A friend once explained to me that in her journalism course, she was taught that bad news is news - people are not interested in hearing that a store was not robbed, no car crashes occurred and nobody was shot. There are two hypotheses about human interest in bad news: evolution favored the genes that worried about predators and therefore survived and news is what is unusual. In fact, life goes on without major incident most of the time.
In tragic times, the usual reverses. In Haiti, where tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands depending on the report, have died, the news focuses on each survivor pulled from the devastation. Suddenly, good news is news because it is so rare. This is bad.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Screams in the night in Haiti
At the Cleveland Park Congregational Church today a parishoner who was in Haiti during the earthquake related his experience. He was in a hotel above the city. Hotel guests camped on the tennis courts arranging some food, water and security. As complete darkness fell the sounds of the city below rose - screams that blended together into one voice. After each aftershock, of which there were 15 or 20, the screams intensified. His description blends the magnitude of the total horror with the personal horror each individual scream represented.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The dots may be a blob
There was a headline yesterday in The New York Times, "Military is Awash in Data from Drones," describing the potential information overload the videos taken by drones in Afghanistan and Iraq are creating for the Air Force and the systems being created to deal with it. This also evokes thoughts of why the would-be Nigerian plane bomber's information wasn't processed correctly. One commentator has pointed out that "connect the dots" may be the wrong metaphor for a system generating so many dots that they blend together. The real challenge for intelligence systems, and perhaps for all of us, in this age is how to create systems that filter the information coming to us so that we know where to direct our attention.
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