June 2012
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“An informed industry insider has recently revealed that for smartphone vendors...”
– China Wireless News
394 RMB is roughly $62.
AP Editor to Staff: Stop Mocking CNN
Jim Romenesko has been forwarded an amazing note:
From: Scott, David T.
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 9:51 AM
To: News – Central Editorial Staff
Subject: Twitter/Health Care
Importance: High
All,
Please, immediately, stop taunting on social networks about CNN and others’ SCOTUS ruling mistake and the AP getting it right.
That’s not the impression we want to reflect as an...
“Big loss for Mitt Romney, as court upholds national version of the successful...”
– Alec MacGillis
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Buzzfeed Reports on CNN Wrongly Reporting on... →
All in the first 10 minutes after the decision was released.
Our news cycle just ate itself.
How could news organizations have handled this better? Look to SCOTUS Blog, which wrote at 10:09: “It’s very complicated, so we’re still figuring it out.” Related
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“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable,...”
– Charles Babbage
Beyond this being a fantastic quote, its striking how much American big business has adopted the British mode Babbage describes. It’s a sweeping generalization to say, but one which I’ve observed: in the above quote you could swap ‘British’ for...
“As anyone who has reported from Mexico knows, the line between incompetence and...”
– James Virini, while reporting on botched U.S. gun policing and the Mexican perception of them in Foreign Policy. The above quote could be applied to pretty much anything.
Drug wars, or really any covert actions, yield strange bedfellows. Beyond the main example of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,...
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Google's New Products & Price Points
So we’re clear, here are the price points of Google’s new products:
$199: the 7 inch, quad-core Nexus 7 tablet
$299: an internet stereo reciever
$1500: beta access to Google Goggles
Let’s run down the list
Great price point. Competes with the Kindle Fire and clearly has content in mind (a first for Android). Stop talking about ‘quad core’ processors and focus...
“It turns out the explanation is quite simple: they appear to be banks but they...”
– Thomas Beller on the explosion of bank storefronts in Manhattan.
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WatchMIT engineers have built a micro-glider which uses computer controls to perch on a wire. The team envisions using the tech in small drones that will land and feed on power lines.
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“After years of defending its financially underperforming newspapers, News...”
– NYTimes
The new companies will be named “News” and “Corporation,” respectively.
“It was like looking at the worst movie set you could imagine.”
– Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on the Colorado Springs wildfire.
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We’ve created a news climate where people race to declare others dead.
Philosophy of Drawing asks why I think we’ve arrived at such a climate. Here is my response:
I we’ve achieved this climate because conversations and media move so quickly that news outlets have only two sustainable editorial models: move really fast or create amazing analysis. The audience for the former...
“It only takes a single millisecond for the robot to recognize what shape your...”
– A Japanese robot beats you at Rock, Paper, Scissors every time. (Via IEEE Spectrum)
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On The Newsroom:
Watching a premium cable show about high-quality network news is like using an iPhone case that looks like a cassette tape.
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“It’s so much easier to make decisions which are good for your users when...”
– Jonathan Lenaghan beautifully boils down the Dark Sky story during an office discussion.
“Not one person enjoyed reading that.”
– Peter answers The Verve’s form questions
I enjoyed this: “Working on web interfaces and apps feels like a weird thing and sometimes it’s hard to say who’s doing it right because it’s so new.”
“Russia is missing not only a middle class but also a millionaire class.”
– Ruchir Sharma on Russian and Chinese billionaires.
“I think given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of...”
– Deadmau5
“The reason we encode velocity data as an image is so we can pass it off to the...”
– How Dark Sky Works
How Dark Sky Works →
jstn:
I can’t get over how awesome Dark Sky is. Besides being visually & technically incredible, it also employs a devilishly clever forecasting system centered around the observation that weather behaves quite linearly on short timescales:
It’s very much a numerical & statistical approach, rather than a meteorological one. Since we’ve launched the Kickstarter project, we’ve had...
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“The men sweated a lot in those lofts, and I remember one worker who had a...”
– Arthur Miller, “American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning”, The New Yorker
Fussiness is so in right now.
“For most Europeans, almost nothing is more prized than their four to six weeks...”
– NYTimes
iFixit Tears Down the Apple's New Line, Pines for... →
After slamming the Retina MacBook for its glued in batteries, locked down case, and proprietary parts, iFixit took every opportunity during its non-retina MacBook Pro teardown to point out to Apple that user-servicible parts in-fact exist and could be used to make mind blowing products.
Their request for an optical drive is notable:
A significant portion of the weight savings in the Retina...
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“Malware researchers investigating a Trojan linked in a gaming forum as a how-to...”
– Ars Technica
Romney is Banking on Panic & Depression →
The Atlantic Wire:
To get reelected, Republican governors in swing states need to say they’ve led their states to over growing economies, but to get Mitt Romney elected, they need to say their economies are awful and it’s President Obama’s fault. It is a tricky needle to thread, and Florida Rick Scott is not doing it very well. Romney’s campaign asked Scott stop issuing...
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“The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful...”
– Spencer Ackerman for Danger Room
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Apple Patents Identity Spoofing →
Over at Slashdot, Theodp writes:
On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Apple an odd patent on Techniques to Pollute Electronic Profiling, which presumably might concern the targeted ad revenue-hungry folks at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn (and their investors). The patent, apparently assigned to Apple from Novell, is designed to thwart ‘dataveillance techniques from automated Litter...
“In the lingo it’s known as a “pinballl house,” a property...”
– Matt Yglesias
“There is a very simple reason that drones have a higher failure/crash rate than...”
– James Gerrond
“In Cold Blood was required reading at Shawnee Mission North High School in...”
– Bill James, Popular Crime
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The iOS 6 App Opportunity: Transit
Apple’s new maps application ships without public transit directions. Transit directions was a service provided by Google, whom does a mostly fantastic job at aggregating disparate public transit data into a unified format. While Apple has focused on delivering a great in-car experience, they’ve punted on local transit.
As a compromise, they’re recommending apps that provide...
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Demoing Siri to a large room with maybe 1% of the audience women is more than a bit disconcerting.
“Aaron Burr had a property development company, the Manhattan Company. The...”
– Bill James in Popular Crime.
I haven’t yet decided what to think of this book. On one hand it’s gripping and James has a knack for dropping in simply stated asides almost poetically within a tentatively linked narrative, like the above. When a crime narrative wraps up he applies the...
“True enough, there are obvious signs of real-estate and asset bubbles all over...”
– James Fallows explains why China’s slowdown will not be identical to America’s
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Ferrari "Convoy" Caught Hitting 132 MPH, Fined... →
Meanwhile, in China:
A group of maniac drivers in multimillion-yuan Ferraris had their driver’s license suspended or were fined 200 yuan ($31.40) after being caught speeding on Hangzhou-Xin’anjiang-Jingdezhen Expressway Saturday, according to police in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.
Highway traffic police in Hangzhou said traffic monitors detected one of the drivers traveling at...
