- Reuters: How I misread News Corp’s taxes
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston broke a story earlier this week about how News Corp had received $4.8B in income tax refunds over the past four years, while paying nothing. Turns out he was entirely wrong. What he'd written was the opposite of the truth. News Corp changed how they report their tax payments on their financial statements—switching from positive to negative numbers—and that was how it all started. Further confusing matters, Johnston contacted News Corp about his conclusions, and they had no quarrel with it. To Johnston's credit, he's going on the same press tour he went on a few days ago, trying to make the story of his mistake as big as his incorrect initial story. - CSS Sprite Generator
Upload a ZIP file full of images, it returns with a file full of sprites and the relevant CSS. It's a great little tool! - Thirty Thousand: The Population Size of U.S. House Districts by Year and by Congress from 1790 to 2100
This website, which advocates returning the House of Representatives to its 1793 rate of representation, provides this chart of the average population per U.S. House district from its founding until 2010. The chamber was envisioned—and created—to have each member represent 30,000 people. Congress fixed the number of seats at the arbitrary number of 435 back in 1929, and congressmen have come to represent more and more people ever since. It now stands at 710,000 people and climbing.
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I still don’t understand why the News Corp people didn’t correct Johnston when he called them up about it. Did they believe that having it become a huge negative story for the company was worth it in order to have it blow up shortly thereafter, giving them a way of discrediting Johnston and by extension the non-Murdoch media? It’s hard to believe it’s really a net plus for New Corp, since the number of people who hear about a correction is always much smaller than the number who hear the original story.