Film, media and art links
Creepy killing of chocolate bunnies.
William Shatner does Sarah Palin and then it gets even funnier.
Really hating 2012:
Hopefully, When Worlds Collide will flop and achieve burnout for a genre that should never have existed in the first place: the planetary holocaust feel-good movie.
A philosopher teaching Existentialism offered students extra credit if they did a short film (6 minutes or under). The results are being posted here.
If you are going to publicly criticise a columnist, make sure (1) you get the dates right and (2) you get his views right.
About the awkward issue of reporting kidnappings.
A prize-winning photo of a murder on a Haifa street and the issue of media complicity. Examining ways in which terrorism is a media event.
Satirising current media coverage of the Fort Hood massacre by applying it to past assassins and mass killers. Post with lots of links and comments on the US media coverage. About a TV interviewer not getting it.
Noting the differing media treatment of Coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pakistan is undergoing a media revolution.
The real problem with vampires:
Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.
The “uncanny valley” and why porn video games are failures. The philosophical implications of the uncanny valley. A rejoinder. Researching the uncanny valley.
Why do all my husbands want to kill me?: the Elster Ralston story part one, part two, and part three.
A journalist sends a private email to a gay lobby group about an issue he did not cover, gets Google™d, gets fired. Way to go guys, show how much you support privacy, freedom of speech and a free press-and that is just the newspaper in question.
About the RBA’s selective briefing of journalists. The US Treasury has decided to be nice to selected bloggers. And also.
FoxNews gets caught substituting old footage in new reports.
About the incentives in environmental reporting:
Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn’t depend on finding them. That’s something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate.
Also, “beat” journalists tend to be partly captured by their primary, repeated information sources. The NYT has a very long history of reporting looming polar doom. But wants to make clear that there is still scientific debate:
But Revkin and Tierney both told me that, after that broad understanding among scientists, there is sharp debate over how fast the earth is warming, how much human activity is contributing and how severe the impact will be.
“Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement,” Revkin said.
Just so that’s clear. 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages run the same editorial. Being amusing on that. How it was organised.
About Climategate’s initially rather limited media coverage:
Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown-in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand-that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
An uncharitable view of the role of journalist(s):
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of The New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.
Jon Stewart having a bit of fun. Climategate early on was still a non-events at The Age and the ABC. Toing and froing with the ABC. Noting the early silence of the mainstream media and their likely embarrassment. Links showing spreading media coverage. The Age runs a “nothing to see here” piece: quite a lot of the readers do not appear to agree.
About the online Climate sceptic counter-culture.
William Shatner does Sarah Palin and then it gets even funnier.
Really hating 2012:
Hopefully, When Worlds Collide will flop and achieve burnout for a genre that should never have existed in the first place: the planetary holocaust feel-good movie.
A philosopher teaching Existentialism offered students extra credit if they did a short film (6 minutes or under). The results are being posted here.
If you are going to publicly criticise a columnist, make sure (1) you get the dates right and (2) you get his views right.
About the awkward issue of reporting kidnappings.
A prize-winning photo of a murder on a Haifa street and the issue of media complicity. Examining ways in which terrorism is a media event.
Satirising current media coverage of the Fort Hood massacre by applying it to past assassins and mass killers. Post with lots of links and comments on the US media coverage. About a TV interviewer not getting it.
Noting the differing media treatment of Coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pakistan is undergoing a media revolution.
The real problem with vampires:
Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.
The “uncanny valley” and why porn video games are failures. The philosophical implications of the uncanny valley. A rejoinder. Researching the uncanny valley.
Why do all my husbands want to kill me?: the Elster Ralston story part one, part two, and part three.
A journalist sends a private email to a gay lobby group about an issue he did not cover, gets Google™d, gets fired. Way to go guys, show how much you support privacy, freedom of speech and a free press-and that is just the newspaper in question.
About the RBA’s selective briefing of journalists. The US Treasury has decided to be nice to selected bloggers. And also.
FoxNews gets caught substituting old footage in new reports.
About the incentives in environmental reporting:
Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn’t depend on finding them. That’s something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate.
Also, “beat” journalists tend to be partly captured by their primary, repeated information sources. The NYT has a very long history of reporting looming polar doom. But wants to make clear that there is still scientific debate:
But Revkin and Tierney both told me that, after that broad understanding among scientists, there is sharp debate over how fast the earth is warming, how much human activity is contributing and how severe the impact will be.
“Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement,” Revkin said.
Just so that’s clear. 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages run the same editorial. Being amusing on that. How it was organised.
About Climategate’s initially rather limited media coverage:
Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown-in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand-that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
An uncharitable view of the role of journalist(s):
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of The New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.
Jon Stewart having a bit of fun. Climategate early on was still a non-events at The Age and the ABC. Toing and froing with the ABC. Noting the early silence of the mainstream media and their likely embarrassment. Links showing spreading media coverage. The Age runs a “nothing to see here” piece: quite a lot of the readers do not appear to agree.
About the online Climate sceptic counter-culture.