Our Picks: Friday’s Top Political Stories
John Harwood delivers a first person account of having his words appropriated for a Mitt Romney ad, based on a plain-vanilla news report on CNBC. “It was merely a three-second factual observation — ‘The worst job-adding quarter in two years’ — and not especially elegant at that. Yet beginning on July 11, it was shown 6,136 times over six days in media markets from Denver to Tampa.” This is becoming increasingly common as campaigns try to use media figures to validate their arguments. (New York Times)
Slow on the uptake? Dave Weigel asks: “Why did it take so long for Mitt Romney’s campaign to realize that Barack Obama dry-heaved at the thought of businessmen? It was on July 13, late evening, the president gave an unusually unteleprompted speech at Fire Station No. 1 in Roanoke, Va. and riffed that ‘if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.’ No news outlet led with that part of his speech.” That’s now become a major conservative attack line. (Slate)
Pundits read polls with Talmudic intensity, but Jay Cost says: “Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats. They have a point.” The statistical bias, he says, is in an oversampling of Democrats. (Weekly Standard)
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Social Media Powers Road Trip
May 25th, 2013So what’s a tweet, a Facebook like or
a picture on Instagram really worth?
For the 30 students from Kansas City
who participate in the program
Minddrive, social media will literally
fuel their road trip to Washington
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“Minddrive is an after-school program
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shared on YouTube.
DIY Hacking Ikea Style
May 24th, 2013You don’t get to be the world’s largest furniture store without delivering popular, accessible design at a reasonable price. When you throw in eco-sensitive and durable construction and a tiny Allen key, you’ve got a world-beater, and that’s Ikea.
When you add in a do-it-yourself attitude, an informed design aesthetic and crowd-sourced problem-solving, you’ve got something very different: IkeaHackers.
NASA Making Printable Pizza Good Enough to Eat
May 24th, 2013Everyone loves pizza, and everyone loves astronauts, so when you put pizza, a Star Trek food replicator, and NASA together, how could you miss?
3D printing is currently considered The Coolness in nerdland, and we have to admit it’d be a pretty jaded futurist who wouldn’t consider it pretty amazing technology. It’s the promise with which science fiction has long tantalized us: Whatever you can design or imagine can be yours, with the click of a mouse.
New Twitter App ‘Retwacts’ Your Tweets
May 23rd, 2013On a really bad day, a quick, inaccurate tweet can spiral a news story out of control, as seen prominently during the coverage of the recent bombings in Boston. As of now, Twitter doesn’t have its own fix.
As the Atlantic’s Brian Fung reported earlier this month, software developer Stonly Baptiste – whose daytime job is with the Pennsylvania-based company independenceIT – has developed a plug-in app that could solve the problem. He named it Retweet Retwact or Retwact (see what he did there?).
Soldier ‘Before and After’ Portraits Go Viral
May 23rd, 2013We Are Not the Dead documents the effects of war in a virtual photo gallery. The images portray 15 British soldiers before, during and after serving in Afghanistan and are captioned with their thoughts from each time period. Between yearnings for the feel of carpet underfoot and expressions of repatriated culture shock (pink hair!) it chronicles the limitless human capacity to normalize anything, even IEDs. It is just how we cope.
“It was a nightmare trying to extract [a wounded soldier] and get the chopper in while we were in water up to your chin, it was horrible,” says Private Ben Frater, 21. “And now we are home? It’s strange. Quiet. I find that I’m getting bored easily after 10 minutes. I feel anxious all the time that I should be doing something.”
