palewire / video

The Bo Diddley Beat (1955-???).

02-Jun-08

Bo Diddley died today. But his beat lives on. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Try to tell what these songs have in common.

LA red light cameras on your TomTom or Garmin.

19-May-08

Today our A1 features Rich Connell’s look at the effectiveness of all those automated red light cameras positioned around Los Angeles. Here’s the nut:

In Los Angeles, officials estimate that 80% of red light camera tickets go not to those running through intersections but to drivers making rolling right turns, a Times review has found.

…

One of the most powerful selling points for photo enforcement systems, which now monitor 175 intersections in Los Angeles County and hundreds more across the United States, has been the promise of reducing collisions caused by drivers barreling through red lights.

But it is the right-turn infraction — a frequently misunderstood and less pressing safety concern — that drives tickets and revenue in the nation’s second-biggest city and at least half a dozen others across the county.

Our web package includes some hot tape put together by Rich, an awesome interactive explainer by Raoul Ranoa, the now perfunctory Google Map, and my own little goofy idea: portable downloads for TomTom and Garmin GPS devices (check out the roadblock halfway down the main story).

Loading the points into your device will not only map them on your dashboard monitor — but you can also easily program your system to give you an audio warning as you approach upcoming lights. And in that same soothing computer voice that already tells you when to turn.

I’m not sure how interested readers will be in this sort of product, but it seemed like a fun experiment. And since Rich had put in a great effort collecting the data from LA’s many fragmented municipalities, it seemed like we had to look for some extra yard to go for.

The technical part is pretty easy. Both manufacturers have handy developer guides that — once the data is prepared — only take a couple hours to suss out. Here’s TomTom. Here’s Garmin.

Any thoughts on other newspapery data projects that might work for GPS? The most dangerous intersections? The location of famous landmarks around town?

Bill O’Reilly Flips Out, The Ringtone.

18-May-08

I must admit, I’ve fallen in love with that amazing video of Bill O’Reilly flipping out during his old Inside Edition days. Especially the hot remix. So, in homage, I’ve cut down the first 20 seconds into an mp3 file that should be easily portable as a ringtone to your smart phone of choice. Be it iPhone, Treo, Motorola, Nokia or LG.

Just right click the file below and save it to your computer. After that, you’re on your own.

Bill O’Reilly Flips Out, The Ringtone.mp3

Let them eat Yellowcake: Iran’s hottest YouTubes.

08-Apr-08

There’s a great nugget buried in the back of the Berkman Center’s new study on the Iranian blogosphere. I’m sure their awesome social networking diagram is going to rack up hits across the Western Web this week, and deservedly so, but what I’m really taken with is their ranking of Iran’s most highly cited YouTube videos (as of Feb. 2008). The study’s general finding is that Iran’s blogosphere has a fairly diverse set of views, but they mention that expatriates and secular reformers tend to link in YouTube more often than conservos. Their methodology for the study (and, presumably, the ranking) is at the bottom. But, first, let’s get those mothers out the pdf and onto the Web, where they belong.

10. “Against Capital Punishment—Against the Islamic Regime”

09. “Mansour Osanloo - Freedom Will Come”

08. “Iran ey Sara e Omid”

07. “Mohsen Namjoo”

06. “Nazeri”

05. “Crack in Iran”

04. “Holy Crime”

03. “A girl with a childish voice”

02. “Akhoond’s (Cleric) Comment on Girls.”

PRIVATE! NO!

01. “Kiosk: Love for Speed”

Berkman provides a translation for the No. 1 hit. Here goes:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the evil axis
Speed freaks in jalopy taxis

Why feel any pain and suffer
When pills and powders’ all on offer

Nothing for lunch or dinner to make
Then let them eat Yellow Cake

Multiple choice elections left to chance
Holy matrimony by loan and finance

Scraped up the very last dime
Sent it straight to Palestine

Guaranteed success or money back
Underground music or cultural attack

No need for cardiologists
Just facelifts by cosmetologists

Immoral zealots, fanatic factions
Chinese-style economic expansions

Religious democratic droppings
Pizza with Ghormeh Sabzi toppings

Now for the Berkman methodology:

The basis of the social network analysis and blogs selection was a corpus of blog data collected by Morningside Analytics (MA) between July 2007 and March 2008. MA tracks a list of over 200,000 Persian language blogs, built initially from a snowball spidering process. 98,875 of these blogs are monitored daily, with all new text and links recorded to a database. Social networks analysis was used to identify the most active and prominent blogs, the top 6018 of which were mapped to identify the core structures of the Iranian blogosphere, create visualizations, and identify blogs for human and computational text analysis. The map (visualization) of the Iranian blogosphere is plotted using the Fruchterman-Rheingold algorithm, which employs a ‘physics model’ approach in which blogs that are more densely connected are drawn together into clustered ‘network neighborhoods.’ The color of the blogs results from ‘Attentive Cluster Analysis,’ in which the linking histories of blogs are compared statistically in order to identify groups sharing similar linking preferences. The largest seven attentive clusters corresponded with major structural features of the Iranian blogosphere, and were selected for qualitative study. Smaller clusters were not studied in-depth, though this would be a worthy topic for future analysis.

What’s the Standard Issue?

07-Sep-07

A ritual stop on my regular tour of DC blogs is The Worldwide Standard, an online outpost of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard.

Even if you’re not a DC newsjunkie, you’ve probably come across TWS’s editor, Bill Kristol, at one time or another. He’s on cable news all the time, serving as one of the Bush Administration’s leading supporters.

I like to follow the site’s blog, which is tended by editor Michael Goldfarb and a team of bloggers, to keep tabs on conservative opinion. The content has an interesting focus on military matters, so it’s also a good way to skim my way into what’s going on in the circle of military bloggers (”milbloggers”) that have bubbled up in Washington over the past couple of years.

One of the site’s regular features is a post called “Required Reading” that provides a short list of links and maybe a picture or video.

In the spirit of a previous post I made analyzing the links to online outlets offered by one of TWS’s political opponents, I wrote a script this afternoon to fetch all of the TWS’s “Required Reading” lists and add up what sources we’ve been pointed to the most.

If you click here, you can download a spreadsheet ranking the different sources. It totals all the links from posts they’ve tagged as Required Reading, which stretch back to February of this year.

I’ve eliminated all of the internal links to Weekly Standard’s own material, so those aren’t even in the running.

At the top of the list is the Washington Post, followed by a number of publications with a reputation for conservative editorializing. Fellow Rupert Murdoch properties, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal finish ahead of the NYTimes. And a number of military-oriented organizations, foreign policy wonks and blogs pepper the rest of the list. The national security blog at Wired and BillRoggio.com have been particularly popular. You’ll also find a couple regional newspapers and a few other oddballs. Unlike my previous study, there are, sadly, no referrals for my employer, The Center for Public Integrity (Hey, guys. You might like my military aid database!).

Any thoughts? Anything I screwed up? Overlooked?

See his work

25-May-06

I work as a reporter, albeit a somewhat unconventional one. My job calls on me to specialize in what is often called computer-assisted reporting. That’s a funny phrase — have you ever heard of a computer-assisted photographer or a computer-assisted architect? — but what it means is that I use computers to collect, organize, analyze and present large amounts of information. Databases. Maps. Web Toys. Scripts. That stuff.

While I’m excited by the journalistic potential of new technology, I have an abiding admiration for the virtues of traditional reporting techniques, which I plan to continue using wherever I work.

I’m employed at the Los Angeles Times, a daily newspaper and 24-hour Web site based in Southern California. Nothing I write here should be interpreted as the opinion of that organization.

Before working at the Times, I worked on data projects at The Center for Public Integrity, covered state politics and elections in Jefferson City, Missouri, helped produce long-form documentaries for cable channels like CNN and Discovery Times, and pitched in on some television and newspaper reporting in Chicago. I earned a master’s degree from the Missouri School of Journalism — where I worked at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) — after receiving my undergraduate training at DePaul University.