Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A few words …

Tuesday

Things to read

Just a bunch of links today, I’m afraid. But good links. So do check some of them, and the selected excerpts, out.

LinkedIn: Online publishing up 24%, newspapers down 28%

How has our economy evolved in the past five years? Which industries are shrinking or growing through these challenging economic times? These are some of the questions that the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) delves into each February in the “Economic Report of the President” (ERP). This year, the CEA worked with us to glean further insights into industry trends both during the recent recession and after its end in June 2009.

[...]

The fastest-growing industries include renewables (+49.2%), internet (+24.6%), online publishing (+24.3%), and e-learning (+15.9%). Fastest-shrinking industries were newspapers (-28.4%), retail (-15.5%), building materials (-14.2%), and automotive (-12.8%).

Since this great economic sorting out isn’t yet settled, I’m sure some of the industries in that terrific chart are still moving around.

Meanwhile.

C.S. Lewis, replying a letter to a young fan, on the what really matters in the craft of writing:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

[...]

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

You should read the full letter, which is full of masterful advice.

Steve Yelvington says “adaptive HTML5 layouts on the “everything just works” principle will eclipse smartphone, tablet apps.”

Two First Amendment stories.

My boss once observed that I was something of a First Amendment guy. As a journalist himself, he understands, though all of us should. Those stories are more than a little abhorrent. But if anyone needs to have that explained: the Founders thought it kind of important. They put it first.

Sports: Auburn hired a new women’s basketball coach, Terri Williams-Flournoy, late of Georgetown. On her first day in the new job she said “We want to cause havoc as much as we can.

Like the sound of that. Before she took the job she called Nell Fortner, who just resigned from the position. Fortner is the best. Flournoy, or others, might be better coaches, but the athletic department will never find anyone that loves the place as much as she does. This is what she said when the new coach called: “She knew that it would be a great place for me to bring my family and she just kept going on and on and on about the community.”

The new NFL uniforms, in poor photographs. I’m not sure if it is the imagery or the new gear that is underwhelming. And “fast is faster”? Ugh.

Auburn / Samford / Tuesday / baseball / video — No Comments
27
Mar 12

“Hit hard! Left field!”

On the occasions that Auburn and Samford play each other in some sport — as they did in football last year, as they occasionally meet in the non-revenue sports and as they do in every year in baseball — my loyalties are not torn. There’s my alma mater and there’s my employer. I’d like for both of them to win.

But since everyone doesn’t get a trophy in collegiate sports, I hold out for a good finish.

Auburn was at Samford tonight. They’d trailed for most of the game, but took a 5-4 lead in the eighth inning. In the bottom of the ninth the Tigers’ Justin Bryant was on in relief. He hit a batter. Then he allowed two singles, so the bases were loaded.

Sophomore Phillip Ervin walked to the plate for Samford:

Samford wins 8-5. The Bulldogs are now 17-8, the Tigers 15-10.

More here.

Auburn / Tuesday / baseball / hobby / photo — No Comments
20
Mar 12

These pictures look perfectly composed to me

I think squirrels need Instagram treatments too:

For the record: I do Instagram the old-fashioned way. I shoot through a window screen and lower the shutter speed on the camera to kill the exposure. I’m an old school member of pointless photographs.

I was about to step outside and take this picture in the last of the high evening’s dying light, but the cat snuck out behind me. She sits and watches squirrels and birds all day. Sometimes she gets agitated by this and meeps and peeps at them. We think this is cute. And then we read it is frustration.

I felt bad about that once, for about 25 minutes, and then I remembered how often she wakes me up in the middle of the night, just to show off how good of a “hunter” she is that she found and retrieved one of her toys. I stopped feeling bad about it after that.

Anyway, I was stepping outside, Allie sneaked out around me. You’d think with that much time staring at the wildlife she’d consider going out to play with them. “Pickup hoops, anyone?” Or at least chase them. But no. This cat just goes outside and rolls around in the dirt.

Our cat thinks she’s a dog.

Baseball night. Auburn, fresh off winning a road series against 12th ranked Mississippi, was hosting South Alabama for the Tuesday contest. Determined not to look ahead to this weekend’s homestand against 12th ranked LSU, the Tigers put John Luke Jacobs on the mound.

He pitched shutout baseball for eight innings, allowing only three hits and two walks. He struck out 11:

A five run fifth inning cracked it open for Auburn and the Tigers rolled to a 7-0 victory. (Jacobs, as the Tuesday starter, leads the team in strikeouts, and leads Auburn’s starters in hits, runs and home runs allowed, opponent batting average, ERA.)

By this point, unfortunately, I’ve noticed a suddenly less-than-good feeling for the evening. So this is abbreviated, but I’m going to go try and sleep off this general feeling of mild blah.

Samford / Tuesday / iPhone / photo — 1 Comment
13
Mar 12

Among the reasons to love Samford

President Andy Westmoreland sends out a weekly message to students and faculty. In this week’s installment he wrote of a senior who’s father was struggling with terminal cancer. This is part of the note, from the student’s mother, that Westmoreland shared in his email:

“On January 10 of this year, we were told that it did not appear that my husband would survive until May for the graduation ceremony. He had been asking prayer for his situation in his Sunday School class. On Tuesday, January 17, his Sunday School teacher contacted Samford University and asked for help in arranging a surprise ceremony at our church so that my husband could see Taylor graduate college.

“Three days later, on January 20, Dean Finch and Professor Carson from the Brock School of Business were in our church with a certificate attesting to Taylor’s planned graduation, and a cap and gown. This was a complete surprise to my husband. Professor Carson spoke very personalized words of high praise for my daughter and Dean Finch addressed my husband personally with uplifting words of encouragement with regard to how my husband had prepared and equipped Taylor to succeed in life. Many of our family, friends and church family were able to attend. Several of Taylor’s friends from Samford were also there. This was the last time my husband left the house and he passed away eight days later on January 28. If the ceremony had been put off even until the next Monday, he would not have been able to attend. The sensitivity and sense of urgency that was given to this request could not have been more appropriate.

“My family received a precious gift that day that can never be measured. Even if the Lord had allowed my husband to live until May, he would never have heard such specific personalized words at a traditional ceremony. The decision to send our daughter to Samford was a costly one that met with most of our friends and family questioning the wisdom of such a decision with regard to the costs and our personal financial circumstances. Over the years, this decision has been reaffirmed several times but never more than on January 20. Yes it was a costly decision to send our daughter to Samford University, but that day, it became a ‘priceless’ one.”

Westmoreland ends his notes with a message like this, “The world is better because our people live out the core value of “service to God, to family, to one another, and to the community.”

Also, today was omelet day:

Tuesday / Twitter / journalism / links / memories — No Comments
6
Mar 12

There is a bad pun at the end of this post

Now this was a beautiful day. High of 67, clear, sunny. This is the kind of pre-spring that would make the rest of the country jealous. Sure, our autumn is fairly well abbreviated. And you may keep your winter if you operate under the idea that you need snow to feel complete. But everyone that loves snow is tired of it by March. Everyone that has a fondness for sweaters and layers would love to have a day like this to enjoy just now.

Pretty much everyone below the 38th parallel is enjoying it. Sorry Midwest and New England.

This is an office day, and an office night, so I have no anecdotes. But I have links.

Things to read: The “Dangerous” Veteran: An Inaccurate Media Narrative Takes Hold:

If you’ve read the news lately, you may have seen one of several stories describing recent Veterans as “ticking time bombs” or as “dangerous” on account of post-traumatic stress. It’s a narrative that has persisted for decades, but a handful of recent high-profile incidents have resulted in headlines like these:

Police get help with vets who are ticking bombs (USA TODAY)

Experts: Vets’ PTSD, violence a growing problem (CNN)

Veteran charged with homeless murders: Hint of larger problem for US military? (Christian Science Monitor)

While these stories highlight horrific killings, the connection between disturbed murderers like Benjamin Barnes and Itzcoatl Ocampo and their service in combat is weak—despite what media reports and popular culture would have many believe. And such rhetoric, when solidified in the public consciousness, can have negative consequences for both Veterans and society—like causing Veterans to avoid seeking help or employers to avoid hiring them.

“This is a huge misrepresentation of Veterans,” said Rich Blake, an Iraq War Veteran and psychology doctoral student at Loyola University Maryland. “Crazed? That’s even more extreme.”

That’s a great perspective. A few years ago I did some consulting for a PTSD organization, met a lot of great people from all walks of life — the Vietnam veteran who walked across an entire state every year as a personal awareness campaign, the woman who’d been abused as a child who had to tell everyone she met that PTSD isn’t exclusive to members of the military — and ultimately found the misperceptions easy to understand. But they’re almost always misperceptions. There’s a quote in this piece that makes a great shark attack analogy, for example.

Facebook’s US User Growth Slows but Twitter Sees Double-Digit Gains:

As recently as 2010, growth in US Facebook usage was well into the double digits, at 38.6%, eMarketer estimates. But with 116.8 million US internet users already logging on to the site at least once monthly that year, growth rates were bound to plateau.

By 2011 Facebook user growth rose a comparatively small 13.4%, and this year will be the first when growth rates drop to the single digits. Rates of change in the US will continue to decline throughout eMarketer’s forecast period.

On Twitter, by contrast, growth is stronger. Last year’s 31.9% increase in users outpaced that of 2010, when growth was at 23.5%. Similar to Facebook’s trajectory, Twitter’s growth rate will also fall in the coming years, but still remain nearly four times higher than Facebook’s growth rate in 2014.

Twitter is smaller, so there’s the issue of scale, but what I’d like to see is abandonment rates and existing customer use rates.

Some papers see Q1 sales rise – first since 2006:

In a series of informal conversations, some publishers counted it as a victory that their numbers in the first two months of 2012 were equal to those of the prior year. Others reported that their sales met or surpassed conservative budgets that forecast single-digit declines between this year and last.

“It looks like the cycle finally has turned,” said an executive who could not discuss specifics of his company’s sales because it is publicly traded. “People counting out newspapers have not taken into account the effect of the weak economy. It won’t take much of an improvement [in the economy] for us to see real increases in profitability after the cost-cutting we have be doing for the last several years.”

While a turn in the economy is bound to be helpful, it must be noted that every other medium has long since rebounded from the Great Recession, which technically ended by mid-2010 (though it is of little consolation to those continuing to suffer from foreclosure, unemployment and financially challenged retirement).

The comments paint a different picture, and the most recent Pew research paints a different picture, but any good news for the newspaper business would be welcome. Hopefully such good news wouldn’t be a signal to publishers that they’ve weathered some sort of storm and return to their traditional business-as-usual models. Inertia is a problem.

And is often the case, I’ll leave you with a little something to make you smile.

What do you call the sum of the diagonal elements of the tensor of inertia?

The spur of the moment.

And they say physicists have no fun.