The “new normal” in current affairs
Preamble: I owe the expression new normal to business partners LINQ Ltd.
A recent New York Times article boasted 14,000 tweets read by its journalist as a basis for research. The graph in How to Know What Donald Trump Really
Cares About: Look at What He’s Insulting is impressive indeed, but…
How about trying 4,000,000 instead?! Patrick Martinchek in What I Discovered About Trump and Clinton From Analyzing 4 Million Facebook Posts contrasts almost as starkly as his priceless picture below…
Aside from matching in the colors above and the number of figures (8), do Quealy’s 750 words vs. Martinchek’s 1750 not reflect a data journalist vs. a data scientist? I’d love to see their respective hits but we’re not privy to that…
Disclosure: I’m a geoscientist not a journalist — I have worked with reporters as related in my previous Medium post, and I took another look at data analyses in my field (at left) — but I only look at all this with the curious eye of a concerned professional.
The ‘story behind the story’ are these reporters’ respective outlets: Is Medium not a classic tale of disruption? And do big data not give more scope to those with the right tools?
The late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham described in her memoir the transition away from union-choked business practices, through allowing the scoop that lead to Watergate, to the challenges of breaking out of printed into electronic media — 1997 looked like the Wild West of AOL, Netscape and AltaVista — then in Calgary & Dallas I posted my first website:
Twenty years later comes The Third Wave of totally distributed computing infrastructure and data ownership well reported already. Did you know how AOL founder Steve Case penned that book? Crowd-sourcing on this very site!
Wayback Machine puts the launch of its website on 7 Nov. and the Medium invite dates 21 Oct. Evidently that’s not the start of the project, but run inside the same quarter would put any publisher to the test!
That is yet another patent example of disruption, to bring publishing cycles and therefore prices down, by opening the book, so to speak… The ‘new normal’ is indeed taking many guises, not necessarily the way we might have guessed it!
No less than three shows in London this fall on ‘what’s next in geospatial’, had me describe on Pulse a robotic future of smart devices rather than of classic humanoids… Is the following picture not worth a thousand words?
