The New York Times discovers Twitter.”Taken collectively”, it says,
“the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it”.
Wow! You don’t say.
If you’re puzzled by the firestorm over Amazon’s apparent decision suddenly to block “adult” books and DVDs from searches and best-seller lists, then Rory Cellan-Jones has done a sterling job of trying to figure it out.
Charles Arthur has written a terrific piece in Media Guardian about the implications for journalism of the new data-retention legislation.
Want to be an investigative journalist of the future? You’ll need a pen and paper, pay-as-you-go phone, and a motorbike. We’ll explain the motorbike later. But you may be an endangered species. New regulations that came into force last week – requiring telephone and internet companies to keep logs of what numbers are called, and which websites and email services and internet telephony contacts are made – have left some wondering if investigative journalism, with its need to protect sources (and its sources’ need, often, for protection), has been dealt a killer blow.
Worries focus on the fact that every government department, local council and even quango can access this telephone and internet data, given a judge’s clearance. What will they use it for? To investigate everything from treason to flytipping. Might it also be used to find out who has been tipping off a journalist on a local paper about the misdeeds of local councillors? That’s the concern.
It’s a real worry IMHO. When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was being pushed through Parilament in 1999, some of us were concerned — and warned — about its almost infinite extensibility. And in due course we found that it was being used not just to monitor alleged terrorists, but by a local authority to spy on parents suspected of giving a false address in order to get their kids into a particular school.
The new data retention laws will make it impossible to protect journalistic sources — unless totally non-electronic channels are used. And, even then, widespread use of car number-plate recognition software will make it risky to travel to a meeting in a car. So, as Charles says, use only snail mail, unlocked SIM-cards bought with cash and travel to meetings with confidential sources on a bike.
We’re building an Orwellian state on the instalment plan.
Fascinating Ars Technica piece on hos the market for software is changing as the iPhone consolidates its strangelhold on the smartphone market.
In addition to giving away some nice swag to celebrate the countdown to one billion App Store downloads, Apple also created a list of top 20 paid and and top 20 free applications. The list gave us a good idea of what iPhone users like and what they are willing to pay for en masse (the lists appear to be region specific, so many of you will be looking at the US list).
To make the list a bit more interesting, however, MacRumors has collected sales numbers for some of the apps from a variety of different sources. While none of the numbers are 100 percent up to date, they are a reasonable approximation.
Since not all developers are open with their sales numbers, the article only talks about four of the top 20 applications numbers. The number-two application, Koi Pond by the Blimp Pilots, has made an estimated $623,000 (after Apple’s cut) from about 900,000 downloads. Number three, Pangea’s Enigmo, is harder to pinpoint because it has fluctuated in price over its App Store lifespan. With an estimated 810,000 copies sold, however, Pangea has made at least $561,330 on the one application alone. PocketGod, number 12 on the list, has earned an impressive $350,000 since its release in January with somewhere around 500,000 sales. The last application with any numbers is iShoot, which at number 19 on Apple’s list has reportedly made the author $800,000 in just five months.
While the numbers are in no way indicative of the whole, it makes it quite clear that it is possible to make a comfortable living developing solely for the iPhone. Even with mildly popular applications, we would estimate that a developer could squeak out a living if they were any good…
LATER: Nice email from a reader with a link to an Irish Times story about one of his students, Steven Troughton-Smith, who “has emerged as Ireland’s most successful software developer for Apple’s iPhone, generating revenues of up to $1,000 a day.”
I always thought that Larry Summers was an idiotic choice for President of Harvard — and that Obama was crazy to choose him as a senior economic adviser, but it turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful column by Frank Rich which explores the extent to which Summers is ethically challenged:
On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.
We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard. [emphasis added]
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies…
Interesting footnote: As I observed a while back, Harvard’s endowment (which pays for a third of the university’s operating costs) is in deep, deep trouble. Partly this is due to the collapse in the stock market. But it is made worse, as the New York Times reported, because — on the advice of its President — “it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.”
The truth is that Summers is a creature of the monster he is now charged with nursing back to health. Why should anyone believe that he is capable of acting impartially — or even ethically — given his record?
… in Chema Madoz’s photographs. Amazing stuff. See also here.
Thanks to Jack Schofield for spotting them.
Extraordinary article in the Irish Times giving a per capita breakdown of Irish public finances. Sample:
We hear financial analysts talk about the economy in billions of euro, and in concepts such as GNP per capita. But for many of us, it may be difficult to appreciate these numbers and concepts. So let me try a different approach.
Let us take the Macroeconomic and Fiscal Framework 2009-2013 published on the web site of the Department of Finance. I also assume that our population is approximately 4.2 million.
Last Tuesday, our Government said it will collect this full year, on average, €8,200 of tax for every single woman, man and child in the State. However, some of this comes in the form of corporation tax from companies – €900 for each of us.
The difference – €7,300 – is on average each citizen’s burden of taxes. The €7,300 figure consists of €3,000 of income tax; €2,700 of VAT; and the remaining €1,600 in further taxes such as excise, stamp duty and so.
How, then, is our money to be used? The Budget showed for each person in Ireland, our Government will spend €11,000 on “current” recurring activities (such as, in particular, civil service salaries and social welfare). It also showed a further €2,600 for each one of us on “capital” items (such as roads and buildings). The total spend by our Government for 2009 for each citizen in the State will be €13,600.
Note that €13,600 is ahead, by a considerable margin, of the tax which the Government expects to collect from us. The difference will be borrowed from overseas investors, and we will have to pay this loan back – along with the rest of the money we already owe in the national debt – through further taxes in the future. At the end of 2008, the net debt position of our Government was about 22 per cent of GDP, that is, about €9,000 for each one of us. Since then about a further €11 billion has been raised, which brings the total to about €11,600 per capita. These figures do not include the investment that our Government is intending to make into our new National Asset Management Agency. For every billion euro that the agency spends in the future, a further €240 has to be found for each one of us.
Repaying our national debt to foreign investors is dead money: it is money that will be lost from our society and which could otherwise have been used to help build a better Ireland.
How is each of our €13,600 going to be spent across the Civil Service? There is a full department-by-department breakdown in the document I mentioned above and, from this, the per capita expenditures can be derived.
Some €5,100 for every person in the country will be spent by the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which of course includes all social welfare benefits to those challenged in our society. Another €3,600 will be spent by the Department of Health and Children (including the Health Service Executive). Then there is €2,300 that will go to our schools and third-level institutions via the Department of Education and Science. The Garda will get €360 for each person in the State, and the Defence Forces will receive €190 on behalf of each one of us. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (which includes the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, and Science Foundation Ireland) gets €350.
Thanks to Karlin Lillington for the original link.
It seems that the spirit of the old LAPD lives on — though this time in San Francisco. Chris Nuttall sent me this link to a story about a police murder which occurred in January.
The cell phone video, one of a handful that have surfaced, aired Friday night on KTVU-TV. It shows a male BART police officer walking over to three men lined up against a wall near a female officer, and then striking one in the face.
The victim of the punch – identified by Channel 2 as 22-year-old Grant – slides to the ground. The video then shows the moments preceding the shooting, then the shooting itself. It appears that the officer who punches the man is the same person who later is seen kneeling on Grant's head when he was shot.
Sources have identified that officer as Tony Pirone. He and the other officers present at the time of Grant's shooting all remain on paid administrative leave while the investigation continues, but until Saturday BART was not investigating the conduct of anyone besides Johannes Mehserle, 27, who shot Grant.
Mehserle later resigned from the force and was charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail…
(Image from Wikipedia.)
Today is Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday. As Ireland slides into economic meltdown, governed by a clique of incompetent, corrupt and venal politicians, this is a rare opportunity to celebrate. RTE, the national broadcaster, has done something imaginative: in collaboration with the Lannan Foundation they have produced a landmark 15-CD box set of the poet reading his own Collected Poems. And from 9am this morning RTE is broadcasting this entire collection. You can listen on the Web. If you have time, his 1995 Nobel Lecture — “Crediting Poetry” — is a great read — as a reminder that we are all, ultimately, “hunters and gatherers of values”. Or you can listen to him giving the lecture here.
… in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in at the age of 63 & Vice President Harry Truman became president.