Category: news
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The Future of the Calendar
The calendar has the possibility to become “the biggest software revolution of the future”, says Scott Adams in an article looking at how crucial time and proximity are in making information (more) relevant. I also found myself agreeing with Adams’ thoughts on news: When I read the news, I’m generally most interested in how stories…
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Online-Only Newspapers: Counterintuitive Trends
Studying the progress of the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat as it became Europe’s first online-only newspaper, researchers from City University London discovered a number of seemingly counterintuitive trends from the newspaper’s retiring of its print business. Six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 percent lower and Page Impressions 11 percent down. […]…
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Visualising the News (The Guardian & New York Times APIs)
The New York Times Developer Network is the media outlet’s “API clearinghouse” offering details of how you can get access to the extensive data they have released (from stories dating back to 1981). Using this API, Jer Thorp has created some visualisations of NYT trends using Processing (a language I keep promising to take a…
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The Year in Photographs
I try not to link to individual entries from The Big Picture because, well, they’re all good. However, there’s always an exception. The Year 2008 in Photographs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) is a three–part collection of some of the best photographs from the year, covering a wide range of events. 2008 has been…
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Time’s Year in Review
In the most unsurpsing move of the year, Time has announced Barack Obama as Person of the Year, 2008. But it’s the other parts of the Year in Review issue that interest me the most. People Who Mattered tells the story of those who have changed the course of science, politics and science in 2008: some for…
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Church of England to Apologise to Charles Darwin
A breath of fresh air:the Church of England is to officially apologise to Charles Darwin—126 years following his death—for dismissing his theory of evolution. This apology coincides with the release of a new CoE website promoting Darwin and his views, released this morning. The trouble with homo sapiens is that we’re only human. People, and…
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Children Can’t Differentiate Between Toys and Nutritional Items
“Children can’t differentiate between toys and nutritional items” No, it’s not a classic piece of ‘Onion‘ reportage; it’s a quote from Miriam Gruß, a member of the German parliamentary children’s committee, on why the Germans plan on banning Kinder Eggs (are these available in the US?). Charlie Brooker’s characteristically hilarious retort is best placed here.…
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Must Read Daily
Wondering what the hot topic of the day is? Wonder no more, with Must Read Daily: Wish you could get the one article everyone’s talking about e-mailed to you every morning? Welcome to Must Read Daily, a daily text-only e-mail list. Every weekday morning, we promise to send you the most important article in a…
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Key Factors in the Economic Slowdown
The BBC has compiled a number of graphs vividly showing the key factors affecting the current economic ‘crisis’ – the results are quite enlightening. Some aspects aren’t deviating far from the general long-term trend (petrol prices); some are not as dramatic (with a long-term comparison) as some fear (house prices); while others genuinely are anomalies…
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Suicide and Media Coverage
The British Medical Journal has an article that I’ve spoken of numerous times lately (IRL), discussing how media coverage of suicides affects the rate of similar suicides. There is clear evidence that the media may affect method specific suicide rates. In Britain an excess of about 60 suicides by burning occurred in the 12 months…