Dr. Wolicki's deep thoughts

GREENSBORO, NC -- Greensboro physician Karol Wolicki (an ear, nose and throat man) writes a letter to the News & Record today. Here it is in its entirety:

"The parallels are obvious. Any discussion of the comparison is thus far conspicuously absent. If you like the way the government administers health care to our veterans, you'll love Obamacare!"

Maybe the exclamation point is meant to head off any further consideration of his opinion, but I don't find his parallels "obvious" at all.

The VA is a cabinet level veterans benefit system, Obamacare is a series of laws passed by congress that mandate private insurance coverage for use among private health care providers and which helps pay for that private insurance with sliding scale subsidies.

Obvious? I think what's obvious is that Dr. Wolicki, who himself received over $30,000 in public payments last year through government administered Medicare, has something against Obamacare he is unable to articulate cogently.

Journalism

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

— George Orwell 

Keep it stupid, simple: John Hammer misguided on city's public records policies

GREENSBORO, NC -- Rhino Times editor John Hammer drones on with a negative opinion of the city's efforts to improve transparency and its handling of public records requests. In his view, the city is over-complicating things and nefariously working to shield itself from the demands of state public records law. "It's a trick," he writes in his uninformed paranoia.

In his view, access to public information is all very simple: Whoever has public records should provide them when asked. Sure, in some ideal pre-computerized era where paper records resided in binders and file cabinets, that might have worked fine, but in a world where records reside mostly electronically across a multitude of physical and virtual repositories, that's not a comprehensive policy.

Hammer might have gained some insight into the challenges and opportunities of modern technology and pubic records had he gone to the City's meeting today about improving public records access as did Ben Holder, Amanda Lehmert of the News & Record, Jordan Green of Triad City Beat, City Council members Mayor Nancy Vaughan, Marikay Abuzuaiter, Jamal Fox and Mike Barber, the City Manager, the City Attorney, the City's pubic relations director, the City's public records administrator and I.

Had Hammer attended, he might have learned how thinking bigger than his quaint notions has already resulted in greater access to public information and how the city is planing to make an even more responsive and transparent city government. (Not to mention being disabused of his mistaken notion that the City intends to start charging for copies of public records.)

Here are some things the city has implemented or is planning:

Staff education: It's fine for Hammer to say that staff should just "follow the law;" that does no good if staff doesn't know what the law is or what their obligations are. The city intends to implement formal procedures for educating city staff about public records law and the city's policies.

Providing reasons when records are denied: State law allows people who have had records requests denied to ask for the reason for the denial and the city is obligated to give a response. Under the City's updated policies, a reason would be given as a matter of course if records are denied, without the requester having to ask. This is one of those rare examples of the city raising its standards above the minimum the law demands.

Online request tracking and repository: The city has already undertaken laudable efforts to put more information online. The recent document dump of records related to the finances of the city-sponsored International Civil Rights Center and Museum and the now-searchable online access to City Council and committee agenda documents, video and minutes are two good examples. The city also plans to roll out this summer online access to the system that tracks records requests so that people can see just how well (or not) the city is responding to requests for public records.

This kind of proactive and modern transparency is a world away from Hammer's simplistic view of how people are to access public records.

Appeals process: Under state law, the only recourse one has if he feels records have been improperly withheld is to go to court (or whine and make a big stink). Hammer brags of having gone to court over public records. I have too. Hammer is right that it's not the ideal remedy. The city is considering coming up with some sort of dispute resolution process so that people, like Hammer, when denied public records have another course of action more accessible than the courts. It's the kind of proactive policy Hammer should cheer.

Better access to records of elected officials: Today's meeting covered several other aspects of public records that could greatly improve transparency including the possibility of having council members forward emails about city business from their private accounts to a city account where they could be better archived and searched; and considering how texts and emails sent and received during public meetings by elected officials and city staff can be made part of the record of the meeting.

While it's true that many (but not all) of these things are plans and promises, there is a very different posture towards transparency at city hall nowadays. Gone is the hostility towards transparency that flourished under former Mayor Robbie Perkins and the former city attorney Mujeeb Shah-Khan. John Hammer would help this city out if he recognized the opportunities this new council and new city administration offer and proded them forward. It may not be like this forever and putting some policies and procedures in place now, in a friendly environment, would make it just a little harder for some future enemy of transparency to clamp down on public access. Hammer could help things along, if he thought about it a little more than he has so far.

Judge: eye contact with police equals reasonable suspicion

From the News & Record, in an article describing an appeals court decision throwing out a weapons possession conviction for a man who was stopped by Greensboro police for walking away as officers approached:

"In his dissenting opinion, Judge Chris Dillon said that if someone walks away from police after making eye contact with that officer, there is justification for an officer to stop the person."

Adobe woes and your profit had you followed my short advice

GREENSBORO, NC -- On March 6th, I wrote a post saying that I was wary of the business prospect for Adobe, the maker of the very excellent website design software Dreamweaver. The title of the post was I'd short the heck out of Adobe, a reference to the stock trading method of placing a bet that the stock price will decline in the future. The day I wrote that post, Adobe's stock closed at $68.92. Yesterday it closed at $60.20. If you had followed my short advice, you would be sitting on a gain of 12.7%.

My opinion then was that Adobe was making a mistake by no longer allowing customers to buy and install Dreamweaver (and other flagship products, like Photoshop) on their computers. Instead, they moved those products exclusively to a cloud based subscription service. I thought that was a dubious move—a roll of the dice that did not justify the then 121 price to earnings ratio (P/E).

[P/E: The price of a share of stock divided by the annual earnings per share. At 121, it would take 121 years of earnings to total the current share price. The S&P historical average is currently 16]

Even with the stock's decline, Adobe's current P/E ratio of 117 is still way too high, for the same reasons I posited previously: I doubt the ability of the cloud-only software model to sustain Adobe's revenues, much less grow them.

Indeed, Adobe's entire cloud service went down yesterday. Customers who no longer have Adobe's software installed on their computers, who had moved to the subscription service, were left in the lurch. I cannot imagine how businesses are supposed to put any confidence in mission critical infrastructure vulnerable to these kinds of sustained outages. From Reuters:

Adobe Systems Inc said on Friday that access to its Creative Cloud was restored following an outage that disrupted the Web-based, subscription service to top-selling software programs including Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash for about a day.

Customers can apply to get compensation for the outage, which company spokeswoman Vanessa Rios said lasted about 24 hours and was due to a database software failure.

Not dead yet

GREENSBORO, NC -- Just as I was observing that the News & Record seems to have become incurably infected with a preference for the laziest substitutions for journalism, along comes reporter Joe Killian with an exceptional glimmer of hope. In covering the defamation suit by Conservatives for Guilford County against a local blogger, Killian takes a story tailor made for the he said/she said trap, gives each side its due but firmly stakes the story down to the pertinent and independently researched empirical facts. Journalism, not stenography.

Update:: There was an error in the link to the Killian article. It has been corrected.

Police unable to identify studies cited in their press release

GREENSBORO, NC -- In a May 6th press release announcing a new round of intensified traffic enforcement, this time on High Point Road, the Greensboro Police Department claimed this:

"Nationwide studies show that intensified traffic enforcement in hot spots serves the dual role of increasing roadway safety while serving as deterrence to potential criminals."

Upon request, Greensboro police were unable to provide or cite such studies. Instead, they provided a variety of documents explaining the methods used for this type of policing, one of which included a reference to a 1996 study of these techniques in Dayton, Ohio, but they were unable to provide or cite a nationwide study, much less the multiple studies they said existed, that demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques.

Is it the role of police public relations to propagandize the public they serve with made up information or to be accurate and honest?

The News & Record's failure to understand the market

GREENSBORO, NC -- The News & Record "reports" on the lawsuit filed by Conservatives for Guilford County against a local blogger with this very lame link-free, one-sided "she-said" article. Which makes this piece by Mathew Ingram at Gigaom very timely. From the summary:

As Jay Rosen argues, the days when it was enough to just give both sides of a story — without providing any additional viewpoints or fact-checking — are over. He said/she said journalism is both an ethical lapse and a failure to understand how the media business itself has changed. 

Of course, I could have it all wrong. Maybe the News & Record deserves more credit and has simply decided that their audience is not people who want to know the truth. Maybe they've decided their business opportunities lie with telling people what they want to hear.

Cheese eating results in bedsheet entanglement deaths

GREENSBORO, NC -- The Greensboro Police Department (GPD) and the regurgitating News & Record, have been saying that police data shows the GPD's program of intensified traffic patrols made streets safer and reduced crime in the areas of their deployment despite the fact that police data shows a mixed bag of increases in some accidents and crime during such efforts.

Still, that hasn't stopped News & Record police stenographer Joe Gamm from drawing an unjustified straight line of causation: "That campaign resulted in a 16.9 percent drop in crime," he writes of last year's campaign on Wendover Avenue.

Gamm and the GPD should take a look at Spurious Correlations, a website that crunches various datasets to illustrate the reasoning mistake of, well, spurious correlations (although the GPD and News & Record take it beyond correlation and actually proclaim a cause and effect). Did you "know," for example, there is a "correlation" between per capita cheese consumption and the number of deaths caused by people becoming entangled in their bed sheets?

If the News & Record were to receive a press release with the claim, it would report: Cheese eating results in increased entanglement deaths. 

Here is more about the site from Popular Science:

"Data suggest: marriages in Alabama are causing deaths by electrocution, divorces in South Carolina are causing bees to produce more honey, and Nicolas Cage movies are saving thousands of lives each year. 

"Tyler Vigen created a program, appropriately titled Spurious Correlations, that finds correlations between random data sets and produces a chart every minute. Thus, the .95 correlation between mozzarella cheese consumption and civil engineering doctorates is finally uncovered. The sets appear to use easily available information, including loads of statistics about deaths, which lends the correlations a hilariously dark humor.

"Funny? Yeah. Clearly it's a sendup of the sometimes dubious findings of certain studies. But, hey, good time for a reminder: we know "correlation is not causation" but don't immediately dismiss every correlation as irrelevant. Otherwise how will we recognize and stop the swimming-pool-related deaths caused by The Wicker Man?"

Average Crime Stoppers reward: $26

GREENSBORO, NC -- You've probably seen the Crime Stoppers promise of cash rewards for crime tips: "You could be eligible for a cash reward of up to $2,000."

According to figures made public by the City of Greensboro, in 2013, the Guilford/Greensboro Crime Stoppers received 890 tips that resulted in 1,365 criminal charges and the clearing of 284 criminal cases. It paid $23,125 in cash rewards.

That's an average of $25.98 per tip or $81.43 per cleared criminal case.

Look up

Matheny's fill-in-the-blank endorsement

GREENSBORO, NC -- I received a campaign mailer from 6th district congressional candidate Zack Matheny yesterday. It included this endorsement attributed to Greg Walden, Chairman of the National Republican Committee:

"Zack's conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama's irresponsible agenda. North Carolina's hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on their backs. I am certain that Zack Matheny will be a strong contender this election cycle."

Impressive.

But wait...

Here's what Walden had to say about congressional candidate Ryan Costello from Pennsylvania:

"Ryan’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. Pennsylvania's hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on their backs. I am certain that Ryan Costello will be a strong contender this election cycle."

About congressional candidate Andrew Walter from Arizona:

"Andrew’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. Arizona’s hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on the backs of their families. I am certain that Andrew Walter will be a strong contender this election cycle."

About congressional candidate Lee Zeldin from New York:

"Lee’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. New York’s hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on the backs of their families. I am certain that Lee Zeldin will be a strong contender this election cycle."

About congressional candidate Matthew A. Doheny from New York:

"Matt’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. New York’s hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on their backs. I am certain that Matt Doheny will be a strong contender this election cycle."

About congressional candidate Jeff Gorell from California:

"Jeff’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. California’s hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on their backs. I am certain that Jeff Gorell will be a strong contender this election cycle."

About congressional candidate Ryan Zinke from Montana:

"Ryan’s conservative principles and priorities provide a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s irresponsible agenda. Montana’s hardworking families deserve better than skyrocketing health care costs, financial instability and mountains of debt on their backs. I am certain that Ryan Zinke will be a strong contender this election cycle."

And on and on...

Serious question on News & Record's suspect descriptions

GREENSBORO, NC -- When it comes to describing criminal suspects, the News & Record will scrub race from descriptions in police press releases if it deems the descriptions to be otherwise not "complete." Fair enough, that's their prerogative. One might think that as much information as possible, no matter how scant, would aide the public in helping to identify possible criminals—presumably, that's why the police provide the information to begin with—but the News & Record regularly proves itself allergic to inclusion of all the facts, so no real surprise that it would be okay with intentionally withholding public information.

But here's the thing: Why is that delineation made for race but not gender? While the News & Record will take police descriptions that include gender and race and scrub race from what they print, they will still report gender. Even as they cite the lack of "complete descriptions" as the reason for not reporting suspects' race, they will still identify the same suspects as "male."

I question the journalistic purpose of scrubbing anything from police issued descriptions to begin with, but it is truly unfathomable to me why a newspaper would describe "white males" as simply "males." The way I see it, either as much information as is available should be reported or, if characteristics are to be scrubbed because the description is otherwise too broad, then gender should not be reported either. If not "white males," it should be "people." What am I missing? What is the justification for reporting only the gender of suspects when only gender and race are known?

Security vulnerabilities: City's fixed, News & Record's still broken

GREENSBORO -- A quick update on the security vulnerabilities of some local websites reported by this blogger previously. The City of Greensboro has corrected theirs (kudos!). The News & Record has not  (it figures). Their Ad Express still has the security flaw.

News & Record: The myth machine

GREENSBORO, NC -- I really don't know if the News & Record intentionally works to deceive the community or if they are just oblivious. Regardless, they often leave out important details, thus feeding the misunderstandings of a deluded community.

Case in point, this from a N&R article by Dick Barron about the downtown ballpark:

"The Joseph M. Bryan Foundation built the stadium with $12 million of foundation money, a $10 million loan and Jim Melvin."

A version not afraid of all the facts would have included this, which the News & Record avoided:

Melvin not only heads the non-profit Bryan Foundation which funded the stadium, but he had an ownership stake in the team for which the stadium was constructed. The non-profit-owned stadium, built for a cost of $21.5 million in 2005, was sold to the owners of the team for about $12.8 million in 2012. 

Why would the News & Record not include this salient fact in its coverage? Is it interested in factual reporting for the sake of comprehensive understanding or does it cherry-pick information for the sake of crafting myths? Which best serves the people of Greensboro?

Team Matheny fools the News & Record again

GREENSBORO, NC -- Last month, the News & Record published a letter to the editor in support of Zack Matheny, the Greensboro District 3 City Council representative who is running for congress. Although the News & Record failed to identify him as such, the writer of that letter was a paid consultant to Mathney's campaign.

Today, the News & Record publishes another letter in support of Matheny from Tiffany Clark of Greensboro. Clark's husband is Director of Client Engagement for G-force Marketing, a company to which Matheny's campaign has paid over $80,000 this year to market his candidacy.

Clark's relationship to the Matheny campaign was not noted by the News & Record.

Get out of that state you're in

GREENSBORO, NC -- It seems Rhino Times editor John Hammer has some complaints about the News & Record's website.

The Rhino Times, with a website design from 1997, designed and maintained by a junior high school student that doesn't adapt to mobile devices, with archaic photo galleries and commenting system and no RSS feed or social media integration goes unaddressed by its editor, but he has the wherewithal to complain about another media site? Is he just monumentally oblivious or what?

News & Record impugns millions with suspect descriptions

GREENSBORO, NC -- At some point, it is going to dawn on the fogies at the News & Record that they are no longer gatekeepers of information, haven't been for a while now, and that much of what they purport to "report" we have already seen from original sources. Until then, their confusion allows us to catch them red handed subverting the facts in the service of ends other than thorough reporting.

In a press release from the Greensboro Police Department describing the robbery of an individual yesterday, the suspects were described as four "black males." In the News & Record's regurgitation of the press release, they scrubbed some of the detail and described simply "four male suspects."

I've written before of the News & Record's outright deceptions when altering suspect descriptions whereby they falsely explained to readers that descriptions were not available, incomplete or where they simply censored descriptions with no explanation.

Anonymous commenters have defended this practice by saying that it is "irresponsible" to describe suspects with only two or three characteristics because such descriptions potentially describe "millions" of people. How exactly that is irresponsible has not been explained and it implies that the police too must be irresponsible in providing the available details, even if those are "incomplete" descriptions of suspects. Of course, a "complete description" is practically impossible.

It is hilarious though how tightly backed into a corner the News & Record finds itself by pretending they have some professionally justifiable reason for dumbing down their reporting. Today's story is a perfect example.

By describing yesterday's robbery suspects as only "males," the News & Record has committed the very offense it pretends it has been avoiding when scrubbing race from suspect descriptions: They have provided a description that could not possibly be any more incomplete unless they just described the suspects as "people." They have "irresponsibly" provided descriptions that could describe half the population. If there is some theoretical line not to cross where descriptions are too broad to be "responsible," than a description that only provides gender crosses it for sure.

Why did the News & Record describe the suspects as four males instead of four people or instead of four black males?  Maybe there is no legitimate line delineating just enough and too little detail and the News & Record has other good reasons for scrubbing race from suspect descriptions; or maybe there is no good reason.

Records contradict police P. R.

GREENSBORO, NC -- At the conclusion of a months-long intensive traffic enforcement campaign on Battleground Avenue earlier this year, the Greensboro Police Department announced that a "benefit" of the campaign was a decrease in "part 1 index crimes"—the worst offenses, like murder, rape, robbery and auto theft—during the period of the patrols compared to the same period the previous year. Records contradict the claim that crime decreased.

From Greensboro Police Department press release.

It is ludicrous to claim that because two things correspond to each other, one caused the other. Without including other factors that influence crime, such as population and demographic changes, weather, economic conditions and other crime-fighting efforts, it is impossible to credibly say that increased traffic enforcement caused a decrease in crime. It's even worse when the numbers used to come to that conclusion are wrong.

Faulty logic did not stop the media from dutifully regurgitating the claim, however. No surprise there considering local media's lazy preference for stenography over journalism. Nonetheless, it turns out that the claim of a reduction in crime during that period, no matter its cause, is actually contradicted by police records.

Information provided by the police in support of their press release said that there were 24 part 1 crimes within a 1/4 mile of the traffic enforcement area in 2013 and 22 during the same period in 2014.

GPD's list of crimes

Among the crimes in 2014, the GPD said there was one motor vehicle theft. Police records contradict that representation. A search of crimes just on Battleground Avenue alone (not even including the 1/4 mile radius the police said they included) in the confines of the enforcement area (Cornwallis Drive to Horse Pen Creek Road) and only during the hours of operation of the campaign showed there were actually four reports of motor vehicle theft during the period of the enforcement campaign, not one.

They were:

01/16/2014 17:09 Incident Case #: 20140116343
Primary Offense: MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT - AUTOMOBILE 2906 BATTLEGROUND AV

01/30/2014 12:00 Incident Case #: 20140227146
Primary Offense: MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT - AUTOMOBILE 2605 BATTLEGROUND AV

02/12/2014 12:00 Incident Case #: 20140227152
Primary Offense: MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT - AUTOMOBILE 2605 BATTLEGROUND AV

03/03/2014 07:00 Incident Case #: 20140317073
Primary Offense: MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT - AUTOMOBILE 2630 BATTLEGROUND AV

When asked about the discrepancies, Captain John Wolfe, the officer in charge of the enforcement campaign said in an email:

"I can't speak to the numbers specifically as they are generated and reported through our crime analysis unit. I can speak to the methodology but not in this format. I will look into the discrepancies you've noted to determine how they occurred."

With four auto thefts instead of one, the total number of Part 1 crimes actually increased year over year, from 24 to 25. If the correlation-as-causation thinking still applies, one would say that as a result of the traffic enforcement campaign, serious crime rose 4 percent. Of course, the enforcement campaign no more deserves such sloppy blame as it deserved the sloppy credit assigned to it when the numbers were thought to imply something positive.

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