Of most concern to the president himself, one high-level aide said, is the perception that the United States would once again be meddling in the Middle East, where it has overturned many a leader, including Saddam Hussein. Some critics of the United States in the region — as well as some leaders — have already claimed [...]
Entries Tagged as 'News'
Call It The Dead Billionaire’s Tax
June 9th, 2010 · 1 Comment · News, Politics
From the NY Times comes this tale of a recently-deceased billionaire, Dan L. Duncan, whose estate will be the first ever billion-dollar estate in the U.S. to pass to his heirs 100% tax-free.
This situation is the bastard child of the Bush-era tax “reform” in which the estate tax was characterized as a “death tax” and [...]
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Stop Responding to Terrorism with More Security Theater
December 26th, 2009 · 4 Comments · News, Politics
Over Christmas we were following the story of the loon who attempted to set off some kind of incendiary device on an airplane. Today, this:
According to a statement posted Saturday morning on Air Canada’s Web site, the Transportation Security Administration will severely limit the behavior of both passengers and crew during flights in United States [...]
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Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses
December 20th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Work
My former Yahoo! colleague Simon Willison is doing some amazing work setting up near-instant crowdsourced content analysis systems for government documents in the UK. He and his team are developing vital knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in these kinds of systems, and he’s shared it on his blog:
News-based crowdsourcing projects of this nature [...]
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Sometimes A Movie Is Just A Movie
October 16th, 2009 · No Comments · Movies, News
Link: Movie Review – Where the Wild Things Are — NYTimes.com
There are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination.
There are probably fewer ways to ruin a movie review, but trying to [...]
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LATimes.com’s Redesign is 1000% Awesome
September 1st, 2009 · No Comments · News
I’m really, really appreciating the new LATimes.com. The recent redesign was timely since this week there is actually news going on down there that I sort of care about (the city where I went to high school is apparently becoming even more of a hellish infernal wasteland than it was when I lived there).
The downright [...]
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The Associated Press Discovers Tagging
July 12th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Web/Tech
The Associated Press is floating the idea of creating a tag taxonomy that would provide metadata about their news stories to automated crawlers.
Setting aside the fact that this would appear to be an attempt at creating their own niche set of copyright regulations, I’d be surprised if the AP will even be able to pull [...]
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“Google and the AP Should Reveal Their Licensing Terms”. Should They Really?
May 30th, 2009 · No Comments · Google, News
The always canny Danny Sullivan has a piece that calls for the Associated Press and Google to reveal the terms of any business agreements they may come to. He notes that the AP and Google first made a content licensing agreement back in 2006, and lately the AP has been making noises about extracting more [...]
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Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” Wins Punch Award
April 26th, 2009 · No Comments · News, Things What Look Good
The Punch award is an internal New York Times award for journalism. This is the first (but, I’m sure, not the last) time the journalism award has been won by a software developer (Alan Taylor). This sounds like a tipping point to me, or at the very least a data point that points to a [...]
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The Newspaper Business: Still Confused About Itself
April 20th, 2009 · No Comments · News, Web/Tech
I’m taking in all the news about the 2009 Pulitzer Prize awards. Because the industry is at a perilous crossroads, I had a feeling that the announcements would be a rich source of quotes of the ironical variety, and indeed I was not disappointed:
“The watchdog still barks. The watchdog still bites,” [Pulitzer administrator] Gissler said. [...]
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