.

More than 50 residents — some living miles away — complained of booming noise and profanity-laced lyrics coming from the open-air Ford Ampitheatre at the Florida State Fairgrounds during this week's concert.

"I came home from the hospital Tuesday (the day of the concert), and I couldn't get to sleep," resident Peg Sexton said. "I've never, ever had it so loud. It was like it was across the street. It's unbelievable. We don't get that noise from a thunderstorm."

During an emergency meeting Thursday, County Commissioner Ronda Storms referred to venue owner Clear Channel Entertainment when she said: "A bane upon them; may the worms of your avarice consume your intestines, Clear Channel."

The racket even shocked county Environmental Protection Commission officials, who this summer cited Clear Channel and the Florida State Fair Authority for violations of noise ordinances. The citation has been appealed.

However, commissioners decided against pursuing a court injunction, since the only remaining event this year is an 10-hour country-western concert this Saturday featuring the Charlie Daniels Band. The performance will support The Angelus, a home for the handicapped.

Korn is a repeat offender of noise ordinances, as its most recent concert is the second show that has exceeded noise limits at the Hillsborough County venue. This time, the noise registered 90.6 decibels, the equivalent of a running blender, and represented the highest noise numbers recorded yet.

The Environmental Protection Commission may levy fines up to $5,000 for each noise violation, be it an entire concert, a song or even a single line of music or a single note.

In a five-page letter to the commission, Clear Channel said it has enacted several measures to reduce noise, including installing noise-muffling blankets along an outer wall, reducing decibel levels at the mixing booth, requiring performances to end by 10 p.m. and monitoring noise levels at all events.

Fair authority attorney Gordon Schiff said the authority and Clear Channel have made a good effort to work with the county.

"We think that progress has continued and should continue," he said.

August 10, 2004

The Lost Boys Are Found

This is a follow-up on a mystery (see previous post). There is a very simple lesson for researchers --- even though you feel pressured to provide answers, you should never go beyond your actual knowledge base. There are some things that you don't know and there are others things that are possible but is not verifiable for the moment. You can greater credibility and confidence by refusing to engage in idle speculation.

(New York Times) Young Men Are Back Watching TV. But Did They Ever Leave? By Bill Carter. August 9, 2004.

Unlike those other notoriously missing items - the weapons of mass destruction - television's missing young men appear to have been found, back in front of their TV sets.

The case of the missing young men began roiling the television industry a year ago. Droves of men from ages 18 to 34, one of the groups most coveted by advertisers, had seemingly stopped watching television, according to the sole ratings arbiter, Nielsen Media Research. Commentary abounded that a significant cultural shift had taken place and that a generation of men was steadily quitting television-viewing, forsaking both network and cable programs in favor of video games, DVD's and the Internet.

Nielsen stands by its ratings, but in a development that several Nielsen critics call utterly predictable, the most recent evidence indicates that the young men are back, watching television in pretty much the same numbers they were two years ago.

In July, one year after the falloff was detected, an average of 25.8 percent of men from ages 18 to 34 were watching television at any given moment in prime time. That figure was up from the 24.7 percent that Nielsen reported a year ago - and virtually the same as the 25.9 percent that it reported for the group in July 2002.

"It kind of went right back to where God intended it to be," the president for research for NBC, Alan Wurtzel, said.

Mr. Wurtzel's facetiousness was matched by a real sense of vindication. He was among the most vocal of the critics who took on Nielsen last year, saying its numbers - which in September showed a drop in viewing by young men of more than 10 percent - could not possibly be accurate because they were so inconsistent with viewing patterns established over years of measurement.

"None of this made conceptual sense," Mr. Wurtzel said. The decreases in viewing were seen in all kinds of areas, including professional football games and late-night comedy shows, traditional staples for younger men.

"Usage numbers move glacially," Mr. Wurtzel said. "Double-digit declines just don't happen."

The dispute has had significant financial implications. Nielsen, owned by VNU, enjoys a monopoly in delivering ratings information, which determines how an estimated $40 billion in television advertising revenue is spent each year.

With the young male numbers off so sharply, Mr. Wurtzel said, networks lost millions of dollars in advertising sales last fall and winter. "We lost inventory we can never regain," Mr. Wurtzel said - and all for a measurement, he argued, that should have been dismissed as bogus to begin with.

But Nielsen executives do not agree that last year's ratings were wrong. "The numbers were accurate then, and the numbers are accurate now,'' Nielsen's chief research executive, Paul Donato, said.

He added, "The numbers suggest that young men are watching more television this year, after they watched less last year."

Among the programming attracting young men, are repeats of Comedy Central's biggest hit, "Chappelle's Show," and numerous hours devoted to poker on cable.

To Nielsen's critics - who mostly reside at the broadcast networks, because they have the most revenue to lose - the ratings company is consistently maddening. But undoing Nielsen's monopoly status would be prohibitively expensive. The networks tried in the late 1990's with a company called Smart, run by Statistical Research Inc. But when the company said it needed $12 million from each network to become a full-fledged competitor, the deal collapsed. And there are no plans to try again.

Critics acknowledge that what Nielsen is trying to do - accurately measure a passive behavior like watching television - is inherently difficult.

It is especially difficult with young men, they say, because that group is the least likely to do what Nielsen wants: cooperate with a system that demands they push buttons every time they watch TV or change channels. What makes it worse, the critics say, is that young men are now more likely to be living with their parents, but may do most of their television viewing away from home.

This is hardly the first time that discrepancies have turned up in the ratings. While Nielsen always defends its numbers as accurate, over time the measurements typically return to their normal levels. Critics say that Nielsen must have tinkered with its methodology in those instances; Nielsen denies doing so.

As recently as 1998, the networks were up in arms because of a similar disappearance of young viewers, among both sexes. NBC accused Nielsen of fraud and threatened to sue over breach of contract. Within a few months, the numbers started to swing back. The suit was never filed.

After last year's report of declining viewership, Nielsen executives suggested larger cultural reasons for the trend. Nielsen sent a memorandum to clients, speculating that one possible cause was the increase in the number of young men playing video games and watching DVD's. A Nielsen spokesman, Jack Loftus, even speculated that the number of young men off fighting the war in Iraq might be affecting the numbers.

That especially enraged network executives.

"Besides being ridiculous on its face," said David F. Poltrack, the executive vice president for research for CBS, "they could have checked the Iraq thing easily by just polling their measurement sample to see how many young men from those families had gone to Iraq."

To many network executives, the Iraq explanation was typical of the way Nielsen has grabbed at culture change to try to explain statistical anomalies.

In the 1998 dispute, Nielsen sent ABC a letter in which it suggested that one reason for the drop-off was lower interest rates on homes - prompting young people to move a lot and thus drop out of the Nielsen sample.

In the latest case, the network critics were also insulted by a suggestion that it all came down to their lousy programming. Even if young men hated new shows like NBC's "Coupling" and Fox's "American Juniors," the executives argued, they were unlikely to have stopped watching television altogether.

Now, Mr. Wurtzel noted, the same young men have suddenly found television to their liking again - and, he said, "it doesn't seem like all that many of them have made it back from Iraq yet."

Mr. Donato again offered programming as an explanation, and pointed to specific shows that seem to have made a difference. With its heavy schedule of "Chappelle's Show," for example, Comedy Central's ratings have risen more than 50 percent this summer, while on the Discovery Channel, young men seem to be watching the show "American Chopper" in big numbers. On the networks, Fox's "The Simple Life'' and "Trading Spouses'' have performed well.

Then again, television had plenty of hits last summer as well, including NBC's "For Love or Money'' and Bravo's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."

Nielsen's reluctance to admit error drives its critics to distraction. They point out that Nielsen finally conceded last fall that 40 percent of the falloff in young male viewing was attributable to changes in methodology - but only after critics pushed it to analyze its system.

Mr. Donato said last year's changes in methodology, which included a system for weighting results to make sure the sample reflected the true demographic makeup of the audience, only made Nielsen's measure more accurate.

"The sample is in the best shape it has ever been in," Mr. Donato said.

What about all those sweeping statements last year about how the drop-off in viewing pointed to long-term cultural change?

"Nielsen should never be talking about what things mean for the culture," Mr. Donato said. "The only thing we should be out front about is what our numbers say."

Online Research Worries Many Educators

Wed Dec 8, 1:58 PM ET

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK - Go to Google, search and scroll results, click and copy. When students do research online these days, many educators worry, those are often about the only steps they take. If they can avoid a trip to the library at all, many students gladly will.


Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn't mean it's reliable, yet their perceptions of what's trustworthy frequently differ from their elders' — sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.

She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?'"

While the answer might just have been a smart aleck's bid for laughs, Bruckman and other educators grapple daily with the challenge of ensuring their students have good skills for discerning the truth. Professors and librarians say many come to college without any such skills, and quite a few leave without having acquired them.

Alex Halavais, professor of informatics at the University at Buffalo, said students are so accustomed to instant information that "the idea of spending an hour or two to find that good source is foreign to them."

In a study on research habits, Wellesley College researchers Panagiotis Metaxas and Leah Graham found that fewer than 2 percent of students in one Wellesley computer science class bothered to use non-Internet sources to answer all six test questions.

And many students failed to check out multiple sources. For instance, 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations only visited the company's Web site in search of the answer.

It's a paradox to some that so many young Americans can be so accepting of online information whose origin is unclear.

"Skepticism ... is part of their lives, yet they tend to believe things fairly readily because it appears on the Internet," said Roger Casey, who studies youths and pop culture at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.

One concern is commercial influence online; some search engines run ads and accept payments to include sites in their indexes, with varying degree of disclosure.

"If I'm going to go to the library, chances are somebody hasn't paid a librarian 100 bucks to point me to a particular book," said Beau Brendler, director of the Consumer Reports WebWatch.

Another potential minefield is the growing phenomenon of collaborative information assembly. The credentials of the people writing grass-roots Web journals and a committee-written encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear. Nevertheless, some Internet users believe that such resources can collectively portray events more accurately than any single gatekeeper.

In many ways, the greater diversity of information is healthy.

Paul Duguid, co-author of "The Social Life of Information," points out that no longer, in most of the United States, can school textbooks get away with one-sided views.

Even South Texas College of Law professor Tracy McGaugh finds her curriculum challenged as students can quickly discover how other professors teach the same material.

But as students come to trust resources that may be correct only part of the time, the extent of the downside is not yet fully known.

Some believe the challenge of determining whom and what to believe amid the information flood is bound to influence the political views, medical decisions, financial investments and other key aspects of this budding generation's life.

Accuracy can be crucial when lives and property are at stake — and older generations certainly don't have any particular claim to it.

In 2000, a prescribed burn calculated using incorrect information online spread to a wildfire that left more than 400 families homeless in Los Alamos, N.M.

Adults who should know better get duped, too.

Georgia Tech professor Colin Potts said he recently received by e-mail a photograph said to be a 1954 projection of what a home computer would look like in 2004. Instead of the small boxes we know of today, the image shows a giant contraption that resembles an airplane cockpit with a large steering wheel.

"I thought this was hilarious and filed it away in a scrapbook for my lecture next semester on the perils of technology forecasting," Potts said. "I also forwarded it to several people. Unfortunately, as another colleague informed me by e-mail a few minutes later, it's a hoax."

Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, said many older Internet users, familiar with the editorial review that books and newspapers go through, may assume incorrectly that Web sites also undergo such reviews.

Youths, many of whom have created Web sites themselves, tend to know better.

In the end, it's just a matter of adjusting to how information gets around now that the Internet has revolutionized communication.

Every new medium has its challenges, said Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., yet society adapts.

Referring to the 1903 Western "The Great Train Robbery," Saffo said audience members "actually ducked when the train came out on the screen. Today you won't even raise an eyebrow."

http://sports.yahoo.com/box/news;_ylc=X3oDMTBpaHJkYzlxBF9TAzk1ODYzOTU2BHNlYwN0aA--?slug=ap-klitschkofights&prov=ap&type=lgns

Klitschko worries about Ukraine while he prepares to fight Williams
By TIM DAHLBERG, AP Boxing Writer
December 1, 2004

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Vitali Klitschko begins his day an hour earlier than usual, waking at 6 a.m. so he can have some time before training for his heavyweight title defense against Danny Williams.

That's when he gets on the phone with friends and family in Ukraine, getting the latest news on the country's presidential crisis just as the sun begins to come up in Los Angeles.

One of the biggest fights of his career is less than two weeks away, but Klitschko is just as concerned over the fight for democracy in the country where he was born.

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``We're Ukrainian citizens, and what happens is very close to us,'' Klitschko said. ``I'm keeping focus for training and the fight, but it is also important what is happening in my country.''

Klitschko and his brother, Wladimir, have been prominent figures in the protests that have paralyzed Ukraine since pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko was declared the loser in an election many suspect was fraudulent.

They've made videos in support of democracy, and Wladimir spent four days last week in Ukraine among the protesters in the street. All the while, Vitali is getting ready to defend his WBC heavyweight title for the first time, Dec. 11 against Williams.

``It's difficult, but in life nothing is easy,'' Vitali said Wednesday.

The sons of a helicopter pilot in the former Soviet Union's armed forces, Wladimir and Vitali have taken a leading role in recent months speaking out on the need for Ukraine to have democracy and free press.

Last week, Yushchenko called Vitali to thank him for his support, while Wladimir spoke on the streets to urge protesters on.

``Our father was communist, and I grew up with the old Soviet Union ideology,'' Vitali said. ``It was brainwashing all the time. Right now I spend a lot of time in the West and I can see the difference between West and East. I wish my country to go the democratic way.''

Vitali, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two young children but travels frequently to Ukraine, meets Williams in a scheduled 12-round fight at the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.

The bout is a major test, against the man who knocked out Mike Tyson, and Vitali will spar 10 rounds Thursday in his final big preparation. As always, Wladimir will be in his corner, urging him on.

The Klitschkos hope the world will be watching so they can use the stage to promote new elections in Ukraine.

``I hope this fight will be a very important message for everybody in Ukraine and the world,'' Vitali said. ``I know the result of my fight is very important for Ukraine.''

Both Klitschkos say they are saddened by view the world is getting of Ukraine, which became an independent country following the breakup of the Soviet Union. They think of their country as a place of honest, hardworking people who simply want to be free.

Wladimir went to Ukraine after the vote, and spent four days giving interviews and telling his countrymen of his support for democracy.

``It was very important to be present there,'' Wladimir said. ``I supported people in Independence Square, and sent the message that we support democracy.''

Vitali nearly canceled the fight and went himself, only to be talked out of it by supporters who said the fight would give him a platform.

On Wednesday, Yushchenko signed a deal for his supporters to lift their siege of government buildings and proposed a new run-off vote between him and the declared winner, Viktor Yanukovych.

But he urged backers not to give up mass demonstrations, and the battle might be ongoing when Klitschko fights.

That means Vitali will have two jobs in the upcoming days -- talking about violence in the ring while urging none in Ukraine.

``I hope the whole situation will be peaceful,'' he said. ``After every fight, I am in Ukraine and we speak about freedom and liberty and free press. People don't want to live like they have the last 10 years.''