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Thursday, April 30, 2009
Swine flu viewed as worldwide epidemic due to uses of modern communication By Charles Austin The Maneater
As you read this, dinosaurs are attacking the White House. The Associated Press is reporting dinosaur sightings across Virginia and Washington, with rumors that the creatures have spread as far as New York. Scientists fear a massive dinosaur migration toward Houston once they realize how delicious fat people are. The government has issued orders to ground all airplanes because Americans got tired of hearing about reptiles on planes about three years ago. I realize now that half of my readers are probably already running toward Seattle in an effort to lose weight and escape the dinosaur menace. I realize that the other half of you probably stopped reading because you realized how dumb this column and its author are. But if anyone is still around, I must admit that I was a little hasty in my opening remarks. I saw “Jurassic Park” on TV and mistook it for a live news feed for a moment. How did they get those dinosaurs to act, anyway?
NASA From Page 4
ly believe that increasing spending on social programs from $1.581 trillion to $1.597 trillion would make any appreciable difference? Note also that we are only talking about federal spending here. Not included in these estimates are the vast amounts of money that state and local governments spend on social programs. Needless to say, state and local government funding of space exploration is negligible. The idea of NASA money being diverted away from social programs is the most common proposal by those who would divert NASA’s funding. But how does NASA compare to other big gov-
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THE BG NEWS SUDOKU
“Spreading bad information isn’t just for the government and H.G. Wells radio broadcasts anymore. With the latest technology, everyday people like you and me can propagate bullshit to millions of people, just like the pros do.” But the truth is, I’m not the only one getting carried away in baseless fear mongering these days. According to CNN, people are spreading all sorts of misinformation about swine flu over Twitter. Finally, spreading bad information isn’t just for the government and H.G. Wells radio broadcasts anymore. With the latest technology, everyday people like you and me can propagate bullshit to millions of people, just like the pros do. As of the moment I’m writing this, swine flu has killed a staggering zero people in the U.S. I say this is staggering because, according to a Nielsen Online report, 2 percent of all Twitter posts Monday related to the swine flu. When one out of every 50 posts is about an illness, I would expect it to be the plague or the TVirus. It’s especially ridiculous when you consider that,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 36,000 people die every year in the U.S. alone from normal flu-related symptoms. Even including Mexico, the amount of swine flu deaths is less than 1 percent of that number. But your average run of the mill flu isn’t exciting enough for the average Joe the Plumber to get worked up about, no matter how deadly it may be. A few years ago bird flu was supposed to kill us all, and a few years before that it was Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. When CBS broadcast “War of the Worlds” over the radio in 1938, people panicked when they misinterpreted the fictional emergency news broadcast for a real one. But 40 minutes into the program, there was a message letting viewers know that what they were hearing was fictional, and yet another message at the end. Anyone who was actu-
ernment expenditures? Compare, for example, the NASA budget with the United States defense budget. One can argue forever over the merits of government social programs, how much we should be spending on our military, or how much the government should rely on borrowed money. What one cannot argue about, however, is that space exploration gets a very, very small slice of the pie. Compared to the behemoths of government spending, NASA is a pigmy. The fact that NASA achieves so much with such a small share of the federal budget is astonishing. When it comes to funding space exploration, it is time for space advocates to stop playing defense and start playing offense. While not slackening our efforts to
protect the funding of critical NASA projects, we must also begin to push for increases in funding for space exploration. We must begin to reframe and recast the entire debate in Washington on this issue, so that the politicians start thinking in terms of “how much can we spend” for space exploration rather than “how much can we cut” from space exploration. To conclude with a final observation, recall that NASA spending made up more than 5 percent of the federal budget during the heady days of the Apollo program. If it received 5 percent of the federal budget today, its annual funding level would be $139.2 billion. Imagine what the space agency could do if it had that level of support. Let’s make it happen.
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ally paying attention would have quickly had his or her fears assuaged. But even so, over the next few months, newspapers wrote more than 12,000 articles about the incident, making it seem like the panic was bigger than it truly was. I’m not sure how many posts are made on Twitter each day, but if the numbers from Monday keep up for even a few more days, that’s surely more than 12,000 posts about swine flu. But the fact is, you and I will still be alive tomorrow, next week and probably next year. I would go post on Twitter right now about how I’m still alive and how everyone in the country is still alive, but unfortunately, 100 percent of people who can read are alive, meaning that this news is shocking to no one. But I’m pretty sure I hear a dinosaur outside my window right now, so I think I’ll go Twitter about that.
SUDOKO To play: Complete the grid so that every row, column and every 3 x 3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. There is no guessing or math involved. Just use logic to solve
Print journalism hoping to survive with online industry By Gavin Mathis Daily Evergreen
The smudged ink on the reader’s fingers, the rings of coffee stains on the paper, the tactile feeling of flipping through pages of daunting black print – For many people, reading a newspaper is a religious experience. However, the days of waking up to a cup of coffee and a copy of The New York Times (or The Daily Evergreen) are numbered. For better or worse, a fundamental change in the dissemination of news is occurring, and the newspaper industry must adapt or be swallowed by its antiquated methods. Due to the dramatic economic decline, advertis-
ing revenue is slowing to a trickle and newspapers have been forced to do more than eliminate distribution costs. A shift away from the current business model, which does not charge readers for the content they read online, must be undertaken to save America’s crippled newspaper industry. There is little sense in defending the medium of newsprint, but my critiques of the physical medium should not be confused with the newspaper’s content. The printed word transcends time and space and is a cornerstone of a functional democracy. It is illogical to abandon print journalism simply because the conduit used to convey the message is no
longer pertinent in society. The San Francisco Chronicle, The Rocky Mountain News and — to an extent — the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have already fallen victim to this faulty business model. Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, is receiving considerable attention for his idea to incorporate micropayments (fees similar to the ones made on an iTunes account) to the online newspaper industry. According to Isaacson’s plan, readers would pay a small fee for every article they view, making the paper beholden to the reader rather than advertisers. Read the rest of the column online at bgviews.com