The Offline Report

I tweeted a link to a positive news story -- really the most well-produced magazine story I've read this year -- and the algorithm suppressed it from the view of anyone who surveys my timeline. Which is just fine, I needed the nudge to post the positive news link to this blog instead of lazy-posting to social media. The story is of a bird-watching "savant" - an African-American man who, from the time he was a college student, could discern from his professor's car thrumming 40 mph down the freeway, the call of a blue-winged warbler. Among other sounds. It is the first piece of writing that made me actually want to try birding. The article was written for Bay Nature magazine which is one of the few publications to still employ fact-checkers and copy editors. It's also one of two magazine articles this month in which the author gives a "shout out" to the copy editor. (The other article was Paul Ford's essay that made May's Wired cover in which ...

Saturday April 1, 2019 Before I went to college, my grandfather sent me a cassette tape filled with his thoughts as a sort of “audio-letter” experiment. “Maybe one day you’ll work at The New York Times,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be the next Russell Baker.” There was only one. https://t.co/5wyG1gLFj3 — Gregory Cowles (@GregoryCowles) January 23, 2019 I put them back. https://t.co/aEJLXqNBJ8 — Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) May 31, 2019 I mean is this an example of flexible legal doctrine or what. Looks totally responsive to the shift in public sentiment. https://t.co/7GWwRTA6XS — Dina Srinivasan (@DinaSrinivasan) June 1, 2019 This is important and a good reminder of how Facebook and Google often escape liability under the Wiretap Act and Stored Communications Act when consumers allege privacy violations. https://t.co/FeniGz8sUm — Dina Srinivasan (@DinaSrinivasan) May 30, 2019 Friday May 31, 2019 Six lessons learned from my deepfake research at Stan...

In early May, I decided we'd reached a milestone in our culture when the front page of our regional newspaper critiqued the big tech companies— a rare event for a newspaper which is courting advertising dollars and pursuing prominent source access. These last few weeks, I've wanted many times to say "my work is complete" which of course it isn't. The goal of this site is not strictly to critique big tech companies. It's to look at them objectively, celebrate the upsides, and mitigate the downsides. Or mitigate our human downsides in the wake of big tech's upsides. Still, it was not the beat I chose originally. In 2008 I was so sure someone else would pick this topic area and report on it for a series, that I let lapse my registered domain offlinereport.com eleven years ago. I finally registered the remaining offlinereport.net version in February 2018. This way, I thought last year, I could clarify some edge cases for anyone who cared to read. An incompl...

It is late May 2019, and people have once again disappeared to the internal silo that is Facebook. Or so I've read. And heard, "oh I was in a group chat all morning" one young friend told me, when I asked her reaction to the abortion bans that passed last week in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri. (Did Mississippians pass a ban, or did comedians just say they did?) Facebook's group chat is the new FOMO trigger. This time I'm resisting the herd. It's getting difficult and lonely out here. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Monday May 20, 2019 "The empirical work suggests three key findings: first, the peak heights of momentary popularity for individual topics are stable over time, second, the attention associated with individual topics rises and falls with increasing gradients and third, the shifts of collective attention between topics occur more frequent."    nature.com “Similar to checking the ingredients or calories in food before you consume it… data scientists should look at the ingredients in the data they use,” Newman says.    onezero.medium.com "Google suspends some business with Huawei after Trump administration's trade blacklisting"    abc.net.au "Chess legend Garry Kasparov warns of a ‘cyber Cold War,’ says Western ‘political will’ needed"    cnbc.com "You could be a great driver, but still have to pay more because of reasons unrelated to driving, a Sun-Times investigation found."    chicago.suntimes.com "...

Wednesday May 15, 2019 Lots going on with the journalist shield law this week.     latimes.com Sunday May 12, 2019 🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

"Teens also report feeling anxious about their interactions with friends. Many teens report that they prefer not to interact directly with others at school for fear of looking foolish in front of their peers. Teens feel judged and their phones provide them some amount of cover. They want to hide behind their small screens so they can edit and re-edit their thoughts before sending them along to friends. Talking on the phone without a script is not something teens do in the digital age." — NYU Press Blog "From The Square" This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A source I exchanged emails with recently did something to his emails that I ended up imitating: he'd hit carriage return early in his sentences to narrow the width of the text of his emails. I noticed when I slipped and used the entire column width for my emails, my source either wouldn't respond, or said he could only answer my emails by phone as, he then told me, "I'm not much of a reader." This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Wednesday May 8, 2019 "ROVANIEMI, Finland — Under pressure from the United States, the Arctic Council issued a short joint statement Tuesday that excluded any mention of climate change."    sfchronicle.com Is scraping ethical? Nonetheless, a site called "Journalists Toolbox" provides many scripts for scraping tweets of accounts not belonging to you, which at one time, was a violation of Twitter's terms of service.    journaliststoolbox.org "Google is set to launch new tools to limit the use of tracking cookies, a move that could strengthen the search giant’s advertising dominance and deal a blow to other digital-marketing companies, according to people familiar with the matter."    wsj.com Privacy vs. security is a tension to be kept in mind when reading about this NH judge ordering voice recordings made during the time of a murder be turned over to the court.    cbs.com California also introduced a dissemination bi...