Lone Gunman

Alisa Miller of Pub­lic Radio Inter­na­tional is speak­ing at TED 2008 — for her talk she posted a back­ground video depict­ing the shock­ing state of U.S. cable and net­work news organ­i­sa­tions’ reportage.

“The US accounted for 79% of the total news cov­er­age” on Amer­i­can news out­lets ded­i­cated to inter­na­tional news sto­ries in 2006!

I’d love to see a map like this over time — à la Hans Rosling, 2006 — show­ing the fluc­tu­a­tions in size of dif­fer­ent coun­tries as dif­fer­ent news sto­ries break and news report­ing itself evolves.

Thanks, Carl

Obvi­ous stated, still fas­ci­nat­ing. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste bet­ter:

A new brain scan­ning study has sup­ported what we’ve sus­pected all along, more expen­sive wine tastes bet­ter partly because we expect it to.

[…]

What the vol­un­teers didn’t know was that there were only three dif­fer­ent wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occa­sion it was described as cost­ing $90 a bot­tle, on another as cost­ing $10 a bottle.

The vol­un­teers rated the ‘more expen­sive’ wine as sig­nif­i­cantly more like­able despite being iden­ti­cal to the ‘cheaper’ wine.

I’m sure the same must work when the upper end is more my price range (£15 is an expen­sive bot­tle of wine for me!).

Good to see some­one in power and in the pub­lic eye stat­ing this for the record.

Gov­ern­ment pol­icy is often badly formed because it is drawn up in response to tragedies and prob­lems, the Government’s new head of risk man­age­ment has said (Sam Coates writes).

Rick Haythorn­th­waite, head of the Risk and Reg­u­la­tion Advi­sory Coun­cil, said that pol­icy was often affected by pres­sure from an aggres­sive media and a con­fronta­tional Par­lia­ment. “We have got to deal with some of the sys­temic flaws in policy-making within White­hall,” he said.

He told The Pol­i­tics Show on BBC One that calls to pro­tect the pub­lic sapped self-reliance, resilience and the spirit of adven­ture. Some risk could be a very good thing, he said.

via The Magistrate’s Blog

From The Guardian

The Pro­fes­sional Pilots’ Rumour Net­work is a pub­licly acces­si­ble online forum where air­line pilots dis­cuss their work. So if you want to main­tain the belief that you are in safe hands… stay as far away from it as possible.

Thanks, Matt

An hilar­i­ous dia­tribe on UML and it’s prac­tices:

The Teach­ing Assis­tant for your OO-101 class has instructed me to approach you directly about the D-minus grade I got on my term paper “An eval­u­a­tion of the pro­posed Uni­fied Mod­el­ing Lan­guage (UML)”. I hope you will con­sider chang­ing it to some­thing bet­ter — a plain D per­haps? — as it would be a real blow to my Grade Point Aver­age, already not in too good shape after that “Fail” you gave me in your last class. (You may remem­ber that in the final exam I wrote “there may have been other things between sliced bread and Java”. I now real­ize how ill-advised that com­ment was and sin­cerely apol­o­gize if I hurt anyone’s feelings.)

I real­ize of course the rea­son for the D-minus and appre­ci­ate your gen­eros­ity in not being harsher on me. As the T.A. pointed out, there was not any­thing pos­i­tive about the UML in my paper! Surely that can­not be right. Every­one says the UML is a break­through in soft­ware engi­neer­ing, and who am I to ques­tion this? That’s why I am not ask­ing you to change my grade just because of the effect on my GPA, although I do hope you will appre­ci­ate that it’s not nice to lose my Good Stu­dent insur­ance rate, not to men­tion girl­friends and the like. No, I admit I was wrong and I want to make up for it. There must be some­thing good to say about the UML.

via The Regsiter