Jason Tate
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Jason Tate
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Fall Albums (Encore Episode 136)

Encore 136
Jason Tate

On this episode of Encore, Thomas and I break down some of their favorite “fall albums.” What makes an album a fall album? Why did we pick what we did? And what other habits do we have when the weather gets cold? We also talk a little about Yellowcard’s final show, Laura Jane Grace’s upcoming book, and our usual shenanigans. We’d love to hear from you about what albums you listen to as the weather gets cold, so hit the little quote bubble on this post to jump to the forums and discuss!

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A long time reader of the website sent me some @jimmyeatworld “Integrity Brews” beer to enjoy this weekend. It almost feels wrong to open it. Gonna have to play the new album and crack one a little later. #beer #jimmyeatworld

Jason Tate Photo Blog

Yes, American Democracy Could Break Down

Jason Tate

Politico:

There are three interlocking reasons why our confidence in the system is naïve. For one, we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.

The IT Era and the Internet Revolution

Stratechery
Jason Tate

Stratechery:

Newspapers obviously weren’t the only industry to benefit from information technology: the rise of ERP systems, databases, and personal computers provided massive gains in productivity for nearly all businesses (although it ended up taking nearly a decade for the improvements to show up). What this first wave of information technology did not do, though, was fundamentally change how those businesses worked, which meant nine of the ten largest companies in 1980 were all amongst the 21 largest companies in 19951. The biggest change is that more and more of those productivity gains started accruing to company shareholders, not the workers — and newspapers were no exception.

How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

The New York Times
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.

He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.

And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.

How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.

It’s Been Too Long (Encore Episode 134)

Encore 134
Jason Tate

It’s been a few weeks since Thomas and I have sat down and talked, so we really enjoyed catching up on this episode of Encore. There’s some talk about new Apple products, AirPods, Apple Watches, and then a lengthy talk about seeing Blink-182 live and all the bands that opened for them on their recent tour. We end with a bunch of really fun listener questions about albums, music, life, an and had a blast trying to decide what band we’d want to see if we could travel anywhere in the world. This is a fun one.

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Barack Obama on AI, Medical Research, Self Driving Cars and the Future of the World

Obama
Jason Tate

Wired, with a great interview with President Obama:

My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks.

We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.

Jason Tate

The New York Times:

You’ve heard of the “margin of error” in polling. Just about every article on a new poll dutifully notes that the margin of error due to sampling is plus or minus three or four percentage points.

But in truth, the “margin of sampling error” – basically, the chance that polling different people would have produced a different result – doesn’t even come close to capturing the potential for error in surveys.

Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come up with two very different results.

How so? Because pollsters make a series of decisions when designing their survey, from determining likely voters to adjusting their respondents to match the demographics of the electorate. These decisions are hard. They usually take place behind the scenes, and they can make a huge difference.

If you’re interested in polling at all, this is a really great article.