In an article entitled "The Crowd Within," The Economist has commented on some recent work that has expanded on the earlier and well-publicized counter-intuitive findings of James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" (2005). Surowiecki found that the aggregated guesses of non-experts were often startlingly accurate. The averaged guesses…
I'm aware that McCain is different than Bush on a few issues. But these are areas in which McCain has stumbled over a very low bar, indeed. For instance, McCain has the intellectual brilliance to admit that we are terribly screwing up our environment and that energy is an issue…
I caught this video at Funny or Die:
This was the third year I attended the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. This year's conference was held in Minneapolis. As in previous media reform conferences, I was reminded about many of the hurdles faced by those American citizens who are attempting to get serious and coherent coverage of the news. By "news," I mean the type of information that is critically important in order to prepare us to make good decisions as citizens (i.e., voting). One of the most distressing things one learns from attending the conference is that very little news is available to those watch local TV "news" and read their local "news"papers. One of the fundamental principles of Free Press is that there cannot be a healthy democracy without a vigorous news media. The problem is that our news media is sickly, poisoned by rampant commercialism. The modern corporate media is over-consolidated to such an extent that it reflexively kowtows to political power and repeatedly refuses to challenge abuses of that power.
McChesney/Nichols - Part I
Topics covered in Part I:With the high price of gasoline, more people are now riding trains then ever before. I hadn't before seen any fuel efficiency numbers for Amtrack, but here are some from the NYT: Oil costs hurt Amtrak, too. Fuel is projected to reach 11 percent of Amtrak’s budget this year, up…