The Problem With the Media

Politics

Did you hear about the government spent $16 a muffin at a recent breakfast? You probably did, even though it isn’t true. As Sam Stein shared on Huffington Post, that price actually reflected “a full continental breakfast plus tax.” But instead of searching for context or qualifiers, most media outlets just ran the prepackaged “government wastes your cash” staple and called it a day.

Stein sums it up:

There were 223 stories that mentioned either “$16 muffins,” “$16 per muffin,” “sixteen dollar muffin” or “16 dollar muffin,” according to a LexisNexis search. Of those, 178 reported the issue critically or didn’t even mention the Hilton hotel’s response. Thirty-seven stories offered an explanation for the cost of the muffins or attempted to correct the record. Eight simply played off the issue without taking a side (such as figuring out how one would actually make a $16 muffin).

That’s not to say the government doesn’t waste money. But if you want to know why the public thinks the government wastes more than half of what it spends, stories like this are a good place to start.

Riding the Gravy Train

Games

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

I finally read Taylor Branch’s takedown of college sports in the Atlantic, and it’s a knockout. “The Shame of College Sports” details how the NCAA oversees a billion-dollar industry, diverting profits from participants to the top stakeholders. The organization uses the student-athlete concept to—perhaps illegally—strip athletes of their rights to their representation and labor. They have opaque, arbitrary enforcement and appeals mechanisms. They’ve enlisted universities in perverting their own central mandate: education.

And I eagerly consume their product, so I’m a big part of the problem. In a perfect world, I think athletic scholarships shouldn’t exist. At minimum, students should have proceeds from their likeness (jersey sales, video games, etc.) placed in a lockbox until after they graduate.

But in the meantime, it’s exciting to hear that players have contemplated taking matters into their own hands. As Branch shares, “William Friday, the former North Carolina president, recalls being yanked from one Knight Commission meeting and sworn to secrecy about what might happen if a certain team made the NCAA championship basketball game. ‘They were going to dress and go out on the floor,’ Friday told me, ‘but refuse to play,’ in a wildcat student strike.”

Can you imagine the reaction? I’d love to see it. Dunkers of the world unite…

Seeing a Song

Music, Science

Too fascinating not to share: Jon-Kyle, who appears from his website to be a designer and musician, has used the software refreq to do a real-time map of all the frequencies that go into a song in a circle around a vertical axis.

Musical spectrum analysis from Jon-Kyle on Vimeo.

As a crappy amateur musician myself, I think it would be fascinating to explore how you can craft and characterize sounds from their innate waveshapes. I know there are tools out there that let you begin to do this, but it would take some serious brain time to even begin to understand them.

Thanks to Flowing Data for calling my attention to this.

Redrawing the Boundaries

Well Worth Reading

After a death, family members show signs of grief and exhibit ritualistic behavior. Field biologists such as Joyce Poole, who has studied Africa’s elephants for more than 35 years, describe elephants trying to lift the dead body and covering it with dirt and brush. Poole once watched a female stand guard over her stillborn baby for three days, her head, ears, and trunk drooped in grief. Elephants may revisit the bones of the deceased for months, even years, touching them with their trunks and creating paths to visit the carcass.

The most recent National Geographic has a moving article on efforts to save orphaned elephants in Kenya. Because elephants are such social animals, they need humans to provide emotional support as well as food and shelter.

It’s amazing how sophisticated the elephants are in their interaction with the people and peers around them. The boundaries we set for cognition come out looking pretty arbitrary.