Scary New Cigarette Labels Not Based in Psychology - ScienceInsider

More on the revolting images that will be added to cigarette packaging.

Science Insider asked Tavris what the current research in behavioral psychology has to say about the effectiveness of fear imagery.

" 'Current' research?" she replied in an e-mail. "Social psychologists have decades of research showing that fear communications generally backfire, that people tune them out, and therefore that these tactics are generally not effective."

Scary New Cigarette Labels Not Based in Psychology - ScienceInsider

Mediactive - Creating a User's Guide to Democratized Media

Frivolous post here:  Years ago, in a story about punk rock, the Times insisted on referring to “Mr. Rotten” and “Mr. Vicious.”

The Times mandates courtesy titles (Mr., Ms., etc.) only in news stories, though it drops them for some dead people and those it arbitrarily considers evil enough not to deserve them. For example, Osama Bin Laden lost his Mr. after US forces killed him in May. But Saddam Hussein was recently still being called Mr. Hussein, as Slate notes.

Mediactive - Creating a User's Guide to Democratized Media

U.S. Releases Graphic Images to Deter Smokers - NYTimes.com

Persuasion by disgust.

The graphic images will include photographs of horribly damaged teeth and lungs and a man exhaling smoke through a tracheotomy opening in his neck. The Department of Health and Human Services selected nine color images among 36 proposed to accompany larger health warnings

U.S. Releases Graphic Images to Deter Smokers - NYTimes.com

Find Free Money: Almost Every Bill You Get Is Full Of Mistakes - CIO Central - CIO Network - Forbes

Check your pockets.

Is your phone bill so phony that it’s secretly robbing you of thousands  of dollars? Could your garbage costs be trashing your company? And are  your payments for security services making you feel insecure?

If so, then you’re not alone.

An analysis by SIB Development & Consulting found that 95% of all  regular monthly service bills contain errors – errors which can can add up to  big bucks.

Find Free Money: Almost Every Bill You Get Is Full Of Mistakes - CIO Central - CIO Network - Forbes

Taymor opens up about 'Spider-Man' - Entertainment News, Legit News, Media - Variety

I had heard that the problems of Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark were caused by failure to control web technology.  Now I get it.

As a result of the national spotlight directed at the development of the project, she noted, "You get bored of a show before it even opens because there's been too much talk about it."

She added, "Twitter, Facebook, blogging just trumps you."

Taymor opens up about 'Spider-Man' - Entertainment News, Legit News, Media - Variety

Split personality disorder: brought to you by the Internet » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented

The fellow out-Freys James Frey.

Recently, the blogosphere has been buzzing about Amina’s blog A Gay Girl in Damacus: An out Syrian lesbian’s thoughts on life, the universe and so on. For years this American-Syrian woman was an inspirational activist, her powerful writing touched the lives of her followers and those in the Middle East fighting for their rights. At the beginning of June Amina disappeared. Her cousin posted on the blog, claiming Amina had been captured and was being held in custody by the Secret Service. There was an outcry for her release, as her faithful followers worried about their heroine’s well-being. A search ensued, only to find…that no one in Damacus had ever heard of the woman. After some digital investigation, it turns out that Amina was in fact not a resolute gay woman fighting in her country for her rights, but a 40-year-old man in Scotland with a brilliant imagination and enough knowledge on the subject to breathe life into the blog. On June 12, Tom MacMaster came clean, posting an apology to his readers

Split personality disorder: brought to you by the Internet » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented

Social networking sites and our lives | Pew Internet & American Life Project

Does MySpace offer a refuge from the internet echo chamber?

MySpace users are more likely to be open to opposing points of view.

We measured “perspective taking,” or the ability of people to consider multiple points of view. There is no evidence that SNS users, including those who use Facebook, are any more likely than others to cocoon themselves in social networks of like-minded and similar people, as some have feared.

Moreover, regression analysis found that those who use MySpace have significantly higher levels of perspective taking. The average adult scored 64/100 on a scale of perspective taking, using regression analysis to control for demographic factors, a MySpace user who uses the site a half dozen times per month tends to score about 8 points higher on the scale.

Social networking sites and our lives | Pew Internet & American Life Project

Nieman Reports | Online Comments: Dialogue or Diatribe?

Last sentence (of this excerpt) is chilling.

The 90-9-1 principle convinced me that many, not all, comment sections are an exercise in faux democracy. This theory goes that 90 percent of us will read something online and move on. Nine percent—I'm in this group—occasionally take time to comment. That leaves roughly 1 percent who dominate the online conversation, and among this smaller number is found the digital equivalent of the loudest drunk in the bar. Their messages are often rude and accusatory; they indicate little interest in joining a conversation, yet they succeed in scaring off those who might want to truly engage.

This has occasionally pushed away a news source.

Nieman Reports | Online Comments: Dialogue or Diatribe?

Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Just another click in the the wall…

The Guardian’s digital leap: The Guardian has long been one of the top newspapers on the web, but this week, the British paper announced a major step in its development as a digital news organization with a transition to a “digital first” operation. So what exactly does that mean? Essentially, that the Guardian will pour more of its resources (especially financial) into its digital operation in an effort to double its digital revenues within the next five years.

Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Eat Your Vegetables, and Don't Forget to Tweet - WSJ.com

When documenting your experience interferes with experiencing your experience, you are officially a victim of your times.  

Ms. Wilson, an avid cook, photographs most family meals for her "Gotham Gal" blog. "If you try to take a bite of your appetizer before she's taken a picture, you hear her say, 'Wait wait wait wait,' and she'll make you put it back," Josh says.

Eat Your Vegetables, and Don't Forget to Tweet - WSJ.com

Letter to the Public Editor of The New York Times

Here is the text of a letter I just sent to the public editor of the New York Times.

=== === ===

Dear Public Editor of the New York Times,

The chess column of 12 June 2011 includes this sentence: “A message sent to Natsidis’s Facebook page asking him for comment was not answered.”

The sentence motivates these questions: 

1. Is Facebook a legitimate medium for seeking comment from public figures before publishing stories about them?
2. If so, when did it become so?  Is LinkedIn also considered legitimate for this purpose?  What procedures are in place to ensure that reporters are not communicating with a spoofed/counterfeit identity?
3. Do the formal policies of the New York Times include a list of acceptable communications media for reaching the subjects of news stories?  Are reporters now burdened with trying several different media—a policy that would honor the reality that different people prioritize various communications media differently?

These and other questions bring to mind your column of 02 April 2011, in which you discuss a “move The Times should make, one that would help secure a tighter bond with its audience: publishing The Times’s journalism policies in a searchable format and in a visible location on NYTimes.com.”

You correctly point out that such a move would “enable readers to see more clearly into the news operation.”  Another benefit: it would reveal the rules of the game to news subjects.  If the new reality is that reporters’ due diligence for seeking comment can be satisfied merely by posting a message on a Facebook page, that reality ought to be formally—and publicly—articulated.  Is it?

Sincerely,

Joe Maguire

Chess - Christoph Natsidis Punished for Cheating - NYTimes.com

Tut tut…

A German master was disqualified from his country’s championship tournament this month, done in by his cellphone.

Officials determined that the master, Christoph Natsidis, 23, had consulted a computer program on his smartphone during his game against the grandmaster Sebastian Siebrecht in the last round.

…

A message sent to Natsidis’s Facebook page asking him for comment was not answered.

Chess - Christoph Natsidis Punished for Cheating - NYTimes.com

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert. - NYTimes.com

A recurring theme of information responsibility: Knowing how your brain can let you down (e.g., through confirmation bias).  Now we have a a theory about why your brain lets you down.

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert. - NYTimes.com

U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad - NYTimes.com

Can you fear me now?

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

…

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler

U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad - NYTimes.com

Book Review - The Filter Bubble - By Eli Pariser - NYTimes.com

Note that this review—even-tempered, resisting the urge to amplify the author’s hand-wringing about serendipity—is by a man known for some hand-wringing of his own: none other than Evgeny Morozov, the author of the recently published The Net Delusion (about which more here).

Such selectivity may eventually trap us inside our own “information cocoons,” as the legal scholar Cass Sunstein put it in his 2001 book “Republic.com.” He posited that this could be one of the Internet’s most pernicious effects on the public sphere. “The Filter Bubble,” Eli Pariser’s important new inquiry into the dangers of excessive personalization, advances a similar argument. But while Sunstein worried that citizens would deliberately use technology to over-customize what they read, Pariser, the board president of the political advocacy group MoveOn.org, worries that technology companies are already silently doing this for us. As a result, he writes, “personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

…

Most important, personalization’s effects on serendipity are far more ambiguous than “The Filter Bubble” suggests. Lacking a stable working definition of serendipity, Pariser sometimes equates it with randomness, sometimes with unexpected exposure to new ideas. But serendipity is a subjective concept that cannot be understood in isolation from the searcher’s own quirkiness and previous search history. By knowing which Web sites you like to visit and bookmark, a search engine might immediately point you to useful links that could otherwise get lost on Page 99 of unpersonalized search results. (In a 2009 study of search habits that tested this proposition, researchers for Microsoft found that “rather than harming serendipity, personalization appears to identify interesting results in addition to relevant ones.”) Building on Louis Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors the prepared mind,” one could see how personalization might augment serendipity by helping us maximize our own preparedness.

Book Review - The Filter Bubble - By Eli Pariser - NYTimes.com

Emma Forrest, Hollywood L-it girl - The Globe and Mail

How much privacy is a memoirist allowed to claim?

Call me a stickler, but deliberate obfuscation of the facts is a dangerous game to play when promoting a memoir of “obsession, heartbreak and slow, stubborn healing” (as Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert described it in her cover blurb). It’s simply unreasonable to accept public adulation for laying yourself bare one moment, then behave as though your privacy is being invaded the next. Emotional honesty is the memoirist’s stock and trade, but it’s also a sacred contract with the reader – lest we all forget the example of James Frey.

Emma Forrest, Hollywood L-it girl - The Globe and Mail

Conservative Group Scanned Weiner’s Posts, Warned Women - NYTimes.com

Gotcha!

As Democrats and Republicans embrace Twitter and other social media tools as a way to interact with their constituents and woo voters, many have discovered a downside to online communication: cyberstalkers, who track and criticize their every move.

Conservative Group Scanned Weiner’s Posts, Warned Women - NYTimes.com

A Federal Study Finds That Local Reporting Has Waned - NYTimes.com

Not terribly surprising, but discouraging nonetheless…

An explosion of online news sources in recent years has not produced a corresponding increase in reporting, particularly quality local reporting, a federal study of the media has found.

Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged, concluded the study, which is to be released on Thursday.

A Federal Study Finds That Local Reporting Has Waned - NYTimes.com

Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker

Being able to write clearly is a part of information responsibility. Without it, access to education is wasted.  That’s what Professor X says:

When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like. Someone who has reached the age of eighteen or twenty and has never been a reader is not going to become a writer in fifteen weeks.

Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker

Mind Control & the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

More on a recent topic: Search makes it harder for me to encounter ideas that challenge my world view.

With personalized search, “now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular—and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” It’s as if we looked up the same topic in an encyclopedia and each found different entries—but of course we would not assume they were different since we’d be consulting what we thought to be a standard reference.

Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of fifty-seven variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology, and assumptions.

Mind Control & the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

Celebrity Books and Ghostwriters - Noticed - NYTimes.com

Neglecting to mention the ghostwriter qualifies as information irresponsibility.  But (warning, snarkiness arriving in three, two, …) really, is there any information in a book written by a Kardashian sister? And, sigh, if you’re buying a book purportedly written by Snooki, aren’t you guilty of information irresponsibility yourself?

Like a branded fragrance or clothing line, the novel — once quaintly considered an artistic endeavor sprung from a single creative voice — has become another piece of merchandise stamped with the name of celebrities, who often pass off the book as their work alone despite the nearly universal involvement of ghostwriters. And the publishing industry has been happy to oblige.

Celebrity Books and Ghostwriters - Noticed - NYTimes.com

Loss-making Groupon defines itself as profitable | Business blog | Business, finance, media and technology views from the Financial Times – FT.com

Ignoring GAAP in such a self-serving way surely qualifies as information irresponsibility.

The S-1 filing shows that Groupon had 83m subscribers at the end of March and its revenues rose from a total of $713m in 2010 to $645m in the first quarter of 2011 alone.

Meanwhile, it made a loss according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles of $390m in 2010 and $103m in the first quarter of 2011.

…

How exactly does it “adjust” its operating income, you may ask? By ignoring both the cost of stock-based compensation and the huge amount it spends on online marketing.

Loss-making Groupon defines itself as profitable | Business blog | Business, finance, media and technology views from the Financial Times – FT.com

Google +1 is Available Now: Why it Matters & Why it May Not Work

Another step in the inexorable trudge toward customizing my web experience so that I never encounter an idea I’m inclined to dislike.  (Remember, information responsibility requires that I force myself to contemplate divergent ideas.)

Google's much-discussed +1 button became available for any and all website publishers today and it's a social initiative with a uniquely Google twist. Web travelers will be able to click the +1 button on any web page or ad they want to recommend (just generally recommend!) and then that page will be privileged in relevant searches performed by their Google account contacts. Searches on YouTube will show +1 results from Google contacts as well.

Google +1 is Available Now: Why it Matters & Why it May Not Work

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

For the individual speaker/reader/writer/thinker/voter, an important part of information responsibility is understanding how metaphor both clarifies and distorts reality.  Why shouldn’t large organizations also work to understand metaphor?

All this to say: The Metaphor Program may represent a nine-figure investment by the government in understanding how people use language. But that's because metaphor studies aren't light or frilly and IARPA isn't afraid of taking on unusual sounding projects if they think they might help intelligence analysts sort through and decode the tremendous amounts of data pouring into their minds.

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Three kinds of software innovation, and whether patents could possibly work for them | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

The referred-to post is interesting for several reasons, including this gem of a sentence.  

In several technological eras, just about everything about applications has been a commodity except the data model, but the data model alone was enough to provide long-lasting product differentiation.

Makes you wonder:  Why is it that in most IT organizations, application developers are the cool kids and all the reward structures are designed to promote application quality, but data designers are considered the grown-up equivalent of the AV club?

Three kinds of software innovation, and whether patents could possibly work for them | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Pentagon to Consider Cyberattacks Acts of War - NYTimes.com

Before “deliberately ambiguous” inspires guffaws about the bumbling nature of government, folks would do well to remember that ambiguity arises in the most seemingly unambiguous contexts.  Previous posts on this blog have mentioned that companies often struggle to answer straightforward questions such as “how many customers do we have?”  For example, see here. 

Also worth noting that a little deliberate ambiguity might be exactly what’s called for in this case, to provide a little wiggle room for those responding to future cyber-attacks.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.

…administration and military officials acknowledged that the new strategy was so deliberately ambiguous (emphasis mine) that it was not clear how much deterrent effect it might have.

Pentagon to Consider Cyberattacks Acts of War - NYTimes.com