When you find the best data-mining blogger o
n Earth, I guess you have to go with him.
Data-mining, explained at high level
Filed under data mining, You go with it
Need to sell climate change? Advertise, already.
I’ve just finished reading a Q&A in Yale Environment 360 in which an expert contends that our educational system is a significant cause of “green failure,” ie. the inability of society to come to grips with climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. Here’s the nut of the argument:
The environment is often seen as a political issue and pushed to the margins of school curricula by administrators and parents, note [Charles] Saylan and Daniel Blumstein, a biology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, in The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). But at its core, the authors contend, environmental responsibility is a broadly held, nonpartisan value, much like respect for the law. As such, they believe, it deserves a central place in public education, with lessons on the environment permeating every student’s day.
I’m all for better education. I’m sure the co-author being questioned, Saylan, who’s co-founder and executive director of the California-based Ocean Conservation Society, is a smart and decent man. I consider the author/questioner in this piece, Michelle Nijhuis, to be an extraordinarily talented journalist. But the goo-goo argument I just summarized seems, to me, a very unfortunate example of preaching to the choir of environmental true-believers while, simultaneously, playing into the deepest fears conservatives love to spread about environmentalists and liberals. The belief that liberals control the academy and are corrupting our youth by pushing their ideology on them at school is central to the conservative catechism. What environmentalists might see as commonsense and noncontroversial — incorporating environmental responsibility into school curriculums — will be easily and effectively characterized/caricatured by the right as yet more of the leftist, nanny-statist, environmentally extreme social engineering that has killed the economy and saddled the nation with multitrillion-dollar debts and …. blad-dee-dah. Yes, it’s simplistic misleading nonsense, but it’s politically effective nonsense, and it seems that Saylan and his co-author are pitching right into the conservative big-government-is-bad wheelhouse. (I say “seems” because I’m judging from this one interview; I hope to get and read the book and will revise my opinion if necessary.)
By all means let us teach true scientific facts to our schoolkids. But climate change is a clear and present danger — the most serious threat the world faces — and a couple of generations of wrangling over environmental education policy is exactly the wrong way to address it. I don’t claim to possess a lock on wisdom about conveying the climate change message so public attitudes change in the direction of accepting scientific fact and rejecting know-nothing political rhetoric and energy industry obsfucation. But I do believe that the large environmental nonprofits — the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Audubon and others — need to take some of their huge income streams and devote significant chunks of money directly to the task of making climate change uncool and stupid, in the way that cigarette smoking has been made dumb and unhip.
Congress won’t aggressively act on climate change until public attitudes strongly support action. The ability of advertising — funny, smart, hip, multi-platform advertising — to change attitudes, and particularly political attitudes, has been proven, over and over again. Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth did their part to start the climate-change marketing effort. It’s time for the environmental lobby to pull money out of Washington and put it into a major, long-term, brilliant ad campaign focused on the most conceited, mean, greedy and uncool kid in school: Carlyle Dioxide.
Filed under education, environment
How Warren powned* a congressman
There’s a California-ism that my 13-year-old son uses — powned* — that has something to do with beating someone so badly in a competition that you didn’t just own him, you poned him. I don’t know where the starting p came from, but being poned by your son in basketball is definitely worse than merely being owned. And if you want to see the definition of someone poning a member of Congress, watch what one of my heroes, Elizabeth Warren, does to Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry in this video. (h/t to Gawker.)
* as noted in a comment by the esteemed Shameless Pedant, I had no idea where “pown” came from or even how it was spelled when I wrote this post. As explained below, pown or pwn is an acceptable spelling, but “pone” is not. My apologies to the powning world.
Developing the future of investigative journalism
If you’re a cutting-edge geek with an interest in investigative journalism, there’s a great job opening at the badly named Reporter’s Lab, a project supported by Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. Headed up by former Washington Post editor and reporter Sarah Cohen, the Reporter’s Lab is Duke’s effort to extend what is known as “computational journalism” into the realm of investigative reporting and thereby make investigative reporters more efficient and effective. (I wrote my take on this effort, “Deep Throat Meets Data Mining,” back in 2009; you can find it behind the “columns” tab on the home page of this blog.) The lab, which has an advisory committee that includes many of the top names in American investigative reporting, is looking for a developer, and the description makes it sound like a dream job to me. But then again, I don’t do much in the way of coding (yet). If you do and want to help journalism and advance the public interest in a significant way, you really ought to take a look.
Filed under computer algorithms, media, program developers
Bibi the PR debacle
My support for the idea of Israel — as the permanent home the world owes to the Jewish people — is deep, and I understand the fears Israelis have of Arab populations that appear to hate them and Arab governments that still, overtly or covertly, hope to erase the Jewish state from the map of the Middle East. (I saw this directly during the Persian Gulf War, while I was reporting from Saudi Arabia. When Iraq lobbed Scud missiles into Israel night after night in an attempt to draw it into the war, The Arab News, the official English language paper in Saudi Arabia, barely mentioned what was the lead story in most western news outlets. Every day, Scuds landing in Jewish cities were noted at the very bottom of the jump of a story on the course of the war. And when the newspaper deigned to show readers where these Scuds were falling, it was on a map that had Israel, the West Bank and Gaza melded into one entity called “Palestine.”) I also understand the reluctance to negotiate with Hamas, which is a terrorist organization by any stretch of the definition. But I absolutely do not understand why Israeli voters see Benjamin Netanyahu as a credible person to represent their country and keep it safe. There is plenty of testimony from the Clinton and Obama administrations that Bibi is unreliable, untrustworthy and uninterested beyond measure in reaching a peace accord that creates a Palestinian state. Beyond that, he is a public relations nightmare that his supporters apparently sleep too deeply ever to experience. Watch the video of his performance at a joint session of Congress today with a fresh eye. Would you buy a used car from this prime minister? His is a jowly, sneering schtick, full of trite catch phrases, planned off-the-cuff remarks and truculent insistence that Israel, the strongest military power in the region, never misuses its power. The performance — both today and last night at an AIPAC dinner — seemed not just unconvincing to me, but insincere and condescending. And I don’t think condescending insincerity is the best path toward persuading those who do not already sing in your choir that your melody is pure.
Comedy and Theoretical Criminology
We have a clear winner this week in the competition for “best” academic abstract, and it comes from the wonderfully named journal Theoretical Criminology, which has set me to thinking along several tangents, including one that involves theoretical jaywalking. But that’s neither there nor here; what’s important are learned and impenetrable sentences such as:
Taking its cue from Bakhtin’s exposition of the grotesque realism of the Rabelaisian novel, this article explores the abstract notion of ‘justice’ through the lens of ‘folk humour’—specifically, stand-up comedy which references securitization in the post-9/11 period.
There’s more, including Habermas. Go here, and enjoy.
Pawlenty Good
It may be because I grew up in the Midwest, but I think Tim Pawlenty is going to wear a lot less on Republican primary voters than Mitt Romney. Others describe Pawlenty as boring, someone who sucks the air out of the room. But his basic line — I’m not going to bullshit you, we’re in trouble — aims squarely at both Romney, who will flip before he’s even done flopping, and at Obama, who has a real record of accomplishment but also a real aversion to calling for sacrifice from average Americans. Over at The Daily Beast, Andrew Sulllivan calls Pawlenty the “eh, why not?” candidate, but I think the national media’s estimation of Pawlenty’s personal appeal is like a lot of national media estimating — that’s to say, it’s the sound of the one drunken Swiss yodeler who’s ever seen Pawlenty in person howling inside an echo chamber that has Phil Spector at the mixing board. But you can watch the video and judge for yourself whether Pawlenty is a sleeping pill, or the non-crazy Republican candidate from a battleground state who might just be Obama’s worst nightmare.
Filed under 2012 election
Irony, thy name is Debby Boone
When you have a headline this eerie — “‘You Light Up My Life’ composer kills self, police say” — I suppose you have to go with it. Especially if the composer-suicide was facing multiple sex-crime charges.
Filed under absurdity, sex crimes, suicide, You go with it
The debt: tax cuts and war
If you haven’t seen these charts and lean even slightly toward the Tea Party point of view, you ought to take a look. The American deficit-debt problem is largely not a result of stimulus efforts to combat a looming global financial meltdown. The problem is almost wholly composed of tax cuts for the wealthy, the economic downturn and the cost of war. Just a fact, and conveyed well by these charts, provided by The Atlantic‘s inimitable Jim Fallows.
Filed under finance
Area 51 Revisited
I’ve always been a sucker for stories about and images of spy planes. The U-2 and more particularly the SR-71 Blackbird had a Jetsons, the-future-as-seen-from-the-1950s look that seems, somehow, classic to me. And National Geographic has an exclusive set of pictures of the 1963 crash of a prototype of a successor to the U-2 known as the A-12. It’s an early attempt at stealth technology that looks like it was designed in Hollywood for a sci-fi movie. Here’s the run-down:
Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly at 2,200 miles an hour (3,540 kilometers an hour)—fast enough to cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes. From 90,000 feet (27,400 meters), the plane’s cameras could capture foot-long (0.3-meter-long) objects on the ground below.
But there’s another reason I’m linking to this annotated slideshow. I’ll let National Geographic explain: “During the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51’s top-secret OXCART program developed the A-12 as the successor to the U-2 spy plane.” Area 51. Top-secret spy plane. How could I resist? Particularly when I know the search engines are going to feed hordes of UFO-niks to this blog, where they will doubtless find yet more evidence of the government’s fiendishly clever attempts to cover up what really happened at Area 51.
John Mecklin, writer/editor 
