Posts Tagged ‘Gary Robbins’

According to a report by U-T San Diego science and technology reporter Gary Robbins, there are two main reasons why the University of California San Diego (UCSD) is losing its world-renowned media theorist.

Firstly, The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate College threw a ton of money at Lev Manovich (pictured); in addition to nearly doubling his salary, there’s also start-up cash and a special scholarship fund he gets to allocate. Secondly, as Manovich told the reporter via email, CUNY is headed where he wants to go:

The 52-year-old Manovich said the university is investing heavily in the digital humanities — a rapidly emerging field that includes studying shifts in culture by using powerful computers to probe huge databases, or “Big Data,” as it is coming to be known…

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Although San Diego Union-Tribune science reporter Gary Robbins applauds California Watch for embracing non-tradition revenue streams, he suggests that their 99-cent earthquake-focused myFault application registers about 2.0 on the consumer value scale. From his review:

It’s a clunky, poorly-designed app that badly depicts the location of many fault zones and fails to include all or part of many well-known systems, making this seismic hazards software worthless. The faults are not labeled, and the designers didn’t include important basic data, such as the dates of notable earthquakes on significant faults or how large of a quake can be expected to occur on a system.

The spring 2011 article series offshoot was developed by Chase Davis, who juggles daytime Center for Investigative Reporting duties with nighttime entrepreneurship. When contacted by Robbins, Davis defended his decision to bypass information readily available from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

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News travels fast, except in Orange County, where it’s around 1994, and the web log is all the rage. Gary Robbins, a science columnist at the Orange County Register, helpfully explains:

You can post something new on your blog in seconds, and it sometimes seems like reaction from readers arrives nearly as quickly.

FBLA is curious to know what these reader reactions are, exactly.

FBLA also notices that Patrick Goldstein is trying out some new words, as well. Writing in the LA Times, he’s all atwitter over American Idol as

a classic example of user-generated content.

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