Rob Ford's Toronto

[animatronic]

Some thoughts on the arrest predictions:

Normally you can improve predictions by averaging a number of individual predictions - this removes personal bias and takes out the extremes. However, you need to have decent information as an input. Election predictions are a good example - if you survey a bunch of people who have access to polling data and are following the news, you'll usually end up with a decent guess. In many cases the guesses will even fall into a normal distribution. If the histogram doesn't fall into a normal distribution, there's a good chance that consensus on a specific date is lacking. This is a wildly oversimplistic explanation but don't sweat it.

Now, shown below is a histogram showing the predictions to date (the list from this morning plus some of the stragglers). Note that most predictions came in last week, so "week 0" of the series is 23 Feb. Also note that the time series is reasonably logarithmic. The take-away from this is:

- Very few people think the arrest will happen in the current or following week
- Around a quarter to a third of people think the arrest will happen 2-3 weeks out, and half think it will happen in the next month
- There is an emotional tie to 1-year anniversaries of major events
- The guesses are almost evenly distributed by day of the week except for Sat/Sun, which are each half as frequent. There's a slight preference for Thursday/Friday
- The shape of the curve makes it likely that this will be the result regardless of when the survey is taken
- The above will only stay true in the absence of any major developments

Discuss.

View attachment 23645

 

[euler]

All that work and you save a high-contrast image like a chart as a highly compressed JPEG, for shame.... ;-)

 

[BobBob]

Awesome, I'm glad someone did this. I was going to, but laziness made it impossible.

Wisdom of Crowds = Ford is toast in early April.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

I'm not judging the community as a whole. I'm saying as they've become more Westernized more kids are giving up traditional values for our gang culture.

I know you weren't addressing me, but FWIW, I know you weren't making any kind of blanket judgement on anyone. I only chimed in because "drug dealers are everywhere" is something that surprised me growing up and moving through various cities/apartment buildings (sheltered childhood? maybe).

On a more general note: thanks for your contributions to this thread! Especially given your local knowledge, your posts are generally way more interesting than anything I could hope to bring to the table.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

I work in "computers" and it has been my experience that people are far less technologically aware than they should be, even young folks who, we are continuously told, are "tech savvy"." Not only do I believe that they would use a free host like Bugs3 to host the "crack" video, I think they would feel like they were anonymous in doing so. The Goonies may be known in some circles, but they are hardly the Hells Angels. The word "Goonies" is popular enough as a cultural reference that they may have felt safe using it for any number of digital accounts.

Also, there is some evidence to show that the account was created before the video was shown to Gawker. This is a screen capture from the Wayback Archive showing the account in question was active on June 2013. The Wayback Archive takes its time in getting a first snapshot, so this account was likely opened at least a month - or more before. For unpopular sites, the archive takes less snapshots, so this account could have existed weeks, months or 2 years earlier. The Bugs3 website was first registered on 2011-03-14. This tells us nothing about who really owns the account, but it does show that the account was not created just to bolster a boast of involvement.

I also work <something with computers> and I agree that people aren't generally that savvy. However, having something this valuable up your sleeve tends to sharpen the mind and increase caution... hence my theory that they would be super-careful and/or seek out advice.

As for the account being created in time for the story to make sense, well, that's one thing, but there's still no proof that it contained anything meaningful, nor that the "hacker" ever had access to it, nor that it was the same "goonies" - as you rightly point out, it's a fairly common name used by different people in different worlds.

Still, there are some valid questions regarding the validity of the story because any credible hacker would know that you cannot destroy a video simply by deleting it from a single server and would probably have said so right away. It would have off-line backups, possibly on multiple servers. Free or not, the hosting company likely has redundant backup technology to restore accounts should the worst happen. Although the wording was to "find" the video not "destroy" it, the intent would have been clear.

Everything you say here is correct, but nothing here changes my assessment that the entire Vice "hacker/Massoudi" story is a bunch of baloney fed to them by someone who is an expert at feeding people baloney - and in fact derives great pleasure from the act.

 

[casita]

I don't know if this has been posted previously, but for anyone interested in 320–340 Dixon Road:
http://www.condomadness.info/contents-YCC42.html

 

[Dottie]

Some thoughts on the arrest predictions:

Normally you can improve predictions by averaging a number of individual predictions - this removes personal bias and takes out the extremes. However, you need to have decent information as an input. Election predictions are a good example - if you survey a bunch of people who have access to polling data and are following the news, you'll usually end up with a decent guess. In many cases the guesses will even fall into a normal distribution. This is a wildly oversimplistic explanation but don't sweat it.

Now, shown below is a histogram showing the predictions to date (the list from this morning plus some of the stragglers). Note that most predictions came in last week, so "week 0" of the series is 23 Feb. Also note that the time series is reasonably logarithmic. The take-away from this is:

- Very few people think the arrest will happen in the current or following week
- Around a quarter to a third of people think the arrest will happen 2-3 weeks out, and half think it will happen in the next month
- There is an emotional tie to 1-year anniversaries of major events
- The shape of the curve makes it likely that this will be the result regardless of when the survey is taken
- The above will only stay true in the absence of any major developments

Discuss.

View attachment 23645

I assumed that we could only guess dates that hadn't been already taken. Some other people may had had the same assumption and guessed dates that were not their first choice. So there's that.

What this chart shows is, at best, an indication of when this group of guessers thinks an arrest will be made. It would be foolish to assume that this has any relationship to when an arrest really will be made. If we were polling police officers or lawyers familiar with the case, that would be different. But we're not.

 

[animatronic]

Wisdom of Crowds = Ford is toast in early April.

Actually, the Wisdom of the Crowds says he will be arrested around one month from whatever day you take the survey. Therefore, there's not much value in polling the board for a specific prediction.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

So there's still a chance that Lil' Mikey Ford is the Don Corleone in all of this

Hah! I know someone who met him while working at a kid's summer camp a couple of years ago. He was just another guy, but somehow it came up in conversation. The way it was told to me was something like:

Mikey: "...well, yeah, because of who my uncle is."
My friend: "Oh, who's your uncle?"
Mikey: "Rob Ford, you've probably heard of him."
My friend: "Um, yeah, I've heard of him."

Third-hand tidbit from that story: while discussing that later with other people at camp, my friend heard that apparently Rob has been quite the father figure to Mikey. My friend also remarked on the very strong physical resemblance between specifically Rob and Mikey - basically he looks like what you imagine Rob was before 20-something years (and some hard living).

...and they want to run him for Council? Yikes.

 

[rightwingSUVdriver]

Hah! I know someone who met him while working at a kid's summer camp a couple of years ago. He was just another guy, but somehow it came up in conversation. The way it was told to me was something like:

Mikey: "...well, yeah, because of who my uncle is."
My friend: "Oh, who's your uncle?"
Mikey: "Rob Ford, you've probably heard of him."
My friend: "Um, yeah, I've heard of him."

Third-hand tidbit from that story: while discussing that later with other people at camp, my friend heard that apparently Rob has been quite the father figure to Mikey. My friend also remarked on the very strong physical resemblance between specifically Rob and Mikey - basically he looks like what you imagine Rob was before 20-something years (and some hard living).

...and they want to run him for Council? Yikes.

When this whole crazy saga is over, the Ford name will be political poison forever. Thank goodness for that.

 

[DonValleyRainbow]

Thanks Basic for all your hard work!

Because so many people mentioned The Wire when talking about the Ford saga, I started to watch it. Almost done the first series. It is soooooooooooo good! And I can see the similarities between the stories. I just hope that this sordid tale gets as good writers/directors/editors/actors as that show.

You're going to see a bunch of actors from the Wire popping up in other things, it will blow your mind. At least once a month they will have a small role in some TV show, and at first you're all like 'that guy looks familiar...', you IMDB it and realize it was because THEY WERE IN THE WIRE. At least once a month.

 

[anne]

Everything you say here is correct, but nothing here changes my assessment that the entire Vice "hacker/Massoudi" story is a bunch of baloney fed to them by someone who is an expert at feeding people baloney - and in fact derives great pleasure from the act.

Regarding seeking advice before doing anything with the video, it is possible they had an "expert" friend (the quotations are sarcastic). People who say they are experts are a dime a dozen, real experts are a little harder to find. It's doubtful a real expert is anywhere near where they live. They would have approached their search for expertise from the viewpoint of people who probably knew next to nothing and probably located a guy who can format a Windows XP computer.

Interestingly (at least to me), just before all this came out in the press, around the time that Ford was reported being intoxicated in public the first time, I happened to read a message in some forum from a guy who claimed to know there was much worse out there and that it would be revealed soon. The other people either ignored him or told him he was full of it. This tells me there was at least one person out there trying to warn people of Ford's behaviour online but was too afraid to come out from behind his handle. Behaviour like Ford's is never private. People must have seen him, sold drugs to him, did drugs with him or had friends who did long before this story ever became public.

There may be, as you say, some people out there just trying to feel like they are part of the story, but I call you back to my assertion that the goonies.bugs3.com site was up and running well before this guy ever went to Vice. Do you believe a troll set the file hosting space up just to fool them - months before going to Vice? Or, do you think he just happened on this URL? It seems the latter is quite fantastic as there are dozens of these hosting services and unless you signed up for each and every one of them, you might not know how they structured the URL for an account. I've not heard of bugs3.com before today and to think some troll who spends his time in forums playing bigshot could pull that off just doesn't add up to me.

To further add to the mystery is the fact that the domain for bugs3.com was registered by domains by proxy - a service which offers anonymity. This service would appeal to people like the goonies as they may erroneously believe that their activity was also anonymous. A quick search shows it's full of spam and phishing sites, not exactly a reputable business.

Adding it all up, I'm inclined to believe that the source of the vice article was not the troll unless he is so desperate for attention that he set this up the very moment Gawker published the crack video story.

 

[blearghhh]

Dang it.

Here I spent 30 whole minutes doing this, and you come along and do it before me.

And, you apparently have some understanding of statistical analysis too, which means that yours is not only earlier than mine, it's better.

I think I hate you.

Mine was done by just looking at each date and adding up how many guesses happened within 5 days each side of that date, which, when charted, gave me the following:

Which agrees with animatronic's chart pretty much. Basically, we have a huge cluster around a week or so from now, which seems to be the golden date for whatever reason, then another blip around May 24th, then a relatively predictable drop off outside of those two points of interest.

Edit to say: this was supposed to be in response to animatronic's post, but apparently I can't do that right either.

 

[rightwingSUVdriver]

Dang it.

Here I spent 30 whole minutes doing this, and you come along and do it before me.

And, you apparently have some understanding of statistical analysis too, which means that yours is not only earlier than mine, it's better.

I think I hate you.

View attachment 23647

Edit to say: this was supposed to be in response to animatronic's post, but apparently I can't do that right either.

I like yours! The greater level of spiky detail is good

 

[retailestate]

I don't know if this has been posted previously, but for anyone interested in 320–340 Dixon Road:
http://www.condomadness.info/contents-YCC42.html

Sounds like it has Ford "ALL OVER IT":

http://www.condomadness.info/YCC42-achievements.html