21st May 2009

Time to embarrass my brother


Kevin Craver is apparenly the Shaw Newspapers Journalist of the Year. Tell me if you see any resemblance.

He won this prestigious honor with Danielle Guerra for covering an improbable cluster of rare brain cancers that occurred near a chemical plant that at various times dumped stuff in the aquifer and in the air. The underlying story is very complex, and they didn’t dumb it down: the cancer cannot be traced to any simple cause, and isn’t simply environmental malfeasance by some chemical plant, but also a failure of local government, and an inability of local officials to wrap their heads around the science involved—and yet, here are two people who were able to wrap their heads around the science and also communicate it to ordinary people. Part of the award is surely due to presentation, because rather than simply reporting on events in plain text they used new media formats to give the victims a presence they otherwise would not have had in spare print.

Kevin is a generally skeptical person, and resourceful, distinct from other jouranlists because he is equipped with the scientific, logical and quantitative machinery needed to question and evaluate factual claims. For example, when the plant in question used air stripping to transfer harmful waste into the air, its managers argued that this wouldn’t hurt the town because the town was south and the wind blew west to east. Kevin turned to nearby O’Hare airport to access their mountains of data on wind speed and direction, allowing him to prove that this was an absurd simplification.

But seriously, he has to lose the sweater. Not that it’s a bad sweater, but the last 10 pictures I took of the dude are in that sweater. He’s starting to come across as a cartoon character.

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

11th May 2009

The Dude Owns Property!

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

13th Jun 2008

The 2008 Underhanded C Contest

Posted by Xcott under Crypto and policy, Science | No Comments »

13th Jun 2008

Data hiding in pseudo-random state

Posted by Xcott under Crypto and policy, Uncategorized, Useful Arts | No Comments »

19th Sep 2007

Usability versus security in doors

Posted by Xcott under Crypto and policy | 1 Comment »

17th Apr 2007

I can walk to a rodeo from my house.

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | No Comments »

14th Feb 2007

Oh the weather outside is HUAAAIIAAAIGHHH!!

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

11th Feb 2007

And there goes my shredder

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

03rd Feb 2007

Spam on spam

Posted by Xcott under Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

07th Jan 2007

2007 predictions

Posted by Xcott under Crypto and policy | 2 Comments »