Author's posts
Oct 30 2010
Delerium of Disorder
Oct 26 2010
Millennial Million Dollar Mash Up
Oct 24 2010
Sociology Porn From Wikileaks And Using Google Fusion Tables As Lube
(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)
Data journalism works best when there’s a lot of data to work with. Wikileaks’ Iraq war logs release has dumped some 391,000 records of the Iraq war into the public arean. We’ve had them for a few weeks – what have we found out?
This is in a different league to the Wikileaks Afghanistan leak – there’s a good case for saying the new release has made the war the most documented in history. Every minor detail is now there for us to analyse and breakdown but one factor stands out: the sheer volume of deaths, most of which are civilians.
No fake!
Here’s the data:
http://tables.googlelabs.com/D…
(requires Google log in)
Oct 24 2010
The Only Thing You Can Do With A Degree In Sociology
You can download the data from the Datablog:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…
It’s not lucrative, just necessary :-/
Oct 23 2010
Wikileaks Releases Iraq War Documents
(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)
At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports (‘The Iraq War Logs’), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a ‘SIGACT’ or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’ (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 ‘host nation’ (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 ‘friendly’ (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the ‘Afghan War Diaries’, previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.
Oct 22 2010
Conflict Theory In Practice
(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)
Below is what I submitted to my Graduate School class in the “sharing notes” as an assignment.
I can’t stop starting shit 🙂
Oct 14 2010
Foreclosure Robo-Signers Play Dress Up To Fool You
(I know this, because Tyler knows this)
NEW YORK (AP) — In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in “foreclosure expert” jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.
In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn’t define the word “affidavit.” Others didn’t know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers’ accusations about document fraud.
Oh, it gets better, and you’ll get angrier…..
Oct 08 2010
Bank Foreclosures: If The Banks Want’em, Tell’em To Come And Get’em From Us
(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)
Senior Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal authorities to investigate tens of thousands of home foreclosures in the US following reports that leading lenders failed to follow proper procedures.
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, joined other Democratic representatives from California in urging the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to examine “possible violations of law or regulations by financial institutions” in connection with delinquent mortgages.
You know the drill already.
They’ll demand a probe, investigate, say they’re going to do something about it, and then in the end the industry will get a payout while you’ll still owe.
And you’ll put up with it, because you’re all fucking pathetic.
Sep 29 2010
Technological Singularity
The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.