The Offline Report

Two members of Generation Z were spotted at a cafe in the S.F. Bay Area one day this month of April. One of the two GenZers stacked a print newsweekly atop his college textbooks. "They have to bring back print," the other GenZer told the paper pollster. The GenZer did not explain why "they" had to revive circulation of paper versions of print media publications. The GenZer asked how long the sidewalk paper-distributing racks had "been broken." The group pedmount newsracks were not broken, the pollster replied. "The slots are all empty" the GenZer said. Fact check: nearly all slots of the dark-green barely-visible pedmount newsracks were empty. But one was full of Alt Newsweeklies ready for the taking. The GenZer hadn't noticed those. <-- Paper Media Poll: Former Nonreader 'Rick' Now Itches For His Kindle at Lunch | Paper Media Poll: Books' Uptick Crosses Periodicals' Decline --> This work by AJ Fish

Saturday May 4, 2019 All told, "about 51 percent of the 350 single-family homes built after 2008 in the path of the Camp Fire were undamaged, according to McClatchy’s analysis of Cal Fire data and Butte County property records. By contrast, only 18 percent of the 12,100 homes built prior to 2008 escaped damage."    sacbee.com Neil Young's upcoming book "To Feel The Music" "takes you through how the sound was and is compromised by the tech and record companies, and instead of improving over time like other technologies, it has become worse."    jambase.com Friday May 3, 2019 Where in the Bay Area you can afford to rent on $100k per year.    eastbaytimes.com Thursday May 2, 2019 A commenter says the founder should not reap money from an IPO if the company pays less than a living wage.    nytimes.com "At Bell Labs, there were systems in place to try and figure out the unintended consequences and their solutions before a product was co

Sunday April 21, 2019 A taxi tablet informs passenger whose face is being recognized as it happens.&bbsp;   twitter.com call me a grandpa but back in my day music festivals weren't a place where you'd see celebrity children standing on a suspended tesla singing exclusively through autotune pic.twitter.com/olyHLrGRHO — nikki jagerman (@nikkijagerman) April 13, 2019 "Great article. I’m a teacher #librarian. I love tech. I’ve lived this transition as a learner. I believe there is an energy field shared in any learning environment that is lost in the online educational experience. Tech isolates. Brains need diverse inputs of info to create."    twitter.com "Academics at prestigious US institutions like MIT & Princeton have partnered w/ Chinese organisations tied to Beijing’s authoritarian state security regime. They have worked together on developing 'human tracking technologies.'"    twitter.com     ft.com Manhattan Institute call

Saturday April 20, 2019 "Facebook claimed, for example, that they said they could reach 1.7 million more Australian teens than there are teens in Australia . When asked to explain, the response was 'we estimate audience'. Ok. TV does too. But that’s NOT what the digital ad sales folks have been saying."    douggarnett.com Friday April 19, 2019 Massive Internet Attack Floods the World with Fake Data:     datasciencecentral.com "Beginning with the 'brain attic'--Holmes's metaphor for how we store information and organize knowledge--Konnikova unpacks the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insights."    amazon.com A poem about gun violence for #nationalpoetrymonth.    poets.org We’ve got work to do: Lagging behind, Charlottesville aims for more ambitious climate goals:     c-ville.com Thursday April 18, 2019 Modern machine-learning technology brings deepfakes within reach of anyone:     nextgov.com "A

It's a hive. Silos are hives on hyperdrive. Like fish schools, bird flocks or bee swarms, thoughts in human hives intersect the group mind. In aggressively herded silos, he detects he's no longer detecting. Finite hive breaks carve room for insight . He started an exercise: give hive thoughts a paper interrupt, "so-and-so posted x, wrong?" Warning: pen-directing finger muscles atrophy, fast. Rebuilding takes time. (Ascend a half-step; move to a text file interrupt. Erect an openweb blog! We hear Blogger runs.) Something else atrophied: his ability to notice when he didn't agree, or did. Without a paper interrupt, he's swapping thoughts in the RAM of his cranial hard drive. With audio news, and cloud storage, and single-sense print media, that RAM is approaching capacity. Nowhere to offload, outsource into muscle memory. Thoughts swap out, overwriting ROM's yesterday news. Individuation is a chipping away at growable, invisible umbilical chord. H

Saturday April 13, 2019 Dateline Berkeley High School: "Students also learned about vote fraud, hacking and digital privacy after a high school junior who was running for class president cast hundreds of fake online votes for himself."    westport-news.com Finally some variegation and nuance, this breakdown of the government's charges against Assange says the charge is legitimate, but alleges a broader conspiracy than it needs to.    rcfp.org "On April 11th 2019, the US National Pet day I released a dataviz driven exploration in collaboration with Google Trends."    visualcinnamon.com "A website aimed at tracking dark patterns identifies behavior, such as a website or app showing that a user has new notifications when they do not."    reuters.com "Notification theater derived from security theater , 'the practice of investing in countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to

"Congress will be good if it has leaders. The courts will be good if they're honest. And the democracy will be good if people are informed . And you won't have a president who will go off the limb. Most presidents won't want to. Most presidents want to serve their people. But you can prevent that only if each of the pieces are in place, and working as the constitution intended them to work." - Samuel Dash in "Watergate Plus 30" Alternative youtube link: -------------------------- Further Reading: On March 1, 2019, John Dean wrote "We need to pay more attention."    nytimes.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . hyphen: - en: – em: —

Anyone who's survived an untreated BPD knows chaos manufacture is a tool to wrest control or diffuse accountability. It's used in business, politics and the animal kingdom. In National Geographic's "Eternal Enemies" series, a standout episode is " Lions vs. Hyenas: Competing Interests ". The reviews on Netflix's DVD page for the episode don't read like reviews of nature documentaries . More reviews: "Spectacular. This was the most humanizing animal documentary I have ever seen. I felt like I was watching people , and at certain points were really moving and insightful. The animals are so amazing, and one thing I definitely come out with is that hyenas are weird and gross. Bravo." "I love this documentary! I knew hyenas and lions don't get along, but this was very educating. When you think of lions you think unconquerable, but it is amazing how the hyenas work together to defeat their enemy . This is very graphic and emo