We saw this scary little stand of dead trees on the way home yesterday. We actually saw them on the way down on Friday, too, of course, but we resolved to stop and take a few pictures. We could make True Detective jokes about this place:
I don’t know if you’ve been watching True Detective, but the thing I’ve taken from the show is that the location scouts did some amazing work. The place in this picture, outside of Waycross, Ga., could be an alternate shot for the show.
Also I meant for this to be some sort of allusion to how I’ve been feeling: like a burned out stand of trees in a clear cut area with standing water everywhere. That’s how I’ve been feeling.
I started coming down with something on Friday — right about the time we were passing through this place in Georgia, come to think of it — and it has only gotten steadily more interesting. We even made the almost-midnight trip to an out-of-town drug store. How cliched can I be?
This morning marked day three of filling my system with whatever medicine we bought. I did pretty well in getting in front of the sinuses or allergies, so it hasn’t been too bad so far. But! We had to drive through this nightmarish setting again, and if the allergens were there, well, I have a double dose and tomorrow will just be fun, won’t it?
So we went swimming today. I agreed to this because, I figured, I can’t breathe on the surface and I don’t try to breathe underwater, what could be the harm? I didn’t know we were going swimming when I had my breakfast of an apple and peanut butter. Also, I haven’t slept well since Thursday. (I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep at all on Friday night.) And so on …
We got to the pool and it was configured for the long course style, which I have never swam before. So instead of doing 50 yard laps I would get to do 100 meter laps. That wall at 25, I learned today, makes a big difference.
But I swam it anyway. I swam 1,800 meters, which is 1,968 yards, which is 1.118 miles.
I do not know what is happening.
Did I mention I might be the first person in the recorded history of lap swimming to sprain his wrist from hitting the water? How exciting is that? I’m not sure how I managed to do that, only that after some time my wrist started hurting — let’s blame lousy form — and that I wisely continued swimming.
So now I’m sick, have a little sunburn on my neck, haven’t slept well or breathed right in days, have a slight fever and a mildly sprained wrist.
I know one thing that is happening: I am falling apart. I blame Waycross. Give me some time and I’ll figure out how.
Everyone seemed OK. The troopers were there. We had just a slight slowdown and I met no ambulances coming the other direction for the rest of my drive. Even still, you see these small accidents and know that these people just had their week ruined. And on a Monday morning, too. But at least everyone is OK.
And now, to change the subject, here’s another hit from Kid President:
It is probably selfish to say, but I hope that guy never changes.
In class today we talked about mobile marketing. This is the part of the conversation where students always find the line dividing acceptable and creepy. Say you’re walking down the street and your phone buzzes, “Hey! We noticed you’re just a block away from Starbucks. Couldn’t you go for a nice coffee and muffin? Here’s a coupon!”
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
In November, the Macy’s department store chain began testing a product called ShopBeacon at stores in San Francisco’s Union Square and New York’s Herald Square.
The app, created by Shopkick Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., enables a merchant to offer discounts on specific products that a customer has expressed interest in or, perhaps, has lingered near, prodding him or her to buy.
“We can find out where you are standing and how long you’ve been standing in front of the Michael Kors handbag and if you haven’t purchased,” Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren said at an analysts conference in November. “And if you haven’t, I’ll send you a little note to give you encouragement to do so.”
And that’s the new world in which we shop. Or does something like this just push you further away from brick and mortar stores?
I didn’t mention it but I did have a nice, brief bike ride yesterday evening. I got in a quick 14 miles, wherein I managed to have two thoughts. The first was that I haven’t been riding my bike enough. I knew this because I hit too small little uphill segments and pushed my feet down and accelerated and that was a wonderful feeling. The ride was really meant to be the first half of a brick workout, where I would take on a long run. Just as I went back outside, though, it started to rain. And while I enjoy riding in the rain, I don’t much see the need to run in it. But the other thought I was continually having on the bike was “I wanna run.”
I do not know what is happening.
I did not run, however, because of the rain. This evening I swam a mile, 1,750 yards. It even felt pretty good, which doesn’t happen often. Didn’t want to run, though!
Things to read … because I still don’t want to run.
“It actually started with me reading an article by Steven Levy in Wired about algorithms and news content — ‘Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Christer Clerwall tells Wired.co.uk. “My first thought was ‘maybe it doesn’t have to be better — how about ‘a good enough story’?” Sadly, Wired may turn out to be the architect of its own destruction. Because Clerwall, an assistant professor of media and communications at Sweden’s Karlstad University, has found the answer to this question. And it’s yes.
This is the second small study I’ve seen like this. Both have to do with sports copy, which probably means something. What may be promising, however, is that as the algorithms improve this could free up writers from the more basic stories and allow for better storytelling.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
The copy, which you can read in that story, was basic, to the point, and not perfect regarding style, but it shared the pertinent information, apparently within three minutes. What happened afterward was telling. ” Quakebot’s post had been updated 71 times by human writers and editors, turning it from the squib above into this in-depth, front-page story.”
This first story, the early morning Quakebot copy, is a first step. It didn’t save the day, or save even a big part of a reporter’s day, but it is the sign of a utility to come, or, rather, a tool that is already here.
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.
“2013 was the first year for multi-channel video industry losses, but the modest losses represent only about 0.1% of all subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “While the overall market remains fairly flat, further share-shifting has taken place. Cable providers now have a 52% share of the top multi-channel video subscribers in the US, compared to a 58% share three years ago.”
We are at something of a hinge point in entertainment history.
The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
[…]
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
I don’t recall Daylight Saving Time having this much of an impact on me. Maybe I’m just not sleeping well. Maybe my diet is off. For one of these, or some other, reason, I have been battling a terrific laggard feeling today. I’m blaming Daylight Saving Time. That’s what I said getting out of the pool after a lousy swim this evening.
That’s also why I’m saying I’ve staggered through the entire day. The clear parts, the hazy parts. The warm parts and the mild parts. It has all felt like syrup.
So I swam 1,350 yards tonight. It was unremarkable except that I have discovered if I go slower each lap I actually go faster in the long run. And now I have to develop a routine that makes it all work — for when I am not in molasses.
Things to read … because other parts of the world are moving at normal speeds.
When I first saw this 1919 picture of nebulae in the Pleiades, I was surprised to see such an old photograph of distant stars. To think that an image like this was published just a year shy of the end of the first World War and over 40 years before the first man stepped foot in outer space seems almost beyond comprehension.
There are so many models out there. We’re at Bloomberg now, where a core terminal business is funding journalism, and it’s something that is of use to the users, giving them real-time information that’s going to be efficacious and useful. That’s one way to go. You have Huffington Post at the other end, where it’s not a narrow user base; it’s the broadest user base possible. You have BuzzFeed, which is taking viral content and then overlaying it with a skin of serious news. You have a lot of mainstream journalists like Ezra Klein, formerly of the Washington Post, Kara Swisher, and Walt Mossberg leaving Dow Jones and striking out on their own or in alliances with nonlegacy companies. There are all these bets all over the table and nobody knows what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.
Here’s the full video, which has some nice, thoughtful conversation throughout:
“The legislature hereby finds that a free society is maintained when government is responsive and responsible to the public, and when the public is aware of governmental actions. … The legislature therefore declares that government is the public’s business and that the public, individually and collectively and represented by a free press, should have access to the records of government …”
We’re quoting from the preamble of New York state’s Freedom of Information Law. It requires governments to release records of their activities, with some exceptions, so that taxpayers know where their money is being spent and how their government is performing. FOIL is a powerful tool for demanding accountability.
Alas, saying “government is the public’s business,” and acting like it is, are two different things. Government agencies and officials routinely resist public disclosure.
The press-freedom portion of the First Amendment is a compact between the Founders and future generations. A strong democracy depends on journalism to keep government honest. This applies from the top all the way to the bottom — from details about the federal government’s expansive domestic-spying program all the way down to the goings and comings of a county’s criminal justice system.
“Democracies die behind closed doors,” wrote a federal judge in 2002. A journalist’s job is to pry those doors open. Someone should keep an eye on the courts, the city council and the streets department, to cite a few local examples.
Human nature tends to cut corners if no one is looking. And the kind of corners we’re talking about — public safety, criminal charges, proper bid processing involving taxpayer dollars — can come with a steep price, in terms of money and, occasionally, human life.
And, lastly, from the Department of The Children Are Our Future, comes another fine tale of the generous spirit of young people:
Trinity Classical was up over 20 points against Desert Chapel with time winding down in the California section championship. Trinity Classical brought in Beau Howell, a player on the team with autism who had never scored a point.
Take your eye off the ball. Watch number four. And then, at the very end, the winning championship team is giving Beau the ball.
Kids these days.
Monday / photo — Comments Off on No one tailgates this guy 3 Mar 14
I could tell you about my drive to work today. I could write about how I couldn’t decide whether it would be responsible to eat a burger in the car or selfish to eat it at a table, in the restaurant, like a human. I could discuss my disappointment that the burger had mustard, when I clearly said no mustard. Or the dismay that surely I tried to mask when the thing came out because it had the mustard sticker on the paper, but I didn’t have time to send it back because, already, I was being selfish, and besides that, the bread would be good.
I could complain about the fries.
I could discuss the interesting thing that happened in the car one day last week. I hadn’t seen the sun all day, and then, just as whatever station I was listening to started playing the opening strings of a live version of Carolina In My Mind the sun finally appeared through the clouds to my left.
Now this is a magical James Taylor song. Always has been. But I knew it even more that particular day, because just as the live crowd faded at the end of the song the sun disappeared again. I didn’t see it any more during my drive.
And I could wax on about how all of that means that stretch of road may never be the same now. Which is silly because it is obviously different, coming and going, full of of wholly different emotions and textures and probably even with a different tire noise.
I could write about the class I had today, but I’ve had better ones.
So it turns out that I could write about several things.
But, instead, I’m going to share with you the funniest trailer hitch cover I’ve ever seen. I walked outside and saw a big truck with a giant sticker stretching across the top of the windshield: University of Parris Island. That’s where I was born. And the “university” there is the USMC base. Other stickers indicated the owner was a retired sergeant major.
So I walked around the back of the truck to see where this person was from. And I saw this:
The best part is the little tag that points out this is a replica, juuuuust in case anyone thought the driver might have decided to attach an actual Claymore to the truck. I wonder if that little plaque was required by law.
Turns out, you can buy them on Amazon. Just always read the directions.
Still so very, very tired. Like I said, this is the kind of tired you don’t get over.
So, as I vainly try to recover a bit of energy, here are some historic front pages from Louisiana newspapers. The ULL journalism department is collecting and displaying these throughout their building. It looks quite nice. The earliest one they have on their walls is an issue from when John Kennedy was killed. One of the profs told me he found it in the attic when he moved into his home. It was in great condition; someone just forgot it when they moved out.
The most recent addition to the set is another big moment. The few here are just a sample, enjoy.
Tomorrow, I hope. I’ll feel a bit more like myself.
