The White House Soup of the Day for August 31, 2011 via MSNBC and FishbowlDC:
Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-b0P
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The National Institutes of Health has released bold new ethics rules. All NIH grantees, recipients of tens of billions of dollars in public research funds, must reveal their financial ties to big medical and drug corporations to administrators of their institutions, who will then keep the information to themselves.
“The National Institutes of Health New Ethics Rules: A Swing and a Miss,” Paul Thacker and Ned Feder, Project On Government Oversight
“Worst Excuse Ever,” Matthew Yglesias, Think Progress
Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-aZT
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Two months after he was released from government detention, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has written an essay for the online version of Newsweek. It’s about economic oppression, human rights, and urban sprawl in Beijing:
“Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves.”
Read it here.
Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-b0B
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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You may have read that the new 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary omits the term “cassette tape” from its entries to make room for a bunch of new Web terms like “sexting,” “retweet” and “woot.” Digital displaces analog, get it? Good story, only it doesn’t appear to be true.
The White House Soup of the Day for August 29, 2011 via MSNBC and FishbowlDC:
Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-aZI
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Astounding animated GIF about Compact Disc audio recording sales from Digital Music News. Cliff Kuang explains it well at Fast Company Design.
On Capitol Hill, damage from Hurricane Irene is due to rain, not wind. Mature older trees shade the streets, but many have rotted root systems, so the storm’s two days of heavy rain loosened their foundations, causing the trunks to come crashing down, either in the street or on nearby houses. The photo above shows the results on the 1200 block of C Street SE. Here’s what the roots look like:
Hurricane Irene is now a tropical storm, but the surge caused by its huge vortex of winds has reinforced the incoming tide and caused flooding of the southern tip of Manhattan Island, including Battery Park, the ferry terminal, and the edge of the Financial District. At this time we do not know if Con Edison intends to cut off the area’s electrical power or if the Stuyvesant High School swim team is doing laps outside, on Chambers Street.
The Eastern Seaboard of the United States is currently experiencing the ravages of Hurricane Irene, and local television stations are desperately trying to justify their 21st-century existence by keeping staff meteorologists up ’round the clock and sending hapless reporters to the beach. As far as we’re concerned, reporters assigned to the Delaware Shore when steamed crabs and frozen custard are unavailable deserve hardship pay.
Local TV news coverage of hurricanes chiefly consists of shaky, intermittent video, and lots of wind noise. Live remote broadcasts show reporters invading evacuated coastal resort towns, driving through standing water, walking on the beach, and doing all the things citizens are cautioned against by emergency officials.
Ohio’s Joe the Plumber may challenge Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D, OH-9) in the 2012 election. You may remember him. His name isn’t really Joe, and he isn’t really a plumber, but he became famous in 2008 for asking presidential candidate Barack Obama questions about a tax bracket actually much higher than his own. Since then, Samuel Joseph “Joe” Wurzelbacher campaigned for failed presidential candidate John McCain and failed as both author and Internet foreign correspondent.
Joe’s book, like his biography and politics, is fiction. His political aspirations, however, are real — his greatest accomplishment to date is his recent election as one of only 400 Republican Party committee members in Ohio’s Lucas County (37,258 registered Republicans).
