July 2011
53 posts
“Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved....”
– Inside Match.com - FT.com
Another good reason why single people should be liberal and not conservative.
Piers Morgan and phone hacking - guardian.co.uk →
Roy Greenslade finds an old piece from the Daily Mail, in which Piers Morgan admits to listening in to a private voicemail from Paul McCartney:
“Stories soon emerged that the marriage was in trouble - at one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone.
It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was...
There’s been a lot of shamefacedness and embarrassment on Twitter from people who tweeted the false news that Piers Morgan had been suspended from CNN. I can see why: a lot of the tweeters were professional journalists, foremost among them Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow. And professional journalists hate to report something that’s wrong.
That said, one of the things I like about...
“No word on whether she wore the shirt while splishing and splashing about the...”
– Gay Couple Denied Entry to Gay Icon’s Theme Park
I think this might have happened to me. Who can I sue?
“Our long term perspective is that in the middle of a cycle it is attractive to...”
– Investors scramble to position for expected downgrade | Reuters
A true classic in the the annals of meaningless marketbollocks
Frustrated, annoyed and fed up
soupsoup:
Tumblr has become terribly unstable. My theme just changed format for no reason whatsoever, my posts are showing up multiple times, posts are getting lost after I send them.
I can’t deal with trying to hack together fixes for this. I can’t spend time putting together posts only for them to be lost, wasting the time and effort to do it.
I’m not paid by Tumblr to maintain this blog, I...
Only 52% of Americans Approve of God's Job... →
hragv:
Best.Poll.Ever.
utnereader:
(via The Atlantic Wire)
Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning polling organization out of North Carolina that likes to make news with flashy headlines, released the results of a survey today that included a question not too often asked by pollsters: “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of its performance?” Fifty-two percent of the 928...
“Without a government quo for News Corp’s 100,000 quid, without even the...”
– The case against the bribery case against Murdoch | MediaFile
@ledbetreuters with a smart take on the FCPA
This sort of thing would be a bit more acceptable if it didn’t come out at exactly the same time as your Newsweek feature on the “United States of Narcissism”. (And yes, you’re using your book cover as your Twitter background, too.)
“activism, allergies, Alps, Apple, boarding school, boat, broken bone(s),...”
– Katie Baker on the New York Times wedding section - Grantland
@katiebakes FTW!
“Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says, “I hope and pray and believe they...”
– What About Honor? | www.businessweek.com
Kinsley on the Republicans on the debt limit
“News Corporation’s Management and Standards Committee met this morning, and has...”
– Glenn Mulcaire Legal Fees Halted by News Corp. - NYTimes.com
I love the way that News Corp manages to say that it’s stopped paying Mulcaire’s legal fees without quite coming out and saying that actually, yes, it has been paying those fees up until now. INSOFAR as it has been paying...
“It is simply wrong to assail Mr. Murdoch simply because of his politics.
...”
– Murdoch and His Critics | The New York Observer
This is so bad it looks almost like a parody of that notorious WSJ editorial. He put his head in his hands, people! What more could he have done? And the “simply because of his politics” line is priceless.
Now, remind, me, what was that...
“Chambers added in the interview that even if the parties agree to raise the debt...”
– S&P warns that chance of downgrading U.S. credit rating is 50 percent - The Washington Post
An important statement from S&P: all the noise about a downgrade isn’t only about the debt limit. There are fiscal issues too. Which I have to say I’d like to see spelled out, given that...
Obama picks bank critic Cordray for consumer job |... →
From Warren’s perspective, I can see why this makes sense. Rather than having her entire life caught in limbo for the foreseeable future, she gets to go back to Harvard — which is hardly unpleasant — AND run for Senate. Meanwhile, Cordray has the unenviable job of sitting around wondering whether a recess appointment might ever be a possibility. Still, a disappointment for Warren...
“Complicating the rollout are troubles facing the Montreal-based supplier that...”
– NYC bike-share idea loses momentum | Crain’s New York Business
Wha???
It seems to me there are three possibilities w/r/t that WSJ editorial:
It was essentially dictated by Rupert Murdoch;
It was written by Paul Gigot or someone else in an attempt to write what Rupert Murdoch would like to see;
It’s a genuine statement of what the WSJ actually believes.
Genuine question, here: which of these three options would be the worst?
“A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a...”
– Charlie Brooker | Rupert Murdoch: what will MPs do without someone to fear? | Comment is free | The Guardian
A truly great paragraph in an otherwise rather messy column
“I’ve got no doubt that a good number of papers were engaged in identical...”
– Rebekah Brooks Arrested: The Rise and Fall of Murdoch’s Protegee - Newsweek
Sometimes you’ve gotta love Boris Johnson.
Life During A Stint At The News Of The World
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,
we blended with the crowd
We got computer, we’re tapping phone lines,
I know that ain’t allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives,
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,
I don’t know what I look like!
“New staff would be given the cold shoulder until they’d proved themselves...”
– Special Report: Inside Rebekah Brooks’ News of the World | Reuters
Sounds a bit like Raj Rajaratnam’s Galleon…
Why all journalists should be on Twitter
Joe Nocera attacks the WSJ today:
Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World…
Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business...
“A Beijing-based stone-carving company estimated that to make a single copy of...”
– Sculptor finds alleged copies of his work in corporate collection | The Art Newspaper
What Netflix Isn't Saying
ahknight:
Netflix jacked their rates for Instant Watch + DVD delivery and gave a lame-ass excuse for it. It was calculated to be lame, however, because if they used the real reason for it prices might go even higher.
The Internet’s memory is short so let’s go back a week ago to when Netflix lost the Sony movies and almost lost Starz. Why did that happen? Netflix WI subscribers passed a certain...
“No discussion of aggregation is complete without a mention of the granddaddy,...”
– Huffington Post’s challenge to the legacy media. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
This.
Dropping tables and shelves
This from today’s NYT, under the headline “Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon”:
A major American utility is shelving the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant…
American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer…
Company officials, who...
“I have to say, though, that I’m disheartened by your decision to indefinitely...”
– Simon Dumenco (via soupsoup)
“Feynman visualized the world with pictures rather than with equations. Other...”
– The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books
Feynman died in 1988, and Dyson’s now 87. If Dyson replaced Feynman as the physicist who could explain quantum mechanics in English, who will replace Dyson?
bobbymacReports: My frustrating Comcast customer... →
bobbymacreports:
I’m still not sure if Wilbur is a human or a robot. It really could go either way. This is from Sunday morning, July 10, 2011. And these turkeys at Comcast think that it’s OK to advertise more expensive services to a customer who is dissatisfied with his current service.
Robert: My Issue: I…
My guess is that this is a reverse Turing: a human who’s indistinguishable...
Comment du jour
Sometimes you come off as the greenest cub reporter. You don’t have to speculate when discussing this when a 30 minute call to a competent real estate attorney in Utah would have educated you fully.
I desperately need to start unfollowing people on Twitter — I’m following far too many people. And there are friends of mine, on Twitter, whose tweets tend to the banal and ignorable. They’re obvious unfollows. But, they’re also friends! I need a Twitter mute button: some way of taking their tweets out of my timeline while still allowing them to DM me and see that I’m...
“Myler is “pretty ruthless, pretty hard – a traditional, old-fashioned...”
– News of the World editor Colin Myler: ‘an old-fashioned newspaper guy’ | Media | The Guardian
Good to see the Grauniad keeping up old traditions.
“Scotland Yard chose not to mount a formal inquiry. Instead a senior press...”
– News of the World surveillance of detective: what Rebekah Brooks knew | Media | The Guardian
“Correction: The DealBook column on Tuesday, about new legislation around patents...”
– Patent Bill Shows Wall Street Has Clout in Washington - NYTimes.com
“In college, Bachmann was a Democrat and campaigned for Jimmy Carter. Her...”
– Meet Michele - FT.com
Sell-side email du jour:
Stocks rebounded violently, on very thin news. Technicals look good for the next 1-2 weeks, but then the outlook turns murky again.
Thank you, major bulge-bracket bank! You are surely earning your seven-figure bonuses putting out this stuff!
David Cho, April 21:
As great as we think we are, and I think we’re all very happy with the product that we’ve made—Choire and Alex with the site’s content, and myself with the model we’ve built to monetize that same unique and thoughtful content without compromising too much of ourselves—aside from instances where, late at night on the birthdays of our site I write long things on my...
“News of the World journalists intercepted – and deleted – the voicemail messages...”
– Missing Milly Dowler’s voicemail was hacked by News of the World | UK news | The Guardian
Just, wow.
“A parking attendant said Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s car ducked into the entrance...”
– Strauss-Kahn Goes Out on the Town - WSJ.com 