There have recently been a few high profile cases of plagiarism, the latest being Fareed Zakaria, who quickly admitted to the offense and apologized and whose TV show was initally suspended for a month as a punishment but quickly brought back. He has also resigned from Yale University’s Governing Board. [Read more…]
I have a simple rule about news items about celebrity gossip. I tend to ignore those things that concern people that I am too much of an old fogey to be aware of, let alone care about. So I will read something if it is about a truly famous actor or someone not so famous but who is of my generation (i.e., old). But if the header of a news item refers to people like minor celebrities like Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and the like, I tend to skip over it and the story usually disappears fairly quickly. I save lot of time this way. [Read more…]
I went for dinner to a friend’s place last Saturday and the TV was on in their family room showing the Olympics. What was the event featured during this prime viewing time? Women’s beach volleyball. This event is apparently scheduled at times for maximum exposure. Who would have guessed that buff young bodies leaping around in skimpy bathing suits would draw viewers? [Read more…]
It should not be a surprise that I like blogs. But it is true that bloggers are sometimes responsible for the generation of fake news that makes its way into the mainstream media. This happens when a poorly-sourced item on a blog gets picked up by other blogs and spreads, creating the impression that it is based on fact. These items tend to be those that are either intriguing, surprising, or address widely held beliefs or hot trends.
Ryan Holliday in Forbes magazine provided two recent examples of how this happened. Edward Jay Epstein exposed one article that appeared in the New York Times that said “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths’ and that they exhibit an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.'” But while many people might suspect that to be true, no such study exists. Or rather there was a study that had some data on corporate professionals but whose authors did not make any claim along the lines reported in the news articles.
While bloggers are sometimes responsible for these false news items gaining wider currency, on the plus side, bloggers can also be a valuable source for corrections to false news.
One lesson from this is to pay close attention to the sourcing of the news. But not everyone has the time or the resources to track down and gain access to the original source. Another option is to treat such conclusions as tentative and wait a bit before passing judgment to allow for corrections and opposing views to surface.
I got a Twitter account when it first started but have never sent a tweet. It is like Facebook and LinkedIn. I was one of the early people to get accounts on both but don’t use either anymore. With Twitter my reason for not using it is that I do not see what I could possibly say in less than 140 characters that would be worth saying. [Read more…]
Being an atheist in America is, at least for now, to be a member of an unpopular minority. While atheism and conservatism are perfectly compatible philosophies, the combination can be poison for those who seek to be in good standing with the Republican party which currently is under the tight control of religious fanatics. An atheist Republican is an even greater endangered species than a gay Republican or Muslim Republican. [Read more…]
And, as you can see, it’s a good thing too.
As another unlamented former ad campaign used to say, we’ve come a long way, baby.
In the comments to my earlier post on Malcolm Gladwell, commenter sisu pointed me to a link to an excellent and detailed article that exposes how Gladwell was groomed from his early days to be a shameless huckster in the service of right-wing and corporate interests. [Read more…]
Sometime ago I wrote in a post titled God save us from the Queen my view that the British monarchy, like any other monarchy, is a feudal parasitic institution that should be abolished and that I am amazed that people in the US with its republican tradition pay so much attention to its absurdly excessive pageantry. [Read more…]
Like many people, I watch the occasional TED talk, usually because someone else recommended it to me. From watching the talks, I had a vague idea that they were given at a conference of some kind but was not curious enough to try and find out what the conferences were about and who attended. [Read more…]