first – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Stories filed under: "first"
DailyDirt: Women In Spaaaaace….
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Over fifty women have flown in space so far, but that’s only about 10% of the total number of people who have physically left the planet. It’s not easy to become an astronaut (or cosmonaut or taikonaut…), but when humans go into space nowadays, the ratio of women-to-men is slightly better than it used to be. This year marked a couple anniversaries for female space travelers, and hopefully, there will be more manned missions in the future for everyone.
- Valentina Tereshkova isn’t a name most people in the US remember, but she was the first woman to fly into space — 20 years before the first American woman would. Fifty years ago, Tereshkova orbited our planet 48 times over 3 days. [url]
- Sally Ride was the first American woman to go into space thirty years ago. Ride went up aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, and she is often mistaken to be the first woman to travel to space. [url]
- In 1962, NASA wasn’t even thinking about training female astronauts — as evidenced by rejection letters sent to aspiring women who wanted a chance to escape the Earth’s full gravity. These rejection letters were apparently not uncommon, and Hillary Rodham Clinton even received one when she was a teenager. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: anniversary, astronauts, cosmonauts, first, rejection letters, sally ride, space, taikonauts, valentina tereshkova, women
Companies: nasa
Healthcare, Journalism, And The Mad Dash For 'The Scoop'
from the getting-back-to-insights dept
As you may have heard, when the Supreme Court came out with its ruling on healthcare, CNN and Fox News jumped the gun and incorrectly reported that the Court had struck down the individual mandate. Fox News corrected the mistake pretty quickly. CNN took a bit longer (and spread the false “breaking news” story far and wide). The whole thing even had President Obama confused for a little while.
It was, of course, also great for late night television. People are referring to this as cable news’ “Dewey defeats Truman” moment, while others are arguing that “breaking news is broken.” Of course, being a part of the “blogging” world which is often accused by “old media” types of publishing untrue things… there is some element of schadenfreude in being able to see it made clear that the mainstream media is often no better at publishing incorrect things. Of course, some tried to flip this around, and suggest that the problem actually came about because of “new media” thinking around things like “process journalism,” though there’s a strong argument that reporting before reading something isn’t process journalism, it’s just bad journalism (i.e., process journalism is about reporting things as additional news comes out — but in this case, the news was out, the problem was people reporting it before reading it).
A few years ago, uber-blogger Mike Arrington said something that has quite a lot of truth to it: to get attention as an online media player, you generally have to be first, funny or insightful — and being first is often the easiest, so lots of people concentrate on that. It’s the chase for “the scoop.” Being funny is powerful, but very, very difficult. And… being insightful takes a lot of time and effort, and is no guarantee of attention. Generally speaking, our goal here has never been to be first with news (in fact, we often wait for others to publish so that we can link to their reports in what we write up). Personally, I like that much better. Focusing just on “the scoop” may be good for traffic in the short term, but especially for big stories like this one, I’m not sure how much value it creates in the long term.
Of course, the realities of gaining traffic often support the quick “scoop” over deeper insight. For example, Reddit — a potential major firehose of traffic these days — has its algorithm designed to reward quick, early votes, meaning that longer, thoughtful, insightful pieces almost have no chance, because by the time people have read and thought through them, it’s “too late” to have the votes really count.
Some will argue, of course, that this is just a sign of the “bad” side of the internet: valuing quick, dirty and sometimes wrong reporting over longer, more thoughtful work. But I’m not convinced that’s true. Again, there are plenty of historical examples of this in pre-internet times as well — with Dewey Beats Truman being just one of many such examples.
Instead of just mocking those who messed up, or using a bit of confirmation bias to insist that it shows how awful things are in this “real time era,” I’d be much more interested to see if we could have a discussion on how to change the incentives. How do we better reward insight and thoughtful commentary over the quick hit-scoop? Is it possible? And, if so, what needs to be done?
Filed Under: first, healthcare, hot news, scoop, scotus, traffic
Companies: cnn, fox news, reddit
Being First Isn't The Most Important Thing, Getting It Right Is
from the and-that's-hard dept
Marcus Carab points us to this wonderful comic from Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions. I won’t post the full strip, but just one awesome panel, so as to encourage you to check out the whole thing. In it, two guys are discussing Steve Jobs and his ability to make products that work:
That last line is a classic:
He’s the kid who copies off of your test, then gets a better grade than you.
But the overall point is a key one, and one we’ve tried to make often around here. Merely copying what someone else has done isn’t all that meaningful. If you’ve just copied, and don’t add anything new, you haven’t done much. But if you can copy something that’s so-so, and make it _work_… that’s real innovation. This is something that people who haven’t built companies or brought products to market often don’t understand. Execution is everything. The idea is almost worthless.
Actually, I really like the way Derek Sivers has explained it: the idea is a multiplier, but the execution is still what matters:
AWFUL IDEA = -1 WEAK IDEA = 1 SO-SO IDEA = 5 GOOD IDEA = 10 GREAT IDEA = 15 BRILLIANT IDEA = 20
NO EXECUTION = $1 WEAK EXECUTION = $1000 SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000 GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000 GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000 BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000
To make a business, you need to multiply the two.
The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.
So the idea matters… but marginally. Execution is what makes the big difference all around. Along those lines, being first doesn’t much matter if the execution is weak. And in technology, plenty of first executions are weak. If we limit the ability of anyone else to execute better, then we lose out on tremendous opportunities for others to execute correctly. We want products that work. We don’t want broken products that were “first.”
Filed Under: first, innovation, making things work, right
Companies: apple
Do We Really Want The First To Come Up With An Invention To Own The Market?
from the does-that-make-sense? dept
Tim Lee has another excellent post on the state of the patent system these days, taking on the claim by Michael Mace that software patents are good because it stops big companies from competing with him, by questioning whether or not there’s a reasonable policy rationale for this. Lee’s point is that it’s not at all clear that letting the “first” own the market makes much sense:
Companies have other ways to protect their innovations. They can use copyrights, trade secrets, and the head start that any inventor has over copycats. Mace objects that these protections aren’t adequate to guarantee that the original inventor will win in the marketplace. But that’s the point: consumers benefit from the robust competition that results when inventors have only a limited advantage over competitors. The first company to enter some market shouldn’t be able to simply rest on its laurels. Remember, Facebook was a “me-too competitor” in the social networking space; it’s a good thing that Friendster and MySpace weren’t able to stop Mark Zuckerberg from entering its market.
The function of the patent system isn’t to maximize the profits of inventors. Rather, it’s to provide inventors with sufficient incentives to ensure they continue innovating.
This is a big point that is all too often ignored in these debates. People seem to think that the entire purpose of the patent system is to maximize the benefit of whoever got their first. But that’s simply not the case, and any argument based on that is faulty.
Filed Under: competition, first, markets, monopolies, ownership, patents, social benefit
That Weird Compulsion To Put Info On Wikipedia
from the can't-resist dept
With all the questions zipping around about whether or not Wikipedia is “good” or “bad,” one thing that often gets lost in the shuffle is the question of why people contribute to Wikipedia. Toronto’s Globe and Mail has a fascinating column written by, Ivor Tossell, the guy who edited the Wikipedia page about Meet the Press to add in the fact that Tim Russert died. This isn’t the guy who got fired for editing Tim Russert’s Wikipedia page, but someone who went to the Meet the Press website soon afterwards and noticed that it hadn’t yet been updated.
What’s most fascinating is that he’s not sure why he edited it, but he felt compelled to. It wasn’t so much to make sure that the public was properly informed — but more for personal gratification: the fact that he was “the first” to get there and notice it. As he says, “it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time.” In other words, it’s not about some grand social consciousness or need to participate — but for wholely selfish reasons: to be able to say that he was the guy who did it. To make him feel special.
What is it about breaking news that can turn bemused onlookers into frothing fan-boys? The ability to edit Wikipedia should have lost its thrill by now. People having been fraudulently offing each other on Wikipedia for ages; the comic Sinbad appeared on the public radar for the first time in years when he had to insist that his Wikipedia page exaggerated reports of his own demise. A British Web magazine called B3ta.com ran a competition last year to see whose virtual celebrity assassination would last the longest on Wikipedia. But those were just diversions.
The action is in writing history as it happens. As Noam Cohen of the Times observed, Wikipedia guarantees its readers a large audience. There’s no shortage of ways to publish things online, most of which will start with readerships of precisely zero. The Internet gives everybody the power to be ignored. But editing a Wikipedia page that’s at the heart of a breaking news story will affect thousands upon thousands of readers.
So, despite all those who claim that those who give up their “free” labor are being exploited, or even those who suggest that such endeavors are “communist,” it appears that it really comes back to your basic capitalist instincts: self-interest rules the day. If there’s a personal benefit, no matter how silly, for someone to feel like they were the first to provide the info, it will get provided.