Wi-fi allergy hoax: do journalists ever check facts?
The recent stories about the man claiming to suffer from an “allergy” to wi-fi were not just, as I initially thought, someone with a psychosomatic problem; it was a publicity stunt that cleverly exploited journalists’ inability to check facts. (more…)
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LA Times false accusation of Facebook
Yet more examples of the wonderful fact checking that we can rely on journalists to do, the LA Times has a story that relies entirely on the authority of “someone’s blog said so”, accusing Facebook of using user’s photos in ads without permission. It was soon convincingly re-butted by Facebook. (more…)
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National Portait Gallery and everlasting copyrights
I had not intended to blog about the National Portrait Gallery threatening to sue Wikipedia over the latter’s publication of copies of paintings in the gallery, as I thought it would be obvious to anyone that this is a blatant attempt to use physical possession of a work to get around the expirations of copyrights. Tactics like this can effectively extend copyright indefinitely. (more…)
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Why blogs are better than newspapers
Here is an example. It is readable (even if you skip the calculations), explains the argument for expecting a strong recovery, and why it may not happen. (more…)
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Google hatred
The usually intelligent Willem Buiter has written a great example of the irrational hatred that Google seems to sporadically evoke. He attacks them with a list of charges, all of which are easily refuted.
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Scary Pew Research
Many people have called the recent Pew Research Centre poll that “showed” that only 26% of Americans believed in evolution. What is really scary is that no-one seems to have looked closely enough at it to see that it showed nothing of the sort.
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Old news, but….
…just in case you missed it (I did till today).
The Guardian was fooled by an elaborate hoax into claiming that NASA conducted experiments on sex in space.
They believed the story because they got the claim from a “respected French scientific writer”, Pierre Kohler. Neither he nor Jon Henley (the Guardian journalist responsible) actually thought of doing some of the proper fact checking.
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Here is the news: and its going to get better
Alan Patrick has a rather dismal take on mainstream news media’s loss of audience to bloggers. I am considerably more optimistic: I think Alan both over-estimates the quality of newspapers and TV news, and under-estimates the quality available from blogs.
Newspapers deserve to die
We all know newspapers are slowly dying. Competition from the internet may be one cause, but newspapers hardly help themselves by simply being so bad. The Guardian has a great example in Zoe William’s whine about how her baby is more affectionate towards his father than to her. (more…)
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The Wall Street Journal gets spun
The Wall Street Journal seems to have been completely fooled by telecoms spin-doctors into claiming that Google, and other prominent advocates of net neutrality, have changed their views.
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