Interesting Links for 27-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• Depression makes it more likely you'll do overtime
  (tags: work depression psychology )
• Cars Kill Cities
  (tags: cars transport cities )
• Android and iPhone neck and neck in the US smartphone market
  (tags: iphone apple android mobile )
• Apple still dominates the tablet market, but Android narrows the gap
  (tags: apple android tablets

Comments

[anton_p_nym]

re: Mail vs. Times... I would visit the NYT (or IHT, the international version) a lot more if they didn't cap ad-supported "free" access to a mere 20 articles a month. I ran out of "free" viewings last Friday, and won't get any more until next Tuesday... and I am certainly NOT subscribing for their "99¢ subscription" given that they are so cagey about what the subscription will cost after the promo expires. (And likely not even then, given how damned expensive they have been in the past given that you still see bloody ads.)

If the Mail is still free to access online, then there's one reason it surpassed the Times.

As for the "cover up", well, no; "Morgellon's Disease" has never been well supported by research literature, and certainly anyone other than the True Believers has found that the foreign matter samples were from textiles or other common environmental substances.

-- Steve is certainly not dismissing the syndrome, but thinks that "delusional parasitosis" is a better term. Now to find out why these folks' neural nets are falsely signalling the creepy-crawlies...

[andrewducker]

It's not about The Times not keeping its top spot, it's that The Mail is an appalling newspaper. If The Guardian or somesuch had taken top spot I'd be perfectly happy.

And Morgellon's Disease is clearly real - you must be part of The Conspiracy if you're denying it! Aieee!

[anton_p_nym]

Oh, I'm quite aware of the "Dail Fail"'s reputation... I'm guessing that the bulk of its traffic is celebrity gossip and surrepetitious photos of starlets in swimwear, with a side-order of fascist frothing. I was just pointing out that the NYT is at least in part the authour of its own woes.

-- Steve wishes he was part of The Conspiracy; his retirement fund could do with some top-up with Illumaniti money.

[philmophlegm]

"...it's that The Mail is an appalling newspaper. If The Guardian or somesuch had taken top spot I'd be perfectly happy."

As you'd imagine, I take the opposite view and would reverse the two newspapers in that statement!

[andrewducker]

I'm disturbed. If you were to support The Times, Telegraph, or FT then I'd entirely understand, but The Mail is disturbingly awful. (I don't actually read The Guardian myself, but I'll take it over The Mail any day)

[philmophlegm]

Sorry. We'll just have to agree to disagree...

[andrewducker]

I'd just like to see positive examples of daily mail journalism. The Guardian at least occasionally breaks important stories. If there are examples of The Daily Mail doing so I'd actively like to know about them.

[octopoid_horror]

While the stories the Guardian breaks are sometimes important in the sense of being about events affecting the world in a big way, a celebrity story broken in the Daily Mail, on TMZ or in the pages of Hello! may well be seen as more important by individual people.

I care more about the SNP's position on corporation tax than I do the love-life of Justin Bieber or who was a bitch backstage at the X-Factor, but the latter two examples are going to sell more papers/magazines and so be important to people. (although I, like you, would have a different view of what's important)

[philmophlegm]

The Daily Mail (the paper edition) really doesn't do much in the way of celebrity gossip - nowhere near as much as the website does. When it does, they are generally fluffy light-hearted articles rather than news stories.

[philmophlegm]

For a fairly topical one, how about the Stephen Lawrence thing?

It's a fairly important point made in that BBC website article that we're talking about the website, not the newspaper. The website does show some content from the newspaper, but an awful lot of the stories on the website don't appear in print. The print newspaper doesn't have much in the way of celebrity gossip for example.

[andrewducker]

That's a good example. I just read this article and it's clear that they went out on a massive limb to support the family and bring about justice.

Thinking about it, most of what I despise about The Daily Mail comes from their commentators, things like Jan Moir's piece on Stephen Gately, from their unceasing scare stories about cancer, and from looking over Julie's shoulder at the website.

As the Guardian also publishes comment pieces I find horrific, from writers like Julie Bindel, or things that I disagree with severely (most opinion pieces around economics), I can't overly-fault it on that front.

My memory of the paper itself is that it was horribly alarmist, and terribly bigoted. Pieces like this don't help with that view. But having not picked up a copy in 20 years, I have no idea what it's like outside of the bits that I see paraded as examples of its badness.

I'll take your word for it that it's not generally that bad (until I find myself in a dentists waiting room with a copy of it to analyse, of course!)

[anton_p_nym]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

"I know it's true; I read it in the Daily Mail" is sufficient rebuttal while being more entertaining than anything I could come up with off-the-cuff, so I'll just stick with that.

-- Steve is gradually becoming less amazed with the remarkable run of the Weekly World News, given how little its coverage differs from that of the Daily Mail.