Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Open Media

  • The Keys to the City are Yours

    I have many opinions about Wikileaks,  none of which are original or interesting (if you want that, try here, here, here, here, here, here and  here).

    What I find more interesting (and disturbing) is the reappearance of Anonymous to defend Wikileaks. Three  thoughts:

    1. If a bunch of anonymous hackers can take down several notable sites so easily, how can owners of smaller sites rest at night?
    2. Although I’m glad that the New York Times is finally tackling Anonymous, it would be harder for bloggers and smaller sites to speak with such candor (especially since Anonymous is so arbitrary about its targets).
    3. I have to wonder whether Anonymous will ever go legit (especially against such obvious targets like the Chinese government). How easily could an anonymous flashmob movement be manipulated to carry out an attack on behalf of a  well-funded  interest?

    Related: Tom Scott envisions a flashmob nightmare scenario.

  • What CNN Headline News looks like before the election

    Here’s an amazing comment on a Washington Monthly thread about cable TV news. I am reprinting it in full:

    On Nov. 1, the day before the election, I spent an hour watch Headline News and making a record of how much time they spent on each story. Here is what I came up with:

    Commercials 17:30
    Cargo Terror Incident 5:15
    Negligence lawsuit against 4-year olds 5:00
    Calif. Law Against Violent Video Games 4:30
    Local Story – Early Retirement Scams 4:30
    Jim Leyritz Trial 3:45
    Gonzalez Murder Trial in Florida 2:45
    Bret Favre 2:45
    Teasers 2:30
    Elizabeth Smart Case 1:45
    “Off the Beaten Path” 1:45
    Clark Howard Advice – Car Service 1:30
    Election – only about the CNN poll results 1:00
    Parents leaving kids in casino parking lot 1:00
    Suicide following Webcam Incident 0:45
    Arizona Immigration Law 0:30
    Airbag Malfunction 0:50
    Randy Quaid 0:40
    Lancet Study on Alcohol v. Cocaine 0:40
    Space Shuttle Launch 0:20
    Steam line explosion in Utah 0:20
    Indonesia Volcano 0:20

    Note this was the day before the election. The ONLY political story involved CNN’s own poll of the President’s popularity and the generic ballot. And they did a 30 second spot on that every half hour.

    I would submit that none of this is "real news," except, perhaps, the coverage of the "cargo terror incident," which by then had happened 3 days earlier, and the coverage consisted mainly of experts relating how many holes in our security there are when it comes to air cargo.

    Note that the commenter is talking about CNN headline news, not the "real CNN." CNN Headline News does shorter segments which are repeated endlessly. Aside from the context of watching it on the airport or the dentist office or elevator, I don’t think anyone would go out of their way to watch it. The real CNN does have legitimate in-depth shows. It has some recycling and entertainment news, but if you watch long enough, you can find some good in-depth analysis about the Scandal or Disaster of the Day. I particularly recommend Fareed Zakaria’s GPS Podcast.

    Related: Jon Stewart and cohorts once  did a hilarious satirical look at what the schedule for a 24 hour news network looks like.

    Anecdote: I personally cannot stand these headline news channels. Besides being shallow and repetitive, they have an unusually high amount of advertising. When I lived overseas, they had something equivalent called EuroNews which provided nothing but fancy graphics, weather reports and bland  multilingual headlines. It was mind-numbing and borderline torture.

    At a previous job  they had a crazy arrangement where the company cafeteria had TV sets playing headline news (either Fox or CNN) continuously. It drove me crazy! Oddly, the TV audio was piped into the restrooms right across the cafeteria. It was disconcerting because you heard the same story over and over during the day to the point where you could almost recite it. I got to know way more about certain topics (like the Wynona Ryder trial) than I ever wanted to.

    We soon  became  used to hearing silly news on the TV whenever  we took a leak or ate lunch. Then a strange thing happened. Real news started to happen. The Iraqi war delivered constant headlines. Yes, the headline channel  blandified everything (you had to, or you couldn’t run commercials for cars and mutual funds), but still it was unsettling. A little  later, Katrina earthquake caught the restroom goers by surprise;  during restroom breaks and lunch hours, we were seeing live feeds of utterly crazy things: helicopters flying over stranded homeowners, African-American residents  accusing the government of indifference.

    Suddenly the peculiar fact that the company left the TV on in common areas now became a source of constant stress. I’m sure I was not the only one who wished the TV could just be turned off. Permanently.

  • 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.

  • David Edwards: 5 Things Everyone Ought to Know

    This came from a great 2000 interview with David Edwards on Medialens. It is a long quotation, and I’m highlighting the 5 points because they get a little obscured in the discussion. Between the fourth and the fifth point there is a fascinating discussion about distraction, self-delusion and how journalists are influenced by corporations as well (which I am not including).  It’s amazing how relevant these insights still are 10 years later.

    Jensen: You’ve said that there are five things everyone ought to know. What are they?

    Edwards: The first is that the planet is dying. One way to chart the damage is to look at insurance figures. Between 1980 and 1989, the insurance industry paid out, on average, less than $2 billion a year for weather-related property damage. From 1990 to 1995, however, hurricanes, cyclones, and floods in Europe, Asia, and North America cost the industry an average of more than $30 billion a year. The Red Cross is warning that climate change is about to precipitate a century of natural disasters. We have already seen a number of “superdisasters” in Honduras, India, Venezuela, and Mozambique, all “clearly tainted by human actions,” according to climatologists.

    Global warming affects more than the weather. Last year, marine biologists estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of the coral reefs in the Indian Ocean have died due to global warming. Coral-reef ecosystems are home to one-fourth of all fish species. And they’re just the first major victims of global warming. Others will soon follow. Scientists now predict that the polar bear will be extinct in the wild within twenty years.

    Now, many environmentally conscious people would argue that the scale of the environmental crises threatening us is being communicated. After all, most newspapers these days have environmental correspondents. But the level of coverage in no way matches the severity of the threat. Think for a moment about the media response to the supposed threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Hollywood churned out pro-America films; novelists wrote thrillers pitting the “free world” against the “godless communists”; headlines decried the dangers of communism; and so on. By comparison, there’s next to nothing being said or written about the threat of global warming.

    Jensen: I know what you mean. I like baseball, but it breaks my heart to see ten pages in the newspaper every day on sports and maybe three column inches a month devoted to the biodiversity crisis.

    Edwards: This leads to the second thing that everyone should know, which is that huge numbers of intelligent, motivated people are working all-out to prevent action that could save the planet. No matter how clear the evidence or how stern the scientific warnings, time and again, effective action is obstructed. The Global Climate Coalition, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers are all vigorously opposing even the trivial cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions proposed by the Kyoto Climate Treaty. The irresponsibility is breathtaking.

    The so-called debate on global warming is a war between the biggest enterprise in human history-the worldwide coal-and-oil industry-and the planet’s ability to sustain life. And our hearts and minds are battlefields in that war. The corporate press and corporate-financed politicians keep talking about global warming as if there’s significant doubt about it, yet the “debate” pits perhaps half a dozen high-profile skeptics bankrolled by this trillion-dollar industry against the consensus of twenty-five hundred of the world’s most qualified climatologists working as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How is it that the opinions of these six-whose arguments are often shot full of illogical and absurd statements-carry the same weight as all that scientific evidence?

    This brings us to the third thing I believe everyone should know, which is that the death of the planet is symptomatic of a deeper, institutionalized subordination of all life-including human life-to profit. Algeria is a typical example. It’s been ruled by a military dictatorship since 1962. Elections were held in 1991, but the government scrapped them when it became clear a militant Islamic party would win, and since that time some eighty thousand people have died. In some cases, armed attackers have descended on defenseless villages at night to cut the throats of women and children. The violence has been characterized by psychotic frenzy, including the dismemberment of infants. It’s not exactly clear who is doing all of it, although the government is heavily implicated. But one thing is for sure: the world has done nothing about it.

    Jensen: Why not?

    Edwards: I can answer that question with one word: oil. Algeria has gas and oil deposits worth billions and supplies the gas for Madrid, Rome, and many other European cities. It has a $2.8 billion contract with British Petroleum. Because of this, no Western government wants to make trouble with Algeria. John Sweeney-just about the only British journalist who has written anything about it-called the eighty thousand deaths “Europe’s gas bill.” Instead of demanding an end to the slaughter, the European Union is giving Algerian generals $125 million for “restructuring and democratization.”

    This story, of course, has been repeated any number of times: Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Russia, Indonesia, East Timor, Iraq, Vietnam-anywhere there are profits to be made. Yet few people in the media want to talk about this pattern in which the economic interests of the U.S. and Britain are synonymous with the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of Third World populations. It’s the same with the environment. Although the planet is being demolished before our eyes, the media remain content to artificially isolate each new disaster, leaving us to try to complete the jigsaw puzzle.

    The absence of discourse about these patterns leads us to the fourth point, which is that the economic and political forces that profit from destruction and atrocity also profit from the suppression of truth. It’s the job of the corporate media and the politicians to prevent us from digging beneath the surface and uncovering the truth.

    It’s important to be clear, however, that our delusions are not just the result of some conspiracy on the part of a few business moguls. The real problem is much more structural and psychological. Modern thought control is primarily dependent not on crude, conscious planning, but on the human capacity for self-deception. One of the biggest obstacles to social change is the propaganda system working undetected inside our own heads-mine included.”

    ….

    Jensen: What, then, are we afraid of in this culture?

    Edwards: Emotions, for one thing. We in the West seem to take it for granted that emotion and reason are in conflict. We think that to be rational is to be like Mr. Spock from Star Trek; that being unemotional gives one the capacity to see clearly. You see this often among business-people and scientists: when they want to be taken seriously, they speak in a cold, unemotional manner. On one level, this is quite reasonable; we’ve all experienced what infatuation or anger can do to our ability to perceive something accurately. But Buddhists believe that greed, ambition, and selfishness keep us from perceiving the world as it is, whereas compassion and affectionate love (as opposed to romantic infatuation), actually help us perceive the world more clearly.
    This comes back around to the last of the five things everyone should know, which is that, if the planet is being killed by institutionalized greed and the sacrifice of life for profit, then the solution is to undermine the illusion that greed is "normal" and even desirable. And one way to do this is through compassion. When we reinforce our capacity for compassion and love and concentrate on other people’s needs, rather than on our own, we begin to weaken the psychological system that powers the selective inattention and self-deception we were talking about.

    Of course, it’s not enough just to sit there and have compassionate thoughts. Your compassionate thoughts need to be reflected in what you do, how you behave. How can you aspire to compassion and yet work for an arms manufacturer? You need to help other people, or at least experiment with working in that direction.

    And trying to be more compassionate should include being compassionate toward ourselves: we shouldn’t expect to start out being fantastically, perfectly compassionate. It’s like becoming a weight lifter. Your ability to feel and act out of compassion and love has to be developed through learning and practice. Just as no one expects you to come out of your first weight-lifting session and lift up a car, there will be situations where you’ll try to be compassionate, but it will be beyond you; you’ll get angry, be selfish, whatever. Sometimes the best thing to do is just to run away.

    I think compassion is especially important for dissidents seeking to change society. Think about it. The distinguishing characteristic of writers like Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Sharon Beder, and Mark Curtis is that, unlike many mainstream writers, they refuse to place their personal concerns for wealth, status, respectability, and even physical safety above the needs of the wretched of the earth. Compassion is at the core of what libertarian radicals are about, or should be, yet we rarely discuss it.

  • Pseudo-journalists with a camera

    Simon Owens on how activists with a camera practice gotcha journalism:

    But what should be pointed out above all else is that Thomas did not seek out the spotlight to air these views. She did not say them during a speech before a university or include them in one of her columns. She had an activist come up and thrust a camera in her face and ask her a slew of politically loaded, vague questions. We don’t see the context of how Nesenoff introduced himself or what happened after the video cuts away. We have a completely manufactured incident that never would have happened if it weren’t for an activist’s — yes, I’ll say it — entrapment.

    Do we really want to live in a world where you can get fired because some guy comes up to you unannounced, launches questions for which you haven’t prepared, forces you to say things you had no plans to say, then edits the video down into the most damning soundbite before hanging you with it?

    James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart would say this is a world where corruption and malfeasance is uncovered, but I say it’s a world in which mainstream journalists unquestioningly carry the water of political activists who masquerade as fellow journalists.

    I was thinking some of these very thoughts during the Helen Thomas thing. She was being flippant and a little crude (and possibly ironic).

    By the way, why should we start ignoring the writings of a noted journalist and instead start focusing on the random remarks she made extemporaneously to some nobody? If Helen Thomas had simply said, “The Israels should get the f—- out of Gaza and the West Bank,” she would have still been fired.

    There are occasions when circumstances warrant an on-the-run or undercover interview, but most of the time it seems unnecessary. The problem I have with these kind of surprise interviews is that the interviewee is not at his or her best. He doesn’t have his positions ready; he hasn’t had time to consider the implications of his remarks. If Helen Thomas had been writing those remarks in an editorial, she would have given the sentence more nuance.

    One of the underlying problems behind gotcha video journalism is that American politicians are so inaccessible and many don’t make public appearances. They will talk to local TV stations and maybe CNN or Fox, but if you’re a freelancer or (worse) a print journalist, you’re out of luck.

    A question remains about how the legal system can deal with people who make fake entrapment vids. ACORN is not a private company, so they’re not likely to start a SLAPP lawsuit. If a libel suit were ever initiated, would O’Keefe be held solely responsible or would broadcasters like Fox? I have to wonder if Fox made O’Keefe indemnify Fox against lawsuits when it started running his videos.

    See also:  how Sascha Cohen got his subjects to sign legal releases .