THE FAKE HEADLINES

theonlymagicleftisart: (Philip Dunne)

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 10:15:18 -0700

(Philip Dunne)

A Song You Don’t Meet Everyday: The Take Down the...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 19:28:00 -0700

A Song You Don’t Meet Everyday: The Take Down the Government Edition

“Government Center”

I listen to “Government Center” by The Modern Lovers when I need to break up the tedium of a work day — which is every work day. Especially now that I’ve started commuting to a sterile office environment filled with repetitive tasks instead of the dingy student newsroom where any day someone could walk in with a tip that would start up an adventure.

“Government Center” is a song about the destruction of blandness with the power of rock and roll. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if long-haired rock bands dropped by the citadels of bureaucracy and made all the worker bees feel better while they’re sending out all that correspondence? If so, grab a guitar, and come by 920 Yonge St, Toronto, Ontario any weekday between 10am-6pm.

newyorker: Click-through to find out the story behind this...

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:03:49 -0700

newyorker:

Click-through to find out the story behind this week’s cover “Adrift” by Mark Ulriksen, and for a slideshow of past New Yorker covers about graduation: http://nyr.kr/Kr4ST7

Lawless neutrinos

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:29:38 -0700

NYT on the “faster-than-light” neutrinos.

During a panel discussion recently at the American Museum of Natural History, Sheldon L. Glashow, a physics professor and Nobel laureate from Boston University, said the best theory he had heard was that the neutrinos had behaved lawfully in Switzerland and speeded up when they crossed the border into Italy.

Read the rest here.

The Fabulists

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 21:09:27 -0700

The shocking revelations that Mike Daisy fabricated large portions of his monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” parts of which were adopted by This American Life for an episode on working conditions at Apple, should not be so shocking.

In retrospect, the story was too good to be true. That one man, with no journalistic training or experience, would be able to uncover so much, in such dramatic fashion, during such a short trip to a country he knew little about, is more reminiscent of a bad made for TV movie than a series of actual events.

And throughout his intense pseudo-confession to Ira Glass which aired in This American LIfe’s “Retraction” episode, Daisey clings to the notion that he did more good than bad. And though he states that his biggest regret was that he allowed his piece to be interpreted as journalism instead of theatre, the exchanges between him and Glass actually reveal an inherit tension between two oft-stated goals of journalism: to tell the truth and to instigate change.

Unlike the most famous of the recent fabricators that he will inevitably be lumped into, Daisey appeared to have generally decent motives. He wasn’t glory-hungry like Stephen Glass or wracked by personal problems like Jayson Blair. Instead, he appears to sincerely believe that his truth is the truth, despite any pesky facts that may get in the way.

Unlike Glass or Blair or Janet Cooke, Daisey can’t blame a high-stress working environment that forces young writers to always have the next scoop.

He comes a little bit closer to Truman Capote, who fictionalized swaths of “In Cold Blood” for the sake of narrative. He made things neater.

Regardless of stated motive, Jack Shafer at Reuters has it write about motivations of all fabulists such as Daisey.

1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten.

For other compelling reading on the subject, take a look at Buzz Bisinger’s “Shattered Glass” and the New York Times’s retraction of Jayson Blair’s reporting.

The digital doldrums

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:48:39 -0800

A number of newspapers gave an unprecedented amount of information to the Pew Research Centre about how the digital revolution is affecting their bottom lines. The news is bad: on average for every digital dollar gained, newspapers lost seven. Here’s some of the highlights.

Cultural inertia is a major factor. Most papers are not putting significant effort into the new digital revenue categories that, while small now, are expected to provide most the growth in the future. To different degrees, executives predict newsrooms will continue to shrink, more papers will close and many surviving papers will deliver a print edition only a few days a week.

Beneath these broad numbers, however, are papers that buck the trend in significant ways and offer the idea that more can be achieved. One paper studied saw digital ad revenue grow 63% and print grow 8% in the last full year for which it had data. Another paper registered a gain of 50% in digital advertising.

Some of these outliers also were having more success growing new categories of digital revenue, not just selling the traditional categories more effectively.One of the papers generating the most digital revenue, for instance, was having significant success selling targeted digital advertising customized based on customer online behavior. This is projected to be the biggest growth area in local digital advertising. Most papers studied had very little of this kind of “smart” advertising.

The growth in digital revenue is generally slower at smaller papers than at larger ones, though so is the decline in print advertising. That suggests that while the small papers that make up the vast majority of U.S. dailies are not changing as quickly as larger ones, they may have more time to sort out their way.

Of the papers sharing private data, advertising on mobile devices accounted for only 1% of the digital revenue in 2011. Executives are generally excited by the prospects of mobile, but for now it accounts for a tiny amount of revenue. Executives also believe that due to its ubiquity in the market, the phone ultimately could be more important to mobile revenue than tablets, a sign perhaps of some growing uncertainty about the ability to charge for apps, though some executives are already skeptical about how much money newspapers can make with smartphones.

Newspaper executives described an industry still caught between the gravitational pull of the legacy tradition and the need to chart a faster digital course. A number of them worried that their companies simply had too many people-whether it be in the newsroom, the boardroom or on the sales staff-who were too attached to the old way of doing things.

fairy-wren: king cormorant (photo by brutus ostling)

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:45:41 -0800

fairy-wren:

king cormorant

(photo by brutus ostling)

jtotheizzoe: Immigration form filled out by Apollo 11...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:36:29 -0800

jtotheizzoe:

Immigration form filled out by Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return from Moon.

“Do you have anything to declare?”

“Why yes, yes I do. From up there, you all look like ants.”

zedequalszee: The worldwide distribution of heavy metal. (via...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:31:50 -0800

zedequalszee:

The worldwide distribution of heavy metal.

(via Kyle Van Blerk)

skyscraper: Vancouver Skyline by ericr33914 on deviantART

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:30:26 -0800

skyscraper:

Vancouver Skyline by ericr33914 on deviantART

theatlantic: What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:57:59 -0800

theatlantic:

What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have In Common?

What’s most interesting about fact checkers is the circumstances they work under and the traits they must possess to perform their job. Generally speaking, fact checking is a largely thankless job where the person is invisible if he does his job perfectly and is only noticed for his work when things go wrong. He must work confidently, meticulously, and take accuracy as its own reward. If he makes an error the stakes can be enormous—a loss of his job, a lawsuit, the damaged reputation of a writer, editors, and a publication. He will receive no byline. This requires essentially a reverse skill set, hell, a reverse attitude about life in a culture that seeks endless pats on the back, where everyone in Little League gets a trophy—even the backup right fielder on the last place team. Where we collectively are in a mad panic to have our thoughts and actions known via lengthy blog posts, and in nugget form on Facebook and Twitter, our every mediocre photo shared on Flickr. Where we are willing to debase ourselves to have our personal dramas on reality TV. Where ads are increasingly tailored to us specifically (thanks to all those aforementioned Facebook posts). The American ethos screams YOU, the individual, are important, you must be counted, you must make yourself noticed! What type of person, in a society with these values, goes the other way and chooses anonymity?

It turns out, the lonely, lowly fact checker, is in actuality not so lonely. There is a commonality of his circumstance and traits among a select group of other professionals, a collective I call The Invisibles, and we as a culture can learn from this unique group.

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

More space! inothernews: MEGALOPOLIS The Eastern Seaboard is...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:58:41 -0800

More space!

inothernews:

MEGALOPOLIS The Eastern Seaboard is seen alight from the International Space Station. (Photo via NASA)

n-a-s-a: Upgrading the International Space Station Credit:...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 17:09:39 -0800

n-a-s-a:

Upgrading the International Space Station

Credit: STS-116 Shuttle Crew, NASA

I used to live a short walk from here. nationalpost: Photo of...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:13:57 -0800

I used to live a short walk from here.

nationalpost:

Photo of the day
The ‘Golden Victoria’ sculpture from the top of Siegessaeule, the Victory column in Berlin, Feb. 23, 2012. Local residents have nicknamed the 69-meter-high column ‘Goldelse’. (Tobias Schwarz/Reuters)

A Song You Don’t Meet Everyday - Brian Eno Edition Third...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:47:35 -0800

A Song You Don’t Meet Everyday - Brian Eno Edition

Third Uncle is a freight train. Loaded with dynamite. Hijacked by that guy from the “Speed” movies that rigs buses to explode. At any moment, the jittery guitars and propulsive drum beat sound like they’re going to run the track totally off the rails. It’s only Brian Eno’s deadpan that keeps the song from exploding entirely.

theprovince: Evel Knievel’s dad’s brother’s great-granddaughter...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:51:27 -0800

theprovince:

Evel Knievel’s dad’s brother’s great-granddaughter plays basketball for the UBC Thunderbirds! (Whew, say that out loud three times.)

How awesome is that?

nparts: Dave Bidini: The English maestro’s new record, Kisses...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:40:50 -0800

nparts:

Dave Bidini: The English maestro’s new record, Kisses on the Bottom, proves once and for all how Paul McCartney imagines himself: as an old lady from Kent in a bonnet and slippers eating quince candy and drinking her weekly glass of stout.

Awesome.nationalgeographicdaily: Child and Water Buffalo,...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:32:56 -0800

Awesome.
nationalgeographicdaily:

Child and Water Buffalo, Vietnam
Photo: Denis Rozan

A young Hmong girl rides a water buffalo in Sa Pa, Vietnam.

The Caging of America

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:31:24 -0800

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker takes a stab at answering a puzzle I’ve often thought about; what is the great moral question of our time?

Gopnik argues in his concise, persuasive essay that, at least for America, it’s about how many people the country puts behind bars.

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

He also addresses the normalization of rape within American society—as long as the victims are male prisoners.

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece.

Some other possible candidates for most egregious moral harm done by Western society: factory farming, climate change, agricultural subsidies that put farmers in developing world our of business and restrictive international migration laws.

The Justice Institute attacks

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:08:00 -0800

At the end of last year, I wrote about the bizarre shootings and arson attacks against people connected to the Justice Institute of BC.

In September, the RCMP advised the public that 10 individuals linked with JIBC had been the victims of arson or shooting attacks throughout 2011. The people targeted included three JIBC employees, two former students and five others with loose links to the institution.

“[We] had determined that there was a larger issue here with regards to a variety of shootings and arsons and quickly determined that there was some commonality between them,” said Sgt. Peter Thiessen.

Since then, three more people have been targeted, though none of the 13 suffered any injuries. The attacks occurred at or near the victims’ homes and vehicles.

Those attacks have continued into the New Year. Last week, Elaine O’Connor at The Province wrote the most comprehensive article on the subject to date. It goes in depth into the ICBC angle and brings to light many details about the actual attacks.

It was a cold, overcast night in mid-January when residents of a normally quiet West Vancouver neighbourhood heard the wail of fire engine sirens.

A blaze consumed the front entrance of a home in the 1000-block Lawson Avenue at about 2:40 a.m. and rendered the house uninhabitable.

The Jan. 13 fire was deliberately set at the home of former West Vancouver police chief Scott Armstrong, who had served on the force until 2006 and had recently sold the property.

The story adeptly captures the absurdity of this situation; an unknown motive, a mysterious group of assailants and the only connection between the victims is a school. It feels like one of Agatha Christie’s lesser works.

“This is one of the most bizarre cases I’ve ever come to know about, ever,” said Prof. Darryl Plecas, a University of the Fraser Valley criminology expert and director of its Centre for Criminal Justice Research.

“It’s an extremely odd case. There is something not normal going on here. And, if you consider the number of victims, this is also extraordinarily complex.

“What is going on here? Is it a personal vendetta? A vendetta against the system or the institution, or is it broader than that? Or are we talking about someone who is ‘not all there?’”

Plecas believes whoever is behind the attacks is thoughtful and motivated, but acting too recklessly and committing too many brazen attacks not to get caught.

“You don’t fire gunshots recklessly without realizing that you could be putting someone in harm’s way,” the professor said.