the route of all evil

Big White Guy (in Hong Kong) on SARS:

I've been meaning to mention this for some time, but one avenue of transmission of the SARS virus that's been overlooked or largely ignored is money.
...
An article I just read pointed out a study on how easily money can transmit diseases. The American Society of Microbiology examined dollar bills collected from students at a high-school game and from shoppers at a grocery stores. Of the bills collected, 7% contained serious pathogenic bacteria, 86% carried ordinary bacteria, and 7% were clean. Thirty years ago, the American Medical Association reported that 42% of notes and 13% of coins were contaminated by dangerous fecal germs (such as E. coli) and staphylococcus...

later, being a silver lining kind of guy, he adds:

...I like to maintain a balanced look at things. There are benefits to the outbreak.

I haven't seen anyone pick their nose in weeks.

in retrospect maybe it would have been better if we'd skipped putting a man on the moon and stuck to finding a cure for the common cold...

accuracy, fairness and balance

Accuracy, fairness and balance are said to be the fundamentals of good journalism.

but when there are two factions and the facts do favor one, or the preponderance of X (whatever X is) lies on one side, how can the reporter go about conveying this info to the reader in a fair and balanced way?

What is balance? if you are not balanced, can you still be fair?

presumably "balance" does not mean positioning the viewpoint of the story equidistant between said factions? or does it? if it does, doesn't accuracy (in mirroring the world) suffer?

is "contextual objectivity" ("an attempt to reflect all sides of any story while retaining the values, beliefs and sentiments of the target audience") the de facto meaning of Balance in the U.S. media as it is for Al Jazeera? (other Al Jazeera articles here)

those are my questions, & here are some writings that resonate with what I see as reality:

The media is failing if it does not educate its readership on the facts

on journalism, objectivity and bias:

The difference between fact and opinion is not a bright line: It is a spectrum. At one end you have "2 + 2 = 4," and on the other you have "Social Security should be privatized"

Tied up in balancing:

What we in the media are concerned about are allegations of bias or imbalance. Fairness is all, but the attaining of a position of perfect balance between two positions on an issue is something else entirely. The pursuit of balance has lead to vast slabs of inadequate copy that can be characterised as "he said-she said" journalism.

This holds that the story is adequately handled if you go first to one side then the other and line the comments up side by side. What might be said might be highly misleading or completely untrue or just meaningless drivel but who cares - journalism is about collecting and collating opposing comments.

There are a myriad of difficulties with this approach. Who said there is only two points of view to most issues? [If it's] a Tweedledee and Tweedledum affair of two sides equally and mutually scared of upsetting the same bunch of horses, the comments can usually be predicted pretty perfectly and won't amount to much anyway. The usual suspects for comment will be those with their hands up, and those least likely to have anything new, different or challenging to say.

The alternative view is that the story is not done, unless you are telling the punter what is really going on. Simply collecting and collating the he saids and she saids won't do that, but requiring comments to be meaningful and challenging those that are untruthful might. This usually implies going to he and she for their comments after a bit of basic digging into the story, rather than going there first and only there.

what ails journalism:

Some critics charge that objectivity is illusory to start with since journalists inevitably control the sources (or, as is sometimes the case, sources control the journalists). Others feel that the objectivity mindset leads to point-counterpoint or he said/she said formulas of news reporting that ultimately have a paralyzing effect on the public. So long as journalists see themselves as detached, value-neutral observers, news becomes a mere recital of context-free information -- often irrelevant, often misleading.

On balance as equidistance:

You [reporters] think you've covered a story when you put yourself equidistant between two groups and then you don't have to evaluate who's telling the truth or what their records are." -- Jeff Cohen

objectivity:

Patty Calhoun: "I think it's more important that we pursue the truth, and I think that's what we're doing. By saying objectivity isn't out there, what we're saying is you cannot, bottom line, be objective because you're going to go in with certain biases. You're going to go in and say I'm a white woman without a girdle who's writing a story. I'm writing it differently than a white woman in a girdle on a daily newspaper might be. Those biases are there and that's going to rule out objectivity, but you can certainly pursue accuracy and fairness and the truth, and that pursuit continues."

Kim Elton:

Michael Kinsley, a journalist, once noted that if a politician declares that two plus two is five, reporters might note in the story that the position is not without some critics. Indeed, he added, journalists probably would quote another politician in the opposite party saying the sum should be four. They might even quote a third politician suggesting there is a possible compromise between the advocates of `five' and the advocates of`four'.

By strict journalism standards the story headlined "Politicians battle over sums" would be balanced if all three politicians are quoted. But readers who don't know what the sum really is or how math really works will have to guess at the truth and may go for the most facile quote.

Reporting that reflects reality instead of `spin' too often is limited by the radical agnosticism in the media that refuses to classify any quote as untrue...

Deni Elliott (in a much more general and wide ranging article):

If a statement known to be false is worth publication, news organizations should help their readers understand that the statement ought not to be believed. The era in which news organizations could claim that they ought not be accountable for knowingly printing falsehoods disappeared in the 1950s coverage of Senator Joe McCarthy and his unchallenged claims of communists in our midst.

psychology today

on inferring other peoples' motives -
a few months back I was talking to someone who mentioned offhand that being manipulative was the normal human condition. which blew me away. then yesterday ran across this MMPI description:

Amorality -...
High: Justifies manipulativeness by projecting own selfish opportunistic and exploitive tendencies onto others.
Low: Denies that other people are selfish, opportunistic, and manipulative.
...A unique scale. It's not as pathological as "Amorality" sounds. It would be better to call it, "Manipulativeness", or what Alex Caldwell (1988) likes to call it, "Opportunism"...

and in combination with other recent events it got me thinking about how we as a species - not just the Opportunists - do infer motives, and I think projection is the way we all do it - i.e. an awful lot of the inference comes from just mentally putting our own psyches into the other person's, uh, shoes. So as a mirror it can be informative.

(digression - footwear metaphor complaint - of course it hurts when the shoe is on the other foot! this is to be expected, says nothing about the intrinsic worth of the shoe.)

Lectures on The Emerging Mind are still in process but if all are as good as the first one (Phantoms in the Brain), read. The explanation of why we laugh will shed scales from your eyes.

definition for today:
witzelsucht (vit'sel-zoocht) [Ger.] - "A mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at which the patient himself is intensely amused."

and a very interesting article from Paul Krugman on the evolutionary psychology of investing (The Ice Age Cometh), and why we do so badly at it...

The more I look at the amazing rise of the U.S. stock market, the more I become convinced that we are looking at a mammoth psychological problem. I don't mean mammoth as in "huge" (though maybe that too), but as in "elephant". Let me explain...

happy Iraq links

from Electrolite, wonderful Time mag photo. of Infantrywoman Felicia Harris making herself at home at Chez Uday...

and POW James Riley and others from his company found safe.

i covet my neighbor's truck

snow again this morning.
truck reappeared.

we sure have some fine vehicles in this town.

smorgasbord, not local, mostly not timely

Everyone else is linking to the report by Eason Jordan (chief news executive of CNN) on The News We Kept to Ourselves in order to keep the CNN Baghdad bureau open.

Snake robots. How long until either robotic or live snakes can be equipped with "invisible fence" style collars (well, microchips) and let loose in your yard's gopher/mole tunnels to terminate their makers? seems like an idea whose time is coming...

from the tech blog of ken, a vegetarian saw:

With the device installed in a consumer-grade tablesaw, a company representative fed a hot dog into the spinning blade, using the hot dog as a substitute for a wayward finger. Remarkably, the blade stopped the instant it touched the hot dog, allowing the dog to escape with no more than a light scratch.

and, delving back to the Pleistocene of the web, a quote from C.J. Silverio:

...The net is precious to me because it gives ordinary human beings a way to communicate with other ordinary human beings. Corporations have too many ways to cram their ads down my throat. Human beings have the net...

and she wants you to go out and start a weblog:

...Don't give the world another glorified multimedia dot-finger file. Give the world your art, your music, your poetry, your political rants, your short stories, your first grade photos, your shareware and freeware, your archives of hobby stuff, your hints about how to make great tie-dye, your really handy Perl script, your list of the ten best bookstores in the Greater Podunk area. You know something that nobody else knows. You can do something that nobody else can do quite the same way. You've made something that the rest of the world has never seen...

remember, it's free quick and easy - and surely you could post better stuff than this. So go here to start your weblog. (although if you want to put up anything but text, money must change hands)

on Iraq

(edited to remove wild claims that might be substantiated in fact or might not but i have no confidence to judge)
via David Theroux via Dan Gillmor, the tearing down of Saddam's statue looks different from a distance. my not very educated guess is that inter-ethnic hostilities and the general inclination of the Bush administration to shy away from substantive policy issues make the near-term future of Iraq not look so good. It's a lot easier to tear down than to rebuild.

via bodyandsoul via stoutdem via slacktivist, here's a donor's guide to aid for Iraq.

via Dan Gillmor again, a great suggestion by Jeff Jarvis to support Iraqi freedom of the press by helping Iraqis to start weblog newspapers:

Weblogs give them the chance to publish freely, overnight, with no expense of printing presses and paper, no production equipment needed, no distribution network needed, no investment at all.
The beauty of weblogging is that it is the world's cheapest -- no, history's cheapest -- means of publishing. Weblogging brings the power of the press down to the people. And these people need it...

(of course initially there would not be huge #s of iraqi readers of these weblogs...)
Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo making good points (which you will have to go & read, am not summarizing) on the looting:

...I think it is virtually inevitable that you're going to have some period of rupture -- a window of time when there's an utter vacuum of authority -- when a government like this falls under military assault...

make your will now, avoid the rush; or, howdy from Chicken Little

It kind of looks like SARS is on its way. BTW sarswatch.org is a good place for info/links. (and hopefully unlike the Agonist the author doesn't plagiarize)

Also see the April 11 WHO report on Status of the outbreak and lessons for the immediate future.

my suspicion is that those of us whose colds always turn into $%^& bronchitis or pneumonia anyway best make the most of the time that's left, unless They figure out how to treat it soon.

question: in the short run health care will be swamped and the economy will tank, but if it cleans out us weak & sickly, won't that reduce health care costs & make the economy stronger in the longer run? and what an ingenious way to save Social Security...

on a lighter note...
great bumpersticker sighting:

I [heart] Explosives

which is running neck&neck with the previous Top NC sighting, namely

Warning: I drive like you do

and in case I'm wrong and sky is not falling, here's the pre-registration form for the Calif. "do not call" anti-telemarketing list.

fine art in Nevada City

Mike's truck is downtown this morning exposing itself to passers-by. At least i assume it is still Mike's truck. Having seen it evolve from something near normality to its present splendor, sure hope it is not for sale (vehicles parked in that spot often are) - would hate to see it driven out of town.

apologies for image lack of quality, the real thing is much better.

fish wrap, cynicism, honor

ok, even the freshest part of this almost a week old, but...

Cynicism pervades Top Leadership (the feudal lords, if you will) at The Union. And perhaps in many if not most cases it's justified, and protects against gullibility; however when you see the world through cynic-colored glasses you're likely to make errors in the opposite direction, and ascribe cynical or base motives to honorable, decent people who are are basing their decisions on ethics, not on political maneuvering.

And yes, such people do exist.

To wit:

In last Saturday's editorial touching on the County supes' pro-war resolution, re the Nevada City Council deciding not to pass an anti-war resolution, the editorial said:

The council sensibly decided to not enter THAT lion's den.

Sounds like a calculated political decision, albeit one The Union agrees with. But the reporting at the time of city council meeting shows it in a different light:

"It is not inclusive," Mayor David McKay said of the resolution. McKay, who said he had been to a peace march in January, said the proposed resolution did not represent all of Nevada City's residents.

And of course he was correct; it didn't represent me, for one (am probably the only Nevada County resident who is still undecided on the war). And when I read the article I was proud to have have him as as our mayor; not everyone understands that achieving consensus (or as much of one as possible) is part of the job.

(aside, from the Grass Valley and Truckee City Councils:

Grass Valley Mayor Patti Ingram and Vice Mayor DeVere Mautino do not believe a stand against the war is within the City Council's purview, regardless of one's feelings. "I think that would be a pretty dumb move on our part," Mautino said...

Truckee will not take a position either. "We have a tradition of not taking positions on global issues," Truckee Mayor Ted Owens said Sunday.

)

The other case is that of former supervisor Bruce Conklin (who lost by 20 votes after his opposition's campaign coffers received a $28,000 still-mysterious donation); this article and this editorial questioned the ethics/motivations behind his being hired by the Nevada County Land Trust with money that the outgoing supervisors had voted (4-0) to give to the Land Trust.

Unquestionably, if you don't know the background to this story, it looks fishy. But this is a small community and we do know the background, most of which The Union's article and editorial neglected to mention.

First, was giving the money to the Land Trust an otherwise-unexpected course of action?

Clearly in most communities the answer would be yes--if you bequeath your money to the county, you expect your county to spend it, not to give the bulk of it to an entirely different organization to distribute. However, Nevada County right now is not like most communities. Here's the background:

• To my knowledge it is undisputed that the money was bequeathed to Nevada County, for parks and open space.
  
• At least one member of the new pro-property-rights regime of county supervisors made it clear that, given the opportunity, he would not spend the money in accordance with its donor's wishes. (so much for property rights...)
  
• Therefore (given that there was only a month or so of time to allocate the money before the new group was in control) the only way to make sure that the money was spent as its donor wished was to put it in the hands of a non-governmental organization.
  
• ...preferably one devoted to its donor's cause, namely preserving open space and other near-natural treasures.
  
• ...and preferably one that was avowedly non-denominational, apolitical, willing-seller-willing-buyer etc.
  
• which would appear to narrow the field down to a single potential recipient, namely the Land Trust.

Second, was hiring Bruce Conklin an otherwise-unexpected development, i.e. was there any indication that he was not the most suited for the job?

I don't know the answer; I don't know who the other applicants were. I'll tell you though that my reaction on reading of his hiring was "of course, what a perfect choice". Not "it's all a political setup and he must have bought them off". And based on his experience he has qualifications that no other applicant could match.

yes, maybe I'm naive. certainly in my past i've erred in being too gullible, but my gut says that with a few people, even if you don't know them well, you can tell. There are people who are sincere and there are people who are not. There are people who take cheap shots and there are people who do not. There are people who are authentic and people who are not. There are people who do sleazy things for personal gain and people who do not. And, obviously, vast majorities lie in between.

Please excuse naive earnestness here; it's temporary.
And I count David McKay and Bruce Conklin among those whose integrity is obvious; they are cut from the same cloth as Jimmy Carter. The media was hostile to Carter too; remember the scoffing that went on, when he announced that "human rights" would be a consideration in determining which countries to have good relations with? When he confessed to feeling lust for women other than his wife? When he said "I will not lie to the American people"?

ie. executive summary: while it is good to be on lookout for less than straightforward motives it is not good to just assume that that must be what's there.

(for other articles and letters on the Bruce Conklin/Land Trust issue, on The Union's Search Page type Conklin "Land Trust".)

non-consumer reports

1. [solved mystery and slightly cranky commentary deleted]
   
   
2. did some research on web, on those credit-card-sized digital cameras, & found
   a) lots of sites scamming Google by uploading stale pages every day (note to site owners: this does not generate goodwill)
   and
   b) Radio Shack started selling one, the FlatFoto, back in November for a paltry $80. And while it doesn't have a flash (as in bulb, not as in memory) still it seems worth buying/using until the flashy ones come out.
   
   went to get one yesterday, and found that no, Radio Shack doesn't have them anymore, that was just for xmas, but they do happen to have an equally tiny one for just $300...
   

the past

ran across this just now while digging through old email. reminds me of a few Blogger posts I have transiently known...

> YESTERDAY
>
> Yesterday,
> All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
> Now my database has gone away.
> Oh I believe in yesterday.
>
> Suddenly,
> There's not half the files there used to be,
> And there's a milestone hanging over me
> The system crashed so suddenly.
>
> I pushed something wrong
> What it was I could not say.
>
> Now all my data's gone and
> I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
>
> Yesterday,
> The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
> I knew my data was all here to stay,
> Now I believe in yesterday.

those supermarket cards

They dont save you money. ("Non-sale prices at stores with card programs 28%-71% higher")

They violate your privacy:

According to one privacy expert, at least one national grocery chain voluntarily handed over to the government records from its customer loyalty card database in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

And others say customer databases -- including those culled from travel, financial and insurance industries -- are routinely shared with the government for surveillance purposes.

They will violate it further in future:

The writer, who wished to remain anonymous, was employed in software development and worked on a data mining system to be used with card programs. The most interesting comments concern other businesses that were closely watching the project:

"[...] one of my jobs was to wow potential customers. I had to take them through my data center and development labs and show them our stuff. The usual suspects were there - various marketers and database mongers. But the most interesting were the reps from the insurance companies. we had a BUNCH of 'em."

"The reason they were interested is that they wanted to collect lifestyle information on people so that individuals can be charged according to their lifestyles. 'We see that you eat too much red meat so your life insurance will be higher than the norm'. 'We see that you've bought a lot of electrical supplies which means you're doing unauthorized electrical work on your house. Therefore we're canceling your homeowners policy.' that kind of stuff..."

But you can fight back:

"If you shop at Safeway, I need your assistance in creating an army... an army of clones.

Send me an email with your address and I'll send you a label with my membership number and bar code on it. When you get the label in the mail, stick it on the back of your own Safeway Club Card, carefully covering the old zebra stripes.

Anyone who does this will be lumping their shopping data together with mine. Together we might amass a profile of the single greatest shopper in the history of mankind..."

metablogging

Did Herb Caen have the first weblog?

some days i am a (comparative) fount of mellifluence, other days just an inarticulate quotemonger. But being an I.Q. isn't completely pointless, it's just being a disk jockey in a different medium.

(when did disk jockeys become "Personalities"? how do you tell the difference between a "personality" and a "person"?)

Web[ma]ster's II

Self indulgence: acting upon the assumption that anything which interests you will be of equal interest to your reader. For examples see previous and following posts.