Derek Willis

cjchivers:

A few minutes ago I was skimming through a large folder of recently archived photographs, looking for images of captured Somali pirates for a NYT story in-works, when I found this one.

It’s of Commander Layne McDowell, banking inside the cockpit of an F/A-18F over Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, made while reporting on a decade of changes in American air-to-ground war. I carry a camera to help my work. I am not a photographer. Make no mistake about that. But I’ve found that a camera is an essential tool for fact-gathering. It is also a form of digital notebook, as it is much more efficient to take photographs of passing scenes and people than to try to describe them solely by relying on longhand in a traditional paper notebook. (I use the old-school notebook, too, of course; together these tools complement one another, safeguard accuracy, and allow me to double-check memories and impressions quickly and with confidence.)

Work habits can lead to all manner of surprises. Often I don’t have time to look carefully at all that ends up on the HD cards or that gets saved to a remote hard drive (remember: photography is not my primary job; it’s a tool supporting my primary job). Then, sometime later, like today, I click on the tiny icons and images I did not know I had made pop up on my screen. This was today’s surprise. We’ll make it THE GUN’s photo of the day.

Now back to looking for those frames of the pirates…. and to more posts, and an edit of the story on-desk.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

By the author. Earlier this month, inside Vengeance 13, a U.S. Navy strike fighter on patrol over southern Afghanistan. 

donohoe:

I spent last weekend back in New York to attend the NYTimes Hack Day. It was a lot of fun.

My project wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as most of the others and with a late start I didn’t get to finish it in time to submit.

Well now its up, courtesy of the 6 hour flight to Seattle. Its called The Last Word.

It takes the Homepage feed, grabs the last paragraph, takes the last line and imposes it next to the photograph. Sometimes its a compelling combination, sometimes not.

The feed is freely available as javascript you can pull into your own little web app via a callback. I have a cron job updating it every 30 minutes. The result is uploaded to a Dropbox.

GIS Analyses of Dr. Snow’s Map

Snow’s map, demonstrating the cholera deaths clustered around the Broad Street well, provided strong evidence in support of his theory that cholera was a water-borne disease. Snow drew Thiessen polygons around the wells, defining straight-line least-distance service areas for each. Each Thiessen polygons is comprised of boundary segments that perpendicularly bisect line segments drawn between the point it contains and adjacent points. A large majority of the cholera deaths fell within the Thiessen polygon surrounding the Broad Street pump, amd a large portion of the remaining deaths were on the Broad Street side of the polygon surrouding the bad-tasting Carnaby Street well.

donohoe:

The Washington Post Social Reader app unnerves me. The act of “Reading” is now itself an action. You don’t click any “read this” button. It may be benign to some but there are potential pitfalls on the privacy front.

What if your friends saw a steady stream of articles that you were reading?

Finding comedy in cancer

Study: Sexual potency after prostate cancer can depend on age, weight, treatment type

Quiz gives facts about skin cancer

A fight that’s only begun

What do you think they might want to ask you about?

That is just a hastily put together example, but I think it illustrates my point.

We are what we read, and sometimes we need to explore topics and subjects that need to stay in the private realm. There are plenty of good and bad reasons why you would extensively read up on articles regarding to health, diseases, diabetes, marriage, death, suicide, taxes, depression… the list goes on.

Would you want those articles bunched together in your public feed?

The Washington Post has an Editor’s Note. Its says many things including:

“All you have to do is read, just as you normally do. No “recommending,” “liking” or “sharing” — just read and we’ll do the rest of the work. The app gets better the more friends you have using it.”

Thats a very nice spin on it.

Earlier this year when I was still at the Times we talked to Facebook about a news app. Facebook had a whole set of new features in the pipeline (presumably just launched) and this passive reading action was one of them and they were pushing hard for us to use it. It came up in conference calls and on-site meetings. I believe Facebook is very eager to catch-up or even displace Twitter as a go-to place for news, and this is how they think they can do that.

To their credit the newsroom shelved the idea. The consensus was that this was intrusive and potentially an invasion of privacy. I think after that was repeatedly communicated that Facebook lost interest in doing anything at all.

I think its one thing to broadcast your taste in music, but what you’re reading raises the stakes a bit. For now, all I have is this isolated case but everything has a beginning.

harrisj:

Public Service Announcement: Don’t forget the applications tab of your twitter account. A lot of people have been laughing at the clueless social media expert who fired a ghostwriter and forgot to change his password. But changing a password is not enough, since once a remote client (e.g., Twitter for iPhone) has been authorized against your account, it uses its OAuth credentials and not your password to authenticate. Changing your password will not affect those applications (indeed OAuth was designed so apps could access the account without storing passwords), and the only way to revoke access is to go into the applications tab of your account settings and hit “revoke access.” Try looking at yours and you’ll be struck by a few things immediately:

• How many services you’ve forgotten that you granted read and write access to your account a long time ago (and which might be a way to access your account if they are hacked).
• OAuth is keyed to an application, but in this ghostwriter-gone-rogue case you’d really want to revoke the access of a person. How do you figure out which application they use?
• Most users have little to no idea that this tab even exists.

In conclusion, rotate your passwords in this sort of situation, but don’t forget the applications as well.