EFTA00929389.pdf

From: To: "jeevacation®gmail.com" <jeevacation®gmail.com> Subject: FW: Possible weekend reading- Future of Journalism, Washinton Post business model, parasitic mind control etc. (14 links) Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:13:08 +0000 FYI From: Tren Griffin Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:32 AM To: Bill Gates; Larry Cohen; Boris Nikolic (bgC3); Michael Larson; Alan Neuberger; Jerry St. Dennis Subject: Possible weekend reading- Future of Journalism, Washinton Post business model, parasitic mind control etc. (14 links) 1. Businss models for journalism - can long form survive and how will it effect the Washington Post? http://blogsseuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/12/quality-vs-quantity-online/ "... McAuliffe's 5,873-word feature was written for the [Atlantic] magazine, and went through multiple layers of commissioning, copy-editing, top-editing, fact-checking, and the like. It's not, by any means, an easy read; it includes quite a few passages like this. The neurotransmitter is known to be jacked up in people with schizophrenia—another one of those strange observations about the disease, like its tendency to erode gray matter, that have long puzzled medical researchers. Antipsychotic medicine designed to quell schizophrenic delusions apparently blocks the action of dopamine, which had suggested to Webster that what it might really be doing is thwarting the parasite. And yet, within 36 hours of being uploaded to the Atlantic's website, the story had already amassed half a million pageviews — and was "well on its way to becoming the most visited piece ever" in the history of the site, in the words of Alexis Madrigal. ... The economics, however, still don't add up. For reasons I don't fully understand, high-quality edited journalism is not a little but rather a for more expensive than more-is-more blogging. McAuliffe probably got paid somewhere in the region of $1.50 a word for her piece, which works out at $8,800; by the time you add in the cost of salary and benefits for everybody who worked on it, plus the expenses involved in flying her to Prague to report it, you're talking enough money to get a thousand blog posts out of Norman. Ex post, McAuliffe's article is worth it. But it takes a bold cash-strapped publisher indeed (and all publishers are cash- strapped, these days) to choose a single heavily-reported feature over a thousand blog posts...." http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/12/quality-vs-quantity-online/ [Tren: Re this article on the Washington Post in the NYT today, http://www.nytimes.corn/2012/02/12/businessimedia/the-washington-post-recast-for-a-digital-future.html I have said before that the business model for the Washington Post faces Bloomberg and Reuters having general news as a free byproduct of their financial terminal business. And I am not sure that Khan Academy is good for Kaplan. Covering DC politics (with long form journalism especially) is a niche with problems Felix Salmon only partially describes. A crumbling moat for newspapers is a bigger problem. ] 2. Re that article Felix Salmon links to parasitic mind control- "Because T gondii and the malaria protozoan are related, however, Yolken and other researchers are looking among antimalarial agents for more-effective drugs to attack the cysts. But for now, medicine has no therapy to offer people who want to rid themselves of the latent infection; and until solid proof exists that Toxo is as dangerous as some scientists now fear, pharmaceutical companies don't have much incentive to develop anti-Toxo drugs." http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-makingtyou-crazy/8873/2/ EFTA00929389 3. Gary King, "But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched." http://www.nytimes.corn/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-world.html?2=1 4. A question about the economic benefits of universities ... the way to create a great city is to "create a great university and wait 200 years." http://andrewgelman.corn/2011/03/a_question_abou_10/ [Tren: At the time of statehood for Washington (1889), Seattle had the University of Washington, Olympia was given the capital, Walla Walla had the prison, and Pt. Townsend was closer to markets by sea. Tacoma was served by a railroad first. Bill Gates Senior left Bremerton for Seattle to attend the UW and never left. His son Bill Gates snuck into the UW to learn more about computers while in high school. Seattle "won" the economic development race because it had the UW. Full stop. If there is a better real world long term case study for the value of a university in economic development in a modem economy I'm not aware of it.] 5. Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Will we do anything about global warming? Should we? http://cliffmass.blogspot.corn/2012/02/will-we-do-an) ing-about-global.html Cliff Mass discusses the weather we have now in Puget Sound: http://cliffmass.blogspot.corn/2012/02/unusual-ridge-that-wont-go-away.html 6. A proposal to solve High Frequency Trading problems without Tobin taxes: http://pointsandfigures.corn/2012/02/11/speedy-trading-screws-up-the-market/ 7. The sheepskin effect http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/02/09/caplan-and-the-sheepskin-effect/ 8. "Education Gap: Sabrina Tavernise reports that a racial divide in education is narrowing, but the gap among rich and poor is growing. "The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession's full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend. "With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there's a good chance the recession may have widened the gap," Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially." http://blogs wsj.corn/economics/2012/02/10/secondary-sources-education-gap-recovery: pawn-shops/?mod=wsj_share_twitter 9. An excerpt from Lawrence M. Krauss' A Universefrom Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. hup://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universe-from-nothing 10. Alzheimer's research: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cracks-in-the-plaques-mys 11. Three top books on Innovation: what lessons for development agencies? http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/? p=8483&utm_source=dIvritectitm_medium=twitter 12. The Upside of Dyslexia http://www.nytimes.corn/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-upside-of-dyslexia.html 13. "if you're planning for us to grow our population and economy at 2% and 4%-5% respectively forever, you'd better pray that we soon figure out how to travel at warp speed, live forever in space, and find hundreds of other habitable planets to live on, because otherwise we'll soon cover every inch of the Earth and then some" http://www.businessinsider.corn/we-cant-keep-growing-like-this-2012-2 EFTA00929390 14. http://www.businessinsidencorn/google-invited-these-people-to-a-super-deluxe-resort-last-week-to-talk-about- the-future-2012-2 GOOG "solve for x" Participants: • Omri Amirav-Drory, the cofounder of Genome Compiler Corp., which is all about "synthetic biology" (read: artificial life). • Privahini Bradoo, cofounder of BioMine, which is recycling metal from electronic waste, spoke about resource reclamation. • David Berry, a partner at Flagship Ventures and the CEO of Essentient which wants to transform global nutrition. • Mike Cheiky, the cofounder of CoolPlanet, which is developing carbon-negative energy systems based on plant photosynthesis. • Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. • Kevin Dowling, the vice president of R&D at MOO, which is making stretchable electronics. • Juan Enriquez, managing director at Excel Venture Management, who helped fund ZipCar and a bunch of other startups. • Mir Imran, a medical tech entrepreneur, talked about drug delivery. • Mary Lou Jepsen, an artist and researcher who cofounded the MIT Media Lab, talked about mapping the mind's eye. • Robert McGinnis, founder of Oasys, which is making desalination equipment, spoke about the global scarcity of drinking water. • Nicholas Negroponte, the cofounder of the MIT Media Lab and an author. • Daphne Preuss, cofounder of agriculture company Chromatin. • Andreas Raptopolous, founder of Mattemet, which wants to revolutionize transportation through unmanned aerial vehicles. • Neal Stephenson, an author of speculative and historical fiction, gave a talk about getting big stuff done. • Adrian Treuille, a Carnegie-Mellon computer science professor, spoke about collaborative science. http://www.businessinsidetcorn/google-invited-these-people-to-a-super-deluxe-resort-last-week-to-talk- about-the-future-2012-2fiixzzllIWNYIB1 EFTA00929391