I just installed am update to AT&T myWireless on my iPhone. Of course, I checked the description to see what was new in this version. It didn’t include any bug fixes: no, this version included “stability improvements”. I’m going to have to remember that for the next patch…er, maintenance release…I develop.
Greg Woodhouse
– Posted from my iPhone
There’s a lot of talk of how incompressible $1 trillion is. Well, let’s try doing what physicists sometimes call a “back of the envelope” computation. That basically just means working in round numbers and making a rough estimate. There are something like 300 million people in the US. Three times 300 million is about 1 billion, and 1 trillion is 1,000 billion, so it comes out to $3,000 per person over 10 years, or $300 per year per person (roughly $1 a day).
Now, compare that to your current health insurance premium, and the numbers don’t seem that far-fetched.
Greg Woodhouse
– Posted from my iPhone
I don’t pretend to understand the background to the “baloon boy” story that is receiving so much attention in the media. In fact, I’ve held off writing about it because everyone seemed so sure it was a hoax. Even while the event was underway, commentators were already suggesting it might be a hoax! That seemed very weird to me then, and it continues to do so now. The idea of a small boy being swept away by a baloon of any sort and then possibly having fallen from a high altitude was just too awful to contemplate.
Now, it did not escape my attention that this baloon appeared to be designed to resemble a flying saucer, nor am I unaware of the emails that have recently come to light indicating that the family was planning a publicity stunt, presumably to land a role on another reality series. (Recall that they had previously appeared on a reality series entitled “Wife Swap”.) But how about some common sense here? A little boy being carried away in a baloon is hardly the type of event that anyone would expect to serve as the basis of a reality series. It is even less plausible to think lying about such an event could lead to a reality series. On the other hand, the baloon appears designed to resemble a UFO, and UFO sightings certainly sound like grist for reality TV. It is entirely plausible that a basket could have been attached to the baloon for holding tools and such (and, in fact, this came up on at least one of the networks’ coverage of the event. If this is all true, it is at least possible that a 6 year old boy could have become entangled in whatever was attached to the baloon and carried away by accident.
And that’s really the point. I don’t know if this baloon was to be used for a publicity stunt – quite possibly it was. I have no reason to doubt that any such plans were illegal. Granting all of that, isn’t it possible that an accident occurred, that the family thought Falcon (the boy) was in imminent danger, and that there was at least a reasonal possibility that the 911 call was neither deceptive nor fraudulent?
Now, we’ve heard a lot about how the family was eccentric, with the parents, at least, doing things we shouldn’t approve of. But that’s not the point! I recall that at an early press conference, a woman representing the sheriff’s department answered a question saying that they didn’t want people to be afraid to call 911 because they weren’t sure there was still an emergency. When did that change?
Now, note what I am not saying: I am not saying that it’s okay to knowingly report an emergency when none exists. In particular it is not okay to tie up emegemcy personnel as part of a prank, or something more nefarious. But what the family may have intended to do is not relevant to whether they thought the emergency was real. Now, it’s possible that there is evidence that shows that the 911 call was fraudulent, I don’t know. But from what I’ve heard reported, it seems that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions.
As you probably know, the US senate has traditionally required 60 votes to cut off debate on a bill and bring it to a vote. This entirely reasonable procedural rule has provided the minority party with a tactic, known as the filibuster, for preventing a measure from ever coming to a vote. The idea is to continue the debate ad nauseum, until the measure is finally dropped. This tactic is what Chris Matthews of MSNBC whimsically refers to as “reading the dictionary” or “making them read the dictionary”. And that’s the point, engaging in a filibuster can take a long time, sometimes a very long time, so there is a substantial disincentive to using this tactic.
In recent years, a new procedural rule, known as cloture, has been introduced to streamline this process. The idea is that if 60 senators (that’s 60 out of 100, by the way) vote to cut off debate, then the measure can be put to a vote. A vote for cloture is not the same thing as a “yes” vote on the measure itself. In theory, a senator could essentially say, “I don’t support this, but we’ve debated long enough: it’s time for a vote.” But in today’s divisive environment, it is effectively necessary to get a 60% vote to pass anything, and that’s not right.
But what can be done? One option is to go back to the old way of doing things, but that is likely to lead to lengthy (and unproductive) filibusters. I suggest to take a cue from the National Football League (NFL) and institute something like a “challenge” rule. In the NFL, a coach has the option of “challenging” a call that was particularly close, or where they disagree with the ruling on the field. In such cases, the officials will use videotape (or recordings of some type!) to look more closely and make a ruling based on them. But each team only gets 3 challenges (though they are not charged a challenge if the ruling is overruled), so a coach cannot simply challenge every call he (or she) doesn’t like. Now, why not give the minority party a limited number of opportunities to insist on a 60 vote cloture? That way, legislation would not always be stalled by fights over comparatively minor issues, but the cloture rule would be preserved. After all, it is entirely reasonable to have a mechanism in place that serves as a damper discouraging imprudent changes. But when everything is slowed down and it’s difficult to get any work done, that’s a problem.
I didn’t check the news tonight. Even a few years ago, I would have said that I didn’t turn on the news (on television). But today, we’re as likely to get our news from the Internet as anywhere. On top of that, with our iPhones, BlackBerries and such, we don’t always have immediate access to the “net”, but the devices make it easily digestible and easy to integrate with our normal workflow. Oh, and if I sound like someone who is very excited about mobile computing, it’s probably because I am!
But it doesn’t just stop there. There was a time when we (in the US, anyway) would watch the evening news on NBC, ABC or CBS, and quite possibly read our local paper. But in the era of cable television (and, later, sattelite) networks like CNN began to appear. Today, in fact, we have three major news networks: CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The “traditional” networks have their morning shows, too: “Today” on NBC and “Good Morning America” on ABC, for instance. So, there was competition with the upstart news networks, and there continues to be today.
I could continue, but a multiplicity of news outlets is not inherently a problem. If the market will support 10 types of laundry detergent or 100, that’s not necessarily a problem, and the same is true of news outlets. Or is it? Let’s think about news as a product for a moment. If you have a product to sell, and there are already a number of similar products on the market, you obviously need to distinguish your product somehow. I remember when GMA (Good Morning America) came on the air, although I was just a kid at the time. What really stood out to me was the bright colors of the set (this was 1975), and generally “lighter” feel. These morning shows involved a lot of “talk” between the members of a team of hosts (typically 2 or 3) and, potentially, guests. Interestingly, this is the model that news networks like CNN or MSNBC follow today.
But, apparently, these “atmospherics” weren’t really enough. News outlets needed to offer something more, but what? Both the New York Times (implicitly) and CNN (explicitly) offer trustworthiness to their readers or viewers. Oh, and in this age of multimedia that line is breaking down. How often do we watch video on a web site? An interesting question here is: What is to be trusted? One answer is the competence of the news organization. We want to know whether the news will be timely, accurate and complete. That is, will they miss important stories? But there is more to it than that. There is an awful lot of information out there, and we are looking for people to help us digest it all and put it in perspective. That’s a tall order because we want accurate, unbiased, information and not opinion (unless it is labeled as such). Whether that is even possible is an interesting question, and a topic for another time.
The problem is that people have demanded more and more analysis and perspective. But apparently, there is something more. To be blunt, they want to hear from like minded commentators. This is not, in and of itself, bad. If I pick up a book on linguistics and I favor the Chomskian approach, I’m more likely to look for a book by someone writing from that perspective. One thing we generally expect from scholars is intellectual honesty. We do not necessarily expect them to agree, or even be free of biases, but we do expect them to be honest in how they deal with evidence and counterarguments. I believe this is also true of what we expect from journalists.
But this is where human nature gets in the way. Perhaps due to the sheer volume of news out there, people are not going to be able to examine it all critically (and it is entirely reasonable to argue that this isn’t their job), and so they will choose their news sources and largely stick to them. The trouble is that the world is full of blogs (such as this one) and other web sites that have clear ideological biases or specific political agendas and people read them. That’s the point: these independent blogs and alternate news sources are competing in the same marketplace. The result was all but inevitable.
Now, I’ll be honest here. There is a network I rarely watch, and when I do, it’s often because I wonder how they will cover a given story. I do think there are good journalists working for it, but there is no denying that the network caters to the political right, and much of its content seems to be driven by a political agenda. In short, it plays by the same rules as many blogs. It might be objected that there are many other news outlets that could be criticized along the same lines. But that’s not the point. When I hear a news story that is surprising, disturbing, or even something I’d really like to be true, my reaction is often “Is that really true?” This is not just true of blogs, but of television news networks, including those I prefer to watch myself. And that brings me to my final point: the sense of information overload we all experience is only accentuated by the need to evaluate what we’re hearing, perhaps even checking multiple sources ourselves. This is what I do. I have multiple news applications on my iPhone, including two wire services.
And that’s a lot of work, more than a lot of us have time or energy to do. An entirely reasonable reaction is to give up. Many people just choose a preferred outlet because it is comfortable. This leads to a kind of feedback mechanism. People who have strong political views may limit their attention to news sources that cater to that point of view. This will lead them to be more confirmed in that particular point of view. But then they become more selective in what they choose to read (and believe), and increasingly dismissive of other points of view and of programs or periodicals offering them.
Perhaps this explains a bit of why we have grown so divided as a nation, with increasingly radical views becoming commonplace. Why “tea parties”, extreme, even threatening, rhetoric has become so common, why people persist in believing patent absurdities (such as the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the US, or that the healthcare reform proposals include “death panels”, and so forth).
