Coyote Blog

Once upon a time, years ago, I actually had one of the original twitter accounts.  I had  (I guess I still have it) a really short name, sort of the equivalent of having a 2-letter URL.  I quickly gave it up for a variety of reasons, the most compelling of which is I find it impossible to say anything I want to say in 140 characters.  I am just not a master of the glib and witty little phrase.  Even one of my shortest blog posts ever, which read

My summary on the immigration debate:  Republicans want immigrants who work but don’t vote.  Democrats want immigrants who vote but don’t work.

does not make the cut.   These thoughts return to me when I see this:

Nigel Leck, an Australian software developer, grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created a spambot to “wear down” his opponents. The bot, @AI_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for key phrases commonly used by those who challenge the global warming orthodoxy.  It then posts one of hundreds of canned responses hoping to frustrate skeptics. CFACT’s Twitter account @CFACT (follow us!) often receives many of these unsolicited messages each day. Since the bot became active on May 26, 2010, it has sent out over 40,000 tweets, or an average of more than 240 updates per day!

Technology Review gushed that Leck’s bot “answers Twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.” Leck claims that his little bit of trollware is commonly mistaken as a genuine Twitter user leading the unsuspecting to sometimes debate it for days. Eventually it wears people down.

Here is a good rule of thumb:  Anyone on either side who thinks anything substantive can be argued for or against the science behind the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming in 140 characters can be safely ignored.

I don’t really do news roundup posts, because losts of other folks do them better.  But there were a few things I wanted to blog on today and just don’t have time, and rather than lose them, here they are briefly:

1. Twitter seems to be the data mining tool of the future.  I have seen a number of dynamic maps and graphs of late using Twitter data.  The NY Times has as good of an example as any with this dynamic map showing twitter content by city and time during the Superbowl.  Flowing Data has a bunch more.   Just remember the rules before you data mine:   Cool, trendy application run by hip Internet guys  — data mining OK.  Bad evil credit card company trying to make billion dollar credit decisions — data mining not OK.
2. This is one of the first times I have seen an Internet contest like this go on for so long without a  winner.  Twelve structures, you just need to say which is a church and which is not.
3. There has always been a certain cognitive dissonance between a) media portrayals of employment at Wal-Mart as equivilent to a new ring in Dant’s inferno and b) the reality of lines hundreds of persons long for just a few job openings at Wal-Mart.  Charles Platt was curious about this too, and so set out to work at Wal-Mart to see what it was like.

HT:  Maggie’s Farm for the second two.