USA

A little photoshopping, Scarecrow?

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How about them pics! I was half-expecting the final image to show a group of pale, dour-faced cadets standing solemnly behind a blue/green rotting corpse, with a big “WAR IS BAD” banner displayed in the background. Or maybe I am overreacting — the faux-crossprocessed look is big these days.

The actual article isn’t bad. The cadets come across as intelligent, thoughtful and morally serious. I wish more journalists and elected officials were like that.

(via Rachel)

UPDATE: I’ve posted, below the fold, a composite image showing the original photos from the articles superposed over versions of the same photos that I spent a few minutes roughly editing in Photoshop. Even though the photos were made in different settings with different lighting, they all appear more natural after approximately the same types and amounts of color and lighting adjustments (red levels: 1.15; green levels: .85; blue levels: .90; midtone levels: 1.15-1.40). IOW, it appears that the photographer or photo editor dialed in extra blue and green, desaturated the reds and darkened the images overall. There may be another explanation but it sure looks as though the magazine was trying to make these cadets look less than bright-and-rosy. The grim facial expressions add to the negative effect and, consequently, bolster my impression that the image manipulation here was intentional.

UPDATE 2: OTOH there’s this photo from an unrelated article on a newspaper’s Web site. In this case it looks like the photographer inadvertently used the wrong white-balance setting and they ran the photo without correcting the color cast. I’m sure it’s unintentional, since the accompanying article is a favorable profile of the subject of the photo. Could a mass-circulation magazine make a similar error with images used in a feature article? Maybe, but it seems unlikely.

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Genes and Culture

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This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.

Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.

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Again

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On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The truck was parked at the loading dock, directly under the day care center. My daughter, three years old at the time, was in the day care center on the first floor of the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. It is next to the loading dock. My wife was working on the 19th floor. When I returned to work the next day, someone in the elevator joked that it was too bad the bomb hadn’t taken out the IRS. The ride was short, and I was able to stay still.

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Patriot’s Day

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It all started today.

At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, on April 19, 1775, a company of minutemen from Acton responded to the call to arms initiated by Paul Revere (who rode with other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, with Prescott the only one of the three who was able reach Acton itself) and fought at the North Bridge in Concord as part of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Acton minutemen were led by Captain Isaac Davis. When a company was needed to lead the advance on the bridge which was defended by the British regulars, Captain Davis was heard to reply, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”
 
The colonists advanced on the bridge; in the exchange of musket fire that followed, Captain Isaac Davis and Private James Hayward were killed and Abner Hosmer, also of Acton, was mortally wounded. Davis was the first officer to die in the American Revolutionary War. In Acton they refer to “the battle of Lexington, fought in Concord, by men of Acton.”

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Moving Foreign Policy Into A Networked Age

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Through the kind invitation of my friend, columnist and former FPRI analyst, Bruce Kesler, the well-regarded blog, Democracy Project, is running my guest post “Modern Foreign Policy Execution” subtitled “Instead of Crowning a New Czar, Bush Should Ignite A Revolution“, where I offer some suggestions for changing the decidedly broken, interagency process for foreign policy. A brief excerpt:

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