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	<title>thesnarkhunter.com</title>
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		<title>New York Times Acts Like Local News Sometimes</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I hate it when a local news report picks up some study tidbit, blows it out of proportion and makes a dramatic sounding story out of innocuous facts. Usually these stories skip the important background information such as &#8220;almost everyone in the field already knew that, but&#8230;&#8221; Here&#8217;s the New York Times doing the same damn thing. The number was never really six. That&#8217;s the pop mythology number. There&#8217;s a whole boatload of research that, depending on a more precise version of the question, place the number down near 4.3 or so. I&#8217;m not going to go look it up, but it&#8217;s widely quoted in both Connected (by Nicholas A. Christakis , James H. Fowler) and Linked, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Also, I&#8217;m pretty sure it&#8217;s covered by Thomas Friedman somewhere. Why does a paper that once was known as the &#8220;Paper of Record&#8221; get it wrong? Or at least skip everything in between so as to create slightly more drama? I can imagine an editor saying &#8220;take all that middle stuff about other research out, nobody cares.&#8221; But I also imagine all those teachers who kept telling their students that &#8220;Columbus believed the Earth was round, the skeptics all said it was [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/11/22/new-york-times-acts-like-local-news-sometimes/</link>
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		<title>At First I Was All, But Then I Was Like&#8230; (Social Networks for Two)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Too Many Little Social Networks Popping Up Another thing that seems to fall into the &#8220;we don&#8217;t need it, and we should kill it with fire&#8221; category: social networks for couples. . It&#8217;s just funny enough to forward to someone, and possibly to download or sign up for as long as everyone knows you&#8217;re doing it &#8220;ironically.&#8221; If this were a real thing, relationship-obsessed, self-absorbs teens would be the obvious market. But since it&#8217;s not, adults are more likely to pay money for something that&#8217;s &#8220;ironic,&#8221; and have a much harder time figuring how to delete crap from their phones or computers. So it makes sense that these things have (or pretend to have) more adult content. Swapping Chores for Sexual Favors? How could anything like this not be a joke: Snuggle Cloud is the answer! We not only alert you when your partner is online and provide a Couple&#8217;s Dashboard for you to post anything and everything, but we also send reminders for special dates and moments, and help spark interesting conversations through daily questions and quizzes. Kahnoodle goes the extra mile: Intended for committed couples over the age of 21, Kahnoodle lets partners administer “love taps” – like [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/09/10/at-first-i-was-all-but-then-i-was-like-social-networks-for-two/</link>
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		<title>Hanging On To A Story: or Bad Horse as a Nickname for Europeans?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I grew up in a small town named &#8220;Ridgecrest.&#8221; It got that name because, in 1943, people finally got tired of calling it Crumville. It may have been an improvement, but Ridgecrest never seemed to have much soul, or any real connection to the community or region. I remember a movement to change the name to Maturango. It seemed to make sense, Maturango is the name of a small but popular museum, and it seemed more unique to the area. What I heard was the movement fizzled after someone looked up the word&#8211;and discovered it means &#8220;horse dung.&#8221; The reason I&#8217;m talking about it on this blog is that I always &#8220;sort of&#8221; believed the story. By which I mean that I wanted to believe it, feared it might not be true, so I never looked up the actual meaning. Now, with Wikipedia staring back at me from almost every device I own, not looking something up is much more difficult. This puts a lot of pressure on my little universe of great stories that may or may not be true. I ran across this description on Wikipedia, describing the origin of the name of Maturango Peak: It may be [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/07/30/hanging-on-to-a-story-or-bad-horse-as-a-nickname-for-europeans/</link>
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		<title>Supreme Court Did NOT Say That Kids Have Right To Violent Videogames</title>
		<description><![CDATA[That would be stupid. Yet some newscasters seemed to say it, and this columnist appears to believe it, though since she&#8217;s really just using that as a hook to argue for feeding kids, we&#8217;ll give her some slack. What it did was strike down a badly written law, in which a State tries to regulate the sale based on content of the game. In fact, the Entertainment Software Industry already regulates sales of games to minors. Much like the Motion Picture Association, which rates movies and prohibits minors from watching certain ones, an industry association IS given the power to limit what kids can buy. Though there is not criminal or civil liability for violating the age-restrictions, studies show that it&#8217;s harder to buy a mature game than it is to get into an R rated movie.  The Supreme Court did not change that. One might hope they discouraged the writing of vague laws aimed at non-problems that they couldn&#8217;t possibly affect even if enforceable, but that seems unlikely.]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/06/30/supreme-court-did-not-say-that-kids-have-right-to-violent-videogames/</link>
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		<title>Chicken Soup May Contain Real Chicken &#8212; Twitter Celebrities May Contain Real Tweets</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you go poking around for advice on how to succeed on Twitter, you&#8217;ll find a lot of people saying &#8220;be authentic.&#8221; Or something similar. Sort of like telling the nerdy kid with no chance to &#8220;be himself&#8221; when he asks that girl out. &#8220;Himself&#8221; is the guy in mom&#8217;s basement drinking Mountain Dew, playing D&#38;D, and editing Wikipedia articles on Marvel Comic characters. Still, in some ways it&#8217;s good advice. We follow people on Twitter because we think we have some kind of connection with a real person. When celebrities came into the medium, they offered a behind the scenes, informal connection. At least the real ones did. But a lot of the best celebrities weren&#8217;t. Christopher Walken was hilarious, but he wasn&#8217;t really Christopher Walken. Abe Vigoda was not really tweeting to his followers that he was still alive. Some were real. Shaq found it helpful to add the word &#8220;real&#8221; to his Twitter ID.  This article tried to list the &#8220;real&#8221; celebrities, though it included Twitter feeds that were largely staff-written. Meanwhile, crazed scientists who have failed to grasp the central message of every robot movie ever developed robots that pretend to be human and engage people [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/06/19/chicken-soup-may-contain-real-chicken-twitter-celebrities-may-contain-real-tweets/</link>
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		<title>Why Do We Let Huge Life-Sucking Non-Human Lifeforms Like @Iconix Steal Our Fun?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If this were yesterday, you could have gone to Peanutweeter.com and enjoyed the pairing of one frame from the classic Charles Schultz Peanuts strip with a somewhat random Tweet. These little connections, injecting an old piece of creative expression with a really current connection to our times, would have made your day better. Charles Schultz brought a lot of delight to people for many years. He died in 2000. I&#8217;m convinced he was up there, somewhere, enjoying Peanutweeter&#8217;s creative approach to bringing his work into the light again. Until yesterday, anyway. Even though copyright law has expanded far beyond the original scope given by the Constitution, it was at least partly humanized by the Fair Use provision. This blogger has already made the case that Peanutweeter is fair use, so I&#8217;ll just link to his post. I&#8217;m more concerned with how non-human life-forms have been given even more control. Used to be you&#8217;d hear about how &#8220;lawyers&#8221; from McDonalds, Disney, or Paramount were out suing the best customers of their products. It was bad&#8211;but lawyers are technically human. Iconix is a &#8220;Brand Group.&#8221; If you go to the site and click on either Management or Board of Directors under their &#8220;About [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/06/18/why-do-we-let-huge-life-sucking-non-human-lifeforms-like-iconix-steal-our-fun/</link>
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		<title>Don&#8217;t Ever Let Them Call You a Guru</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some words, like icebergs, only show 10% of their meaning above the water. &#8220;Guru&#8221; is one of those words that seem nice, positive, valuable. When used in the workplace, though, it&#8217;s that big hidden part under the surface that will sink your career-ship. Just to disambiguate the word, here&#8217;s Wikipedia. [Side note, Wikipedia uses the word "disambiguate" incorrectly]. In the modern workplace, the career ladder is populated by people who are afraid that change and innovation will undo all those steps they&#8217;ve climbed over to get to their heirarchically-defined roll. If they see a new trend emerging, they have to either adapt or hire someone to manage that change. If the change can be managed by someone else, they can go back to their safe, slow, time-tested method of slow resume building. That &#8220;someone else,&#8221; though, has to be defined as &#8220;different.&#8221; The word &#8220;Guru&#8221; has come to fill that rule. Guru&#8217;s are protectors of non-changers. They manage the new stuff, make it less important. In the process, they make themselves less important. If a Guru is allowed to jump onto the career ladder, though, the system has failed. The changes were obviously not managed to the point of irrelevance. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/06/16/dont-ever-let-them-call-you-a-guru/</link>
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		<title>Rapture Was a Big Success</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m not very interested in the crazy guy who tried to sell everyone on the idea that Saturday was going to be the date of the Rapture. We have people making a lot of religious-psycho claims walking around DC. Many predict the end of the world. Nobody follows these guys around waiting to point at them and laugh when they&#8217;re wrong. What&#8217;s fascinating is how everyone else played with the story. News outlets covered it, people on Facebook and Twitter kept up a steady stream of pre-rapture comments, and various comment boards filled up with a debate over how &#8220;they&#8221; would feel when it doesn&#8217;t happen. This particular crazy guy became a national event. My current theory is that he&#8217;s a stand-in. For a lot of people, he&#8217;s enough like some other group, say the Tea Baggers or Evangelicals, that we are painting them with his easily falsifiable claim. Laughing at his &#8220;wrong-ness&#8221; is like laughing at them for something they didn&#8217;t actually say. Also, it&#8217;s fun. Doomsday scenarios are exciting because they open up boundaries we normally let run our lives. Instead of thinking &#8220;I&#8217;m going to have to work hard, save, and talk my spouse into it before [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/05/24/rapture-was-a-big-success/</link>
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		<title>Dirty Jokes as Network Testers?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recently saw an email that made a joke about STDs.  All the women had been removed from the cc list.  I remember being the only guy in an office and having to step out so the women could share a crude picture.  But that doesn&#8217;t always happen.  Among peers, in certain circumstances, in groups that consider each other close friends, the standards shift. A crude joke can be funny to every person in a room, and each might share it with three or four friends without any discomfort.  Then, when someone says it in front of the larger group, everyone feels uncomfortable and disconnected. Recently, two leaders had to step down from that role because of humor that crossed the line.  (humor, at least by intent).  In one case the commanding officer of the USS Enterprise had apparently produced some risque videos while serving as the executive officer.  (obviously modeling himself more after TOS than TNG).  The president-elect of the American College of Surgeons had to step down after a joke that involved semen, anti-depression, and valentines day.  (and actual research) There are a number of side issues, many legitimate. But I wonder why people who want to take [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/04/30/dirty-jokes-as-network-testers/</link>
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		<title>Not Everybody is Real</title>
		<description><![CDATA[How many times have you met someone, recognized them as part of a type, treated them according to that type, and gotten responses that are entirely consistent with that type? Do you get to know someone, but still think of them as an amalgam of preconceptions based on education, profession, clothing style, ethnic background, geographic origin, etc.? Some of this seems obvious.  There really are a lot of IT people who are a bit socially awkward and play video-games late into the night.  A lot don&#8217;t.  It&#8217;s not hard to see that the profession draws the personality to it.  But some of the most consistent types are less obvious.  The one I&#8217;m thinking about is the Navy Chief.  Somehow, no matter where they&#8217;re from, what ethnic background that started with, or even what rating they have, most Chiefs end up with the same look, same accent, same set of facial hair (within certain variations) and same waistline.  How does that happen? Some of this may be just the templates we use on people.  We apply, they respond, it&#8217;s efficient.  Honestly, I have a set of types I use as well.  People see me in a certain way, I find it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://thesnarkhunter.com/2011/04/27/not-everybody-is-real/</link>
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