Links for June 27th

WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it …

Links for May 6th

New York Times: Tornado Leaves Couple With Nothing, but Not for LongThis is a simple, sweet story about a poor couple from rural Alabama who lost the little that they owned in last week's tornadoes. Their (rented) mobile home was destroyed. In the week since, though, people keep showing up and helping in ways large …

Links for March 29th

BBC News: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relicsSeventy ancient books, made out of lead, have been found in a Jordanian cave. The text is in encoded Hebrew, little of which has been translated. Scholars are debating whether they are of Jewish origin or—far more tantalizingly—very early Christian origin. Village Voice: Women’s Funding Network Sex …

Links for March 24th

Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in …

Links for February 16th

Washington Post: Ex-rep. Perriello might run for U.S. Senate in Va. if Kaine doesn’tGood. Kaine is my first choice, for practical reasons, but Perriello is my second. Library of Congress: Chronicling AmericaThe LoC has the complete contents of long-ago newspapers from all around Virginia, mostly from around the turn of the last century. The Richmond …

Links for February 16th

New York Times: 30 Steps To Better GovernmentAmidst 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 …

“Why journalists deserve low pay.”

Economics professor Robert G. Picard argues that many journalists deserve low pay in an article in the Christian Science Monitor and, to my surprise, I agree with him. Picard’s thesis is: To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to …

Lazy journalism.

Modern media has adopted the curious practice of reporting claims, rather than facts. (I say “modern” not because I know that it wasn’t always like this, but because I have no idea.) I don’t mean to pick on either this guy or this outlet, but AP writer Anthony McCartney’s story about Jackson Browne’s lawsuit against …