Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Social Sciences

  • The flaw of libertarian economics

    The flaw of libertarian economics is that it overlooks or discounts the predatory aspects of power. You can say that we should get government off our backs or that taxation is an unjust burden or that the free market provides an optimal creation of wealth. But without oversight or interference, more powerful businesses can easily  avoid compliance with contracts and avoid compensating  people who have been harmed by their behaviour. Libertarians refer to the court system as correcting major injustices and disparities between parties, but it ignores the fact that justice is often very slow and  many  victims  are  rewarded  only after considerable waiting (and suffering). A few months ago I complained  that it took the multi-billion dollar company  Comcast more than four months to refund me $20 which it already admitted that it owed me. Comcast, like many Fortune 500 companies,  has the legal infrastructure to fend off legal claims about such malfeasance, allowing it to nickel and dime the American consumer to death with impunity.  A  well-crafted regulation, if applied uniformly with adequate phase-in time, can be easy and  inexpensive for companies to implement; it can also correct injustices promptly  and minimize drawn out court battles  between parties with  unequal power.  I understand that unchecked public agencies can sometimes handicap legitimate business activity without good reason, but at least they are accountable to public pressure.

    The laissez faire policies advocated by libertarians   enable the private exploitation of public resources with the potential to cause pernicious  effects. Libertarians often paint the struggle as government agents encroaching on the house and property rights of an individual, but the more common scenario is a giant company whose injuries to others avoid  public scrutiny by virtue of its economic might, with government  agents (woefully outmatched and underfunded) unable to figure out if the company has done anything wrong.

    Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote that capitalism is efficient at creating wealth but wretched at  assigning it a purpose.  Wealth creation for its own sake is not really a public good  if citizens fear for their safety and economic well-being and  if investment in “social capital” and public resources is minimal. It is not enough for Chevron to pay to build a public park or Walmart to  support food kitchens. There needs to be an entity committed to managing this “social capital” at all times regardless of whether it helps a company’s bottom line at a particular moment.  This entity needs to be accountable to all Americans and needs to have an organizational framework dedicated to treating all people equally and fairly. This entity is called a government.

    Related: see my piece on libertarianism and the health care system (which touches upon a lot of general issues about how to measure libertarianism as a philosophy) and an excellent book  which argues for “soft paternalism”: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (See the Nudges blog).

    Postscript: Here’s an interesting question to pose to libertarians: “do private  contracts always take precedence over liberties?”    Can a prostitute sell her obedience for a price?  Can an intern enter a contractual arrangement where he or she receives no compensation but has to follow the contract’s obligations?  If I bought a piece of property with the intent to exploit its mineral rights, are those mineral rights unrestricted and perpetual regardless of what any later government decides and regardless of  any later safety findings?  Libertarians believe that the ability to make contracts is a sign of liberty, but at some point, this contract can threaten the liberty of  one of the parties (or even a third party, as with the case of environmental harms). By their philosophy, the  liberty claims can be pursued only  after the damage or taking has taken place, making redress impossible for the aggrieved party.  You can’t on the one hand grant one party the right to damage another’s life or liberty and at the same time admit that it is impossible for the damaged party to seek redress. That is tantamount to admitting that one party has the absolute right to deprive the party of liberty. The success of the free libertarian state depends on the ability for weaker parties to receive protection from stronger parties. But if you admit that no such protection exists, you are admitting that liberty no longer is an absolute right in your system.

     

  • Time Magazine Person of the Year should be… the Lone Gunman

    (This was written a few days after the mass killing by a lone gunman at a Connecticut elementary school which claimed 27 lives).

    For the past few years, my mom and I have been busy guessing who will be picked as person of the year by Time magazine. So far I had selected John Roberts (for trying to manage a polarized judicial system and political system) and Steven Colbert. Colbert is my personal favorite; he is an American original; his satirical edge is always on-target and takes Poe’s law to its extreme. Conservatives would  probably enjoy him too (even if  they recognize that he is poking fun of him). I think  the presence of Colbert and Stewart (and probably others)  contributes to political culture without poisoning the discourse.  We should all be thankful for rhetoricians like Colbert. I never cease to be amazed at how effectively Colbert conveys his ironic message underneath the apparently conservative rhetoric. 

    Over the weekend, though, I’ve decided that this has to be  the year of the Lone Gunman. Yes, GunMAN (these types tend to be males – although not exclusively). The Lone Gunman has the potential to move society at will; he has some  personality malady and lives in a society that not only permits the ownership of gun for personal protection – it encourages it.

    It’s a personality type; I lose track of which individual is which – how many calibers are their weapons and how many rounds are fired – even how many have died.  As gracious as  presidents are when giving these eulogies, I almost wish they  weren’t there to do that. The president’s primary role should be decider-in-chief, not comforter-in-chief. The schedule of the decider-in-chief ought not to be set by the Lone Gunman.  Yes, I realize that comforting the afflicted is politically expedient and it’s a natural role for a president to fall into.  It is society’s way of recognizing the enormity of a tragedy. It also happens to be counterproductive for society as a whole. 

    Politicians can and should enact laws to solve problems. They should be held accountable if they don’t or if they fail to support the correct policy.  When politicians offer comforting words during these times of mourning,  it obscures the fact that the politician is not in fact aggressively fighting for laws to combat the problem.

    Update: Tom Tomorrow dramatizes the pattern of these kinds of events.

    Update #2. Looking at the previous winners, I realize that very few women have won the award, no entertainers have won the award, many international politicians have won the award and that “gimmicky” awards to groups or things tend to occur roughly once very 5 years (and since last year the winner was The Protester, it seems unlikely to happen 2 years in a row). I still vote for Stephen Colbert – who would be a nice change of pace.

  • Tufekci on Twitter, Chilean miners, wikileaks, ipad, etc.

    I am still behind on blogging, but here’s some nuggets from  Technosociety blog, a  fresh blog about the relationship between technology and society by Zeynep Tufekci. Lots of deep thinking here. Here’s her take on the Nobel Peace prize announcement and Twitter:

    The Internet is not a game-changer in the sense of a cat-and-mouse game because, yes, it empowers both the cat and the mouse. It is a game-changer because we are not cats or mouse but people, and people care deeply about what other people think of them and how they conduct their lives. In the 21st century, it is not sustainable for a governing elite to be both repressive at home and welcome in the world — and most elites deeply desire the latter as much as they may still cling to the former. One can point to apparent exceptions like the Burmese Junta but I think the formulation holds for most.

    People almost never win over a repressive regime because they are better organized or better equipped or better able to get things done. All the examples one can point to are going to be rare remaining weak states or regimes from the past: the modern repressive state is just too powerful.  People win over repressive regimes because the elites in those regimes are also people, and as people, they also crave the sense of belonging and legitimacy that people everywhere, even the most powerful, crave.  People can win not because they can beat back force with force (they rarely can), but because they can withdraw their consent and undermine the standing the rulers have to repress, as the repressive apparatus itself consists of people. I think the collapse of the Soviet blocs is an amazing example of how the seemingly strongest state can wither away after being hollowed out through lack of legitimacy. (Pick your example: Apartheid South Africa, East Timor, etc.)

    Here’s her thoughts about the Chilean mine rescue narrative:

    My unease with the portrayal of this story isn’t just about the fact that this mine, like many others around the world, had an appalling safety record and the miners would have been out by themselves in 48 hours had the mine owners installed the safety ladders in the ventilation shafts as they were, by law, required to and warned about. And I do realize, as others have noted, that we copiously consume many mined metals and minerals as if they do not come at a huge human and environmental cost – costs which have been increasing as the easy pickings have long been picked over and we are now drilling deeper and deeper to extort the earth to give up these precious elements. Miners around the world are treated as discarded lives (thousands were dead just in China just last year) and suffer from a wide-range debilitating diseases.

    The problem is that this rescue was a spectacle of technological confidence. The message was that with enough money, determination, technological savvy, gadgets, NASA, experts, smarts, we can solve these problems which are of our making. Yes, we can, for small problems (and we should) like one collapsed mine. However, our bigger problems, climate change, resource depletion can’t be solved by just-the-right-amount-of-tech-wizardry. There are hard choices and inevitable compromises ahead and we should get ready for a (global) discussion on how to finally start ameliorating the unavoidable upheaval that is headed our way.

    There is one part of the message, however, I believe is crucial. The spirit of solidarity and camaraderie that the miners held onto under very difficult circumstances will be key. Paradoxically, such a spirit is often easier to hold on to under grave conditions that threaten survival and require sacrifice from all. Metaphorically speaking, we as humanity are already trapped in mine, a big blue and pretty one but still one that confines us and is under threat, and our technology is not going to provide us with a magical phoenix capsule that will solve everything without much sacrifice or pain and there will be no extraterrestrials who send us glucose drinks and video-feeds through ingenious tubes.

    She argues that wikileaks is interesting because it reveals the disparity between what insiders and outsiders know:

    So the multiple pronouncements by many pundits that there is nothing shocking here actually expose the heart of the issue: the jaded insider game of hypocrisy and cynicism involves much of the established media and punditry. Most diplomats and journalists already know, for example, that the U.S. has been spying on United Nations officials––this had actually been exposed but received fairly little media attention, certainly less than Dancing with the Stars. Most “insiders” know how the game is played. That nations go to war for interests and resources. That, around the world, the U.S. is not seen as a pure purveyor of democracy. That lobbyists dominate policy-making. That there is a scientific consensus around global warming and that almost all the dissent is financed through the oil-coal interests. That big nations often try to use multinational institutions to advance their own narrow agendas under the cloak of high ideals.  That many politicians are corrupt, ignorant and self-interested. But most of this is rarely discussed in an open and serious manner.

    There are many other issues that Wikileaks raises (such as the consequences of the corporatization of our social commons, which I had previously written about) and the relationship between the relatively open and distributed nature of Internet’s infrastructure and its ability to support a dissident public sphere (DDoS attacks cut both ways and I believe that they are counterproductive as they derail the conversation away from the real topic, transparency and accountability of the modern state, into trivial questions). However, I believe that Wikileaks also points to the way forward for civic journalism to survive as a relevant force — by first becoming an outsider to power. Without major newspapers’ role in acting as active intermediaries in focusing public attention to the revelations in these cables, these would likely get lost in a sea of confusion and clutter.

    (She has written several pieces about wikileaks, dictatorships, Jaron Lanier and other things which I will get around to later).

    One of the more intriguing posts was her pre-ipad piece about how consumption devices like the iPad may end up devaluing writing or at least   the ability of readers to respond:

    That is a consumptive mindset and before the Internet, that was the most easily available way of spending free time. Over the years, as the Internet has taken over my world, I have done less and less of that and I suspect that is true for many people.  I find it hard to just consume without being able to say something. I want a keyboard nearby.A large part of what made the Internet such a breakthrough for the public sphere that was previously dominated by one-way conversation from the powerful, the rich and the slickly-produced is the fact that interactivity through writing was built into the device that we used to access it. Computers came with keyboards, not touchscreens and not speech recognition . So, the issue is not just that typing on a screen is clunky. And I suspect soon these devices will come with speech and natural language recognition. That’s fine if you want to tell your mobile device to call home or pull up recipes for oatmeal-raisin cookies. Not so fine if you want to comment on a blog post, fire off a tirade, or write a lengthy email. Very few people can dictate as if they were writing — and often those rare types are professional writers.

    Writing, especially writing at length is a different modality of thought than talking and it also allows a different kind of exchange and discourse. (I refer specially to the scholarship of Neil Postman and Walter Ong.) As Postman argues, writing and the spread of the printed word through literacy and the printing press created a culture in which it is possible to debate ideas at length and produce analytic thought which can be produced, advanced, discussed, refuted, rejected, improved and otherwise churned through the public sphere. As Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death: “almost all of the characteristics we associate with the mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; and abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.” (p.63).

    Even though my pasting of the relevant passage included the same hyperlinks, I have not checked the hyperlinks and have not gone to the trouble to determine whether they are relevant or interesting. Is it obligatory for one blogger to include these hyperlinks as is? Sometimes I disable them, sometimes (like now) I leave them as is.  In this case, I trust that the blog author will link to things which are intrinsically interesting; on the other hand, I have noticed that    academic discourse often uses  footnotes and references to other scholarship to buttress (and possibly to distract from) an analysis. Perhaps it is important to allude to Postman here; on the other hand,  can the thought be adequately conveyed without making this allusion? For academics it is important to convey a thought’s provenance, but for plain old writer types, this is less important (and possibly distracting).  Blogger types   constantly refer to things and updating threads. So is hardly surprising that a blog would throw in links everywhere (especially when  citing economic or scientific analyses).

    On the other hand,  it can be cumbersome for the reader to travel though  passages detailing such provenance. Maybe these links will be useful for confirmation, but during the first reading, it is not terribly helpful. Also, I have noticed that many current event bloggers throw in way too many links (which mostly offer confirming or redundant reports without offering new information). As odd as it sounds, when I blog or write something for the web, I tend to keep hyperlinks to a minimum (especially when I am trying to say something). There is a practical reason for this. Ten years from now, 90% of  hyperlinks will be useless, and all that remains will be your descriptions of what was there.  I remain skeptical that archiving technologies like the Wayback Machine will continue to be as helpful as  web applications become more sophisticated and proprietary.

    Back to  Ms’.  Tufekci’s piece about the ipad. There is something  to her argument, but can’t  people  have two devices for two different modalities of communication? I have a desktop, a laptop and an ipad. I bring the ipad almost everywhere (mainly for reading articles/ebooks/RSS feeds, jotting short notes, bookmarking and catching up on email. I do my most productive work on my desktop and as a backup solution, my laptop.

    My concern is different; I publish online fiction, and a laptop or desktop is not useful for reading in bed, in a restaurant or on mass transit. A keyboard might be nice to have when someone is reading my stories, but I’d much rather that a potential reader be able to have the ability to read comfortably in  diverse contexts.

    In that respect, the ipad functions for me very much as a storage device for media/information which I want to process later in a more relaxed mode.  Yes, we are limited by the device’s form factor (and I would expect that to change a decade later), but I wouldn’t be surprised if at that time  I am still using  two devices for different modes of thought.

    In the ebook world we are debating the uses and necessity of keeping the concept of pagination; frankly the experience of reading in a web browser (even if we overlook the ads) is unpleasant and not  conducive to deep understanding. At the moment I have 20 browser tabs open, and screen width is significantly more than height (which results in lines of awful lengths). Also, each paragraph of text seems peppered with all kinds of hyperlinks of varying usefulness. (have you noticed that the NYT includes lots of links to NYT "topics" or "categories"  of no intrinsic usefulness or relevance to the article themself?)

    To contrast: the PDFs and epubs I read on my ipad allow me to read a subject in depth without distraction.  It offers a way to read that I have deeply missed with the advent of the Internet.

    Ms. Tufekci wrote this  piece before the Ipad actually came out, so she didn’t have the benefit of seeing the device in action or the apps which would be later released. But I can report  that after 8 months of ownership: 1)the amount of writing I have done on my laptop/desktop is no less than what it has been before,  2)I have in fact been able to edit an entire book on my ipad and 3)I have been able to read electronic devices on my ipad in ways I was never able to do  comfortably on  my laptop or desktop and   4)there are numerous contexts where I have both the ipad  and laptop/desktop open simultaneously.

    I am not altogether satisfied with the notetaking ability of the ipad — by that, I mean the ability to sync my clippings, notes and bookmarks with other computers where they can be easily accessed.  Often I will find something in the ipad and then access the URL simultaneously in a PC web browser.  Clumsy, but adequate. For me, the hardest adjustment about the ipad was having to deal with one app at a time and to keep switching back and forth. At least with a Windows PC, it is easier to switch between a variety of tasks listed on the toolbar. To summarize:  

    The ipad is a great single-tasking storage  device.

    Update: I notice that Tufekci gave a talk a few months later (presumably after she had time to look at the device). Here’s the provocative summary:

    Apple’s much-discussed iPad fits more within the logic of consumer society rather than the participatory Web 2.0 with its focus on active participation, diminishing corporate control, and a trend towards free products and services (what has come to be known as “prosumer society”). In contrast to Web 2.0, where users as “prosumers” actively participate in the production of that which they consume and often create systems from the bottom-up, the iPad channels passive consumption, corporate control via “closed” systems and a renewed focus on traditional, top-down, pay-per-view media. Indeed, the iPad is engineered to enforce this passivity, for example through lack of a tactile keyboard. The iPad is indicative of Apple’s Disneyfied approach in the way it produces spectacle to enchant or “wow” individuals into passive consumption, attempts to exercise control by creating a “walled garden,” and seeks to monetize more and more of the interactions within the system.

    (That would have been a great lecture to attend!) Let me say that there is merit to most (if not all) of this criticism. But not if you regard the ipad (and  clones) as primarily  storage devices.

  • Adjunct Profs, Academic Poverty & the Quixotic Quest for a Tenure-Track position

    Three articles about the steady decline of tenure. A lot of stories about adjunct teachers.

    Also worth mentioning that for these kinds of columns warning about the job market, it’s just as important to read the comments by disaffected academics as it is to read the actual article. In fact, because most of the time the articles are being written by well-intentioned tenured academics, they could possibly be – by definition – the ones least likely to see the problems at ground level. 

    After reading the replies, I felt inclined to write my own response. I had some nuggets of wisdom to impart. But after typing two paragraphs, I realized that my contribution to this debate was trivial; I did not actually have to live the life that commenters despaired about; there was no way I really understood what it felt like (except the personal testimony who followed market signals and avoided college teaching).  image

     

    image Under the fold  are several dozen commenters on the subject. They will tell you what life in academia is really about.  People in the humanities seem to be particularly hard-hit; it’s amazing how different the perspective of people in professional and science programs can be from people who stuck it out in the humanities. These people ought to be respected, not vilified. Ok, now the comments: 

    (more…)

  • July Linkdump Social/Political 1

    Why is it standard operating procedure  for beauty pageant contestants to favor world peace & world leaders to favor war? — Constant Weader

    I’ve become a real fan of Constant Weader whose  realitychex blog covers a lot of the usual liberal haunts for commentary and analysis in a succinct & entertaining way. I found out about this woman by seeing the URL on all the great comments she made on NYT articles (which she generally reposts on her blog).

    Where  should one  go to read about current events? Reading the NYT headline page is a safe choice. For a while I would go to ThinkProgress/Matt Yglesias site, but I like the idea of checking an offbeat blog for a summary of the good stuff in NYT.

    By 2015 75% of American adults will be overweight or obese, and 41% will be obese.

    According to recent studies, as many as one in five girls between 10 and 18 years of age are now cutting themselves with razor blades or burning themselves with matches (according to Leonard Sax).

    In other words, the girls who are most successful at meeting gender-specific societal expectations appear to be just as likely as other females to be cutting themselves.  Not so for boys.  How come?  That’s one of the questions I try to answer in my book Girls on the Edge.  My bottom line is that these pretty girls are searching for a sense of self that’s not about how they look, but about who they are.  We reward them for how they look but we — i.e. American society — are much less interested in what’s going on inside.  Self-cutting fills that need for some of these girls — just as anorexia does for others, and obsessive perfectionism does in others.

    According to a Chronicle report, white children make up less than 8 percent of the Houston ISD enrollment… None of the 181 Texas state lawmakers are Hispanic Republicans.

    According to this NPR Article:

    "Children of parents who reported having a rule about bedtime scored about 6 percentage points higher on an assessment of their vocabulary compared with children whose parents did not report a rule about bedtime. They scored 7 percent higher on assessments of early math skills."

    Health care information site. Good and easy to find things.

    Melvin Goodman on how much of the defense department is privatized and lacking in accountability:

    Nearly a quarter of the federal budget is devoted to contracts to the private sector, with the new Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence serving as conduits for this money.

    Private contracts are now responsible for 70 percent of the intelligence budget, and private contractors represent more than half of the employees of the new National Counterterrorism Center. The trumpeting of "cyber war" marks the next cash cow for the defense industry.

    See 2 other articles by Melvin Goodman here and here.

    Steve Benen and commenters debate the soul of the Washington Post. I think the downfall began when Bob Woodward started writing Tell-All books about the Bush Administration.

    Realclimate asks whether we can provide different levels of reporting for differing proficiency levels.

    Joe Keohane reports on how brain science is finding that people cling to certain political beliefs, regardless if proven wrong.

    People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

    Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

    Other insights: people with wrong ideas are more likely to change when presented with direct contradictory evidence; just showing them an article doesn’t do any good. Self-esteem has something to do with it:

    Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

    Alan Bellows talks about how the 1985 New Coke marketing campaign overlooked the tendency of people to develop irrational reactions based on groupthink. The concept is informational conformity, defined as “the human tendency to unconsciously adjust one’s opinions to correlate with the outspoken views of the social group.”

    Informational conformity was first formally documented by Dr Muzafer Sherif in 1935, when he placed a group of subjects in a dark room with a single point of light in the distance. He asked them to estimate how much the light moved around, and although each person perceived a different amount of movement, most of them relinquished their own estimates to conform to the predominant guesses within the group. In reality, the light had not been moving at all; it only appeared to move because of the autokinetic effect, a quirk in visual perception where a bright point of light in complete darkness will appear to wander. It is thought that this imagined movement occurs due to the lack of a fixed visual reference point, and it may be the cause of many nighttime UFO sightings.

    (Michael Tobis relates this groupthink tendency to climate change).

    (I remember that era well, and New Coke was on everybody’s minds, even to the point where during a homily, my parish priest held up a can of New Coke and asked rhetorically whether there were more important things to worry about).

    David Corn explains why Politifact sometimes gets things only half-right:

    Yet PolitiFact didn’t evaluate Cheney’s remark. So here’s the real problem: Huffington made a charge that was rooted in reality. Cheney responded with a statement that had no basis in reality. Yet PolitiFact zeroed in only on the former and let the real lie escape. True, Huffington had dared PolitiFact to review her remark. But Adair and his intrepid band were free to expand the mission. The greater public service would have been to compare Huffington’s and Cheney’s comments and determine who was closer to the truth. This is where PolitiFact truly fell short.

    Matt Thompson talks about how news media drowns you with episodic content when  we yearn for  system content: 

    Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.

    This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.

    Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

    See also:  Matt Thompson on 3 key parts of news stories you don’t usually get. Later Thompson describes 5 ways journalists can improve the news:

    You might have heard about Politico’s notorious goal of “winning the morning,” i.e. finding a scoop that’ll lead each day’s news cycle. That’s great, if you’re content with your stories having about as much impact as a popular tweet. Too many of us follow Politico’s lead.

    Instead, try to win the story. Aim to produce a work of journalism so excellent it’ll get passed around for weeks. Put your best storytelling chops to work on this. Try to supplant Wikipedia as the top Google result for your topic. This might not be a single article; it might be a nicely-packaged collection, a wiki, or something else you devise. The key is that it should be long-lasting and distinctive.

    Essay on the same topic by  Tristan Harris and Jay Rosen. Also Thompson has 10 questions journalists should ask themselves.  Also, there is a modest amount of discussion on the Future of Context website even though it doesn’t seem to be actively maintained.

    10 Mistakes JFK Jr. on the day his plan crashed. Interesting insights into the minds of nonprofessional pilots.

    Beijing and Mexico City have the worst traffic congestion. Houston has one of the best.

    Robert Sullivan on new ways to use buses in mass transit to improve efficiency:

    Flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways.

    For me, this leaves out another obvious issue: decentralized mass transit system protects  against terrorist attacks.

    Great list of reasons why using cameras to give traffic tickets is a bad idea. (PDF Alert). I would add:

    • Before these red light cameras, were we facing an outbreak of people running red lights? In my experience, I haven’t seen much redlight running….
    • There are reasons to run red lights on occasion. But the ticketing process makes it impossible for the ticket recipient to have a specific memory about the incident in question (which would be necessary to defend himself). If there were a way for the ticket recipient to be receive immediate feedback about the violation, my opposition would be greatly reduced. But if I receive a ticket and a photo in the mail two weeks later, chances are I will have no memory of this specific incident (and be powerless to oppose it).

    Here’s one reason that I could find persuasive: saving police manpower! If police don’t have to handle routine stops, that could free up their time to do more pressing things. But the benefits of that would have to be proven. For example, traffic tickets may be a good excuse to stop cars exhibiting suspicious behavior.

    My personal problem with camera tickets is that I don’t know the threshold for ticketing. If i follow a car across when the light is yellow, I don’t know if that would be considered a violation. Are the firms looking for egregious cases? Somehow I feel that if there is revenue involved, the tendency will be to fine all people who meet some minimum threshold.