On “Blogging About Nothing”
This is reply to the Cornell Daily Sun’s news story, Blogging About Nothing. Unfortunately, their site does not currently allow comments due to technical errors, so I am forced to reply here.
You say that “very few” bloggers are experts on what they write, but without evidence. I write about IT; I’m an expert in that field. I read hundreds of technical blogs, all from experts and leaders in their fields.
You inarticulately write that “there is money in these blogs.” Blogs are publishing entities–there is not money in the blogs, but in their readership. It’s not fair to claim that making money is an impure motive for writing a blog, unless you want to include all mainstream media as well. The New York Times is plastered with ads. Every news channel runs expensive video commercials. Being paid, I think, is an incentive to do better work. And, in the world of blogging, those paid the most are the ones attracting the most readers, and therefore doing the best work.
You write that the popularity of blogging is forcing news media to change their tactics. That’s not a problem; it’s evolution and selection pressure. If we can obsolete news, that makes us better suited to the public need for information.
You write that news stories about James Kim were inaccurately fact checked when they suggested that Google Maps may have mislead his family. Even though there’s circumstantial evidence that the family did not use Google Maps, the route it planned was identical to the route they may have followed using paper maps. So, bloggers who wrote about a Google maps connection were actually more daring than traditional media, who probably dropped the stories in the face of legal pressure.
For more, go read Christian Montoya’s response which addresses more fundamentals than the particular points I’m interested in.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day Defiled
The other weekend at the University of Connecticut School of Law and Tarleton State University students had a brilliant idea for celebrity Martin Luther King Junior day: they would try to be black. The results dismay even the most hardened criminal:
Wearing dorags, fake machine guns, drinking 40s, and eating fried chicken, so do our American white youth honor the struggle for racial equality.
If you can really stand it, there’s more at TSG:
I always thought this stupidity was limited to those without a post-secondary education…
Tuition at Cornell University
I was interested in how the cost of Cornell University tuition rose compared to other market benchmarks, like general inflation and the stock market. I gathered data from 1980 to 2006 on the yearly inflation rates of Cornell tuition, private American tuition, inflation, and yearly returns on the Dow and Nasdaq indices.
In 1980, if you’d put $1000 into University, you’d now be paying $5905.50. Inflation inflates your $1000 to $2452.37, while the Nasdaq rakes in $5436.02, the Dow $9063.03. Cornell tracks strongly with other University rates, returning $5561.72. The graph makes one thing clear, though–Cornell’s tuition is quickly outstripping inflation, and tracks suspiciously with the higher order return rates common in the stock market. It’s almost like the inexorable rise of our tuition is a hedge against bad investments in the endowment.
In 2020, Cornell University tuition will have skyrocketed:
Right now we’re paying $32,800. In 2020, we’ll be paying $82,440 but our $32,800 will only be worth an $49,613. That’s another $30,000 of 2020 dollars or $20,000 of our real dollars. Therefore, I make this proclamation: In 2020, Cornell University will charge students $53,000 for a year’s tuition–51% more than today!
