Before you spend $2 billion on your own submarine… Read this! Only a few hundred individuals on this rock have the spare cash to drop on such a craft, but still, Bloomberg Pursuits has a feature on this privately made submarine. Might be good for preppers, one would think, until you read that: “Submersibles can’t, however, regenerate their own power, and they rely on yachts or other vessels for long-distance transport and servicing. They’re pretty awesome, but they’re more James Cameron, less James Bond.” Worse still, weapons cost extra. You’ll have to go with Raymond Reddington to arm these puppies, and that might require some costly modifications.
Worst campaign ad ever? Move over Carly Fiorina, your Demon Sheep have competition! Virginia Democrat Dan Helmer has the most cringeworthy campaign ad in years, and it’s making the rounds on social media… precisely what the candidate presumably wanted. Attention from the press! Helmer is challenging vulnerable incumbent Barbara Comstock in Virginia’s 10th district, just outside of Washington. Helmer, an Army veteran, challenges Comstock’s record—starting with the latest Democratic obsession-du-jour, town hall—breaking into a badly sung Top Gun parody:
Teach for America, but for … journalists? Meet “Report For America.” It’s just like the “Teach for America” program, which places professionals without a traditional teacher’s degree in low-income schools to shake things up. But for journalists. The organization running it, Report for America, wants to place 1,000 reporters in newsrooms in the next half-decade.
The group “comes from a partnership between Google News Labs and the Groundtruth Project.” And therein lies a potential downfall: Google, which is being scrutinized by the right and left for its growing influence in all sorts of non-Googly things. (Even here, in a cover story at TWS.) Poynter reports that interested news rooms will “have to make the case that they’ll use the RFA journalist for civically important local journalism that’s in the public’s interest.” And what if that journalist comes under fire? Could be bad PR for Google, as their affiliation will automatically put a critic’s target on their back.
Or, is this just a ploy by Google, like with the Chromebook, to further get ingrained in certain industries? Perhaps:
Just what journalists love: more seminars! There are many ideologically inclined foundations or organizations that train journalists for right-leaning or left-leaning publications. Those programs don’t have to worry as much about being accused of having a bias. Google, however, does.
Science, meet bureaucracy. Here is the best long-read of the month so far, and it comes from the Slate Star Codex blog. It’s about science, an area about which I know little. Psychiatry in particular. Scott Alexander wanted to conduct a test that challenged the screening test very commonly used in testing for bipolar disorder. It goes like this: “Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?” (Answer: Yes, sometime in the late innings of Game 7 of the World Series.)
Alexander suggests that people like me, who might answer “Yes!” because of a series of such events, have bipolar disorder when they … don’t. So he wanted to challenge this test. With a study. And it turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. I won’t spoil it for you, so read the whole thing.
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