How the media make and unmake the Scientific picture of reality —

Q&A Flashback with David Murray on National Review Online Kathryn Jean Lopez: No child has ever been harmed by strangers contaminating candy on Halloween? Even if no kid ever got hurt, does it hurt to have the warnings, and to have hospitals voluntarily checking candy every Oct. 31? David Murray: A study of national criminal … Continue reading “How the media make and unmake the Scientific picture of reality —”

Q&A Flashback with David Murray on National Review Online

Kathryn Jean Lopez: No child has ever been harmed by strangers contaminating candy on Halloween? Even if no kid ever got hurt, does it hurt to have the warnings, and to have hospitals voluntarily checking candy every Oct. 31?

David Murray: A study of national criminal data back to 1958 found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering, almost all of which were fraudulent or mistaken. There have been three reported cases of children dying from tainted candy. The first case involved parents trying to cover up after their child ate the father’s stash of heroin. The second case involved a father intentionally poisoning his son then blaming it on tainted candy. The third case involved a child who suffered a fatal seizure while trick-or-treating. She suffered from a congenital heart condition and no evidence of tampering was ever found. Although her parents immediately notified the authorities about their daughter’s heart condition, the media ran shocking news reports of yet another incident of poisoned Halloween candy.

Bush Flies While Democrats Lose Altitude

What Mr. Bush did with that speech Tuesday night was akin to Chuck Yeager strapping the entire Democratic Party into an X-1 and taking the whole lot of them up to 80,000 feet at Mach 2. They were in ideological air they’d never breathed before. “Let’s roll,” the president announces. First he talks about hunting … Continue reading “Bush Flies While Democrats Lose Altitude”

What Mr. Bush did with that speech Tuesday night was akin to Chuck Yeager strapping the entire Democratic Party into an X-1 and taking the whole lot of them up to 80,000 feet at Mach 2. They were in ideological air they’d never breathed before.

“Let’s roll,” the president announces. First he talks about hunting down thousands of human time bombs. Then he heads to North Korea, Iran and Iraq and rolls them through a 360 around the “axis of evil.” About now, Tom Daschle’s smooth smile is touching the back of his neck. But he won’t stop; now the president is saying “I will not wait on events while dangers gather.” Sweat is running down Joe Biden’s legs. Teddy shifts, thinking his seat in the House is starting to come apart; surely this guy is going to ease off.

Instead, the one-year president invokes History itself, which “has called America and our allies to action,” and says that “it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” Barbara Boxer thinks her head is being pulled through the Capitol dome. A voice inside Hillary’s helmet is saying, “We’re going to survive this; see if you can move your hands and applaud.”

Finally, the speech ends, the party is back on terra firma, and Mr. Gephardt makes a few remarks on what he’s just experienced. He says: “Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market. Our values call for helping patients and older Americans, not just big HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. Our values . . .”

Listening to this, I had one thought: The Democratic Party is shrinking. Maybe not in numbers; it got half the popular vote in 2000. But ideologically, culturally, in the ways a political organization should keep its politics alive and wired to the turbines of national life, the Democratic party is winding down.

Read it all in: Opinion Journal – it speaks for itself.

The Saga of Daniel Scotto —

Here’s another link on Daniel Scotto, the analyst fired by Paribas for accurately predicting Enron’s collapse Conflict for Dain analyst? (1/30/2002) And Daniel Scotto, a bond analyst for BNP Paribas, told the Wall Street Journal that he was forced out because he told clients in August that Enron securities “should be sold at all costs … Continue reading “The Saga of Daniel Scotto —”

Here’s another link on Daniel Scotto, the analyst fired by Paribas for accurately predicting Enron’s collapse Conflict for Dain analyst? (1/30/2002)

And Daniel Scotto, a bond analyst for BNP Paribas, told the Wall Street Journal that he was forced out because he told clients in August that Enron securities “should be sold at all costs and be sold now.” The company said Scotto’s departure was unrelated to his research.

Now contrast Scotto with Mark Easterbrook of Dain:

He not only termed Enron a buying opportunity on Oct. 23 — a day after the SEC request became public knowledge — he also was among the last analysts to downgrade Enron’s stock, issuing an “underperform” on Nov. 29 with the stock trading at 61 cents.

The possibility that Easterbrook may have been less than objective in his assessment of Enron’s stock is easy to understand.

Dain, of course, was one of Enron’s underwriters. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the scandal at Enron isn’t so much about politics or accounting as it is about conflicts of interest on the part of brokerage houses.

ReplayTV a future imperfect DVR

This is a good example of why journalism majors shouldn’t review technology, from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News: Sonicblue is also promising to launch a free service called “iChannel” by summer that will offer Replay TV 4000 owners a menu of TV programs available for download through the Net. This all sounds wonderful in theory … Continue reading “ReplayTV a future imperfect DVR”

This is a good example of why journalism majors shouldn’t review technology, from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News:

Sonicblue is also promising to launch a free service called “iChannel” by summer that will offer Replay TV 4000 owners a menu of TV programs available for download through the Net.

This all sounds wonderful in theory — we could break the chains put on us by broadcasters and cable networks, sharing programs with one another and finding previously unknown gems online.

But the reality is another future imperfect slap in the face. Today’s high-speed home Internet connections aren’t nearly fast enough for video, especially because almost all providers put a cap on “upload” speeds — the rate at which data moves from your house to the Internet — of a paltry 128 kilobits per second, little more than twice the speed of clunky dial-up phone lines.

Langberg makes multiple errors. First, the 128 Kb cap is only on AT&ampT Cable Internet – DSL from Pac Bell caps uploads at a more reasonable 384 Kb. Second, and more significant, the upload cap doesn’t limit the speed at which a movie can be downloaded from a web site setup to serve video-on-demand. Here, the relevant metric is the download cap, around 1.5Mbs for both DSL and cable. With MPEG4 compression, you will be able to download movies across broadband connections at close to real-time; that is, 2 hours, more or less, for a 2 hour movie.

But this is Silicon Valley, where everybody who understands technology does it for a living, and doesn’t write about it in the newspaper.

Best site on the web?

In praise of A &amp L Daily, this (by way of Charles Murtaugh): On one level, Arts & Letters Daily operates simply as a Web site providing links to other Web sites, a system that’s also used for spreading information about everything from movies to hotel accommodations. But that’s only the format. The content makes … Continue reading “Best site on the web?”

In praise of A &amp L Daily, this (by way of Charles Murtaugh):

On one level, Arts & Letters Daily operates simply as a Web site providing links to other Web sites, a system that’s also used for spreading information about everything from movies to hotel accommodations. But that’s only the format. The content makes Arts & Letters Daily unique in cultural history. It’s an engrossing magazine that only the Web could have spawned — cheap, fast, smart and full of surprises.

It’s a unique site, and worth a daily read.