Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Does CO2 Cause Warming?

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…or does warming cause CO2?

Darn that pesky “correlation is not causation” thingie.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems sort of related — does iron-rich dust cause ice ages?

The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet’s orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms – particularly in central Asia – and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.

The plankton that then bloom take the carbon they need from the water, causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate. This cools the atmosphere further, creating yet more dust-producing regions, and the cycle continues, sinking Earth into an ice age.

When the planetary wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, eventually choke off the cooling, the feedback goes into reverse: continents warm, dust storms subside, the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise again.

Emphasis mine.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Homecoming

15 Comments

…from death row:

Just a few months after that December 2001 raid, The New York Times mentioned Maye, Jones and Prentiss in a front-page story about how the drug trade was wreaking havoc on the poor and rural south. That article, in contrast with my own reporting, shows how drastically a journalist’s own perspective can alter a story’s narrative. Certainly there’s no question that two families were devastated as the result of a drug raid gone wrong. But when I first came upon Maye’s story, it immediately struck me as an example of collateral damage from the drug war, not of the drug trade. One family lost a young, likable son and brother forever; another family had a young, likable son, brother and father taken from them for a decade. And the pile of bodies resulting from the policy of sending cops barreling into private homes in the middle of the night to stop people from getting high has only grown since the night Cory Maye shot Ron Jones.

I found Maye’s story while researching a paper about the overuse of SWAT teams and paramilitary search tactics. And so where the Times saw another cop killed by a drug dealer, I wondered why a guy who had no criminal record and no real drugs to speak of in his home would knowingly take on a team of raiding police officers, kill one of them, then surrender with bullets still remaining in his gun. It seemed much more like a series of mistakes resulting in a tragedy — a tragedy compounded by Maye’s subsequent conviction and death sentence.

The evil and societal damage of the drug war vastly exceeds that of the drug sellers (let alone users) and drug trade, all the more because it is well intentioned.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Neither Awe Nor Inspiration

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The secret to Barack Obama’s non-success:

He has a strange, three-step habit that has the effect of turning off both opponents and his base supporters: (a) the initial audacity-of-hope call for civility, working across the aisle, and bipartisanship in melodic cadences; (b) followed by an unleashing of a Chicago-style assault on his opponents with a wide array of martial imagery (e.g. “hostage takers,” “gun to a knife fight,” “get in their faces,” get “angry,” “kick ass,” etc.), general derision (“moats and alligators,” “back seat,” “punish our enemies”), especially aimed at the affluent (“corporate jet owners,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “those making above $200,000,” “fat-cat,” “at some point” “made enough money,” spread the wealth, redistributive change, unneeded income, etc.). That has the psychological effect of making it nearly impossible for those targeted and caricatured to eventually work out a deal with the president.

And then just when his base is fired up by such combative and confrontational red meat, Obama either votes present and hits the links during debate and argument, or drops the “don’t call my bluff” braggadocio and settles for what he can get. The common denominator here is rhetoric — Obama’s once great gift and now greater nemesis. He sounds much tougher and more divisive to enemies than his later walk back would indicate and he postures as a Chicago-style Alinsky organizer only to disappoint the faithful wanting tough action to follow tougher words.

And the worst thing (from his and his supporters’ point of view) is that he is incapable of changing. It is who he is.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama: Still the Alynskyite.

For all the good it will do him.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Bad News For NASA

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Nate Silver has a post on the potential outcome of the debt-limit deal, in which he draws on public polling data from 2010:

The table below reflects the views of Democratic and Republican adults toward cuts in 18 areas of federal spending as derived from the 2010 General Social Survey. The scale runs from 0 (meaning that voters would like to see increased spending in that area) to 100 (meaning that voters would like to see spending cuts).

Public Spending Preferences

His post is mostly about defense spending, but note the category that is number three in terms of preferences for cuts — “space exploration.”

Four points.

First (the trivial one), it’s not a recent poll, but I’m not aware of anything that has happened in the past couple years that would change this, with the possible exception of the Shuttle retirement, and potential unhappiness about that, particularly given the nonsense and hyperbole that it represents “the end of US human spaceflight” (if not the end of all human spaceflight, US or otherwise). On the other hand, I don’t know the methodology.

Second, there is no weighting for the amount of spending. I haven’t seen the poll questions, but I’d be willing to bet that prior to being asked about their priorities, the respondents were not informed of the size of the thing they wanted to cut. For instance, there are no doubt many people who think that we spend as much on NASA and foreign aid as we do on defense, and if I thought that was the case, I’d want to slash them, too. The reality, of course, is that both NASA and foreign aid are a tiny fraction of the money that we spend on defense (as is appropriate). I think that when asking question like this, the polling should be done in a manner that would be reflective of how a rational decision maker would do the cutting, taking into account both the utility of the activity, and the effect of the cuts on the budget (that is, all other things being equal, a larger budget is worth expending more political capital to cut than a tiny one). Like Willie Sutton’s explanation as to why he robbed banks, we should go to the high-ticket items because that’s where the money is. Which means, of course, that entitlements should be first on the chopping block, whereas they are one of the lowest priorities for cutting according to the polling.

Third, in addition to being one of the top three (at least among Dems, though it’s high among Republicans, too) it was one of only two items on which there was a majority of two parties in favor of cutting (the other was foreign aid, with even higher numbers). Defense was favored for cuts by the Dems, but not by Republicans. (As a side note, Republicans don’t seem to be interested in spending cuts in general — there are very few categories that got majority support from them. This is a partial explanation for the rise of the Tea Party.)

Fourth, like all such polls, it is flawed in how the question is framed, and that is particularly the case with the space question. Without taking the time to dig into it, I am assuming that the respondents were simply presented with that list as worded, and asked if they favored cutting the item. Such a poll will only give impressionistic results and, like the issue of how much is spent in each category, is highly dependent on the individual’s interpretation of what the words mean.

I could write a long essay on this (and I actually am, as a chapter for a book), but “space exploration” is such a nebulous phrase as to be meaningless for making public-policy decisions. It’s just short hand for whatever NASA is doing, most of which has nothing to do with “exploration,” nor should it if one reads the agency’s charter. I wonder what the responses would be if instead of whether or not they were being asked to support space “exploration,” they were asked to support space “development,” or space “technology,” or space “industry”? And told how much we are actually spending on those things, with a pie chart compared to the others?

Education, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Good Old Days Of Journalism

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I think that if we’re going to have schools of journalism, this should be a required exercise:

Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for ALL ON PAPER. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…

You must do math.

First, there’s headline counting: A capital M is two, but a lower-case L (or is that the number 1?) is one-half. So how many counts do I have for a 48-point head across two columns?

Then there are the stories whose column inches must be distributed evenly across the page, requiring long division (without a calculator) and resulting in vaguely sexual newsroom directives like, “I need 11 inches to fill this box, and I need it now.”

Finally, there’s sizing photos with that confounded proportion wheel. Even though it’s supposed to help you shrink or enlarge a photo, and even though the instructions are printed right on the front, that God-awful wheel still doesn’t ever seem to give you the proper percentages. It’s more like a Magic 8-Ball than a round slide rule: much more mysterious than accurate.

“It’s been rough,” Mariam admits. “I’ve found myself sitting in silence, reminiscing about the days when CNTRL+Z was all it took. I miss my iMac.” But she also confesses…

Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.

I’ve never been a professional journalist, but this is the process that we went through preparing proposals at Rockwell in the eighties. It took a long time to get the publications department to go to computers, even after the engineers were writing their proposal inputs in Wordperfect, and some had Macs with Pagemaker. We would have to print out our word processing output, and they would dutifully rekey it into their typesetting machines, because there were no compatible disk formats, which meant, of course, that we got to reedit for typos. They would cut out and wax the columns and lay them out on the boards, and then copy the gallies for us to review.

It meant that you had to have everything done about three days before it was due, because last-minute changes were just too painful to incorporate. On a thirty-day proposal, that was a lot of lost time.

There was an ugly transition period in the early nineties (a year or three before I left the company) when those responsible for actually writing the proposals rebelled and insisted on doing it themselves on Pagemaker. Pubs resisted, of course, reading the handwriting on the wall, and washing their hands of the results, though a few saw the future and came over to help (and learn what they would be doing themselves in a few years if they still had a job). Upper management had to adjudicate the situation, but the transition must have happened, because when I went back to do consulting at Boeing a decade or so later, everyone was publishing in Word, with an editor assigned to the team. But I think that it’s important for journalists using modern tools to understand the roots of their profession. If you could give them a hot-lead type machine, it would be even more educational, though probably going full Gutenberg with carved wooden blocks should be reserved for grad school. Hell, it might even teach them the difference between “font” and “typeface.”