Slipr

The world uses 85 million barrels a day.

At 42 gallons to the barrel, that’s three billion, five hundred and seventy million gallons of oil (3,570,000,000).

Niagara falls has a flow rate of 150,000 U.S. gallons per second.

3,570,000,000 of oil / 150,000 gallons per second = 23,800 seconds of flow equivalent.

In other words, if by some horrific means you were able to replace the flow over niagara falls with nothing but oil for 6.6 hours a day, that’s how much oil the 6 billion inhabitants of the earth burn every single day of every year, and have been for more or less the past ten years.

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Spotted in Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: a transcultural neuroimaging approach

Abstract:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

Of note:

By comparing cognitive functions in people from Western (European and American) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera) cultures, the ‘culture-and-cognition’ approach104 demonstrates that different sociocultural systems give rise to dissimilar thought styles. Westerners generally think in an analytical way, whereas East Asians generally think in a more holistic manner5, 7. For instance, during a perception task, Americans were better at detecting changes in salient objects than East Asians, and were less affected by contextual information24, 26, 27.

Cultural differences are also evident in social cognition. In a game that involved two individuals interacting, Chinese participants were more in tune with their partner’s perspective than Americans105. Furthermore, Chinese people were more likely to describe memories of social and historical events and focused more on social interactions, whereas European Americans more frequently focused on memories of personal experiences and emphasized their personal roles in events106. Westerners were better at remembering trait words that they associated with themselves than they were at remembering words that they associated with people close to them84, 107, whereas Chinese people remembered both equally well108. Americans tended to explain behaviours in terms of peoples’ dispositions (for example, a person’s gender and education), whereas East Asians showed a preference for attributing behaviour to situational factors (for example, environmental events)9, 109 and were more likely to use situational information to predict other people’s behaviour110. Chinese people endorsed contextual explanations of physical events (for example, friction influencing the movement of an object) more often than Americans, who were more likely to attribute physical events to dispositional factors (for example, an object’s weight or composition)111.

Culture also influences category-based classification of objects: Chinese people organized objects in a more relational (for example, to group a monkey and a banana together because monkeys eat bananas) and less categorical (for example, to group a monkey and a panda together because both are animals) way than European Americans7, 112. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the diversity of multiple-level cognitive processes across cultures and the dependence of human cognition on sociocultural contexts.

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“Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.”

My Genome, My Self — NYTimes Magazine

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• People will eventually pay for content, one way or another. They already do, in some places (WSJ, Cooks Illustrated, etc.)
• Many people say that whatever is coming next isn’t here yet – I disagree. I know individuals who are building entire (nascent) media brands on little more than sweat equity – without anyone noticing, some bloggers have begun, as their revenue streams have expanded, to turn into actual reporters – ecogeek.org is a good example.
• Charity is probably not the answer, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its place. (e.g. Spot.us) For-profit businesses, by definition, are capable of expanding, even thriving; charities are inherently self-limiting (or limited by the availability of those kinds of funds).
• Things seem bad now, but remember, advertisers still want to reach audiences, and they’ll do it one way or another. This terrible advertising market will bottom out — and whoever is left standing will reap the benefits when it finally recovers.

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“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
–Peter Drucker

Lately I’ve been employing a new method of coming up with pitches and story ideas for my freelance writing gigs: I think of something I’m interested in. I imagine what direction it’s going in. Then I come up with a fanciful or counter-intuitive hypothesis about the state of that field. (In essence I come up with a pitch and a lede first.) Then I back-fill the research to find out whether or not it’s legit.

Basically I’m applying the synthetic engine of science fiction to the observational field of journalism. It reminds me of my days in the lab – come up with an idea, test it, pursue it if it works or discard it if it doesn’t.

(Another, possibly related trick is to pick up an intriguing idea that is a few years old but hasn’t been covered since an initial big discovery. Often researchers and fields doing cool stuff five years ago are still doing it today, and if you’re lucky, nobody but you is paying attention.)

Both of these tactics help me escape the group-think that is a product of all this journalism-by-press-release that is the bulk of what’s put out there these days.

For that reason alone this is often a better use of my time than simply looking around for story ideas, because generally the things I come up with are unique, whereas any stories I hear about are just as likely to be something my editors have already heard of.

Maybe all journalists do this and I’m only just now, a decade into this, figuring it out. I’d always thought journalists found things out through actual, you know, investigation. As sources of cool stuff increasingly find their own voices, however — through blogs, an ever-expanding array of journals and journal aggregators/parsers, university press offices, etc. — I find it’s just as likely that the information will come to me, or that it can simply be found online.

It helps to have cultivated and to obsessively scan a list of primary and secondary sources that are (in my opinion) excellent but (in my experience) not often read by other science journalists. Update: I’ve since discovered an even better trick, which is simply to keep interviewees chatting until they cough up something totally novel — in this way, one piece seamlessly flows into the next.

(It also helps that search algorithms are imperfect and will occasionally surface things that have nothing at all to do with what I’m looking for but are none the less worthwhile.)

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1) Everyone loves news.

They love consuming it, they love making it. People will pay close to $40,000 just to get a masters degree in it, an investment that will subsequently earn them about the same wage as a unionized garbage worker. Maybe less! So really, it’s not like there’s disinterest here, as is the case with other important stuff like math and science.

2) A big reason that news outlets aren’t making enough money online is that there is an oversupply of advertising real estate.

Just think about it: print readership is declining, but not as fast as online readership is increasing. Net result: People are consuming more media than ever!

Meanwhile, ad buyers, who are not known for being the sharpest tacks in the media box, are slow to adapt to new kinds of content. Just ask anyone trying to make money on online video! Worse yet, as audiences fracture, the job of ad buyers — and the companies they represent — becomes more challenging: it’s just about 10 times as hard to do ten $10,000 ad buys as it is to do one $100,000 ad buy.

3) A media die-off will make ad space more valuable

Advertising, after all, is a market, governed by supply and demand. Ad-supported media exists at the whim of companies that need to reach consumers. As media outlets die off, the remaining ad inventory becomes more valuable. Perhaps even to the point that online ads reach parity with their print counterparts — or more than parity, if you recognize that web ads are measured so much better than print ads that a million views does not equal a million subscriptions (on account of all those subscriptions that go straight into the trash).

Ask any young turk with a facility at creating media for the web — right now there is plenty of work out there, especially when you consider what a shite economy we’re having. Which can mean only one thing…

4) What we’re experiencing right now is not the death of media but massive turnover in the media job market.

Is there a net shrinkage as captive markets that used to rely on local newspapers to deliver national news, movie reviews, stock prices etc. suddenly find themselves able to get the same thing directly from Google? Yes… and that’s even in consideration of the fact that some of those jobs are going to people no one would consider journalists, but who answer the same need, like the coders who built and maintain Google News.

But the death of the media? No, that’s silly. Merely a significant transformation.

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