NPR.org: Remembering MLK And The ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’:
King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During his last year he was organizing a poor people’s campaign to come to Washington, D.C.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.
The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the “frequency-model” – more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:
At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.
Read all about it in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”.
The Analytics X Prize is “to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city”.
Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has posted some of his progress so far using spacial regression.
CNN: “Techies unite to brainstorm help for Haiti”
Check out CrisisCamp Haiti
Usware Blog: “Doing things with Django forms”
Love this post by John Nunemaker and programming: “I Have No Talent”:
It is true. I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking about occasionally dabbling in Ruby on the weekends. I am talking about the kind of practice where I beat code that isn’t working into submission (though often times the code wins).
I’d call it some long-awaited recognition for many. Gawker: Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer.
Hmm… have I qualified as a Programmer-Journalist in the past?
It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the ‘wrong signals’. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.
It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the ‘Great Recession’ we are now in. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.
I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn’t *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.
All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.
I’m a free speech absolutist, so I’m not going to say these creatures don’t have a right to speak.
But fuck them.
You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.
Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.
Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.
As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.
The news out of Haiti this week is beyond horrific. While there has been a burst of giving enabled by cellphones that are lowering the barriers to philanthropy, if you haven’t already, give, and if you can, give again.