Pitos Blog

That was the old slogan of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. This morning, while I was in a meeting, my cell phone reported the following ‘breaking news’ from CNN:

“– An explosion at a Connecticut power plant near Hartford has caused “mass casualties,” authorities say.”

Pretty scary. What was it? What’s going on? Well it turns out, now, 6 hours later, that “at least 5″ people died, and 12 injured. Still a serious accident but how can CNN justify that kind of sensational report sent out on their ‘breaking news’ text message?

I was talking this weekend to someone with a lot of experience as a journalist and he said, to my surprise, that news organizations don’t even bother ‘fact checking’ stories now. Gone are the days I remember from ‘All the President’s Men‘ when every story had to be confirmed independently by one, maybe two other sources.

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So I am trying to decide whether I should renew my subscription to Wall Street Journal online. I read an article hear and there in the journal probably every day but certainly not the whole paper. So I’ve been paying a little more attention to what that subscription gets me.

Here are some interesting findings:

If I go to www.wsj.com (not logged in) and click on “Apple’s iPad Changes the landscape for App makers” I get a partial article with a message that I should subscribe if I want to read the whole thing.

If I go to google and search for “Apple’s iPad Changes the landscape for App makers” I actually see the whole article!

If within that whole article, I click on the print link, lo and behold, I only get to print the first paragraph. (Of course I could print the full article myself without using the print link.)

On the other hand if I go to www.wsj.com and click on Kim Strassel’s article in the opinion section, I get the whole thing without needing to log in.

Pretty fancy. Are they over thinking it?

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Stephen Wolfram is a genius. (Ok, he’s also a bit grandiose, self-promoting and arrogant, but I think he’s amazing. Kind of like I feel about Ray Kurzweil, another genius IMHO.)

Wolfram|Alpha is his latest product, and it’s a fascinating experiment. I can only imagine the work that has gone into it, both the Mathematica foundation and the data collection, cleansing and organization.  In my own experimentation with the site, I have had mixed results. It’s still growing up. I see the promise, and I am rooting for it. But for now it isn’t that useful, for me, anyway.

Wolfram has written a very long and interesting treatise on Computable Knowledge as he calls it. I won’t try to excerpt or summarize it. For people interested in mathematics and computation, or in Stephen Wolfram himself, it’s worth reading. I really enjoyed it.Technorati Tags: mathematics, stephenwolfram

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I get asked from time to time to recommend ruby, rails, and other developers in the Boston area, either for full time or part time gigs. I’m developing a list of good local job resources - started so far with the help of pal Brian D:

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Just came across this odd link somewhere. He’s a good and clear writer, enjoyable to read whether you agree or not: Why People Think Computers Can’t by Marvin Minsky.

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Finally I found someone expressing what I have been thinking about the fracas about NBC, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien etc. etc. And while I didn’t know then what I know now, I did eagerly tune in for the first Jay Leno @ 10:00pm show, hoping to see the payoff to all the hype that preceded that first episode. Do you remember all the promos and the hints and speculation? Then, on that first night:

“What would Jerry Seinfeld — Jay’s good buddy — do with five hours of prime time real estate? How about some TV producers, Mark Burnett or Jerry Bruckheimer or Nigel Lythgoe? You think they would have simply recycled old material or would they have used the opportunity to innovate? Jay had the chance to reinvent himself. He didn’t have to do a tired, watered-down version of The Tonight Show. He didn’t have to do what he’s always done before. He had the opening, if not the wherewithal, to break out of the mold.” (from TV Squad)

True, true. I think Jay Leno in the end is the reason why he didn’t do well at 10:00, not NBC, not Conan, not ‘life the universe an everything.” Sorry Jay - I used to be a fan.

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An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about the way the media and politicians want us to react to the recent Christmas Day attempted terrorist attack.

“No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.” (from Paul Campos writing in the Wall Street Journal)

Bruce Schneier, as usual has a lucid and convincing commentary on the article:

“But as a nation we get to set our priorities, and decide how to spend our money. No one is suggesting we ignore the risks of terrorism — and making people feel safe is a good thing to do — but it makes no sense to focus so much effort and money on it when there are far worse risks to Americans.” (from Bruce Shneier’s blog)

He is always lucid and convincing. Here is a recent column in CNN, “Stop the Panic on air security”:

“As circular as it sounds, rare events are rare primarily because they don’t occur very often, and not because of any preventive security measures. If you want to do something that makes security sense, figure out what’s common among a bunch of rare events, and concentrate your countermeasures there.” (from Bruce Schneier, in CNN)

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Ok, I am on a Frank Rich binge, but he does have one thought provoking article after another. In his column recently he wrote about The Other Plot to Wreck America:

“If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.” (from “The Other Plot to Wreck America”)

I just just finished reading the rare business/economics book (I usually skip them) called How Markets Fail. A highly readable and comprehensive review of economic theory as it evolved from Adam Smith to the present day. From the linked review in the Economist:

“For Mr Cassidy, the deeper roots of the crisis lie in the enduring appeal of an idea: that society is always best served when individuals are left to pursue their self-interest in free markets. He calls this “Utopian economics”. (from The Economist)

I suspect Mr. Cassidy would agree with Mr. Rich, above, and vice versa.

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Thomas Geoghegan has a fantastic column in the New York Times explaining the mess we are in because of the perversion of the fillibuster rule. I don’t know how we are going to get out of it, but… come on! You should definitely read the whole thing. Here’s a key quote. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?

“But the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended” (from New York Times, “Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution”)

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Another great column from Frank Rich — Tiger Woods, Person of The Year. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s a telling quote:

“The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and some link to Al Qaeda. That history has since been rewritten by Bush alumni, Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq invasion and some of the news media that purveyed the White House fictions (especially the television press, which rarely owned up to its failure as print journalists have). It was exclusively “bad intelligence,” we’re now told, that pushed us into the fiasco. But contradictions to that “bad intelligence” were in plain sight during the run-up to the war — even sometimes in the press.

Yet we wanted to suspend disbelief. Much of the country, regardless of party, didn’t want to question its leaders, no matter how obviously they were hyping any misleading shred of intelligence that could fit their predetermined march to war. It’s the same impulse that kept many from questioning how Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s outlandishly cartoonish physiques could possibly be steroid-free.” (from Frank Rich, Tiger Woods, Person of The Year)

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