The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism sends out a briefing email every morning, highlighting the biggest changes and news in the industry.
For example, in today’s news: Howard Kurtz and The Daily Beast part ways, Al Jazeera announces plans for a Detroit bureau, Facebook releases “best practices” guide for journalists and Michael Bloomberg may be interested in buying The Financial Times.
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“To me, a library … is a necessity. They have lots of things to offer. It’s kind of like home room for your community. If you want to find something out then you just ask. And they have a lot of things that they offer that they don’t advertise.” — Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading: Select quotes from parents and library staff (via pewinternet)
(via pewinternet)
“Love is the reason why people want to stay healthy. It’s why they want to stay well. It’s why people feel compelled to share, to give each other emotional support, to track observations of daily living, to track how a medication treats them as an individual so others can learn from it. Because of love. Because we want to help each other.” — Susannah Fox, Healthcare Out Loud
[video]
“Data is an abstraction of something that happened in the real world. How people move. How they spend money. How a computer works. The tendency is to approach data and by default, visualization, as rigid facts stripped of joy, humor, conflict, and sadness — because that makes analysis easier. Visualization is easier when you can strip the data down to unwavering fact and then reduce the process to a set of unwavering rules.
The world is complex though. There are exceptions, limitations, and interactions that aren’t expressed explicitly through data. So we make inferences with uncertainty attached. We make an educated guess and then compare to the actual thing or stuff that was measured to see if the data and our findings make sense.”
— Nathan Yau
“Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is “known” from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers.” —
from The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific American
(This entirely piece is fascinating.)
From the Reuters Pictures archives: Russia President Vladimir Putin hugs a Bulgarian shepherd puppy, a gift from Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov in 2010. Putin was seen walking the dog, now considerably larger (and fluffier), in March this year.
Photo: REUTERS/Oleg Popov
Weird Science: scientists have found a better way to learn about the brain… by seeing through it.
Photo: REUTERS/Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Stanford University
A portion of Nikola Tesla’s “revolutionary” neon light display at the Columbian Exposition, 1893, Chicago
(via wnycradiolab)
From Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, a list of ten things you might not know about black holes. Some of this I knew, but this one is incredible:
If you were to rope off the solar system out past Neptune, enclose it in a giant sphere, and fill it with air, it would be a black hole!
See also this recent tweet from physicist Brian Greene:
Remove all the space within the atoms making up the human body, and every person that’s ever lived would fit inside a baseball.
(via @daveg & @rosecrans)