Good journalism from the NY Times:

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Hey, I know he got $31 million for charity — but do the ends always justify the means?

The BBC takes a look at the age-old question: Why are clowns so scary?

But he believes children’s fear may be less to do with clowns per se and more to do with being unsettled by something as unusual-seeming as a clown.

“People are typically frightened by things which are wrong in some way, wrong in a disturbingly unfamiliar way,” Prof Salkovskis says.

Yes, that. And also Pennywise, who reminded us all that “they all float down here.”

Great piece from American Journalism Review on the use of Wikipedia as an official source, both in academia and journalism:

There’s no unanimity about Wikipedia among academic experts, who have engaged in vigorous debates about the online encyclopedia. While many professors refuse to allow students to cite it, it has attracted some prominent defenders, including historians and scientists who have analyzed its content.

‘If a journalist were to find something surprising on Wikipedia and the journalistic instincts suggested it was correct, the journalist might add that as an unsubstantiated Wiki-fact and invite comment,’ says Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University and cofounder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, www.hastac.org), a network of researchers developing new ways to collect and share information via technology. ‘Perhaps an online version of the printed piece, for example, might include a blog inviting people to comment on the Wiki-fact. It may be that there would be Wiki-facts online that were not in the printed piece. In other words, why not use the new technologies available to expand knowledge in all kinds of ways?’

Journalists also should consider, Davidson says, whether some of the sources they deem reliable have their own inadequacies. For example, when she recently researched the origins of calculus, she found that standard Western histories generally credited England’s Isaac Newton and Germany’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But Wikipedia went much furtherfurther, tracing the discovery of basic calculus functions back to the Egyptians in 1800 BC, and then to China, India and Mesopotamia — all hundreds of years before the Europeans.

So while journalists should be cautious no matter what resources they use, “What Wikipedia does reveal to those in the Euro-American world is knowledge which most of our sources, even the most scholarly, have, in the past, neglected because it did not fit in our intellectual genealogies, in our history of ideas,” Davidson says.

In December 2005, the science journal Nature published a survey of several experts about the content of comparable Wikipedia and online Encyclopedia Britannica entries. In a conclusion hotly disputed by Britannica, Nature said that Wikipedia “comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” in that the average Wikipedia article contained four errors to Britannica’s three. Britannica’s 20-page response said that “almost everything about the journal’s investigation…was wrong and misleading…the study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” The company further asserted that Nature had misrepresented its own data — its numbers, after all, showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica — and asked for “a full and public retraction of the article.” Nature stood by its story.

This a good debate. Wikipedia is often deeper and more accurate and because it’s not controlled by one set group of editors.

Interesting case at Brandeis University. Odd that speech is often restricted most at institutions of higher learning.

The Volokh Conspiracy post links to a great Monty Python skit from “The Life of Brian.” Arguments are always better with Monty Python references.

Remember when these were called Sugar Pops?

This is huge:

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks…

Qtrax files contain Digital Rights Management software, allowing the company to see how many times a song has been downloaded and played. Artists, record companies and publishers will be paid in proportion to the popularity of their music, while also taking a cut of advertising revenues.

Sweet.

Economic slowdowns are good for something:

Investors are shifting their bets towards oil prices weakening in the near future as the slowdown in US economic activity damps energy demand growth, traders in London and New York said.

The recent changes in trading positions could signal that oil prices have peaked after hitting a high of $100.09 a barrel early this month. Last week, oil dropped to a three-month low of $85.42 a barrel although it recovered to trade above $90 a barrel by Friday.

I guess $90 is better than $100. Of course, we’re still pretty far away from my $50 prediction (Matt Duffy).

Went to the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby this morning. Here’s a picture of the Scoutmaster pushing my son’s car to the finish line. We lost one of the axle nails that came with the kit. Note to self: Simply replacing the proper axle with a brad nail is NOT a good idea.

Anyhoo, we still walked away with a trophy for “slickest design.” For the record, my kids have never left any kind of competition without a trophy.

Unsuccessfully tried to buy a Ghetto Burger at Ann’s Snack Bar in Atlanta today. The burger, of course, was named the best in the country by the Wall Street Journal last year.

A good friend and I arrived at 11 a.m. — waited nearly an hour outside in the frigid Atlanta air. But, we didn’t make the first seating. Ann works alone and only serves 8 people at a time. Opens the doors when she wants to. “She dances to her own drum,” one patron remarked.

We plan to try again in two weeks.

You know you don’t hear…