Links for 2010-01-19

"I especially liked Carl's (I think it was Carl) description of this emergent media enterprise as a delicately balanced ecosystem, each segment interdependent on the others for survival. Several weeks ago, Bora! posted one of his occasional rants relishing the collapse of traditional media, in which he baldly stated that he really didn't care if the cost of the revolution was journalists losing their jobs. (I can't find the link, sorry. He's just so damned prolific.) I adore Bora!, but he's wrong about this. He should care that journalists are losing their jobs, because they are not "the Other" anymore. We are all caught up in the same ecosystem, and draconian upheaval in one segment will inevitably, in time, negatively impact the others. I agree that the revolution must, and is, occurring, and a certain degree of suffering is part of the cost, but that's no reason to abandon compassion -- particularly as the distinctions between categories continue to blur."

"My goal in publishing Mashtag is to serve as both primary sportscaster and color commentator. As a business lawyer and executive in social media and the broader technology industry, I hope to bring the factual background and analytical tools of the profession to bear to explore some of the most interesting current issues in business, law and public policy. As an enthusiastic user and consumer of social media and other information technology since the early 1980s; an "alumnus" of several high-profile (and not-so-high profile) consumer Web and entertainment companies; and a Silicon Valley native who delivered newspapers on Steve Jobs' block and lived in a house once owned by Bill Hewlett, I will also weave in some war stories, anecdotes, and hopefully a bit of accumulated wisdom that might prove useful."

Because there's so much money involved, problems involving gambling are very popular in introductory probability classes. Take, for instance, the Texas Lottery. The odds of winning are supposedly 1 in 25,827,165. Millions of people buy tickets for each drawing, so what is the probability of having n winners given that N tickets are purchased?

"The U.S. Department of Education on Friday proposed an ambitious approach aimed at ensuring that vocational programs and most offerings at for-profit colleges do not take advantage of students. Under the draft regulation, a vocational degree program whose graduates' annual debt repayment loads exceeded 8 percent of the average incomes in the field in question would risk losing eligibility to award federal financial aid."

The truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims.