

Sloppy Reporting on the Self Driving Car - cjoh
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/read-this-not-that-the-self-driving-car

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rauljara
I really like the ideas behind this "infoveganism", but lord do I hate the
name. I think the author chose it because in his mind veganism has to do with
health. Nothing wrong with that association (i don't think there's anything
wrong with veganism, either), but in most people's minds veganism =
restrictions mixed with a sense of superiority. And the thing is, there's
nothing about demanding that actual content be present in your media that
places a restriction on what content enters your brain. As the author points
out, the content you are presently getting is what's restricted by virtue of
being so barren of fact.

So if you were to stick with the food metaphor (not that I think that's a good
idea), veganism doesn't real work. It's more like adding 13 essential vitamins
and minerals to your otherwise toxic fruity pebbles.

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chc
That does indeed seem to be the sense in which infoveganism is meant: You
consume information according to a strict set of ethical standards (which you
feel is superior) rather than what is most pleasant or convenient. Just like
with veganism, it is mostly defined by what you choose not to consume, but it
is also important to replace the "bad" things you discard with enough good
things. It isn't just about "actual content being present in your media" any
more than veganism is about veggies being present in your meals. It's about
only taking in good content and eschewing content which (by the philosophy's
standards) is bad.

When I first heard it, I didn't like it because I thought it was based on the
popular conception that vegans practically starve themselves. But having read
more about it, I think the concepts are indeed similar.

~~~
true_religion
Vegans consume food according to what is pleasant within their ethical
standards. Yes they refuse more food due to ethical boundaries, but that
doesn't mean they've fundamentally changed how they consume food.

Meat-eaters for example mostly refuse to eat _human_ meat, but choose to eat
any other kind of meat that is pleasant--cannibalism excluded.

This standard is strict as well, there isn't any leniency allowed for
cannibalism in the common day.

~~~
chc
I think you're using a different definition of "pleasant" than I was. The idea
of something being ethically pleasant is odd to me. I basically meant "tasty."
Some vegans find, say, fried chicken to be quite tasty, but they refrain from
eating it nonetheless. The same cannot be said of human flesh for most people.

As for the suggestion that vegans are no more dedicated to their diet than
anyone who does not eat human meat, I find that frankly bizarre. Refraining
from cannibalism in a society where cannibalism is illegal is _extremely
different_ from avoiding all animal products in a society where animal
products are nearly ubiquitous. People who don't eat other people are
essentially going with the flow. (This is not to say that they would be
cannibals in a different situation, just that few are even presented with the
choice, and choice is an important distinction here.)

~~~
xsmasher
Most Americans eschew insects, dogs, and cats. That seems like a better
analogy.

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dredmorbius
This is a great article detailing a manifestation of several problems:

\- "News" as entertainment. The primary purpose of many articles isn't to
inform, but to entertain. Or otherwise provide utility other than a deep,
informed, and/or unbiased/NPoV perspective.

\- "News" as marketing. This is so prevalent in tech (and has been for
decades) it's passed from "not funny" to trope. Company launches (itself,
product), hires PR team, shops story to various media outlets, breathless
hagiography ensues. The real market is usually 1) investors and 2) market
shaping (for consumer products), though influencing legislative and regulatory
environments (as in the Google car story) may also be a goal.

\- "News" as linkbait / attention generator. Though we think of this as a
modern phenomenon, and Web-based concepts of eyeballs and social networking
don't help, it's also old as dirt. So you get crap like PC World, Engadget,
and even the New York Times with recursive, internal references, and _lacking_
(as Clay Johnson points out) the truly useful references to original sources.
HN is a great antidote to this -- the "Ron was wrong, Whit is right" direct
link (and discussion of) PKI RNG weaknesses.

And yet ... to a large approximation of "it works", it works -- as a business
plan, these are fairly successful market strategies.

Hard information markets are hard.

~~~
bh42222
They are only hard to support from advertising.

For any service which requires payment for access to the information, said
information tends to be hard. Blomberg news and the Wallstreet Journal, are
examples for this in terms of financial news.

~~~
dredmorbius
WSJ is largely a mouthpiece / propaganda arm of Fox and the Murdoch empire
these days. Some would say it's always had a strong bias toward, shock,
surprise, Wall Street interests. There's a great quote somewhere by Warren
Buffet if you can find it about the WSJ's editorial staff believing its own
writing.

There are a number of information venues that are member/subscriber based, and
which do relatively well: NPR, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor,
Consumer's Union. The Economist Newspaper (as it styles itself) has a rather
interesting revenue model, roughly one-third each subscriptions, ads, and EIU.
The last is the Economist Intelligence Unit, a bespoke research arm, though I
suspect much of its work ends up in the public edition at least in the form of
background and depth.

There's a great deal which could be written on markets and funding streams for
information goods -- not just news, but arts, invention, data, and other
works. Over the past several millenia, we've seen patronage, sponsorship,
performance, publication, subscription, advertising (both direct and
sponsorship), data mining, music sales (sheet, player roll, analogue
recording, digital downloads), mechanical royalties, and other methods. Each
has a profound influence on the nature, quality, and form of work produced.

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rkalla
This obsession with self-promoting links is what makes reading sites like
BoyGeniusReport and _everything_ in the Engadget family so frustrating.

Editorial rules seem to be that any in-story link MUST be a self-reference to
some keyword match inside the site and the only external link (singular)
allowed is the one at the end of the article using text like "Source" or "via
XYZ.com".

~~~
freehunter
God I hate this on About.com. They're almost always the first result when I
search for something, and every link on their page goes to another About.com
page. And none of them have the information I'm searching for. I've added them
(along with all of gawker media) to my hosts file.

~~~
gravitronic
One of the neater features I've seen Google implement is that if you click a
link and then hit back within a short period, a little link shows up next to
that search result that says "hide everything from about.com?"

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kokey
It's a quick thought, but what we could do is the following: Have a wiki-like
site, where the community update source information about news items. On the
items pages, they also make links to news articles on the web. Along with this
there is an analysis tool, so if you see an article on a news site somewhere,
you pass the URL to this site, and it will point you to the relevant wiki page
based on the URLs that are set on the wiki page or by guessing the best one
for you based on content and similarity to other news reports.

~~~
dredmorbius
You mean, like, say, WikiNews?

Specifically: citing your references:
[http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your...](http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your_references)

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ChuckMcM
I so wish so called 'journalists' would take this to heart.

Although sometimes they would 'harsh the buzz' as it were. I recall a series
that ABC news did on unemployment and they profiled a gal who, in their story,
seemed like a sad case of working hard and not getting anywhere. Unfortunately
for them there was enough PII in the story that one could do a bit of Googling
and figure out who this person was, only to find they were a convicted felon
(drug possesion with intent to sell), in and out of rehab, and recently 'laid
off' when their Nova job term timed out and the employer elected not to hire
full time. That is also a sad story but it would not have 'worked' for what
the news producer was going for 'Regular folks, working hard, and unable to
find work.'

I agree its quite different to omit facts to make your story more credible,
buts another form of this 'info-veganism' which. Generally I've been happy
with the Economist (they seem less tempted by this sort of thing than others)
and it suggests that there is once again an opportunity to create a news
organization. (If you are old enough to remember, Fox News was created on the
back of the first Iraq War with the tagline 'we report, you decide' trying to
take the editorial spin out of reporting which was so evident in CNN's
coverage, of course once it was a going concern that changed.) I believe there
is a really disruptive opportunity here which I'm happy to share if anyone is
interested.

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kragen
Yeah! What's the disruptive opportunity?

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ChuckMcM
So the opportunity is to create a video news network based on a streaming /
store model rather than the 24hr model. Lets say you put together such a
network, as you cover stories you put them up on your server. Your customers
click 'the news' and they get a newscast of all the current news, but once
they've seen a story they don't see it again unless there is actually
additional information.

Things like sports highlights, weather, and finance have a regular 30 minute
update cycle. So push the button and you can watch a 'show' which is probably
30 - 40 minutes long of the current news. If you watched the news this morning
and its a slow news day the icon indicates no new updates.

You click news you are interested in and it tailors your broadcast to you're
interest. Don't care about entertainment? not there. Don't want to hear about
the latest hijinks on the debate circuit, not there. Interested in updates on
NASA's budget? there.

You can surface potential stories of interest in the 'crawl', click/press it
and that story gets added to your newscast.

Same basic organization as any other news organization, but the transmission
is network based.

News transition Nightly -> Morning + Noon + Night -> 24hr

Differentiation Liberal leaning / Conservative / more local / less local /
more weather / more sports / etc.

Monetization - advertising.

Disruption - remove transmission costs, pull cable networks out of the middle,
move to NetFlix/AmazonPrime/Hulu with a higher revenue share. Product hook is
"like a Tivo that watches the 24hr news channel and only records the
new/interesting/current bits." Value add - saves time for you, no need to wait
around for the top story to repeat, press go and its there. Partnership
opportunities with business hotels for additional monetization revenue (they
pay for your feed (probably generic version, not customized) and insert hotel
specific ads into the video (rev share). The customer value proposition is
news now, no repeats.

When it happens it will disrupt the crap out of Fox/Cnn and will add a missing
service to the NetFlix/Roku/Amazon/Hulu's of the world.

~~~
kragen
Sounds like a good idea. It'd be a lot cheaper to do in text (and wouldn't
require any technology that didn't exist in 2000); has anyone done it? If not,
why not? If so, what happened? Does making it video greatly change the value
proposition?

~~~
ChuckMcM
The infrastructure cost of it is a barrier. One has to understand the 'news'
is "the highest value video production out there next to porn" [1], you take a
producer, a camera person, and a talking head, and you record what you see.

And to the text only question, efforts using text have not been successful,
people seem to prefer to consume it as video or audio when doing something
else. The goal is to disrupt Fox, not the Chronicle, you need to do it in a
way that the average person has very little friction between wanting to know
'what's happening' and getting the news. They have been voting 'video' by
their consumption habits to date.

Most of the efforts I've seen that have started along here have chickened out
when it came to being _the network_ vs being a repackager. They spend a
weekend writing a server that repackages the AP feed and maybe reads it aloud.
But the editorial voice is pretty important for this endeavor. You really do
need to be the news organization.

The other barrier is that the 'value chain', which is to say the way in which
news is monetized is very well understood and so you cannot succeed by being
another 'channel' to get to the same stuff someone else has, if you are
successful they cut you off from the content. Or if you leverage someone
else's network they cut you off from the bandwidth. So you either have to 'go
big' here, or not go at all. That means a studio for putting the final product
together, a mobile reporting force which can get to places, and partnerships
in place for places where you cannot afford to get to yet.

The change which has been occuring which will make this possible today when it
wasn't possible before is that enough consumers have the requisite network
bandwidth to their home or office to support it, and they are likely to have a
device which can stream it (Roku, PS3, Samsung 'smart' TV, etc). The sweet
spot of this market is the 22 - 42 year olds who want a better news experience
than they are getting and have high comfort with technological solutions. As a
'network' you also already have a business model that can slot you into a
relationship with folks like Comcast, DirectTV, or Time Warner. Partner with
them and their 'smart set top' on a rev share basis and you give added value
add for their customers, and pricing leverage against those networks you are
disrupting.

[1] This was a quote from the guy who was the GM or EVP of the KRON TV news
group at a talk he gave back in the 90's in Palo Alto.

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jey
> Two people are required to be present in an autonomous vehicle, both holding
> a valid driver's license.

Why?

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maxerickson
It's a pilot program for legalizing on road research projects. Presumably,
someone felt that two people paying attention to the autonomous actions was
better than one.

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jws
One paying attention to the research and one paying attention to the traffic
situation sounds like the right division of labor.

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geogra4
A million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive

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AndrewDucker
A pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that
makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't
sound that unreasonable to me.

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geogra4
I guess it makes sense when only large businesses are the ones to own these
automobiles. It puts individual ownership out of reach.

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baconner
Well its not about individual ownership its about businesses testing
commercial self driving cars right?

Seems to me that a company is going to need to sink many millions in to
design, build, and test a truly road safe self driving car no? Even
considering it as a hardware and software mod to an existing model.

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kristianp
I don't like the fact that comments require connecting to facebook. Which
might explain the lack of comments on the page.

