I never mentioned this, but it came to mind during a brief discussion with Chris Brogan and Mack Collier about when to “unfollow” people on Twitter. I typically don’t worry about who decides to follow or unfollow me, and I don’t bother with any of the services designed tokeep everything artificially reciprocal. I can understand why Chris does, though, because he follows more than 80,000 people, and is followed in similar numbers.

I was convinced that I didn’t want to follow more than 500 people, but for personal reasons started expanding my local network, essentially following most Birmingham-area people I came across. But I know of several who, over the course of months, have dropped me. “Nothing personal, you’re just noisy.” And I certainly can be that.

On my Twitter policy page (which anyone who clicks over from my profile will see) I outline my behavior and my expectations. I’ve tried to make clear how I feel about forced reciprocity, and my desire to engage does about every conversation that comes my way. Several people have freely cribbed my guidelines, modified them, and clearly set their own expectations for visitors. (By the way, this is also a great Best Practice for corporations and organizations…)

Recently, I added a way for the noise-averse to still know what I was up to, without being “in their stream.” It’s a link to the Twitter search page for ‘ikepigott’, so it includes all the people who reference me. Instead of being a direct link to the page, I’ve taken the RSS feed for those results, and put them through Feedburner for two reasons:

1. I get a better sense of how many people would rather me not be in their Twitter streams, and
2. I have the flexibility to alter that feed in the future by changing the inputs. For instance, I might change my mind and want just my Tweets instead of mentions, or if I want to include misspellings of my name.

It’s just offering people a different way to engage, and not feel left out of the party (or sheepish about unsubscribing.) For those hung up on numbers, the Feedburner stats aren’t reliable on any given day, but over time you’ll get a better sense of your reach and the measurement you crave.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

But I will be a guest on “BSide with Alan Hunter and Dr. Josh“ tonight on Live 100.5.

Alan Hunter is, well… he’s Alan Hunter. Yeah, that one.

Dr. Josh Klapow is a psychology professor here in Birmingham who I had done a number of interviews with in the past, and is an all-around pretty cool guy.

This time, I’ll be the subject of the interview questions. From 6-7 p.m. (Central time), I’ll be talking with them about the past, present and future of what we call Social Media. Maybe even get a plug in for the new #bhamchat Twitter events on Tuesday nights, and the upcoming Social South conference and soiree.

It ought to be fun, and you don’t have to be in Birmingham to listen. Live 100.5 streams on the net.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

…at this moment…

..married.

Happy Anniversary, Sweetie!

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Given the tremendous opportunity to see significant reach, I felt it was time to share a gem of a secret about how to make your Facebook ad really shine.

First, let’s look at the ad as it appears on most Facebook pages:

The ad itself does not, at first glance, seem to have any miraculous mojo. You might have noticed it sitting idly on the right-hand edge of your page, and if you didn’t pay any attention, that’s just as well.

It’s a simple DIV, with three sections: the top line, meant to resemble other clickable links; the picture; and the teaser copy, with the voting arrows on a line break below.

The hidden markup is what makes this so interesting.

If you look at the actual code, and strip away the < deception > < /deception > tags, you get a very different (and more truthful) result:

With the < deception > markup missing, we see the real result of clicking on the advertisement. < deception > has been buried within HTML since the early days of the web, and is robust enough that Internet Explorer – even in its worst incarnation and configuration for meeting web standards – could still render it flawlessly.

< Deception > is one of the few rarely-used tags in little danger of being deprecated. It is too useful for those who employ it. The < sarcasm > and < irony > tags are often used on blogs today, although the comments section often turns those off inadvertently.

Extremely clever marketing, though.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The “Use Google Libraries” plugin needed updating, and that new version arrived tonight.

We will return you soon to pithy quotes and unusual perspectives. (Provided you have a computer monitor compatible with the new Digital Occam signal from this past weekend’s transition…)

Update: My Text widgets in the sidebar are gone.

I used multiple instances for showing feedburner stats and other things of interest. They also stored my analytics codes, so I am rather blind at this point as to who exactly is visiting me.

Fortunately, not all of my sidebar text was in standard Text widgets. I am a big fan of the Ad Rotator plugin, which is essentially a text widget with a randomization function built in. (That’s how, for instance, you see different endorsements from people each time you refresh the browser.)

So, not all is lost. But a lot is. For now.

Anyone else have a solution? And Wordpress people out there also missing their Text Widgets after the jump to 2.8?

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The QuickRSS plugin I had active on my site was not playing nicely with the built-in RSS fetch in the Wordpress 2.8 administration panel.

I deactivated the plugin, and that problem is solved.

However, I still have no access to the visual editor.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Something funky is going on in the background, so for the time being I bring you Retro-Occam. Plain vanilla theme, plain vanilla plugins.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I originally majored in geology because I wanted a broad science background to become a science reporter. My school wouldn’t have any of it, and instead wanted me to narrow down into a little box. I don’t like boxes so much, so I switched majors and went for a journalism major with a political theory minor.

I also don’t like people using bullying tactics in an attempt to make others go along. The scientists I looked up to never bowed to consensus, nor did they attempt to silence others with the billy club of popularity. Believe me, the moment you speak out against such things, people will come out of the woodwork to pick apart everything they can about you personally, because ad hominem is a great way to shut up dissenters without considering the merit of the argument.

[Ad hominem works both ways, by the way - as there are those who try to connect all environmentalists with a hidden agenda of socialism.]

Folks, no matter what they tell you, the science is not settled, and the case is not proven. Science is never, ever settled. And the academically-honest scientists will tell you that they aren’t making a scientific case for radical environmental change, they are asking for you to make an economic one based on Pascal’s Wager.

Betting on the Angels

Pascal’s Wager is a simple one: given the costs for believing in God (the entry fee, so to speak) and the risk/reward for the existence of Heaven/Hell – it makes sense to believe in God. The eternal reward is so great if you’re right, and if you’re not, you didn’t lose very much.

What we’re being offered on the environmental front is a variation on Pascal’s Wager. Worst-case scenarios are being trotted out, and we’re told that we simply “can’t wait” for the science to prove conclusively that we are beyond the point of global extinction. What’s the harm in living a little cleaner and greener, anyway?

Turns out, there can be quite a lot. Cleaner and greener is a great way to go if all things are equal, but they almost never are. Every choice has a consequence, there’s a trade-off and an opportunity cost: what else could we have done with that money? (Conversely, the opportunity cost of doing nothing at all about the environment is the same as Pascal’s Wager; going to Hell.)

Before you bet on the Angels, though, there are some things I’d like you to consider about the data regarding Climate Change.

Assumptions to Challenge

What is “normal?”

Are we talking about within a lifetime, or within a nation’s written history? Are we talking about centuries on the average, or millenia? Are we talking geologic time?

Oh my God, glaciers are retreating! (We are coming out of an ice age, you know…)

Oh my God, we could lose the polar ice caps! (Some estimates show that within the last 6-million years, we’ve had polar ice around 20% of that time. So polar ice is the exception, not the rule.)

Oh my God, the coastal cities will drown! (Ever see a map of Pangaea? Coastlines aren’t permanent.)

Oh my God, Earth is getting warmer!

That last one is even subject to some debate. Forty years ago, science was convinced we were heading into irreversible Global Cooling (caused by pollution.) And all of those computer models and projections failed to predict that the Earth would peak in 1998 and has been cooling since.

Can models be trusted?

Of course models can be trusted, to the extent they are programmed correctly. You can make a virtual model of a card game, and use it to predict which strategies work and when to double down. You can make very good assumptions over time about how to maximize your profits at the blackjack table. But what if you were playing blackjack and these starting showing up?

The +4 card forces you to draw an additional four cards, and would almost assuredly force you to go over 21. That’s not fair, though! That’s not a part of the game!

If the card starts showing up in real blackjack games but isn’t accounted for in your model, then who is at fault?

Models are only as good as their inputs. I have no doubt that the scientists working on climate change projections have every good and noble interest at heart, but their models have missed some pretty big influences over the last few years, such as El Ninos, sunspots, and variations of solar radiation. The models have been tweaked and poked, but will only be as useful as they are based in reality.

Fundamentally, it is a given that carbon dioxide levels are the engine for the warming as a greenhouse gas. This ignores other, more potent and influential greenhouse gases – and the pressures they exert.

Give or Take a Billion

The genesis for this post came from reading this article in Wired, about the possibility that Earth might be inhabitable for an additional billion years than previously thought.

King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.

The theory here is that atmospheric pressure has always varied on Earth. A theory. Completely unsupported at this point, but the Caltech team is doing the math to see what the consequences might be. And why is he doing that math?

“I am glad that Li and colleagues have raised the issue of how overall variation in atmospheric pressure may have affected past and may affect future climate,” ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University said in an e-mail. “This could be relevant for understanding climate change on the billion-year time scale.”

Despite this potentially important role, atmospheric pressure in the distant past has gone uninvestigated.

“We have a lack of data about the past history of the atmospheric pressure,” said Li.

What is that again? A lack of data? No one has even measured it before, and it’s only now being theorized that it has varied much (or will in the future). Which brings us back to all those climate change models:

• They don’t know nearly as much about the past as they’d like us to believe
• They use an arbitrary “norm”
• They have not shown any true predictive capability, even on the timescales and outputs we can measure.

And they want us to bet trillions of dollars that could instead be put to use for education, health, disease prevention, innovation, quality of life improvements, preventing hunger, relocation, or any of a laundry list of social goods that we might have instead?

They haven’t even accounted for the pressure. So for now, I refuse to bow to theirs.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

My question is, have they checked their water?

• When the pool gets shallow, people are less likely to dive in.
• As water gets more murky, people are less likely to drink.
• The more stagnant the water, the more likely to breed mosquitoes.

It’s applicable to broadcasters and to automakers, industries that ignored decades of trends and advances that changed their markets under them. Instead of measuring the change to understand it, they measured the change as a means to make excuses. Instead of adapting and innovating, those companies are now scrambling and possibly ceasing to be.

Have you checked your water? Are you measuring the right things? Are you prepared to act on those measurements, even if it means straying from your comfort zone?

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.