Sure, but in many, many cases there are public databases that no one has ever looked at. It's not all that different from investigative reporters digging around for information in court docs. Some of the best investigators work ENTIRELY from legal records. Then they do some interviews to color it up at the end when they have it nailed down. It's the same workflow when reporting from an obscure government or corporate database.
Oh, and just for perspective I've been working as a reporter since 2001, and I rarely work from press releases. When we do, it's because we need an official statement on something, and it's an easy way to get it right. There's shoddy journalism out there (oh we know), but it's not all the same.
No, sources provide the raw data. Journalists report the most interesting bits to the public.
Databases are just another source. There is so much data out there that no one looks at (public records, etc). When I was doing investigative work full time, we had spiders out that just pulled every.MDB file from a.gov URL. All kinds of interesting stuff showed up, most of it not "published" in any usable way, but often of great public interest (example: we located and published all the raw contracts between DOJ and service providers in Iraq and Afghanistan, represented many billions of tax dollars being spent with little to no public oversight).
Frankly, whether information is published on a blog or a newspaper is irrelevant. It's like saying journalism can only be printed in black ink, not blue. A blog is a delivery vehicle - a cheaper and easier to use option, much like newspapers were in 1750. People freaked out about standards then too.
Charles Lewis: "Thereâ(TM)s a lot of datasets that most people donâ(TM)t know about. I was excited to hear a few years ago, that the USDA has a database of all the bad meat in America thatâ(TM)s been recalled. Who knew? I had no idea. I donâ(TM)t know if itâ(TM)s online or if itâ(TM)s there internally â" but there are hundreds and hundreds of databases with massive amounts of data that nobody knows about or ever looks at. You could dine off the databases."
He also does investigative journalism for a living. Check him out.
Charlie: sure, but don't you ever have story leads buried in public data? Some of it is demographic issues ( why are three Alabama counties posting infant mortality rates similar to Africa? ). Some of it is fleshing out stories like why a Senator voted on a specific bill, so you can write from evidence rather than anecdote. These aren't classically investigative, but there's new information of public value, no? It's a different kind of reporting, but it's pretty cool stuff when it works.
As for an "algorithm" that automagicly does the work for you and tells you what to write... yeah, we all know that's not going to happen.
Nice to see an interest in computer assisted reporting (CAR), although I'm a little baffled at the article linked calling this an "emerging" practice. I've been at this for about a decade, and there were plenty here when I showed up.
A few observations:
1) Regarding other commenters. anyone who talks about "journalism" as if the field is one homogeneous, cohesive group are maybe not thinking too deeply about media. Kind of like how "Americans" or "humans" covers a lot of folks.
2) All journalism is data mining, in service of storytelling. Talking to people who know things is data mining. Googling is data mining. Crunching public databases, or building your own -- same stuff, but (sometimes) faster and more rigorous.
3) Minus buzzwords, this is just tech saavy reporters trying to pull out interesting facts cheaper, faster, and more accurately than the next girl. Given that much investigative reporting happens in non-traditional media these days, a lot of this is coming from nonprofits.
4) Some projects to check out if you're interested:
Center for Public Integrity (http://www.publicintegrity.org) - disclosure, I worked there back in the day
You can also check out the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR).
Closing thought: you can make a smarter database, search algorithm, etc, but ultimately it comes down to a reporter who can interpret the information available to her, understand what stories matter and present that to the public in a form that is interesting and accurate. Technology is a helpful tool, but that's still a very human enterprise.
The TED lectures (the hype: "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers") are very current, often fun, and generally fairly accessible. I wouldn't 'dumb it down' too much for your kid -- kids will rise to the occasion if the content is well presented.
http://www.ted.com/
Actually, most S&R in the mountain west is volunteer. So your accounting might not explain their motives. High powered options (helecopters) are usually military, who bill it as training.
My sympathy is limited. When mountaineers in the US call for search & rescue bailout these days, they can expect to foot the bill. This is in response to a big increase in S&R on Ranier, Denali and other big mountains in the last two decades. More people were climbing, people were being irresponsible/inexpereinced and putting rescuers at risk, spending tax dollars, and generally wrecking it for everyone. So they shifted the costs back to the people who screw up. Now mountaineers can buy rescue insurance -- neatly transferring the nanny-state role to individuals and whatever insurance company they choose.
This user-pays model is not a great way to say, provide health care to poor kids or put out burning buildings but it's fine for an entirely optional activity like climbing mountains.
So Fosset took off alone in a small plane without a flight plan and got himself lost. Tragic, but entirely his decision. When your job title is "mutlti-millionaire adventurer" then I don't really see the need for taxpayers to subsidize your intentionally risky hobbies.
In China, motorbike producers sat down together and set up a standard for motorbike components. The result was that manufacturers could mix and match, say an engine from company A with a rear suspension from B, and so on. End user prices went through the floor, while the products got somewhat better quality (though admittedly much less inventive). Same idea in gadgets would be great.
The key here is that the component standards were all open-source. Until Bug encourages other opportunistic companies to create cheap and novel hardware modules they just have a 4-feature PDA that can disassemble. Nice idea, but not going to stick as long as that $600 gets you the same hardware as my celly.
Thanks for the rant, and I generally agree. However, all airport employees (tug drivers, bag throwers, etc) go through the same TSA security pat down as passengers (every frakkin day). We don't have to take off our boots because my company gave us fancy non-magnetic fiberglass-toe safety shoes.
So, yes we can - in theory - steal your stuff, but that's because there's no security checkpoint on the exits.
Treat it like bandwidth: give the UAVs 5000-5500 feet, and tell the passenger traffic not to cruise there. Then let the UAVs smack into each other all they want. You still have risk during a passenger aircraft "pass through" and while the UAVs climb to cruise altitude, but that's easier to manage than a fly-wherever-you-want policy.
Anyone know the lift-cost of "three pounds (1.3 kilograms) per day" of air? I know the space station has been hemorrhaging money for years, but it's rarely this, um, poetic.
Yes, actually. Compare the current network of torture sites in Eastern Europe to the post-WWII interrogation centers for high level Nazis in Maryland (or Viriginia, I can't remember). At a recent ceremony to recognize the guys who worked there after WWII, several actually went on stage to decry the current lack of oversight and rule of law in our government today.
What's happening now is new and different and bad.
> The only relief comes from the knowledge, that any evidence illegally collected still can not be used against anyone in the court > of law...
I find this little comfort in an age when detention without trial, secret CIA prisons and extra-judicial renditions to torture-friendly countries are so commonly accepted we make big budget Hollywood movies about them without controversy.
Doing things outside the law has a way of becoming standard-operating-procedure with amazing speed.
Not quite right on the science. You can bind up carbon in lots of useful ways that prevent it from being emitted to the atmosphere as CO2 or methane or other greenhouse gases (many of which are much more damaging than CO2). So you can burn fuel badly and you can burn fuel less badly. Until we have cheaper non-fossil energy, that where most of the cheap emissions reductions will happen.
> You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much.
Badly misinformed. There is no common database, or even a common methodology, for tracking carbon outputs. Right now consultants can make good money helping companies calculate exactly that number. Most have no idea where they are today. The Global Reporting Initiative is a step in that direction, but it's voluntary.
The nearest analogy is the Toxic Release Inventory, a report which is mandated by US law, but CO2 is not a toxic.
Further reading: 'carbon finance', Innovest Group, Global Reporting Initiative.
> You'd do well not to use greenpeace as a source of information. you'll get few actual facts from those weasles
Turns out I don't. My background is in evaluating investment risk around sustainability issues for portfolio managers. I don't care what Greenpeace says, I care what their customers do in response. Greenpeace releases information, capital is reallocated. I try to predict that by examining the actual ethics of the companies involved. Shocking, but environmental best practices do translate to better investments -- primarily through reduced volatility, but there's evidence that it's a leading indicator of innovation and good management as well. See the Innovest Group for more (I use their data).
Apple will only be punished if their customers care about whether "Think Different" is a lie. They're not being punished for being popular: they've been rewarded by being popular. Greenpeace is asking their customers to decide whether they deserve it. Strong brands have higher expectations and higher prices: the value add. Otherwise, Mp3 players etc would be commodities.
Problem: People worldwide are concerned about the environment, human rights, and peace/security. Many feel that multinational corporations are making things worse. But multinational companies are really good at avoiding regulation by 'traditional' democratic institutions, namely governments.
Solution: Brands are already signifiers of complex emotional meanings. Marketers would love to define these meanings for us, but the meaning of a brand is a contested space. Holding high-value brands accountable for the sustainability of their actions becomes a powerful tool, but ONLY when those brands defy the values of their customers. Turns out many customers don't like toxics leaking out their landfills and so on. They never did. But now that marketeering has taught us that brands have deep things to say about who we as customers are, well gosh, suddenly brands that represent poisoned water tables are in deep shit. Because branding is about feeling, and poison-water feels bad.
Think about it: Greenpeace's only action was to release information. Not exactly threatening, unless that information drives customers. If Greenpeace doesn't share the values/ethics of the people who shop at Apple, there's absolutely no effect. But they do. Greenpeace picks targets that have value-added brands, brands with emotional resonance. It's hardball tactics and it's completely fair because what they said about Apple is true. Generic companies are also bad, but those companies don't have fanboys and big brand-name markups. Apple makes all kinds of promises to its customers wrapped into "Think Different". Turns out the customers want that to means something.
The interesting thing about this is that far from destroying brands, it actually makes them more powerful. Suddenly brands go beyond marketing language to become signifiers of real corporate ethics, where a value-added brand is even more desireable, because we customers know that a company that claims to "Think Different" but isn't will get crucified. Outing liars increases trust. Good for everyone: markets are more efficient with more information.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but in many, many cases there are public databases that no one has ever looked at. It's not all that different from investigative reporters digging around for information in court docs. Some of the best investigators work ENTIRELY from legal records. Then they do some interviews to color it up at the end when they have it nailed down. It's the same workflow when reporting from an obscure government or corporate database.
Oh, and just for perspective I've been working as a reporter since 2001, and I rarely work from press releases. When we do, it's because we need an official statement on something, and it's an easy way to get it right. There's shoddy journalism out there (oh we know), but it's not all the same.
No, sources provide the raw data. Journalists report the most interesting bits to the public.
Databases are just another source. There is so much data out there that no one looks at (public records, etc). When I was doing investigative work full time, we had spiders out that just pulled every .MDB file from a .gov URL. All kinds of interesting stuff showed up, most of it not "published" in any usable way, but often of great public interest (example: we located and published all the raw contracts between DOJ and service providers in Iraq and Afghanistan, represented many billions of tax dollars being spent with little to no public oversight).
Frankly, whether information is published on a blog or a newspaper is irrelevant. It's like saying journalism can only be printed in black ink, not blue. A blog is a delivery vehicle - a cheaper and easier to use option, much like newspapers were in 1750. People freaked out about standards then too.
Charles Lewis: "Thereâ(TM)s a lot of datasets that most people donâ(TM)t know about. I was excited to hear a few years ago, that the USDA has a database of all the bad meat in America thatâ(TM)s been recalled. Who knew? I had no idea. I donâ(TM)t know if itâ(TM)s online or if itâ(TM)s there internally â" but there are hundreds and hundreds of databases with massive amounts of data that nobody knows about or ever looks at. You could dine off the databases."
He also does investigative journalism for a living. Check him out.
http://newassignment.net/blog/john_mcquaid/nov2006/20/charles_lewis_on
By request: an investigation into "the lack of actual investigative journalism."
http://newassignment.net/blog/john_mcquaid/nov2006/20/charles_lewis_on
Incidentally, Chuck Lewis was an early advocate of computer assisted reporting as a way of tackling complex stories. Good guy.
Charlie: sure, but don't you ever have story leads buried in public data? Some of it is demographic issues ( why are three Alabama counties posting infant mortality rates similar to Africa? ). Some of it is fleshing out stories like why a Senator voted on a specific bill, so you can write from evidence rather than anecdote. These aren't classically investigative, but there's new information of public value, no? It's a different kind of reporting, but it's pretty cool stuff when it works.
As for an "algorithm" that automagicly does the work for you and tells you what to write... yeah, we all know that's not going to happen.
Nice to see an interest in computer assisted reporting (CAR), although I'm a little baffled at the article linked calling this an "emerging" practice. I've been at this for about a decade, and there were plenty here when I showed up.
A few observations:
1) Regarding other commenters. anyone who talks about "journalism" as if the field is one homogeneous, cohesive group are maybe not thinking too deeply about media. Kind of like how "Americans" or "humans" covers a lot of folks.
2) All journalism is data mining, in service of storytelling. Talking to people who know things is data mining. Googling is data mining. Crunching public databases, or building your own -- same stuff, but (sometimes) faster and more rigorous.
3) Minus buzzwords, this is just tech saavy reporters trying to pull out interesting facts cheaper, faster, and more accurately than the next girl. Given that much investigative reporting happens in non-traditional media these days, a lot of this is coming from nonprofits.
4) Some projects to check out if you're interested:
Center for Public Integrity (http://www.publicintegrity.org) - disclosure, I worked there back in the day
Sunlight Foundation: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/
Two very smart people in the field - Aron Pilhofer ( http://www.oldmedianewtricks.com/old-media-interview-aron-pilhofer-interactive-guru-editor-at-the-new-york-times/ )
and Derek Willis ( http://www.thescoop.org/ ), currently both at the New York Times.
You can also check out the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR).
Closing thought: you can make a smarter database, search algorithm, etc, but ultimately it comes down to a reporter who can interpret the information available to her, understand what stories matter and present that to the public in a form that is interesting and accurate. Technology is a helpful tool, but that's still a very human enterprise.
Fine example of tautology in the wild:
A religious cult... shows the following features: 1) Is widely accepted to be a cult by those not involved. [like Scientology]
Simplified: A cult is what we think is a cult.
The TED lectures (the hype: "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers") are very current, often fun, and generally fairly accessible. I wouldn't 'dumb it down' too much for your kid -- kids will rise to the occasion if the content is well presented. http://www.ted.com/
Actually, most S&R in the mountain west is volunteer. So your accounting might not explain their motives. High powered options (helecopters) are usually military, who bill it as training.
My sympathy is limited. When mountaineers in the US call for search & rescue bailout these days, they can expect to foot the bill. This is in response to a big increase in S&R on Ranier, Denali and other big mountains in the last two decades. More people were climbing, people were being irresponsible/inexpereinced and putting rescuers at risk, spending tax dollars, and generally wrecking it for everyone. So they shifted the costs back to the people who screw up. Now mountaineers can buy rescue insurance -- neatly transferring the nanny-state role to individuals and whatever insurance company they choose.
This user-pays model is not a great way to say, provide health care to poor kids or put out burning buildings but it's fine for an entirely optional activity like climbing mountains.
So Fosset took off alone in a small plane without a flight plan and got himself lost. Tragic, but entirely his decision. When your job title is "mutlti-millionaire adventurer" then I don't really see the need for taxpayers to subsidize your intentionally risky hobbies.
In China, motorbike producers sat down together and set up a standard for motorbike components. The result was that manufacturers could mix and match, say an engine from company A with a rear suspension from B, and so on. End user prices went through the floor, while the products got somewhat better quality (though admittedly much less inventive). Same idea in gadgets would be great. The key here is that the component standards were all open-source. Until Bug encourages other opportunistic companies to create cheap and novel hardware modules they just have a 4-feature PDA that can disassemble. Nice idea, but not going to stick as long as that $600 gets you the same hardware as my celly.
Thanks for the rant, and I generally agree. However, all airport employees (tug drivers, bag throwers, etc) go through the same TSA security pat down as passengers (every frakkin day). We don't have to take off our boots because my company gave us fancy non-magnetic fiberglass-toe safety shoes. So, yes we can - in theory - steal your stuff, but that's because there's no security checkpoint on the exits.
But these days, that's the only way to get a corncob on a plane. Find this one, security man!
Treat it like bandwidth: give the UAVs 5000-5500 feet, and tell the passenger traffic not to cruise there. Then let the UAVs smack into each other all they want. You still have risk during a passenger aircraft "pass through" and while the UAVs climb to cruise altitude, but that's easier to manage than a fly-wherever-you-want policy.
Anyone know the lift-cost of "three pounds (1.3 kilograms) per day" of air? I know the space station has been hemorrhaging money for years, but it's rarely this, um, poetic.
But they're the worst ping pong players ever.
Yes, actually. Compare the current network of torture sites in Eastern Europe to the post-WWII interrogation centers for high level Nazis in Maryland (or Viriginia, I can't remember). At a recent ceremony to recognize the guys who worked there after WWII, several actually went on stage to decry the current lack of oversight and rule of law in our government today.
What's happening now is new and different and bad.
Skip the article, read the footnotes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Detention.2C_interrogation_and_rendition_practices
> The only relief comes from the knowledge, that any evidence illegally collected still can not be used against anyone in the court > of law...
I find this little comfort in an age when detention without trial, secret CIA prisons and extra-judicial renditions to torture-friendly countries are so commonly accepted we make big budget Hollywood movies about them without controversy.
Doing things outside the law has a way of becoming standard-operating-procedure with amazing speed.
Not quite right on the science. You can bind up carbon in lots of useful ways that prevent it from being emitted to the atmosphere as CO2 or methane or other greenhouse gases (many of which are much more damaging than CO2). So you can burn fuel badly and you can burn fuel less badly. Until we have cheaper non-fossil energy, that where most of the cheap emissions reductions will happen.
> You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much.
Badly misinformed. There is no common database, or even a common methodology, for tracking carbon outputs. Right now consultants can make good money helping companies calculate exactly that number. Most have no idea where they are today. The Global Reporting Initiative is a step in that direction, but it's voluntary.
The nearest analogy is the Toxic Release Inventory, a report which is mandated by US law, but CO2 is not a toxic.
Further reading: 'carbon finance', Innovest Group, Global Reporting Initiative.
I read that headline as "Personal Robots Form Valley Startup"
Seems inevitable enough.
> You'd do well not to use greenpeace as a source of information. you'll get few actual facts from those weasles
Turns out I don't. My background is in evaluating investment risk around sustainability issues for portfolio managers. I don't care what Greenpeace says, I care what their customers do in response. Greenpeace releases information, capital is reallocated. I try to predict that by examining the actual ethics of the companies involved. Shocking, but environmental best practices do translate to better investments -- primarily through reduced volatility, but there's evidence that it's a leading indicator of innovation and good management as well. See the Innovest Group for more (I use their data).
Apple will only be punished if their customers care about whether "Think Different" is a lie. They're not being punished for being popular: they've been rewarded by being popular. Greenpeace is asking their customers to decide whether they deserve it. Strong brands have higher expectations and higher prices: the value add. Otherwise, Mp3 players etc would be commodities.
OK, same point I made, only in 90% less words and funny. I retire.
Problem: People worldwide are concerned about the environment, human rights, and peace/security. Many feel that multinational corporations are making things worse. But multinational companies are really good at avoiding regulation by 'traditional' democratic institutions, namely governments.
Solution: Brands are already signifiers of complex emotional meanings. Marketers would love to define these meanings for us, but the meaning of a brand is a contested space. Holding high-value brands accountable for the sustainability of their actions becomes a powerful tool, but ONLY when those brands defy the values of their customers. Turns out many customers don't like toxics leaking out their landfills and so on. They never did. But now that marketeering has taught us that brands have deep things to say about who we as customers are, well gosh, suddenly brands that represent poisoned water tables are in deep shit. Because branding is about feeling, and poison-water feels bad.
Think about it: Greenpeace's only action was to release information. Not exactly threatening, unless that information drives customers. If Greenpeace doesn't share the values/ethics of the people who shop at Apple, there's absolutely no effect. But they do. Greenpeace picks targets that have value-added brands, brands with emotional resonance. It's hardball tactics and it's completely fair because what they said about Apple is true. Generic companies are also bad, but those companies don't have fanboys and big brand-name markups. Apple makes all kinds of promises to its customers wrapped into "Think Different". Turns out the customers want that to means something.
The interesting thing about this is that far from destroying brands, it actually makes them more powerful. Suddenly brands go beyond marketing language to become signifiers of real corporate ethics, where a value-added brand is even more desireable, because we customers know that a company that claims to "Think Different" but isn't will get crucified. Outing liars increases trust. Good for everyone: markets are more efficient with more information.