I am a big proponent of evidence based thinking, especially when it comes to personal planning. Using available data to inform yourself and your planning can go a long way in keeping things realistic and, ideally, rational.

The following numbers are, I feel, probably quite accurate. I have no good reason to believe I will live longer than average - I assume my good and bad habits more or less cancel out and random chance always works against longevity.

The projected numbers are based on current rates with some educated adjustments to factor in highly probable changes in behaviour.  All estimates are based off very real numbers - I attempted to minimize subjective interpretation.
Avg. Canadian life expectancy at birth, men, 1984 in years: 73.1
Provincial Adjustment (BC) applied: 74
HALE projection of healthy lifespan, years: 67
Projected remaining healthy lifespan, years: 42
Projected remaining healthy lifespan, dog-years: 294

Years left with my Mum, projected: 29
Years left with my Dad, projected: 18

Education, projected, years: 11
Age, at completion, years: 36
Mid-life, years: 37

Education debt recovery, projected, years: 6
Mortgage recovery, projected, years: 10
Debt-free employment, projected, years: 15

Academic literature read, projected, books: 568
Computer games played, projected, hours: 13,104
Emails sent, projected: 39,500
Charitable donations, projected: 2,520
Film watched, movies:
Potato chips eaten, projected, bags: 437
Single-malt whiskey consumed, projected, bottles: 504

Software Written, projected, lines of code: 252,000
Prose written, projected, words: 403,200
Prose written, projected, books: 4
Ratio of academic reading to writing: 142 to 1

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After some thought, I decided it would make more sense to create a new blog rather than inject the content into this one - given the established content of this site and the projected content of OrgCog this make sense.

OrgCog / Organizational Cognition is a blog where I write about the intersection of design, cognitive science, organizational theory, management science, technology and other relevant subjects. I hope to use it to distill some of my thinking about the topic and record research notes and findings.

The entries will be highly variable in length but I certainly won’t shy away from longer entries if I think a point bears exploration.

I’ll still be posting here all my personal rants, discussions about tech irrelevant to orgcog (particularly games and gaming), politics, etc.

I think it better to depersonalize my discussion of the subject matter in order to broad the audience beyond people who know me personally or find my ravings modestly interesting.

You can find OrgCog at www.orgcog.com or www.organizationalcognition.com

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I think by describing what ROSI could be, the problems of the existing system and the will to change it will become apparent.

I have a dream that the Student Information and Administration System (SIAS), will be a robust, usable and open service for students, faculty and administration. I can see a future where students enjoy the services provided by their administrative website. I hope that some day soon, clever web developers can create interesting, meaningful and useful applications from the open, standards compliant web-services offered to them by SIAS.

I can access the system, any time, day or night without fear of it being down, unresponsive or unstable.

SIAS won’t be built on burdensome, unnecessarily complicated frameworks like Spring. Instead they will be built on cloud-based, professionally managed and secure services that scale as needed, insuring high-availability and data integrity.

Spring solves all of the problems ROSI doesn’t or shouldn’t have - multiple data sources that need to be federated, multi-device and information network integration, ultra-high reliability, fail-over and clustering needs. Moreover, those things that Java EE frameworks are designed to specifically handle are either absent or malfunctioning in ROSI. It is slow, unresponsive and unstable - the three problems enterprise, distributed systems are designed to handle.

The information I need will be in one place, and it will organize itself.

In SIAS, the calendar, time-table and course enrolment systems are a single federated service, like Amazon. I can shop for classes, read student reviews. I’m presented with a custom calendar based on my program and courses I’ve completed (colour coding lets me know I pick the courses for my time-table and check-out.

If something doesn’t work, I’ll know why and how to fix it.

SIAS will return, readable contextually relevant error messages that tell me precisely what went wrong and provide assistance on how to fix it. It won’t force me to decipher what happened and leave me wondering.

Course elligibility will be transparent, fair and adaptable.

SIAS will use a graded priority system for course streaming. For each course, I will be given a priority score determined by my year, program of study and a variety of other metrics. I will also be given priority points to distribute across courses for which I’m eligible; other students will do the same. My entry in the course is based on the sum of my two scores relative to others. SIAS will tell me what the current avg. score is for a given course before I try to sign-up. SIAS will also reimburse my priority points for any courses into which I wasn’t admitted.

Course enrollment won’t be a rush to the finish line, but a considered choice.

SIAS can handle course enrolment on a continual basis - instead of a single-day. At any time I can see what courses I’m registered for and how many people are signed up for that course, the avg priority score and other details to aid in sorting out my schedule.

I will be aided in my course selection by useful features.

SIAS will allow me to experiment with course schedules before committing me to them. It will allow me to block-off time and alert me if a course overlaps with this. It will tell me if two course schedules overlap, it will prioritize me for tutorials slots based on my course calendar.

Developers can make software for me that enriches my student experience.

SIAS will give me an API key that I can give to applications. I can sync my iCal on my iPhone or my Outlook or Google Calendar.

I can track my progress at any time.

SIAS will have a CGPA calculator built-in. It can help me calculate my projected average based on my current CGPA and the grades of my current courses.

I can make intelligence choices about the quality of the courses I’m taking.

SIAS will work with the Anti-Calendar, showing the ratings for the course or professor right in the calendar as I’m choosing courses - no more balancing six books on my knees.

I won’t miss payment deadlines because I will be informed of what I owe, when and why.

SIAS will present an intelligble financial information interface, which includes payment deadlines and explanations for charges. SIAS will also allow the creation of a separate login to view my financial information, so my parents can login at any time and see the status of my finances.

SIAS will email me when a payment deadline is looming. SIAS will provide clear, cogent instructions on how to pay my fees. SIAS will integrate with book-keeping and spreadsheet software so I can track my finances more easily.

I won’t have to go to my registrar to prove I’m enrolled - SIAS will do so for me.

Third parties, like banks and loan officers can check my enrollment status by accessing SIAS - the information is up-to-the-minute, so I’m not burdened with the consequences of fraudulent student loan requests.

I can vote on all student elections through an easy-to-use, anonymous and secure interface.

SIAS will have a repository of student societies and their election dates, and allow official representatives to upload election relevant information. Thus all student elections can be done fairly and securely - diminishing unfair electoral practices and increasing participation.

I can manage my PoST easily and intuitively.

SIAS will maintain the calendar database including POST requirements. At any time you can see which POSTS you’re eligible to enter, what kinds of course work you’d have to complete to fulfill a POST and what POSTS for which you satisfy conferrment criteria. No managing cryptic serial codes. For tier 2 and 3 POSTS, appropriate contact information, and application forms and deadlines are presented.

There are many ways to fix ROSI - these are just a few. The students need better, faculty and administration needs better. The academic advisors have become robots - serving as high-priests to the byzantine machinations of the great ROSI-God cult. They should be providing human advice on issues of personal importance to the students - not providing explanations for the stymying idiocy of ROSI.

Contact me at jeremy.vernon@utoronto.ca to join me in the Fix ROSI campaign.

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As a student of the university of Toronto, I am regularly subject to the exotice bureacratic mind-numbing torture that is the Repository of Student Information, cheerfully dubbed “ROSI.”

ROSI is crap. Every respiring human being on or off campus who has been within miles of the application knows this. Every season students collectively wail, gnash their teeth as they attempt to wrangle this festering gob of Java into producing a course schedule that looks remotely as they desired.

ROSI is where the life-planning rubber meets the tuition-charging road. Those  ideas of being a chemist/philosopher/lawyer/journalist are determined in no small part by ROSI - if you don’t get into the courses you want your future of in that field is, for most purposes, closed - at the very least seriously dampened. Sometimes exploring new things is great, but the terms of this must under no circumstances by decried by an unthinking spreadsheet - which is how it works at UofT.

The registrar is cult of ROSI - the entirety of the terms of reference for the body is established by this software. It makes Terminator’s SkyNET look democratic. If ROSI does not allow something, your registrar is helpless. Which begs the question, what is the purpose of the registrar other than to shuffle papers and process payments  that nobody has bothered to hook-into ROSI?

ROSI is so badly designed that it cannot handle its specified functionality - the basic requirement of accepting course registration requests, verifying eligibility and either returning a helpful error or adding you to the course and telling you so. ROSI’s errors are utterly opaque - something will fail to happen and you never are told why, you must divine it from a constellation of errors and warnings.

For the next few days I’ll be writing a series of posts about the total failure of the Student Information Services (SIS) team to do their jobs - and should be dismissed or resign in public shame. ROSI is not a tough problem to solve - even if it were, the quality of the solution proffered is totally shameful.  As a professional software developer, I would be ashamed to charge a client for this solution - let alone stick around and charge for support.

The following is an overview of what will be covered in the days to come:

I - Archicture

ROSI’s architecture is simultaneously obsolete and needlessly complicated. I’ll review the usage scenarios that ROSI faces and explain how they can be addressed.

II - Use Cases

ROSI’s fundamental assumptions about how it will be used, when and by whom are completely wrong. It fails to do what it’s  supposed to do and even fails at those things it tries to do but shouldn’t.

III - Domain Model

ROSI’s understanding of how courses should be registered and requirements negotiated is utterly stupid in a computational world. Here I suggest an alternative.

IV - User Interface

ROSI’s user-interface is a catastrophic non-effort. Everything from its report generation to its navigation is terrible.

V - The Toll

Here I go through some scenarios of existing ROSI use and I estimate the losses incurred by the existing system.

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Canada’s constitution was founded on the primacy of law & order. The federal government was imbued with sweeping powers to ensure the “peace, order and good governance” of the newly formed confederation.

The belief was then, as it is now for the most part, that stability and security were paramount for the survival of the realm.

In the world of cheap distributed communications tools - every person a potential pamphleteer, advocate, activist, this fixation on static, staid and stable institutions is both decrepit and dangerous. The many-to-many discourse enabled by contemporary communications technology afford government, local and federal, opportunities for interaction undreamt of by the Prime Ministers of yore.

Richard Bedford Bennet, almost as famous for his voluminous correspondance with far-flung Canadians as for his bungling, heavy-handed treatment of Canada and Communists during the Depression, would I’m sure have given his right arm for this kind of Web 2.0 interaction. Diefenbaker, a self-styled man-of-the-people would undoubtedly be wired-in to the blogosphere, pecking away at his Blackberry sending excoriating polemics to his constituents.

What would Mackenzie-King do with the Internet? He certainly wouldn’t trust it - but he’d scrupulously exploit it. He would definitely not otrich-out and ignore it as much as possible, only lashing out at it with bizarre, ill-conceived legislation that curtails the liberty of Canadians which is what our current government is doing. C.D. Howe would embrace the entrepreneurial opportunities provided by the web with a vengeance, I’m sure .

It is, in many ways, unfair to compare Stephen Harper to these intimidating, accomplished individuals of savvy, intellect and integrity. Harper is no Mackenzie-King, Diefenbaker or St. Laurent, he’s not even really a Clark or Campbell. He is neither cagey nor imaginative. He is, like Tupper or Meighn, humble, reasonably principled and, aside from his day-job, unremarkable. His feat, it is obvious, is finding a way to wrangle the ungainly political-perspective-from-nowhere into a viable political engine.

This need not be so. If someone, anyone, in Ottawa is paying attention to the writing on the wall they would know this:

The future is chaos. Friction wins. And Good Governance requires both.

The political discourse is going to get messier. Anyone who looks deeply into the ways people discuss politics knows it’s already messy.  Like turning over a rock on a stoney British Columbia beach to discover the tidal pool teeming with life, the variety of voices and degree of interaction amongst these elements is obvious - it seems the only organizations to not comprehend this are the political parties and the government they operate. Gone are the days, if there ever were any, of demagogical monopoly. Nobody can lay claim to an ideological program that has consensus across the country - it just doesn’t fit.

As a consequence, the political parties bike-shed all political discourse. They focus on parochial non-issues like debit card fees, a few million dollars in misspent public funds (as if patronage was a novel abhorrance of Chretien - our country is BUILT on patronage) or whether or not a candidate has verifiable Canadian bona fides. Personality politics, and the demagogery it engenders should simultaneously enrage and terrify the electorate - that is the path to Kings and Emperors. To get Jeffersonian on y’all, we are a nation of LAWS not people - debate the laws, not the people (we need to make this easier, a topic for another post).

Friction is where innovation happens - when ideas are mingled, mixed, bashed together, synthesized and otherwise energized. The more this happens and in the more places the greater the probability of the best idea being discovered. This will only happen if citizens are given the tools and incentives to make it happen. The push need not be big, the machine needed is simple, but the inclined plane must be oriented the right way - good ideas should roll down hill.

The investment required is minimal - one can only guess at the motivations behind why it hasn’t been made, most hypothesies one can dream up serve only to fuel the endemic and virulent cynicism amongst Canadians.

The United States government, arguably an institution with pathologies outstripping even the most sweat-inducing nightmares of a Canadian progressive, has released data.gov, Statistics Canada can’t be bothered to publish their website in current mark-up.

Citizens need to realize the value of enagement and demand it aggressively, unapologetically and unceasingly. Baby-boomers need to recognize how and why things got so messed-up. Some might say I’m tarring to many progressive people - however these are a fraction of a minority of the largest demographic group in the country, it is fair to assess this generation (perhaps no other) as a cohesive group. (cf. Born at the Right Time).

Clarity is key. Too many groups have perplexing, convoluted messages. They are steeped in political-correctness and inclusiveness that serves only to muddy the waters. There is a big difference between the insultingly pat, sound-bite messaging of the Carville/Rove -ouvre (cf. “Our Brand is Crisis”) and succinct, intelligble explanations and arguments (cf. anything by Lawrence Lessig).

How can existing organizations fix themselves? How can we catch-up to last decade? Then this one? Then the next one? What can each of us do now, right now, to push this a little further in the right direction?

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A Harris-Decima poll just recently reminded everyone why direct democracy is a profoundly dangerous concept to tinker with.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jrhYITWLPHiAVsXij2ybrXzou6mw

The poll had to do with Net Neutrality, particularly internet traffic control. 20 % of those surveyed had actually heard of it. The remaining 4 out of 5 got all their information from what I’m sure was a nuanced and comprehensive run-down by the pollster before making their decision in the minute or two alloted for the phone-call.

Somewhere between 19 - 25% of those polled said they did not support traffic management of any sort.

A question I have, that is not answered, is how many who had heard about traffic-shaping BEFORE the poll said they agreed with it? I would bet good money that those informed about the issue are disproportionately opposed to traffic shaping.

I would wager that the people polled didn’t even have an operable understanding of the concepts of bandwidth or routing or even a primitive understanding of the architecture of the internet in Canada - these are required for any sort of reasonable stance.

In the same poll I would’ve asked people the following questions:

- On a scale from 1 to  7 what do you think the state of competition is in telecommunications in Canada?

- How many telecommunications companies do you think exist in Canada?

- Have you been a customer of more than one telecommunications company in the last 5 years?

- Globally speaking, do you think Canadian’s pay average, below average or above average for our telecommunications services?

Unlike the survey published, questions like this can actually be spoken to by more than 1/5th the population.

What this really underscores is the colossal failure of net-neutrality activists to raise awareness of the issue and its importance to average Canadians. I think it is time for net-neutrality to split into two groups an education/public outreach group and a political-activist group, the competencies of one do not translate to the other and people will be inclined to be part of one group and not the other.

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Most of the national media outlets have covered what I watched on CPAC today.  Rob Nicholson (Attorney General and Min. Justice) and Peter Van Loan (Min. Public Safety) tabled legislation which is allegedly meant to empower police with greater capacity to fight cyber-crime.

It’s hard not to feel fatalistic about this kind of legislation - it seems this kind of curtailing of Court oversight in law-enforcement is a pernicious ideology that pervades the Conservatives, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

While I’m obviously not opposed to enabling law-enforcement bodies do their job of apprehending criminals - I am suspicious of any law that might provide them with increased autonomy. The RCMP has an astonishing degree of latitude afforded it already and increasing their freedom at the expense of citizen rights subverts the very purpose of the police.

Of course the conventional boogey-men of the internet are trotted out again to provide a pretext for what amounts to systematic constraints on our, that is Canadian’s, right to privacy and presumption of innocence. Child molestation, fraud and identity theft - this apparent torrential storm of cyber-crime is difficult control under the existing framework, at least that’s what the RCMP lobbyists would have you believe.

There is little explanation as to how this legislation will manifestly improve the capacity of police to catch cyber-criminals. The kind of data they would gather can, in no way, positively associate a crime with a given person. Server logs, access records of IP addresses etc. are at the very best, circumstantial, at worst ambiguous and muddying rather than implicative.

I suspect that this legislation is met with enthusiasm by media companies - particularly Rogers and Bell-Globemedia. Buttressed with seemingly inevitable copyright restrictions mirroring the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act, this act actually provides subsidy for these corporations to develop the infrastructure required to investigate and prosecute alleged copyright infringers on a grand scale.

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To some this may seem patently obvious but it’s worth repeating that, throughout history, those people we (in this case “Western Civilization”) hold in the greatest esteem are those that think in and about systems.

These days the best paid employees are CEOs, doctors, lawyers and software developers among many others. These people specialize in systems. CEOs are concerned with the systems of productivity and profitability. Doctors are concerned simultaneously with the body as a system but they are also responsible for the proper functioning of our health-care system. Lawyers provide the generative constraints on our social systems. Software developers construct virtual systems for interaction, commerce and information storage.

It is puzzling then that our education system, and in fact our society. Lacks any sort of operable understanding at a general level of how different kinds of systems are structured and how they function.

Globalization to many scholars is the symptom of a greater struggle between two opposing kinds of organizational structure - command-and-control hierarchies with decentralized networks. This struggle is manifested in many proverbial (and often literal) battlefields.

How then will we grapple with teaching a new generation about how systems work? Or will this knowledge by the purview only of an elite professional class of people lucky enough to have learned the concepts?

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Systems theories, that is, the mathematical models that account for various behaviours of interacting elements are noticeably absent from any discussion, particularly within the social sciences here at UofT.

Thomas Homer-Dixon was an innovator in introducing the concept of complex-adaptive systems to the discourse of young undergrads doing Peace and Conflict Studies. Anatol Rapaport before him bestowed upon his students the mixed-blessing of a comparatively rigorous examination of game theoretic models of strategic agency.

What these men recognized is that there must be tools to understand abstract commonalities between seemingly disparate eventualities. The ultimate goal of history, after all, is to let us learn about the future by examining the past. It astounds me then, that historians steep themselves in factual accountancy rather than examing constructs for identifying patterns.

Just recently I wrote a paper on how dynamical systems theory can account for Jack Goldstone’s framework of analysis of revolutions. Goldstone gestures at the possibility for revolution as an emergent property but he fails to account in the readings we were given for what kind of system this emergence is coming from.

Dynamical systems theory appears nowhere in my Peace and Conflict literature, or any of my political science courses. It was introduced to me in my Cognitive Science class - a class no more connected with the mathematical particulars of dynamical systems theory than peace and conflict studies.

This may seem ironic, or even hypocritical given my previous entry decrying the inadequacy of abstract models at offering solutions to the most pressing problems of development - alluding to Hiediggerian functional fixation and framing issues.

The cognitive framing problem abounds in the social sciences - what start out as heuristics in undergrad become immutable laws of reality in the professional world, with no account as to hardening.

Competitive processes must be at play when examining issues of political or social import. On the one hand, we must be increasing the efficiency and applicability of our solutions - seeking the best solution for particular problems. The kind of hyper-contextualized thinking I said needed to be explored in my previous entry.

Conversely, generalizability and pattern coagulation and integration are also important processes. How can we identify relevantly similar characteristics and frame our problem-space, let alone our potential solution space if we have no basis for connecting two contexts. This is where innovation happens.

Thusly, a professional endeavour of any social scientist is to engender an appropriate governing mechanism for emphasizing one cognitive style over another. It is only in this way that sagacity in situations of apparently iredeemable conflict can emerge.

The only problems we face are ill-defined problems - insight is required and thus a disciplined process of cognitive annealing is needed to avoid functional fixation of the disasterous sort seen in the United Nations.

Systems theories, like any other theory allow us a currency of discourse that is otherwise unavailable. This compression of information accelerates and expands thinking - which can do nothing but help foster more and better solutions to the pressing problems of our time.

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Journalism was born out of intellectual curiosity and maintained by intellectual laziness.  When Johann Carolus gave us what we understand today as the first printed newspaper he did so to provide a way to disseminate knowledge rapidly, asynchronously and persistently. It allowed a small group of authors to rapidly distribute information they thought everyone should know about with a strong emphasis on the timeliness and temporality of said information.

This is the same story for the modern web - except that small group is now a single person and that “everybody” is no longer figurative. Many people have said that the web is an enabling technology as profound as Gutenberg’s printing press. The printing press, like the web, was initially considered a novelty and didn’t really find its legs until its net effect had taken hold - mass literacy. When everybody knew how to read, books became the primary mechanism of information transfer.  Marshal McLuhan posited this lead to a monopoly of the alphabet - where the letter supplanted the spoken-word as the primary communicator.

Journalism, that is the process of compiling information and articulating it for a community of consumers, before Walter Lippman and John Dewey had their say, was simply about communicating facts to a group of people.

Journalism has become, however, a method of maintaining the appearance of worldliness at a convenience. It took the rigor and difficulty out of information and allowed people to understand and contextualize events - to read the immediate unfolding of current-events like a history book.

Without getting overly Marxist all up-ins “the media,” that is the media-industry and its social-class corollary quickly dismantled the necessity for people to think critically. The media classified their audience into aggregations of mutually compatible opinion groups and delivered material to reinforce these classification schemes. It takes a scintilla of factual truth, usually isolated and frequently uncontroversial - and places it in a contrived context to reinforce predetermined political, social or preferential biases (which exist as a synthesis of the political agenda of media corporations and the demand of their consumers).

Newspapers cling, to this day, to a laughable pretense of objectivity. An historical absurdity which has been dismantled, in drastically different ways from people as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Joseph Goebbels. To deem centralized institutional media as any sort of arbiter of fact, truth, reality or correctness is patently fatuous.

People like Andrew Keen cling to an archaic method of imperative reality - it’s true because we (the elite) say it is true. This was, for almost two millenia, an efficient and effective way of establishing a consensus - everyone was on the same page when it came to how the world worked because we all listened to the same people. If we didn’t, we went to war with each other.

The internet, and specifically the web, and the kind of social perception it engenders, greases the wheels for consensus reality. The “web-generation” isn’t called that simply because of the technology we’re using (that is a mulligan in the generational narrative).

People who use the web view society differently from those who do not, dramatically differently. Self-identification and mutual discoverability, which is taken to new extremes on the web, enables a fundamentally different kind of social interaction and self-perception.

Think about the differences in the interpretation of such concepts as “community”, “like-minded”, “friend”, “dialogue”, “openness” that the web has and can enable - this kind of change in perspective is irrevocable once it has transpired, when one “gets” the web one can never go back.

What we can consider fact, or true or even believable has been undermined by instantaneous transfer of information. Nobody can be considered canonical, if Wikipedia (edited by tens of thousands of dedicated supporters bent on veracity) is unreliable then so is everything else.

What newspapers rely on now to justify their existence, are the Aristotlean “incidental” qualities. Those things which are consequential of newspapers qua newspapers but aren’t definitional. They are large format, consume no electricity to read, portable, amenable to advertising placements and consequently (for some) quite lucrative.

Yomiuri Shimbun retains the highest circulation of a daily, paid-for newspaper in the world. Its Alexa rank is 735. The highest Alexa rank for a newspaper website is 91, retained by the New York Times. One must go well below the ranks of all the major social networks, and most of the big-name blog hosts (Wordpress, Blogger, Blogspot and Livejournal) to get to NYT. Wikipedia, is however, ranked 8th by Alexa - an Amazon property dedicated to tracking the relative popularity of websites.

If the New York Times really does give us all the news that fit to print (newspapers have condescension integrated even into their mottos), why then does NYT get two-thirds the traffic of CNN.com? Surely the world demands the rigour, expertise wisdom and insight proffered by the editorial staff of the NYT and newspapers of its ilk. Americans have used the TV as their primary source of news since 1963, the glitz and multimedia nature were used to explain the appeal. On the web, no distinction necessarily applies.

Perhaps, however, the world is getting messier. Perhaps there is an awakening of the fallibility of expert opinion (that is, in the case of mass-media opinion provided by a purported expert).

The mythology was the journalist was the citizen-ally against the potential corruption of our ruling elite, then it became our surrogate watch-dogs against our democratic leaders. They were, the story goes,  an essential pillar in maintaining the most important (and only essential) element of good politics - transparency.

Now, thanks to Chomsky and others, they are regarded merely as one more vested group. Owned as they are by large, vertically integrated corporations with extensive integration within government and private business. Media institutions are not our friends.

The principle threat is not from the blogosphere, mass-media is being eroded by newspapers themselves who’ve lost their way, their purpose and ultimately their reason for being.

Newspapers are made of dead tree. They’re falling without making a sound.

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