Quotulatiousness

February 4, 2011

The Montreal Gazette‘s 1969 view of the year 2000

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Paleofuture‘s Matt Novak digs up a Montreal Gazette cartoon from 1969:


Click to view full size

The January 18, 1969 Montreal Gazette ran this most peculiar comic, chock full of hilarious expositional dialogue and dystopian delights.

We follow the futuristic misadventures of George Daedalus, also known as Daeda 928 502 467, in the year 2000 AD. George lives in Oshtoham, Canada’s second largest city — which I’m guessing is a combination of the cities Oshawa, Toronto and Markham — and works as a travel agent. George lives his life surrounded by technological wonders like robot servants, videophones, moving sidewalks and 3D hologram walls, but we come to find out that he’s really just not that happy. The last panel shows George taking drugs and using a computer to escape his reality. Boy am I glad I don’t live in that future!

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

January 21, 2011

Remaking Red Dawn as a metaphor for US fear of China

Filed under: China, Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

David Harsanyi notes the remake of the 1980’s movie Red Dawn with the Chinese taking the place of the original film’s Soviet and Cuban troops:

Doubtlessly, the remake will be entertaining and offer a far more plausible plot line than the original — seeing that the Chinese, well, they have a proper army. Producers will almost certainly capitalize on a growing alarmism regarding China’s growth. Few issues, in fact, can bring right and left together in this polarized world of ours than a shared knowledge that China is bad news.

Now, the American populace can typically be divided into two categories: 1. Those who don’t care one whit about foreign policy. 2. Newspaper editors.

So before Chinese President Hu Jintao was here meeting with the president, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal and explained what we think about the topic.

Apparently, 47 percent of those he surveyed cited China as the world’s top economic power. (Only 31 percent properly identified it as the U.S., which has an economy nearly three times the size.) Another Pew survey from last year found that 47 percent of us consider China’s growth a “bad thing” for the United States. A new CNN poll found that 58 percent of us believe that China’s “wealth and economic power” are a threat to the U.S.

I’m certain our relationship with China is layered with international complexity and fraught with danger. But why would we fear the aspects of China’s ascendancy — its “wealth and economic power” — that pose the least threat to United States? Unlike ideological clashes, economic competition can be mutually beneficial. A country with real economic wealth is typically free and doesn’t look kindly on radical behavior. Suicide bombers rarely drive top-of-the-line BMWs.

I have a long history of doubting the stated size and growth of the Chinese economy and therefore feeling that the “threat” they pose is overstated. Overall, the economic growth in China is a good thing, both for China and for the world economy, but there’s still too much malignancy from the “bad old days” of the command economy that haven’t been properly dealt with. China is big, and getting bigger, but will face severe problems the longer these historical artifacts remain unexamined and unresolved.

January 20, 2011

In case you weren’t worried enough about the rise of China

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:23

The Wall Street Journal rounds up the leading indicators of the current “USA sliding down the ladder” worries:

Of all the differences between dictatorship and democracy, probably none is so overlooked as the ability of the former to project strength, and the penchant of the latter to obsess about its own weakness.

In 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik and the U.S. went into a paroxysm of nerves about our supposed backwardness in matters ballistic. Throughout the 1980s Americans lived with “Japan as Number One” (the title of a book by Harvard professor Ezra Vogel, though the literature was extensive) and wondered whether Mitsubishi’s purchase of Rockefeller Center qualified as a threat to American sovereignty.

Now there’s China, whose President is visiting the U.S. this week amid a new bout of American hypochondria. In an op-ed last week in these pages, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center noted that a plurality of Americans, 47%, are under the erroneous impression that China is the world’s leading economy. News reports regarding Chinese military strides, or the academic prowess of Shanghai high school students, contribute to Western perceptions of Chinese ascendancy. So does the false notion that Beijing’s holdings of U.S. debt amounts to a sword of Damocles over Washington’s head.

Oh, we nearly forgot: Tough-as-nails Chinese mothers are raising child prodigies (a billion of them!) while their Western counterparts indulge their kids with lessons in finger-painting.

There you go, more than enough to keep you up late tonight worrying about the inevitability of China’s rise to top economic dog in the pack. Of course, most of it is misinterpretation of the facts, but you can worry about it if you want.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

January 3, 2011

Healthy skepticism about study results

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

John Allen Paulos provides some useful mental tools to use when presented with unlikely published findings from various studies:

Ioannidis examined the evidence in 45 well-publicized health studies from major journals appearing between 1990 and 2003. His conclusion: the results of more than one third of these studies were flatly contradicted or significantly weakened by later work.

The same general idea is discussed in “The Truth Wears Off,” an article by Jonah Lehrer that appeared last month in the New Yorker magazine. Lehrer termed the phenomenon the “decline effect,” by which he meant the tendency for replication of scientific results to fail — that is, for the evidence supporting scientific results to seemingly weaken over time, disappear altogether, or even suggest opposite conclusions.

[. . .]

One reason for some of the instances of the decline effect is provided by regression to the mean, the tendency for an extreme value of a random quantity dependent on many variables to be followed by a value closer to the average or mean.

[. . .]

This phenomenon leads to nonsense when people attribute the regression to the mean as the result of something real, rather than to the natural behavior of any randomly varying quantity.

[. . .]

In some instances, another factor contributing to the decline effect is sample size. It’s become common knowledge that polls that survey large groups of people have a smaller margin of error than those that canvass a small number. Not just a poll, but any experiment or measurement that examines a large number of test subjects will have a smaller margin of error than one having fewer subjects.

Not surprisingly, results of experiments and studies with small samples often appear in the literature, and these results frequently suggest that the observed effects are quite large — at one end or the other of the large margin of error. When researchers attempt to demonstrate the effect on a larger sample of subjects, the margin of error is smaller and so the effect size seems to shrink or decline.

[. . .]

Publication bias is, no doubt, also part of the reason for the decline effect. That is to say that seemingly significant experimental results will be published much more readily than those that suggest no experimental effect or only a small one. People, including journal editors, naturally prefer papers announcing or at least suggesting a dramatic breakthrough to those saying, in effect, “Ehh, nothing much here.”

The availability error, the tendency to be unduly influenced by results that, for one reason or another, are more psychologically available to us, is another factor. Results that are especially striking or counterintuitive or consistent with experimenters’ pet theories also more likely will result in publication.

December 15, 2010

This is a sign of a slow news week

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

When the National Post carries a story about someone purloining one of the wise men figures from a church in Brooklin:

Durham Region police reported that the 6′ x 3′ plywood cutout of one of the Three Wise Men was stolen in the early morning hours Dec. 12, and the church had said they would like it returned.

“It’s a bit of an insult,” said Brooklin United Church council chair Rick Barnes.

Mr. Barnes said the thieves were caught on camera, and said they appeared to be “a bunch of kids goofing around and having fun.” The wooden cut-out, which was fastened to a metal post and then attached to the larger constructed scene, would be hard to remove quickly, he said.

“It didn’t take all night but it took them a considerable effort to get it removed,” he said.

Mr. Barnes said that although Brooklin United doesn’t plan to make a big deal out of the incident, it is unfortunate for the church, who have limited resources to begin with.

Brooklin is kind of a quiet place . . . but even here, this isn’t really a big story. Why the National Post bothered to report on it, I can’t begin to imagine.

December 4, 2010

QotD: “Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it”

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Here’s a clip of HG Wells in 1943 predicting the demise of the newspaper, as people abandon print journalism in favor of using their telephones for up-to-the-minute news.

In one way, it’s very prescient — “using the telephone to get the news” isn’t so far off from what we do on the web today. But in another way, it’s exactly wrong (after all, it’s been nearly 70 years and there are still newspapers), And it’s wrong in a way that futurists are often wrong: it assumes a clean break with history and the positive extinction of the past. It predicts an information landscape that is reminiscent of the Radiant Garden Cities that Jane Jacobs railed against: a “modern” city that could only be built by bulldozing the entire city that stood before it and building something new on the clean field that remained. Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it. Real new cities are build through, within, around, and alongside of the old cities. They evolve.

As Bruce Sterling says, “The future composts the past.” What happened to newspapers is what happened to the stage when films were invented: all the stuff that formerly had to be on the stage but was better suited to the new screen gradually migrated off-stage and onto the screen (and when TV was invented, all the “little-screen” stories that had been shoehorned onto the big screen moved to the boob-tube; the same thing is happening with YouTube and TV today). Just as Twitter is siphoning off all the stuff we used to put on blogs that really wanted to be a tweet.

Cory Doctorow, “Newspapers are dead as mutton – HG Wells, 1943 (No, they’re not)”, BoingBoing, 2010-12-03

November 23, 2010

Succinct summary of Irish situation

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

From Andrew Bloch’s Twitpic page and brought to my attention by Damian Penny.

QotD: “Shut up and be scanned”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

More on your authoritarian media . . .

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Welch ran off a list of newspaper editorial boards who are lining up behind TSA. The headline to this post is the actual headline from the L. A. Times’ editorial. Given such cowardice about defending civil liberties in the face of hysterical hand-wringing about national security, I was going to post a snarky comment about how the L.A. Times would probably have told Japanese-Americans to “shut up and report to your internment camp” back in 1942, too.

Then I did some Googling, and discovered that the paper pretty much did exactly that. As did a number of other papers.

Radley Balko, “Shut Up and Be Scanned”, The Agitator, 2010-11-22

November 21, 2010

He comes not to bury Twitter, but to praise it

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Linked from one of Walter Olson’s Twitter updates, an interesting summary by Alan Rusbridger on the things that Twitter does for media folks:

I’ve lost count of the times people — including a surprising number of colleagues in media companies — roll their eyes at the mention of Twitter. “No time for it,” they say. “Inane stuff about what twits are having for breakfast. Nothing to do with the news business.”

Well, yes and no. Inanity — yes, sure, plenty of it. But saying that Twitter has got nothing to do with the news business is about as misguided as you could be.

Here, off the top of my head, are 15 things, which Twitter does rather effectively and which should be of the deepest interest to anyone involved in the media at any level.

There are lots of people who send Twitter updates on what they made for dinner, or what they’re watching on TV, but you don’t have to follow them. I’ve been amazed at how useful Twitter has been to me for keeping on top of what I think of as “blogfodder” items: things that I think my own readers would be interested in.

November 9, 2010

How to create false sympathy for “victims”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Adrian MacNair gives a couple of examples of how to manipulate your reader into a sympathetic view of someone who isn’t actually a victim:

In the first instance we have a story about a court pondering whether a person can agree in advance to unconscious sex. It’s not a particularly edifying piece of news as it discusses an Ottawa court case involving a kinky couple who were involved in sex involving asphyxiation.

Although the article focuses on the court’s upcoming ruling of “sexual autonomy”, a quote from a woman’s legal advocacy group, and the background details of the alleged assault, we only learn in paragraph nine about an extremely important detail:

“The woman took her complaint to Ottawa police two months after the alleged assault, when she was seeking custody of the couple’s toddler.”

Two months after the fact, while embroiled in a custody battle. Sounds like something that could have been delivered a little higher in the story. Indeed, one could rewrite it in such a way that implies this parent is using the legal system in a manipulative way that challenges sexual autonomy just to win her kid.

The second case involves the new parents who “lost their seats” on a flight:

And then we get to salient information in paragraph 11. The couple arrived through security 20 minutes before takeoff, and then decided to run their baby [to] the bathroom because he soiled his diaper. This diaper changing took so long that apparently the airline gave away their seats to standby. Sorry, so sad. Too bad.

Journalism students are taught to find a hook or an angle to make the story of interest to the largest possible audience, but these two cases sound like the story is actually being distorted to fit a pre-decided agenda.

November 6, 2010

Creating a more privileged class of commenter

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:44

I don’t normally read comment threads at the Globe and Mail website (actually, I rarely get too far in comment threads anywhere . . . too many comments, too little time), so the creation of Globe Catalysts was news to me earlier today. Elizabeth mentioned that certain prolific commenters at the Globe website had been given privileges which makes their individual comments much more visible and (apparently) keeps catalyst comments near the top of the thread.

It must have appeared to Globe management that the comment threads were getting too unruly, so they’ve appointed class monitors or “trustys” to keep the unwashed masses in line.

It’s nice that they chose a name for these folks that allows the group of them to be referred to as “the Cattle List”.

November 1, 2010

It’s not liberal bias: it’s statist bias

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

Radley Balko uses the media positions on California’s Proposition 19 as a proxy to determine the actual bias:

For the last few months, my colleague Matt Welch has been tracking the positions of California’s newspapers on Proposition 19, the ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. At last count, 26 of the state’s 30 largest dailies (plus USA Today) had run editorials on the issue, and all 26 (plus USA Today) were opposed. This puts the state’s papers at odds with nearly all of California’s left-leaning interest groups, including the Green Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; progressive publications such The Nation, Salon, and The Huffington Post; and a host of prominent liberal bloggers. According to a CNN/Time poll released last week, it also pits the state’s newspapers against 76 percent of California voters who identify themselves as “liberal.”

On this issue, the state’s dailies are also to the right of conservative publications such as The Economist and National Review, prominent Republicans such as former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a growing portion of the Tea Party movement, and even Fox News personality Glenn Beck. (Beck has said he favors marijuana legalization, although he has been typically schizophrenic on Prop. 19.) So who are the newspapers’ allies? Nearly all of California’s major elected officials are against the measure, and the No on Prop. 19 campaign has been funded mainly by contributions from various law enforcement organizations, including the California Police Chiefs Association, the prison guard union, and the California Narcotics Officers Association.

It’s telling that the loudest voices opposing pot legalization are coming from the mainstream media, politicians, and law enforcement. The three have a lot in common. Indeed, the Prop. 19 split illustrates how conservative critics of the mainstream media have it all wrong. The media — or at least the editorial boards at the country’s major newspapers — don’t suffer from liberal bias; they suffer from statism. While conservatives emphasize order and property, liberals emphasize equality, and libertarians emphasize individual rights, newspaper editorial boards are biased toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem.

October 23, 2010

Has Molly Norris become an un-person to the Society for Professional Journalists?

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Matt Welch sees little positive effort and much bitchiness from one of the organizations that should have been front-and-centre to help Molly Norris:

On Sept. 15, it was announced that Molly Norris, the Seattle-based alt-weekly cartoonist who suggested, then eventually backed away from and repudiated, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” protest against Comedy Central censoring bits of a South Park episode, had gone into hiding with the FBI’s assistance so as to hopefully avoid being murdered by Islamic assassins. It was a dark, dark day for American journalism and the freedom of expression. On Sept. 20, the Washington Examiner newspaper wrote an editorial criticizing the professional journalism/free speech community for its comparative silence on the issue.

[. . .]

I don’t expect journalism organizations to share my priorities. But I do expect them to do more than raise an eyebrow when a cartoonist goes into hiding after being threatened with death, then act all bitchy when someone calls them out on it.

October 4, 2010

Winning the media war

Filed under: Asia, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Strategypage reports on the ongoing struggle by both the Taliban and the NATO/US forces to influence media coverage, both inside Afghanistan and in the outside world:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have been very successful with the media, mainly because they give the media what they want, or an offer they can’t refuse. The Taliban know that the media loves stories where the underdog prevails, or where the powers-that-be screw up. Put out the right kind of disinformation, and the media will take it and run it as the truth. Or at least something that could, might or ought to be true somewhere.

The Taliban media people know what the Western and regional media want, and this is provided. For example, the Taliban have invented the idea that Western troops are causing most of the civilian deaths in the Taliban effort to regain control of Afghanistan. But the truth, which is published but not emphasized much, is that most of the civilians are killed by the Taliban, and the Western troops have been killing fewer and fewer civilians, even at the risk of more Western casualties. The Taliban regularly use civilians as human shields. Again, the media mentions that, but it’s something for the back pages. The headlines stress what the Taliban wants, mainly that they are winning, even when they are losing.

For a backwards, almost medieval group, the Taliban (or their non-Afghani advisors) have developed a talent for manipulating the international media coverage:

But you don’t have to bribe or threaten Western media. Just package your lies in an acceptable manner, and your message will be delivered. The Taliban are smart enough to constantly recast their press releases to suit the perceived needs of Western and regional media. All they have to do is note what stories editors are running, and work up new stuff with a Taliban angle. Thus while corruption has been an Afghan cultural problem for centuries, the Western media will swallow whole a Taliban press release suggesting that the Taliban are less corrupt (they aren’t) and this more attractive to the average Afghan (not according to opinion polls, or reports from American troops who deal with local Afghans every day.) But in the Western media, you survive by pushing what will sell, not what is actually happening.

September 29, 2010

QotD: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by malice and incompetence”

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

I used to publish in the National Post back in the day Conrad Black ran the show. It was a business run with integrity. The last time I had a call from their editorial board I had to explain the Post paid me 40 cents a word. The man was genuinely scandalized — I mean audibly taken aback and offended — when I told him I would not hand my work over to him for free (btw, Adam, how did selling your integrity work out for you? Looks like you got what it was worth).

These days they don’t bother to call. Last week, they took my Margaret Atwood story and ran with it uncredited. They lacked the decency to do something that would have cost them nothing.

[. . .]

I am a writer. I don’t expect to get paid much. But I do expect to get paid. If this country aspired to be something more than a grasping, pissant kleptocracy celebrating third-raters and UCC school ties my work — this blog and others like it — would be understood as part of the real Canadian cultural establishment.

Fortunately, I don’t require their acknowledgement.

Nicholas Packwood, “Neither honour nor courage: The National Post”, Ghost of a Flea, 2010-09-29

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