Sunday, July 31, 2011

Social media is about "connections... and the ceaseless flow of time"

Insightful commentary from Paul Ford; much more at 

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/07/paul_ford_facebook_and_the_epiphanator_an_end_to_endings.html


"Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions...

"[Franzen] tells the Kenyon 21-year-olds, who were likely texting throughout the ceremony, that they need more love. If the sub-30-year-olds with whom I've worked are typical, these young men and women love — each other, or bands, or ideas — too much, they love too often, with a feral intensity and with the constant assistance of mobile devices. Maybe what he was telling them is that they should be more old.

" speech recalls another, very different commencement speech, by Apple CEO Steven Jobs to the 2005 class of Stanford. Jobs is the embodiment of California, all gold rush, less city-on-hill. At Stanford he invoked the Whole Earth Catalog as "one of the bibles of my generation" — its cut-and-paste aesthetic, hippie cheer, and promise of access to information a balm for his late-adolescent soul. The Whole Earth Catalog was a DIY-bible assembled by former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, far from the clanking Epiphanator. "We are as gods," reads the preface, "and we might as well get good at it."


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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Head Shots: a cartoonist's take on the debt debate

Wonder why music affects different people differently? Science may know.

Being a particular fan of both Barber and Glass, I was intrigued by these findings and what they suggest. You might be, too.

"What's that sound? It's your prolactin & dopamine talking in response to music." http://bit.ly/i33nOs

http://flavors.me/howard

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James Gleick has a useful overview of the current crop of Google books at the NYRB

Smart enough to grasp the basic issues, fair enough to summarize them and their critics, Gleick's overview -- drawn from reviews of a half-dozen current books -- is a good introduction to a subject I think needs attention: Google's march to global information hegemony. 

how-google-dominates-us
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?page=1

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GWB was president eight years and added $7 trillion to the national debt ...

... so, honestly, where were all the cries for a balanced budget amendment then? Can this kind of hypocrisy actually work on Americans? (I fear the answer is "yes.")

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infographics/us-national-debt

http://flavors.me/howard

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Friday, July 29, 2011

An illustration for our newspaper motto in 1976: "Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger"

Img_2424_-_version_2

This discussion of the motto we adopted for the Alaska Advocate in 1976 is taken from my forthcoming book about the Alaska newspaper war: Write Hard, Die Free. There's a sample chapter here.

We tried to make our intentions clear. Early on we seized on a motto suggested by a Daily News colleague and attributed variously to everybody from Mark Twain to Abbie Hoffman: Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger. We wanted to class it up a bit, so photog and art director Ken Roberts, a seminarian in his younger days, dusted off his Latin for a rough translation:

Sacre Boves Optimus Hamburgerus Fiant. Close enough for the girls we went with.

Want to be advised about the book and exactly when next spring it will be available? Just write me at howard.weaver (at) gmail.com and I'll add you to the list.

916.531.4561
More about Howard

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"Man, fuck cancer." "Seriously."

It's hard to "like" this post about cancer, but it's powerful and well worth looking at.

via xkcd.com on 7/28/11

Each quarter of the lanes from left to right correspond loosely to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

How "The West Wing" nailed the debt ceiling issue perfectly -- in 2005.

How The West Wing nailed the debt ceiling issue in 2005. Perfect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5igKuNF1rI&sns=tw h/t ckrewson

http://flavors.me/howard

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New York Times parodies its own anonymous source standards:

This anonymous source attribution in this New York Times story is like a parody: worse than no standards, this is pure laziness and expediency. Do they think we're stupid?

“There were concerns about him being named and the way he was parachuted in,” said one of these investors, speaking on condition of anonymity because he prefers not to discuss the issues with the news media. “These concerns remain.”

http://nyti.ms/rfrExW

Share what's new…

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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Yeah, guns are the answer: 5 dead, 3 wounded at Texas roller rink shooting

Texas, of course, has some of the loosest gun laws in the country, which may have something to do with the fact that the shooter happened to be armed at a roller rink birthday party.


http://flavors.me/howard

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Friday, July 22, 2011

Encounters with a Terrible Mind

After brief exposure, I can say two things about "terribleminds," a blog I recently encountered written by a freelancer who calls himself a "pen monkey":

1. His writing style is too frenetic and often somewhat precious for my taste; and
2. He comes up with insights I find highly original and useful to me in thinking about evolving media.

Not always, which is hardly surprising. After all, I'm just not interested in or even engaged with many of the subjects he explores. But when our interests cross, I've found him provocative and stimulating.

Like this, from a recent post mainly focused on Google+:

"Twitter isn’t for everyone. I get that. But it’s definitely my one true social media gal pal. It took the formula put out by Myspace and Facebook and flipped it on its ear. Twitter is the beat poetry version of social media. It’s some crass noisy combination of soapbox-shouting, flea-market-hawking, carnival-barking, stand-up-joke-telling, and haiku-having. It’s got the motion and madness of a city street with all its sounds and smells. Twitter is ever the low but persistent hum. I merely need to tune into its Zen frequencies for a time. It requires no massive investment. It demands little of me. I splash about in its waters like a spider monkey who has never before played in the ocean. Splish-splash.

"But — but!

"Twitter is shit for conversation."

If that resonates with you, I'd encourage you to visit the site and try his thinking on for size.

Here: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/07/20/of-google-plus-and-circle-jerks-part-ii/

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Thursday, July 21, 2011

First time I've seen this bumper sticker (Woodinville WA)

Photo

♨ flavors.me/howard

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Deadwood meets Citizen Kane? Yes, please.

https://twitter.com/#!/tcarmody/status/91941258230104064

http://flavors.me/howard

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Why partisans view mainstream mdia as biased and ideological media as objective (yes, you too)

"Perhaps the most crucial determinant of perceptions of bias in the news, however, is the extent to which news coverage is seen as disagreeing with one’s own views. Individuals who feel most strongly about an issue tend to see their own side’s views as being more a product of objective analysis and normative concerns, and less influenced by ideology, than the other side’s views (Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995)."

http://bigthink.com/ideas/39389

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Friday, July 15, 2011

I'm still looking for Alaska photos

As I mentioned recently, I need your help finding photos of Alaska journalists, newspapers, politicians and the like for my forthcoming book on the Alaska Newspaper War, 1972-1992 (or shortly thereafter).

If you have anything you think might be of use, can you please contact me soonest and let me know?

Thanks.

howard.weaver (at) gmail.com


http://flavors.me/howard

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I'm still looking for Alaska photos

As I mentioned recently, I need your help finding photos of Alaska journalists, newspapers, politicians and the like for my forthcoming book on the Alaska Newspaper War, 1972-1992 (or shortly thereafter).

If you have anything you think might be of use, can you please contact me soonest and let me know?

Thanks.

howard.weaver (at) gmail.com


http://flavors.me/howard

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Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Please help: I need your photos of Alaska and our newspaper war from 1972-1992

I need photographs for use in my memoir of the Alaska newspaper war between about 1972-1992. I hope some of the Alaskans who read my stuff here can help.

I'm especially interested in photos that showcase personalities from Alaska media in those years, as well as selected politicians who helped shape the news in that turbulent period. Photos illustrative of key events — building the trans-Alaska pipeline, ANCSA struggles, the Exxon Valdez spill, for instance — would also be of interest.

Payment will be modest but the credit and gratitude profuse. The book has emerged as an engaging chronicle of an important period of transition. There's some news in it, and some stories that have never been told. Readers deserve and will expect to see as well as read about it.

My book — "Write Hard, Die Free" — is due next spring and my manuscript is completed, but the publisher tells me we need at least a good catalog of available photos and illustrations in a month or so, so if you have ideas or contributions, please let me know soonest. You can contact me here or, most reliably, at howard.weaver (at) gmail.com.

Thanks in advance for your help. You might have just the one thing we really need to round out this portrait of a state on it's way from Wally Hickel and Jay Hammond to Sarah Palin ...

http://flavors.me/howard

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Your mission, should you choose to accept it... (I'm in)

Photo

♨ flavors.me/howard

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Wednesday, July 06, 2011

About Casey Anthony: Convict the guilty or protect the innocent?

How smart were our Founding Fathers?

John Adams on the relative importance of convicting the guilty versus protecting the innocent: 

"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever." via http://daringfireball.net/


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