Here’s how the Boston Globe’s lead story opens today:

Standing on stage at a Republican debate on the Gulf Coast of Florida last week, Mitt Romney repeatedly lashed out at rival Rudy Giuliani for providing sanctuary to illegal immigrants in New York City.

Yet, the next morning, on Thursday, at least two illegal immigrants stepped out of a hulking maroon pickup truck in the driveway of Romney’s Belmont house, then proceeded to spend several hours raking leaves, clearing debris from Romney’s tennis court, and loading the refuse onto the truck.

The “yet” indicates that the Globe thinks this is a story about hypocrisy. Indeed, it goes on to say that “Throughout the campaign, Romney has spoken on the issue of illegal immigration with increasing fervor…But at his home, he paid less attention to the issue.”

Who cares? Romney spoke once to the landscaping company’s boss, although the boss disagrees about the tone of the discussion. Does the Globe really want Mitt to be demanding documentation from the guy blowing leaves off his driveway? This incident doesn’t help us decide if Mitt has any integrity. (Note: He doesn’t.) It’s merely anti-Mitt propaganda.

If there’s a story here, it’s about how deeply integrated into our society are illegal immigrants, and how shallow and despicable is the simple-minded xenophobia exploited by almost all the Republican candidates.

PS to the Globe: Last night was the first night of Chanukah, not tonight as you report. [Tags: media boston_globe mitt_romney immigration christopher_lydon ]

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Dan Gillmor continues to hold Time’s feet to the fire for it’s reluctance to correct Joe Klein’s factual errors.

Time is giving us as good as example as we could have asked for of the down side of relying on institutions that depend on being perceived as authoritative.

[Tags: media joe_klein authority everything_is_miscellaneous dan_gillmor ]

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Aargh. Steven Levy‘s excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!

Well, I’ll send it out anyway, and will link to it here tomorrow. Damn the pace of human events! [Tags: books libraries steven_levy amazon ]

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The Times They Aren’t a-Changin’ explains itself this way:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times’s own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

So the blog takes a current story from The Times and finds stories on the same theme in its archive. The result is a list of the mythic narratives of our culture.

This so reminds me of the feature that Spy magazine (I believe) used to run that rounded up all the tiny filler-ish NY Times stories headlined “Bus Plunge.” [Tags: media newspapers narrative nytimes ]

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Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source has found a home at Brown University’s Watson Center. Yay! [Tags: radio_open_source christopher_lydon media radio ]

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Jay Rosen has another initiative launching today: Enabling a dozen beat reporters to have a social network comprised of people who know the topic and have an interest in having the coverage be thorough, accurate, and deep. Very cool experiment.

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Jay Rosen has another initiative launching today: Enabling a dozen beat reporters to have a social network composed of people who know the topic and have an interest in having the coverage be thorough, accurate, and deep. Very cool experiment. [Tags: media journalism jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Dave Winer has come up with a clever way of reslicing the NY Times. Not only does it group articles by keyword, the layout creates a histogram of the topics. [Tags: dave_winer ny_times nytimes everything_is_miscellaneous media metadata ]

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I have a friend who is in charge of managing the peer review process at some serious scientific journals. It’s a tough job requiring a set of skills that includes dealing with sometimes ornery people, managing multiple schedules, and expertise in the fields in which she works. She makes a good case for peer review, and for the journals that rely on it. Peer review has value and costs money, she says. So, journals have to charge fees to support the peer review process, and they have to hold onto the rights at least long enough to recover their costs.

I recognize the value of peer review. It not only directs our attention to worthwhile research, it is part of an editorial process that improves articles before they’re published. But peer review doesn’t scale. There’s so much research being done. A lot of it is good work but isn’t important enough to merit the investment in a traditional peer review process (including the failed hypotheses that we were taught in school were not failures at all). Peer review is valuable, but it’s a choke point required because traditional publishing’s neck is so thin. And it may — may! — turn out that the combination of crowds and quirky individuals can replace peer review’s value. Of course, we’d want the crowd to consist of people with some standing for evaluating the research. And we’d want to be sure that the quirky individuals who buck the crowd are not delusional psychotics. I of course don’t know what the world will look like (or what it does look like, when you come down to it), but I suspect that we’re going to have a mixed research ecology, with peer reviewed journals making recommendations we trust highly, and a wide variety of other ways of finding the research that matters to us. With PLoS and PLoS, and arXiv, and Nature’s version of arXiv, and all the rest of it, we’re already well on the way to filling the important niches in this new knowledge ecology.

In fact, peer review generally establishes two characteristics of a piece of work: It was performed properly and it is important enough to merit throwing some ink at it. Those are important criteria, but hardly the only ones. “This hastily performed work uses a flawed methodology but turns up an interesting fact worth considering” is the type of criterion researchers use when recommending articles to one another. There’s value there, and with research that has good data that it misanalyzes, research that is promising but incomplete, research that inadvertently demonstrates a flaw in some lab equipment, etc. etc. etc. And, as always, the value is in the long tail of et ceteras. [Tags: peer_review open_access science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I mean this seriously, not snarkily or rhetorically: Is there any reason why Blackwater “contractors” are not more properly termed “mercenaries”? [Tags: mercenaries blackwater]

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