Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Dec 14

There’s money big and small in this post

The view from my run this afternoon:

Today’s pace was 41 seconds faster than Monday’s run. I cut 4:07 of Sunday’s three-miler. Tomorrow I’m going to run at a different place, flatter, but with more boring views. I’m going to run farther, and probably slower.

We went back to Ulta today, the store I just learned about yesterday, because there was something there of a cosmetic nature we did not pick up yesterday.

Technology is great, not only does my phone time and map my runs and give me various breakdowns of the poor splits therein, it also gives me an excuse to stand near the front of the story and just scroll through things. I can give off the disinterested vibe without making anyone feel uncomfortable about their choices.

“Oh, no, not that blush, dear,” he never said to any stranger, “it will never work with your complexion.”

Things to read … because this stuff matches your tones.

The one everyone is talking about, Sony Pictures Cancels Holiday Release of ‘The Interview’ After Threats:

The film’s collapse stirred considerable animosity among Hollywood companies and players. Theater owners were angry that they had been boxed into leading the pullback. Executives at competing studios privately complained that Sony should have acted sooner or avoided making the film altogether. To depict the killing of a sitting world leader, comically or otherwise, is virtually without precedent in major studio movies, film historians say.

And some Sony employees and producers, many of whom have had personal information published for the world to see, bitterly complained that they had been jeopardized to protect the creative prerogatives of Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg.

[…]

The multiplex operators made their decision in the face of pressure from malls, which worried that a terror threat could affect the end of the holiday shopping season.

That movie cost $44 million to make, but the losses directly stemming from Sony’s entire cyber nightmare are piling up much higher. Sony’s Very, Very Expensive Hack:

(T)he corporate hack seems likely to be among the most expensive of all time – up there with the 2014 Target breach (price tag: about $110 million), TJX’s 2007 hack (about $250 million), and Sony’s 2011 Playstation hack (about $170 million).

It’s still too early to know just how badly the hack might hurt Sony’s bottom line, especially given that the hackers keep on putting out new leaks and new threats. But some early estimates of the corporate damage have started to trickle out. And $150 or $300 million does not seem like a bad guess at the moment, meaning the hack might wipe out half of the Sony pictures unit’s 2013 profits.

Big federal money coming into UAB … UAB’s annual NIH funding up 20 percent:

The University of Alabama at Birmingham received $225 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health during the 2014 fiscal year, which places the school 10th in NIH funding among public universities.

That total is up 20 percent from last year when UAB secured $188 million in NIH funding.

And smaller amounts, too … Meet the 5-year-old Ohio boy who sent his $1 allowance to try to save UAB football.

Rouble turmoil leads to Apple halting online sales in Russia:

The company stopped sales of its iPhones, iPads and other products in the country after a day in which the currency went into free-fall.

The rouble has lost more than 20% this week, despite a dramatic decision to raise interest rates from 10.5% to 17%.

By afternoon trade the rouble was flat with one dollar buying 68 roubles.

Its all time low, set on Wednesday, saw one dollar buying as many as 79 roubles.

Apple last month increased its prices in Russia by 20% after the weakening rouble left products in the country cheaper than in the rest of Europe.

That’s some serious volatility.

The amounts at play here are interesting. NowThis Media Raises Another $6M To Deliver Video News Stories In Less Than A Minute:

(T)he startup has become focused on “being a distributed media company and finding audiences where they live.” In other words, it’s less focused on drawing audiences to the NowThis mobile app and website, and more on finding viewers on social media.

Apparently the strategy is paying off — Mills said the company was seeing 1 million monthly video views as recently as early summer of this year, but it was up to 40 million monthly views in November. NowThis has also launched NowThis Studio, a division focused on branded content, and it acquired another startup, Cliptamatic.

That acquisition provided the foundation for a new platform called Switchboard, which is scheduled to launch early in 2015.

NowThis seems to work better in the app than in the browser, a good first step for social reach. I just watched four videos on it. Things move fast there. You get context, but not a complete story. There’s a fine idea there, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it matures.

journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Dec 14

A flea mall trip

I mentioned on Monday that I was withholding the most fun part of my afternoon’s adventures. I wanted to share some of the pictures with you today. Here are a few of them now.

For $20, you can pick up a five-album set of the Boss.

They looked good, too.

There’s this collage of paintings you see in one or two places. One of the pictures is a color version of this old hand-drawn shot of Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum and Cliff Hare Stadium. I’m assuming this is an original draft from the artist, then. That it is labeled as Cliff Hare means this board, if it was drawn contemporaneously, is from at least 1973. It can be yours for $9.

They used to do these in the textile buildings, as part of the students’ work, I guess. I used to see them on ebay and the like, but I haven’t run across them in a while. Who knows how old they are:

When was the last time you saw a postage stamp vending machine?

I saw other things in my quick stroll. Also I picked up three Gloms for my collection. I also met Mr. Brewer, the owner of Angel’s Antiques. We talked about my collection — I now have 101 books, 86 percent of the entire series — and he promised to keep an eye out for me.

Also, I just realized how many of those things I need to scan. We’ll have weeks of covers to look at soon.

Things to read … because you can check this stuff out right now.

This is a long excerpt, but you need it. And it isn’t every day you read about high school journalism. This one you should read, because it is awesome: Student journalists learn to cover scandal from Stamford High School halls:

After the newspaper staff returned to school in the fall, the story ratcheted up. In October, Stamford police charged the principal, Donna Valentine, and an assistant principal, Roth Nordin, with failing to report what they knew about Watkins and the student to state authorities.

Rebecca Rakowitz, features editor of The Round Table, said Ringel asked the staff whether they wanted to report the news by summarizing the work of outside organizations or “whether we wanted to go to the courthouse and the police station and take it on ourselves. We wanted to take it on ourselves.”

They ran into barriers. They learned nothing more from police than what was said during a news conference that followed the arrests of Valentine and Nordin, for example.

And teachers weren’t talking.

[…]

Sports editor Bailey Bitetto said the newspaper has a role.

“Teachers are supposed to be the voice but now we are the voice, because the teachers are too scared,” Bitetto said. “It’s a lot of responsibility but we understand that their jobs could be at stake.”

Four news stories:

‘I don’t feel like he’s dead’: Son vindicated as father rescued after 12 days at sea

Police look for clues in case of Mississippi teen burned to death

Credit unions: Retailers “should be held accountable” for data breaches

Instagram Hits 300 Million Monthly Users To Surpass Twitter, Keeps It Real With Verified Badges

I kinda hope this goes to court. I don’t have any strong feelings about it in any of the possible directions, I simply think this would be an interesting First Amendment case — assuming the issue of “tag as state property” was mitigated. Is ‘No Homo’ license plate free speech? Alabama Revenue Department says no, recalling tag:

Amanda Collier, spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Revenue, confirmed the tag saying “NOHOMO” does exist and was approved by mistake.

“By law, the issuance of motor vehicle registrations is not centralized and must be processed at the county level. However, the Motor Vehicle Division of the Alabama Department of Revenue does hold the authority to approve personalized messages on license plates,” she said.

[…]

When a person buys a tag, the county employee enters the desired message into its system. Those on the banned list are supposed to be automatically rejected, but that didn’t happen here.

And a thought exercise, what if the plate had said “YESHOMO”?

How would you like to be on the plate approval committee? Well, a 1982 DMV rule, by the way, says they’ll turn down any plate “which contains objectionable language or symbols which are considered by the Department of Revenue to be offensive to the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.”

They are typically very proactive in their refusals. And you better like the E-Street Band. You couldn’t get H8BOSS, for example. But you can get those records at Angel’s …

photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Dec 14

In the clip below we revisit the word ‘mainframe’

I had a late night hanging out with the newsroom folk last night. And, after they were done, I still had to finish my work, planning a lecture and an exam. So I got to sleep at about 4:30 this morning.

After class today I spent the afternoon working on a website and then critiquing the newspaper and hanging out with the news staff again. It was a full and long day. So this is short.

I received a Christmas ornament from a friend, handmade!

So that will go in a place of happy Christmas joy.

And, we’ll just end the long day with this, another one of those clips that are resting in a folder in a drawer in my office. This little blurb is from 1987, which was just years after the journalism department was reinstated, and not too long after the first personal computers showed up on campus. My, what a marvel:

I have four computers in my office and there are five more in the bullpen just outside my door. “You have here a whole world of information possibilities,” indeed.

It is still very much in progress, but check out the relaunched samfordcrimson.com, the “product of modern technology.”

books / family / history / Wednesday — 1 Comment
26
Nov 14

My family is now convinced I am a picker

Which is funny, because when I first saw American Pickers, which introduced me to that entire group of people, I immediately thought “That’s the job I should have.”

It’s like they invented it for me. You get to prowl and learn things? And there’s money to be made doing those two things?

I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.

But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.

Here’s something that belonged to my uncle as a boy. You can buy My Name is Pablo for pennies on Amazon or a few bucks on ebay. But that cover art is great:

This is on the inside cover of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia aimed at elementary and middle school students. My mom told me she would sit and read these for hours. It was one of three encyclopedia sets I found, but it obviously has the best illustrations:

This car art just jumps out:

This is the cover to another book you can buy online for pennies, Fifty Famous Americans. The dust jacket is gone, which is a shame, because it apparently featured a great Wright Brothers illustration.

That book was written in the 1940s and so, happily, there isn’t a single reality TV star listed. Here’s the inside cover:

My grandfather was a ham radio operator and owned an electronics store and was apparently a varied reader. This isn’t a book I’d ever read, but you could see he might have a reason to consult it, also, the cover is terrific:

My grandfather was so cool, he had things like this:

And this just scratches the surface. I learned a fair amount about my grandfather today, just digging through dusty stacks of wonderful old pulp. I’m glad to have the opportunity to see and hold and laugh over some of the things he read and wrote. Inside those many pages there will be plenty more to share. Clearly I’m going to have to revitalize his section of my site.

journalism / links / music / photo / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Nov 14

Winter breaks, and now to spring, right?

It has been cold. We have enjoyed bitter cold. Or, perhaps, the opposite. These last few days a few places have reported wind chills at 12 degrees. Twice we’ve had weather stations reporting morning lows lower than you can find on the northern shores of the 49th state.

When it is warmer in Barrow, Alaska …

But it has all turned a bit today, when it is only chilly. It isn’t the sort of “Oh we’re used to it, and so now it is just chilly” sort of day, but rather an invigorating sort of “take it outside while there’s still warmth in the sun to enjoy” kind of chilly.

I watched a lot of it pass by from my window, as usual.

So this guy goes on Chatroulette and gets people to sing songs with him. This is very helpful since I somehow found myself in a conversation about Taylor Swift today. I was able to retort with this:

If you didn’t watch, allow me to try one more time: I’m not sure if I preferred the Spiderman-Batman interaction or the grandma making it rain.

In class today we talked about user generated content, which I can sum up in one business card-sized image for anyone interested in curation and aggregation:

The Verification Handbook, an invaluable resource, has more on the subject if you’re interested.

That’s what they don’t see …

Sometimes that song isn’t so good, no?

One of our students, who is awesome:

@kennysmith My friends asked me why they haven't seen me in 9 days. I told them the @SamfordCrimson is a lifestyle, not a hobby.

— Emily Featherston (@feathers_878) November 20, 2014

Things to read … which are also awesome.

Polygraph Critic Charged with Training People to Thwart Polygraphs:

Williams is admitting to the charges. But why is his action a crime? Polygraphs have been notoriously unreliable for decades and their results are inadmissible in court because of that. A campaign to further undermine confidence in the technology is, if anything, laudable.

Nielsen to Measure Netflix Viewing:

Even as Netflix Inc. and other streaming-video providers have expanded to reach 40% of American homes, they have largely remained black boxes. They have refused to share data on how many viewers watch TV shows on their services, and there has been little independent data.

This looks to be about licensing, but I wonder if it will account for the times I inevitably fall asleep watching while I’m streaming something.