Adam R Brown

As a follow up to the previous post, I suppose I should entice you to go check out Abstract Politics by telling you a little about what you’ll find there.

The most recent post reviews “Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment ,” an article from APSR by Gerber, Green, and Larimer. I don’t know how they got this past their human subjects review, but somehow they got permission to send postcards to a bunch of Michigan voters listing the names of all their neighbors, as well as whether each neighbor had bothered to vote in the previous two elections. At the end, there was an ominous note that they’d be sending an updated after the upcoming election, so all the recipient’s neighbors would know whether the recipient had voted.

Turns out this sort of social shaming works. (Want to read the rest of this post? Click here.)

Check out Abstract Politics , a new site dedicated to reviewing the latest in political science research. Dozens of new articles are published in every issue of the top journals. It’s hard to keep up with them. The creators of Abstract Politics intend to write brief summaries (and critical reviews) of each new article.

This has the potential to be very cool. These summaries can help us decide whether reading a particular article in its entirety is worthwhile. They can also provide a forum to debate the merits of each article (via each summary’s comment form).

You may already be familiar with WikiSummary . WikiSummary is similar, but it is no longer accepting new submissions–these days, it’s merely an archive of old summaries. The creators of Abstract Politics are the same folks that were behind WikiSummary, but with a new approach and a new look.

Full disclosure: I happen to be a major player in running both WikiSummary and Abstract Politics. But that should only encourage your further to bother checking out (and contributing to) Abstract Politics .

Hmm, something isn’t quite right. I taped an interview with Hillary on CNN, and while watching a segment frame-by-frame, I noticed that Hillary’s face completely changed for 1/100 second, then it changed again, and again, for a total of four flash changes. These are the screen captures:

(Want to read the rest of this post? Click here.)

I received a letter today from my parents. The post office canceled the stamp by printing a quotation from John Adams over it: “Let us dare to read, think, speak, and debate.” Below was a link to poweroftheletter.com .

So I went to the site. It’s a promotion for an HBO biopic of the second president. Huh? Hey, if HBO wants to pay some money to keep postage down for the rest of us, I guess that’s okay.

At the site, there was some prose talking about how much we know about John Adams thanks to his letters, implying that we should all write more letters:

In his prolific correspondence, John Adams left us a remarkable first-person account of the birth of our nation, as well as a candid portrait of his life and personal relationships. John and his wife Abigail’s letters offer a window to our past; we can be inspired to revive this tradition, to return to the enduring power of the written word, and leave a legacy for future generations.

The (implied) argument is that we should write more (hard-copy) letters as a gift to future historians. This argument is incorrect, though. True, we know more about Adams and his wife than about most people from that period because of their letters. But these days, it’s easier to know about people if they write blogs and emails instead of letters, since those are so easy to archive, search, and distribute. Today, people who rely on paper correspondence actually make themselves less visible to the world, not more.

My, how things change.

Can you spot the problem with this advertisement? I came across this ad while using gmail:

www.EDIn08.com - 70% of 8th Graders Can’t Read at Grade Level. And Won’t Catch Up.

Don’t get me wrong–the problem this advertisement addresses is real. Seriously, though, am I supposed to take this advocacy group seriously if they don’t know how to compose grammatically complete sentences?

If you visit WordPress.org , you can’t help noticing a massive banner at the top of the page urging you to support WP’s bid to win the “Most Likely to Succeed Award” from the 2007 Crunchies. And over at automattic.com, there’s a front-page blog post by Matt Mullenweg, WP’s driving force, also urging you to vote .

The Crunchies are new this year. It’s a web-based awards gimmick, like the Webbies, I guess, but with a goal “to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” For WordPress to win a Crunchy, those voting need to agree that it is the “site most likely to meet with future financial success (may be defined as revenue creation, a big exit, or other future accomplishment).”

If the WP folks are encouraging people to vote for them, then apparently they themselves foresee significant future financial successes. Now, WP itself is free, so that’s not the source of money. They also offer a few fee-based services, as well as paid add-ons for (free) wordpress.com blogs. But I have my doubts that those efforts bring in major revenues.

So here’s my question. Does this portend an effort by the folks at automattic to build up goodwill so they can seek a buyout by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, or one of the other major players?

Honestly, I’m a little surprised not to have already seen the headline, “WordPress acquired by Google.”

Maybe you saw my earlier post (on my other blog) inviting you to find out whether you’re smarter than a fifth-grader monkey. Maybe you didn’t.

But the quiz is now new and improved. Check it out.

I named 68 HTML elements in 5 minutes and missed 23 (dang it). It’s harder than it sounds. Try the quiz .