“Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We’ve tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into: The ‘minority of the week’ story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., ‘Here are our Latinos!’). The ‘minority bad news story of the…
“It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don’t know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One…
“The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it’s GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a ‘better’ customer, it…
“Detective Smith — who calls himself a ‘Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy’ — has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her…
“The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today. | They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again…
“Kelley’s insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC’s Nightly News, Newsweek Online and National Public Radio.| The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized — lifted word-for-word from a…
“University officials say once file traders are notified they’re breaking the law, they don’t tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it’s trying to send a message to administrators and students.” —RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)…
“Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal expense.|But as video war…
“Today’s web sites, particularly e-commerce sites, can be more complex than standard software products that often confine users to a very limited set of activities. Web tasks are also vastly more complex than those users have with most software applications. For example, our tests asked users to complete shopping tasks. No two users looked for…
“Just as Old Testament prophets called for conversion and repentance, doctors have to ‘convert’ patients away from smoking, obesity, stress, alcohol and other indulgences… As prognosticators, doctors foretell what is going to happen if patients don’t change their way of life. The prophet role provides power over people. Some doctors consciously avoid it. They encourage…
“Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a ‘Second Superpower’, it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.|Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the…
“The Hassans decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their farming village that showed a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic. | Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: ‘To be safe, stay…
“A gentle waterfall pours from the cliff into a large aqua pool. The rocks are molded concrete and the pool reeks of chlorine. Under clear resin, our tabletop bears a colorful design of the Mayan alphabet and calendar. Down one level to the right is an area with carpeted steps and a large video screen…
“Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors and even led journalists…
“Children don’t go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the ‘traditional’ past-times of children and replaced…
“Because McLuhan saw the media as extensions of the human body — printed books as extensions of eyes, radios as extensions of ears — he believed that each new technological advance would reshape humanity and traumatize it, too. ‘We shape our tools and our tools shape us.’…. The tanks rolling into Iraq from the south…
A student writes: “I’m not quite sure how I could make the topic of ‘digital divide’ into something controversial that allows the reader to form their own opinion.” Digital Divide: Looking for ControversyLiteracy Weblog) I did a Google search: “digital divide” controversy and came up with a few good leads. While links from the first…
After my 1:00 class today I saw a colleague at the other end of a hall, struggling with a load of books that was about to drop. I momentarily interrupted a conversation with a student to try to pick up the items my colleague was dropping. The colleague looked at me with that familiar “I’ve-got-the-flu-please-kill-me-now”…
“On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy. The primary subject of the photo was a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. After publication, it was noticed that several civilians in the…
Technology may solve problems, but it also spawns new technology to solve the new problems caused by recently-spawned technology. While one group of upright entrepreneurs works to protect the privacy of victims targets of clothing-penetrating 3D holographic body scans (marketed for airport security), a group of hackers works just as hard to remove the digital…