1. The anti-rape condom. I blogged about the "Rapex" here.
2. "Pleistocene Rewilding," I blogged that here.
3. "The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution." Blogged here.
So, I found lots of new things to fascinate me, especially:
"The False-Memory Diet"There's a good idea that isn't on the list but is exemplified by something on the list. That is: MSM referring to blogs. A great strategy for traditional news sites to get more readers is to say something about blogs in their stories. Bloggers will tend to notice -- it's about me! -- and devote a blog entry to the story. I know this strategy works on me. For example, last week, I wrote about "food swings," and I'm sure part of the reason the story jumped out at me as bloggable was because there was some material in there about how some of these food swing types blog about their adventures in hunger management.
"The Hypomanic American"
"Microblindness"
"Preventing Suicide Bombing"
"Splogs"
"Stoic Redheads"
"The Year in Ideas" makes its plea for attention from bloggers with this entry: "Conservative Blogs are More Effective." Throw that into Technorati and see if there isn't a hot new idea deserving a mini-article titled, perhaps, "Tossing in a Reference to Blogs Is More Effective." Oh, and it helps if the reference to blogs also says something that a lot of bloggers are going to feel isn't quite right, so that we'll instantly fire up a compose window and start typing out the little insight they could so easily have predicted. "Conservative Blogs are More Effective" is a perfect example of this. You know all those conservative bloggers, always ready to go, always monitoring the MSM. They will surely bite at this one!
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10 comments:
Dave, I have a question for you. Is the magazine boring, or is it that by the time the magazine recognizes something that you would have found interesting you have already read the subject to death online?
I think one reason papers don't mention blogs more is they semi-steal a lot of what blogs write about.
Dave: Did you read "The Year in Ideas," or are you just talking about the magazine generally? I think "The Year in Ideas" is a phenomenal annual feature. If you say you found it boring, I'm inclined to think you're boring. Explain yourself.
Dave, thanks for the answer.
The latter.
The "false-memory diet" is just more utter nonsense from the diva herself, Elizabeth Loftus. More interesting to blog about would be the invasion of privacy lawsuit pending against her in California, or the human subjects sanfu that ran her out of Washington.
How anyone can take this diet idea seriously is beyond me. The underlying "studies" provide ZERO basis for thinking this would actually work. You are gullible, dear professor, if you think this is "interesting." It's actually junk science, pure and simple.
The junk science diet. Now there's an idea.
Funny post ann.I like funny more than say, interesting.
Let us say that a distinguished profesor does something unethical. I guess in Daryl's world, they would have a free ride, because saying anything about it would constitute a "personal" attack.
Sorry Daryl, that just does not make sense. I am not attacking the messenger. I am attacking a shoddy scientist, who has done any number of unethical things -- things that caused her to leave her last position and things that are currently being litigated in a civil suit in California.
Want to ignore those things and remain ignorant? Fine. But don't blame me, I'm just the messenger that Loftus's "false memory diet" is utter junk sceince!
There's an unmentioned corollary to the Hypomanic American story.
If you believe that the risk takers left Europe and other places to come to America, then you have to assume the risk averse are a greater percentage of the breeding stock left in those places.
In Europe you have the added likelihood of a genetic predisposition towards wimpiness given the devastation of two World Wars fought on their turf.
I seem to remember reading where current German males have the lowest testesterone levels amongst populations studied. (Those with the least 'cojones' were the ones most likely to breed after WWII)
So European waffling and risk aversion isn't only cultural it's genetic.
(and I have about as much science behind my assertions as the UCLA professors cited in the article do for theirs, which is to say very, very little)
Also given the nature of the web, I hate when MSM mention scientific articles without linking the actual papers that produced the results they are highlighting.
Why should I have to google when presumably the author of the article has already visited the site they distilled?
(To answer my own question I suspect many of those MSM science articles are probably from press release reporting rather than reading the primary sources or directly speaking with the scientist cited)
Brylin: What's with you and Wikipedia? Who cares what accumulates over there? Why is the existence of an entry for anything there interesting or surprising? I don't get your Wikipedia fascination.
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