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12
Feb 14

More snow

As I write this we have something like two-and-a-half or almost three inches of snow on the ground. It is supposed to continue off and on. There are just a few flurries here and there now. Earlier there was an urgent rate of snowfall. The clouds had a date, and there was much brushing of the shoulders.

I heard someone say to a friend “You’re wearing Chacos!”

The friend said “I didn’t know the snow would be this cold!”

And I wept for the future. And the tears froze on my face, because it is cold.

Actually, we’ve hovered just above freezing for hours. That could make the overnight interesting.

This morning everything else had closed up, but our campus held out until the mid-afternoon. They were hoping against hope, but you just knew the feeling was in the air. Then, after lunch, came the word.

My afternoon class was canceled. The weather has closed the campus for four business days in the first three weeks of school. It has been a crazy semester, but a pretty, wet, snow. At least the roads have been passable.

In the evening came the snow:

Overnight will come, possibly, the ice.

adventures / iPhone / links / Samford / things to read / Thursday — 1 Comment
6
Feb 14

Another weather day

The big cultural event of the spring at Samford is Step Sing, the choreographed, team-based, song and dance revue put on by the Greeks, independent groups and who knows whom else. I learned today that there was once a professors’ group. I suspect there’s probably enough interest in creating a local alumni group. I say local because this is a seriously orchestrated event. They put in about 40 hours of rehearsals for the three days of shows. It eats into everything.

One of the ancillary aspects of Step Sing is the banner drop. There are 14 groups performing this year. I know this because there are 14 banners now on display in the Caf. Everything is supposed to be kept strictly confidential until the banners are unveiled, and then the real anticipation for the shows begins. Here are two of the banners:

More later this week.

I say Step Sing eats into everything. The only thing big enough to eat Step Sing is winter weather. And so it was, that on the sixth day of February, and for the fifth time in just the second week of the term, we’ve had campus closed.

So I went home. Which was good, because we had to be in Atlanta tonight. There was a play:

Here is the curtain call:

That show isn’t for everyone, but if you like your satire acerbic and irreverent, well you might find a place in that show.

Things to read … because reading is for everyone.

This story should really be titled “Russia: Our shower surveillance says the hotel rooms are fine.” Russian Officials Fire Back at Olympic Critics

If you were wondering about J.C. Penney’s Super Bowl adventures, here’s an explanation. How JC Penney Accidentally Won the Super Bowl:

But here’s the kicker: It never even occurred to the company or its agencies that people would accuse them of staging a hack — or, for that matter, being drunk. In reality, the tweets were part of JCPenney’s ongoing campaign for the Olympics, which involves promoting its special Go Team USA mittens. The original plan for the Super Bowl was to tweet a stream of these misspelled, clumsy tweets through the big game and then reveal the #tweetingwithmittens hashtag at the end.

If you believe this telling — which has some depth to it — then you have to acknowledge that what really happened here was J.C. Penney was more or less very lucky with an incredible unsound strategy.

You’re going to run a series of bad tweets for a few hours and then tell the joke? There were 25 million tweets during the game, which is to say the firehose was turned on full bore. And you’re going to run a joke for three hours in an environment that is guaranteed to have an audience with an attention span of Dory the Pacific regal blue tang? At best you get ignored and forgotten. At worst people assume, well, what they assumed.

J.C. Penney will take all of the publicity they can get, but the point is this was a deeply flawed plan.

Quick ones:

Der Spiegel journalists on walking the fine line between informing the public and compromising NSA intelligence

IRS Criminal Prosecutions Surge Under Obama

Twitter Breaks Rank, Threatens to Fight NSA Gag Orders

More of … something … tomorrow.

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5
Feb 14

Field tripping

I took a class on a field trip today. This is the class that takes three or four each term, which is one of my favorite classes, mostly, I think, because of the field trips.

So here we are in the conference room at Intermark Group in downtown Birmingham, where the students learned a bit about the day in a life of PR practitioners, advertising reps and creatives.

They give us a quick walking tour, offices, cubicles, a server room, some of their edit bays — they have a full service production studio in their building — and the famous camper:

They bought it online, restored it, had it installed and now all of their clients try to have their meetings in there. One of the dozens of neat touches you’ll find in a shop full of out-of-the-box thinkers.

Things to read … because sometimes you have to stay in your box.

Here are three quick ones to frighten you:

Retailers warn Congress that more cyberattacks are looming

Bankers want retailers to bear the costs of data breaches

Cyberattacks are on the rise. And health-care data is the biggest target

Who wants to go back to stamps and checks?

What can make audio go viral? NPR experiments with building earworms for social media:

So why doesn’t audio go viral? It’s not because shareable audio doesn’t exist — it does. If you’re an audio listener, you’ve probably heard something amazing, surprising, or funny that you really wanted to share. But in many cases, there are boundaries that prevent shareable audio clips from spreading.

When we started experimenting around audio and social, we identified three hurdles.

It is a shame, really, because audio can work as such a focusing agent, or an atmospheric agent, or a telling agent. There’s something inherently compelling about really good audio — recognizing and capturing it is an art unto itself — but if you’re discussing the nebulous “go viral” as a goal then you are talking about online. And, usually, if you can record audio you can record video. And, of course, in video sometimes the audio is lowered, or removed, or just overwhelmed by what the eyeballs see.

Take note of this, it will be huge. Amazon Lays Foundation for Giant Video Advertising Business:

Amazon is shedding a little more light on where it hopes to take its ad business. It is announcing that it has inked a deal with video ad company FreeWheel to provide the technology for Amazon to build out its video advertising business.

FreeWheel is essentially responsible for putting the right video ads in front of the right Amazon customers.

In short: Get ready for a lot more video ads on Amazon video content.

Get ready to buy in pre-roll, buying from more directions in Kindle and buying, buying, buying everywhere.

Still don’t think your packages are being delivered by drones, despite 60 Minutes’ breathless efforts.

The first thing you have to know about this one is that the headline and the story don’t play well together. The US will build regional ‘hubs’ to combat the impacts of climate change

The Obama administration is pushing ahead with its vow to mitigate the effects of climate change. Today, the US government announced plans to create seven “climate hubs” that will offer information and resources to communities in rural regions across the country.

Specific details on the hubs are slim for now, but each one will be tailored to a specific region’s climate-related challenges — such as water shortages, forest fires, pests, or floods. The hubs, which will be overseen by the US Department of Agriculture, are largely zeroing in on farming and ranching. In a statement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack noted that the hubs will help ensure that “agricultural leaders have the modern technologies and tools they need to adapt and succeed in the face of a changing climate.”

The first question I have: Why not just use the existing Extension infrastructure? They are in place. They have a wide array of experts. They are already networked into the local farming and ranching communities and so on. The answer to that question would be telling.

Just enjoy the comments. NBC News’ Richard Engel: My Computers, Cellphone Were Hacked ‘Almost Immediately’ In Sochi. Also, there are plenty of things about this that don’t make sense yet, but do enjoy the comments.

Two posts on the multimedia blog today:

I did not know half of these Google Doc tips

GoPro moves you, moves themselves

And I think that will be enough for a cold Wednesday. Here’s to a warm weekend coming your way.

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13
Jan 14

Do not do math underwater

Swimming again this morning. I got in 1650 yards, which apparently used to be measured as a mile in the pool. That’s weird because, when you swim as slowly as I do, you have plenty of time to do multiplication and division in your head — several times — and realize, Hey, that math isn’t right.

Don’t do math in the pool. Because the sequence of events that follows is not unlike those Directv ads. And the inevitable “What lap am I on?” is only the beginning.

Don’t do math in the pool.

This evening I went for a run. It seems that if I get a route in my head some part of me feels obligated to do the entire thing, if possible. And there I was, wondering how this felt and why that ached, and enjoying that it was cold, but I was sweating. Wondering how my hair could be wet, the temperature could be 46 and I find that I’m enjoying myself. So I ran and walked eight miles. OK, really it was 7.94 miles, but my first rule of running is to round up. I walked the hills, because of whatever is going on with my legs. The entire route was on sidewalks or bike paths, except for one little bridge. I fairly well sprinted over that.

I don’t sprint.

I do not know what is happening.

Now, as I sit resting quietly, Allie has come for a visit. I moved to take a picture of her cuddliness and my poor posture, and she does this:

I can take photos of her with my camera all day long. She’ll tolerate an iPad being shoved in her face. You pull out your phone, and that is just going to ruin her night, you filthy paparazzo.

Things to read … because reading is fundamental.

A conversation on Mobile Content Strategy with Mark Coatney, Al Jazeera America:

Mark reads books on his commute so he believes that long form is absolutely possible on mobile. In his eyes a 5-minute video is long form. Short form means anything that is a steady stream of consumption: ‘stock and flow’. When asked if he was encompassing that theory by combining into one or splitting into two apps he replied “Two, but I hadn’t really thought of it like that”. One will give the steady stream of information and be more social. The other is a second screen, a companion that will give you more information, go deeper whenever a consumer wants to.

There is a ton of stuff, in that one simple paragraph.

Enhanced fan experiences: The sportd strategy of the second screen:

Consider this: 83% of fans say they use social media during games. Sixty-nine percent prefer phones as second-screen alternatives; 48 percent check scores and 20 percent watch highlights via mobile, according to data from March 2013.

[…]

Not enough is said or written about the engagement teams are having with fans in social. I feel conversations are not genuine enough and too many teams and leagues have built a barrier, not engaging fully with those who appreciate them most.

That is because most teams are terrible at the practice. The exemplar Tom Buchheim uses are the Boston Bruins. “The team uses replies to many fan tweets, even personalizing each response with the initials of those behind the scenes.”

So someone there understands Twitter is a conversation. Good for the Bruins. Why are most professional and big-time college franchises have difficulty grasping the attendant concepts? Buchheim continues:

Game time is go time in social media, and it can be chaotic. But teams should dedicate resources to connect one-to-one with fans more. Share their content. Have conversations. Build stronger bonds. This will only drive further engagement during the off-season and help fulfill social media’s true value — breaking down barriers and connecting people in authentic ways.

[…]

A sports fan’s second-screen options are endless. So are the ways teams and leagues can reach them during live events. It’s imperative fans find value in these experiences, whether they’re watching online, on their couches or in the bleachers. As it becomes ingrained into the sports experience, the second screen must be about the fan, providing deeper engagement, better access and increasing value.

The standard if/then/so structure there is heartening. These programs will figure it out, though I’m not sure why it will take them that long.

Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait:

Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years: In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.

[…]

Today’s poor families are structured differently: In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.

Poverty is more evenly distributed, though still heaviest in the South: In 1969, 45.9% of poor Americans lived in the South, a region that accounted for 31% of the U.S. population at the time. At 17.9%, the South’s poverty rate was far above other regions. In 2012, the South was home to 37.3% of all Americans and 41.1% of the nation’s poor people; though the South’s poverty rate, 16.5%, was the highest among the four Census-designated regions, it was only 3.2 percentage points above the lowest (the Midwest).

Pew has a chart and a map on that page which say a lot, quickly.

And a more localized view, from Kaiser Family Foundation researchers:

All 10 southeastern states have poverty rates above the national figure. Mississippi (27 percent, second-highest) and Louisiana (26 percent, third-highest) are near the top of the rankings, while North Carolina and Florida, each at 21 percent, are just slightly above the U.S. rate.

Alabama, meanwhile, sits at 22 percent, ranked 15th overall.

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7
Jan 14

The Reverse Tiger Walk

The often copied, and originally Auburn tradition of Tiger Walk — where the plays walk from the athletic department to the football stadium a few hours before they play — now has a companion tradition. When the team travels there is a Reverse Tiger Walk when they get back home.

This is the walk from earlier tonight, when Auburn’s team returned, tired from a cross country flight and a bus ride across half the state to make it back home. They found hundreds of fans waiting to welcome them, to congratulate them, to thank them:

They lined up diagonally across the length of the indoor practice facility. They were two and three and four and five deep on either side of the path the players would take. The team, fresh off a plane and then a bus, walked through the crowd, looking a bit tired, but there was plenty of enthusiasm in the air.

Athletics director Jay Jacobs greeted the hundreds in attendance and told the players in front of him, saying “This is truly what the Auburn Family means.”

To the fans, he noted, in case anyone lost count, “In the last 10 years no one has won more SEC championships than the Auburn football program.”

Head coach Gus Malzahn spoke to the crowd:

Senior running back Jay Prosch briefly greeted the crowd:

And so did senior defensive back, and Iron Bowl legend, Chris Davis:

Here is some video:

And that wraps up the football season, and the last real football thing I’ll write about here for a while.

Good thing we’re getting back in the pool tomorrow.