Clay Shirky on Information Overload

He makes a good point:
By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general [...]

Two good posts on journalism

Both from Doug Fisher of Common Sense Journalism; the first deals with the value of journalism:
And that’s what too many journalists do not seem to understand – people never actually paid for the journalism. If they had, we could have been out selling our work individually on the streets (why have a middleman?). They paid [...]

One distinction about the future of work

From a Slashdot summary:
Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site.
I tend to think that given the [...]

Ira Socol on the web, meaning, and connectivity

Some very, very sharp things are said in this blog post.  I’m not sure I agree with them, completely, but they are definitely worth thinking about.
Found via A Collage of Citations.

[LCSD] LT on the Election

LT has a very pragmatic – sobering? – post on the election that you should read.

Oregon Taser Death

From the O:
Officers were called to an apartment in the 1200 block of Royvonne Avenue Southeast in Salem about 7:38 p.m. following a report of a man who was trespassing. They encountered Rold, who Okada said “violently” resisted arrest.
That prompted officers to shoot him with a Taser and strike him with their batons. After he [...]

Local newspaper comment threads – a suggestion

Rhetorical question:  Why don’t I seem to have as much free time as I used to?  Anyway…..
Recently, I’ve had a few discussions about comment threads and having comments on newspaper websites in general.  Said discussions were prompted, in part, by both the GT story on the Sako case and by a typically ignorant and banal [...]

GAPS layoffs

Story here… but no names attached.  So – did the district not release the names or did the paper choose not to publish them?

LPSC: Cost vs. Beauty vs. the Environment

There are two letters and quite a few comments in yesterday’s GT complaining about simple and ‘ugly’ the proposed Linus Pauling Science Center is.  I agree that it has a plain style – like many other OSU buildings.
However, I would imagine that adding a lot of decorative design and trim adds both to the cost [...]

Preventative Detention

Kevin Drum takes – as always – a moderate, pragmatic view.  I happen to disagree with him, unsurprisingly:
I appreciate the outrage, but this is a genuinely knotty problem.  It was knotty under Bush and it remains knotty under Obama.  For various reasons, some defensible and some not, Obama is right: there are almost certainly a [...]

[LCSD] Post-Election

A few things:
1.  The three people I had hoped would win, won.  I can’t say that’s happened too often in the LCSD in the last few years.  I’m still not sure exactly what caused it.  And no, I don’t feel overjoyed or like rubbing it in.
2.  Alperin’s win is, in my mind, almost certainly due [...]

[LCSD] Election Results

Go here to see the results.
As of 8:53 PM, Liz Alperin, Michael Martin and Todd Gestrin are all winning (albeit Liz is winning by a fairly narrow margin).  Holy Mother of God.
I really thought Alexander would win again.
UPDATE: As of 11:15 PM, all the leads still hold, with only the ballots received from other counties [...]

Your Supreme Court Chief Justice, Thinking Like a Ten-Year-Old

From the New Yorker:
In the most famous passage so far of his tenure as Chief Justice, Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Yup.  Real serious thinking, that.  In case you are thinking “Hey, that sounds reasonable!  What’s the problem?”, the problem [...]

News, News, News

Lots of news today.  Briefly, from the Daily Barometer, a column on the credit card industry:
So when we hear now that President Obama and Congress are considering various measures to protect consumers from abusive credit card company practices, we should be suspicious.
In the end, we will find that those protective measures are a net benefit, [...]

Monday Morning News

From OSU Today:
NEW! Frank Ragulsky is retiring after 28 years as Director of OSU Student Media. The university community is invited to a reception in his honor from 3 to 5 p.m., May 26, in the Memorial Union Lounge.
You can’t see it, but I’m doing a happy dance.