By bluerasberry on 2015-12-17
Fabian has been interested in buying a home in New York City. The situation is that for all living memory, buying a home is usually less expensive than renting in New York City because monthly payments are comparable and housing prices have gone up every year. Apartments in New York that are near transit might […]
Posted in New York City | Tagged auction, Fabian
By bluerasberry on 2015-11-25
Some news outlets report that Wikipedia traffic is dropping. Is Wikipedia Being Hit By a Google Penalty?, SimilarWeb, July 2015, an article and concept which was picked up by more mainstream media Wikipedia suddenly lost a massive amount of traffic from Google, Business Insider, August 2015 Google steals over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in […]
Posted in Wikipedia | Tagged metrics
By bluerasberry on 2015-11-10
At the 2015 WikiConference I met Diana Straussman, chair of the board of the Wiki Education Foundation. We had a conversation which I would describe as having two focus points – civility and non-medical information in Wikipedia health articles. As an example in our conversation, she told me that she had a student participating in […]
Posted in education, health, Wikipedia | Tagged Wikipedia education program, WikiProject Medicine
By bluerasberry on 2015-10-29
On Wednesday 28 October I attended a half-day of a two-day conference on “expanded access” at the New York Academy of Science. Johnson & Johnson sponsored the event and I felt that what I saw was guided by their pharma influence. “Expanded access” is a term referring to a pharma company’s provision of an experimental […]
Posted in clinical research, health, New York City, research, rights | Tagged clinical research, safety
By bluerasberry on 2015-10-26
My housemate Pat had her knee replaced on Monday 12 October. I have been surprised about her recovery. She told me that she had pain since her 20s when she had an injury playing rugby. She had an ACL replacement in response to that injury, and some disability since then. For the past 15 years […]
Posted in health, New York City, service industry | Tagged medicine, Pat Slaven
By bluerasberry on 2015-10-24
Wikipedia is built by summarizing and citing what reliable sources already say. Academic journals are reliable sources, but often prohibitively expensive for Wikipedia contributors to access. There is a social movement called “open access” which demands public access and reuse rights from academic journal publishers. I feel strongly about this movement. I stepped up the […]
Posted in Open access, San Francisco, Wikipedia | Tagged Jake Orlowitz, library, Michael Eisen
By bluerasberry on 2015-10-14
There is a trend in the communications industry for metrics reporting. Internet publishing allows for tracking of who reads what and how they read it. In my opinion society has not come to understand the implications of communication tracking, and industry does not know either. As a Wikipedian, I am a communications professional, and I […]
Posted in New York City, quantified self, work | Tagged communications, metrics
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-15
I work for Consumer Reports. Of course I cannot speak for the organization, but I am at Consumer Reports because I care about nonprofit media, and I wish to share some of my thoughts about the state of nonprofit publishing including Consumer Reports’ position among its peers in nonprofit media. This week Rubert Murdoch purchased […]
Posted in non-profit, Wikipedia | Tagged Consumer Reports, medi, public service
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-05
In early September 2015 the popular press picked up a story about what is called the “Orangemoody” network on Wikipedia. The story followed the Wikimedia community identifying about 250 fake Wikipedia accounts which were created for the purpose of promising to insert inappropriate bias into Wikipedia against Wikipedia policy in exchange for payment. I want […]
Posted in Wikipedia | Tagged conflict of interest
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-05
Theo Chocolate is a company in Seattle which makes chocolate. I was fortunate enough to watch its founding and early years. On 5 September 2007 its founder, Jeff Fairhall, died following a series of unusual circumstances. Jeff was my dear friend and many things about his death were very unfortunate. When we would meet he […]
Posted in religion, Seattle | Tagged chocolate, Jeff Fairhall, magic, ritual