Month: May 2016

(credit: flickr user: Hideyuki KAMON)

Research on inequality usually looks at fairly static social structures like schools, transport, healthcare, or jobs. But sometimes glaring inequality can be quite fleeting, as researchers Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton argue in a recent PNAS article. Their example? Coming face to face with just how awful airplane economy class is in comparison to first class.

DeCelles and Norton wanted to study whether exposure to this kind of inequality could prompt people to behave badly. They looked at records of “air rage” incidents, where “abusive or unruly” passengers threaten staff or fellow travelers. “Popular explanations for air rage include crowded planes, frustrating delays, and shrinking seats,” they write—but they suspected these explanations are missing something.

They suggest that when people fly in economy class, their position in the social hierarchy becomes glaringly obvious. This is especially so if they have to walk through the first class section of the plane to get to their assigned space in a cramped hell.

Charter's new footprint. (The numbers are slightly lower than actual as they're based on year-old data.) (credit: Charter)

The Federal Communications Commission just announced that it approved Charter's acquisitions of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks, allowing Charter to nearly quadruple in size.

Charter will face conditions designed to boost broadband competition and prevent harms to online video providers that compete against the cable companies' TV services. Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed conditions were approved over opposition from Republican commissioners.

Charter just needs to tie up a few loose ends before completing the deal. The Department of Justice has proposed a settlement that will allow the merger to proceed, and approval from California state regulators could come in a vote on May 12. When announced last year, Charter expected the acquisitions to cost a combined $67.1 billion.

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Over the crackle of an old record, you can hear a woman singing in Urdu. Though listening to her is as easy as clicking a few buttons on the British Library website, her voice comes to you across vast distances in space and time. Sometime in the early 20th century, engineers recorded the voice of a woman called Malkajan for the German company Odeon, which pressed shellac discs for Indian record collectors in the 1910s and 30s. Now her work is part of a series of recordings called The Odeon Collection, digitized by Mumbai record collector Suresh Chandvankar with help from a grant from the British Library. There are over 1400 recordings in the collection, and all are free to the listening public. If you love music and history, it's easy to get lost in the riches of this easily accessible digital archive.

Chandvankar explains the collection:

Odeon label shellac discs were issued in India in two phases: during 1912-16; and during 1932-38. During the first phase, Odeon's first Indian recordings were made in late 1906 on a grand tour that took the engineers from Calcutta to Benares, then on to Lucknow, Cawnpore, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Bombay and finally back to Calcutta. In all, they recorded some 700 titles, which were duly shipped back to Berlin for processing and manufacture in what was then the established worldwide pattern. Disc records manufactured and pressed in Germany were shipped back to India by 1908... Because of the diversity of language and cultural taste, Odeon's engineers recorded a great deal of regional music for local consumption.

In the second phase, the Odeon disc manufacturing company operated during 1932-38. Its operations were mainly from Mumbai and Madras and the company produced over 2,000 titles in north and south Indian music. At this time, radio and film songs had just entered the entertainment era. Disc manufacturing and distribution activity continued until the outbreak of World War II. Because of the embargo imposed on German goods, the company had to wind up their business in India, leaving behind hundreds of titles. The musical genre recorded on these discs include drama songs, speeches, folk music, classical music, drama sets, skits and plays, vocal and instrumental music.

What he's describing is a treasure trove of Indian musical culture, from a period when folk songs and traditional music were giving way to the pop music that pervades so many Bollywood movies. Odeon records allowed Indians to enjoy everything from classical music to contemporary comedy from all over the country. And now, over a century after many of these recordings were made, we have a chance to hear what the Indian music industry was like in its infancy.

User ratings are often a good way to make choices about a purchase, but they come with some inherent weaknesses. For a start, they suffer badly from sampling bias: the kind of person who writes a review isn’t necessarily a good representative of all people who bought the product. Review-writers are likely to be people who have had either a very positive or very negative response to a product. And often, only a few people rate a particular product. Like an experiment with a small sample size, this makes the average rating less reliable.

It turns out people are pretty bad at taking these weaknesses into account when they assess online product ratings, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors found that Amazon ratings might not be the best way to predict the quality of a product, and these reviews often include more subjective judgments that don't get taken into account by potential buyers.

To assess the quality of user ratings, the researchers used ratings from Consumer Reports (CR), a user-supported organization that buys products and tests them rigorously before assigning a score. Generally, CR is considered a reasonable approximation of objective quality within a few different academic fields. To test the reliability, the researchers took CR scores for 1,272 products and compared them to more than 300,000 Amazon ratings for the same items.

Music from the band Los Tigres Del Norte the authorities found on an assault defendant's mobile phone was wrongly used to prove gang affiliation, Washington state's top court ruled. (credit: Knight Foundation)

Washington state's top court is tossing the assault convictions of three men, in part because prosecutors told jurors that Latin music on one of the defendant's mobile phones highlighted a gang affiliation.

The issue was tangential to why the state Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Ricardo Juarez DeLeon, brother Anthony DeLeon, and Octavio Robledo. The trio was convicted of first-degree assault in connection to a 2009 non-deadly drive-by shooting in Yakima County. The court demanded a retrial because the men told jail officials they were gang members and could not be placed in a cell with rival gang members. But ultimately the admission was wrongly used against them at trial before the jury, the top court found.

"In this case, the defendants made self-incriminating statements to avoid a credible risk of physical violence," the top court ruled. (PDF) "By their very nature, such statements cannot be considered voluntary, and they should not have been admitted."