Links for February 16th

  • New York Times: 30 Steps To Better Government
    Amidst all of the flowery rhetoric about making government more efficient, this op-ed by Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro seems wonderfully concrete. He describes some of the GAO's successes thus far, and where they see improvement is necessary. Auditing oil and gas leases seems promising. Right now, we expect corporations to self-report how much of our oil and gas they've extracted from our land, on which they pay royalties. And—shocker—the numbers seem awfully low.
  • New York Times: Secrets of a Mind-Gamer
    Joshua Foer volunteers for an experiment—he, an average guy, will try to improve his memory sufficiently to compete in memory competitions, performing such tasks as memorizing the order of a deck of cards in just a few minutes, recalling pages of random words, or lists of binary digits. The conclusion is astounding.
  • The Atlantic: Maybe This Nir Rosen Person Should Reconsider Tweeting
    This journalist made a series of jokes about the attack and molestation of CBS News reporter Lara Logan, and is rightly being lambasted by Salon, The Atlantic, and even People magazine. (He lost his position at NYU today as a result.) He's trying to play this off as just a one-time mistake in judgement but, having encountered him professionally last year, I can confirm that he is, in fact, a horrible, thoughtless human being, and that this behavior is just Nir Rosen being Nir Rosen. It's wickedly satisfying to see him get his comeuppance.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

One reply on “Links for February 16th”

  1. The lesson in all of this for Mr. Rosen is as follows: when something bad happens to someone we don’t like through no fault of her own, that’s still a tragedy. When something bad happens to someone we don’t like because the idiot can’t stop himself from trying to squeeze as many rape-related jokes as ever he possibly can into a mere 140 characters, well, that’s just plain hilarious.

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