The headline on the Washington Post‘s health blog, The Checkup: “Study: Soda drinkers at increased risk of pancreatic cancer.” The headline on the Village Voice‘s Edible News blog, pointing to the Post‘s item: “New Study Adds Pancreatic Cancer to Soda’s List of Evils.”

But both items go on to explain the many weaknesses in the study. From what I can tell, despite what the study’s authors say, there’s no reason to think that sugary soft drinks (diet soft drinks weren’t included) pose any particular risk for pancreatic cancer, though further study might be merited. Of course, they shouldn’t be consumed at all because of the many other health problems they create. But there’s no good reason, so far, to add pancreatic cancer to the list of “evils.”   

Update 9 a.m. PST: I should note that many, many news outlets and blogs have cited this study, with equally alarming headlines. And several accounts, like this one by Canada’s CTV, present the study’s findings with zero skepticism or any outside commentary. 

Michael Francis McElroy for The New York Times

Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by the New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times:

Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur who read Mr. Malamuds appeal, managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text.

Then on Sept. 29, all of the free servers stopped serving. The government, it turns out, was not pleased.

A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, pending an evaluation. A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation.

Continuing on the blog:

In the technology world, Mr. Swartz is kind of a big deal, as the saying goes. At the age of 14, he had a hand in writing RSS, the now-ubiquitous software used to syndicate everything from blog posts to news headlines directly to subscribers.

[O]ver the course of six weeks, Mr. Swartz was able to download 780 gigabytes of data — 19,856,160 pages of text — from Pacer. The caper grabbed an estimated 20 percent of the entire PACER network, with a focus on the most recent cases from almost every circuit.

When the government abruptly shut down the free public program, Mr. Malamud saw it as a sign of possible trouble ahead. “Who shuts down a 17-site national program with no notice whatsoever?” he recalled thinking. “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.”

Mr. Malamud told Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.” Mr. Swartz recalled, “I had this vision of the Feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.”

He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while, and then called [to warn] his mother.

But when lawyers told Mr. Malamud and Mr. Swartz that they appeared to have broken no laws, Mr. Malamud sent Mr. Swartz a message saying, “You should just lay low for a while.”

Mr. Swartz said that he waited for a couple of months, but “nobody came knocking on my door. I started breathing a little more easily.”

Want to meet the man behind the headlines? Want to have the F.B.I. open up a file on you as well? Interested in some kind of bizarre celebrity product endorsement? I’m available in Boston and New York all this month — contact me by email, Facebook, and web form.

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More:

• John Schwartz, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy,” New York Times, February 12, 2009
• public.resource.org, “A Cleaner PACER” (“32 districts, 735.9 GBytes, 19,856,160 pages”)

UPDATE: Schwartz expands on his story in Steal These Federal Records—Okay, Not Literally.

eMarketer published this report yesterday: Traditional Media Use Stabilizes as Online Rises.

It’s not really news at this point. I’m sure you’ve seen similar headlines over the past few years. But take a look at this chart which accompanied the report, because it’s not only about online. You’ll see that along with the increased use of things such as blogs and social networking, is also the use of real-world person-to-person advice.

As a society, we’ve been moving toward this place for thousands of years, ever since the invention of the alphabet, which put the power of communication in the hands of a few. This dynamic simply expanded as we saw the printing press and the broadcast networks owned by those who had money and power. The peak was probably somewhere in the 1960′s. But at the same time that Don Draper and his boys were ruling the roost, ARPANET was in its infancy and students at MIT were playing around with a little something we all know as email.

The issue here is that, as mass media got more powerful, we started believing that unless we were “professional” communicators, we didn’t have the right to speak. What “we” had to say was not important. That’s not to say that there’s not a place for professional communicators, the point here is that everyone should have their own printing press. Enter the Internet.

As we began to publish ourselves, via forums and Usenet, I think we also started believing that our voice counted. As more and more people started participating online–an Amazon review here, a social network profile there, we started taking back the power of communication.

The rise of trust in ourselves and each other is one that has been coming for a very long time. It’s about the validity of the everyday as professor of anthropology and architectureDell Upton suggests: “The navigation of everyday spaces, the ordinary, unexceptional sites of most of our sensory and intellectual experiences, is the primary arena within which selfhood and personhood are formed.”

To me that means that what I have to say matters, whether that be via blog post or twitter update, and whether it’s profound or mundane. What’s more, in saying what we have to say, we validate ourselves as worthy of being heard. Even if it’s a Facebook update that I am “grabbing a latte.”

That’s my point about this seemingly simple chart. It’s not about media. It’s much much bigger than that.

Beautifully put by Fred Benenson:

NIN’s CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Fred Benenson, January 5th, 2009

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

Remember way back in 2004 when Howard Dean mobilized the digerati via MoveOn.org and it made big headlines? Well this election is even cooler for the techie set. Here are just a few of my favorite features from around the web…

On the New York Times, a feature that allows users to enter one word about how they feel and choose who they voted for. Results are color coded, so you can view just Obama supporters, just McCain supporters, or both together.

And a pop-up dash board…

From CNN, an interactive map that lets you call the race…

and a customized tracker for your local election (to the level of your state), which is automatically inserted into your CNN homepage (I wish it tracked my city propositions too, maybe next time)…

Then there’s the uber geeky fivethirtyeight.comwho has been tweaking algorithms for weeks…

And what a smart idea—donate your status on facebook to get out the word to vote. I signed up on Sunday and almost a million more people have signed up in the last 48 hours. It automatically updates so that your network sees a refreshed message every few hours. It’s actually moving to see everyone’s status that has been donated, almost like being at a live rally…

Oh Marshall McLuhan would be proud.