[Via BoingBoing]

A couple of days ago, the tabloid ran the 'heartwarming' story of an impala caught by three cheetahs who, supposedly because they were tired and already full, played with it for a while before letting it go.  Aah.  How cute.

The slight problem is that the Mail only used part of the photoset and invented an entirely fictional outcome.  Yes; surprise, surprise: the Daily Mail lied.
As those who have seen the final two images in the sequence published at Biosphoto will know, the cheetahs simply didn't release the impala, which was eaten.

Things like this make me genuinely wonder: what is the Mail for?  Are there really people so blind as to accept it as anything even vaguely resembling a news source?  I consider most mass media to be flawed, and routinely check for corroboration before accepting their interpretations, but at least they tend to be less blatent in cherrypicking evidence to manufacture falsehoods.

[Via BoingBoing.]

Quite apart from my personal animosity to all (and I do mean all) advertising, the institution simply isn't allowed to publish anything which could be considered a commercial endorsement, so if a feed is transparently and solely attempting to sell something, it's blocked.

The commonest offenders tend to be web marketing firms presumingly attempting to attract the attention of, well, me, and they succeed: I retain every 'new follower' e-mail Twitter sends, and I wouldn't knowingly give business to a company which has previously sent me sp*m (er, formal tendering procedures aside, obviously!).
Recruitment agencies comprise another category of frequent abusers, and again, if they're overtly just lists of job adverts, they're blocked.
Student-related sites are sometimes borderline; some seem genuinely useful, and some are relatively clumsy attempts to advertise non-commercial services; they present as adverts, but don't seem to have that intent.  They're judged on their merits, and periodically rechecked.
And then there are the random sp*mmers: why would a student or academic in Lancaster, UK be remotely interested in cheap fence posts available in Alabama, USA?

A bit of free advice to advertisers wanting to pass the censor: offer a genuine Twitter feed, with genuine, personal content about a range of topics.  Mentioning your services occasionally, and offering a link in your profile summary, is fine.  Only feeds that advertise blatently (those in which every single update is an ad, with no personal content, and/or clearly have no relevance to Higher Education) get blocked.  A key question I ask myself is "is this person interested in reading the University's updates, or does he/she just want to get a user icon and accompanying text displayed in our 'Followers' list?".  In fact, the really good marketing agencies would understand that anyway, so that approach would actually be a better advert than something too overt.

All that is a digression from the point I meant to address: what about 'adverts' from campaigning organisations?  Again, my personal views are irrelevant, but should my employer be 'endorsing' religious groups, political parties or, say, drug-legalisation campaigns?  Should my employer be blocking links to such groups?
My own view is that if it's scrupulously even-handed, we should be declining such followers, but I'm finding it difficult to get a definitive view (policy decision) from management, and wouldn't be entirely comfortable about defending a block myself if challenged.
Maybe the foregoing paragraphs weren't a digression after all, and I should simply treat all varieties of adverts as adverts.

Nothing new, but this time the book is a dictionary.

As a commenter at BoingBoing observes, the removal of this salacious text will oblige children to obtain a definition of 'oral sex' online instead.  Far more educational.

*: To be fair, 'banned' may mean 'removed from shelves pending the formality of a review', but it should have been self-evident that the complaint was ludicrous, even to a parent named 'Randy Freeman'.

The problem is that the ex-colleague is now a journalist, a fact I couldn't forget for a moment; I was constantly aware of protecting my employer, and hence myself.
I'm a guarded person anyway, and struggle to reveal personal information even to friends, but it was awkward to be consciously self-censoring and pre-planning the strict factual accuracy of deliberately innocuous statements, whilst 'casually' conversing with a previously close acquaintance.

The hypothesis is intellectually attractive, which may explain its successful propagation (a good narrative demands less proof), but it seems to have been under-researched, and most evidence is merely anecdotal.  That's not to say it's bogus, of course – the effect has genuinely been reported by numerous observers – but more research needs to be done to quantify the effect and explain why.  I'm embarrassed to say I accepted the standard interpretation as 'fact' a little too readily.

A new (to me) factor mentioned in the article seems to be that the sense of dissonance is only significant when a simulation is viewed remotely: CGI and video footage of physical robots can trigger the effect, but those encountering robots in person find them far more acceptable.  As a commenter at BoingBoing says, the distinction may (may...) be that in viewing a CG character one notices "... the imperfections in something we are expected to believe is human/alive. Speaking to a robot, with the knowledge that it is, in fact, a robot, puts a whole different spin on things."

How would the turbines reduce consumption, as opposed to meeting demand?  Is it expected that overawed students will congregate to watch the huge shiny, spinny things for hours on end, thereby reducing usage of electricity?

And 72,000 tonnes of what?  'Energy'?  Incinerated kittens?

Tsk.  Journalism....

Apart from the one major error which drew attention to the image, it isn't grossly distorted (well, if one doesn't include skin colour), and some manipulation is explained by the purpose to which it was put (a web catalogue, in which users could view the same dress in different colours), but it's still interesting to deconstruct the processing routine within the industry.

However, they were selling hot-cross buns, a mere four months before easter.  How restrained.