For several years, in addition to my efforts as a Corporate Drone, I’ve also been a writer and performer of poetry, including Poetry Slams. For the uninitiated, here’s what a Poetry Slam is:

A Poetry Slam is an art form that is a subset of spoken word that is variously related to poetry (by any number of definitions), writing and artistic expression overall.

Specifically, a Poetry Slam is a competitive poetry reading that began in Chicago in the 80′s at the Green Mill Tavern where there is still a Slam today. The purpose of the Slam then (and now, although this can get lost sometimes) is to create a gimmick (the competition) that will make poetry available and accessible to folks who don’t normally consume it.

I’ve been addicted to this art form for the better part of a decade now and this week am delighted to be at the National Poetry Slam in St. Paul, MN.

So why, you’re wondering, would I be writing about a gimmicky, loosely literary pub crawl in the Twin Cities?

I’m so glad you asked. The “gimmick” in a Slam is the competition itself, or more specifically, the effort to assign numeric scores to a 3 minute self-expression on a microphone. This means what you think it means.  A heart-wrenching, gut-punching personal tragedy expressed in verse on stage will be compared 1:1 against a silly poem about giving up coffee for Lent. You may think that the ability to judge the comparative value between these two pieces of art would require years of education and training that would enable a judge to pull apart the strings of each poem in order to judge them.

You would be wrong (unfortunately, some would say). Judges are randomly selected from the audience and the ideal judge is one who has actually never seen a Slam before. These judges are given some guidelines about how to assign scores, but mostly they’re asked to judge what they like.

Let me say that again: Judges are essentially asked to judge what they like.

This means that if, that particular night, the judges want to laugh…funny pieces will win. If they want to cry a little, sad pieces will win. You get the gist here, right? The preferences of judges mean that city, venue, weather, season, economy, and everything else you can imagine that might have an impact on the human condition, can influence the outcome of a poetry slam.

And here’s the kicker, Metrics Geeks: National Poetry Slam illuminates the “best” poets in the country IF “best” equals:

1. Poets who participate in local poetry slams  well enough to win and come to Nationals to represent their city
2. Poets whose work is appreciated by the judges within their particular venue  (I think there are 5 venues here in St. Paul) MORE than those judges appreciate the other poets’ work within that venue.
3. Poets in whose favor the variables of alcohol consumption and poetry fatigue act.

Note that “writing quality” doesn’t make it anywhere into that list! Yet many folks (definitely not all, but many) attending these events would tell you that even with those vague and entirely subjective criteria, the cream tends to rise to the top. That is, excellent writing and genuine performance will be most meaningful to the judges. Not always, but often.

Gracious, I’ve yammered on forever about this, but I want to refer you back to this post describing, as I’ve ranted about again and again that the measure of success of any process or activity is the degree to which it does what it’s supposed to do. So if poetry slams are supposed to be accessible to non-poetry consumers, based on this criteria, this Geek thinks it works.

~Geek~

~Geek~

That’s the intro to why you HAVE to watch this video of Malcolm Gladwell. The Geek loves him some Gladwell, it must be said. But in addition to just getting to watch his gravity defying hairdo move around the stage, you also get to hear a detailed explanation of why data can be misleading if you aren’t careful about your assumptions…in this case that there would be one answer to a research question instead of multiple (variable) answers.

Plus, he explains it all in the context of…wait for it…spaghetti sauce.  Thanks to my pal Khary Jackson for posting this on Facebook.

~Geek~

I work from my home office and listen to my iPod all day…it sort of blends into the background noice. Heck, even when I DO go to the office, I play my iPod on headphones.  So I notice patterns that might go unnoticed by a casual listener.

Specifically, I notice that Manheim Steamroller’s Christmas Album seems to be a particular favorite of my iPod’s. Because I have folks ask me about randomization pretty frequently and because the nature of true statistical random selection means that weird patterns can emerge, but over time the weird patterns should fade into the background of random-ness.

So I had a moment between projects today and thought I would do some research on why some artists/songs seem to play in my iPod’s “shuffle” selection more than others.

Interestingly, this guy says that this is actually a helpful feature from our iOverlords! His point is that my iPod pays attention to what songs I skip and eventually exclude those from the shuffle. Bull Pucky! I made (I realize now) the mistake of buying an iTunes special package of Fiona Apple (OMG, I just got the connection…Fiona APPLE: APPLE Computers. Good hell!) that includes not just some songs but Fiona herself droning on about how she wrote songs or how she fought with her studio, or how she goes about being an artist bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz…I’m sorry, what were you saying?

Well I can tell you that whenever Fiona starts her random rambling, I skip that trash EVERY TIME, and yet I can expect to have it forced on me (despite actually trying to delete it from iTunes at least once) at least twice a day.

These folks say that it IS random, but that I would have to listen to all the songs in the library in one sitting (without skipping or stopping) and I would hear every song once. BULL PUCKY! I have sat at my desk for a 4 – 5 hour stint and heard the same song (out of many thousand possible choices) TWICE!

So I was pleased to come across someone who had conducted an actual experiment and surprise! It IS a conspiracy! (OK, maybe not, but it’s suspicious as hell).  Here’s the full article [David Braue for CNET Australia; published on 08 March 2007].

I totally admire the author’s methodology to test the random-ness..the article was worth the read (it’s relatively short) just to see how they setup the experiment. But note that they tested the creation of random playlists, NOT random play on iTunes or iPods. Assuming the randomisation (Australian spelling used in homage to the author) math is the same for creating playlists and for playing songs, these results should be solid.

Their method was to use a combination of songs ripped from CDs and songs bought from iTunes.  Artists were equally represented (i.e. 5 songs each in most cases, except where the experiment dictated something different) and results were tracked by what studio the song came from in case (as was the theory they were working from) there was evidence that studios had paid Apple for preferential treatment for their songs. Songs were added to a library, then assigned randomly to playlists (using iTunes feature for that).

If truly random, one would expect songs to show up evenly for all artists, but that’s NOT what happened!

Here are the summary conclusions:

• 20 playlists (10 of 25 songs, and 10 of 40 songs) were created from a pool of 100 iTunes Music Store sourced songs, and 20 additional playlists when the pool was expanded to 200 songs using CD-ripped songs. This provided a total of 1300 slots to be filled at random.
• On average, one would expect each song to appear on 6.5 playlists.
• Popular, top-50 singles were rotated onto our playlists far more frequently than would be expected. Some artists, having just one song in the iTunes Library, were played more often than the entire 5-song collections of other artists.
• Artists and singles purchased through iTunes were played more frequently than those that were not.
• Four songs — Christina Aguilera’s At Last, Creed’s What’s This Life For, Crowded House’s World Where You Live and Led Zeppelin’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine — were in the iTunes Library but were not chosen for any of the 40 playlists generated during this exercise.
• Lionel Richie (Universal) was iTunes’ favourite artist; his songs were chosen 59 times for 40 playlists [iTunes songs only]. Times per possible playlist (TPP) = 1.475.
• Def Leppard (Universal) was iTunes’ favourite artist among songs ripped from CD; their songs were chosen just 24 times for 20 playlists [iTunes songs and ripped MP3s]. TPP = 1.2
• John Mayer (Sony) was iTunes’ least favourite artist; his songs were chosen just 32 times for 40 playlists [iTunes songs only]. TPP = 0.8.
• Oasis (Sony) was iTunes’ least favourite artist; their songs were chosen just 10 times out of 20 playlists. TPP = 0.5.
• Songs from Universal and EMI showed up in more play lists than their share of the iTunes Library would suggest.

Could this be a result of the relative popularity of each label’s artists, or is somebody conspiring to keep Sony’s numbers lower? Or is this just a natural manifestation of the known deficiencies in computers’ random-number algorithms?

It’s obviously difficult to tell whether back-room marketing deals or just dumb luck were responsible for the results we saw, but it appears that we can safely lend credence to the suspicions of myriad iPod users around the world. When it comes to choosing songs, ‘random’ clearly is relative.

Songs from Warner and Sony showed up in fewer play lists than their share of the iTunes Library would suggest. The disparity was striking in Sony’s case, with the company’s 67 songs (the largest single label representation amongst our Library) accounting for 34.18% of our songs, but chosen for just 18.8% of possible playlists.

So there you have it. Mr Brauer doesn’t come to a conclusion of conspiracy, but it can apparently be safely assumed that “shuffle” on your (and my) iPod is NOT actually random.

As much as I would like to think that Apple (or any corporation) was so pure in its intentions that it wouldn’t let something as crass as profit get in the way of purity-of-experience, I’m sure if Sony Music came to Apple with a check and said, “You know…if our songs played a little more often, that would be so cool!” <wink, wink>

~Geek~

I looked into the glass, through the protective screen to try to catch a glimpse of the microwaves being released from (I imagined) their pen in the housing. The little buggers flew pell-mell around the interior making the food heat itself up until it was, well, pasty and dry (ever try to cook a chicken breast in the microwave?).

These days, I still don’t yank the door open while it’s running because of my secret fear that the microwaves can indeed escape, but I do have one in my home and still manage to sleep at night.

Every morning, my coffee ritual involves microwaving about a cup of water until it’s just before boiling (I’ve managed to come up with the right volume of water to be able to hit the 30 second button twice and get what I need), but lately I’ve discovered a new bit of microwave magic!

No matter how many seconds I put the timer on, the turntable always returns my dish (measuring cup) exactly to where I placed it! I never have to reach in the back to get the dish! What amazing microwave technician determined the algorithm that makes this possible?

I may be more impressed with this than with the microwave itself, I don’t know.

~Geek~

Only 240 calories! 12g of fat! Dude, this is HEALTH FOOD! Must be the peanut. Makes it sort of like a vegetable, sort of like having a bag of green beans.

Wait. 240 calories per serving.
Wait. This is two servings.

Who gets to decide how big a “serving” of M&M’s is?

Bastards. Makes me want to cover my body image issues in an avalanche of peanut M&M’s. That’ll teach ‘em.

~Geek~

• Litre-to-gallon conversion is 0.264172051:1
• About 40% of crude oil is converted to gasoline
• So we’ve wasted about 19,126,056 gallons of gasoline*
• It’s 5000 miles from Fairbanks, AK to Miami, FL
• Assuming a conservative average of 20 miles per gallon, a fleet of 38,250 cars could make the round trip from Fairbanks to Miami.
• This is more than the population of Fairbanks. We could have sent them all on a spectacular vacation (in separate cars).
• Sent in Priuses, think of the side trips.
• What else could we have done with this resource?

*Not to ignore or discount the myriad other real costs in lives (11 at the explosion) or natural resources.

]]> http://metricsgeek.com/2010/06/reasons-to-be-forgetful/feed/ 0 http://metricsgeek.com/2010/04/national-metric-day-what/ http://metricsgeek.com/2010/04/national-metric-day-what/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:22:36 +0000 Geek http://metricsgeek.com/?p=164 National Metric Week is the week including October 10th, which is (obviously) National Metric Day! (10/10/10) What?! How have I missed this so long?

How shall we celebrate?! I have only a few months to plan…

~Geek~