There’s no end to the back and forth bashing between bloggers and traditional journalists. Journalists have felt threatened by bloggers really because blogs are too immediate. That doesn’t fit with the process and techniques reporters are taught in journalism schools. With blogs everything they’ve spent years learning seems to go out the window. But really when you stop and think about it the techniques used in reporting as it’s done for print is entirely driven by the medium, the printing process. Newspapers are printed nightly. Reporters are subject to deadlines driven by the printing process. So the techniques they use are driven by the time factor.

There are these people we like to refer to as bloggers and this medium we refer to as blogs, but all we’ve really done is remove the constraints of the printing process, how often news can be printed, and constraints of delivering a physical printed paper, how often a paper can be distributed. It’s technological advancement no different than moving from the handwritten letter to email, or from the handwritten letter to the wired telephone, to the cordless, to the cell phone. Instead of winding yourself up in the 20′ stretchy cord while you talk, now we can talk to someone who’s not in front of us from virtually anywhere we want, though until recently that still wasn’t true for a long stretch of I-70 through Kansas.

It’s true though that blogs make it easy for people to do incredibly bad reporting, and not really report at all. But I’d also argue that the monopoly held so long by the print medium has allowed reporters to go relatively unchecked, except by those with a similar interest. The worst most common bad reporting technique is getting quotes to bolster the reporters view, while burying the other side of the story. This is so rampant it is just the norm and accepted. Seriously, no one even expects to get an honest, unbiased story out of a paper. Some blogs have done well, because the authors are truth seekers. Readers seek out these authors, whether they be bloggers or print journalists. They just want the truth.

A downside to the expediency of the blogging medium is fact checking, particular those widely read blogs that are expected to publish the latest news immediately and many times throughout the day. The model has become, write a couple paragraphs, add a picture (relevant or not, it doesn’t matter), publish, get feedback, then correct if necessary, but in a day the story will roll off into the archives anyway, so don’t be too concerned with accuracy and corrections. Now though, once something is published on a popular blog, there are hundreds of little sucker blogs waiting in the wings in hopes of having a little bit of the big blogs success. They are like the symbiotic relationship between sharks and the fish that latch on and clean it. Except that when the popular blog does shoddy work, it propagates out all over the world, even now into print media, and talk shows.

So we’ve got this crazy huckster guy out here in Colorado who says he’s got a tape that proves UFOs exist and he’s going to show it today. Well that’s certainly a tantalizing tale. The story goes from the local paper to the blogs and when a popular blog runs with it, then it’s all over the Internet, all day long. No exaggeration, “alien video” is Google’s 13th most searched term today, “Denver alien” hit 38th, “Jeff Peckman” 65th, “Jeff Peckman alien video” 84th, and “alien footage” 90th. Not until late in the day did anyone bother to report the fact that the guy is a huckster selling credit card gizmos that are supposed to put your chi back in order, and not for $10, but a whopping $150 a card! And then I suspect it was probably a commenter who pointed this out and got the record straight, rather than either a blogger or print journalist. Even the slightest bit of due diligence, just a few minutes effort would have made it clear what kind of sham man this guy was.

The funny thing is the guy, no doubt, did not anticipate getting picked up by the blogs and getting media attention worldwide. He’s in Boulder, which next to the Arizona desert, is hotbed for spiritual charlatans. It’s like Miami and penny stock scams. It’s the norm there. Now he’s probably going to be spending time in jail, with all the attention he’s drawn to his scams.

The odds are stacked against us - Guardian

The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural


tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when you flew to Las Vegas. You’d step out of McCarran airport, stare down the Strip at all those glittering, palatial casinos and say to yourself, “Holy crap – think of all the suckers who must have lost everything to finance this place!” Instead, our foolish minds are filled with thoughts like, “Man, look at all the money in this town – I’m going to win big!” And another casino is built.

It’s Fortune magazine, August 2000, Special Investors Issue, Retire Rich

Article: 10 Stocks to Last the Decade

And here’s the list:

 1 share of each = $972.

Where are they now?:

Of the ten companies, the only one that would have made money over the past eight years was Genentech. Your shares would now be worth $506, a 48% loss. Without the admirable help of Genentech, the loss would have been 64%. Somehow it feels a lot worse than that though, considering that you would have lost everything on Enron and virtually everything on Nortel. Of course, the majority of people sold at or near the bottoms, fairing even worse. Mathematically speaking, the bottom is generally caused by increased selling. Nice picks.

Wikipedia

The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the false belief that the probability of an event in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events, its probability increasing with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur. If a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up many times in a row, a gambler may believe, incorrectly, that heads is more likely on the following toss. Such an event may be referred to as “due”. This is an informal fallacy.

The inverse gambler’s fallacy deals with the belief that a particular outcome is less likely to occur because it has happened recently (”law of averages” or “exhausted its luck”), or because it has not happened recently (”run of bad luck”).

A joke told among mathematicians demonstrates the nature of the fallacy. When flying on an airplane, a man decides always to bring a bomb with him. “The chances of an airplane having a bomb on it are very small,” he reasons, “and certainly the chances of having two are almost none!”.

Also see Non-examples of the fallacy

5 Ways to Go Broke Getting Drunk

When does a shot of scotch cost $3,300? When the bottle’s going for $38,000 and hits $75,000 in a bidding war. Amazing Google capability: Enter ‘number of shots in a liter’ into Google Toolbar and before you hit enter AJAX serves up the answer of 22.5426817 shots, which would get an investor $72,600 in shots with a sip left over for themselves. But I suspect that bottle is going to stay on the shelf, or in the safe, the one behind the picture, for a very long time.

Betting on Volatility in Crocs

This just seems like a really bad idea. Like betting on stocks for the sake of the betting. Go to Vegas! You’ll have more fun, and people bring you drinks while your doing it, perhaps even $3,300 shots if that suits your fancy. Nicolas Cage’s character in Leaving Las Vegas would have lived a really long time at that price.

A White-Collar Sentence of 330 Years

Was it worth it? But the Dalmore 62 Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky was good while it lasted.

A federal judge sentenced 72-year-old Norman Schmidt last week to a mind-bending 330-year prison sentence after he was found guilty last May of a laundry list of conspiracy and fraud charges. Barring a scientific breakthrough in cryogenic technology, Schmidt will spend the rest of his days behind bars.

Learning from our mistakes? Flies can do it.

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

This guy Allan Snyder, sticks a magnet up to a persons head and turns them into savants, for real.

In addition to co inventing a wearable computer to predict where a roulette ball will land with an accuracy good enough to turn $1 into $1.44, way back in the 70s no less, Doyne Farmer has also done a ton of research on the markets. Also see: The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory

Investors’ mood is not key, but consumer psychology is

The Mind of Chinese Men: the Anxiety of Disorientation

The more George Soros talks, the less people care what he thinks.

What the hell really happened to Crocs?

This pretty much says it all:

Harper’s gets it, why didn’t shareholders? In a word: greed.

The Slice: Episode 14