Peter Brantley summarizes the latest Books In Browsers conference. (more)

Politifact.com is a project operated by the TampaBayTimes, in which reporters and editors from the Times and affiliated media outlets "Fact-Check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups" (Journalism).[2] They publish original statements and their evaluations on the Politifact.com website, and assign each a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for completely accurate statements to "Pants on Fire" (from the taunt "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for false and ridiculous claims.[3] The site also includes an "Obameter", tracking President Barack Obama's performance with regard to his campaign promises, and a "GOP Pledge-O-Meter", which tracks promises made by House Republicans in their "PledgeToAmerica". Politifact.com's local affiliates keep similar track of statements and figures of regional relevance, as evidenced by Politifact Tennessee's "Haslam-O-Meter" tracking Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam's efforts[4] and Wisconsin's "Walk-O-Meter" tracking Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's efforts.[5] Politifact has been both praised and criticized by independent observers, conservatives and liberals alike. Conservative bias and liberal bias have been alleged, and criticisms have been made of attempts to fact-check statements that cannot be truly "fact-checked". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politifact.com (more)

Fact checking is the act of checking factual assertions in non-fictional text in order to determine the veracity and correctness of the factual statements in the text. This may be done either before (ante hoc) or after (post hoc) the text has been published or otherwise disseminated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact_checking (more)

Mike Caulfield: How “News Literacy” Gets the Web Wrong (more)

Jay Rosen looks at the history of Business Model-s for News (Journalism). We don't know how the general public that is supposed to have informed opinions will in the future try to inform itself. What we do know is that rich and powerful people will always find the means. Includes links to some good Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis bits.

Clay Shirky finally responds re z2003-08-05-EchoWikiBacklash - "Things seem unfocused." This is, I think, the real and core issue - the Echo Standards Wiki isn't wiki-patterned enough... As a result, many of the pages looks like a crappy BBS instead of a good wiki, and pages multiplied without being folded together.

In honor of Dave Winer (c2000) NYC visit, some notes on my history with Userland Frontier... (more)

Creator of UserLand's Userland Frontier (released 1989). See Medscape And Frontier. (more)

having a DayJob (more)

Jon Udell interviews MAPICS CEO Dick Cook on the Jobless Recovery, Off Shoring, China and India. Dick’s a pragmatic guy who outsources to India, and likely will outsource to China too, because he thinks doing otherwise would be noncompetitive. He’s not deaf to the siren song of protectionism, but would rather focus on ways to stimulate American innovation and competitiveness, and he’s compiled a list of strategies: Do more to foster math, science, and technical education. “Other countries are catching up in terms of education and skill, and we all want to ignore that,” Cook says. Make it easier for foreign nationals who earn advanced technical degrees in the United States to live and work here. “There should be a fast track to a green card, so we keep more of those highly educated people in the country,” he explains. (more)

People holding the Belief that Vaccinations cause Autism and various other problems. (more)

Vaccination to prevent The Flu (more)

aka Variola Virus (more)

Andrew Hacker asks whether we should teach Algebra. (more)

Mr. IgonValue http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Igon_Value_Problem (more)

Genius.com laid off a third of its staff, with the bulk of the cuts coming from the engineering department (more)

The universe of WebLog sites which link to each other. aka Blogosphere. (more)

Not having been a Dungeons And Dragons type, reading Geektastic was the first time I recall running across the Alignment Model of Moral/Ethical behavior. Early editions of Dungeons & Dragons allowed players to choose between three alignments when creating a character: lawful, implying honor and respect for society's rules; chaotic, implying the opposite; and neutral, meaning neither. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons introduced a second axis of good, neutral and evil, offering a combination of nine alignments. There are a couple variants of Neutral/Neutral: Neutral alignment, also referred to as True Neutral or Neutral Neutral, is called the "Undecided" or "Nature's" alignment. This alignment represents Neutral on both axes, and tends not to feel strongly towards any alignment... Some Neutral characters, rather than feeling undecided, are committed to a balance between the alignments. They may see good, evil, law and chaos as simply prejudices and dangerous extremes. One test finds me Chaotic Neutral, today... (more)

Anonymous is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. A website nominally associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives".[2] The group became known for a series of well-publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.[3] Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)

Last week, Aaron Barr, a top executive at computer security firm H B Gary Federal, boasted to the Financial Times that his firm had infiltrated and begun to expose Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers that had launched cyber attacks on companies terminating services to the whistleblowing site (such as PayPal, Master Card, Visa, Amazon and others). In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the email accounts of HB Gary, published 50,000 of their emails online, and also hacked Barr's Twitter and other online accounts. Among the emails that were published was a report prepared by HB Gary -- in conjunction with several other top online security firms, including PalantirTechnologies -- on how to destroy WikiLeaks. The emails indicated the report was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank Of America through its outside law firm, Hunton & Williams... It turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir). Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber Of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department -- meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks. (more)