Linked List: December 6, 2016

Tuesday, 6 December 2016

That Viral Graph About Young People’s Declining Support for Democracy Is Very Misleading ★

Remember the story last week in The New York Times, showing an alarming drop in support for democracy by young people around the world? I described the accompanying chart as “terrifying”. There’s good news — the Times’s chart was deliberately misleading, to greatly exaggerate the survey result. Erik Voeten, writing for The Washington Post, explains:

The data for the graph are from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), which asked people to place themselves on a 10-point scale where 1 meant that living in a democracy is “not at all important” and 10 “absolutely important.”

So where does this graph go wrong? It plots the percentage of people who answer 10, and it treats everyone else the same. The graph treats the people who place themselves at 1 as having the same commitment to democracy as those who answer 9. In reality, almost no one (less than 1 percent) said that democracy is “not at all important.”

The graph below uses the exact same data, but it plots the average scores rather than the percentages who place themselves at the top end of the scale.

Voeten’s accurate chart does show a decline in the average support for democracy by age, but it’s subtle, not dramatic, and shows that young people still believe democracy is important. The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for its original chart.

‘Let’s Make the Facts Louder Than the Opinions’ ★

Weather.com meteorologist Kait Parker has a message for Breitbart.

Google: ‘We’re Set to Reach 100% Renewable Energy’ ★

Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure:

I’m thrilled to announce that in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices. […]

Over the last six years, the cost of wind and solar came down 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively, proving that renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option. Electricity costs are one of the largest components of our operating expenses at our data centers, and having a long-term stable cost of renewable power provides protection against price swings in energy.

Interesting: Google’s renewable purchasing is overwhelmingly wind, not solar. Same for Microsoft. Amazon looks like about one-third solar, two-thirds wind. Apple is almost entirely solar.

Update: Interesting email from a longtime DF reader:

I work in renewable energy with corporations who are seeking to do exactly what Google is about to achieve.

The best reason to explain “Apple is almost entirely solar” has to do with renewable production — solar produces during the day and U.S. wind sites mostly at night. Since daytime hours align with higher power prices, Apple seems to have strategically gone for value with many, smaller solar projects, while Google and others have gone after fewer and larger wind deals.

SamMobile: ‘Galaxy S8 Is Not Going to Feature a 3.5mm Headphone Jack’ ★

I love how the headline says that the phone “is not going to feature” a headphone jack, rather than saying that Samsung is going to remove it.

Anyway, this was utterly predictable by anyone who had their head out of their ass. As I wrote back in September, iPhone 7 reviews that obsessed over the removal of the headphone jack are “going to age about as well as a 2007 review of the original iPhone that devoted the same amount of attention to the lack of a hardware keyboard.”

Samsung won’t face anywhere near the amount of criticism Apple did, because Apple went first and took most of the arrows. Which, yes, took courage.

Gomix ★

New build-your-own-web-app service from Fog Creek Software, debuting alongside the announcement of Anil Dash as CEO. Here’s how Anil describes it:

Many geeks of my cohort came of age building things on the desktop using HyperCard or Visual Basic, or by using View Source in their browser to tweak HTML pages that they uploaded to Geocities. The web’s gotten a lot more mature and a lot more powerful, but the immediacy of that kind of creation has been lost. Today, even if you’re a skilled developer, the starting point you’re working from is usually a pile of unassembled parts.

Gomix lets you start from a working app (or bot, or site, or whatever) and then remix it into exactly the app of your dreams. If you just want to change a button from blue to green, or add your logo, you can be running instantly. See a fun or smart Alexa skill or Slack bot? You can jump in, edit the responses to be the text you want, and have your own version running in just a few minutes.

Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software ★

Joel Spolsky:

Fog Creek is a weird company here, with unique values that you don’t find in a lot of other companies. That’s why we’re so successful, and that’s why we love working here. Some of the weird stuff we do is non-negotiable. We would never dream of having just any competent person from outside the company come in, let alone give them the CEO role, if we weren’t convinced that they were 100% fanatical and excited about Fog Creek Software’s unique operating system. We’ve been friends with Anil for so long that we’re confident that the combination of his talents and worldview with our quirky operating system will be a stellar combination. […]

What are you doing, Joel?

I’m the full-time CEO of Stack Overflow, which just hit 300 employees and really takes all my time now.

Tim Cook: Apple Watch Sales Set Record in Holiday Week ★

Julia Love, reporting for Reuters:

Responding to an email from Reuters, Cook said the gadget’s sell-through — a measure of how many units are sold to consumers, rather than simply stocked on retailers’ shelves - reached a new high. […]

“Our data shows that Apple Watch is doing great and looks to be one of the most popular holiday gifts this year,” Cook wrote.

“Sales growth is off the charts. In fact, during the first week of holiday shopping, our sell-through of Apple Watch was greater than any week in the product’s history. And as we expected, we’re on track for the best quarter ever for Apple Watch,” he said.

This is in response to a widely-circulated report from IDC yesterday, claiming Apple Watch sales fell 71 percent in the third calendar quarter. IDC often pulls numbers out of its collective ass — they’re the outfit that claimed back in 2011 that Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone by 2015 — but these things could both be true. (Although it does look like IDC’s estimate is far short.)

Comparing Apple Watch sales in the third calendar quarter this year to last year is not meaningful. Last year the Apple Watch was still a brand-new product in July–September, drawing sales from early adopters. And remember that Apple Watch was extremely supply-constrained when it hit the market in May 2015. Many models were back-ordered for 6–8 weeks. This year, Apple Watch was a year-old product in those months, with many would-be purchasers correctly predicting that Apple would introduce new models in September.

Common sense suggests that the Apple Watch sales cycle is going to look a lot like the iPod’s — with truly humongous spikes in the holiday quarter. That’s when the new models come out, and it’s a natural gift.

Smartwatches in general might be suffering, but it’s looking more and more like Apple Watch is a hit.