But the pollster went on to ask Minden, who is Jewish, how she would vote if she knew that Obama was supported by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and was responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. "It is scare tactics. It is terribly underhand," she said.
Well this graph on CNN affected me, it affected me so much that I could barely focus on the debate, I was so busy watching the graph. I knew it was completely unreliable and irrelevant, and yet my heart sank and rose according to it. I sort of heard what the candidates were saying, but mostly I watched the orange (for women) and green (for men) lines rise and fall as each phrase was uttered. When Sarah Palin spoke and the lines went up, I felt irritable. When Joe Biden spoke and the lines went up, I felt happy.
Trust means that a site overall is trusted. This will be one of the larger sites, with very high traffic, lots of content, one of the heavy players. This is a site Google trusts as a well established legitimate, respected sites. Amazon. Government sites. Wikipedia. Plenty of reasons to trust them, very few not to trust them. In my mind, I picture doing my own research on any particular topic, what sites do I trust? Trusted sites do rank higher even when less relevant. Trusted sites pass a lot of juice, a link from a trusted site is gold.
An authority would be a page or site that is an authority on a specific topic. This site may not be trusted, but this particular page, section, or site, becomes an authority on a topic. This is gauged by incoming links on the topic; the more links a site has on that topic/keyword, the more of an authority it is on that topic.
The problem with journalism's stock in trade, semi-omniscent objectivity, is that almost no one views the world with semi-omniscent objectivity. To see the world and see it whole, as a London Times editor once said of his calling (doing so before the Internet and thus having a not easily findable quote), is just not what the typical reader does, for the obvious reason that the typical reader is self-interested.
And when it's over, don't be spun by the post-debate pundits. "Turn off your television and make up your own decision," said Aaron Zelinsky, Yale University debater and editor of the Presidential Debate Blog. He adds: "Don't listen to the campaigns set false expectations before the debate, either. It's just as bad."
“A lot of people are anticipating this to be almost a ‘Saturday Night Live’ live,” said Tammy Vigil, an assistant professor of communications at Boston University and a co-author of the upcoming book, “The Third Agenda in U.S. Presidential Debates.” “The entertainment value on this debate is going to be huge.”
This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. It is meant to portray factual information, not the author's opinions (except where so stated). Some of the questions inherently require subjective analysis; in these cases I have tried to show a sample of responsible opinions.
As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector.
The same thing is happening now. Financial markets are global, not local, today, so the problem isn’t that the failure of any single bank locks individuals or businesses out of the credit markets. Instead, the nasty surprises of the last 13 months — the sort of turmoil that once would have been unthinkable — have caused an effective breakdown in informational capital. Bankers now look at longtime customers and think of that old refrain from a failed marriage: I feel like I don’t even know you.
I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic.
Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something... It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.
By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.
Average number of emails received per day: 180,000.
Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%.
What we are relearning is that without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability, even while it unleashes forces that undermine those self-same values. London's money markets froze because of a trust collapse; banks simply don't believe each other when they say their businesses are sound and will not default on their obligations. Trust matters.
For all the millions of dollars and thousands of people employed at the mainstream newspapers, broadcast networks and cable channels, Drudge had assembled the perfect mix of salient links and real-time information...
Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers in Gucci loafers?
Today you can never really leave. For one thing, most of the world looks alike now anyhow. For another, if anything big happens back home, friends will text you. And not just big things either. They'll tell you who's been fired on The Apprentice. They'll phone you from the toilet for help in their local pub quiz.
Just to make things worse, shortly before leaving I bought a swanky new "smart phone" aimed squarely at absolute cast-iron wankers. Go on, treat yourself, I thought. Be an unashamed cock and buy it. Turns out it does everything. Email, internet, GPS system, Google maps ... there's probably a can opener on it somewhere. If you're standing in the middle of nowhere you can push one button to be told precisely where you are and another to find out where the nearest synagogue is. Or sauna. Or both. Punch in a query and it'll recommend eight local restaurants, give you their phone numbers, and ask if you want to ring them. Then it'll give you directions. Since I'm on a road trip, it's proved incredibly useful...
...Political Browser was born of a determined effort by The Post to get into the news aggregation game. Eric [Pianin, the Politics Editor] told me that interest in news aggregation extends to the highest level of The Post’s senior leadership, including Katherine Weymouth — they have been “fascinated” by the success of aggregation sites like Drudge, Huffington Post, Hotline, and others.
Doesn't transparency amount to more than just posting a bit of legislation up on a Sunday, giving the public a few hours to wonder what it says, and then rushing to approve it in congress?
There has never been more abundant information about the individuals and institutions whose claims we have to judge. Openness and transparency are now possible on a scale of which past ages could barely dream. We are flooded with information about government departments and government policies, about public opinion and public debate, about school, hospital and university league tables. We can read facts and figures that supposedly demonstrate financial and professional accountability, cascades of rebarbative [forbidding] semi-technical detail about products and services on the market, and lavish quantities of information about the companies that produce them. At the click of a mouse those with insatiable appetites for information can find out who runs major institutions, look at the home pages and research records of individual scientists, inspect the grants policies of research councils and major charities, down-load the annual reports and the least thrilling press releases of countless minor public, professional and charitable organisations, not to mention peruse the agenda and the minutes of increasing numbers of public bodies. It seems no information about institutions and professions is too boring or too routine to remain unpublished. So if making more information about more public policies, institutions and professionals more widely and freely available is the key to building trust, we must be well on the high road towards an ever more trusting society.
This high road is built on new technologies that are ideal for achieving transparency and openness. It has become cheap and easy to spread information, indeed extraordinarily hard to prevent its spread. Secrecy was technically feasible in the days of words on paper. But it is undermined by easy, instantaneous, multiple replication-and endless possibilities for subtle or less-than-subtle revision.
US-led efforts to tackle the al-Qaeda group are not regarded as successful, an opinion poll carried out for the BBC World Service suggests.Some 29% of people said the "war on terror" launched by President George W Bush in 2001 had had no effect on the Islamist militant network. According to 30% of those surveyed, US policies have strengthened al-Qaeda.
There is a nice irony in Roger Alton's huffing and puffing about my book, Flat Earth News (Interview, September 22). The book tries to track the scale and origin of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in news media. One of its central themes is the ease with which the PR industry now manipulates journalists. One of PR's regular techniques is to try to bury true stories with a "non-denial denial", ie a statement which has no value at all but which serves to mislead.
Roger replies to the revelations about his problems at the Observer by saying: "You can accuse me of incompetence, of being a shitty journalist or a shallow halfwit, but to say I would deliberately lie about stuff and manipulate information - nothing could be further from the truth."
It just so happens that "deliberate lying" is precisely what the book does NOT accuse him of. What the book describes is how, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, Roger was manipulated directly by Downing Street and indirectly through key reporters by intelligence agencies and Downing Street again. The result was that he published mighty falsehoods because he thought they were true and failed to publish true stories because he thought they were false. Deliberate lying does not come into it.
The manipulation of the Observer in the cause of war happened. It needs an explanation. A lot of Roger's readers might think it needs an apology. What it doesn't need is for the editor of a national newspaper who has been such a spectacular victim of PR to adopt its tactics.
Nick Davies, London
What advice would he [Alton] have for young pretenders keen on getting to the top of his own profession? Not enter it, he chuckles. "Take up photography ... sell luxury goods. Maybe chocolate, people always want little treats, like the £1 Independent."
Search is where Google started, and even though the mission was back then was (and officially still is) to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," no one at Google was really putting many of today's non-search services into a blueprint for success. Many of these products emerged from Google's own internal needs, opportunistic purchases, ideas that curious Googlers with "20% time" suggested and sudden departures into areas not envisioned at first but which made sense as Google evolved.
The underlying theme with Google is the user. Google does things in the interest of the user.
I don't agree with this. I think Google has made scores of moves calculated by centralized senior management to benefit the company as a whole, AND, at the same time, has green-lit scores of other projects which, taken as a whole, are in no way centrally planned. Examples of centrally planned moves? The AOL deal. The Dell distribution deal. Chrome. Gmail (I disagree with Danny that this was not a centrally planned move. Same with Checkout.) Book search (Google knew it was in for a legal fight and it engaged because it felt it was in the company's, and culture's, best interest.) YouTube (very much a central decision). Ummmm....going public.
...new software - which transforms the written information on an iTunes-linked computer screen into speech or Braille - stemmed from an agreement between Apple, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company, the National Federation of the Blind and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley
Crucially, isn't press and broadcasting coverage getting more like blogging and less like conventional journalism? Blogging, after all, whirls on 24/7. Three in the morning, three in the afternoon. It doesn't worry much about fact checks. It exists in a tumult of constant outrage. It doesn't care what 'My View' was yesterday or last year. and to be sure, there is something of a plot there; a plot against ordinary understanding.
Kid, the next time I say, "Let's go someplace like Bolivia," let's go someplace like Bolivia.
“The next year to 18 months may be ‘make or break’ for the newspapers,” says David T. Clark of Deutsche Bank in a report summing up the NAA Retail Advertising Forum that just wrapped up in Dallas.
Noting that all signs point to weak retail sales and lean advertising budgets for the balance of this year and much of next, Dave says it is “unclear” whether newspapers “are moving fast enough to secure local market share for when the economy climbs out of its hole.”
...perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time, just like his hero, Benjamin Franklin.
Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, wrote a mysterious blog post today asking for someone in the U.S. to send him an Amazon Kindle, and hinted that he might be working on a new project involving eBooks.
“Do [sic] anyone wanna help me out? I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…,” he writes.
...Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978), alias brokep, is a Norwegian-Finnish computer expert,known as the co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.
According to the Los Angeles Times The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading", and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright — or pro-piracy — movement."
The only way we can bring sanity back to the credit and stock markets is by restoring public trust. And to do that, we must improve the quality, accuracy, and relevance of our financial reporting. This means resisting any calls to repeal the current mark-to-market standards. And it also means expanding the requirement to the securities positions and loan commitments of all financial institutions.
..Mr. Levitt was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Mr. Turner was SEC chief accountant from 1998 to 2001.
The field of cognitive expertise has a certain tradition of using case studies of experts, but in a recent article we went one step further: we analysed a famous but fictional expert – Sherlock Holmes (Didierjean & Gobet, 2008).
The use of citations taken from Conan Doyle’s works made it possible not only to present the latest advances in the field of cognitive expertise, but also to suggest avenues of research that we believe should be explored with more attention.
Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.
The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur.
Increasingly, sites are depending on the wisdom of their users to build their businesses, from CrossLoop’s IT support to Trusera and PatientsLikeMe’s health advice and statistics.
Livemocha leverages the “world wide” bit of the web to create a language learning community and the Seattle-based company has just passed the 1m member mark, a year after launching.
It's hard enough trying to write songs, without having to design Chinos as well.
...the Labour Party is exploring plans for an online rapid rebuttal unit, designed to kill off damaging stories circulating in the blogosphere.
Former lobbyist Derek Draper will oversee the initiative, having recently been called in by Labour’s general secretary to advise on how the party can communicate its message.
Labour strategists are keen to respond to the growing influence of right-wing blogs. The eventual system could resemble a modern-day version of Labour’s famous Excalibur unit, which was successfully used to kill negative stories by Tory-supporting newspapers in the run-up to the 1997 general election.
If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.
...the notion that Ethan Winner and his cronies — all of them PR professionals — are just “concerned Americans” who attempted to make the Palin smear video “go viral” out of personal conviction is patently absurd. The obvious question, then, is for whom were Winner and his “associates” working? The most obvious answer is: the Obama campaign. Another and at least equally troubling possibility, however, is that they were working for one of Publicis’s high-powered European clients.
Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.
So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is a guy with nothing but a page full of links (you know, the kind that “send people away”).
I'd like to suggest to you that the term newspaper should be broken into two parts, news and paper. The paper part needs to be put aside for a moment, as it is only one of many potential distribution methods. The news engine is independent of the delivery mechanism, or it should be…. when you move into the online environment you know that deadline is a bit of a funny word, or at least it should be because it can go as soon as it's editorial accepted. The notion that news is continuous as opposed to an episodic thing has a lot of dramatic effects on the consumers of that information.
...the allegations of media bias frequently stem from the proliferation of politically charged radio talk shows and television analysis programs, which viewers and listeners 'mistake' for journalism.
"I think their reputation kind of washes over our reputations," he said. "The folks who are sounding off about politics on all of the talk shows and the 24 hour news channels and so on. I would not make the argument that those people are free of bias. They are in fact paid to be opinionated."
"Well, you know, what did Karl Marx say?" he said. "Money creates taste. I think there's a relationship. I'm not sure exactly if it's the money. But [with] the number of people collecting now, the artists feel that there is more of a potential audience critically, commercially and so on. And that draws out talent, usually. I'm not sure. I think a lot about the same thing."
A 70-year debate over the authenticity of a Robert Capa photograph dating back to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) may have been settled by an upcoming exhibition...
“Looking at the photos it is clear that it is not the heat of battle," said Cynthia Young, the curator of the show.
The picture is one of Capa’s two most famous (the other being of a GI landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day), and it has often been hailed as the greatest war photograph of all time.
The allegation had first surfaced in 1975, in a book by Phillip Knightley, a British journalist and historian, about how war correspondents — ever since the beginning of the profession, during the Crimean War of the 1850s — had often distorted the truth.
“Whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization,” Schmidt said. “It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day impugns the McCain campaign, attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. [Sarah] Palin. It excuse Sen. Obama.
“Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective — that it is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition, to advocate for the defeat of one candidate — in this case, John McCain — and to advocate for the election of the other candidate, Barack Obama.”
A firm led by Rick Davis, a long-time McCain aide and chief of the Republican candidate's day-to-day campaign, received payments totalling $500,000 between the end of 2005 and last month from Freddie Mac, according to the New York Times and others this morning.
I went on air and reported that Prescott had punched a protester in Rhyl, and expressed the view that this was potentially a resignation issue for him.
When I came out of the studio, a Labour press officer was already waiting on the phone. He told me that party officials travelling with Prescott confirmed the incident had not happened, that Labour was demanding an immediate retraction and an apology and that I had just ruined my career.
the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?
You bet - at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.
The pendulum of the Lobby is ready, eager even, to turn against the too smooth, too cool Cameroons.
...The huge difference: Android is open source and there is an (almost … there are default applications) completely level playing field for mobile application developers...
For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning.
"It just turns out that narcissists are using Facebook the same way they use their other relationships – for self promotion with an emphasis on quantity of over quality."
...with some admissions officers confirming in a new survey that they visit social-networking sites, high schoolers say getting into college is no longer only about sky-high test scores and impressive extracurricular activities. Now it means being smart about their online personas as well.
I am at my dad's because he's having his roof repaired, which is always stressful. The builders came last week to set up the scaffolding, only they went to the wrong street - the correct house number, but the wrong street - and built the entire platform (the owners were at work, obviously) before realizing their mistake. I've just asked the boss what happened. He said: "The sat-nav told the driver he'd arrived, he didn't think he might not have."
...cartographers and others, including the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Geological Survey, have debated whether the Southern Ocean should, in fact, become part of the lexicon.
Some European countries don't recognize it, and the most recent query to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names doesn't specify whether the new ocean has been accepted. The board's approval is necessary before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration places the name on its charts. So far, the name isn't there.
For us, it’s like the modern way to do retail. This way, we can travel with the store and try out different neighborhoods. It’s like we are trying out the relationship before we marry.
Luckily, Sean had some spare decommissioned servers we could put in a rack. So, like good Boy Scouts, we installed this rack under a large metal framed tent behind his data center in the fuel yard.
Here are some pictures of our setup. First, a couple of shots of our tent, nestling in the corner of the fuel yard. Sean coined the phrase “Tent City” to refer to our efforts.
With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”
Right now, Publicis and Google have been testing ads on the iPhone’s YouTube app and are currently working on apps for the Google Android smartphone, but were otherwise tight-lipped about what might be coming.
Still have a landline? You’re showing your age. The young, hip, cool people have cellphones only, and that is bad news for traditional phone providers. In a survey of Internet users, JupiterResearch found that 12 percent “do not subscribe to fixed voice service, and nearly two-thirds of them are ages 18 to 34.”
It’s all very Twitter meets Improv Everywhere. Very interesting idea –who would have guessed blog comments could become a stage ...
Oh it is a long list Mr. Morrison. The Saudi’s, the Roman Catholic church, Hamas, Al Qaeda, a dozen private parties, hell the CIA. Lots of people have motive, but George had the best motive. If he is dead, it’s because George wanted to die.
Analysis of these data indicates that IM use has no influence on overall levels of work communication. However, people who utilize IM at work report being interrupted less frequently than non-users, and they engage in more frequent computer-mediated communication than non-users, including both work-related and personal communication.
