Awas

(Awas is Malaysian for "If you fall in that hole it's your own damn fault".*)

Effect Measure is not safe to visit today. The title of this post draws a pained request from a reader, but the proprietor's response is not at all helpful.

From someone in Metafilter (here) a while back:

I remember reading at one point that having a song stuck in your head stimulates part of your lower brain, and that the dumber and simpler the song is, the more the lower part of your brain likes it. It's like having an inner moron.

Thought experiment for business people and developers

Picture this -



It's summer.
It's around noon.
It's maybe a hundred degrees outside.

You're at home.
The house is cool.
But you need a few things from the world.

Are you going to get in your car and drive to the sea of blacktop (sporting mini-atolls of charming tiny trees and drought-tolerant shrubs,
while frying cars and customers sunny side up) to patronize the local bricks-and-mortar establishment?

Or will you just say to yourself "I can find it on the web, or else make do with what I've got"?

I know what I do.

If there was a shopping center with shade in this town, it'd be making money hand over fist.



The Fowler center. Fry your fowl here (and at every other shopping center in Nevada County).

The shopping center is young, they're growing the shade as fast as they can right?


Wrong. Note the dieback; some trees are shrinking. (tip to landscapers: trees need water)

A solar grove solves the problem elsewhere, but up here the wildlife would be likely to log it.

paging Sherlock Holmes

May 2007 update: am removing letters from trigger words, in the hope that this will keep Google from misleading people into looking at the lovely photo. If *I* don't know what bit me, this page isn't going to help *you* identify anything either.


Who did this?

It happened this morning, in garden and/or on lawn. It started out a mosquito-bite-sized white lump, with a red pinpoint center; now - 15 hours later - it's 4 inches in diameter and fixing to take over the free world.

Not a black w---w - their bites are supposed to cause intense pain, and this doesn't hurt.
_____________

Wednesday update - it's less impressive today, but here's how it looked by Tuesday morning, at roughly 8 inches wide -



(there's something awkward about flaunting one's bloated corpulence like this...would that it was a shapely leg instead. On the other hand, seeing as how I get to keep it, maybe a little more gratitude is called for. And fortunately it is not the leg of two weeks ago, after weedeating in gravel, which could have passed for an Appaloosa's)

In any case - Anonymous in comments has raised the specter of L---, and Russ wanted an update ASAP (sorry Russ; my excuse is "the venom made me slothful" - sad to say, this was no radioactive sp----.)

I would fear L--- too, but: first, I got it in the backyard, which a) is in town and b) is occupied by a very suburban lawn and ground cover; no self-respecting t--- would visit here. (although it does call forth the memory of one afternoon at the movies after a morning hauling brush, when in Theatre Number Two a t--- made its tactile presence known. I grabbed it between thumb and forefinger, but didn't want to walk out right in the middle of the scene to flush it; later on when I left, I looked, and - the t--- was gone.

Whoever you were, who next made its acquaintance, by engaging in that high-risk behavior "going to a movie" - sorry.
(And if you're the same person who was outdoors in Orinda decades ago, when my cousin's lunch exited the plane after I'd shown her how much fun parabolic-flight-induced weightlessness can be - double sorry.)

Related - respect and appreciate your Western Fence Lizards, whose blood purges t---s of L---.

Returning from digressions -
It also shouldn't be L--- because

• It was sudden - bite and rash happened in same day
  
• No t--- visible.
  and
  
• The colors, man. They're not the right ones, or not in the right order, for L---.
  

Shades of the Firesign Theatre's "Name that Disease" ("you've got...the plague.")

The California Poison Control System's sp---r bites page had a description which matched perfectly:

While most sp---r bites are not dangerous, there is a group of sp---rs that can produce bite wounds that look similar to a br--- rec---e sp---r bite... the running sp---r, jumping sp---r, wolf sp---r, taran---a, sac sp---r, orbweaver sp---r and the northwestern brown sp---r.
...pain or burning at the bite site in the first 10 minutes. The bite from this group is usually described as looking like a "tar--t" or "b---'s----." The center of the wound is usually a bl---r surrounded by a r------d area. A pale or blanched area may surround the discolored r------d area. The bl---r may rupture, leaving an open ulcer.

With the benefit of hindsight and web research:

• Do not sit down upon the lawn in shorts, early, when it's cool and moist and the lawn denizens are likely to be about, to feel threatened by the imminent descent of mountains of pallid meat.
  
• Wash the wound and put antibiotic ointment on it.
  
• Contact your doctor and ask if s/he wants you to get oral antibiotics - sp---rs typically don't put a lot of effort into hygiene, so their fangs can inject microbes as well as v---m.

Nobody's proposed a br--- rec---e culprit, but since we're on the topic of venomous sp---rs -

Unfortunately The Union's Search function is, as of Sunday at least, still defective - has it been a whole year yet? - so when I searched for local citizen scientist Bob G.'s discovery of the "plaid re---se"* - yes, EZ-Off Oven Cleaner has eight legs and a f---le on its back, and is considerably more likely to attack - I couldn't find it, else would provide the link.

oh, the marketing...searching Google for brown re---se info, this Google Ad came up:

Rec---e Sp---rs Great deals on Re---se Sp---rs Shop on eBay and Save!

[Quote from re---se arachnologist Rick Vetter (as recounted by B.G.) along the lines of "Why is it that a carpenter can recognize a br--- re---se from 20 feet away while I have to look at its [private parts]?" will appear here, when the scrap of paper it's written on resurfaces.]
Meanwhile, from Vetter here-

There are no populations of br--- re---se sp---rs living in California. ... The br--- re---se is the Richard Jewell of the sp---r world.
...
People get all worked up and say, "BUT IF THEY FOUND ONE BROWN RECLUSE IN CALIFORNIA THAT MEANS .." It means they found one, it is smashed, mangled, mutilated, pickled in alcohol, dead, deceased, passed on, no more, ceased to be, bleeding demised, bereft of life, resting in peace, gone to meet its maker, pushing up the daisies, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible, etc. and no longer poses a threat to humanity (not that it posed a great threat to begin with). THIS is an ex-sp---r!

_____________________

Mon. Aug 1: I don't think anyone saw this sp---r either, but it must have been a whopper. Bet they had to repair the roof...
(via)

Restoring honor and integrity to the White House

Updated.
It seemed Karl Rove violated the Espionage Act - "(1) possession of (2) information (3) relating to the national defense (4) which the person possessing it has reason to believe could be used to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation and (5) wilful communication of that information to (6) a person not entitled to receive it."
(update - as Russ Steele points out in comments, this assumes that Rove _did_ provide the info to Novak, but newspapers now report he says he didn't, he merely confirmed it.
On the other hand, apparently he did volunteer the info to Matt Cooper of Time, so...)

The Union sees the news as "Rove's publicity could jeopardize his image" - this being the headline they applied to Tom Raum's July 12 AP story*, elsewhere* titled "CIA Leak Probe Focuses on Rove".

It echoes their June 20 "Downing Street memos reveal British reaction to U.S. plans for 'regime change' in Iraq" - I did an informal survey to see if anyone could infer the actual news from this, and the only person who had any inkling was an NPR listener, so knew full well.
(although the article's apparent AP title, "Memos Show British Fretting Over Iraq War", isn't a whole lot better)

The mind reels

Tuesday update: toned down some wording, added a question.

It takes a lot to raise me from the moribund, but The Union has done it.

They've won prizes from the California News Publishers Association's Better Newspapers Contest (PDF evidence) - for a feature by David Mirhadi*, and for Becky Trout's reporting, which was used to form part of The Union's pre-election volley against Conklin - widely regarded to have been a (successful) smear.

Four questions for Becky Trout -

1. Are you proud of this series, as it appeared in The Union?
   
   
2. When you wrote the "Crowd Defends Land Trust" story (the more informative headline, "Investigation Finds No Wrongdoing", wasn't used) for this series, was it published as you wrote it? (did you wait until your sixth paragraph (and the story's jump to the back page) to note that "[counsel found that]...based on current evidence, Conklin's hiring by the Land Trust did not violate any laws governing conflict of interest for public officials", or was this the editor's doing?)
   (For any newcomers to this story, here's a summary with links; Yubanet's report is here)
   
   
3. Would you be willing to discuss how this series came to be written, on the record?
   
   
4. Who (plural) thought it was a good idea to submit the series in this contest?

Update:
I went looking to see what the judges for the contest were like, and ran across this from Jack Ronald * on the hardships in running a newspaper in Russia:

...civil war that tore the country apart...killed about 50,000 people and continues to haunt the country’s politics. Newspapers played an unfortunate role in the conflict, Ronald said, fanning the flames of ethnic and religious hatred.

"More than one editor in Tajikistan has told me that the country’s newspapers have blood on their hands," Ronald said.

"Ironically, that excess may create an opportunity," he said. "Newspaper editors in Tajikistan have realized that if they are ever to win back credibility and the trust of their readers, they are going to have to go down the path of objective reporting.

"The best of the editors I’ve worked with are far ahead of their colleagues in other parts of Central Asia simply because they’ve seen the consequences of political rhetoric passed off as journalism."

Contest judge Chris Braithwaite also has thoughts worth reading.

press, pestilence and Pollard

On the press -

See Fred Clark on commercial bias in reporting, and Bruce Murphy's wonderful In the Belly of the Beast, a no-holds-barred account of his three years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Joseph Pulitzer quote (found in Nieman Watchdog):

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
(North American Review of May 1904)

The Greensboro News & Record gets recognized as one of Editor and Publisher's "ten papers that do it right". Not sure this is all that newsworthy, though - for it to be news, it'd have to be something we didn't already know.
(Update: July 4 NY Times article on the N&R)

On the avian flu pandemic -

From Recombinomics, the Pandemic timeline so far.

Effect Measure on the food shortage angle to the Osterholm "we're screwed" press briefing

Phila from Bouphonia on the coming pandemic -

(in a comment at EffectMeasure:)
...if the pandemic comes, half of America is going to be saying it's the wrath of God, and the other half's going to be saying that some shadowy cabal cooked it up in a lab. The idea that nature has active powers all its own seems to be very much on the wane in the USA.
(and on his(?) own blog:)
Lately I've been thinking about the Republicans' nonsensical claim that we must fight terrorists in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them here. It'd be nice if we took that approach to epidemic disease. Given a choice between spending $300 billion of taxpayer money on the Iraq War, and $300 billion on global flu surveillance and research, I think I would've been tempted to pick the latter.

Dave Pollard on Making Peace With the End of Civilization -

As Canadian archaeologist Ronald Wright says, if we destroy the ecosystem that sustains us "nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea".

...we are wrong in the uniquely human conceit that we are in charge of our own destiny and that there is some kind of collective politic and collective intelligence and 'free will' that can be harnessed to move us all in a chosen direction. We are nothing more or less than six billion creatures individually doing what we are driven to do moment by moment.

Of bluegrass bands and blogs

The Father's Day bluegrass festival happened at the fairgrounds this weekend; and walking around, listening to the knots of people playing, the blog parallels were striking - mostly A-listers on the main stage playing to the crowd; a multitude of great smaller-traffic(k)ed sites in the "long tail" of the campground; the same blurring of boundaries between listener and performer; and from their talk, a fair number from North Carolina.

sorry, no photos. I was an idiot and did not bring the camera.

Papers vs. bloggers

The only cases I recall of newspapers playing "Goliath vs. David" (aka "quash the blogger") involved the Tulsa World's attempt to stop a blogger from linking to and quoting from it, and the New York Times's attempt to make Robert Cox take down his New York Times Columnist Corrections Page.

Have there been others?


Related - in previous post's comments, local blogger Russ Steele notes that the EFF's new Legal Guide for Bloggers is now online. It's very well done; if you like it too, invest in our future - send them money.

Other outings of the anonymous - rumored, attempted, actual

June 30: I'd forgotten that blogger (and talk show radio 'personality') Hugh Hewitt outed PressThink commenter 'Ben Franklin' last winter. I guess blogging doesn't magically instill ethics.

Mon. June 20 update: South Knox Bubba outs himself, in response to the local paper's publisher's threat to do it; the formerly anonymous Atrios weighs in.


Start of a collection. (do you know of any others, and their circumstances?)
There may be plenty that we'll never know of, or shouldn't publicize, since the natural inclination would be not to draw attention to it, to minimize the harm. And the harm can be substantial: as one correspondent pointed out, if you're a woman who's escaped a violent ex-husband - or you're another victim of violence - whether or not your name gets printed can be a matter of life and death.

I asked the writer of Medpundit about the publishing of her name in an article some years ago; here's her account*:

The AMA didn't out me. I gave them permission to use my real name.

Although I haven't been interviewed by a lot of reporters, those who have spoken to me have always made a point of asking me how I wanted to be identified. My local paper did an article about Medpundit and the reporter took care not to mention who I was, although I gave her my name and phone number so she could make sure I was really a doctor.

P.S. I can't think of anyone off-hand who has been outed. The only ones I can think of are people who made their names known themselves, like Atrios (who revealed himself as Duncan Black, about a year ago; Luskin had tried to out him earlier) and "Jane Galt".

There have been cases where people were outed for cause, having posted under false or misleading circumstances:
Libertarian 'Girl' (see here), and Buckhead/Harry MacDougald and "Mike" (info).

Also, The One True b!X (of the Portland Communique) recently outed an anonymous commenter with relevant undisclosed connections - excellent work.

(mine, from May 31)

Slogging

Sun: two minor changes (added an asterisk, removed a season)

Quoted (from here) in Staci Kramer's Journos and Bloggers: Can Both Survive? at OJR:

What journalists can learn from bloggers:

• you can blur the line between the personal and professional without corrupting the process;
  
• you can learn to improvise in real time;
  
• how to have a conversation with their readers;
  
• to be humble - you don't know everything.
  

Bloggers can learn from journalists:

• the value of leg work;
  
• the nature of accountability;
  
• that editing is a good thing;
  
• to be humble - you don't know everything.
  

FYI, profile updates - updated the NCFocus profile and policies page a day or two ago, to reflect my new status. Conversely I've turned off access to my Blogger profile (here) since it's rather confused and shows my "most recent" posts as being ones from ages ago, when a lot was going on that I don't want to rehash right now.

Also made a few updates to Outed by The Union. Here's a sadly amusing reaction from a big-city blogger:

...If the newspaper has an ombudsman, I would suggest that you complain to him/her, and to the editor in chief. At least let the people in who are supposed to be in charge of ethics at the paper know what happened.

Yup. "Our newspapers are run with local autonomy* by publishers and management teams who are leaders in their communities." (*)

-40- *

On stuff and status

The hidden costs of too much stuff (via) -

... "We did a focus group on why people renovated their kitchens," he says. "They said it was because their friends had done it."...

On Choosing the Right Pond -

"Perhaps those high-income readers who do not consider their current high relative standing that important will find it illuminating to consider a simple thought experiment..."

A tiny rammed-earth house -

In a sense, the overheated real estate market and the passion for all things domestic have spawned two distinctly different construction extremes, like siblings destined to be forever at odds. One is the proverbial monster house, a creature suckled on the principle that bigger is better, no matter how far the commute, no matter how lackluster the design. The other might be called the infill infant, a quieter creature we need to embrace more often.

Owning a home changes you -

...being a property owner ... claims our inner real estate and begins to define who we are, what we think about and how we see the world.

guess I don't get out much

Spent some time driving around Penn Valley last weekend - and OMG, I had no idea, someone has been working overtime waving the magic luxury home estate construction wand over it. The results are stunning, in all senses of the word. (the fourth time one is kicked in the head by a mule...)

When I lived there it was different.

Do people ride their horses, or just use them as lawn ornaments?

Enron - the smartest guys in the room

Tuesday: got rid of the italics.

Excellent film, highly recommended. Am told tonight was its last night at Sierra Cinemas but that it'll be at the Sunday night movie at Nevada Theater one of these Sunday nights.

Most valuable to me was the footage of CEOs and other executives lying, when we know - due to subsequent events and revelations - that they're lying. Usually you don't get the opportunity to calibrate your personal intuitive lie detector like that.

And I'm not voting for Arnold, ever.

_________________________

Friday additions, as various memories of watching the film kept surfacing -
The way corruption can creep in, when the little coverup needs a bigger coverup and so on...;
The courage of Sherron Watkins;
The difference between loyalty to an institution and loyalty to those who are running it into the ground; synchronicity (aka implicit attentional selection?) with Deep Throat/Mark Felt here (and see Lex on Felt)

And how can an entire audience (albeit small, and smaller with self and companion excluded) not be Simpsons fans? It was a disturbing moment, when exactly two laughs rang out.

Outed by The Union

(Summary of what happened is below the updates, here)
______________________________

Updates, most recent first:

Wed. June 29: I've described the interesting (to me) pattern of reactions to the outing in a comment at PressThink. Locally, still no responses (beyond the already-published email exchanges). I haven't been pushing though; just left an ignored reminder and made another unreturned phone call to circ. director.

Monday June 20: No response from city editor, no response from circ director, one polite response from the Spam Firewall at smtp.theunion.com:

I'm sorry to inform you that the message below [sent 2 days before] could not be delivered. When delivery was attempted, the following error was returned.
: connect to 66.92.199.3[66.92.199.3]: Connection refused.
the message::
Hello Craig, thanks for your response.
People who place classified ads with you are advertisers, correct?
(if I'm mistaken about this, please let me know)
Thanks -
Anna Haynes

Wednesday June 15: No response from city editor, nothing new on their blog. On separate topic, circ. director emailed back - "Unfortunately, audit information is something we only share with our advertisers." I've replied, asking if those who place a classified ad are advertisers.

Tuesday June 14: emailed The Union's city editor this morning asking if his recollections matched editor Pat Butler's; no response as yet. Didn't get a response from Mr. Butler on how I might get the circulation report, so I've emailed the circ. director, on the off chance that it works better than phone. No posts about the outing (or any new posts) on The Union's weblog.
Others have been more vocal:
Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has posted some pointed questions for David Mirhadi in The Union's weblog comments, reprinted here on his weblog. Robert is a master of blistering prose, and I am very glad he's on my side of the barricades this time...
Local blogger Sadie argues that it's inappropriate to have an anonymous blog if you engage in criticism of others. (which is why I shared my last name with the folks at The Union, thus violating a different principle, "don't tell a reporter anything you don't want reported.")
Also, belated thanks to global blogfather Dave Winer.

Monday June 13: a brief (three word) response from editor Pat Butler, in the email after this one.

Sunday June 12: Chewie's account is much clearer than mine. Ed Cone and John Robinson have also weighed in.
Related, and needing your contributions - today's post.
Sorry for the disorganized post below - like I said, Chewie does a much better job.

Friday June 10: I've sent a second reminder to each, along with an offer to donate $100 (each) to Hospice if they'll answer my questions.
(also performed minor cleanup and clarified some logic below.)

Friday June 3:
Email exchanges with the reporter and with the editor regarding my outing are now up on NCDocuments.
(BTW, my intent is to always ask and get permission before publishing emails, except in cases like this. Go, read, make up your own mind as to whether it was appropriate in this instance.)

In other news, The Union's publisher has raised $200 for Hospice today - he says he was not involved in the decision to print my name. Still no word from editor Pat Butler or reporter David Mirhadi on my questions to them from two nights ago, as to who (besides Mirhadi) was involved in making the decision. Publisher says "call Pat Butler" - but the phone leaves no text trail, and people can be - and have been - snowed by misleading wording, and recollections can vary even when communication is in good faith, and at this point I loathe "he said she said". [snip]

Thursday June 2:
Should the title of this post revert back to the original "Outed, and Stonewalled, by The Union"?
Reporter David Mirhadi was the one who outed me, with full awareness that I had not given consent. [snip]
I've asked whether he had guidance in making this decision, and if so from whom, but answers have not been forthcoming.
Hospice of the Foothills is a very deserving organization, and the previous offer(below) went untouched, so I'll double it, for a slightly different question for the publisher - Jeff, $200 to Hospice if you'll tell me whether you were involved (directly or indirectly) in the decision to print my name. (answered Friday; he says he wasn't)
Thursday morning: Changed name of post to reflect correction.

Wednesday June 1 correction and updates:
In the comments below, Dixie Redfearn points out that she did email me, twice, in response to my email and voicemail. Dixie, I am very sorry - stupid move on my part. Moral of story, that others might do better (they probably will anyway) - when you set up a rule to automatically send emails to a folder, CHECK THE FOLDER.
I also got responses today, from editor and reporter. It was done deliberately.
________________________________________

Summary (updated Friday June 10) -
NCFocus is no longer an anonymous weblog. On Memorial Day, reporter David Mirhadi published my full name in The Union, deliberately, when I had asked him not to - he included NCFocus in a roundup of local blogs, pulling the synopsis and my first name from the blog, then plugging in my last name, which I'd provided in my email to him. I'd thought it was only ethical to provide it there; seems it was also naive.
(The third time one is kicked in the head by a mule, it is not a learning experience)

My email exchanges with reporter David Mirhadi and editor Pat Butler regarding circumstances of the decision to print my name * came to a halt when I asked Mr. Mirhadi to confirm or deny that he'd been aware he was outing an anonymous blogger, and when I asked who else had been involved in the decision.
(I'm told The Union's publisher was not involved.)

In fairness to those at The Union, I have not asked for an apology (and don't want one, in the paper itself) - what I most wanted from them was to know what happened and why.

________________________________________
the original post:


In their roundup of local weblogs yesterday (photo here), after I'd specifically asked reporter David Mirhadi "please don't use my last name", The Union published my full name.

The NCFocus background info they printed comes from the (old) Profiles and Policies page, where it's made clear that the weblog is anonymous.

Before they outed me, I'd made the point to them - numerous times - that this action is wrong:

• After The Union appeared * to have outed someone else, I pointed out (here) on their blog that exposing someone's identity without consent is not appropriate behavior.
  
  
• As I noted in The Union's weblog comments here, anonymity has value in a community like ours that historically has been rife with corruption and intimidation (by threats, vandalism, arson...). Silver lining: now I'm ideally situated to report whether it is all in the past. :-}
  
  
• (added June 3) And in off-topic comments (here) to the editor's very second post, I quoted and linked to Lisa Williams' writings on the need to allow anonymity.)
  

Emails to editor Pat Butler and reporter David Mirhadi, and readership editor Dixie Redfearn (no - see update above) asking who decided to publish my name, have gone unanswered.
(did they all take the day off?)

Superseded - see Thurs update above, he answered. This evening I've emailed publisher Jeff Ackerman, offering a $100 donation to Hospice in exchange for answers to these questions:

• Whose decision was it?
  
• What was the justification?

Stay tuned.

Advice for current and future bloggers: when something like this happens to you, it is really, really good to sleep on it before posting. The wisps of smoke now wafting from my ears are nothing like yesterday's jets of fire.

local and global

Two articles in The Union today related to discussions in their weblog - report on Mr. Spencer's apology ( after an exchange starting with this comment to this weblog post), and Lamphier will stay put, which started on the The Union's weblog with this post and subsequent commentary.

It's worth reading both blog and paper on these.


And, looking up to discover the existence of a wider world, we found Effect Measure reporting on and linking to Nature's special issue on bird flu:

Nature is doing nothing less than trying to jump start action on avian flu. That a private publication should find it necessary to take this on is a sad commentary on the dereliction of duty from local, national and international public health authorities...

(Here's Nature's fictional bird flu blog, to help you visualize what could be in our future.)

To glocalize *: we need our local public servants to take up blogging. They work for us; they should be telling us what they're up to. What is Nevada County's pandemic plan? Who is working on it? Where is it available for the public to read, and to share their collective wisdom? (Dan Gillmor says his readers know more than he does, and en masse, we do. )