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On holiday

Off to points west. Don't expect any new posts until early April.

Posted by Felix at 11:17 EST | Comments (3)

Report Report Report 2: Atheists

My eyebrows went up when I saw this report from the Minnesota Daily:

Atheists are America’s least trusted group, according to a national survey conducted by University sociology researchers.
Based on a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households and in-depth interviews with more than 140 people, researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as “sharing their vision of American society.” Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.
“It tells us about how Americans view religion,” said Penny Edgell, an associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher. “Many Americans seem to believe some kind of religious faith is central to being a good American and a good person.”

On the one hand: really? I've been an "out" atheist in America for the past nine years; I've even married the daughter of Americans, and I've never encountered anything like this. On the other hand, the article quotes the author of the study, and she doesn't seem to have any doubts about its conclusions.

Of course, I'm not going to extrapolate from anecdote. And besides, I live in liberal-secular NYC. So I emailed Penny Edgell and asked her for the study, which she immediately supplied. (It will be published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.) And does the study say what the Minnesota Daily says it says? In a word, yes: The Minnesota Daily gets an A– for its article. Here's the paper's conclusion:

Atheists are at the top of the list of groups that Americans find problematic in both public and private life, and the gap between acceptance of atheists and acceptance of other racial and religious minorities is large and persistent.

The author of the article, Jeannine Aquino, has done a very good job both of reporting what the study says and of going out and seeing whether and how those attitudes are reflected in the Minnesota population. The reason she doesn't get the highest A and A+ grades is purely because she displays no skepticism regardig the study, and doesn't stop to ask whether there might be some flaws in it.

As in any survey, everything hinges on the exact way in which the questions are worded. In this survey, the key question was the following:

Now I want to read you a list of different groups of people who live in this country. For each one, please tell me how much you think people in this group agree with YOUR vision of American society—almost completely, mostly, somewhat, or not at all?

The results showed that 39.6% of respondents said "not at all" with regard to atheists. Second was Muslims, at 26.3%, third came homosexuals, at 22.6%, and fourth was conservative Christians, with 13.5% of people saying that they did not agree at all with their vision of American society. Fifth was recent immigrants, at 12.5%. Hispanics, Jews, Asian Americans and African Americans followed; white Americans came at the bottom of the list with 2.2%.

There was a second question:

People can feel differently about their children marrying people from various backgrounds. Suppose your son or daughter wanted to marry [a person in given category]. Would you approve of this choice, disapprove of it, or wouldn’t it make any difference at all one way or the other?

One might think that the vast majority of people would choose the latter choice for every category: how can you know if you'd approve or disapprove of a future son- or daughter-in-law without even meeting them? But in fact the results were startling: 47.6% of respondents said that they would disapprove if their child wanted to marry an atheist. Again, Muslims were a distant second, on 33.5%; homosexuals, of course, weren't included in this question.

But there are problems with the way the questions were worded.

The first question is based on the assumption that I have a known vision of American society, and that the groups in question can share that vision on a scale essentially from 0% to 100%. If a group shared between 75% and 100% of my vision, I'd choose "almost completely"; if it shared between 50% and 75% I'd chosse "mostly"; if it shared between 25% and 50% I'd choose "somewhat"; and if it shared between 0% and 25% I'd choose "not at all". (Obviously no one was asked to quantify these things, but that seems to be the general idea behind the way the question was structured.)

My problem is with the word "agree" in the question. When you ask one person whether they agree with another person or group, they immediately think in terms of whether they agree or whether they disagree. In other words, they don't think on a scale of 0 to 100, they think on a scale of –1 to +1, where –1 is completely disagree and +1 is completely agree.

If someone disagrees mildly with a different group, what are they going to say? They might be torn between the "somewhat agree" answer and the "not at all" answer. But I think many if not most such people will end up choosing "not at all", because they don't want to give the impression that they agree, even if only "somewhat", with a group of people that they actually disagree with. Someone who feels very strongly that homosexuality is evil and disordered and who thinks that atheists are sadly missing out on an important part of life will therefore end up giving the same response to both categories. And in general a negative opinion which is weakly held by a large minority will be overstressed by the answers to this question, while a negative opinion which is strongly held by a smaller minority will be understressed.

Similarly, a religious person, when asked, is going to feel uncomfortable saying that "it wouldn't make any difference at all one way or the other" if their child married an atheist. So they'll plump for the "disapprove" option, even if they're not a judgmental kind of person at all.

There's also some conflict in the report's conclusions. On the one hand, we're told that

while rejection of Muslims may have spiked in post-9/11 America, rejection of atheists was higher... In our survey, concerns about atheists were stronger than concerns about homosexuals.

On the other hand, we find this:

We believe that in answering our questions about atheists, our survey respondents were not, on the whole, referring to actual atheists they had encountered, but were responding to “the atheist” as a boundary-marking cultural category.

The survey is very unclear about whether Americans are rejecting actual atheists, or whether they're simply rejecting "atheists" qua "cultural category". Homosexuals, we all know, are explicitly and vehemently rejected on a regular basis around the country, even (especially) by their own families. Concerns about homosexuals in general manifest themselves in intolerant behaviour towards individual gay men and women on a daily basis.

If the study is true that concerns about atheists in general are even stronger than concerns about homosexuals, wouldn't we expect individual atheists to be shunned by their co-workers, their communities, even their families? Wouldn't we expect "atheist", "heathen" and the like to be common terms of abuse? But that's not something one hears. Maybe it happens but isn't reported; my feeling, however, is that it's genuinely rare.

There's evidence in the survey to support the theory that when people think about atheists, they're not thinking of real people. Atheists, remember, are surely the least self-loathing of all minorities. Being an atheist, unlike being gay or being a Jew, is entirely a matter of choice. And yet

about 17 percent of the nonreligious say that atheists do not at all share their vision of America, while about one in ten indicate that they would not approve of their child marrying an atheist.

The only way to explain this is to understand "atheist" as a somewhat inchoate marker of alterity rather than as a well-defined grouping of individuals. Indeed, the study makes this quite explicit:

We assess the degree to which atheists represent a symbolic “other” against which some Americans define themselves as good people and worthy citizens.

In other words, many Americans understand by "atheist" something akin to "a person who doesn't share my vision of American society". Maybe the word "communist" has similar connotations. Which essentially turns the survey question into:

Please tell me how much you think people who don't share your vision of American society agree with your vision of American society

And it becomes easier to see how even the nonreligious might react in such a seemingly bizarre manner.

A look at some of the interviews in the study tends to reinforce this belief. Look at KW, a Republican in her 60s, who told her interviewer:

It’s that same arrogance again. I’m an American, I can do anything I want, and to heck with the rest of the world. These people aren’t very religious, you’ll notice that. There’s a real, “I’m an atheist” attitude among people with major money. If you’re going all through life, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in anything except the almighty dollar,” this is definitely a destructive attitude and the rest of the world sees it.

Of course, if "the wealthy" had been added as a category to the survey, I'm sure they would have come out quite well. But this woman doesn't like the wealthy, and so she decides that being wealthy and being an atheist are more or less interchangeable, since it's socially acceptable for a Republican to dislike atheists even as it's much less socially acceptable for a Republican to start talking in a nasty fashion about "people with major money".

Another interviewee said that

the prisons aren’t filled with conservative Republican Christians. The prisons are probably filled with people who don’t have any kind of a spiritual or religious core.

It's not worth arguing the substance here: the point is that this person simply took a group of people he didn't like – prisoners – and threw them, willy-nilly, into the "atheist" bucket.

I think, then, that it's wrong to conclude from the survey that Americans are particularly harsh on atheists. Everybody defines himself at least in part in opposition to someone or something else, and "atheist" seems to have become a catch-all term for whatever that something else might be. Actual individual atheists, I think, still have little to fear from coming out.

Posted by Felix at 0:58 EST | Comments (3)

Brantley on Lord of the Rings

Frank Rich, of course, was the famous "Butcher of Broadway", who could close a show with a single review.

But his successor, Ben Brantley, has his moments as well. Remember The Capeman, the $11 million flop from Paul Simon? Brantley tore it apart: "it may be unparalleled in its wholesale squandering of illustrious talents".

But Brantley outdoes himself today, with his review of Lord of the Rings, the musical. It opened in Toronto, so maybe Ed Mirvish was hoping Brantley wouldn't hop on a plane to review it – but $25 million musicals are rare enough beasts that he obviously had to go.

Brantley clearly had much more fun writing this review than he did eviscerating The Capeman. He even starts to channel his inner Anthony Lane at points:

You may be interested to know that, according to a news release, the dress worn by the beauteous Galadriel (Rebecca Jackson Mendoza, who sings of Elvish good will in the style of Celine Dion) has more than 1,800 hand-sewn beads. (The release does not stipulate whether nuns were the seamstresses or if they lost their vision to the work.)

And this from a man who liked the film version! I fear to think what he would have written were he to have hated it.

Posted by Felix at 10:21 EST | Comments (1)

Frank Stella cashes out of EV for $10m

As I was walking down 13th Street last night, I looked up, as I usually do, to see if there were any horrendously ugly sculptures on view. For 218 E 13th Street was for a very long time the studio of Frank Stella, the great minimalist painter turned dreadful maximalist sculptor. The studio is part of the same lot as the townhouse at 123 E 12th Street, where Stella lived.

But now it seems that Stella sold the whole lot in September for $10 million. The property on 13th Street no longer has any sculptures in it; instead, it has a sign saying that it's available for lease. Looks like the owners were asking $900,000 per year, but will now settle for $600,000. Apparently it's "ideal for restaurants, night clubs, art galleries and home furnishings showrooms".

Meanwhile, the townhouse can be leased too, for $300,000 per year (that's $25,000 per month) – or you can just buy it outright, it would seem, since it's on the market separately for $3,500,000. There's an application in with the Department of Buildings to split the lot into two tax lots, so that it can be owned by two different people. Which explains why Elliman doesn't know what the taxes on the townhouse will be yet.

Is Walter de Maria, at 421 E 6th Street, the last major minimalist in the East Village?

Posted by Felix at 16:14 EST | Comments (0)

Lemann on O'Reilly

Nick Lemann has 4,685 words on Bill O'Reilly in this week's New Yorker. At no point is the article presented as a profile, but that's how it reads. Until you reach the end and you realise that although Lemann has quoted O'Reilly a lot, it's always cited: it's a quotation from a book or a transcript. The absence of any visible first-hand reporting is striking.

Lemann does note near the beginning of the piece that O'Reilly

has called on his audience to shun several news organizations, including The New Yorker—whose specific sin was questioning the assertion, repeated frequently on “The O’Reilly Factor” during December, that the country is in the grip of a “war on Christmas.”

Would it have been too much to add, at that point, that O'Reilly therefore refused to talk to Lemann for this article? As it stands, we don't know what happened: it's possible that Lemann asked for an interview and was turned down. It's also possible that he asked for an interview but O'Reilly talked to him only off the record. It's also possible that he asked for an interview, spoke to O'Reilly briefly, and got nothing worth quoting directly. It's even possible that Lemann, approaching the article less as a profile and more in the spirit of media criticism, didn't ask for an interview at all. But a full explanation of what happened would have been worthwhile, I think, if only in the interests of full disclosure.

Normally, I wouldn't bother making such a minor quibble, but Lemann is dean of the J-School at Columbia. One holds him to a higher standard.

Posted by Felix at 13:48 EST | Comments (1)

Restaurant update

Le Miu. Went there last night. Just check out the menu here. We spent rather more than we'd intended. But it would have been worth it if we'd spent twice as much. Quite possibly the best sushi I've ever had in New York. Make sure you order the salmon toro, and the fluke. Nothing too exotic: no sign of the freshwater obscurities one used to find at Jewel Bako, say. But friendly service, magnificent food, and an unpretentious atmosphere make for the best addition to the East Village dining scene in a long time. When my wallet recovers, I'm definitely going back – and next time I'm sitting at the sushi bar, because that's what this place is all about.

Zum Schneider. Seems to think that it can prevent eviction by sending a petition to the Supreme Court of New York City. Huh? Would like some background on this.

Tarallucci e Vino. Can't get enough of this place. I still think the original, on 1st and 10th, has marginally better coffee. But the wine here is wonderful, as is the food, and the atmosphere and service are spot-on. Can't imagine going anywhere for a drink or a coffee or a snack else if I'm anywhere near Union Square.

Posted by Felix at 13:32 EST | Comments (2)

The BBC and Brutalism

Amy Lawday sends me a rather weird on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand report-slash-editorial about Brutalism on the BBC's website. The story comes in the wake of the first listing of a Brutalist building: the 1958 Old Vic Annexe, by Lyons Israel Ellis.

Writes Amy:

If it is agreed by a large majority that a building is dog ugly, and depressing, then why save it?

I agree. I opposed the preservation of 2 Columbus Circle for much the same reason:

Preserving great buildings, and even merely good buildings, is one thing. But preserving provocative buildings is another thing entirely.
The fact is, the kind of people who love From Bauhaus to Our House are exactly the sort of people who look at 2 Columbus Circle and consider it a hideous eyesore. This building is one of the few things on which both die-hard Modernists and most anti-Modernist laymen can agree: very, very few people actually like it.

On the other hand, not all Brutalism is dog-ugly and depressing. The National Theatre, for instance, to take only the most obvious example, is a wonderful building and should be preserved. The Old Vic Annexe is not a wonderful building, however: it's being listed not because it's good, but because it's early. And that's a bad reason to list something.

But the thing which really puzzles me is the illustration halfway down the BBC article:

Yes folks, the editors at the BBC decided to illustrate an article about Brutalism with an illustration of the Royal Festival Hall, one of the greatest post-war buildings in the UK, and possibly my favourite building in London. I'm far from alone in this: go there any day of the year, but especially in the summer, and you'll find both the interior and exterior spaces thrumming with life. The foyers, the balconies and the terraces all make the RFH one of the most open and inviting buildings in the city.

What's more, the RFH is not Brutalist at all. For one thing it was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951, so it's far too early to be Brutalist. For another thing, it's not a big concrete slab: as this page notes,

The brutalist approach of Modernists like the Smithsons and Erno Goldfinger in the years ahead would owe little to the Royal Festival Hall's inviting curves and whitewashed friendliness.

But even BBC journalists, it seems, are so architecturally illiterate that they see a magnificent structure like the Royal Festival Hall and just because it's made of concrete decide that it represents a "bunker mentality". I hope that Ed Dorrell, the editor of the Architects' Journal and the author of the BBC article, gives them a suitable amount of grief.

Posted by Felix at 12:16 EST | Comments (13)

More on Buses

In my first Report Report Report (please nominate articles for subsequent ones!) I went into some detail about the views of Austan Goolsbee and David Reiley on the subject of incentive pay for bus drivers. Both of them agree that paying bus drivers per passenger decreases wait times, but at a cost: those drivers get into many more accidents.

Both would like to see bus systems experiment with introducing incentive pay, along with safeguards which would seek to protect passengers' (and drivers') safety. Goolsbee proposes docking bonuses when a driver gets into an accident, while Reiley proposes GPS-equipped buses which calculate the average spacing between one bus and the buses in front of it and behind it.

I suspect that neither scheme would work, and that there is actually a causal relationship between shorter wait times and more accidents. If you keep everything else constant – the amount of congestion, the number of buses, the price of the fares – then any attempt to incentivise bus drivers to minimise wait times will also end up increasing the amount of accidents they get into.

To understand why, one first has to understand the reason why buses "bunch" in the first place – the well-known phenomenon whereby you wait half an hour for a bus and then three arrive at the same time. This has been understood since 1964, when it was explained in a paper by GF Newell and RB Potts. Here's Reiley, summing up:

Buses may start out with even intervals, but a small random shock, such as local traffic congestion or the arrival of a sudden influx of more passengers, causes one bus (say Bus A) to be stopped longer than usual at a stop. This may cause the bus to fall behind schedule. As it falls behind schedule, more and more passengers arrive at stops to wait for its arrival, which slows it down even more. The driver must spend extra time boarding those passengers and collecting their fares and later unboarding them. Meanwhile, Bus B, immediately following A on the same route, starts collecting fewer passengers than usual because the interval between A and B has diminished. The small initial change thus gets amplified, as Bus A makes longer and longer stops to pick up and drop off more passengers, while Bus B similarly makes shorter and shorter stops. This process continues until Bus B completely catches up to Bus A.

Now observe what happens in Santiago, where bus drivers are paid on a per-passenger basis:

Initially we conjectured that drivers would improve their spacing by slowing down if they got too close to the bus immediately ahead, but this turned out to be incorrect. In fact, once they get sufficiently close, they attempt to pass the bus in front. This ameliorates the problem of bus bunching: an empty bus proceeds more quickly (making quicker stops) than a bus full of passengers, so putting the empty bus in front of the full bus tends to reduce bunching. However, this technique often involves aggressive driving by the driver attempting to pass, which can result in an uncomfortable passenger ride or an increased probability of accidents.

There's a small irony here: in order to ameliorate bus bunching, one has to accelerate the process which causes it. Santiago has less bus bunching than other cities not because buses catch up to the bus in front less frequently, but because they catch up to the bus in front more frequently.

So now consider Reiley's proposed scheme:

With a full implementation of GPS technology, drivers could have information on the location of other buses at all times. Drivers could have a real-time display showing the locations of other buses both in front of and behind them, enabling them to respond with adjustments to the spacing. GPS technology opens up a whole new realm of contractual possibilities. For example, one might pay drivers a bonus based on the continuous-time average spacing between their bus and other buses on the route, thus providing drivers with appropriate incentives to minimize passenger waiting time.

Under this scheme, what is a bus driver to do if he finds himself gaining on the bus in front? He basically has two choices: either slow down or speed up. Given his incentives, the obvious move would be to slow down, since that would increase the spacing between himself and the bus in front, and thereby increase his bonus. But the bus in front is only going to get slower and more crowded so long as it doesn't have a bus in front helping to pick up the extra passengers who are accumulating and waiting for it. So wait times will go up, not down. What's more, one overcrowded slow bus could end up slowing down a whole convoy of buses behind it – meaning not only longer wait times, but longer travel times as well.

But what happens if the second bus decides to speed up, and overtake the bus in front? That would decrease wait times, but might well have an adverse effect on the driver's bonus. For all the time that the second bus is decreasing the gap between himself and the bus in front, he is also decreasing his bonus. And then once he's overtaken the bus in front, he'll be picking up large amounts of passengers who have been waiting a long time, so it's going to be more difficult for him to pull away from the bus behind and start increasing his bonus. In order to maximise pay, he would have to exhibit the tendencies seen in Santiago: leaving the bus stop before everybody has fully boarded, and maybe even missing bus stops in order to get some space between himself and the bus behind him. All of which is dangerous behaviour which shouldn't be incentivised.

How about a slightly different incentive system? Austan Goolsbee emailed me:

The best way to address such problems is to give incentives that include more than just one criteria. You could pay the drivers by the passenger but penalize them for accidents, for example.

I'm not sure that would work either. In Santiago, the incentivised drivers have 10 accidents for every million kilometers they drive. If they drive 100km per day, that means they have one accident every 1,000 days: on average they will go three years without an accident, even driving as dangerously as they do. In order to make the drivers drive more safely, the penalties would have to be huge. That would have two effects: it would unfairly penalize drivers who got into an accident through absolutely no fault of their own, and it would give drivers a very strong incentive not to report any but the most serious accidents.

The real, underlying problem is that it's far from obvious exactly what behaviour one wants to incentivise. In Santiago, there's a clear and strong correlation between how fast a bus driver drives and how much he gets paid. Or, to put it another way, there's a strong correlation between how aggressively drivers drive and how much average wait times are cut. More aggression means shorter waits. So do cities want to reward aggression in their bus drivers? You can't have it both ways: tell bus drivers that you want them to cut average wait times, but at the same time tell them that you don't want them to be more aggressive. The two work against each other, and you'll end up with sheer confusion.

It seems to me that the easiest ways of decreasing wait times are the most obvious: increase the number of buses, increase the number of bus lanes, decrease the amount of congestion. Pace Goolsbee's original article in Slate, drivers in Chicago could also simply be given permission to take surface streets when Lake Shore Drive is backed up. Incentive pay is an interesting idea, but I'm far from convinced it can work well in practice.

Posted by Felix at 12:15 EST | Comments (1)

Report Report Report 1: Buses

Report Report Report 1: Buses

Many thanks to Gari N Corp for recommending this Slate article as the first recipient of my Report Report Report, wherein I compare academic reports with the journalism which reports on them.

At first, I thought the Slate article would get high marks. I wasn't convinced by Gari's quibbles, and what's more the Slate author, Austan Goolsbee, is an economics professor in his own right, rather than an innumerate journalist.

After reading the underlying research, however, I have to give the Slate article a C–. The research simply doesn't say what Goolsbee says it says, and in fact the government of Santiago, where the research took place, has drawn exactly the opposite conclusions to Goolsbee.

The underlying research here is a paper called "The War for the Fare", by Ryan Johnson, David Reiley, and Juan Carlos Muñoz. Follow my link to find it: Goolsbee unhelpfully links to an NBER page which will charge you $5 to download it.

According to Goolsbee, the paper shows that if cities like Chicago moved to an incentive pay system, rather than paying their bus drivers a fixed hourly rate, that would improve productivity, "raise efficiency and save tax dollars."

Goolsbee frames the question simply: why do Chicago bus drivers sit in traffic on Lake Shore Drive, when they could use surface-street shortcuts instead? His answer: they wouldn't benefit, financially, by doing so. And if you look at what happens in Santiago, where drivers are paid per passenger rather than per hour,

Paying by the passenger leads to significantly shorter delays. Give them incentives, and drivers start acting like regular people do. They take shortcuts when the traffic is bad. They take shorter meal breaks and bathroom breaks. They want to get on the road and pick up more passengers as quickly as they can. In short, their productivity increases.

Does paying by the passenger lead to significantly shorter delays? It depends on what your definition of "significantly" is. The Santiago study does find that

a passenger waiting for a bus 30 km away from the start of a route can expect to wait 15% longer, on average, when the driver is paid a fixed wage rather than per passenger.

Does Chicago have 30km bus routes? I don't know. On shorter routes, the effect will be smaller. Here's the scatter chart:

As you can see, in aggregate the per-passenger buses do have slightly shorter wait times than the fixed-wage buses. But the difference isn't huge.

Do the per-passenger buses "take shortcuts when the traffic is bad"? On that subject – the key subject of Goolsbee's article – the report he cites is completely silent: there's no mention of shortcuts at all. Do they "take shorter meal breaks and bathroom breaks"? Yes.

Goolsbee omits, however, most of the downside to paying drivers on a per-passenger rather than a per-hour basis. Here's what he says:

Not everything about incentive pay is perfect, of course. When bus drivers start moving from place to place more quickly, they get in more accidents (just like the rest of us). Some passengers also complain that the rides make them nauseated because the drivers stomp on the gas as soon as the last passenger gets on the bus. Yet when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose the bus companies that get them where they're going on time. More than 95 percent of the routes in Santiago use incentive pay.

Do drivers paid on a per-passenger basis get into more accidents? Yes. The report shows that they have 10.03 accidents per million kilometers travelled, compared to just 5.98 accidents per million kilometers travelled on the Chicago-style buses. That's a huge difference, which can't be shrugged off by saying that they are "moving from place to place more quickly". The pay-per-passenger system means that drivers have a very strong incentive to overtake the bus in front of them, and pick up all of the passengers which the bus in front would otherwise get. So they are likely to drive more aggressively, and less safely.

As for feeling nauseated, the report finds that

Once a bus finally does stop, the driver quickly gets the bus moving at full speed, often in complete disregard for the stability or comfort of the passenger. These rapid stops and quick accelerations can occur for the entire duration of the trip.

This causes not only nausea, of course, but also injuries:

if all buses in Santiago had the same number of accidents per km as those with drivers paid a fixed wage, we estimate that it would save 55 lives per year. It would also eliminate 227 serious injuries, 210 less serious injuries, and 1,293 light injuries.

And these numbers actually understate the likely truth, because the per-passenger bus companies are less likely to report minor accidents than the per-hour bus companies.

In economic terms, then, moving from a per-hour system to a per-passenger system is a tradeoff. On the one hand, people will wait slightly less for a bus, and that saved time is worth money. On the other hand, they will be killed and injured in bus accidents more frequently, something which carries a significant economic cost of its own.

There is another reason why the pay-per-passenger system is flawed, which Goolsbee doesn't mention:

When a passenger is waiting at a stop alone, sometimes the driver won’t stop because the opportunity cost of the time spent picking up that passenger is greater than the income from the fare. In fact, often times a single passenger waiting will have to wait for several buses or until more passengers arrive at the stop.

A public service such as a bus system should treat all customers equally, but moving to incentive pay gives drivers an incentive not to.

And Goolsbee is downright wrong when he says that "when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose the bus companies that get them where they're going on time." The citizens of Santiago are not "given the choice" between bus services running on a per-passenger or per-hour basis. Some bus routes pay one way, other bus routes pay the other. You take the bus which goes to your destination.

Does the report conclude, at least, what Goolsbee says it concludes? Not really:

We find our most interesting result to be the fact that per-passenger compensation yields more regular spacing of buses, and hence lower expected waiting time for passengers, than does fixed-wage compensation. However, this clearly does not mean that per-passenger compensation is a superior system. We find significant costs to the per-passenger system as well. In particular, per- passenger compensation exhibits a much higher incidence of accidents and much lower passenger comfort.

So to Goolsbee's point that "more than 95 percent of the routes in Santiago use incentive pay". Here's what we find in the report:

In 2006 Santiago will complete a dramatic overhaul of its bus system. The plan, called Transantiago, will replace the current system of disorganized owners with a dozen or so large companies. Partially influenced by conclusions of this research, drivers will all be paid a fixed wage.

Not exactly the outcome you might have expected from reading Goolsbee's article, eh?

UPDATE: David Reiley emails:

I do think the wait times are quite economically significant ($38,000 worth of lost time per day!), and I'm disappointed that you don't mention what we think is the most important point in our article. We think that there are significant gains to be had in improving bus spacing, and we're interested in finding ways to do that without promoting accidents or discomfort. We think that it's well worth exploring what types of driver incentives will matter, and that's why we speculate about GPS-based incentive systems that give drivers a reason to try to cooperate with each other (as opposed to competing in a way that causes traffic externalities). I would prefer it if your Report Report Report reflected this.

Since this is a Report Report Report and not a Report Report, I did miss out the stuff about GPS-based incentive systems. But I'm happy to oblige.

At the end of Reiley's report, we find this:

With a full implementation of GPS technology, drivers could have information on the location of other buses at all times, not just on corners where sapos work. Drivers could have a real-time display showing the locations of other buses both in front of and behind them, enabling them to respond with adjustments to the spacing. GPS technology opens up a whole new realm of contractual possibilities. For example, one might pay drivers a bonus based on the continuous-time average spacing between their bus and other buses on the route, thus providing drivers with appropriate incentives to minimize passenger waiting time. Such systems could improve quality of passenger service in cities like Santiago, and could be potentially even more useful in the cities of developed nations.

At some bus stops in central London, there are now signs which tell passengers how long it's going to be until the next bus arrives. The technology for these static signs was expensive, but they are certainly useful. What Reiley is proposing is a system which puts that kind of data than into a computer display which is easily readable by bus drivers. I don't know whether that technology exists, how reliable it is, or how expensive it is. Neither, I suspect, does Reiley.

I do suspect that bus drivers' unions would react badly to any attempt to pay some drivers more than others, especially when bonuses would be based on something as abstract as "continuous-time average spacing". There could be unintended consequences, too, such as drivers not stopping at bus stops if they're too close to the bus behind them, or being much less willing to help out wheelchair-bound passengers because the amount of time involved in getting those passengers on and off the bus would throw off their bonuses.

It's also worth noting that bus drivers already have a lot of demands on their attention: collecting fares, navigating traffic, keeping an eye on the passengers, telling tourists when it's their stop, etc. Would trying to keep up with dynamically-generated GPS maps impact the other aspects of their job?

It's clear, then, that there would be a significant number of costs associated with a scheme like the one Reiley proposes. Maybe a pilot scheme somewhere could try to determine whether the benefits in decreased wait time might outweigh those costs. But I suspect that simply adding more buses on busy routes might be an easier and cheaper way of decreasing average wait times.

In any case, Reiley's plan involves a significant up-front expense: at the bare minimum it involves kitting out every bus with a computer and GPS system, as well as setting up a centralised system for calculating and paying bonuses. It's a far cry from the quick fix that Goolsbee implies is possible.

UPDATE 2: I've had an email exchange with Austan Goolsbee, some of which might be of broader interest. Said Goolsbee:

And then at the end I must wonder if you have gone crazy: "In 2006 Santiago will complete a dramatic overhaul of its bus system. The plan, called Transantiago, will replace the current system of disorganized owners with a dozen or so large companies...drivers will all be paid a fixed wage." Are you under the impression that replacing competing companies with a few giant firms and then removing all incentives to the drivers is a good idea? It is a recipe for monopolization. Prices will rise and delays will get worse. You are not talking about a change that the consumers are driving. You are talking about a change being imposed by the government. Why would you expect this to raise consumers' value when the evidence shows exactly the opposite?

I replied:

As for the Transantiago plan, again that was taken straight from the report (footnote 23). It seems to me that its introduction could present you with a prime opportunity to test your hypothesis about incentive pay. Wait for a little while, and then see whether prices have gone up, delays have gotten worse, or passengers are less happy. But in my experience, Chilean government officials are generally the most economically sophisticated government officials I've ever met. (Did you know that every single minister in the new government has a postgraduate degree?) And they were very aware of the findings of this report when they made their decision.
If you look at what Chile is doing with toll roads, you'll know that it remains a leader in terms of bringing private-sector discipline to government functions. (And, of course, it was the first country ever to embark on a major privatization program.) I would look very carefully at the Transantiago plan before dismissing it as "being imposed by the government" and therefore likely to decrease consumers' value.

And Goolsbee wrote back:

This bus decision is a federal govt decision or a city govt decision? The federal government people predominantly have Ph.D.s from here at U. Chicago (and indeed I taught several of them Ph.D. Public Finance). My impression was that this was more of a city level thing.
No question that I would predict that this new system will lead to more delays and the concentration of ownership to higher prices. We will agree to revisit this issue in a year and see if it was born out. I am prepared to admit that the incentives didn't work if that doesn't happen.

Someone remind me to ask about Santiago's bus prices in a year's time!

Posted by Felix at 12:32 EST | Comments (3)

The NYT and Sudan

Summit Communications, a company which makes money by taking the prestige of the New York Times and selling it to corrupt third-world governments, has outdone itself today with a "Special Advertising Section" on Sudan in the New York Times, featuring second vice president Ali Othman Taha on the cover. "We have approached the formation of the united government in a spirit of cooperation and partnership," he says in a big pull-quote.

Stefan Geens points me to Summit's website, which features a long video interview with Taha, complete with sycophantic and extremely softball questions. The interviewer, Racquel Picornell, tells us at the beginning that she's going to ask him about "the economic development that will ensure a very rosy economic outlook", and that we will hear "the words of one of the makers of its history, a history that will lead Sudan into a new peaceful era".

Taha does not disappoint: "I feel honored to be what God has bestowed upon me: to be one of the peacemakers in Sudan," he says.

Taha is not a peacemaker. Quite the opposite: he comes in fact very near the top of the list of living genocides. As vice-president of Sudan (a post he still holds, under the presidency of Omar al-Bashir, the strongman who came to power in a military coup in 1989), Taha was the primary architect of the genocide in Darfur. In a nutshell, Taha and the Arab militias have been slaughtering black Sudanese in the western Darfur region of the country.

On Friday, the US State Department put out a press release in which Nancy Pelosi and George Bush both agreed that there is genocide going on in Darfur. The release comes in the wake of Pelosi's visit to Sudan, during which Taha admitted to her group that his government has supported the genocidal militias.

Recently, Taha's genocide has started spilling across the border and into Chad, a development the New York Times abhors in its leader today.

And yet the New York Times is happy to take the Sudanese government's money and run an eight-page advertisement for the country.

Would the New York Times run an advertorial extolling the charitable works of Osama bin Laden? Would it run advertisements from Nambla, or from the Ku Klux Klan? Taha is an evil man, a genocidal war criminal who has caused suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. What he wants now is a modicum of international respectability – and who better to give it to him than the New York Times. So the Times takes Taha's blood-soaked dollars and happily funnels them to its shareholders, even as its very own Nick Kristof files heartbreaking dispatches from Darfur. Here's Kristof from his latest column:

Elie Wiesel once said, referring to victims of genocide: "Let us remember: what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander." And it's our own silence that I find inexplicable.

The only thing worse than silence, of course, is outright complicity. I would love to know what Nick Kristof thought of his employer when he picked up the paper this morning.

Posted by Felix at 0:26 EST | Comments (2)

Serious journalism in Vanity Fair

David Carr ♥ Graydon Carter. Carter has just poached Cullen Murphy and William Langewiesche from the Atlantic; they're only the latest in a long list of big-name journalists at Vanity Fair, from Christopher Hitchens to Todd Purdum. Gushes Carr:

Beneath Vanity Fair's louche exterior lies the beating heart of a well-financed, well-edited enterprise that has managed to break news as a monthly at a time when the news cycle is frequently measured in minutes.
Wonderful amalgam or cognitive dissonance? However you view the current cultural conversation, some of the blame can be traced to Vanity Fair. We are either a vacuous people who can occasionally be seduced by a big narrative about the Asian flu or we are a serious people who occasionally need to read about what Gwyneth really thinks. Either way, Mr. Carter is editing a magazine for both sides of the brain.

What Carr doesn't mention is that VF is actually a very bad home for serious journalism. Carter can run 20,000-word articles on the run-up to the Iraq war all he likes, but serious journalists will never dream of having their work published by Vanity Fair in the way they dream of being published by the New Yorker. Instead, their dream is much more prosaic: simply being paid by Vanity Fair, with its legendary budgets and expense accounts and contracts.

Carr hints at this:

[Carter's] magazine, the top earner at Condé Nast, spends like a pirate, madly assigning and killing stories and buying up contracts of every writer it fancies — an impunity that seems quite retro in a threadbare age.

In other words, Carter behaves a bit like the artist Francis Bacon, who used first-growth Bordeaux as cooking wines. The long pieces of journalism in Vanity Fair might pay very well indeed, but they're still a lot cheaper than the cost of commissioning a photographic portfolio of minor European royals. And they never get any respect within the magazine.

While the New Yorker or the Atlantic will lead with a long, well-reported story, Vanity Fair always leads with celebrity fluff. More to the point, VF has never bothered to work out how to make long-form journalism readable. The New Yorker is much smaller and lighter than VF; that makes it physically much easier to hold and to read. And long stories in the New Yorker never do what long stories in Vanity Fair always do, which is jump all around the magazine. A story will be "continued on page 227"; once you've found page 227, which isn't always easy, because most of the pages don't have numbers on them, it might have two or three different stories on it, making it that much harder to work out which one you're in the middle of. By the time you've managed that, you're pretty much guaranteed to have lost the train of thought leading up to the sentence you're putatively in the middle of. And this can be repeated 8 or 9 times or even more: jumping around reading one column on one page and then the next column on a page 20 pages further back.

Vanity Fair also refuses to put any of its journalism online, where it can be read by news consumers around the world.

In other words, Vanity Fair doesn't seem to care about the readers of the long-form journalism for which it pays so handsomely. It cares about the writers, whom it looks after very well. And it cares about the prestige they bring. But my impression of Vanity Fair is not that it's a magazine which wants to serve me with great journalism, so much as that it's a magazine with so much money it can run great journalism just by throwing its checkbook around. When VF starts discovering promising new voices and giving them space, when it runs fascinating articles about non-important subjects that you never thought you might be interested in, when it stops introducing every article by telling us how important and wonderful it is – then I'll start taking it seriously as a journalistic enterprise.

Posted by Felix at 19:52 EST | Comments (0)

Crappy wine lists

Eric Asimov doesn't like the wine list at Cafe du Soleil:

It’s not that the wine list is too small. It offers several dozen bottles – mostly French but some Italian, American and Spanish, too – befitting the size of this small bistro.
But the list shows both a complete lack of imagination, and total indifference to wine. It’s as if the restaurant abdicated responsibility for the list and allowed the first wine salesman in the door to put it together from the dreariest of his selections. Almost every last bottle is from a mediocre producer from a predictable region who is simply churning out product. It’s a complete bore, and it’s enough to keep me from going back.

Now Eric Asimov writes about wine for a living, so he's in the tiny minority of people who knows a mediocre producer when he sees one. He's like the gin rummy player who not only remembers everything his opponent picked up, but also remembers everything his opponent discarded.

Most of us, however, find it hard enough to remember good producers, let alone try to remember wines which turned out to be mediocre.

So, Mr Asimov (or anybody else): Is there any way that a non-professional can recognise a bad wine list? It seems unfair to extrapolate from one bottle: if you're disappointed once, that doesn't mean the entire list is weak. So when and how does one come to the conclusion that the list is bad enough to keep one from going back?

In my case, this has only happened at Alias, on Clinton Street, and only because that restaurant is so excited about its wines. It has lots of them by the glass, and everybody there seems extremely enthusiastic about them. So if you go with a group of people a couple of times and order wine by the glass rather than the bottle, it's relatively easy to get through most of the list. And come to the conclusion that none of it is particularly great.

But if a restaurant doesn't push its wines like that, and just has a list of a few dozen bottles which aren't available by the glass, are there any telltale signs of mediocrity?

Posted by Felix at 12:05 EST | Comments (0)

Vigilantism on the LES?

I was a bit disquieted to walk down my street this evening and see this poster taped to the wall. The poster (click for full version) gives the name and alias of a man who may or may not be a sex offender:

PLEASE BEWARE
At this present time there is a preditor in our neighborhood [LES] He preys on girls ages from 13–17. He is very cunning and manipulative. Please talk to your daughters so they could be aware of this man. [NAME REDACTED] It takes a whole community to stop men like him so lets all work together to get him registered as a sex offender. We have to many children in this neighbor so lets work collectively to keep our children safe! Thank you

There's a lot here which makes me very uncomfortable, and I'm not talking about the misspellings. For one thing, it feels like a call to vigilantism. I've explained at length (in the comments here) why I think it's a very bad idea for sex-offender registries to be publicly available.

What's more, this guy has a common name: it's entirely possible some entirely unrelated person could get severely harrassed as a result of this poster. And in what way can a community get someone registered as a sex offender in any case? Can communities somehow vote on whether or not they think someone is a sex offender? I thought you, well, needed to be convicted of something first.

As for talking to daughters about being aware of predators, well, that's always a good idea. It's easy to find maps of sex offenders online, and there are already eight registered sex offenders living in the East Village/Lower East Side. Let's teach our children to be safe, by all means. But let's not start spilling red ink on these people, lest we start spilling something else as a result.

Posted by Felix at 2:00 EST | Comments (3)

Female partners at law firms

The NYT's Timothy O'Brien has a long article today – which immediately hit the top of the Most E-Mailed List – headlined "Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?"

O'Brien gives a comprehensive overview of the problem and possible causes. But let me add my own, which is hinted at near the bottom of the piece:

Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown, analysts say; many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.
"I see a lot of people who are distressed about where the profession has gone," Ms. Rikleen says. "They don't like being part of a billable-hour production unit. They want more meaning out of their lives than that."

Let's make a few assumptions here:

1. Lawyers in big law firms are increasingly unhappy with their work.
2. Most lawyers marry and have children.
3. Most women marry a man who earns more than they do – this is true even of high-earning women.

Do you see where I'm going here? If you're a male lawyer with the potential to make partner, you go for it, because you have a wife and kids to support. If you're a female lawyer with the potential to make partner, the chances are that your husband is earning enough to support both you and the children. Which gives you the opportunity to seek out more rewarding work and more time with your children.

I can absolutely see why in such a situation there would be a shortage of female law-firm partners. And in the real world, among my lawyer friends, something very similar is happening. None of them, having spent time at a big law firm, actually wants to make partner. Most want a less stressful life, often as corporate counsel somewhere. The ones who stay at the law firms are the ones with a family to support.

At the moment, it is very rare for a female lawyer to be the main breadwinner in a family with children. Only when that becomes more common, is my guess, will the number of female law-firm partners start to rise.

Posted by Felix at 0:24 EST | Comments (3)

Archiquiz

Which classic suite of skyscrapers is this a picture of?

Work at it: if you look in the background of the photo you'll see a big hint. If you really can't get it, the answer is here.

What fascinates me is the harsh, almost brutal lines of these buildings, which tower over their neighbours in a most unsympathetic manner. It's amazing what time can do to a skyscraper.

Posted by Felix at 21:48 EST | Comments (0)

The Report Report Report

I'd like to start a new feature on felixsalmon.com, called the Report Report Report. The Report Report Report is for anybody who has ever read a news article whose subject is a "new report" (or survey, or study, or similar). I will track down the original report, and judge the reporting on it. Does the report say what the news articles say it says? Do the articles present hypothesis as fact, or otherwise sensationalize findings? Do they display the requisite amount of skepticism with respect to the methodology and possible ulterior motives of the report's authors? You ask me, and the Report Report Report will tell you.

Nominations now being accepted – I'll try to cover any articles pointed to in the comments, so long as I can find the original report.

Posted by Felix at 21:08 EST | Comments (1)

The NYT Magazine's bedfellows

Pages 69 to 80 of this weekend's New York Times Magazine comprise a 12-page advertorial from Rwanda. The web address given should you want even more information is www.rwandatourism.com – yes, Rwanda Tourism. Somehow I doubt that the amount of money that Rwanda is going to make from tourism is going to come close to justifying the cost of a 12-page advertorial in the New York Times Magazine.

The advertorial comes with a credit: it was "produced and sponsored by Summit Communications", a company whose sole purpose seems to be to publish advertorials in the New York Times. Some advertorials, like that for Libya, for example, are even on the web at nytimes.com.

So far this year, Summit Communications has produced advertorials for Rwanda, Congo, and Sierra Leone. Last year it did Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, and Libya – twice. Most of these countries come very low on transparency indices and very high on corruption indices. Most of them, too, are unlikely to benefit greatly from this type of exposure.

One can't help but wonder how Summit Communications persuades these ministers from highly corrupt countries to pay large amounts of money for advertorials in the New York Times.

Now it's true that the fee that Summit Communications charges has to be significantly greater than the amount that Summit Communications has to pay the NYT. That's right and proper, of course: Summit has to produce the report, and make some money for itself. But maybe – just maybe – some of that fee finds its way into an offshore bank account controlled by the minister in question? That can't be the case: such a practice would make it easier to sell these advertorials, but would also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

So how does Summit Communications – none of whose principals are named on its website – manage to keep its sales going? I have no idea.

Posted by Felix at 19:42 EST | Comments (91)

Gutted

So you know that trip to Patagonia? The one I've been super-excited about for ages? The one which begins this coming Wednesday? Well, it's off.

I'm not leaving the country, because I'm married to a US citizen. If I wasn't married to a US citizen, my plan would probably work fine: pop into the US embassy in Lima on the way back from Patagonia, pick up a new I visa, and come back to New York. But an I visa is a non-immigrant visa, and if you've been living in the US for many years and are married to an American who lives in the USA, you don't look much like a non-immigrant any more.

It's a bit counterintuitive, but it's actually much, much easier to enter the US if you're not married to an American than if you are. Most people, especially from countries that are part of the visa waiver scheme, can come in as a tourist, or on one of any number of visas. If you get married to an American, however, you basically have to go through the laborious green card application procedure.

The one real weirdness I've discovered: the famous H1-B visa (I had two, in my time) is a "dual intent" visa. That means, according to the wonderful definition at this website, that the holder can have "the intent to immigrate and nonimmigrant intent". Most other visas, however, including my I visa, don't allow such a useful impossibility. I'd love to know the historical reason for this special dispensation for holders of H1-B and L visas.

Posted by Felix at 21:49 EST | Comments (2)

Euphemism alert

Apparently the show I'm listening to on the radio right now isn't a repeat or a re-run, it's an "encore presentation". Offender: National Public Radio, or at least WNYC.

Posted by Felix at 12:42 EST | Comments (0)

Verbal tics

As I was posting the last entry, I noticed my use of the phrase "ultimately, however" in the final paragraph. It's a nasty, pompous phrase, but – worse – it also felt uncomfortably familiar. So I did a quick search of felixsalmon.com, and there it is, six times in the past four years. Must stop now.

Posted by Felix at 12:25 EST | Comments (0)

NYT vs Costco

The NYT is going all-out on what seems to be little more than a storm in a teacup about whether or not Costco sold a couple of fake Picasso drawings. The first article was published on Thursday and corrected on Friday; today, Saturday, there's a lengthy follow-up article which was reported by Daphné Anglès and Alan Riding in Paris, Carol Kino in New York, and David Hochman in Newport Beach. Yikes! Must be important, no?

Actually, not really. The story seems to be this: Costco started selling art on its website, including a couple of Picasso drawings, which were sourced from Rick Yamet, a fine-art vendor in Peekskill, N.Y. A bit of Googling finds him authenticating a dubious Picasso print in the past, so maybe Costco's dealer, Jim Tutwiler of Boca Raton, was a bit too trusting of Yamet. But ultimately the art world is swimming in fake Picassos, which is why buying from Costco is actually a very smart move. If a buyer has second thoughts about any drawing, be they to do with its authenticity or even simply that it doesn't go with the sofa, then it can be returned for a full refund.

But here we have NYT reporters banging on buyers' front doors, leaving messages for the CEO of Costco, and generally behaving as though they have uncovered a major scandal. Why the seeming overreaction?

Two reasons, I think. Firstly, the correction on Friday. No reporter likes to have to issue a correction, so when it turned out that the original article had got a couple of facts wrong, the Times decided it was going to town on the story to pin it down. Secondly, the Times ran a gushing profile of Costco's art-selling operations a couple of years ago, complete with details of Costco's quality-control mechanisms and use of outside appraisers. As recently as last November, Online Shopper columnist Michelle Slatalla was equally complimentary about Costco's fine-art franchise. Maybe the Times, embarrassed at its former enthusiasm, is now overcompensating.

Ultimately, however, the first two articles trusted in Costco for a very good reason: the company's full-refund guarantee, which stands uncontested. Much dirtier dealings than Costco's go on in the art world every day; it's not clear why the NYT has decided to pick on Costco like this.

Posted by Felix at 12:17 EST | Comments (1)

Culture round-up

For no particular reason except to remind myself what I thought:

Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes: Don't believe the hype. Starts off well, but has far too much padding. No one cares about whether, why or how Arthur Conan Doyle related to women and/or fell in love, and we don't want to spend hundreds of pages wading through his thought processes while waiting for the plot to restart. Some wonderful turns of phrase, of course, but not enough to make the book worth reading.

The Whitney Biennial: I like messes like this, contemporary life is messy, contemporary art is messy, and this exhibition reflects that messiness in all its glory. There's humour enough here to keep one occupied, and there's even some good art, too.

Panic. Just watched it on DVD, so I'm adding it to the list. Fantastic cast, overly-oppressive soundtrack. Could have been a great movie, but for the Precocious Kid. But pretty much anything with Donald Sutherland in it is worth watching.

Posted by Felix at 23:02 EST | Comments (0)

The American North-South Divide

The 50 least expensive cities in America are all in the south. The 50 most expensives cities are overwhelmingly in the north, plus California and a couple of places like Miami (which is still just 56% as expensive as New York). A "moderately affluent lifestyle" takes an income of $69,496 in Paris, Texas. It takes an income of $166,777 in New York.

Does that seem excessive? If you spend a third of your pre-tax income on housing, that would be $55,600 per year. Call it $1,000 a month in maintenance payments and $3,600 a month in mortgage repayments. That means your mortgage is about $750,000. Which doesn't buy much in New York City these days.

Posted by Felix at 23:30 EST | Comments (13)

False Positives on Gawker Stalker

Both Joseph Clarke, in the comments to my Gawker Stalker piece, and Andrew Krucoff, today, make the good point that the evil nature of Gawker Stalker can be allayed by celebrities (or anybody else) reporting false sightings. Indeed, false sightings could be a whole new art form: imagine a series of sightings of John Travolta, say, doing increasingly improbable things in increasingly improbable places – but all in a manner which is consistent in terms of the fictional celebrity being able to get from one fictional sighting to the next in time.

I'm sure that Nick Denton doesn't care in the slightest if people report false sightings, so long as the feature becomes/remains popular. In fact, insofar as the popularity of Gawker Stalker is a function of the number of sightings reported, Denton might even like the fictional ones: there's no such thing as a bad datapoint, if all datapoints, at the margin, drive traffic.

I'm just not sure who we're meant to rely on to submit the false sightings. It's a fun joke for Krucoff for one day, but he's not going to do it day in and day out – and I doubt the celebrities and their minions are going to want to come up with such things day after day, month after month, either. Still, if you're ever feeling bored at work, go ahead and give Gawker something fictional. It'll throw some noise into the Stalker Database, and will probably help pay Denton's hamsters interns as well.

Posted by Felix at 20:55 EST | Comments (0)

Piggybacking, part 2

Talking of the NYT, the op-ed page strikes back at the news pages today. Remember that dreadful story about wi-fi piggybacking? Well Timothy Lee obviously saw it, had much the same reaction as I had, and managed to get his response published in the NYT's own storied pages. Good for him. Of course, the story he's talking about isn't mentioned by name, but since it sat atop the Most E-Mailed List for quite some time, I'm sure that a great number of the op-ed's readers will know exactly what Lee is talking about in his second paragraph:

News reports tend to paint the practice as a growing problem. Reporters use words like "stealing," "hacking" and "intrusion." But despite the alarmist talk, the articles rarely explain what the problem is.

My only issue with the op-ed comes when Lee says this:

One problem, as telecom companies will be quick to point out, is that my unscrupulous neighbor might use my Internet connection permanently instead of paying for his own. They have a point: that borders on theft of service. I'd slap a password on my network if that was happening.

Well, is it theft of service or isn't it? And who's being stolen from here, Lee or the ISP? Would Lee slap on that password because he feels a debt of gratitude to his ISP for its service, and hopes that maybe the price will come down if his "unscrupulous neighbor" pays a monthly charge as well?

Posted by Felix at 20:03 EST | Comments (0)

NYT cripples its blogs' feeds

What's happened to the New York Times's RSS feeds? Up until a day or two ago, they were generally excellent, providing the full text and all images for blogs like those from Bruni, Carr and now Asimov. Actually, Carr's now-discontinued blog continues to have a full feed. But it seems that Bruni and Asimov have taken a leaf out of Pogue's book, and started truncating their feeds. This is particularly bad news in the case of DealBook, which I started off loving but now will read much, much less. Be nice, NYT: bring back the full RSS!

Posted by Felix at 19:51 EST | Comments (0)

Adele Fergusen's 15 minutes

The cache function on my web browser has failed me, and now when I try to view this page, all I get is a 404 error. Worse, Google seems to have failed to cache it as well. So comes the blogosphere to the rescue! For the full text of Adele Fergusen's op-ed in The Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal, check out Disturbing the Comfortable. Here's a snippet:

One of these days before I die, I hope to see a shift in the attitudes of so many of my black brothers and sisters in this great country we share, from perpetual victimhood, to pride in their achievements on the road from slave to American citizen.
Remember Ronald Reagan’s story about the kid who had to shovel a huge pile of manure? He went about it with such joy he was asked why and said, “With all that manure, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.”
The pony hidden in slavery is the fact that it was the ticket to America for black people. I have long urged blacks to consider their presence here as the work of God, who wanted to bring them to this raw, new country and used slavery to achieve it. A harsh life, to be sure, but many immigrants suffered hardships and indignations as indentured servants. Their descendants rose above it. You don’t hear them bemoaning their forebears’ life the way some blacks can’t rise above the fact theirs were slaves.
Besides freedom, a job and a roof over their heads, they all sought respect. But even after all these years, too many have yet to realize that to get respect, you have to give it.

It's worth noting that before this came out, no one outside Washington State knew or cared about The Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal. But because it has a website, it wasn't long before Adele Fergusen's claptrap was winging its way, via the likes of Wonkette, to the world at large. New Media has changed everything!

Yet at the same time, Fergusen has gotten in trouble because her opinions found their way into a printed newspaper, and printed newpapers still have a certain gravitas that blogs and talk radio, say, don't. If an unknown Washington State blogger or talk-radio caller had said the same thing, few people would have noticed or cared. Old Media still matters!

It's also interesting to read this letter from Lary Coppola, the editor and publisher of The Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal:

Right-wing politics have proven to be a product that strengthens the bottom line. If liberalism did, that's would be the corporate media product. It isn't about the issues in the corporate boardroom, it's about selling the product that delivers the greatest return on investment for the stockholders. In the case of the media, it's conservatism.
The corporate owners of the American media are doing nothing more than catering to their customers and delivering the product they want to buy. It's just that simple.

Could Coppola really be so cynical as to have published Fergusen's hateful op-ed because he thought he was simply "delivering the product" that his readers wanted to buy? My guess is not, and that rather this is more of a cock-up than a conspiracy. Fergusen filed her op-ed, and at no point in the editing process did anybody stop to think whether simple decorum should trump her freedom to say what she likes in her column.

Finally, it's worth noting that it's far to cheap and easy to equate Fergusen's column with Coppola's "right-wing politics". I'm sure that Fergusen is, indeed, a right-winger. But for every Republican who feels like this, there's a Democrat who agrees with her. Part of the reason that Republicans do better than Democrats in US elections is that Republicans have fewer compunctions about pandering to the likes of Fergusen than Democrats do. Once upon a time, Democrats were the party of the racist heartland; now, it's Republicans. But the racist heartland itself has changed less than the coastal elites might think.

Posted by Felix at 23:23 EST | Comments (0)

Theater stars

Did you know that an Australian film star, who was in all three Lord of the Rings films as well as loads of critically-acclaimed features, is starring in Hedda Gabler at BAM? Well yes, we all know that Cate Blanchett is in town: BAM has been plastering her noble profile all over the place. I was actually talking about Hugo Weaving.

Weaving is a very accomplished actor with many great films to his name and at least as much name recognition as Blanchett, thanks to the Matrix films. Both Blanchett and Weaving are real theatrical actors, rather than film stars going on stage for a laugh. Yet BAM seems to understand on a gut level that people will pay to see Blanchett, but won't pay to see Weaving (although his performance, which I saw last night, is fantastic). I'm not sure why this is: I don't think it's Blanchett's Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Aviator. And I don't think it's simply sex appeal, either: While Blanchett is certainly very beautiful, I can think of other film stars who are much uglier who would get the same treatment over Weaving. Rather, I think it's some kind of inchoate star quality, which Blanchett has and Weaving doesn't.

Do people really go to the theater to see stars? I guess they do. In this case, they'll be well rewarded. But most of the time, the presence of a big-name film star in a Broadway production is a good indication that the play might well be worth missing.

Posted by Felix at 15:25 EST | Comments (3)

Gawker Stalker Maps: Skeevy

Nick Denton is very excited about his latest franchise, Gawker Stalker Maps. I've never been a fan of Gawker Stalker: the feature has always seemed to me to be little more than a cheap way of getting readers to interact with the website. Indeed, I said back in 2003 that the introduction of Gawker Stalker was "the beginning of the end of Gawker as it was originally envisaged". Gawker Stalker Maps, however, moves beyond uninteresting and well into the realm of positively unpleasant.

The spectacle of Gawker vs Flacks in the New York Daily News today is particularly unedifying:

As innovative as it might be, it dangerously puts these people in harm's way. Somebody's going to get hurt," warned flack Leslie Sloane Zelnik, who reps Lohan, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and other soft targets.
"These people are trying to lead a normal life, and I think at some point the government is going to have to step in and regulate this. I really think this crosses a line."
Coen retorted: "I think the government should get involved to stop Leslie Sloane Zelnik."

Up until now, Gawker has been the bitchy office queen, gossiping about NYC media types and occasionally common-or-garden celebrities as well. Jessica Coen might have been mean about many people, but she's been mean in the manner of the powerless snarking about the powerful. Now, Denton has upgraded the "Stalker" part of "Gawker Stalker" from ironic to literal.

Your friend is walking down Broadway and sees Sarah Jessica Parker walking towards her. The following day, she finds herself seated a couple of tables down from SJP at a trendy restaurant. The following week, the two of them are in the same dog run at the same time. "I'm becoming a Sarah Jessica Parker stalker," she says. Funny or scary? Funny.

Now think what would happen if your friend reported all of these sightings, in real time, to Gawker Stalker. Apropos Denton, this should eventually be able to happen directly, without even being filtered through the two extra interns that he's reportedly brought on for this project. Your friend would be building up a database of exactly when and where Sarah Jessica Parker is seen in public. On her own, that might be harmless enough: three datapoints over the course of a couple of weeks. But Gawker has well over a million readers. It only takes a very small percentage of those to get in on the game, and pretty soon Gawker is able to "pinpoint the location of every stalkworthy celebrity". Yes, that's their stated aim. Funny or scary? Scary.

Part of what makes cities work is the anonymity conferred by large crowds. One of the reasons why people move to New York from Smalltown is that in Smalltown, everybody knew where they were and what they were doing at all times. Here, you can walk down the streets wearing nothing but an inflatable crocodile, and no one will care. Gawker Stalker Maps is an exercise in taking those comfortingly anonymous crowds and turning them into a million-eyed intelligent beast, collating and organising information on hundreds of individuals unlucky enough to be recognisable in public.

That information, of course, will be incredibly useful to genuine stalkers, who will be able to use it to work out their prey's habitual wanderings. There might even be genuine security implications to posting regular sightings of Bill Clinton or Rupert Murdoch or any number of other world-famous New Yorkers. But even without those worries, Gawker Stalker is destroying the implicit compact between New Yorkers and celebrities. It's one thing being recognised on the street; it's another thing entirely having to wonder how many of the people who recognise you will be posting your exact location on the internet in real time, on a web page devoted to that very purpose.

Nick Denton has a refreshing couldn't-care-less attitude to what other people think of Gawker Media and its properties. You don't like his porn site? Doesn't bother him, he's not forcing you to go there. I'm sure that he saw the technological potential of a site like this, and decided to grab himself a first-mover advantage, complete with sponsorship from E! Online. After all, if he didn't do it, someone else would, sooner or later. But there are lines he won't cross: he won't publish, for instance, a database of celebrities' cellphone numbers and home and email addresses.

At the moment, Gawker Stalker Maps is new, so it doesn't have the really scary functionality: being able to see not all celebrity sightings over the past couple of hours or days, but rather being able to see all the sightings, ever, of any given celebrity. I can only hope that day will never come. And for the first time ever, I also hope that this webpage will not grow itself an RSS feed, since it would be trivial to create such a celebrity-specific database through a simple RSS filter. All the same, Gawker Stalker Maps is already a nasty and dangerous web page, and really should never have been created in the first place.

Posted by Felix at 17:05 EST | Comments (7)

The Daily Show on iTunes is broken

When I gave up my cable TV, the only thing I really missed was The Daily Show. So I was very happy indeed when I found it available on iTunes. I bought a pass, $9.99 for 16 episodes, and successfully downloaded the two episodes which were already there. Since then, there have been two further episodes, which are meant to have automatically downloaded, but I haven't got them on my computer. When I sign into my account at iTunes, however, it says that I have received 4 episodes. What am I to do?

UPDATE: Problem solved! You go to the Advanced menu in iTunes, and select "Check for Purchases".

Posted by Felix at 12:44 EST | Comments (3)

Comment is free is live

Comment is free has launched. It looks handsome, but. At its heart, it's an aggregation of Guardian columnists, and of course if you're a newspaper columnist you don't write with hyperlinks. So there's precious little of the link-juice that really drives the blogosphere: no indication that every link out is rewarded with a new link in. The likes of Jeff Jarvis (who consults for the Guardian) love to say that blogs are a conversation; well, these ones aren't, or aren't yet, at any rate.

The site also suffers from its corporate ownership:

We don't include full text at the moment because we'd prefer you visit the site and participate. It's also very hard to tell who's reading what if you offer full text RSS, and on a free site that information is quite important.

In other words, given the choice between serving readers and serving advertisers, the Guardian chose the latter. Which is understandable, given that the Guardian is an advertising-funded company. But RSS with advertising is much better than broken RSS.

Still, one wish has been granted: Marina Hyde now has a homepage and an RSS feed!

Posted by Felix at 11:25 EST | Comments (0)

Fabulous Chinatown

Most people who love places like the East Village, the West Village, or the Lower East Side love them for basically the same reason. They're real neighborhoods: each one has a unique culture, a feeling you get when you walk its streets. The reason that people hate it when the Gap or Starbucks arrives in such a place is not because they hate the Gap or Starbucks, but because they're chains: they're not unique.

Other New York neighborhoods can be described in terms of the type of brands that one finds there: when tourists come to New York, they can find brands they've heard of on the Upper West Side or on Madison Avenue or in Soho. Increasingly, they can even get the same frisson of familiarity in the West Village too, especially on Bleecker Street.

So far, however, the East Village and the Lower East Side have proved relatively immune to this phenomenon: the only big national brands making incursions are really the banks, and even they seem very hesitant to venture south of Houston. (The long-standing exception to this rule, of course, is Delancey Street, which has everything from Sleepy's to Starbucks, Chase Manhattan to The Children's Store. Even Delancey, however, has its fair share of unique, only-in-New-York establishments, like Solid Gold Jewelry on Norfolk.)

That said, gentrification will always breed changes. Consider Sol Moscot, the optitician's which has anchored the north-east corner of Orchard and Delancey since 1951 and which has been on the Lower East Side since 1915. I was flicking through my records there on Saturday – they're still kept on 3x5 index cards – and it turns out that I've bought all my glasses (or at least all my lenses) there since June 1998.

When I first started going to Sol Moscot, they were an incredibly friendly, family-run Lower East Side institution. They're still all of those things, but there's no doubt that Moscot's has changed along with the neighborhood. As the number of hipsters increased, so did the space that Moscot devoted to expensive designer frames; the store has even recently started its own retro-cool hipster-targeted brand. Meanwhile, the minimum cost of going to Moscot's was inexorably increasing. The price of lenses is now merely at the cheap end of the spectrum, where they used to be significantly cheaper than anybody else. No longer will they throw in a basic frame if you're buying decent lenses. And they now charge $125 for an eye test.

This weekend I wanted to get prescription polarized sunglasses for my trip to Patagonia at the end of the month.(!) Sol Moscot was happy to oblige, but only at what seemed like excessive cost. The staff there seemed to have less sympathy for my plight than they would have done in the past, and were more likely to try to justify the vast expense than they were to try and come up with a way of bringing it down.

Reluctantly moving away from Sol Moscot, I found myself at Manhattan Grand Optical, a Little Chitaly opticians which is absolutely wonderful. There's not a hint of a hard sell there, they have a wide selection of cheap frames, they're extremely friendly, professional and knowledgeable – and they don't focus on hipsters at the expense of real people. They came up with a smart solution to my problem (clip-on magnetically attachable polarized lenses, don't laugh, they can look pretty cool these days), and they even gave me a full-scale eye exam for only $15. I can't recommend them highly enough – tell them Felix sent you!

Coming home from Manhattan Grand Optical on the way back home, I stopped off at the best supermarket in the Lower East Side, the Clinton Street Supermarket, on Clinton between Delancey and Rivington. I bought a pork loin for a dinner party, but their meat department has a very wide selection, and their fish department is even better; most of the stuff there is alive until the minute you buy it. The produce is fresh, the prices are rock-bottom, and the whole store is super-clean.

The tanks of live fish reminded me of the excellent meal I'd had the night before, at Ping's on Mott Street. Coming from London, I'm normally pretty snobbish about Chinese food in this city: I reckon New York is great at pretty much everything, but comes up short in the Chinese and Indian departments. Ping's is definitely of London standards, however, almost as good as the great Mandarin Kitchen on Queensway. Maybe the comparison is invidious, but I reckon its noodles are better (yes, better) than the Japanese noodles at Omen on Thompson, and the prices are definitely lower.

Manhattan Grand Optical, Clinton Street Supermarket, Ping's Seafood – what these places have in common, of course, is that they're all Chinese. While everybody else in downtown Manhattan seems to be chasing the latest trendiest thing, the Chinese have carved out a hugely valuable niche providing excellent products and services at bargain prices. Whether it's glasses or apples or noodles or even electrical equipment from Lendy's, Chinatown is the last remaining neighborhood south of 110th Street that seems to care how much things cost. Think of it as Manhattan's answer to Wal-Mart. How I would have loved to have bought an apartment in Chinatown, had there only been any available! But I think there are precious few co-op or condo buildings there. Maybe that's why it has stubbornly resisted the gentrification that's happened elsewhere.

Posted by Felix at 21:01 EST | Comments (4)

WIN errors: From bad to worse

After I posted my entry about the willingness of WIN bloggers to correct their errors, the WIN machine moved into action. First Jason Calacanis left a comment on my blog, saying that he was looking into it. He also said that there should be a tip form on every WIN site. In fact, he's right about that. The narrow column to the right of the main column is mainly used for advertising. But in between the ads, there's a series of links for sending news tips or pointing out corrections. It might be worth making those links easier to find, rather than burying them in a series of ads.

If you click on the corrections link, it takes you to a form which you can fill out, saying "Use the form below to get in touch with the people at The Unofficial Google Weblog." On the face of it, that doesn't help much, since it has the same effect as leaving a comment on the entry in question. And as we saw with the Google Earth entry, that alone doesn't seem to result in a correction. In fact, however, I have now been informed by Judith Meskill, WIN's editorial director, that filling out the corrections form brings the error to her attention as well as the blogger's. It might be worth mentioning that on the form.

Not long after Jason left his comments, I got an email from Judith Meskill. At the bottom of the email, she checked a little box saying that it was not bloggable and was private and confidential, so I won't tell you what it said. But it wasn't long until the Google Earth entry was updated, rather than corrected.

Here's what it said originally:

The Indian government was worried about sensitive areas being available through Google Earth searches, so Google will be taking high resolution versions offline.

Here's what it was changed to, with no indication that changes had been made:

The Indian government was worried about sensitive areas being available through Google Earth searches, so Google will look at taking these high resolution versions offline when presented to them.

That update, it would seem, came from Chris Gilmer, the author of the entry.

It didn't stay that way for long: pretty soon the entire entry was put in strikethrough, with an update at the top. The exclamation mark, and the fact that Gilmer is referred to in the third person, are clear indications that the update and strikethrough were the work of Meskill:

UPDATE: Thanks to Frank Taylor of Google Earth for pointing to Stefan Geens' correction (in the comments below) of the Times of India article, cited below as the source for this post. Chris Gilmer will follow up shortly with a revision of this post. Thanks!

By this time the headline of the post had been changed, from "Sensitive India Areas Removed from Google Earth" to "Sensitive India Areas Rumored to be Removed from Google Earth?". There was no indication that the headline had changed.

In response to the update, Stefan updated his entry at Ogle Earth:

The Unofficial Google Weblog has now retracted its post, after some further prodding by Felix Salmon. But Kudos for running the correction, though.

The kudos was to be short-lived, as was the correction. For this morning, the update and the strikethrough were all removed, and a whole new story put in their place. It starts off with exactly the same altered sentence that Gilmer changed at the beginning, referring to Google looking at taking images offline. Gilmer then changes the story he's linking to, from one at the Times of India to a UPI story at physorg.com. At the end of the entry, we find this:

Thank you to Felix Simon (sic), Frank Taylor, and Stefan Geens for pointing out that there might be flaws in the India Times article previously referenced.

Of course, I never pointed out any flaws in the India Times article; most of us were, rather, pointing out flaws in Gilmer's own blog entry. But Gilmer refuses to admit that he made any mistakes, only that his sources might have been erroneous. He completely elides the fact that there was a part of the original blog entry about Google blurring imagery at the request of the US government – that was wholly Gilmer's own work, and it was completely wrong.

On an informational level, Gilmer's new entry is nearly as bad as his original entry. "He no longer makes unsubstantiated claims, but none of it is coherent," says Geens.

Gilmer completely misses Geens's point that in the past, Google has made images higher-resolution, or has clarified images which were previously blurred or blacked out. It has never gone in the opposite direction, as Gilmer's article implies it might.

In any case, Google doesn't provide its own imagery: Google just buys this stuff from satellite companies. The American ones sometimes have to censor, but Google can buy from French companies if it wants to, and they don't have to censor. Gilmer seems newly obsessed with the fact that some imagery in Google is censored – he doesn't seem interested that that's nothing to do with Google. Google didn't want the information to be censored, they just happened to buy censored information, which they de-censored when they could. So Gilmer's links are irrelevant to the putative point of the story, which is that Google might actively censor on its own – something it has never done until now.

On a journalistic level, however, what Gilmer did is much worse than his factual disingenuousness. With the latest revision to the blog entry, there is no indication that Gilmer ever made a mistake, except for a comment at the bottom of the post which no longer makes sense. The links in blog entries by me and by Stefan Geens are now semi-broken, since they link to something entirely different from what they linked to originally. Far from being open and honest about corrections, Gilmer and WIN seem to be doing their very best to make it seem as though they never got anything wrong at all.

If I might, I would like to refer Gilmer and Meskill to a very good blog entry from April 2004:

We know we're error prone, we know we report things quickly, and as such we make corrections in real time with the help of our audience. Blogs are so error prone that we have our own device for deal with errors: strikethrough! If an error occurs we use strikethrough to note the error and correct it immediately in the existing article. This is a lot more than any print publication does. Print publications can't correct like this because they are not real time. Can you imagine if the New York Times reprinted every article with the incorrect facts noted with stickethrough the day after they came out – in the same location? That is what blogs do, so we are clearly more responsible than print publications in issuing corrections. We should be because we are more error prone.

The author of that blog entry? Jason Calacanis. His employees would be well advised to pay attention.

Posted by Felix at 13:44 EST | Comments (3)

NYT publishes private information

How often does the New York Times publish email addresses or mobile phone numbers for people in the news, let alone people important enough to merit their own story on the front page? Well, it's done it today. But maybe giving out an Iraqi mobile phone number isn't as irresponsible as giving out an American one? All I know is that even the most irresponsible bloggers tend to redact that kind of information. If the NYT wanted to reproduce this chap's business card, that's one thing. But failing to blur out at least a few letters or digits, that's just wrong.

Posted by Felix at 12:10 EST | Comments (0)

Taxicabs and Pedicabs

I'm a fan of Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution: one of the better and more entertaining blogging economists. I'm not such a fan of his co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, however. His entry on Ethiopian drought insurance, for instance, refused to even address concerns that it might not be a wonderful idea. And then, today, he moves on to New York pedicabs:

There are fewer taxicabs in New York City today than in 1937. Entry restrictions have meant too few taxis, too many private cars, and gridlock so bad that in downtown Manhattan, pedicabs, basically tricycle-rickshaws, are faster than cars.

The first sentence is flat-out wrong. There are 12,487 taxicabs in New York City today, compared to 11,787 in 1937. The second sentence is hard to parse. What is Tabarrok talking about when he refers to "entry restrictions"? Does he mean bridge and tunnel tolls? I think what he means is that it's hard to enter the taxicab market, because the number of taxi medallions is artificially constrained by law. That might mean that there are too few taxis, but I can't see how it has much of an effect on the number of private cars. To constrain that, one would need to implement some sort of congestion charging.

In any case, there really aren't any pedicabs in downtown Manhattan, let alone pedicabs which are faster than cars. Pedicabs are overwhelmingly found in the tourist-heavy parts of midtown Manhattan, and while they might in certain circumstances be faster than cars, they're not generally used for their speed. In cases of gridlock, speed is a function of width, and pedicabs are pretty wide – almost as wide as cars. While I can speed past most backed-up traffic on my bicycle, that traffic often includes motorcycles, since even they are too wide to squeeze in between traffic and parked cars a lot of the time. And pedicabs are certainly wider than motorcycles, so I doubt they're much faster than cars.

Pedicabs might like to claim that they're faster than cars, but I'd be interested to do the experiment. Take a typical midtown trip, say from Barney's to Times Square, and time how long it takes by subway, by taxi, by foot, by pedicab, and by bicycle. My guess is that since that trip doesn't involve changing trains, the bike and the subway will be easily the fastest, followed by the taxi, the pedicab, and the pedestrian.

Posted by Felix at 12:01 EST | Comments (5)

The Snack Dragon Empire expands

Josephine Jansen's Snack Dragon Taco Shack, on 3rd and B, is the place to go for high-end low-price tacos when you're out drinking in the East Village. The best tacos you've ever had in NYC are all freshly made, and are only $3.

But what if you're not in the East Village, but rather on the Lower East Side? Fear not: I can reveal that Snack Dragon is expanding, and will soon open an outpost on the corner of Stanton and Allen – in good time, I'm sure, for all the hotel traffic which will surely be passing that way. Lower East Siders rejoice! The hotel might be horrible, but I promise you that Josephine will always keep things real.

Posted by Felix at 0:34 EST | Comments (0)

Bad blogging at WIN

UPDATE: The WIN blog entry in question has now been greatly altered, in a rather disturbing manner. Details here.

If you're blogging professionally, people are going to hold you to higher standards than if you're just another guy in his pyjamas. Jason Kottke never understood that, I think, and now I wonder if that other Jason – Calacanis – really cares about it either.

Calacanis, of course, has famously sold his Weblogs, Inc empire to AOL; he is now rumoured to be moving on to bigger things. But someone is surely in charge of editorial content at WIN, and they should be taking their job extremely seriously now that everybody with a WIN blog is ultimately working for Time Warner. Apparently WIN has an editorial director named Judith Meskill, who might be an expert on "online social and knowledge networking practices and tools," but she doesn't have any journalism background, as far as I can tell, and she certainly can't write particularly well.

Jason Calacanis and Pete Rojas, of course, both know the media world very well: it's not like no one at WIN understands the issues involved in publishing information. But neither of them is likely to get involved in issues which arise at the level of individual blog entries.

So what happens when a WIN blogger publishes something which is lazy and wrong? Stefan Geens, over at Ogle Earth, called out WIN's Chris Gilmer yesterday for publishing something completely false: an entry about Google Earth which (a) displays an obvious lack of familiarity with the product, and (b) didn't receive even the most cursory fact-checking. Now Chris Gilmer is the primary author of The Unofficial Google Weblog, so one might presume that he knows a little bit about Google Earth. But if he doesn't, one might certainly presume that he'd bother to check easily-checkable facts before publishing something.

Now I've been following Jason Calacanis for long enough that I'm pretty sure what he would do if he found a false blog entry. In the interests of transparency, he would correct the entry to the best of his abilities, crediting whomever pointed out the mistake, all while being very open about the fact that WIN got it wrong to begin with.

But Chris Gilmer, it seems, is no Jason Calacanis. His blog entry was posted on Thursday evening. Later that night, Geens fisked it. Early the next morning, Frank Taylor, of Google Earth Blog, left a comment on Gilmer's entry pointing out the mistake and leaving a link to Ogle Earth in case Gilmer needed more information. Since then? Nothing.

Says Geens (who, full disclosure, is a friend and the designer of this site):

There has never been a case, in the US or elsewhere, where existing imagery has been switched for blurred images. Nor has the US ever asked for areas to be blurred, something which Google has confirmed. For a blog to say it has doesn't make it so.
Nevertheless, expect this meme to do the rounds now that a mainstream blog has validated it. Who watches the watchers, indeed? This kind of sloppiness gives blogging a bad name.

The implicit point, here, is that if Gilmer is going to blog professionally as part of the Time Warner empire, he ought to care about accuracy since he has something of a bully pulpit. Simply by dint of his blog's ownership, he has a high-profile mainstream blog which can and will shape conversations and opinions.

Everybody makes mistakes, of course, or has a bad day. But any time that happens to a blogger, he should embrace the fact that he can easily and transparently correct the error. The fact that that hasn't happened at The Unofficial Google Weblog gives WIN even more of a bad name than the fact that the error was made in the first place.

(By the way, on the subject of transparency, there seems to be no way of finding email addresses for WIN bloggers. I had no way of asking Gilmer or Meskill for their comments about this, because they refuse to publish any email or IM address by which I might be able to reach them.)

Posted by Felix at 18:47 EST | Comments (1)

Betting on Oscar

You heard it here first: Next year, the film studios jostling for recognition at the Academy Awards are going to move a small part of their publicity budgets online. Not to advertising, mind, but to bet on themselves.

For the past three years, I've had a bit of fun betting on the Oscars at Tradesports, an online prediction market. I've lost some money betting on early favourites (Martin Scorsese to win Best Director for Aviator) but won more betting on outsiders (Adrien Brody to win Best Actor for The Pianist) who won. This year, I was lucky enough to be watching the Oscars in a wifi-enabled house when I realised shortly before the announcement was made that Crash was going to win. Which was a pretty lucrative bet.

The Oscars are an interesting event to bet on, since there's infinite amounts of speculation as to who will win, but in reality nobody knows anything. All the same, films do build up momentum, and the Academy does seem to have a tendency to vote for perceived favourites. Which is one way of explaining why Lord of the Rings III swept the awards, winning 11 Oscars including Best Director, Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay as well as Best Picture, while Lord of the Rings I and II, which were of pretty much the same quality, had to make do with only technical awards.

Increasingly, the best way of working out which films are the perceived favourites is to go to somewhere like Tradesports. Indeed, Allen Wastler today has the temerity to complain that this year, the markets were wrong:

The contracts also indicated that Paul Giamatti would edge out George Clooney as Best Supporting Actor. Instead, Clooney walked off with the statuette and "Crash" shattered Best Picture expectations.
That was unfortunate for me since I made my office-pool picks using the futures contracts. I trusted, as we are so often told to do, in the wisdom of markets.

The FT is allowing free access to its articles this week, so if you go over the next couple of days, you'll be able to read Matthew Engel's article on the leadership election in the Liberal Democratic Party. Which isn't really about the leadership of the Lib Dems at all: it's about the storied history of bookies and politics in England.

Political punting has long been a particularly British phenomenon, helped along by the first-past-the-post electoral system and the liberal betting laws.
The phenomenon is believed to date back to the 1973 Isle of Ely by-election when the Liberal candidate Clement Freud famously placed a bet on himself at 33-1, helping to create a buzz that brought him victory.
There was also reputedly an Irish local council candidate who started at similarly long odds with the local betting shop and then issued a leaflet telling people to both back him and vote for him. "Vote yourself some money," was the slogan.