aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, August 28, 2006
Southern Inhospitality
Cho has been here working on a film. This week she was suffering through one of our hot, muggy summer days when she encountered some unkind behavior in our alleged “city too busy to hurl ethnic slurs.”
“When you walk, you become a moving target of sorts,” writes Cho on margaretcho.com. “A free-for-all to entertain motorists as they burn up fossil fuels and leave you in their smoggy wake. I got hit today with a classic, ‘Me love you long time!’ The offender was loud and cheery enough, and the streets were just crowded enough, and I was just in between buildings and out in the blazing spotlight of sun enough to feel the full force of bitter amusement and overwhelming shame.… The incident only reveals the insensitivity and racism of the driver yet I am the one who is embarrassed. I feel violated and wronged… . I swear, I have nothing against straight men, I really adore them, when they behave.”
Via PageOneQ.
Katie goes LIVE on September 5
New York says she’s got what it takes to rejuvenate the formula. Romenesko:
Couric lacks old-fashioned TV-news “gravitas,” which is good
New York
Katie Couric is the first network anchor to have a quick, smart, mischievous sense of humor as a major part of her public persona, says Kurt Andersen. “She wonÂ’t have many opportunities to crack wise on the ‘Evening News,’ of course,” he writes. “But if you strip away the jokes from Jon Stewart‘s ‘Daily Show’ performances, what remains is an intelligent, charming, clued-in, puckish, apparently unpretentious, occasionally self-deprecating fortysomething whose responses to news stories seem recognizably, appealingly human.”
Late Breaking Repeats
Jon and Stephen are on vacation. Repeats! What to do? The Onion, tried and true:
Despite claims from the TV news outlet to offer “nonstop news” and “coverage you can count on,” an Onion investigation has uncovered hundreds of instances in which KAMR Channel 4 10 O’Clock Eyewitness News team relied almost exclusively on news reports, weather forecasts, and even special-interest features already generated by the station’s 6 O’Clock Eyewitness News team.
Via Lost Remote.
Shocking and unconscionable
That’s how Kenneth R. Feinberg, the special master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, described the contingency fee collected by one of the lawyers. The propriety of the fee is now in the courts, and that’s the gist of the article on law.com.
Indeed the fee is highly questionable to those of us taxpayers not privy to the ways of the bar. But buried down deep in the article (and highlighted by Ted Frank at Overlawyered) there’s this unfortunate turn of phrase:
Joseph P. Awad, the incoming president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and a partner in Garden City, N.Y.’s Silberstein, Awad & Miklos, was one of the lawyers who participated in TLC. He said the group was holding a dinner on the fifth anniversary of the [September 11] terrorist attacks to celebrate “the largest pro bono project in history.”
If I were Awad I just might sue.
RINO Sightings is up!
A collection of good posts from people who don’t drink Republican Kool-Aid:
A self-described “honorary member,” I’m there too:
Happy Birthday Don! Love the Ninja Text Generator!
The rigmarole called peer review
When it works, it’s genius - quality control that ensures the best papers get into the appropriate pages, lubricating communication and debate. It’s the quiet soul of the scientific method: After forming hypotheses, collecting data, and crunching numbers, you report the results to learned colleagues and ask, “What do you folks think?”
But science is done by humans, and humans occasionally screw up. They plagiarize, fake data, take incorrect readings. And when they do? Oy! Somebody always blames peer review. The process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that’s merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that’s been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. “Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish,” says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing - and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.
