Month: March 2010

by Patrick Appel

Pew's report on news consumption came out this morning. Ambinder summarizes:

Pew's latest survey of news consumption is out, and if there's been any illusion about the pace of the shift to the Web, it ought to end: 63% of Americans say that online news sources are regular providers of information of them. Forty-six percent Americans get their news from at least four sources. More than a third of Americans have participated in the newsgathering stream in some way, either by contributing comments or iReports.

The Web is now the number two for news, just behind local and national television — and ahead of newspapers and radio.

ReadWriteWeb has more highlights. Below is graph showing which topics the public thinks don't get enough attention:

by Alex Massie

I'll be concentrating on British politics and the forthcoming election here this week, but if you'll forgive a foreigner wandering into the battle for health care reform, might I suggest that if James Carville and Jim DeMint are correct to argue that failing to pass HCR will be "Obama's Waterloo" then the converse must also be true and, therefore, passing the bill could also be "Obama's Waterloo" because, you know, Waterloo was a significant victory for some of us.

And even if it's not a final, crushing victory on the scale of Waterloo, it might be considered "Obama's Peninsular War". That's not nothing, either. Right?

by Patrick Appel

The other blogs have been restored.

In Dish specific news, Sitemeter is back up (traffic from today looks tiny because it only started counting visitors around 4 pm). We've been told that the fonts will change. Other fixes are forthcoming.

by Chris Bodenner

HuffPo is live-blogging early reports that a hazmat unit has been sent to deal with a "suspicious substance" at an IRS building in Ogden, Utah. Two stretchers were spotted by an NBC affiliate.

by Graeme Wood

The eroto-quants at OKCupid.com have produced a data-intensive argument that men should date older women.  Specifically, they should target women who have moved into what Sanjay Gupta has called (on 30 Rock, anyway) their "dirty thirties":

There are two operative stereotypes of older single women: the sad-sack (à la Bridget Jones) and the "cougar" (à la Samantha from Sex In The City) and both, like all stereotypes, are reductionist and stupid and I've tried to avoid them. I hesitated beginning my case for older women with something about their sexuality, like I did in Exhibit A, because that territory borders right on cougar country. But the evidence there was too compelling to ignore.

by Chris Bodenner

A new poll from Anchorage-based GOP consultant Dave Dittman finds that only 17% of Alaskans want Palin to run for president. Mudflats doesn't seem shocked:

No Alaskan pollster has asked the question that I would ask – “If Sarah Palin were to run for governor of Alaska in 2010, would you vote for her?”   That’s the one I want.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

It seems likely that high IQ people are more likely than others to reject the religious outlook of their families and strike out on their own. As such, lower IQs will correlate with any society's dominant religion, and higher IQs will correlate with its minority religions insofar as those religions accept converts. Atheism is always recruiting, so in theistic, Christian societies like the United States, atheists will have, on average, slightly higher IQs than Christian theists. I recall reading that, in Japan, Christianity and high IQ are correlated, for similar reasons.

Jason Richwine made this same point last year in response to another study:

The correlation exists not because smart people have necessarily rejected religion, but because religion is the “default” position for most of our society.

This same principle works in places where the default and iconoclastic beliefs are reversed. Japan, for example, has no tradition of monotheistic religion, but the few Japanese Christians tend to be much more educated than non-Christians in Japan. By the logic of someone who wants to read a lot into the Stankov study, Christianity must be the wave of the future, perhaps even the one true faith! But, of course, the vast majority of educated Japanese are not Christians. Just as with atheism in the West, the correctness of Christianity cannot be inferred from the traits of the minority who subscribe to it in Japan.

To reiterate, people who subscribe to non-traditional ideas probably have above-average intellects, but that does not mean other smart people will like those ideas.

Ilya Somin thinks along similar lines.

By Andrew Sullivan

Megan chimes in:

I've been doing this nearly since the inception of the political blogosphere: I started the predecessor to this blog, Live from the WTC, in November 2001. And I know that a good many of you have been with me the whole time. The new design violates a lot of those conventions and I've heard a lot of angry pushback. Oh, boy, have I heard it.

There's been internal conversation about this, and like James and Ta-Nehisi, I'm optimistic. The internet is great precisely because it enables rapid experimentation, and failure, and change of the things that don't work. But there's no way of knowing whether something will work until you've tried it. Some of the new features are great–there are some hitches in the comment system, but overall, I think most of us agree that it's a huge improvement. The site as a whole has vastly improved navigation. But as with all new products, there probably need to be some tweaks.

The good news is: all this can be fixed and your suggestions and comments are enormously helpful in restoring what was lost while retaining some of the great new stuff. I'm just relieved that the Dish wasn't turned into a bunch of headlines. The sharpest analysis in my book comes from one of Megan's commenters (as so often). I had no input into any of this whatever – except for a final quick check of what my page would look like on a piece of printed paper. Big mistake on my part.

But I feel pretty confident we'll get the fixes you've all asked for so insistently since last week. I've certainly forwarded them all to the relevant parties. Maybe by the time I get back from vacation, all will be well again.

by Alex Massie

Question: What's the difference between Greece and Britain?

Answer: Britain has the Elgin Marbles.

Well, I exaggerate. But only slightly. Britain's financial position isn't quite as bad as Greece's but it's clattering downhill all the same and looking desperately likely to end in a fearful crash. If the budget deficit peaks at 13% of GDP this year then we'll look back on that as a good result. Which is kind of terrifying in its own right.

The seriousness of the fiscal crisis – brought on by a combination of feckless government spending (mislabelled, as is traditional now, as "investment") and the near-collapse of the banking system – is such that, frankly, the public would rather not contemplate it. But the next government, whether run (sic) by Gordon Brown or David Cameron is going to be in hock to the bond markets and it is they who will call the tunes.

The idea that neither party might win a majority and that instead we'll have a hung parliament (great for pundits; not so hot for the markets) is already spooking the markets. This spring is a good time for Americans to visit the UK: the pound has fallen below $1.50 and will probably fall further.

Worse, from the perspective of Britishers rather than tourists, there is a non-trivial possibility that Britain will lose its Triple A credit rating. We're not there yet and Britain isn't Greece yet but it's a testament to the seriousness of the situation that such comparisons can be made in the first place.

This, then, is the background to the election and yet no-one really wants to confront it. Both parties agree that cuts in public spending will have to come and that taxes will have to rise (VAT will almost certainly be increased to 20% for instance) but no-one, understandably, wants to frighten the voters too much by talking about any of this in any great detail.

But the underlying fiscal reality is that the winner of the election is going to have to tell the public that there isn't any money left. This too is something the public doesn't much care to hear and that only increases the sense that there will be few prizes awarded for winning this election.