Archive
Song For Friday- Gregory Brothers are back. With cats.
Welcome new subscribers! This has been a great week for my blog life. Productive and fun. Made some new friends in the process. Happy song time!
The original viral video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTTwcCVajAc
Schmoyoho’s nyan-reminisce remix.
Awesome. Now get back to auto-tuning the news, Gregory bros.
Where is Prop 8 now?
I think this is one of the best pieces of journalism I have ever done. I learned so much about the District and Ninth Circuit courts in the writing process. Namely I learned that Schwarzenegger didn’t show up to Court even though his name was in the lawsuit, and that justice is very very slow.
Prop Hate will fall one day, though. If you like the article there’s a button on the article’s page to “like” it on facebook.
Same-Sex Marriage, CA’s Prop. 8 Court Battle History and Standing
Read more at Suite101: Same-Sex Marriage, CA’s Prop. 8 Court Battle History and Standing | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/content/same-sex-marriage-cas-prop-8-court-battle-history-and-standing-a378638#ixzz1ROI9Ydj
How Google Panda Hurts Freelance Bloggers
So, as you may have noticed with my notorious link whoring, I recently joined a freelance writing site. I picked Suite101 over Examiner due to higher editorial oversight and general content quality. I made about $3 in 5 days, which is actually better than average for the average newbie freelance blogger. But still, I checked out their writer forum to see if others had insight into how they were doing.
Apparently, people who have been on the site for years found a massive drop in revenue in the last couple months. People who had way more articles than me were not not doing vastly better. The phrase “Google panda” came up over and over again on the forum. Instead of trying to trace the orignal conversation, I, of course, turned to Google. (No, unfortunately, Google didn’t adopt a Panda cub.)
I found a great article, apparently unharmed or able to surpass the limitations of Google Panda. Here’s what I learned:
- Google has a codename or nickname for their search algorithm. Formerly “Caffeine,” it is currently “Panda,” named after one of their engineers.
- The change was prompted in early 2011 by a call to help weed out “low quality” sites from the searches. This includes websites from content farms.
Via wikipedia: “Content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views.” < Suite 101 sounds like it fits the criteria.
- Unfortunately, what determines this “low quality” isn’t always relevant to the quality of writing. Wisegeek, which I always thought had great articles, took a 77% hit in traffic, based on keyword exposure. Simply by having a site with multiple ads hosted by AdSense (iroincally owned by Google) can hurt your ranking.
A Wired.com interview discusses Suite101:
Wired.com: I spoke to someone yesterday who runs a site called Suite 101. His rankings have tanked, and his keyword traffic is down 94 percent. He says that it’s not fair, since he commissions and curates his own articles and contends the quality is high.
Cutts: Oh, yes. Suite 101, I’ve known about it for years.
Wired.com: So why did this guy take a much bigger hit than Demand Media, which has a reputation as the classic site that wins high rankings for low-quality content?
Cutts: I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.
I’ll still be using Suite101 for certain articles, simply because a couple bucks is better than the nothing I’m getting on WordPress. But in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), my experience finds WordPress better for Google exposure. Fair or not? Probably not, but at least I’m aware of it.
5 Worst Body Parts to get Bit by a Mosquito
A Bloodsucking Plague of the Skin
Your Foot
If you work full-time at a job that requires standing and wearing shoes, the foot is an absolutely nightmare to get a bite on. There’s no other way to reach it unless you have a giant scratchy stick; you have to lift your leg up or bend over to scratch. If you’re bitten here, be prepared to look awkward in public.
Your Ear
The skin here is so sensitive and the ear is so tiny. If you have short hair, a big bite will look like a giant red zit, protruding from the side your head.
Your Armpit
As surreptitiously as you might try to scratch it, you will not be able to avoid looking a hick. Sweat + bite in a hot place is a recipe for itching. Putting deodorant on top of it probably isn’t good for it either.
Your Face
Nothing says social suicide like a swelled up tumorous mass on your face. Be ready to answer the question “Are you okay?” with a look of annoyance and tirade against the entire race of mosquitoes.
Your Diddly Do Dads
I have never experienced this indescribably horrifying situation. But apparently others on the Internet have.
Mosquito bite remedies include Benadryl cream, hydrocortisone cream, calamine lotion, and vinegar. Although I would ask a medical professional before putting any of these on your diddly do dads.
Disappointing Things of 2011: Movies, rock music, and the GOP primary candidates
Ahoy 2011. The second week of the 6th month of the year is already over. Unless more interesting things start happening in the next half of the year, jibjab’s yearend video is going to be 30 seconds long and consist entirely of a certain liberal disappointment’s weiner.
1. Movies
Continuing the X-men movie franchise pattern of excellent casting and okay everything else, X-men: First Class has so far been the only decent action movie of the summer. Correctness to comic canon and history aside, all I wanted to see was Magneto fuck some Soviets up, and it almost but didn’t quite deliver.
You already know what I think about Thor. I didn’t see Jack Sparrow, exclusive edition, because I don’t like rum catch phrases enough to justify $12 and 2 hours of Johnny Depp. I also didn’t see Rango, but believe that any motion picture with that that amount of short-sleeve, Hawaiian shirt requires more PCP.
2. Rock Music
Rock artists I found significant in high school that released crappy albums this year: Foo Fighters, Incubus (anticipated), and Death Cab for Cutie.
Looking at the Billboard current rock 100 I’m depressed that I’m most impressed by Rise Against. Also, Korn apparently decided that its krumper fan base was not large enough and incorporated dubstep demon Skillrex, known for synthesizing the sick beats of a giraffe fucking a tugboat.
Linkin Park, I remember you fondly in my bad poetry-laden teenage years as the angry but catchy musical backdrops to badass mechabot warfare–a deep, complex music video metaphor for neglectful parents and broken post-pubescent hearts. But when last year’s “Waiting for the End” was released, I could only think, how apt a song title for your career. Really, your most recent music is the soundtrack to the most boring mid-life crisis ever.
3. Republican Presidential Contenders
We have:
Mama bear of Minnesota, Michelle Bachman. She eats insanity and shits crazy. Like Joan of Arc she’s a tragic figure in that she’s blatantly out of her mind, but someone gave her power anyway. In Bachmanland, chlorofluorocarbons cure cancer, progressive taxation makes all of her 23 foster children cry, and Obama wants to stick his icky black power fingers in the assholes of Muslim dictators and then marry them.
T-Paw. The only thing I know about him is the mononym T-Paw.
Then there’s the guy “who looks like every guy who ever fired your dad.” Oh Mitt Romney. You are the awkward moment when you say goodbye to someone and end up walking in the same direction. You have the charisma of a school bus fire. If you lose the actual Presidency in 2012, I’m quite certain you have the hairline to play the Presidency in every action film that will ever be made.
And then there are some other people who don’t matter and one who will remain unnamed that likes to pretend she still does.
Runner-ups to the largest disappointments of 2011 thus far include the unemployment rate and mid-season finale of South Park.
Are private prisons worth it?
The most widely cited study in argument of states contracting out private prisons on the Internet seems to be: “Do Government Agencies Respond to Market Pressures? Evidence from Private Prisons” headed by James F. Blumstein of Vanderbilt Law School.
$15,000,000 savings it says. Wow. How can you argue with $15 million more in a state’s pocket?
Well, you can read the study:
http://www.cca.com/static/assets/Blumstein_Cohen_Study.pdf
…which unsurprisingly received funding by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and by the Association for Private Correctional and Treatment Organizations (APCTO).
In using the study as evidence in favor of contracting out prisons over public prison, it’s important to note the study does not focus on the direct cost savings that accrue as a result of the lower costs of privately-provided government services, but rather the rate of growth in expenditures on publicly held prisoners.
I’m going to assume the numbers are accurate and assume the study’s own attempts to weed out extraneous variables were admirable. I can’t fact check the math largely because my math education hasn’t covered regression analysis. (Ugh, lengthy multivariable formulas are every journalist’s nightmare.) But I can argue that $15 million in savings is not terribly significant when by the study’s own numbers, “in 2004 the average Department of Corrections expenditures in states without private prisoners was approximately $493 million.”
The study also concludes that “while we believe this is an important finding and should provide policy makers with an additional reason to favor privatization of some portion of a state’s prisons, we realize that this is only a cost-analysis, and does not necessarily relate to the benefits of private versus public prisons. A benefit-cost analysis would need to account for both the cost savings as well as the benefits of public versus private incarceration.”
Cost-benefit analysis, eh?
3% estimated average savings versus the numerous qualitative arguments against private prisons such as:
- It create incentives for both legal and illegal methods of increasing sentence terms for prisoners. Obvious ethical quandaries ensue.
- Corporations cut corners, most often in the areas of staff pay, training, and Research and Development. This results in facilities that are short staffed, inexperienced, and with high turnover rates. Some studies promote that private facilities are a recipe for poor containment.
- Some private institutions reserve the right to reject high cost inmates, sending them to public facilities, thereby artificially inflating their cost-savings figures.
- The Israeli Supreme Court declared private prisons unconstitutional under the premise that the profit motive undermines prisoner’s rights and the incarceration thus loses legitimacy.
David Foster Wallace Interview from 2003
“For the upper middle class in the US, particularly younger people, things are often materially comfortable. And there’s also often a great sadness and emptiness…There’s a particular ethos in US culture especially in entertainment and marketing culture that very much appeals to individuals. You don’t have to be devoted or subservient anything else. There is no larger good than your own and your own happiness…. We all worship and all have a religious impulse… but the myth that were worship nothing… simply sets us up to give ourselves something different. For instance pleasure, drugs, or the idea of having a lot of money and being
able to buy nice stuff.”
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