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Self-interest in Wikipedia edits has been unmasked by a tool called WikiScanner (wiki, faq). It was created by self-described disruptive technologist Virgil Griffith (homepage).  I was able to use it to quickly find that someone at Fox News had altered Al Franken’s page under the sub-heading Conflict with the Fox News Network (click below for before & after). 

But Fox is by no means alone. As reported on Colbert, someone at the NY Times added “jerk …” to George W’s wiki entry. Corporations enjoy politicking too. Someone at Land O’Lakes wrote:

The Republican Party of Minnesota is basically a front for the crooks, liars and religious zealots that strangly enough call themselves “human”.

For balanced vandalism, someone at the ACLU wrote slanders on Pope Benedict XVI’s page; and, no doubt in an exercise of freedom of speech, someone at the NAACP inserted “bugly wugly my ugly lugly” in the Declaration of Independence page.

Wired’s Threat Level blog has an updated list where you can submit and vote for the most shameful wiki spins. 

 ”Vanity of vanities, all is vanity“. – Ecclesiastes

Update: The Boston Globe has an article about this.

Clarification: ‘George W’ does not refer to George Washington.

Khodayar Akhavi points out that education funding is nowhere near as generous after the 911 crisis as it was after the Sputnik crisis (which may have ended with Gene Cernan’s last footprint on the Moon). Nevertheless, PhD production in the U.S. seems to have picked up after both crises.

The College Board just released figures for the 2007 SATs.  I looked at the scores for Math in States where at least 40% of the student population took the exams, and compared the rankings for 1997 (left) to 2007 (right).  The rankings are color coded in quintiles, with legend Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet (Red the worst).  Making double jumps up in the rankings are NC, VA, and VT; double jumps down are MD and ME.  Maine should get a bye, since this year it forced 100% of its eligible students to take the exam.  IN, TX, and NV should get special mention as the only non-coastal States to have at least 40% SAT participation. 

Update: While SC as a State improved, Miss SC Teen has issues with geography & numericity.

Born on this date in 1847 in Makó Hungary on the Romanian border (a stone’s throw from Vallaj, where my dad was born), the son of a wealthy grain merchant of Jewish origin (like my paternal grandfather) and a German mother who was a devout Roman Catholic, young Joseph Pulitzer always dreamt (like many Hungarian boys of yore who were weaned on the children’s fantasy Hári János doc) of being a soldier.  After not qualifying for the Austrio-Hungarian Army nor the French Foreign Legion, he fulfilled his dream by coming to America and joining the Union Army in 1864.

In 1872 he bought his first newspaper for $3000.  He became famous after he bought New York’s World, transforming newspaper journalism with pictures, cartoons, and a liberal editorial ethic.  He fought against the Spanish American war, a war bought and paid for by rival “yellow journalist” William Randolf Hearst.

He survived the “newsie’s” strike of 1899.  Newspapers were distributed by young orphans and homeless children for a meager 10 cents per hundred – and they would have to eat the cost of unsold papers!  This is all commemorated in the Disney musical mega-flop Newsies.

We all know about his endowment ($500,000) for journalism and literature prizes.  He also happened to mentor the entire field of journalism serving in the public interest.  He mentored Nellie Bly, who’s expose, Ten Days in a Mad House, was groundbreaking firsthand journalism.  We can thank Pulitzer for Pulizer prize winning editorial cartoons, such as the following by Mike Luckovich.  You may not be able to pick up a Pulitzer, but you can enter the 2007 Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon contest, or Science Idol – but hurry, the deadline is May 22^nd.

The US Census Bureau has a Special Edition comparing data from 1915, 1967, and 2006 – when the US population was about 100, 200, and 300 million, respectively.  Aside from Wilson being president and John and Mary being the most popular names in 1915, what does it mean?

The table below shows how 8 factors compare relatively, using constant dollars and 1967 as a base.  Some are a surprise to me, e.g., we have a smaller percentage of the population being foreign-born today than in 1915.  The chart below illustrates how these 8 concerns weigh in relative to each other. 

In 1915 tuberculosis trumped everything.  The data suggests today our concerns (aside from war!) ought  to be milk prices over gas prices; aliens, legal and illegal but not extraterrestrial (too few or too many?); and not enough farms. 

Mohammad Yunus (autobiography) just won the Nobel Peace Prize - for developing micro-loans and starting the Grameen Bank helping Third-Worlders lift themselves by the boostraps – 12 years to the day of accepting the World Food Prize, created by another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Norman Borlaug (just published biography)- who founded the Green Revolution and probably saved the world from a Malthusian destiny.  In his 90s and still going strong, you can read and hear some of Dr. Borlaug’s views at an Ohio State University lecture.

On May 10, 1933, the year the Nazis took power in Germany, students, encouraged by their professors, burned mountains of “un-German” books{top left}. In his play Almansor (1821) the German writer Heinrich Heine wrote:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

In 1982, about 50 years later, they were burning books in Minnesota{top right}.  That same year, 25 years ago, the American Library Association proclaimed the last week in September as a week to celebrate banned books{posters below}.  Google Booksearch chipped in this year with a search to find banned books in a library near you.

Oly távol, messze van hazám…
Csak még egyszer láthatnám.

President Bush visited Budapest today to commemorate the the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.  He is 4 months early (history lesson from the book Anarchy, A Graphic Guide). 

It was October 23rd when the revolt began with demonstrations.  It was November 1st when Kádár János betrayed Hungary by “inviting” Soviet troops to assist putting down the revolution.  I remember my parents waking me in the  middle of the night to look out the window of our main street apartment to see a long line of those tanks entering Hungary – each with exactly one soldier seated on top carrying a flaming torch.  It wasn’t until my birthday on December 5th that we stepped outside our apartment for the last time and became refugees.  By mid-December the borders were effectively closed.  Over 200,000 Hungarians had fled their country of birth.

 The “Daily Dish of Cosmopolitan Budapest,” Pesticide said this about Bush’s visit:

Snow’s statement that Bush’s trip “about visiting the Hungarian government and paying homage to what they went through 50 years ago” seems just a little odd, given that the current government is pretty much the same party that fought against the heroic ‘56ers. Not that this should really matter, given that it’s all about a “tone poem,” whatever the f*** that might be.

They also said this about protesting (Bush, not Voldemort!):

Go to the main protest against you-know-who, which will be starting at 16:00 on Szabadság tér (Freedom Square), conveniently right in front of the American Embassy. While we can hardly fault anyone for showing up to let off some steam at Uncle Sam, do make sure to note the big, ugly-ass Soviet monument while you are there, and remember that if it wasn’t for the occasionally boorish Yanks, you’d all be speaking Russian. Or, even worse, Hungarian.

Now go see the dokumentumfilm OLY TÁVOL, MESSZE VAN HAZÁM (in Hungarian). Or better, visit Budapest and use Bob Dent’s book Budapest 1956: Locations of Drama as your guide.

Dr. Lynette Davidson writes a great article, What do Templars, the Jesus Family and DaVinci have to do with Nazis?, about how bad history, even fictionalized, has real consequences.

But do Knight’s Templar, as seen in their heyday and in the 1930’s, suffer?

Does DaVinci’s Last Supper suffer from being repainted, or from modern interpretations?  The artwork at the top is

“A life sized rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper constructed from 20,736 spools of thread strung onto aluminum ball chain. When seen with the aid of optical devices, the spools of thread coalesce into realistic images of Christ and his disciples.”

Below is the repaired version along with a detail showing before and after of JohnMary.  The third picture is an ad showing a sacred feminine version that was banned in Milan.

As for albinos, Karen Jordan, Lexi’s mom, says this about the stereotypical depiction of albinos in books and movies:

One more evil albino makes things just a little harder for my daughter and many others.

Incidentally, athough albinos usually do have some vision impairment, their eyes are only red, like everyone else’s, in flash pictures.

Egressing Black History Month, I thought I’d publish my intersection with famous Blacks in the Riverdale section of the Bronx (yes, it is in the Bronx). 

First, and foremost, I met the great Jackie Robinson at PS 81 on a campaign stop for Hubert H. Humphrey (the “Happy Warrior” who lost to Nixon).  This was less than a year before Jackie’s death (at my current age!).  There was something so very majestic about him – a much larger man than I expected, with white hair, and nearly blind. 

Apparently, Willie Mays lived in Riverdale for a time.

I met Stokeley Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), the father of “Black Power,” in an English class at the Bronx High School of Science.  He had graduated Science 10 years earlier, so what he was doing sitting in class I’ll never know – he didn’t talk to anyone.

Graduating Science in 1976, Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and distinguished Director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.