but these large corporations are just as large and inefficient as the government
I suspect that if that were indeed the case we'd see a lot more countries like Cuba out-performing more capitalist nations. Government isn't without a profit motive; you've just convinced yourself that there isn't one.
Look on the back of your computer. What Communist country was it made in?
I've been reading the WSJ for >30 years. It used to be the world's greatest newspaper, but since Murdoch took over it suffered a noticeable decline.
When they wrote a story, they used to interview people on all sides of the story, answer every obvious question, and wrap it up in a tight 1,500 or 2,000 words. Now they just interview a few people and wrap it up, even if the story has holes in it. They used to have editors who would review the stories and make sure they did everything right. Now they just let things slide.
Case in point: WSJ had a story a few days ago about how Wikipedia lost 50,000 editors, supposedly indicating a decline in Wikipedia. But: They didn't give the total number of editors. What good is a numerator without a denominator? (By one count, Wikipedia has 300,000 editors who edited >10 times.) But actually, Wikipedia has been modifying its pages with procedures like nofollow to discourage spammers. Does that 50,000 editors represent 50,000 editors who were discouraged and hassled by Wikipedia pettiness, as the story claimed? Or was it just 50,000 spammers who were successfully discouraged by new policies? The story doesn't find out. I pay $155 a year for my subscription and for that money, I expect to get a story that tells me. And I don't want to spend 5 minutes reading it and find out I've wasted my time.
Another story covered the closing of a prison in Michigan, because it finally hit them that the $40,000 a year it costs to keep a prisoner is coming out of their tax money. The WSJ did a lot of stories like that over the years, and they would always talk to one of the prisoners. This story didn't interview any of the prisoners. Is Michigan locking up people who are dangerous to society, or are they locking up shoplifters and drug dealers? The story didn't say.
Another bad development is that many of the columns in the WSJ are no longer written by journalists, but contracted out to business consultants, who are just promoting their own consultancies.
But I think the problem is the underlying philosophy. The WSJ used to be run by the Bancroft family, who loved great journalism more than they loved making money. Murdoch loves some things, but not great journalism.
Murdoch, listen to this: I'm willing to pay $155 a year for good information. That's what I pay for Science, the New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, and others. I even paid $50 for the New York Times online. I'm not willing to pay $155 a year (which you just deducted from my credit card without my permission) for the same crap I can get anywhere else. You know how to win the race to the bottom, but you don't understand fair, balanced, quality American journalism, and you don't understand the Internet.
The free market is giving you a kick in the ass. Well deserved.
Fortune magazine makes no secret about representing the interests of businesses and employers. Their answer to you is going to be, "Be glad you have a job, do what your boss says, you miserable groveling wretch."
(Journalism education) I've always said that you can tell whether a journalist is any good by seeing who they interview. Do they interview people from all sides of the issue, or do they just get the people they agree with and tailor the quotes to support the argument they want to make? Anne Fisher http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/25/news/economy/overtime.oncall.fortune/index.htm interviewed two lawyers, one from Aiken Gump and the other from Fowler White Boggs. They're both employer's lawyers whose practice includes fighting unions and union organizing. They're not representing your interests (the employer/contractor), they're representing the interests of the employer. It's in their interest to encourage *all* workers to settle for a bad deal, so that if one or two of you try to demand what you deserve, they can replace you with someone more subservient and cheaper. Here's a Google search for those 2 firms:
The firm regularly provides advice and assistance to employers in union organizing campaigns and elections, including representation before the NLRB in unit determination hearings; negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements; arbitration and litigation of disputes under existing contracts; counseling and litigation in connection with strikes and related issues, such as striker replacement and strike-related violence; and the defense of unfair labor practice charges before the National Labor Relations Board. For those clients needing such assistance, we provide intensive training programs for supervisors on their obligations in union organizing campaigns or similar critical aspects of dealing with employees.
For decades our lawyers have successfully worked with employers to remain union-free. Our experience includes winning union elections and unfair labor practices cases before the National Labor Relations Board and similar local agencies. In fact, one of our senior lawyers began his career as a litigator for the NLRB. We have also successfully litigated union organizing, picketing, boycotting and violence injunction cases to aggressively defend the rights of employers, employees, and the public. We have negotiated favorable union contracts and arbitrated union grievances under union collective bargaining agreements. Our lawyers frequently advise and work with employers and their managers regarding compliance programs under various labor laws. Our lawyers have been recognized as contributing editors to the leading treatise on traditional labor law, “The Developing Labor Law.”
We have represented multiple national and local clients in labor law issues including:
* Wal-Mart
(/end quote)
Wall-Mart! They're a good candidate for the worst employer in America. Do you want to work at Wall-Mart wages?
If Fisher had instead spoken to lawyers from a kick-ass law firm that represents the rights and interests of employers/contractors http://www.vladeck.com/ she would have gotten a completely different story. (Even the corporate executives go to Vladek when they get screwed.)
A basic rule in reporting statistics is that when you give a numerator, you give a denominator.
For example, if you say that 100 people get cancer from X-rays every year, it makes a difference whether 100,000 or 100 million people get X-rays every year. That's the difference between a risk of 1/1,000 and 1/1 million, which are completely different orders of magnitude. You start out by giving your readers an idea of the magnitude of the problem. Scientifically-oriented people usually understand this intuitively.
This was explained in a classic, short paperback book called How to Lie With Statistics, which gave examples from Time magazine. This is now also explained in journalism classes and journalism books. Editors used to read stories and make sure they handled statistics properly.
Over the last 30 years, the WSJ used to do that religiously. Now they don't. Because they didn't follow the basic rules of handling statistics, it's a lousy story.
Some people have offered the explanation that Wikipedia has instituted policies to make spam less valuable for spammers, and some of those 50,000 editors are spammers who quit spamming. How many? We don't know because the two reporters didn't bother to find out. Which is another reason why it's a lousy story. Over the last 30 years, when WSJ reporters wrote stories like this, they used to find out things like this. They used to have editors who read the story to make sure they found out. If you want to see how they did it, you can read a book called The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, by William Blundell, and read some WSJ stories on the Pulitzer Prize web site. But Murdoch fired those editors.
The WSJ isn't a blog. It's a newspaper. I'm swamped with information. I pay them $155 a year to give me the best information I can get in 1,500 words. If a story raises an obvious question, I expect them to answer it. That's why I read them rather than one of the 10 million blogs or 1,000 newspapers I could read free. Now instead of all the stories being like that, about half the stories are like that. And this one sucks.
According to other posts here and on the WSJ Comments page, Wikipedia has instituted nofollow and other policies to discourage spammers from becoming editors and posting spam links.
Nobody has told us how many of those 50,000 editors who quit editing are Wikipedia editors who actually contributed, and how many of them are spammers. I don't know if it's true, but it's a reasonable hypothesis and explanation. If they're all spammers, then it's good for them to leave. If Wikipedia institutes anti-spam policies, you'd expect spammers to quit.
And somebody else pointed out that more editors are joining Wikipedia. So there may be a net gain of (non-spammer) editors.
But we don't know. And the reason we don't kow is that it was a lousy WSJ story, which didn't check out the obvious facts.
That is one of the dumber stories the WSJ wrote, although since Murdoch took over, there have been a lot of dumb, poorly edited stories.
The significant fact, as I and other readers pointed out in the comments, is that it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.
Google search for "Number of Wikipedia editors." 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. So that would make it 17%. Aren't WSJ reporters supposed to do that?
But another WSJ reader said:
Guys, Do your homework. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia becoming less relevant or the other reasons discussed. It's because they mahttp://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?art_pos=6#de a technical change to the site that makes it less attractive for spammers to use. It's a good thing that these spammers are no longer editing the site to link to their blogs / websites.
I define as journalists anybody who writes for a publication according to a certain set of standards.
The main standard is that you're committed to telling the truth more than you are to promoting a cause. As Richard Feynman said, if the facts go against your position, you have to report those facts. Same rule for journalists and scientists.
Traditionally, a newspaper columnist started out as a reporter, and after he mastered the job, he moved up to writing a column (sort of like a cop who gets promoted to detective). And Saul Friedman was a reporter at Newsday before he became a columnist.
There was a bad practice at the New York Times and elsewhere of making columnists out of people who had never worked as journalists, and who often had nothing to offer beyond an ideological position. Example: William Kristol.
Molly Ivins wrote about this. She said that when you work as a reporter, you learn how to figure things out and get to the facts in a hurry. You cover a school board meeting, people are throwing charges back and forth, and a reporter has to figure out what's going on. Ivins said that a lot of columnists were political appointees, and never learned how to do that. They never learned basic fact-checking. So they can't even get their basic facts right. Just because some economist at the Heritage Foundation or some guy at the CIA said something, that doesn't mean it's true.
Some bloggers are journalists. They check out their facts, and report the facts no matter whose ox gets gored. I pay to read that.
Some bloggers just spout their own opinions and cut and paste whatever they happen to agree with. They're not journalists. Most of them aren't worth reading, even for free.
GWB's war has cost us $3 trillion, according to (Nobel Laureate) economist Joe Stiglitz. Your share of that is $10,000.
GWB's "death tax" repeal shifted another $3 trillion in tax liabilities from the richest 1% of Americans to -- you. Another $10,000.
Have fun paying your college loans. Have fun paying the insurance companies a 50% markup for your health care. Have fun paying your mortgage. Have fun working more years than your father did before you retire. Have fun with the social safety net when you're unemployed in the new economy.
I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.
But sometimes it isn't possible.
Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html
The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.
If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).
If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.
Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.
This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.
Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.
You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.
Even today, when I'm looking for a movie with my friends, we'll look in the newspaper.
In the New York Times, I can see all the movies displayed, in proportion to how heavily the studio is buying ads to promote it, by flipping through just a few pages, and I can see which ones are playing in my neighborhood. I can circle the ones I'm interested in and decide which one to go to at the end.
In principle, I should be able to do the same thing online. In reality, it's not as easy. http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html It's funny, when it finally comes down to deciding which movie to go to, I actually prefer the ads.
Similarly, I picked up a Sunday newspaper the other day and it had advertising sections. I forgot how convenient they were to look through. I could see the latest printers, how much Best Buy was selling netbooks for, etc. I really can't get that from the online web sites. http://www.bestbuy.com/
Newspapers are great for browsing and deciding what you might want to buy. That's a seller's dream, and they're willing to pay for it.
Of course, when I know exactly what I want, like a specific product, I can find it more easily online,
I'm sure there will be a time when we'll have portable displays equal to or better than a newspaper page. I'm sure we'll have better user interfaces to help me pick out movies. But I don't see anything ten years out.
Maybe people growing up with the Internet will have different preferences.
Those Egyptians did a good job with paper. It's had a long run.
However, Yong is a science writer and journalist, not a scientist. He writes for New Scientist and Nature. He got his story by interviewing the Harvard researcher (rather than from the BBC report). My point is, that's what bloggers, journalists, reporters, anybody should do if they want to produce useful science information.
There's a process in science for finding the truth (which is a good model of the process of finding the truth in other disciplines). The process is not to get a really smart guy who can tell you the truth. The process (as Feynmann described it) is to take an idea, examine it skeptically, have people from diverse viewpoints challenge it, and see how well the idea holds up. Science journalism follows and facilitates that process. It doesn't matter to me whether you do it on a blog, a daily metropolitan newspaper, or the news section of Nature.
People who don't understand and don't follow this process are not going to write useful blogs.
To return to my original point, if you want to contribute information to the Internet rather than noise, one of the important steps is to check your facts. It sounds trivial but many bloggers (like TFA for this Slashdot story) don't understand this.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.
A blogger is just as entitled to a police press pass and the protection of the First Amendment as a reporter from a metropolitan newspaper, but I've done both and there are a hell of a lot of advantages to working for a news organization. If I'm writing a biotechnology story, I could walk down the hall and talk to somebody who understood finance.
The major newspapers, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Joural (pre-Murdoch, anyway) are able to let a reporter take six months off for intensive investigation of an important story -- like those New York Times stories that traced contaminated drugs like heparin from the U.S. back to China. An independent blogger can do great stuff, but how many bloggers can fly to China to see first-hand how they make heparin there, if that's where the story leads?
And don't forget the legal department in case you get sued for libel.
If you read the Reuters story you'll see that the Reuters story has a source. For a science story, the source is the scientist who did the original research, and then if the reporter is good he'll get a comment responding to the research from another investigator who can critique it.
In an ideal world (with editorial budgets) a reporter would do what I used to do -- take the Reuters story, call up one more expert, and add that to the story, so that as the story travels around you get more information, and more reliable information, with quotes from more people with different perspectives, and a better understanding of the story.
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example
I thought I pointed that out. I gave the examples of Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
Blogs by experts are fine. I'm just defining the role of a journalist -- someone who isn't necessarily an expert on the subject at hand but knows how to round up experts.
Doctor A is an expert who believes in treating a disease with surgery. Doctor B is an expert who believes in treating a disease with medication. My job as a journalist is to get Dr. A to explain why he believes in surgery, get Dr. B. to explain why he believes in medication, and get each of them to explain why they disagree with the other guy. In my story I can wind up with a broader perspective than you might get from a blog by Dr. A or Dr. B.
Take prostate cancer. Some doctors believe you should operate routinely (which leaves the patient impotent about half the time). Other doctors (especially in Europe) believe it's rational to do without surgery in a large percentage of cases. I've written a lot of stories lining up the arguments for both positions and trying to lay it out in a way that helps you figure out who's right.
If a blogger is going to give the arguments on all sides, then he's doing what a journalist does (or a good scientist), and more power to him. Conversely, the journalists in the news sections of journals like Science, Nature, etc. usually have some expertise of their own. Some of the journalists who write for the New York Times have MDs or PhDs.
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
Every journalist learns quickly that you hear some shocking story, you call up the accused to check it out, and the story often turns out to be misleading, misinterpreted, wrong or downright lie (think weapons of mass destruction).
I write about medicine. I once did a story on needle exchange programs. http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/needlex.htm The scientific evidence seemed overwhelming that needle exchanges saved lives, but a lot of doctors, and politicians, were obstructing them. I spoke to Herbert Kleber, who was supposed to be one of the bad guys who was obstructing them. To my surprise, he had changed his position because of the weight of the scientific evidence. Happens all the time. But I see bloggers attacking people for things they don't actually believe, because they didn't check their facts.
We old guys have been working to develop what you now call the Internet for >60 years. Independent journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone used to do a great job, and we were looking forward to the great day when a lone journalist could publish a newsletter without printing and postage costs. It's been good and bad.
The most obvious flaw that I notice in blogs is that most of them -- but not all -- don't check their facts. It's a big game of telephone. Some blogger cuts and pastes a paragraph from another blog, which came from another blog... which came from the New York Times. I can read the NYT myself. If you want to add value to that story, you can check the NYT's facts, and in my experience, you have a pretty good chance of finding them wrong. Make a fucking phone call to the original source and see if the NYT got it right. Or check out a different source. If you want a lesson in journalism, examine their health care reform coverage.
It's like replicating DNA. A bunch of enzymes copies a stand of DNA, and then another bunch of enzymes checks the duplicated strand to make sure it's copied right. If you don't have error-checking enzymes, you wind up with (sometimes disastrous) mistakes.
There are a lot of blogs that are written by people who have such a good command of the facts, have such expertise, that they're not likely to make mistakes -- they've already checked out the facts, for their academic work or their books, like Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
But most journalists aren't experts. They have to check their facts with the experts. That's the game. No matter how smart I am, I interview and quote somebody who knows more than me.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
A blogger who does nothing more than copy a story from a major news source like the NYT, or, even worse, from a blogger who wouldn't meet the reliable source standards of Wikipedia, is just adding noise, not useful information.
If you want to add useful information to the Internet, you're not going to find it on the Internet, obviously. Call up an expert and get some new information. And then call up an expert who disagrees with him, to make sure he hasn't given you a sales job.
If you RTFA you'll see that it's highly qualified to the effect that "we really don't have good intelligence."
I remember watching Colin Powell at the UN showing aerial slides that I couldn't figure out that he said were mobile chemical weapons plants.
I remember thinking to myself, "Well I think this WMD business is bullshit, but if the whole Bush Administration is going to put themselves on the line over it, then maybe there's something to it. If they're lying, Bush will lose the next election."
Anyone who unskeptically believes the government is stupid.
You've raised an interesting point. It DOES take a village to prevent obesity.
Obesity is a classic example of a behavior in which there is good evidence from rigorous scientific studies that the behavior is determined by community influence, rather than individual choice. Nicholas Christakis showed in NEJM that people are far more likely to become obese if they have a close friend, sibling, or spouse who is obese. People in a community become obese together and loses weight together. The most effective weight loss methods are community-based.
Christakis demonstrated the same thing for smoking. He has great computer-generated diagrams of social networks over time, as people gain and lose weight together in nodes.
The only way to deal with obesity effectively is to approach it as a community problem, like sexually transmitted disease.
After extensive studies, they identified soft drinks as one of the worst contributors to the problem (obesity, not STD), and the one most vulnerable to intervention.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James H. Fowler, Ph.D.
Background The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Methods We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.
Results Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], â¥30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.
People with macular degeneration can already walk down a sidewalk or navigate around a room. They still have peripheral vision.
The macula is the spot at the center of the retina which has the highest concentration of receptors and the highest resolution.
It's damn useful, and it's hard (though not impossible) to read and identify faces without it. But macular degeneration spares the peripheral vision, so people can still get around. It's not "cane-tapping" blind. There are also some methods of using the peripheral vision to replace the macula with optical manipulation with fancy glasses, or digital manipulation.
Not that I would complain about the accuracy of a Slashdot story, but it's a teachable moment.
The real innovation of that MIT group is to place a titanium implant in the eye which can last a year in a pig. It's great work on the long, hard road to replacing the retina. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, but hats off to anyone who can prove me wrong.
Last I heard, this sort of technology was approaching 1000 effective pixels of visual information (assuming ideal electrode placement). Has this effort from MIT pushed this boundary? How does '1000 effective pixels' compare to the eye's effective resolution? Can we put normal vision in terms of pixel resolution?
To get an idea of the eye's effective resolution, think of a very high resolution monitor -- resolution so high that you couldn't tell the difference between it and a higher-resolution monitor sitting next to it. That's how much resolution the eye has.
Reviewers used to say that you didn't need a digital camera with a resolution greater than 5 megapixels, unless you were going to enlarge it. So 5 MP, which is about a 2,000x2,000 pixel line, sounds like a good guess. That's about 0.1 degree per pixel, which sounds about right.
That's not exactly right, because the eye doesn't take in a whole scene at once. It aims at different parts of the scene, with (in humans) the macula, which has higher resolution than the rest of the retina. So it's more efficient than a camera.
Besides resolution, contrast is also important. And the retina can recognize movement directly.
There's also a lot of image processing that goes on from the retina, to the optical nerve, through the processing centers in the brain. The retina figures out edges, points, movement, and color, and passes it on, then the brain figures out 3D stereoscopic information, objects, figures out what the objects are, recognizes them, and passes them on to other parts of the brain for higher processing. I think there are some error-correction circuits. There's a lot of great research on this.
This is oversimplified. There are people who enjoy correcting oversimplified explanations, and some of them know more about this than I do. I will leave it to them to enjoy themselves.
I just remembered that I actually taught an online journalism course. I recommended a couple of textbooks, gave them assignments which we critiqued, linked to examples of good and bad news stories on the Internet, and gave them a running account of a story that I was working on and explained how I did it. I also invited a couple of students in my region to some journalist's events.
I think I did a pretty good job. It was a lot more interactive than reading a textbook and handing in exercises that only a teacher would see.
But it was a much different experience than a lecture or class in person. For example, when I organized lectures in person, I usually brought in a guest speaker.
And the content of my online course was also much more limited than we would have had in a one-hour discussion every week for 12 weeks.
All classes today have an online component. You may be able to give some classes entirely on line.
But the idea of that BusinessWeek column (not an article, I would note) was that some of us will go to universities with classes, and for the rest of us, online classes are good enough.
That's a two-tier education system, and the kids who go to the second tier aren't getting what we used to call a college education. They won't get what the kids in Europe are getting.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that if that were indeed the case we'd see a lot more countries like Cuba out-performing more capitalist nations. Government isn't without a profit motive; you've just convinced yourself that there isn't one.
Look on the back of your computer. What Communist country was it made in?
I've been reading the WSJ for >30 years. It used to be the world's greatest newspaper, but since Murdoch took over it suffered a noticeable decline.
When they wrote a story, they used to interview people on all sides of the story, answer every obvious question, and wrap it up in a tight 1,500 or 2,000 words. Now they just interview a few people and wrap it up, even if the story has holes in it. They used to have editors who would review the stories and make sure they did everything right. Now they just let things slide.
Case in point: WSJ had a story a few days ago about how Wikipedia lost 50,000 editors, supposedly indicating a decline in Wikipedia. But: They didn't give the total number of editors. What good is a numerator without a denominator? (By one count, Wikipedia has 300,000 editors who edited >10 times.) But actually, Wikipedia has been modifying its pages with procedures like nofollow to discourage spammers. Does that 50,000 editors represent 50,000 editors who were discouraged and hassled by Wikipedia pettiness, as the story claimed? Or was it just 50,000 spammers who were successfully discouraged by new policies? The story doesn't find out. I pay $155 a year for my subscription and for that money, I expect to get a story that tells me. And I don't want to spend 5 minutes reading it and find out I've wasted my time.
Another story covered the closing of a prison in Michigan, because it finally hit them that the $40,000 a year it costs to keep a prisoner is coming out of their tax money. The WSJ did a lot of stories like that over the years, and they would always talk to one of the prisoners. This story didn't interview any of the prisoners. Is Michigan locking up people who are dangerous to society, or are they locking up shoplifters and drug dealers? The story didn't say.
Another bad development is that many of the columns in the WSJ are no longer written by journalists, but contracted out to business consultants, who are just promoting their own consultancies.
This is partially the result of layoffs http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/the-wall-street-journal-layoffs-memo-nws You can turn any great institution into a mediocre institution by cutting its budget sufficiently.
But I think the problem is the underlying philosophy. The WSJ used to be run by the Bancroft family, who loved great journalism more than they loved making money. Murdoch loves some things, but not great journalism.
Murdoch, listen to this: I'm willing to pay $155 a year for good information. That's what I pay for Science, the New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, and others. I even paid $50 for the New York Times online. I'm not willing to pay $155 a year (which you just deducted from my credit card without my permission) for the same crap I can get anywhere else. You know how to win the race to the bottom, but you don't understand fair, balanced, quality American journalism, and you don't understand the Internet.
The free market is giving you a kick in the ass. Well deserved.
Ask Fortune magazine about your rights as an employee/contractor? Why don't you ask Fritz the Cat about your rights as a mouse? http://www.saskndp.com/history/mouseland.php3
Fortune magazine makes no secret about representing the interests of businesses and employers. Their answer to you is going to be, "Be glad you have a job, do what your boss says, you miserable groveling wretch."
(Journalism education) I've always said that you can tell whether a journalist is any good by seeing who they interview. Do they interview people from all sides of the issue, or do they just get the people they agree with and tailor the quotes to support the argument they want to make? Anne Fisher http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/25/news/economy/overtime.oncall.fortune/index.htm interviewed two lawyers, one from Aiken Gump and the other from Fowler White Boggs. They're both employer's lawyers whose practice includes fighting unions and union organizing. They're not representing your interests (the employer/contractor), they're representing the interests of the employer. It's in their interest to encourage *all* workers to settle for a bad deal, so that if one or two of you try to demand what you deserve, they can replace you with someone more subservient and cheaper. Here's a Google search for those 2 firms:
Aiken Gump
http://www.akingump.com/services/ServiceDetail.aspx?service=267
Labor-Management Relations
The firm regularly provides advice and assistance to employers in union organizing campaigns and elections, including representation before the NLRB in unit determination hearings; negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements; arbitration and litigation of disputes under existing contracts; counseling and litigation in connection with strikes and related issues, such as striker replacement and strike-related violence; and the defense of unfair labor practice charges before the National Labor Relations Board. For those clients needing such assistance, we provide intensive training programs for supervisors on their obligations in union organizing campaigns or similar critical aspects of dealing with employees.
Fowler White Boggs
http://www.fowlerwhite.com/what-129.html
Labor Law/Unions
For decades our lawyers have successfully worked with employers to remain union-free. Our experience includes winning union elections and unfair labor practices cases before the National Labor Relations Board and similar local agencies. In fact, one of our senior lawyers began his career as a litigator for the NLRB. We have also successfully litigated union organizing, picketing, boycotting and violence injunction cases to aggressively defend the rights of employers, employees, and the public. We have negotiated favorable union contracts and arbitrated union grievances under union collective bargaining agreements. Our lawyers frequently advise and work with employers and their managers regarding compliance programs under various labor laws. Our lawyers have been recognized as contributing editors to the leading treatise on traditional labor law, “The Developing Labor Law.”
We have represented multiple national and local clients in labor law issues including:
* Wal-Mart
(/end quote)
Wall-Mart! They're a good candidate for the worst employer in America. Do you want to work at Wall-Mart wages?
If Fisher had instead spoken to lawyers from a kick-ass law firm that represents the rights and interests of employers/contractors http://www.vladeck.com/ she would have gotten a completely different story. (Even the corporate executives go to Vladek when they get screwed.)
IANAL but I've wor
A basic rule in reporting statistics is that when you give a numerator, you give a denominator.
For example, if you say that 100 people get cancer from X-rays every year, it makes a difference whether 100,000 or 100 million people get X-rays every year. That's the difference between a risk of 1/1,000 and 1/1 million, which are completely different orders of magnitude. You start out by giving your readers an idea of the magnitude of the problem. Scientifically-oriented people usually understand this intuitively.
This was explained in a classic, short paperback book called How to Lie With Statistics, which gave examples from Time magazine. This is now also explained in journalism classes and journalism books. Editors used to read stories and make sure they handled statistics properly.
Over the last 30 years, the WSJ used to do that religiously. Now they don't. Because they didn't follow the basic rules of handling statistics, it's a lousy story.
Some people have offered the explanation that Wikipedia has instituted policies to make spam less valuable for spammers, and some of those 50,000 editors are spammers who quit spamming. How many? We don't know because the two reporters didn't bother to find out. Which is another reason why it's a lousy story. Over the last 30 years, when WSJ reporters wrote stories like this, they used to find out things like this. They used to have editors who read the story to make sure they found out. If you want to see how they did it, you can read a book called The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, by William Blundell, and read some WSJ stories on the Pulitzer Prize web site. But Murdoch fired those editors.
The WSJ isn't a blog. It's a newspaper. I'm swamped with information. I pay them $155 a year to give me the best information I can get in 1,500 words. If a story raises an obvious question, I expect them to answer it. That's why I read them rather than one of the 10 million blogs or 1,000 newspapers I could read free. Now instead of all the stories being like that, about half the stories are like that. And this one sucks.
According to other posts here and on the WSJ Comments page, Wikipedia has instituted nofollow and other policies to discourage spammers from becoming editors and posting spam links.
Nobody has told us how many of those 50,000 editors who quit editing are Wikipedia editors who actually contributed, and how many of them are spammers. I don't know if it's true, but it's a reasonable hypothesis and explanation. If they're all spammers, then it's good for them to leave. If Wikipedia institutes anti-spam policies, you'd expect spammers to quit.
And somebody else pointed out that more editors are joining Wikipedia. So there may be a net gain of (non-spammer) editors.
But we don't know. And the reason we don't kow is that it was a lousy WSJ story, which didn't check out the obvious facts.
That is one of the dumber stories the WSJ wrote, although since Murdoch took over, there have been a lot of dumb, poorly edited stories.
The significant fact, as I and other readers pointed out in the comments, is that it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.
Google search for "Number of Wikipedia editors." 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. So that would make it 17%. Aren't WSJ reporters supposed to do that?
But another WSJ reader said:
Guys, Do your homework. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia becoming less relevant or the other reasons discussed. It's because they mahttp://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?art_pos=6#de a technical change to the site that makes it less attractive for spammers to use. It's a good thing that these spammers are no longer editing the site to link to their blogs / websites.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Wikipedia_Adds_NOFOLLOW_Attribute_To_Outbound_Lin
I define as journalists anybody who writes for a publication according to a certain set of standards.
The main standard is that you're committed to telling the truth more than you are to promoting a cause. As Richard Feynman said, if the facts go against your position, you have to report those facts. Same rule for journalists and scientists.
Traditionally, a newspaper columnist started out as a reporter, and after he mastered the job, he moved up to writing a column (sort of like a cop who gets promoted to detective). And Saul Friedman was a reporter at Newsday before he became a columnist.
There was a bad practice at the New York Times and elsewhere of making columnists out of people who had never worked as journalists, and who often had nothing to offer beyond an ideological position. Example: William Kristol.
Molly Ivins wrote about this. She said that when you work as a reporter, you learn how to figure things out and get to the facts in a hurry. You cover a school board meeting, people are throwing charges back and forth, and a reporter has to figure out what's going on. Ivins said that a lot of columnists were political appointees, and never learned how to do that. They never learned basic fact-checking. So they can't even get their basic facts right. Just because some economist at the Heritage Foundation or some guy at the CIA said something, that doesn't mean it's true.
Some bloggers are journalists. They check out their facts, and report the facts no matter whose ox gets gored. I pay to read that.
Some bloggers just spout their own opinions and cut and paste whatever they happen to agree with. They're not journalists. Most of them aren't worth reading, even for free.
http://democracynow.org/
GWB's war has cost us $3 trillion, according to (Nobel Laureate) economist Joe Stiglitz. Your share of that is $10,000.
GWB's "death tax" repeal shifted another $3 trillion in tax liabilities from the richest 1% of Americans to -- you. Another $10,000.
Have fun paying your college loans. Have fun paying the insurance companies a 50% markup for your health care. Have fun paying your mortgage. Have fun working more years than your father did before you retire. Have fun with the social safety net when you're unemployed in the new economy.
Let's each take one.
1 scientist per gene = 30,000 scientists right there.
I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.
But sometimes it isn't possible.
Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html
The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.
If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).
If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.
Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.
This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.
Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.
You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
There is just less money in new online compared to print media. Advertisers are just not as willing to pay as much.
I've never read a newspaper a day in my life, other than some stupid school assignments to cut-out articles and write reports about them.
Even today, when I'm looking for a movie with my friends, we'll look in the newspaper.
In the New York Times, I can see all the movies displayed, in proportion to how heavily the studio is buying ads to promote it, by flipping through just a few pages, and I can see which ones are playing in my neighborhood. I can circle the ones I'm interested in and decide which one to go to at the end.
In principle, I should be able to do the same thing online. In reality, it's not as easy. http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html It's funny, when it finally comes down to deciding which movie to go to, I actually prefer the ads.
Similarly, I picked up a Sunday newspaper the other day and it had advertising sections. I forgot how convenient they were to look through. I could see the latest printers, how much Best Buy was selling netbooks for, etc. I really can't get that from the online web sites. http://www.bestbuy.com/
Newspapers are great for browsing and deciding what you might want to buy. That's a seller's dream, and they're willing to pay for it.
Of course, when I know exactly what I want, like a specific product, I can find it more easily online,
I'm sure there will be a time when we'll have portable displays equal to or better than a newspaper page. I'm sure we'll have better user interfaces to help me pick out movies. But I don't see anything ten years out.
Maybe people growing up with the Internet will have different preferences.
Those Egyptians did a good job with paper. It's had a long run.
I just checked http://scienceblogs.com/ and picked a story in a field that I follow. I will be forever grateful to Ed Yong for comparing wrapped DNA to dried raman noodles http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/10/what_is_the_difference_between_the_human_genome_and_a_pair_of.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
However, Yong is a science writer and journalist, not a scientist. He writes for New Scientist and Nature. He got his story by interviewing the Harvard researcher (rather than from the BBC report). My point is, that's what bloggers, journalists, reporters, anybody should do if they want to produce useful science information.
There's a process in science for finding the truth (which is a good model of the process of finding the truth in other disciplines). The process is not to get a really smart guy who can tell you the truth. The process (as Feynmann described it) is to take an idea, examine it skeptically, have people from diverse viewpoints challenge it, and see how well the idea holds up. Science journalism follows and facilitates that process. It doesn't matter to me whether you do it on a blog, a daily metropolitan newspaper, or the news section of Nature.
People who don't understand and don't follow this process are not going to write useful blogs.
To return to my original point, if you want to contribute information to the Internet rather than noise, one of the important steps is to check your facts. It sounds trivial but many bloggers (like TFA for this Slashdot story) don't understand this.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.
A blogger is just as entitled to a police press pass and the protection of the First Amendment as a reporter from a metropolitan newspaper, but I've done both and there are a hell of a lot of advantages to working for a news organization. If I'm writing a biotechnology story, I could walk down the hall and talk to somebody who understood finance.
The major newspapers, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Joural (pre-Murdoch, anyway) are able to let a reporter take six months off for intensive investigation of an important story -- like those New York Times stories that traced contaminated drugs like heparin from the U.S. back to China. An independent blogger can do great stuff, but how many bloggers can fly to China to see first-hand how they make heparin there, if that's where the story leads?
And don't forget the legal department in case you get sued for libel.
If you read the Reuters story you'll see that the Reuters story has a source. For a science story, the source is the scientist who did the original research, and then if the reporter is good he'll get a comment responding to the research from another investigator who can critique it.
In an ideal world (with editorial budgets) a reporter would do what I used to do -- take the Reuters story, call up one more expert, and add that to the story, so that as the story travels around you get more information, and more reliable information, with quotes from more people with different perspectives, and a better understanding of the story.
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example
I thought I pointed that out. I gave the examples of Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
Blogs by experts are fine. I'm just defining the role of a journalist -- someone who isn't necessarily an expert on the subject at hand but knows how to round up experts.
Doctor A is an expert who believes in treating a disease with surgery. Doctor B is an expert who believes in treating a disease with medication. My job as a journalist is to get Dr. A to explain why he believes in surgery, get Dr. B. to explain why he believes in medication, and get each of them to explain why they disagree with the other guy. In my story I can wind up with a broader perspective than you might get from a blog by Dr. A or Dr. B.
Take prostate cancer. Some doctors believe you should operate routinely (which leaves the patient impotent about half the time). Other doctors (especially in Europe) believe it's rational to do without surgery in a large percentage of cases. I've written a lot of stories lining up the arguments for both positions and trying to lay it out in a way that helps you figure out who's right.
If a blogger is going to give the arguments on all sides, then he's doing what a journalist does (or a good scientist), and more power to him. Conversely, the journalists in the news sections of journals like Science, Nature, etc. usually have some expertise of their own. Some of the journalists who write for the New York Times have MDs or PhDs.
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
Every journalist learns quickly that you hear some shocking story, you call up the accused to check it out, and the story often turns out to be misleading, misinterpreted, wrong or downright lie (think weapons of mass destruction).
I write about medicine. I once did a story on needle exchange programs. http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/needlex.htm The scientific evidence seemed overwhelming that needle exchanges saved lives, but a lot of doctors, and politicians, were obstructing them. I spoke to Herbert Kleber, who was supposed to be one of the bad guys who was obstructing them. To my surprise, he had changed his position because of the weight of the scientific evidence. Happens all the time. But I see bloggers attacking people for things they don't actually believe, because they didn't check their facts.
We old guys have been working to develop what you now call the Internet for >60 years. Independent journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone used to do a great job, and we were looking forward to the great day when a lone journalist could publish a newsletter without printing and postage costs. It's been good and bad.
The most obvious flaw that I notice in blogs is that most of them -- but not all -- don't check their facts. It's a big game of telephone. Some blogger cuts and pastes a paragraph from another blog, which came from another blog ... which came from the New York Times. I can read the NYT myself. If you want to add value to that story, you can check the NYT's facts, and in my experience, you have a pretty good chance of finding them wrong. Make a fucking phone call to the original source and see if the NYT got it right. Or check out a different source. If you want a lesson in journalism, examine their health care reform coverage.
It's like replicating DNA. A bunch of enzymes copies a stand of DNA, and then another bunch of enzymes checks the duplicated strand to make sure it's copied right. If you don't have error-checking enzymes, you wind up with (sometimes disastrous) mistakes.
There are a lot of blogs that are written by people who have such a good command of the facts, have such expertise, that they're not likely to make mistakes -- they've already checked out the facts, for their academic work or their books, like Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
But most journalists aren't experts. They have to check their facts with the experts. That's the game. No matter how smart I am, I interview and quote somebody who knows more than me.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
A blogger who does nothing more than copy a story from a major news source like the NYT, or, even worse, from a blogger who wouldn't meet the reliable source standards of Wikipedia, is just adding noise, not useful information.
If you want to add useful information to the Internet, you're not going to find it on the Internet, obviously. Call up an expert and get some new information. And then call up an expert who disagrees with him, to make sure he hasn't given you a sales job.
If you RTFA you'll see that it's highly qualified to the effect that "we really don't have good intelligence."
I remember watching Colin Powell at the UN showing aerial slides that I couldn't figure out that he said were mobile chemical weapons plants.
I remember thinking to myself, "Well I think this WMD business is bullshit, but if the whole Bush Administration is going to put themselves on the line over it, then maybe there's something to it. If they're lying, Bush will lose the next election."
Anyone who unskeptically believes the government is stupid.
It does NOT take a village to enforce thinness.
You've raised an interesting point. It DOES take a village to prevent obesity.
Obesity is a classic example of a behavior in which there is good evidence from rigorous scientific studies that the behavior is determined by community influence, rather than individual choice. Nicholas Christakis showed in NEJM that people are far more likely to become obese if they have a close friend, sibling, or spouse who is obese. People in a community become obese together and loses weight together. The most effective weight loss methods are community-based.
Christakis demonstrated the same thing for smoking. He has great computer-generated diagrams of social networks over time, as people gain and lose weight together in nodes.
The only way to deal with obesity effectively is to approach it as a community problem, like sexually transmitted disease.
After extensive studies, they identified soft drinks as one of the worst contributors to the problem (obesity, not STD), and the one most vulnerable to intervention.
That's why they're going after soft drinks.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 357:370-379 July 26, 2007
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years
Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James H. Fowler, Ph.D.
Background The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Methods We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.
Results Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], â¥30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.
(In case that link doesn't work http://www.media6degrees.com/about/pdf/Spread%20of%20Obesity%20in%20a%20Large%20Social%20Network.pdf)
Try this exercise:
Imagine your wife or girlfriend.
Now imagine your wife or girlfriend, with a can of soda constantly in her hand, weighing 300 pounds.
(Next exercise: Imagine your wife or girlfriend imagining you with a can of soda constantly in your hand, weighing 300 pounds.)
People with macular degeneration can already walk down a sidewalk or navigate around a room. They still have peripheral vision.
The macula is the spot at the center of the retina which has the highest concentration of receptors and the highest resolution.
It's damn useful, and it's hard (though not impossible) to read and identify faces without it. But macular degeneration spares the peripheral vision, so people can still get around. It's not "cane-tapping" blind. There are also some methods of using the peripheral vision to replace the macula with optical manipulation with fancy glasses, or digital manipulation.
Not that I would complain about the accuracy of a Slashdot story, but it's a teachable moment.
The real innovation of that MIT group is to place a titanium implant in the eye which can last a year in a pig. It's great work on the long, hard road to replacing the retina. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, but hats off to anyone who can prove me wrong.
Last I heard, this sort of technology was approaching 1000 effective pixels of visual information (assuming ideal electrode placement). Has this effort from MIT pushed this boundary? How does '1000 effective pixels' compare to the eye's effective resolution? Can we put normal vision in terms of pixel resolution?
To get an idea of the eye's effective resolution, think of a very high resolution monitor -- resolution so high that you couldn't tell the difference between it and a higher-resolution monitor sitting next to it. That's how much resolution the eye has.
Reviewers used to say that you didn't need a digital camera with a resolution greater than 5 megapixels, unless you were going to enlarge it. So 5 MP, which is about a 2,000x2,000 pixel line, sounds like a good guess. That's about 0.1 degree per pixel, which sounds about right.
That's not exactly right, because the eye doesn't take in a whole scene at once. It aims at different parts of the scene, with (in humans) the macula, which has higher resolution than the rest of the retina. So it's more efficient than a camera.
Besides resolution, contrast is also important. And the retina can recognize movement directly.
There's also a lot of image processing that goes on from the retina, to the optical nerve, through the processing centers in the brain. The retina figures out edges, points, movement, and color, and passes it on, then the brain figures out 3D stereoscopic information, objects, figures out what the objects are, recognizes them, and passes them on to other parts of the brain for higher processing. I think there are some error-correction circuits. There's a lot of great research on this.
This is oversimplified. There are people who enjoy correcting oversimplified explanations, and some of them know more about this than I do. I will leave it to them to enjoy themselves.
I just remembered that I actually taught an online journalism course. I recommended a couple of textbooks, gave them assignments which we critiqued, linked to examples of good and bad news stories on the Internet, and gave them a running account of a story that I was working on and explained how I did it. I also invited a couple of students in my region to some journalist's events.
I think I did a pretty good job. It was a lot more interactive than reading a textbook and handing in exercises that only a teacher would see.
But it was a much different experience than a lecture or class in person. For example, when I organized lectures in person, I usually brought in a guest speaker.
And the content of my online course was also much more limited than we would have had in a one-hour discussion every week for 12 weeks.
All classes today have an online component. You may be able to give some classes entirely on line.
But the idea of that BusinessWeek column (not an article, I would note) was that some of us will go to universities with classes, and for the rest of us, online classes are good enough.
That's a two-tier education system, and the kids who go to the second tier aren't getting what we used to call a college education. They won't get what the kids in Europe are getting.