Wednesday, August 10, 2005

OJR's Mark Glaser talks to NYT's Keller and Nisenholtz about merging the online and web newsrooms. 4:33:34 PM   permalink   comment []

Salon's Farhad Manjoo says about the web, "Creativity is back. The idea that the Web is a giant get-rich-quick vehicle no longer pervades the business." Similar to what Tim Berners-Lee is saying. Creativity on the web...what if someone had a conference keyed to that theme? It would be cool. Better yet, the conference could recognize that the web opens creative opportunities for all people...hey, let's call it Converge and have it in Greensboro in October. (Manjoo says new and better web tools are on the way, including some from a company called 37 Signals; I spoke to founder Jason Fried for this article). 12:45:47 PM   permalink   comment []

A transcript of Paul Bermanzohn's testimony to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission is now available at the T&R blog. You are supposed to get conservative in medical school; I became more radical as I saw how poor people were treated. How no expense was spared in taking care of upper class people and how if you were poor, and especially if you were poor and black you were treated as a lesser creature. I was shocked to hear poor black people routinely called "teaching material" in the clinics. Poor white folks weren’t treated much better. When I took a year off from medical school to work in Durham’s anti-poverty program as a health specialist, it was no surprise that the black community called Duke Hospital the Plantation. My father got sick when I was a medical student and he got about the same treatment in NYC teaching hospitals as was given to poor folks at Duke. It wasn’t just a Southern thing or a black thing. By the time I graduated from medical school in 1974 I was on my way to becoming a revolutionary. This is important stuff, as it humanizes the marchers and explains something about their motivations. Other explanations and rationalizations in the testimony I found less compelling. Read the whole thing. 8:22:25 AM   permalink   comment []

Gatheroo is a free alternative to Meetup. "Gatheroo was created on the premise that community organizing and meeting sites, by their very grassroots nature, should be available to all, not just those who can afford the fees." Here's their blog...and the bio of co-founder Randall Kindley, a Greensboro native (and political-polar-opposite to his brother, Marcus). 8:07:01 AM   permalink   comment []

More meth-panic backlash, this time from Jack Shafer in Slate. Moral panics rip through cultures, observed sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, whenever "experts" and the "right-thinking" folks in the press, government, and the clergy exaggerate the danger a group or thing poses to society...No exaggeration or vilification directed their way is too outrageous for consideration. For the last year, a moral panic about methamphetamine and its users has been gathering force. Shafer takes on reports of "meth mouth," the tooth-rot supposedly caused by drug use: "None of the articles blaming 'contaminated' methamphetamine for meth mouth cite any literature or authority, perhaps because it doesn't exist." As discussed in the comments to yesterday's post on "drug-war" hysteria, I don't think anyone but long-distance truckers and supermodels should do speed -- it is a nasty and dangerous drug. But it's well past time to rethink our drug laws, which clearly do not work very well, and to address more substances as public health problems instead of just putting users in prison. 8:01:12 AM   permalink   comment []