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Another poor month. Let’s blame the holidays and all that comes with that. And the weather.
Next month, I’ll do a lot more than this.
For the year, I rode 1,722 miles. The calendars say I ran about 100 miles, give or take. But I didn’t start put the spring running in there, so that’s incomplete.
Funny, it never seems enough.
I’m thinking of using that headline every Monday. I don’t know what it is about the day, but they never lend themselves to anything insightful, curiosity-inducing, oblique or funny. TDoesn’t matter if they are busy days or quiet days or anything. They all seem to exist in the category of “They just are.”
And if that is the extent of your Monday problems, well, just try to keep it together, would ya, bub?
I took the opportunity for a quick ride this afternoon. I was going to go farther, but I started too late in the day. I was going to try a new route, but it seemed wise to get home in the daylight rather than the twilight.
Besides, I was just trying to stretch my legs and clear my head.
Which had a soda cup tossed at it. So that was charming.
That’s never happened before. But the best part was that I almost caught up with the guy in the white pickup, license plate redacted to protect the owner in case the truck was stolen for a joy ride by a guy with a taste for Sonic, at the next stop sign.
I’d decided I’d stop right by his window and nicely say “How awkward for you.”
But he got through the intersection before I could catch him. So that’s a good reason to get faster.
Things to read … Robot Writers and the Digital Age:
The printing press put a generation of scribes out of a job, and the telegraph sent couriers scurrying to find new employment.
Could software robots do the same for reporters?
That’s one of many questions raised by the emergence of Narrative Science and Automated Insights, two startups that have developed sophisticated computer programs that analyze large amounts of data and automatically generate news stories.
Someone told me once, when I was first starting out, this could never happen. She no longer works in news, but for different reasons. That story does a nice job identifying a lot of the interesting work done in automated/robotic/AI reporting. In the short and middle distance we’ll see a place where programs do some really awesome augmenting and complimenting the work of human reporters. In the long term? Don’t bet against this stuff. Or someone might refer to you vaguely, as I did to start this paragraph.
Once again, this was all foreseen by Back to the Future II. Though they’ve yet to deliver on the hover boards.
I wonder if robot reporters would accept so many “anonymous sources” as their human counterparts are doing as of late. Anonymous sources are increasing in news stories, along with rather curious explanations:
“Frankly, this kind of sourcing is ridiculous,” says Alicia Shepard, a journalist and NPR’s former ombudsman. She adds: “I get it that [news organizations] are trying to be transparent, but it doesn’t enhance the believability of the anonymous quote. The only thing worthwhile about the convoluted sourcing explainers is how funny they are.”
In fact, such descriptions can do more harm than good, says Matt Carlson, an associate professor at St. Louis University and the author of “On Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism,” published in 2011. Rather than enhancing a reader’s understanding, the descriptions used by reporters can be disingenuous and misleading about a source’s affiliation or motives, Carlson says.
Using anonymity in reporting has a venerable place in the craft, but it is becoming a crutch.
I read some wire copy today that five times (five!) referred to unnamed sources. How many reporters, branded or generic, do you trust that you’ll, as a reader, allow five references to anonymity and no names on the record?
By the way, that was a sports story.
Related only in that these are stories and they are about sports: perhaps you’ve seen the Together We Make Football promos on television? Well, the finalists include some incredible tales.
Here’s a quote: “It took me a while to realize I was still alive. I thought, ‘This is what it feels like to be dead.'”
This video is of mom recording her son receiving his acceptance letter to Samford. Fun stuff:
In a somewhat similar vein, this reporter covered a story and then got involved personally. Two years later and the Boston Globe’s Billy Baker is updating the tale on Twitter, where it was a huge hit today. Now it is a story in the traditional format. Two critically poor kids. VIetnamese parents. Dad killed himself. Kids struggle. Reporter comes along and gives them a nudge here and there. They scrape and save, these kids. They worked hard:
In the fall, Johnny left for his freshman year at UMass Amherst.
As college application time rolled around for George a few months later, we knew he was in a good position. His grades were outstanding. He had a compelling story. And so he aimed high. Very high.
These boys are the nearest I’ve come to that thing we call the American Dream. But when George texted me on Monday evening …
Well, just go read the thing.
Take a tissue with you.
I went for a run last night. It was cold and I was about two miles from home when it was dark enough, and simultaneously light enough, that I could see my breath. Then I car would come, and those headlights are far off in the distance in the night time when you’re on foot and only doing a tiny part of the job of closing the gap. Then suddenly there are all these headlights, and yet you’re in the dark. And by the time you figure that out, the curious behavior of directional photons and the physical features of the earth and what not, the headlights are now upon you, blindingly so.
You run a little farther off the road, farther away then you already were. Because it is dark in December and cold and no motorist has a reasonable expectation of finding you there. In my 5.32 miles I met four walkers, five cyclists, two joggers and a couple walking their dog. Hope we all got home safe.
This evening I took my bike for a quick 20-mile spin. I was pressed for space by three separate pickup trucks. One which lingered long enough to allow me to make jokes about his license plate. Another which clearly belonged to a man who’d just received word that his baby was about to be born and, with it, the luckiest lottery ticket of all time, but it could only be cashed if he showed up 15 minutes ago, having bent space and time to learn how to deliver the child himself and could do so with the ease of years of practice. And so he must pass every living thing like it were a dead thing and proceed with great haste to the special baby extraction unit. Or to his late appointment at the accountant’s office. Whatever was going on in the guy’s life.
How I didn’t roll up on the accident he must have surely caused later can only be explained by the idea that it happened on a different road than my route.
And so, I have a theory: pickup trucks are the most dangerous vehicles to cyclists, and perhaps everyone else.
Otherwise, grading and some grading. The grades are due this week, and so they will be done this week. I’ve made good headway and will, tomorrow or so, input the final numbers into the Excel formula. I will watch the averages move up and down and spot check a third of a class roster’s score with good old fashioned math to make sure I’ve built the spread sheet correctly. It is the least I can do. I usually build them correctly, but there’s always that concern, right?
Met Adam for dinner. We visited Cheeburger, where we had large cheeseburgers and I had a milkshake. All the while I complained about always being hungry. I was hungry when we left the place, in fact. Exercise will do that to you, it turns out.
Things to read … If you take away toy guns from toy monkeys then only toy monkey criminals will have guns. Our society is a little out of control just now, with the exertion of so much control, just now. Funny how that works. TSA Seizes Tiny Toy Gun From Stuffed Monkey, Threatens to Call Cops:
“She said ‘this is a gun,'” said May. “I said no, it’s not a gun it’s a prop for my monkey.”
“She said ‘If I held it up to your neck, you wouldn’t know if it was real or not,’ and I said ‘really?'” said May.
The TSA agent told May she would have to confiscate the tiny gun and was supposed to call the police.
The terrorist monkeys have won, basically.
But wait! It gets even more sublimely stupid! Snowball Fight at Univ. of Oregon Could Lead to Criminal Charges
Is there video? There is video:
So, yes, college students are doing silly college student things. And the retired professor decided to get out of his car, where he was safe behind his high-tech, ultra-dense, futuristic anti-snow polymer shielding. If it feels to you like there’s more to this story, it is probably because there is more to that story.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, leave your quiver-filled imagination at home. Or get suspended. Truly these are dangerous times in education.
How about a few nicer stories. Building a library: Donation of books to low-income first-graders in Birmingham underscores importance of early reading:
Zion was among 80 first-graders at the school to receive a bag of five books to take home. Other books were “Charlotte’s Web,” “Amelia Bedelia,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and “Where the Wild Things Are.”
“These kids don’t have a lot so this is an opportunity for them to really build their own personal libraries,” said Theris Johnson, student achievement coach at Minor Elementary School. “They’re starting a lifelong interest in reading.”
There was nothing, and still is nothing, quite like a book that could take you away from the struggles of your day.
Though someone should tell educators there is an axe in Charlotte’s Web, Amelia uses scissors and Peter Rabbit is drugged by his mother. I’m sure there was something subversive and dangerous to school principals in Where the Wild Things Are, as well.
So the boss gave you a nearly unlimited budget to do a bit of viral marketing. Well done:
The selfie. Someone making contortions to explain it away: context matters.
So does decorum. When you land on a site called Selfies at Funerals, you have little of it.
Someone commented there, “One of the most important pictures of our time.” And that may be right. Another person, elsewhere, recalled Barbara Tuchman:
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
Granted, The Guns of August may be a bit of an overreach for a vacuous photograph. At least we all hope so, at any rate.
Finally, this incredible video has been making the rounds. A design professor friend asked why I didn’t make an appearance. I assured him my only trick was balance, and even then only on occasion:
That is very much the kind of video you need to watch from the beginning to the end. It only gets more impressive as it goes. Amazing stuff. And, much like the rest of life, stick around to the end to see the (painful) bloopers.
Maybe we should all take our football a little less seriously. And maybe people should reconsider that extra drink. And if you judge people based on how dejected they act after your team loses, let’s not be friends, mmkay?
Woman charged with murder in Hoover Iron Bowl party shooting
The title of the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States hasn’t been in Alabama since Detroit filed this summer. So, in a way, Jefferson County got off the hook of ignominy. Now the county is out of bankruptcy:
(T)he county’s bankruptcy exit is being appealed by ratepayers. Critics of the county’s plan have said the sewer rate increases will place to great of a burden on poor residents. Others have noted that the debt structure of the deal could lead to problems down the road.
But county officials have maintained that the plan represents the best option for the county.
I knew, when I first covered the super sewer scandal in 2001, this would never end. This will never end.
Now for something more fun, AdWeek has compiled what, they say, are the 20 most viral videos of the year. Enjoy.
How about a few stories about disruption?
Professor Jeff Jarvis writes, Past the page, asking you to watch a video about Ask Google. Then he writes:
(T)hink about the diminished role of the page and what that will do to media. We publishers found ourselves unbundled online, so we shifted from selling people entire publications to trying to get them to come to just a page — any page — and then another page on the web, lingering long enough to shove one more ad at their eyeballs.
But just as the web disintermediated physical media, voice disintermediates the page. But media still depend on the page as their atomic unit, carrying their content, brand, ownership, and revenue. Now, when you want to know the score of the Jets game — if you dare — you don’t need to go to ESPN and find the page, you just say, “OK, Google. What’s the Jets score?” And the nice lady will tell you the bad news.
Now let’s go farther — because that’s what I live to do. Let’s also disintermediate the device.
What Will Google Glass Do For Journalism Education? Good question:
While Google Glass has some clear applications in higher education already, Robert Hernandez, a professor of web journalism at the University of Southern California, sees the technology’s potential more than anything else. “From a digital perspective, from my perspective, it’s just another device…it doesn’t change your life,” he explained. Nonetheless he can see a number of ways it can influence journalism and how it’s taught.
According to Hernandez, Google Glass isn’t likely to revolutionize journalism or education so much as provide users with a few additional options for how to create and interact with content.
Doesn’t technology just feel like that a lot? I’ve had that perception for most of the last decade. “This is neat, useful, somewhat impressive. But it is just a step along the way.”
More than anything, I see the shiny new thing (“Look what my phone can do!”) as an indicator of potential.
Eventually it starts to really change people’s lives. Like, perhaps, this story: The Beginning Of The End Of Waiters and Waitresses?
A friend of mine is producing this video. Like mountain bike riding?
Sport Science discusses Chris Davis’ Iron Bowl return:
This could be the last word on the subject. Probably won’t be, but it could be:
The Onion: Nobody At University Of Alabama Caught Saturday’s Game
Maybe this year I’ll get to take this ride: Bo Jackson to take bike ride for tornado relief to Auburn for 2014 A-Day game
This is what I did on the bike and on my feet. All units are miles. Sad little effort, It all picks up next week.
