The notion of “true enough” should discourage anyone who values information responsibility.
Nevertheless, a significant portion of the public accepted the claim as true or, perhaps, as “true enough.”
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Two Years Later: The Media Response to Death Panels and Why It’s Still Important | Lippmann Would Roll
Friday, May 27, 2011
What Big Data Needs: A Code of Ethical Practices - Technology Review
A call for information responsibility…
In this era of Big Data, there is little that cannot be tracked in our online lives—or even in our offline lives. Consider one new Silicon Valley venture, called Color: it aims to make use of GPS devices in mobile phones, combined with built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers, to parse streams of photos that users take and thus pinpoint their locations. By watching as these users share photos and analyzing aspects of the pictures, as well as ambient sounds picked up by the microphone in each handset, Color aims to show not only where they are, but also whom they are with. While this kind of service might prove attractive to customers interested in tapping into mobile social networks, it also could creep out even ardent technophiles.
…
The potential dark side of Big Data suggests the need for a code of ethical principles. Here are some proposals for how to structure them.
What Big Data Needs: A Code of Ethical Practices - Technology Review
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
How Twitter Was Fooled Into Thinking bin Laden Watched The IT Crowd and Big Bang Theory
“A lie can be halfway around the world while the truth is putting its boots on.” (Mark Twain, paraphrased from memory.)
So how did a comedy writer with just over 100,000 followers trick the world? Linehan pulled a page from any 16 year old gossip's book, saying "it appears that one good way of starting a rumour is to pretend that the story is already circulating," and tweeted on May 7th:
Does anyone have confirmation that Osama was watching The IT Crowd in these home movies? Amazing if true. Don't know how to feel
Adding to the drama, Linehan added speech-marks to another tweet, as if he'd picked the quote up from a news outlet:
"...seen in several videos watching and mouthing dialogue from the cult Channel 4 sitcom. Unbelievable." #itcrowd #OBL
How Twitter Was Fooled Into Thinking bin Laden Watched The IT Crowd and Big Bang Theory
The web's weakest links | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
On the blurring of primary and secondary sources…
So, the next time you link to something, check it out a bit more. If it's just a summary of someone else's original reporting or analysis, take the extra few seconds to link to the original. Let's all raise our linking standards, and give credit where it's genuinely due
The web's weakest links | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
The Media Blog: Action against superinjunction busters "very viable" ...if Twitter plays ball
Does Twitter count as “the media” with respect to super-injunction laws in England?
Earlier this week, a leading media lawyer told The Media Blog it was "only a matter of time" before the courts attempt to make an example of superinjunction-busters on Twitter, adding it will likely be "sooner rather than later".
Then yesterday that time arrived as the courts ruled that a professional footballer and his legal representation should be able to pursue individuals who have breached the terms of his privacy injunction by revealing his name online.
The Media Blog: Action against superinjunction busters "very viable" ...if Twitter plays ball
The Media Blog: Media must sharpen social skills
More on the same theme…
Speaking at the BBC Social Media Summit, Peter Horrocks, head of global news at the BBC, said one wake up call for his own organisation came earlier this year when a joint interview for Christine Amanpour from ABC News and Jeremy Bowen from the BBC, with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, became known as ABC's scoop. This was simply because Amanpour was tweeting about the interview within seconds of it ending (right), while Bowen's involvement became lost in the hiatus between completing the interview and it being broadcast later that day.
Horrocks said this incident enforced a realisation that "using social media... should no longer be peripheral."
Yasmina Reza on ‘How You Talk the Game’ - NYTimes.com
Extending (er, riffing on) the previous post: A successful creative-type working in a first-millennium medium (i.e., live drama) has trouble manipulating television (old media) and largely refuses to participate in the new (e.g., Twitter).
A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter.
…
She does not have a Web site, blog or Twitter account. She resists television interviews. “It’s degrading,” she said. “They never give you time to talk. I hesitate. I reflect. I contradict myself. Whenever I’ve done it, I was very, very bad. A catastrophe.”
Watchlist: A Self-Conscious Web Experiment From CBS News - NYTimes.com
An old-media attempt to co-opt new media, looked upon skeptically by the really old media: The Old Gray Lady Herself.
The live Web show “What’s Trending” at cbsnews.com, an attempt to build a news-and-chat program driven by social networking — sort of a digital “Today” — is a self-consciously experimental project.
…
In the premiere episode the struggle by Ms. Lazar and her producers to find an intelligent way to discuss current events through the lenses of Facebook and Twitter (here, as in most discussions, the alpha and omega of social networking) was palpable and mostly unsuccessful.
The news topics — protest movements in the Arab world and online campaigning for the 2012 election — were chosen for their Twit-Face dimensions, and while this made some sense with regard to presidential politics, it made for an embarrassingly shallow and naive discussion of events in the Middle East.
…
A prerecorded feature on forward-thinking do-gooders was titled “People Are Awesome.”
Watchlist: A Self-Conscious Web Experiment From CBS News - NYTimes.com
Psychiatric Insights, and Ethics, Blurred From Afar - NYTimes.com
Remembering a low point in the history of information responsibility, and comparing it to current behaviors that are little better.
Just before the 1964 election, a muckraking magazine called Fact decided to survey members of the American Psychiatric Association for their professional assessment of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee against President Lyndon B. Johnson.
…
The psychiatrists’ assessment was brutal. Half of the respondents judged Mr. Goldwater psychologically unfit to be president. They used terms like “megalomaniac,” “paranoid” and “grossly psychotic,” and some even offered specific diagnoses, including schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder.
Psychiatric Insights, and Ethics, Blurred From Afar - NYTimes.com
Monday, May 9, 2011
Red in Tooth and Claw Among the Literati
It was the best of epochs, it was the worst of epochs…
Some literary scholars have begun incorporating neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, and—most prominently and controversially—evolutionary psychology into their work. Their work explores how evolution might have shaped aspects of literature, the potential adaptive benefits of storytelling for our Pleistocene ancestors, and the mystery of why humans spend so much time immersed in it. Evolution provides a framework for understanding human behavior; evolutionary psychology explores the origins of mental phenomena and can bridge evolutionary biology and the humanities. Some recent evopsychology also emphasizes the plasticity of the human mind, which helps explain how universal human behaviors (such as storytelling) can exist but can nevertheless be expressed in different ways in different cultures. Many scientists encourage this work, although applying evolutionary thought to the human mind has never been popular in the humanities. But since 2007, the number of books and articles incorporating Darwinian and other scientific thought into literary studies has more than doubled. These scholars are convinced not only that evolutionary thought can improve literary research but also that literature can teach scientists a thing or two about human evolution.
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Visualizing Plagiarism
Two interesting themes here: 1) Information irresponsibility (specifically, plagiarism), and 2) data visualization.
The image color-codes each page of the doctoral dissertation of former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who recently resigned in response to allegations that he plagiarized much of it.
Key:
- One vertical bar per page.
- Horizontal axis: Page numbers
- White bar: Page on which no plagiarism has been found.
- Black bar: Page on which plagiarism from a single source was found.
- Red bar: Page on which plagiarism from multiple sources was found.
- Blue bar: Table of contents and appendices, excluded from the analysis.
Busy Week for America's Leading Anchorman - NYTimes.com
Information responsibility from NBC anchor Brian Williams: sacrificing a one-time ratings spike for a more important story. No good deed goes unpunished.
Williams is a self-professed "weather geek" who checked on the devastating tornado outbreak in the South on April 27 before boarding an overnight flight to London to help the "Today" team anchor coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding.
…
Picking up his baggage at Heathrow Airport, he saw a report on his smartphone that 83 people had died because of the tornados. The death toll was well into the hundreds by the time he was driven out of the airport. He asked the driver to pull over, consulted with his bosses in New York, and decided to book a flight back home. He arrived in time to anchor Thursday's news, then flew to Tuscaloosa, Ala., and checked into a hotel where the manager said the regular night clerk had been killed in the storm.
…
In the short term, the decision did not pay off. On Friday, when ABC led its newscast with Sawyer in London talking about the wedding while Williams opened with tornado damage, ABC had 236,000 more viewers, the Nielsen Co. said. It was the first day since September that ABC had won. On a typical day this season, "Nightly News" has a 1.1 million viewer advantage over ABC, more than 3 million over CBS.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Selling Books by Day, Writing Them by Night - NYTimes.com
Novelists—even those who use twitter—hang on to the perhaps quaint notion that their output is books you can weigh.
“I’m a writer, but I also love selling books.”
Through her job, Straub has befriended other booksellers across the country, at conferences and, increasingly, on Twitter. Which, in turn, helps her as an author. “When I was setting up a tour, I called on them,” she said. “Working at the store has helped me make relationships with people I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.”
…
Other writers agree that bookselling work has a concreteness that writing itself can lack. “It’s tangible — you go in and straighten the shelves and sell a book to someone who might have never thought of buying it otherwise,” said Jami Attenberg, who works every Saturday at Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Book Review - Idea Man - By Paul Allen - NYTimes.com
Yet another review of Paul Allen’s recent memoir. Notice that the whiteboard indicates (in the area just behind what’s-his-name’s head) that data is at the center of everything: applications, compilers, graphing tools, drawing tools… Lots of other everythings have been invented since then, but data remains at the center of it all.
Barry Wong/The Seattle Times
Paul Allen and his business partner in 1982.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Inside the List - NYTimes.com
Competition for Microsoft Word from Microsoft PowerPoint?
POWER SELLER: PowerPoint has been blamed for everything from corporate stupidification to burying Western civilization in a hailstorm of bullet points. It may have also helped “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” Jennifer Egan’s widely praised novel-in-stories, clinch this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a recent talk at the New York Public Library, Egan (who normally writes her fiction by longhand) described getting hooked on the program while preparing to write a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation: “I was possessed. I was doing PowerPoint when my husband went to bed. I was doing PowerPoint when he woke up. Everyone was so tired of it. If we went to the beach, I would pull down the shades and do PowerPoint. . . . It’s almost embarrassing how much time I spent colorizing my PowerPoint, like a mad scientist with little tinctures of color.” “Goon Squad” is No. 18 on this week’s trade paperback fiction list.
Omigod, Who Is Osama Bin Whatevs? - Noreen Malone - National - The Atlantic
A little bird told me: Something big happened to some guy somewhere.
“Who is Osama bin Laden?”
…
Yet according to Yahoo Search trends, on May 1, the question was the fifth-most-searched phrase on the search engine 66 percent of those searches came from teenagers, who would have been small children when the twin towers fell.
…
It was a failure of our education system (and this was even before considering the grammar and punctuation). It was a slap in the face to those who'd lost someone on 9/11 or in the wars since. The instinct to take to Twitter as resource-of-first-resort said something frightening about the way the rising generation consumes information, and augurs dire things for the future of facts and truth; so does the ease with which we can block out anything we don't seek out specifically on the ever-specialized Web.
Omigod, Who Is Osama Bin Whatevs? - Noreen Malone - National - The Atlantic
Thursday, May 5, 2011
New York Times Company : Investors : Press Release
A return to the old newsreel? Not exactly.
New York, May 2, 2011 – The New York Times and Emerging Pictures are launching Times in Cinema, a cinema preshow and advertising sales platform for independent theaters. Times in Cinema will feature original HD videos produced by The New York Times, drawn primarily from entertainment, travel and lifestyles stories. These videos will comprise a ten- to twelve-minute preshow, which will be used as a platform for selling cinema-quality advertising. The preshow will run before the trailers at each show.
PBS plays Google’s word game, transcribing thousands of hours of video into crawler-friendly text » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
Case study in converting from meta-model (spoken narrative) to another (written narrative)…
Blogs and newspaper sites enjoy a built-in advantage when it comes to search-engine optimization. They deal in words. But a whole universe of audio and video content is practically invisible to Google.
Say I want to do research on Osama bin Laden. A web search would return news articles about his assassination, a flurry of tweets, the Wikipedia page, Michael Scheuer’s biography, and an old Frontline documentary, “Hunting Bin Laden.” I might then take my search to Lexis Nexis and academic journals. But I would never find, for example, Frontline’s recent reporting on the Egyptian revolution, where bin Laden makes an appearance, or any number of other video stories in which the name is mentioned.
While video and audio transcripts are rich for Google mining, they’re also time-consuming and expensive. PBS is out to fix that by building a better search engine. The network has transcribed and tagged, automatically, more than 2,000 hours of video using software called MediaCloud.
Twitter Begins Sending @ Replies to Users - Not All of Which Are SFW#more#more#more
Hmm…
Retention of new users is Twitter's #1 problem and this little experiment could help solve the biggest challenges new people face: boredom and pointlessness.
So Twitter initially inspires curiosity, but quickly bores? I wouldn’t know because my curiosity about Twitter hasn’t yet risen to fascination. I’m not bored by Twitter because I don’t allow myself to be distracted by it. FWIW, here is a possibly on-topic quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer: “Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”
Twitter Begins Sending @ Replies to Users - Not All of Which Are SFW#more#more#more
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