Quoted: New system finds that education level is more of a factor than race or severity of crime

Quoted: There’s a lot confusing information out there about how the next president will tax the rich. But one chart boils it all down. It comes courtesy of the Tax Policy Institute and I've reproduced it below. It shows the average percentage change in after-tax income for various groups in 2009. The blue bar is Barack Obama and the red bar is John McCain. Not surprisingly, Mr. Obama’s plan helps those at the bottom of the wealth ladder while Mr. McCain’s plan helps those at the top. What’s most striking, however, is the divergence in incomes for the truly wealthy ...

Quoted: The artists essentially use grass as a form of photographic paper, projecting a black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows in a dark room, and using the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs. As Wimbledon is the only remaining Grand Slam tennis tournament that takes place on grass, it was a natural fit for Ackroyd & Harvey’s work, which has also appeared on the National Theatre Lyttleton flytower and Dilston Grove in Bermondsey. For this work, they photographed three people at Wimbledon prior to the tournament, and displayed the resulting grass versions of the photos on three large panels in Merton Park, where the tennis fans have been camping and then queuing for tickets this year. The three people featured are: Tara Moore, competing in the qualifying tournament; Eddie Seaward, head groundsman at Wimbledon for the last 15 years; and Lizzie May, a coach for the Wimbledon Junior Tennis Initiative.

Quoted: Sometimes, software isn't so magical. Even for Bill Gates.

Quoted: Every publisher is after that dazzling image, that killer title; less obvious, perhaps, is the irresistible spread of the expository subtitle, now so subtly pervasive that non-fiction books going without seem undersold, even underwhelming.

I'm glad someone is trying to quantify the crappyness of science coverage in the media. It can lead to the impression that scientific findings are arbitrary.

Quoted: Gary Schwitzer used to be a journalist, but now he has turned to quantitative analyses of journalism, and this month he published an analysis of 500 health articles from mainstream media in the US. The results were dismal. Only 35% of stories were rated satisfactory for whether the journalist had "discussed the study methodology and the quality of the evidence": because in the media, as you will have noticed, science is about absolute truth statements from arbitrary authority figures in white coats, rather than clear descriptions of studies and the reasons why people draw conclusions from them.
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Only 28% adequately covered benefits, and only 33% adequately covered harms. Articles routinely failed to give any useful quantitative information in absolute terms, preferring unhelpful eye-catchers like "50% higher" instead.

Quoted: In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”: