Math genius Jeff Hammerbacher, former Facebook research scientist who later co-founded Cloudera. (via copyeditor
)
true that.
(via futurejournalismproject)
This Is Informative, You Should Watch It of the Day: Do you consider yourself to be typical? NatGeo promotes its 7-part series on the challenges facing a world with 7 billion people by taking a brief look at what constitutes a “typical” human.
[thd.]
By looking at global population trends, the most typical person in the world is a 28-year-old han Chinese male. He has a cell phone, but not a bank account. He’s right-handed, and makes less than $12,000 per year.
IRIS: Thom Yorke I’d like to dance la Quebradita with you next!
Nice addition to the Thom Yorke dance vid meme from MexandtheCity.
Is PR Taking Over the News
Journalists are a busy lot, out reporting each day as fire breathing editors demand they fill news holes post haste.
No wonder the allure of a press release. Flip a word here and there, massage some copy and here you go, an article ready for publication.
Not so fast.
England’s Media Standards Trust has released a “churn engine” that lets readers compare articles to press releases to see whether what they’re reading is actually independently reported. Some results can be seen here and examples run the gamut from science to royal family reporting.
As the Guardian notes:
A new website promises to shine a spotlight on “churnalism” by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases.
The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a “churn engine”. It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a “churn rating”, show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material…
…In a typical example, the Express, Mirror and Sun all lifted of chunks of text from a press release last month on behalf of the Benenden Healthcare Society, which quoted a poll showing ‘British women spend more money on their looks than their health’. The Daily Mail copied 98% of the text directly from the press release.
passive/aggressivness at it’s best.
Insert a coin. Your selected piece of china will fall to the bottom of the vending machine. It will shatter. This project by artist Yarisa and Kublitz. If you feel better when you do it, because the designers contends that this machine will make you feel better.
This is so messed up. Screen grab from today’s New York Times. Real news about a democratic uprising in Yemen next to ads for fake news network The Onion.
