Misc 070417

Only three days to go...

With the Virginia Tech shooting , they are angry about the fact that notification was slow for over two hours after the first couple were shot in a dorm room. I think the reason is two people shot was no biggie. This is not my usual "a few less Americans is a good thing" view - I'm just saying that so many people get shot over there that, statistically, two more wouldn't have seemed like a big deal.

John Howard still doesn't get it. He acknowledges he's behind in the polls and all he can say is "What it means is that I must work a lot harder to point out the dangers of a federal Labor government." No buddy, you've got to work a lot harder to point out the positives of continuing with a Liberal government.

Bog Water

I'm for drinking recycled water, by the way. I mean, do people think birds and fish and things don't already crap in the dams.

9 News had a poll which showed only 55% support; but it was a phone in-poll which means the more motivated people (the ones who are against it, given that President Pete's decision means those who are for it have lost motivation) have more incentive to ring and vote. Clive Berghofer
probably voted a thousand times.

9's just done a story on Vista. Given that they're in partnership with Microsoft at Ninemsn, it's not surprising that they gave it a positive review. But we can do without the falsehoods in the story, thanks - 95% of computers use Windows, ha!

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I went to school with the Mad Bomber!

My mother has passed on the word from my brother that, yes, I did go to the same school as Brisbane's mad bomber John Amundsen. He was in my brother's class. Another success for Marist Brothers' Rosalie! They don't just turn out bitter public servants. That'll give them something to talk about at the Old Boys' Dinner in a fortnight.

I was talking to a friend this evening - before I got the above news - and he said that Amundsen went to uni with his sister. He was a nutjob then, he's a nutjob now. Allegedly.

I'll wait to see if we find out the contents of the email threat he sent, but if he wasn't threatening to blow stuff up unless the government changed some policy or another, he's not a terrorist. He's just a mad bomber. Allegedly.

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By the time they said "I do" their expenses totalled $19,000 (US$)

There's an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about the cost of weddings in the US these days. I know I say "interesting article" a lot, but this time, Boycat's Mum read the whole thing when I showed it to her; and that was two and a half A4 pages of 10 point text, so I figure it might actually be interesting to someone other than me.

I think our wedding cost $3000 (in 1993). We paid for it ourselves although Boycat's Mum's Dad slipped us $1500 after it was over. We did the flowers in the church ourselves (that was when I learned you don't cut 6 inches off the end of long-stemmed roses to make them fit), my sister made the wedding dress, our reception was at our favourite indian restaurant — we'd been paying it off for the previous six months — and the entertainment was a couple of mix tapes I put together plus a belly-dancer.

Some of my friends had posher weddings, like the one in the botanical gardens, and some had traditional Italian weddings, but I'm pretty sure no one spent anything like $19,000 U.S dollars.

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Plagiarism Update

From the New York Times:

Fresh passages in the novel by a Harvard sophomore, whose book was pulled from stores last week after she acknowledged plagiarizing portions of it, appear to be copied from a second author.

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She should have said it was a homage... (updated)

Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional

Actually, I'm serious. While the 'mirroring' in the quoted portion goes on for just a little too long, it would only need to be slightly re-written (maybe find something that doesn't include the words 'ha', 'uh' or 'yeah') to make a claim that it was a homage to Megan McCafferty reasonably plausible.

But there's nothing wrong with the "(a), (b)" stuff - after I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test I used Tom Wolfe's triple-colons ( ::: ) loads. So a little bit of trying someone else's techniques on for effect is fine, I reckon.

Followed by: a bit of discussion in the comments of this post.

LATER: Here's a link to the article that broke the story, from the Harvard Crimson

Here's a big list of similarities, also from the Crimson.

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This has got to be fake, doesn't it?

Bizarre baby born in Dolakha

A link to information about a hoax referred to in the comments is here.

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Sometimes the Headlines rip off stories from Law and Order

There is an interesting story by Warren St. John from somewhere* (I've cut and pasted the article into a word doc, so I have no idea of the original source until I google it) about an author who survived being a male prostitute in West Virginia only to end up a junky in San Francisco with Aids.

Authors, publishers and celebrities offered the man help with his publishing career, as well as general support. He's written three books and at least one article for the New York Times.

Oh, yeah, and he doesn't seem to exist. Photos of him look suspiciously like the half-sister of a member of the couple who 'rescued' him from the life when he was a teenager. His writing is suspiciously similar to some documents that the other member of the couple asked someone to type up and fax once.

Various authors, publishers and celebrities are now pissed off...

Neither of these are the article that I read, but here are pieces on the story from The Australian and The Washington Post

Disclaimer: None of this should be construed to suggest that Ms Albert and Mr Knoop ever killed anyone a la the L&O:CI episode.

*The New York Times

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Miner Miracles

Written Thursday 5/1.

The mine disaster communications disaster is one of the most interesting things I've seen on TV all year. (Or all last year, whatever.) But I'm a breaking-news-junkie, so this was my idea of entertainment.

What's going on? Who got it so wrong? Will the media do its job or will it take some blogger to track down who originally said what to whom?

But by my count it only took about an hour from the discovery that only one was alive until the post-mortems started (sorry for the language, but that's what people call them). By the time the company man got up to do his press conference, you could hear from the tone of the questions that journalists weren't happy.

It seems the news that the 12 miners were "alive" broke while I was at work. It was all over the cable news channels when I got home. It lead the 5.30 pm Sky news bulletin, but then they broke in at about 5.57pm to say that only one was alive. Sky cut to Sky UK.

We watched that for a few minutes, but because it was 6pm, I checked out the two free-to-air channels. Neither was leading with the story, but Seven got to it before 6.15, but they ran the outdated "miracle rescue" story. I didn't see what Nine ran.

After a while I switched over to CNN, which was showing Anderson Cooper 360 from CNN US. Anderson was doing his usual "people are upset about this so I will be, too" routine, but he was the first I heard to raise the important point, which was that the company shouldn't have waited three hours to come out - they should have hosed down what they knew to be speculation as soon as they realised what was being speculated upon. I can understand the company man's reasoning when he says that after the first news, they didn't want to make an announcement until they had the facts, but that presupposes that there are only two courses of action. It doesn't take the preferred "We just don't know, we can't confirm that" into account.

Around 7pm, I checked out some websites, too see what they were saying. The New York times was still reporting the miracle story (in fact AFP/ABC/Reuters report that the New York Times print edition led with this story the next morning, too.) Topix.net showed the problem with automated news aggregators: it had both the "all alive" and "all dead" stories from different sources, but the all-alive story was placed higher on the page probably due to more links or page-views or however their ranking algorithms work.

It was instructive being able to read the NYT's story after the true facts had started to come out. The NYT sourced the story to "family members" and a "State official". They quoted the official in the third par, but his words did not confirm that the miners were alive, only that they had been found and were being medically evaluated.

I think this is where the whole confusion came from - if you hear someone is being medically evaluated, I think you would think they were alive, but their condition beyond that was unknown. It now seems that the 'evaluation' had not even reached the basic stage of 'alive or dead?'.

The family members said they'd been told people were alive, but no one has traced the chain back yet.

The Columbia Journalism Review's CJR Daily will have a field day with this. Even the NYT runs a story sourced only to family members who had heard things from unidentified people and a state official who only says vague things?

But then again, the Governor of West Virginia was calling it a miracle. In situations like this, it would be reasonable to expect that a high official is plugged into the official networks. Thus the fact that he is celebrating and no hosing down speculation would been seen by many reasonable people as confiming the truth of what was said. After all, he could always have said "I don't know. I've heard what people are saying but no one has told me officially."

LATER (09/01/2006): As predicted, CJR Daily did have a field day. They, too, were asking where were the journalist's sources. And speaking of Anderson Cooper, one of the complaints about the whole thing was that there were too many celebrity anchormen there and not enough actual journalists...

Harry Shearer, writing at the Huffington Post, also asks similar questions. Harry's been focussing on New Orleans, so his questions are in the context of why, after the many retracted 'New Orleans is falling into anarchy' stories, weren't they more careful this time.

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