Working on a chain gang?

Take the example of the bailout/takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States.

In America Fox News, so denounced as statists by so many libertarians, had many critical voices on Monday September 8th. On Neil Cavuto's "Your World" show both M. Malkin and Bob Barr (who are very different from each other on so many political issues) both laid in to the corrupt statism. And Mr Cavuto also did so. The next day (Tuesday 9th September) Ron Paul was on the show - continuing the attack. Later on the 8th of September the Brit Hume show (although Mr Hume himself was away) Ed Crane of the Cato Institute was on denouncing the bailout/takeover. There were, of course, other voices and perhaps to let Fannie and Freddie go bankrupt would have been even worse than what the government did - but this is not my point.

My point is that there was no dissent in Britain - from any media source. The BBC did not even report in its main news shows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the government and run by political cronies. The leftist Independent newspaper gloatingly declared that President Bush had "torn up years of lassez faire polices". The claim that there has ever even been a "lassez faire" policy in the United States under President wild spending Bush is such a blatant bit of agitprop that it is hard to know how to respond to it.

And the so-called 'Conservative' newspapers? No dissent anywhere - at least none I could find. In fact the Daily Mail was demanding something similar for Britain.

George Lakfoff calls this stuff "framing". Samizdata's Paul Marks wants to know if he is living in a communist country.


Somewhere in Highgate cemetry I imagine a coffin is spinning uncontrollably.

The Fact of the Matter, doesn't matter

Now, though, facts seem irrelevant, at least to the campaigns. “I think we may have had an impact earlier in the campaign,” says Viveca Novak of FactCheck.org, “but now we don’t seem to be having much of one.”

Slate on the End of Facts.

When a politician says something, the assumption is that it adheres, however loosely or distantly or illogically, to the truth. This week has shown that assumption to be hopelessly naive.

Fears mount that writers may be drinking less

There seems to be this funny idea going around that a successful writer is “professional”– in demeanor, in dress, in temperance. I’m horrified by that idea, if only because one of the central reasons I first entered this profession was that none of these things would be required of me.

Writers: let the contemporary nomad know about the number of alcohol units you consume per day.

...writing's on the wall

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

These are the stories we tell around the campfires, that sort of thing? Maybe there's not so much of it these days.

"Once you get to things like avoiding ladders and cats crossing the road, it's clear that culture and modern life have had an influence on many of these things," says Foster.

"My guess would be that in modern life, the general tendency to believe in things where we don't have scientific evidence is less beneficial than it used to be," he adds.

Hmm.

I wonder whether AOL.com is like “The CBS Evening News” — an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling.

Asks the NYT.

In search of search

In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It’s clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it’s also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search.

Now this is really interesting. From Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience...


...at Google.

Privacy, what privacy?

Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person's movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of her steps taken, her calories burned, and even the quality of her sleep. Data is wirelessly uploaded to the Web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends.

Fitbit here


Story from Technology Review.

Trust Again

Two prestigious institutions, the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute, want to do something about that and have teamed up to create the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.


Earlier this week, the commission held a forum at the Google campus in Mountain View. I was invited because over the past year I've been conducting the Next Newsroom Project, where with money from the Knight Foundation I've been trying to design "the newsroom of the future." (Any suggestions?)


The discussion during the daylong session ranged all over the map. But one key theme came up repeatedly that I think should top the commission's agenda:


In a world where everyone is becoming a publisher, how can a community find information that it can trust?

Read on at Mercury News.

Freedom at a cost?

At yesterday's RIN Freedom of Information workshop an interesting position from Dr. Harriet Jones.

As FOI is implemented over time, it becomes harder and harder for hard-pressed officials to fulfil FOI requests within the legislated time limit. Those obligations take priority over the systematic review of records being transferred to national archives, an extremely important task which gets hopelessly de-prioritised. Inevitably, standards suffer, and neither process is satisfactory, so that researchers end up waiting so long for requests to be filled that they stop using FOI; and the quality of the records that end up getting transferred to archives deteriorates.

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information said that around 100,000 FOI requests are made a year.


But surprisingly few academics are doing so, said Professor Duncan Tanner of Bangor University. Does that mean most historians are either working on 30 year old history - or working on partial information sets about more contemporary issues?


The Campaign for Freedom of Information blog is here.

Your new girlfriend (seventh iteration)

So in yet another example of mobile success, the service really took off, when Artificial Life released a simplified version, where V-Girl would require less keystrokes and interaction, and more of her "personality" and the gaming experience was on the servers over at Artificial Life, and the individual gamer would more react to V-Girl, that initiate interactions.

From Communities Dominate Brands.

Web optimists and pessimists

At the Technology Liberation Front Adam Thierer suggests a way of categorizing some of the books that shape the current internet debate: those that see it as a force of good, and those that don't.

Many Net optimists have a tendency to paint an excessively rosy picture of the transformative nature of the Net. In the extreme, the optimists seem to imply that the Net is somehow remaking man, altering human nature, and changing the economy only for the better. Among the Net optimists, there’s often a lot of romanticized talk of collective action / intelligence overcoming all barriers to knowledge or progress, and so on.

Check out the full details here.


It's a great primer to the debate.

Euston, September the eighth, after a seminar on Freedom of Information

FOI tommorow.





After Euston, Camden.

Tudorial

Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention - a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) - introduced to the show with cries of "by God, what is that?", and other such, from the actors.

Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV - some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.

Getting angry with the BBC take on Tudor history.

The Facebook News Feed is Two

We are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike.

---

What the hell happened to my views on privacy and the views of so many others?

Asks Mashable's Ben Parr.


---

When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.

---


The NYT in more Facebook News Feed depth.

How to Review a Forger?

But these aren’t petty or victimless crimes– they are not only crimes against literature and culture, they are also crimes against the very people, businesses, and institutions dedicated to discovering, documenting, promoting, protecting, and preserving for all time the valuable and often irreplaceable artifacts of our civilization.

A research expert on a literary forger.

Newspapers and Trust part 42

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that's the 51% advantage.

Huff-po on why a good candidate isn't winning by a mile.

Open search

By opening its index to thousands of independent programmers and entrepreneurs, Yahoo hopes that BOSS will kick-start projects that it lacks the time, money, and resources to invent itself. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research and a consulting professor at Stanford University, says this might include better ways of searching videos or images, tools that use social networks to rank search results, or a semantic search engine that tries to understand the contents of Web pages, rather than just a collection of keywords and links.

It isn't all Google.


Although most of it...

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in.

...still is.

From Nick Carr's Rough type.

DNA evolution

...genome sequencing is no longer just a research tool. Anyone with $350,000 to spare and an adventurous spirit can now have his or her own genome sequenced.

The Genetic Early Adopters.

More

Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

It has to be Google, again.

Word up

But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

Name that newspaper.

Two takes on convention politics

From Wired.

Politics is the opiate of of journalism and it’s time to go to rehab.

From Buzz Machine.

Deckard's choice of mobile?

According to the Android guys, this is the Google phone.

And it launches this week.

A matter of taste

Although a violent death in Brooklyn, where I live, might have made the front page 50 years ago, The New York Times, the New York Post and The Daily News kept mum on their Web sites. Eventually, The New York Sun carried a notice online: “Man Found Dead in Bathtub.” Although the “police said they recovered knives at the scene,” according to the article, “there is no criminality suspected.”

On reporting death.


Narrowcast news by Virginia Heffernan.

Another magnum, luvvie?

Personally, I find the images thought-provoking and beautiful. They free the fashion world from its ivory tower isolation and allow it to circle ethical issues — without forcing any particular conclusions on the viewer.

Photography, war, and fashion. An interesting post from the NYT.

Phone Politics

We may get excited about political campaigns going mobile in the beginning but as the interaction and messages remain stale so will our excitement eventualy become.

"When that happens," Wark points out, "people tend to refuse communications that do not come from a reliable source. So if you want to get out an email or a text send it to a friend, ask her to pass it on to a friend and so on." To its credit the Obama text campaign does ask you to "Forward to a friend" but if I understand what Wark is saying correctly there is a difference between being asked to do that by an automated Barak text message robot instead of your brother, or best buddy or cute boy or girl.

From TechPresident.

Putting you on Holde

Late to this, but still fun.

Strategy 101

John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.

From Pressthink at NYU.

Sometimes we need the Economist

That point is the extraordinary myopia of a line much-written by the European press in recent days: that the European Union has ended up in charge of the Georgia crisis, because the United States is so "distracted" by the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the weakness of a lame-duck administration.

From the often useful Certain Ideas of Europe blog tucked inside The Economist site somewhere.

A weakened, distracted America has just promised a billion dollars (€700m) in aid for Georgia with about half of that earmarked for "fast-track" delivery, sent two warships to Georgia bearing humanitarian relief supplies, and is about to send the USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the 6th Fleet, into the Black Sea. It has also sent the vice president, as mentioned above.

Even more here.

Who needs The Economist?

“Sarah’s smile is sincere, which I never felt from Hillary, who has anger and resentment in her eyes,” said Ann Schmuecker, a delegate from Mountain Home, Arkansas, where she met the Clintons decades ago.

Friends of Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, say she is the Obama campaign’s greatest weapon in pointing out Democrats’ differences with Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain.

From the NYT.

Surely the literary quote of the year?

Much of the zest in English fiction comes from rogue individualists looking for new ways to lose money by leaving orphaned books for future scavengers to discover and promote.

Iain Sinclair in the Guardian while writing about a man called Roland Camberton, "the great invisible of English fiction" - it seems.

Tom and Now

Thanks Google.


Makes it all much easier. Betwixt continues, and will be back regularly soon.

The Future of Polling

Since betting real money keeps people honest (to reduce their loses), markets with real money are considered a much better indicator of opinion than a mere poll — which has no “penalty” for being less than honest. But real money prediction markets are (stupidly) illegal in the US. So token markets like Long Bets and Bet2Give are devised to innovate around the law.

Kevin Kelly.

Get Happy!

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, where people were asked about their sense of wellbeing, the researchers were able to draw up a map of happiness down to district level across England, Scotland and Wales.

After adding in factors such as employment, health and educational qualifications, the team found that the area of Brecknock, Montgomery and Radnor in Powys was the happiest place.

It's Wales.

Unmapped: good for driving

"Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history - not to mention Britain's remarkable geography - at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.

"We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there."

The president of the British cartography society on new maps.

Even if this is fiction it is worrying...

...and the author is a novelist.


Live from the Obama afterparty (ft. Oprah).

"Nice to meet you, Congresswoman," our driver said a few minutes later as we exited and Friend Two led us purposefully toward a black town car that miraculously sat idling next to the bus we were planning to jump on.

I smiled magnanimously. What can I say? A dozen years of Catholic school might be a black mark on my record, but it made me a good liar and an even better politician.

From radar online.

Dogg eat dogg 1

"It is analysis that strikes me as having born no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and web sites is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

"Charles Babington, find a new line of work."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann gets angry after the Obama analysis.

Spot the Difference?

If I want to explain my job as founder of Spot.Us in one sentence, I'll just say "I'm fundraising for independent journalists to do local investigations."

Obviously it's much more involved than that, but depending on how much energy I have, it works.

An interesting move in local/community journalism.


And community building.

Different take on Denver

When I finished choking on my wine, I immediately sidled up to him, cursing myself for failing to change into flats. He is about five-feet tall, and in heels, I am nearly six-feet. He didn't seem bothered and we began to exchange the requisite political pleasantries: He's "really good friends" with Hillary Clinton, but then liked Barack Obama and ended up voting for him in the primary; oh, and the only thing he didn't like about Hillary's speech last night was her orange pantsuit, describing it as "not the most flattering choice." Which is fair!

Then, out of the blue, I blurted out: "Is the song 'Gasolina' really about chicks who do a lot of coke?"

I immediately regretted my question. Couldn't I have transitioned a little more subtly? He opened his mouth and I thought he was going to admonish me or walk away or call his publicist/guard dog to escort me, red-faced, out the door. Instead he told me, in his smooth, one-note, slightly garbled voice, that it wasn't wise, when you're throwing a party, to start drinking vodka too early in the evening, otherwise, "When three o'clock in the morning rolls around, you're standing on top of a building with your shirt off screaming 'I'm a Golden God,' and you come back downstairs and there are Eastern European mafia people doing cocaine off your coffee table." He added for emphasis, "One's judgment is seriously impaired by drinking straight vodka very early."

Find out who it is here.

After Marxism, Relativism

Found a copy of Lesley Chamberlain's "Motherland, A Philosophical History of Russia" today. It was published in 2004. Just read this in the preface:

"...Russian thought has spent much of its time and energy defining a specific Russian way of seeing and doing things. To the extent that there is Russian philosophy it has asked and continues to ask not 'What is the truth?' but 'what is the Russian truth?'..."

---

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, claimed today the Caucasus crisis was started by the Americans as an election campaign ploy.

As Russia found itself increasingly isolated internationally because of its invasion of Georgia and its decision to recognise two breakaway regions of Georgia as independent states, Putin suggested the Georgia war had been cooked up in Washington to create a neo-cold war climate that would strengthen John McCain's bid for the White House and wreck the prospects of Barack Obama.

From The Guardian.




Am motoring though Motherland in search of more quotes, obviously.

Another way of telling the story

Czechoslovakia, August 1968. Josef Koudelka positioned a passerby to show the exact time that Soviet troops invaded Prague.


Photograph: Josef Koudelka/Magnum

When I meet him today, in the back room of his new apartment in Prague, Koudelka unfolds a battered map of the world he has just found in one of the many boxes stacked along a wall. It is covered in spidery ink trails that trace his wanderings through Europe and beyond, his handwriting providing a runic commentary of the festivals and gatherings he attended along the way. The map dates from the Seventies and looks like a strange work of art, which, in a way, it is. The real art, though, lies in the photographs Koudelka produced when he began chronicling his restlessness - and rootlessness - as well as his newfound sense of freedom. His first major work, published in 1975, was called simply Gypsies, his second, from 1988, Exiles. Their titles alone tell you much about Koudelka's own life as well as the lives of his subjects.

Lovely Sean O'Hagan Observer piece on the photographer Josef Koudelka.

Karma on Control

Some 66% of those participating in this survey agreed with the statement: "A global internet Bill of Rights should be adopted." Only 6% disagreed.

Some key planks of the Bill of Rights would be: freedom of information, freedom of expression, and the right of people to have affordable access. Some 76% of respondents supported freedom of information as a core ethic of online life and 75% agreed that such a policy ensuring freedom of expression on the internet should be adopted.

On the other side of the issue, 62% of respondents said they believe content controls weaken the internet. And by a 59%-28% margin, they disagreed with the statement, "My country should have the right to approve the internet content available to the people of my country." Even more disagreed (63%) that a commercial internet service provider should have the right to control content.

From Pew on the Future of the Internet.


Full report as pdf here.

Social Bling

I am all for social karma (or "swarmth") building up in the innards of social tools, but directly tying actions to specific economic inducements, instead of an algorithmic authority or reputation is a terrible way to go.

/Message on SocialU - which is, they claim, 'all about you.'



Enough already.

Gaming as Life?

"I see social gaming as a new form of communication that is more interesting than e-mail and AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] in terms of connecting people together," he says. "It drives what we're doing and informs our decisions. We don't want to just stick our finger in the air. We want to create a new category."

Playfish Chief Operating Officer, Sebastien de Halleux.

From Forbes on Facebook's greatest hits.

Ways of Seeing #1

Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for recommending Goodale, M. & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Here's a story for Newscred

Propaganda? News Management? Counter-terrorism? True?

The document also shows that Whitehall counter-terrorism experts intend to exploit new media websites and outlets with a proposal to "channel messages through volunteers in internet forums" as part of their campaign.

The strategy is being conducted by the research, information and communication unit, [RICU] which was set up last year by the then home secretary, John Reid, to counter al-Qaida propaganda at home and overseas. It is staffed by officials from several government departments.

From The Guardian.

Trust, Gender and the Usual Unsurprising Paradox

So women score better on honesty, are - as it were - more trusted. And below is how that quality is rewarded in leadership terms.


All from Pew's latest study, "Men and Women: Who's the Better Leader?". Full details here.

Vin Crosbie and a Great Series about American newspapers

I've heard many experts say that the evolution in access to media during the past three decades has been the greatest since Gutenberg time. Yet the reality is that it's much, much greater. The effects this radical increase in the supply of news and information that is readily available to people will have on civilization, nonetheless any one industry, will be much, much larger than anything the invention of the printing press ever wrought.

Part Two here.
Part One here.

Esthesis: 6 touch screens

...the success of the iPhone has encouraged other companies to explore multitouch screens. It might follow that if people like using their fingers on the screen of a cellphone, they would like it even better on the bigger displays of computers. That’s the hope of N-trig (pronounced “intrigue”), an eight-year-old Israeli company that makes a multitouch screen that can be used with a pen as well a finger.

From the NYT on the rise and re-rise of touch screens.

Why I am not Olen Steinhauer

Above is a "wordle" of the first chapter of Victory Square, the latest novel from my friend Olen Steinhauer.

To see a larger version click here.

Here is my first unpublished novel

And the bigger version.

I particularly like the "just...well..stuff..."

All thanks to Wordle.

Serial Will Eat Itself

The producers of Web serials — including the name-brand ones like “Afterworld,” “lonelygirl15” and “quarterlife” — seem forever anxious about their audience numbers, and they crunch and recrunch them. The producers of “lonelygirl15,” a thriller about a teenager stuck in a cult, claim that they have attracted 100 million views over more than 550 episodes. Marshall Herskovitz, the creator of “quarterlife,” a repertory drama about artsy 20-somethings, counters that his show has drawn 10 million views over 36 episodes — 50 percent more, on average, than “lonelygirl15.” This is possible, since the unit of success is the flimsy “view,” meaning virtually any click on any part of a series, anywhere on the Web. But it’s clear that we’re not talking about numbers advertisers can remotely trust. Are there really any hit Web serials?

The NYT romps through the "numerati" take on web serials.

Dissolution of the Monopolies?

Mr Fincham, who resigned from the BBC last year in the wake of false claims that the Queen had been filmed storming out of a photo shoot, warned that British television could split "like a medieval church", with the BBC and Channel 4, "chastened by public money", being separated from the rest of the industry. He complained of favouritism, saying that "organisations dependent on the public purse... are clasped more warmly to politicians' bosoms than those who say, 'Don't worry, we'd rather look after ourselves'."

Too much Tudors, mate. Easy with the religious metaphors.


Full lecture on pdf here.

The Daily Telegraph on Television and Trust

According to a poll by the consultancy Deloitte, three in four British people don't trust television. Channel executives must be dismayed. Not simply because of the poll's findings, but because they didn't think of running the poll themselves, as a money-spinning premium-rate phone vote.

More from Michael Deacon.

The Data Crunching Elite

A very interesting experiment in the future of book promotion? I think so. From The Numerati website created by Stephen Baker. This is the strategy of an online campaign to promote the book version...like this a lot. And the site itself.

Here's the idea. The Numerati is about tracking and predicting people by their data. So why not use a domain of that very science--behavioral advertising--to spread the word to the most likely readers?

That's what we're going to do. In the coming weeks, my publisher, Houghton Mifflin, will be running an advertising campaign for The Numerati on the vast network of sites affiliated with Platform A/Tacoda, a division of AOL. We'll be studying the patterns of the people who click on Numerati ads. Which web sites do they come from? What types of profiles do they have? Do some profiles click more on one type of ad than another?

Stephen is reassuringly honest about the possible outcome:

For starters, we'll be looking at two types of people, the datamining types who resemble The Numerati and the arty-literature type crowd that might page through an article about The Numerati in a magazine like The New Yorker. I may have quibbles about those choices. Maybe you do too. But the process has to start somewhere.

We'll make adjustments, and I'll describe the process, step by step, on this blog. I'll also be sounding out readers on the conclusions we reach and the advertisements we distribute. Maybe you can steer us along a more reasonable path. Or perhaps the data will lead us along a path that appears to defy all logic--but still works.

I think we have to read this book, and find out how the campaign worked.

I keep forgetting this when I check my Facebook

Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is , 2N - N - 1 where N is the number of participants.



This grows much more rapidly than either the number of participants, N
or the number of possible pair connections, (which follows Metcalfe's law)



so that even if the utility of groups available to be joined is very small on a peer-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.

From Wikipedia, via a David Cushman post.

...our group-forming nature, finds ways around control and mediation of all forms.

Mini Cooper goes hybrid in Beijing

It just turned up.

Missed this the first time...

"If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself."

Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert talks to Reuters


I found the quote on Corante. In a piece by Vin Crosbie about the death of the American newspaper business. The death causes?

The major one is simply that American newspaper companies have violated the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt their core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 15 years.

Vin promises more on Friday in Part Two.

Dull Demographics as ever..

...the rise of the "Hillary Harridan" is a disturbing development. It unearths a creepy literary type that harms women a lot more than it helps them. The suggestion that irrational, emotional, self-referential women are swinging the election is not a theme any woman should endorse.

From Slate: is the UK similar?

Probably.

39 Elevators?

Hannay is back: the BBC Christmas will include a new version of the 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.

...the spy thriller later turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, "reimagined" for the Jason Bourne generation.

The Man Who Fell to Earth?

Is heavy metal making us stupid?


Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was one of the biggest summer hits this year on the dancefloor, with remixes by Andrew Sullivan, John Battelle, and Bryan Appleyard amongst others.



But who or what does Nicholas Carr trust? In auteur theory a movie maker's worst film is said to often reveal much. Here is Carr writing on the album-a-year-meme choices of Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels.

...you bet your ass I'd entrust my mission-critical data and apps to this guy. I mean, he even ranks Made in Japan, that ridiculous double-record Deep Purple live album with the 20-minute version of Space Truckin', as the best LP of '72.

Here are some of Vogels' picks.


1969: Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
1970: The Who, Live at Leads
1971: Marvin Gaye, What's going on
1972: Deep Purple, Made in Japan
1973: Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
1974: Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1975: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1976: Eagles, Hotel California
1977: The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus
1978: Herman Brood and his Wild Romance, Shpritsz
1979: The Clash, London Calling


Full list from 1958 onwards here.


And some of Nicholas Carr's choices:


1977: The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
1978: Wire, Pink Flag
1979: The Undertones, The Undertones
1980: X, Los Angeles
1981: Squeeze, East Side Story
1982: Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights
1983: REM, Murmur
1984: The Replacements, Let It Be
1985: Husker Du, New Day Rising
1986: Elvis Costello, King of America

Full list here.


Another question: Is Wikipedia making us reinvent our pasts?

The new Rosetta Stone

"We're standing now on the last generation of the majority of tribal languages in the world," said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, noting that an estimated 50 to 90 percent of the world's languages are expected to disappear within this century. "We're losing them so fast."

Only this one is a Disk.

Over eight years in development, the Disk is a physical, microscopic library of information on over 1,500 human languages. 14,000 text and image pages are etched into the surface of a 3” diameter nickel disk, which can be read with approximately 750x (optical) magnification.

The nickel disk has a high resistance to corrosion, and can withstand temperatures of up to 300 oC with little to no change in legibility of the text. Kept in its protective sphere to avoid scratches, it could easily last and be read 2,000 years into the future!

From the San Francisco Chronicle and the Long Now Foundation.

More on the Rosetta project.

Facelook.com & Trust

Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.


But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability.

From the Boston Globe.