Entering reporting on an unfamiliar issue or conflict is hard — but engaging the audience in a story mid-telling is something that television writers have faced for years; could we borrow what they’ve learned to help get readers up to speed on news more easily? Continue reading
Dark web, TOR and Proxys
I wanted to create something about this recurrent topic that was not too technical nor boring.
The explainer can be found HERE.
Timeline for the firing of Aristegui
For this assignment I worked on the article of the New York Times about the Carmen Aristegui dismissal “In Mexico, Firing of Carmen Aristegui Highlights Rising Pressures on News Media”
The way I did it was creating a timeline of the latest events in Mexico that could be involved in the story. One of the main believes is that it was the result of some of the investigative journalism that se has been doing as well as her criticism to the Federal Administration, but there isn’t any evidence about that.
Here’s the time line and the link to it:
Explainer: Nigerian elections
Since Saturday’s presidential election in Nigeria, the world has been watching. Firstly, Nigerians and observers feared that cycles of electoral violence and rigged results might repeat themselves. Secondly, a win for presidential challenger Muhammad Buhari – which looked likely early on Tuesday – would mark President Goodluck Jonathan the first incumbent not to win re-election in the country’s history. Before results and Buhari’s historic victory were confirmed later today, I created an infographic to give a brief background explainer about the Nigerian elections. If I had had more time, I would have liked to include more info on social media and tech innovations used during this election.
What’s going on in Yemen and why you should care
The assignment was done in collaboration with Vladimir using Thinglink and Google Maps
From Reuters: Saudi troops clashed with Yemeni Houthi fighters on Tuesday in the heaviest exchange of cross-border fire since the start of a Saudi-led air offensive last week, while Yemen’s foreign minister called for a rapid Arab intervention on the ground.
Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition of Arab states since last Thursday in an air campaign against the Shi’ite Houthis, who emerged as the most powerful force in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country when they seized Yemen’s capital last year.
The Saudis say their aim is to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who left the country last week. The Houthis are allied with Saudi Arabia’s regional foe Iran, and backed by army units loyal to longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was pushed out three years ago after “Arab Spring” demonstrations.
Who’s fighting inside the country
Who’s joining in from the outside and why
Putin says he is against “external interference”
Russian president Vladimir Putin has prompted an angry response from Saudi Arabia after sending a letter to the Arab League commenting on Saudi-led air strikes against Yemen’s Houthi fighters. The letter was read out at a summit of Arab leaders in Egypt on Sunday.
“We support the Arabs’ aspirations for a prosperous future and for the resolution of all the problems the Arab world faces through peaceful means, without any external interference,” Putin’s letter read, going on to condemn extremist groups such as ISIS.
Yemen has been a battling ground between East and West for decades
From Wikipedia: In less than a year, after the Egyptian–Syrian unification in 1958, Egypt’s pro-Soviet strategy had returned to power. Saud had once again joined their alliance, which declined the US-Saudi relationship to a fairly low point especially after he announced in 1961 that he changed his mind on renewing the U.S. base.[11] In 1962, however, Egypt attacked Saudi Arabia from bases in Yemen during the 1962 Yemeni revolution because of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-revolution propaganda, which made Saud seek the U.S. support. President John F. Kennedy immediately responded to Saud’s request by sending U.S. war planes in July 1963 to the war zone to stop the attack which was putting U.S. interests in risk.
British colonialism as possible root cause
From Foreign Policy Journal: Arab nationalism reached unprecedented heights as a result of Western interference in the Middle Eastern affairs, especially after the Suez Canal debacle in 1956. Rebels in Yemen supported by then Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser began guerrilla attacks on British forces stationed in Aden to force their withdrawal from the region.
Egyptian incursion into Yemen in the 1960’s is remembered as “Egyptian Vietnam”
From the Washington Post: In the 1960s, Egypt entered into a long, costly quagmire in Yemen. The Egyptian president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secular autocrat and a champion of pan-Arabism, chose to intervene in Yemen in support of a republican coup led by military officers seeking to oust the country’s monarchy in 1962. Nasser himself came to power the decade prior on the back of an officers’ coup which overthrew Egypt’s fusty constitutional monarchy. Now, he wanted to help a neighboring Arab nation follow in Egypt’s mold.
But Saudi Arabia was set against this state of affairs and sought to return Yemen’s ruling Imam to the throne, and pumped in arms and money to royalist militias. Ironically, these included many tribesmen from the Shiite Zaydi sect, which now forms the backbone of the Houthi rebellion the Saudis are so desperate to quash.
The tens of thousands of soldiers Egypt sent in as an expeditionary force into Yemen soon found themselves on the front line of a civil war, taking the lead in the defense of Yemeni republicanism. What followed was a long, difficult conflict that ground on for nearly a decade.
More than 10,000 Egyptian soldiers died, prompting some historians to call the war the “Egyptian Vietnam”.
U.S. forces leaving Yemen
From AP, March 21st: The U.S. troops, including Special Forces commandos, were leaving the al-Annad air base near the southern city of al-Houta, Yemeni military and security officials said.
U.S. staying nearby
U.S. military has a base in Djibouti, just across the sea from Yemen. This base serves as a launch pad for drone strikes in the region.
US military Camp Lemonnier even has a Facebook page. Feel free to ask them a question.
What is Deep Learning, anyway?
Recently in the tech world, the term deep learning is almost as big a buzzword as “big data” or “machine learning”. In spite to the hype in this emerging research area, a lot of tech news articles seem to be quite overly optimistic about the technology, so this explainer hopes to explain deep learning, its whereabout, recent trends, and what deep learning is not.
This presentation seeks to use graphical navigation, where each node presents a chunk of information. The node color denotes a related semantic topic group and connections suggest similarity between chunks of information. Upon hovering the nodes, the highlighted nodes are the suggested next chunks to read. Due to the time constraint, this explainer is done in a very crude-proof-of-concept way, but hopefully it should show the gist of design philosophy.
Is today’s pot GMO?
I was deep into a longish story about pot potency last week when I was surprised to see an unchallenged assertion that today’s marijuana is GMO, or a genetically modified organism.
I thought that question was settled by the Pulitzer-winning truth-checkers at Politifact. Last year Politifact took on Patrick Kennedy, a spokesman for Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a national group opposed to legalizing weed. Kennedy came under scrutiny for saying modern marijuana is genetically modified and much stronger than what Barack Obama smoked as a teenager. Politifact agreed that pot potency had increased, but said Kennedy’s claim about genetic modification didn’t hold up.
“The most off-base part of Kennedy’s claim is that the rise in THC levels comes from ‘genetic modification,” said Politifact. “It’s actually from genetic selection, a very old process of producing desired traits from crops.”
March 11 Debunking Assignment – Taking on Big Shampoo
Debunking Assignment – Big Shampoo
I took this assignment to mean “use persuasive media techniques” more than to factually challenge something.
I shot this with my Iphone while getting my hair done because I like these guys. And I’ve always wondered what’s the real difference between salon shampoo and the CVS stuff.
I could have read ingredient labels and compared them, scientifically, for some insight into what these products do. But I was pressed for time and these salon owners really charmed me, so they made a better story – if not better actual science.
Also – I usually find my hair salons by word of mouth – as I think many people do.
I also thought a video would capture attention – it’s easy to click through, and done with a little humor would keep me watching. It was also a way to use a new technique, which I’m trying to do with each assignment.
The logical power of the argument here isn’t very strong; the fun was in making it with these guys. Go give some business to Salon Continentale in Belmont. They’ll make you look good.
(Tell a story that makes truth claims about a disputed subject
Using techniques from the Debunking Handbook,
and using what you know about motivated reasoning,
leading with values, persuade a broad audience
– including those hostile to your claims – of the truth of your assertions)
Finding out what happened to UVa student
Link
A UVa student was arrested and seemingly beaten by officials in a nightlife area near campus. I learned about it through social media Wednesday night, and Storified my discoveries.
Patrick – Patty – Paddy
For our assignment, Bianca Datta and I created a simple web page that demonstrates a possible tool for journalists in understanding a lot of social media data. We took the idea of creating a story via social media and attempted to automate it a bit more.
On the left is a feed of tweets based on the topic ‘St. Patrick’s Day’. The search terms we used were ‘StPatty’, ‘StPaddy’, and ‘StPatrick’ . Once we had these tweets in our database, we processed them to get topics using LDA via a Node.js package. The top ranking topics were then displaying on the right side of the webpage using a very simple web graphic. Based on the term’s use, the topic would be allotted a larger height for more use and smaller height for less use. The left column shows common topic terms in tweets with the word ‘Patty’. The middle column shows topic terms for ‘Paddy’ and the right column shows topic terms for ‘Patrick’.
This is a screenshot of the page:
We also gathered content from Instagram, Vine, and Flickr and processed each of those to get topic rankings.
link : http://web.media.mit.edu/~vdiep/vdiepbdatta/indexy.html