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That’s a question, sure thing

There is such a thing as a stupid question. Quora has found it:

Is it safe to do the ALS ice bucket challenge with liquid nitrogen instead of ice water?

But, hey, at least someone thought to ask. One wonders if they simultaneously have access to liquid nitrogen and were unsure about the specific properties of the stuff. Happily, most of the answers have to do with experience in laboratories and an explanation of the Leidenfrost effect. Only one answer goes superlative, along the lines of “sure, if you want to die.”

Mr. Freeze aside, the question was asked, and answered. The question even referenced Leidenfrost. So, yes, stupid question.

Glad it wasn’t asked over at Yahoo Answers, the land of enchantedly silly questions.

Class today. Meetings today. Meetings into the night. It was a full, full day. Quora helped. Yahoo Answers never helps.

Things to read … because even when you read only this much, it helps.

Cyber attacks on hospitals rising 600 percent:

The computer networks of hospitals and health systems that hold millions of patient records and valuable personal information are quickly becoming a favorite target for hackers.

A recent report from security research firm Websense finds that while attempted cyber attacks are on the rise in many industries, the amount of digital invasions on hospitals is unparalleled and has risen 600 percent in the last 10 months.

Just in time for all those medical records in the cloud. Should be fun.

Why Interactives are the Next Big Thing in Content Marketing:

Interactive graphics, or ‘interactives’ for short, are like the Transformers of visual content: They can take on a variety of forms. You can find an interactive that’s a microsite, dashboard, or a map, to name a few. But at the core, they’re all visualizations that allow viewers to explore the information presented for themselves.

By definition, interactives engage viewers in a very active way – and that engagement can be incredibly powerful to marketers. People viewing interactives spend more time on the page, seeing a brand associated with content that interests them, all at their own pace.

[…]There are three situations where making an interactive is the way to go: (1) complex data visualization, (2) personalized branded content, and (3) customized product explainers.

Fortunately, there is already a brilliant visualized explainer to answer the question above. Enjoy:

More tomorrow.

iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / swimming / Tuesday — 1 Comment
2
Sep 14

There are no free potatoes, either

Another free commercial on the basis of a photo, a story and nostalgia. I should get a free meal for this, I think.

The sign, it seems, is getting a makeover. The old neon has been stripped out. And pulling the gas-holding-gas has just shown the smear of age and wear and rain and paint. I love that sign. There’s just something about that pig face, blissfully unaware what is happening to his real life counterparts inside, grinning stupidly despite the messages often on display on the marquee just below. Hopefully they aren’t replacing the whole thing.

The Yankee and I had our first meal there — Friday was Pie Day, I said, and she said yes. I used to eat there frequently when I was still broadcasting. It wasn’t far from the station. I’ve dined there with a lot of friends. I ate there with my book tonight. I’d swam a mile and a big baked potato sounded right.

It was just the thing after only a brunch. The editorial staff at the Crimson dined with the media relations folks late this morning. I took some leftovers to have fruit for lunch, but I’d swam a mile, you see, and I can look at a body of water and get hungry. Real and hearty food was what was required tonight, and there was no Italian to be had with friends. So I had a baked potato with a book.

Things to read … becausing reading always brings around friends. Just get comfy with something great, and someone will come along to interrupt.

Learning How to Score a Job Using Social Media, for Beginners is a free email-based class, if you’re interested.

A friend sent this. I hated telling him he’s going to have to find someone else to see it with. A 15,000ft descent, sheer drops and 300 deaths a year: Welcome to Bolivia’s Death Road, the terrifying route tourists love to cycle

Ukraine: Russian forces in major rebel cities:

A Ukrainian official said Tuesday that Russian forces have been spotted in both of the major rebel-held cities in eastern Ukraine.

The claim by Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s national security council, came as the country’s defense minister said Ukraine’s armed forces are expanding their strategy from just fighting separatist rebels to facing the Russian army in a war that could cost “tens of thousands” of lives.

Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to Track Missing Foreign Students:

The Department of Homeland Security has lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the United States on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished — exploiting a security gap that was supposed to be fixed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything,” said Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators. “Some of them could be here to do us harm.”

Yet another of the core competencies that DHS was created for … and it is less than a sterling success.

3 free iOS apps for visual storytelling:

(J)ournalists do not necessarily need a big budget, banks of editing software or even a desktop computer to create appealing visual stories.

These three apps for iPhone and iPad all allow you to create beautiful visual stories on the move without any special gear.

Even better, each are easy to use – and free.

When you said free, you had my attention. Shame that meal wasn’t also free.

cycling / I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off
1
Sep 14

Labor Day

Last night we ordered Chinese takeout. I offered to go pick it up after The Yankee called it in. The lady on the other end of the phone knows who we are based on one of our habitual orders. You tell the soups and the egg rolls and the entrees and she says “Oh, hi Missus Smith.”

Then I went to pick up during halftime of the Tennessee game tonight and she started asking things about work. The nice lady at the Chinese restaurant, who has people going in and out constantly, knows where I work.

We might be eating too much Chinese.

Tonight we had Italian potluck with friends, and that was awesome. In between I did some work, building a lecture and tinkering with notes for other things and so on. I labored on Labor Day, but there was no grief to it. I sat in a chair at home and typed things. And when I was done, I took a 22 mile spin around town. My cycling app says my ride gave me the best times on four local segments.

This is surely a calculating error, a timing mistake. More likely, none of the fast people in town use this app.

Things to read … because everyone in town should read.

This is a former student, a Fulbright scholar now embarking on a year in Tajikistan. He’s a bright guy, and this will be an amazing adventure. Read along: House of leaves.

Security for journalists, part one

Boomers. When did we get so old?

I prefer the Vyclone app, which lets my collaboration be with my friends, rather than everyone, but this has some uses too: Snapchat lets you watch and create group videos of live events with ‘Our Story’.

7 interesting things about Lee County agriculture

The UK has big, big problems. This is simply a terrible symptom. Scandal hit Rotherham ‘deleted abuse files’:

Top ranking staff ordered raids to delete and remove case files and evidence detailing the scale of Rotherham’s child exploitation scandal, sources have revealed.

More than 10 years before the damning independent inquiry revealed sexual exploitation of 1,400 children in Rotherham a raid was carried out on the orders of senior staff to destroy evidence, it has been claimed.

In 2002 high profile personnel at Rotherham Council ordered a raid on Risky Business, Rotherham council’s specialist youth service, which offered one-to-one help and support to vulnerable teenage girls, ahead of the findings of a draft report, according to the Times.

The raid was to remove case files and wipe computer records detailing the scale and severity of the town’s sex-grooming crisis, sources told The Times.

Meanwhile, closer to home … In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist:

A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—”taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.

There’s a lot about this story that doesn’t yet make sense. Hopefully the next draft has some insight, otherwise, it would be particularly troubling.

(Three days later update: There is a lot going on in that story. And local media interviewed the teacher. It would seem there is still a good deal going on in that story.)

links / photo / Samford / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
28
Aug 14

It isn’t even mean tea

The beginning of every new school year brings about changes and good news. There have been a lot of positive ones at Samford. For instance, we saw this news just today: Samford creates $335M annual economic impact.

President Westmoreland got a little face time with the media, too:

There’s a new business building going up. There have been renovations in my building. And, of course, there are all those new faces buzzing about, too. The food service in the cafeteria is provided by a new company this year, as well. Food is important. I eat it every day. But feeding hundreds and hundreds of people each day can’t be easy, so I won’t say anything so far. Everyone is figuring out all of the new things, which might explain the weird, chaotic energy during lunch. And they might still be working through their menu as well.

But this … this …

There’s a cultural standard to be met here and it isn’t met with “plain tea.”

Who says “plain tea” anyway?

There’s a little sign that says Red Diamond is coming soon. Not soon enough.

Things to read … because this section always comes up soon enough.

Did you see the Star Trek selfie? Who is the guy in the background? There’s a story in that photobombing.

Here’s a great interactive infographic, Losing Ground:

In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year …

What a great story, and adventures, brave young reporters. High school journalists cover Michael Brown’s funeral after addressing legal, safety concerns

“We did not, and do not, advocate our students attending the heavily protested areas,” Goble said. “However, we felt there was an immense journalistic opportunity for them, and they could capture these stories without being in the midst of a protest.”

[…]

But even with the concern for the students’ safety, Goble and his students still felt that this was an important story for them to cover given the proximity and importance of the events.

Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two:

(S)tudents are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.

Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort according to every imaginable search criteria. Scheduling programs that allow someone to find the 47 different classes that meet Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., then narrow them down to those that have no prerequisites, then narrow again to those that count toward requirements in two majors. Or apps that allow you to see what courses your friends are considering, or figure out who has the same free periods that you do, or plot the quickest route between two far-flung classrooms.

But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.

Seeing the initiative is great, terrific and wonderful. Watching them struggle with information access is rather understandable. The really sharp ones will work around it all. And some of them will probably get very, very rich.

Here’s a little PR piece that points out that paying attention to social media pays off. Just ask the airlines! Southwest Airlines’ new listening center making an immediate mark makes perfect sense. You’ll wonder why more shops aren’t doing the same thing.

football / journalism / links / running / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
Aug 14

First down

Started my morning with a run. I got in a nice 5K before a series of meetings — fortunately, there were no meetings about meetings. My workday also ended with meetings about social media. In between, I gave a lecture on the “changing concepts of news.” I started around the muckrackers at McClure’s and worked up to the modern moment. In 2015, remember, Back to the Future II showed us flying robot reporters working for USA Today.

We talked a bit about the Oculus Rift work. I showed them the latest androids being developed in Japan:

Think about all of the changes that have taken place in journalism and storytelling in the last 40 years, I said. Imagine what it will look like toward the end of your career, in another 40 years.

That android, that so many of them thought to be odd or creepy today, will be positively old fashioned by then.

Things to read … because reading will never go out of style.

(We hope.)

How the news upstarts covered ISIS:

The rallying cry for those bemoaning the demise of newspapers was, “Without The New York Times, who would cover Iraq?” Well, quite a few places, it turns out.

As traditional media companies have scaled back their foreign bureaus, newer news organizations like Vice and BuzzFeed have expanded their mandate to fill the void. (Not included in this review is Global Post, the online startup that James Foley worked for, since it started with the express purpose of covering foreign news.) But can a bunch of relatively small upstarts cover the world’s hot spots? ISIS, one of the year’s biggest stories, is as good a test case as any to see how five have been doing it.

Here’s more pessimism for print advertising:

For newspapers, continued print advertising declines will mean more pressure on circulation (print subscribers and paywalls) or new revenue (digital marketing services, events) to make up the difference. Most likely, they won’t, and we’ll see more cuts.

If the rate of print ad decline does slow in 2015 (from 8.9 percent down to 6.2 percent down), that would be…semi-good news, I guess, after several years of drops in the high single digits? But there’s nothing here to predict a leveling off, much less a return to growth.

The ‘guiding principles’ of Quartz redesign

The Miami Herald’s new publisher is moving the paper a bit closer towards irrelevancy

VA ‘Oscar the Grouch’ training angers vets:

The beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs depicted dissatisfied veterans as Oscar the Grouch in a recent internal training guide, and some vets and VA staffers said Tuesday that they feel trashed.

The cranky Sesame Street character who lives in a garbage can was used in reference to veterans who will attend town-hall events Wednesday in Philadelphia.

“There is no time or place to make light of the current crisis that the VA is in,” said Joe Davis, a national spokesman for the VFW. “And especially to insult the VA’s primary customer.”

These people will apparently not get it. And its a delightful little series of events to which we can all look forward.

The first college football game of the year was tonight. This guy was the referee:

I hadn’t realized that Boyd Crowder had taken on a side job:

Justified should be back around January. But football is here now. Hooray football.