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The unknown stories of things

We hope you enjoyed Catember. Allie enjoyed being famous on the Internet. It was another successful month of showing off, cat hijinx and being cute. Life is hard for a black cat.

She’s curled up sleeping somewhere as I write this.

What do you suppose this is?

I caught the quickest glimpse of it on the freeway. The left lane is closed for repaving. The big orange barrels that come with road work are jutting out into the newly redone right line far enough that you’re driving at least halfway onto the shoulder. Fortunately, that was recently paved as well. At least the traffic is moving through the area, and the work is high quality. It is one of three or four stretches of road construction between here and there on that interstate.

None of which explains what that device does. I think it might perhaps have something to do with lane marking, but you can’t see a paint container there.

Things to read … because … we have to fill our own paint containers?

How media outlets are ‘gamifying’ the news:

News organizations are increasingly turning to video games to attract online readers, especially younger ones. The games hold promise — not just in terms of generating more readers and traffic hits, but in terms of helping people understand and consume news in different ways.

[…]

“It’s important for us and our journalists to not allow a medium to develop that we’re not going to at least explore,” Anthony DeBarros, director of interactive applications at Gannett Digital, said in a Digiday story this week. “It’s important to understand how we can be a part of an emerging medium.”

There are several great examples of emerging ideas in that story, including work from the European Journalism Centre and Al Jazeera.

How newsrooms can make the most of their archives:

In 1950 William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” in his novel Requium for a Nun. However, the quote gained renewed attention in 2008 when then-candidate Obama gave a major speech on race in America. Obama was tapping into the archives of American culture to add context to the news of the day and connect that moment to the long and troubled history of race in America.

The Internet has made this idea of the past living alongside – and interwoven with – the present more true now than ever. Today, even relatively new newsrooms have vast and quickly growing archives of work to tap into and build upon. These archives hold huge potential to add context to current events, fuel community engagement and even serve as a new revenue stream.

Tablet Magazines Are Lousy, But J-Schools Can Make Them Better:

Though Apple claims it has sold more than 200 million iPads since 2010, not many of those users subscribe to magazines. Replica digital magazines accounted for only 3.8 percent of total paid circulation in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. To put this in perspective: National Geographic won the National Magazine Award for best tablet magazine this year. The Geographic’s paid print circulation is 3.5 million. Circulation for the tablet edition: 164,408. The “best” the industry has to offer amounts to less than 5 percent of paid circulation. (Blame the AAM, in part, for the industry’s reliance on tedious replica apps; they are the only versions counted in a publication’s rate base, which help determine its ad rates.)

While magazines are still producing tablet issues, they haven’t saved the industry like we hoped. But that doesn’t stop journalism schools from making them a focal point in the curriculum.

The White House Wants to Reveal Where Government Drones Fly:

The White House is getting ready to send out an order to make agencies open up data on where they fly drones and what happens to all of the data they collect.

Right now, only the government is actually allowed to fly drones legally. Commercial drone use is banned by the FAA, although it gave out several permits to movie and television production companies to let them use drones, and gave unique permission to a company in Texas to let it use drones in a search and rescue mission.

The new executive order would specifically tell federal agencies to open up data on its drone fleets that it has kept secret for years. Although the new rules would cover all federal agencies, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have the largest fleets and would be most affected by the disclosure rules.

We talked about this today in a Crimson meeting. I am no expert on the extent of this issue, but it is an interesting topic that comes to light from time to time, and should be held up for examination more frequently, Reports on college crime are deceptively inaccurate:

The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide on Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.

Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted on Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.

In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.

Here are Samford’s published data covering 2011 through 2013 and for September 2014. I wonder if there is a story there …

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30
Sep 14

It must be Tuesday

A passing thought this morning, as I walked from here to there: I am not sure if I’ve ever been on the Samford campus when the power went out. All of the lines here are buried and the service has always been excellent. The things we take for granted, no?

So late this afternoon the power blinked. And it blinked again and then once more. After a few minutes, wherein students in the newsroom were confessing their fears of the dark and people and clowns and four-leaf clovers and who knows what else, the power blinked one more time.

We noticed the hardwired connection first.

The wireless was down as well. There’s a router right outside the window. Turns out that continual green ring of light means something. You never notice it until it is a pale red, which means you don’t have an Internet connection, so you have the opportunity to notice the telltales on routers:

Telnet was beginning the march.

All of our phones and Internet are tied together in a VOIP, so they didn’t work. Some of the locks on campus are tied into that network, so those doors didn’t work.

I raided my emergency peanut butter stash.

Also, the printer died, because today was a Tuesday:

I’ve renamed that machine the Lazarus. It keeps coming back, though we’ve been worried about it for almost four years now.

Somehow, the cash registers in the cafeteria and food court were online. So the crisis was merely humanitarian rather than truly dire. And the IT people here know their stuff. In perhaps an hour or two — who can tell the passage of time without the web? — things began returning to normal.

But all of that let me hear this:

Student 1: “What did we do before the Internet?”

Student 2: “We were prepared for it.”

For a group of people who grew up with the Internet always at their beck and call, this is an interesting point. There’s a story in this. I wonder if anyone will write it.

Things to read … because people went to the trouble to write it.

Mike Lutzenkirchen is an incredibly brave man, Philip Lutzenkirchen’s father uses son’s life — and death — to motivate high school players:

Mike Lutzenkirchen, standing before the James Clemens High School football team in its weight room Tuesday afternoon, called out Logan Stenberg, the Jets’ offensive tackle, and had him leave the room so that Lutzenkirchen could illustrate a point.

After Stenberg obliged, Lutzenkirchen said, “He just stood right there in the flesh. Now he’s not here. A teammate. That’s how quickly it can happen. That’s how quickly you can lose somebody.”

His son, the former Auburn star Philip Lutzenkirchen, one of the Tigers’ most popular players in recent seasons, was killed in a car wreck in Troup County, near LaGrange, Ga. He was 23 years old.

Mike Lutzenkirchen, who also spoke to the Huntsville High football team Tuesday evening, shared an array of statistics about his son’s sensational career. There was one stat he saved until the last, the one that is most staggering and devastating.

“Listen to this closely: Point three seven seven,” Lutzenkirchen said. “That was Philip’s blood alcohol content.”

Hard to imagine what he must be going through.

And now, for something a bit lighter:

Journalism and tech links:

VR journalism! Harvest of Change: Iowa farm families confront a nation in transition

A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

The (surprisingly profitable) rise of podcast networks

Staying connected with college graduates: Social media and alumni

Magazines Get a Way to Measure Their Reach Across Media Platforms

Things you don’t want to hear from your doctor, American Family Care alerts customers of stolen laptops containing patient information.

I’m having my students read this story this week, Dispatcher reflects a week after Birmingham UPS shooting: ‘I asked God to lead my words’:

“The officers, they did a great job,” said Davis, otherwise known as Operator 8061. “They did a good job in responding and getting me notified so that I could make my notifications.”

Davis, an 18-year BPD dispatch veteran, said she was just one of many dispatchers who sprang into action when the first call from the UPS customer center on Inglenook Lane came into the radio room at 9:21 a.m.

“Had it not been for my coworkers helping me, it would not have gone as smooth as it did,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was a team effort. I was proud to be a Birmingham Police Department dispatcher that day.”

The challenge of that day isn’t unusual. Dispatchers and officers deal with a crisis of some sort almost each and every day, though not usually to that extent.

About 10 calls came in to the radio room almost simultaneously after the shots erupted in the UPS warehouse. Those nearly dozen calls accounted for one dispatch, one of 11,663 dispatches handled by BPD last week alone.

And then there’s this stupid story, New York artist creates ‘art’ that is invisible and collectors are paying millions.

If the empty art studio burns down, how much does the insurance company pay out?

You can only figure that out with an Internet connection.

links / Monday / photo / triathlon — Comments Off
29
Sep 14

So what did you do on your weekend?

Army Ranger, Sgt. 1st Class Cedric King ran a half Ironman. He swam 1.2 miles. He cycled 56 miles. He finished his day with a half marathon, 13.1 miles of running. King stepped on an IED in Afghanistan in 2012. Earlier this year he finished the Boston Marathon. He is a hard man.

Rangers lead the way.

He passed on his second loop just after I’d seen a woman, of whom I wrote: “Just gave a high five to perhaps the last contestant on the course, looking beat, looking haggard. Looking determined, looking awesome.”

She was awesome, but I’d already seen King once as well. Before Cedric King came back by the locals started pulling up the cones. Cedric King just kept motoring along, having run, twice, past signs with head shots placed in honor of his brothers in arms who gave their lives in the Middle East.

I slapped him on the back as he came by the first time, and I wanted to go run through a wall after that. Demonstrations of will are always an impressive site.

(All of those Cedric King links are to different things. You could do worse, today, than spending a few minutes to click and read and listen to those.)

I feel good today. I am tired. I feel like I rode a bike for about three hours and then drove for about four. Mostly because I did. Today, then, is just kind of a get-through-it day. Here are some pictures of trains that have been tagged.

Hey, graffiti has always been popular on this site.

I wonder how Sgt. 1st Class Cedric King is feeling today. Awesome, I hope.

adventures / cycling / maps / photo / running / swimming / triathlon / weekend — Comments Off
28
Sep 14

Augusta Half Ironman 70.3

The calm before the chaos.

We were up before dawn. We were in downtown Augusta before dawn. We’d been on a school bus and got down here to the transition area before dawn. The Yankee was a mile up the street, waiting for parachutists to drop in and the national anthem and a canon to blast and all of the waves to start. As we are running a relay, the unwanted step-children of these races, she was in the last wave.

She still beat a whole lot of people out of the water.

We, Jenni (our runner) and her husband Gavin (our cheerleader) sat on a railroad berm and watched the first part of the morning come and go. We watched the sun rise, and that was not a bad seat for it:

At 9:20 The Yankee was finally able to get in the water. She swam 1.2 miles and then worked her way up the boat launch ramp and then ran a little more than 100 meters to the relay pen, in the very back of the transition area, because, remember, we are the step-children of the race. We’ve watched the pros and quite a few of the age-groupers come and go. A few of the relay teams had their swimmers come in and then came our water hero, having done all of the above in just 28 minutes. Not too shabby.

But these races don’t give you a lot of space. More cramped than a dive boat or darkrooms I’ve known.

Anyway, as I was standing there waiting, having done all of the preparing and water-drinking and snack eating and bathroom breaks I could muster, looking at the fancy bikes next to my bike I hear great stories.

One of the age-groupers was pronounced by friends of hers in the relay area as an idiot. Seems she’d completed a full Ironman last weekend and was doing a half today. That’s a 140.6 mile race followed by the 70.3. This makes no sense.

A guy was telling us about his nephew, who went to an Ironman race and was very excited. Ironman! But he was crushed when Tony Stark didn’t show up, just a bunch of people in spandex with bicycles.

That is a bummer.

The Yankee came in, I pulled the timing chip off her ankle — that’s our relay baton, if you will — and put it on mine. Grabbed the bike, ran out of transition and off we go:

Every other race picture the pros took of me is badly out of focus. Because I go so fast.

Here’s the course, a 56 mile joy ride through the countryside. I have made turned this into a ThingLink, which means it is an interactive image. This one is very basic. Mouseover and click on the black-and-white dots to see the notes. The race starts near the left margin and goes in a counterclockwise direction. The notes, as you might imagine, follow suit.

I finished my part, slower than it should have been, but I spent the back half of the race trying to measure my effort so I didn’t blow up the entire race. (We’ve not eaten well enough this weekend and proper fueling is key.) But I made it in, dismounted with great relief and found that the growing pain I had in both feet was something of a problem as I shuffled all the way through the transition area — because we were camped at the back.

I passed off the timing chip to Jenni she was off and running on her 13.1 mile run.

I, meanwhile, suddenly can’t walk. And I’m starting to cramp up. I got a cramp in my quad and made a facial expression and my face cramped. More water. Much more water. Get all of that under control, change clothes, get our things out of transition and back to the car and we got to watch Jenni go by on the run route. Then we had a snack at a nearby restaurant and watched her run by again. She was awesome.

And here she is at the finish:

Pay no attention to the time, as that clock counts from the beginning of the event, and does not account for the big delay in the wave starts. The important thing is that we finished. We had fun. We survived. And we got bling:

We also got massages. Actually we got stretched. The masseuses had closed up — with people still on the course, but whatever, who cares about those people, right? — so we got the active release guys. I put Jenni’s name on the list and then my name on the list. The Yankee didn’t want one initially, because she’d only done 28 minutes of work or something. But I decided she should get the active release stretch too. So I added her name to the list. The guy says he was closing up shop. He’d seen a ton of people. I explained I was trying to get my wife on the list and my name was his last customer. Before I could even think up the “Help me keep the domestic peace” jokes, he conceded.

“Put her on there,” he said, “And then write ‘No more customers!'”

So the four of us had dinner, deciding that the racers don’t like the relay teams not because we could use all of our energy in one event, but because we are athletes with social skills who know other athletes.

After dinner we got on the road. There was a long drive home — and it was a long drive home. We got in sometime just after 10 p.m., just in time to do laundry and put everything away.

Apparently we’re going to do the whole race as individuals next year. I’m exhausted from the requisite training already.

adventures / cycling / photo / swimming / weekend — Comments Off
27
Sep 14

A Saturday in Augusta

Woke up this morning and we went for a ride on the half Ironman’s bike course. It is a 56-mile counterclockwise loop that goes out of Georgia, into South Carolina and back. I rode the hilly part on the back half:

The Yankee was driving along, making sure I didn’t miss any of the turns. She took that picture at one of them, and had I known she was going to do that I would have really leaned into the turn.

I saw several people training today, they’ll all be riding harder tomorrow. I’m just hoping to get up and over the slow, gentle climbs tomorrow. It felt pretty good today, but I only did about a quarter of the route, which seemed pretty fast.

Afterward, we got cleaned up and did the formal check in down town. We then walked from the convention center to the transition area. Walking was a mistake.

You can’t help where the civic center is in relation to where the logical places on the water — in this case the Savannah River — are relative to one another. On the way walking back up I measured the distance. It was 1.7 miles.

In between was where the swim will actually start, so The Yankee had to double back on her walk. When she finished her practice swim, she pronounced it nice and fast, I drove down to get her. So we’ve done more walking than we wanted and not enough eating today. Great way to prepare for a race!

On my walk back up from dropping off my bike in transition I noticed this:

That’s the back of the Augusta Chronicle, which is a fine paper. There was a large man loading his old, beat up car with some sort of publication. It was about 2 p.m., (I know because I was frustrated that I still hadn’t had lunch) so it was too late for the Saturday paper and too early for the Sunday issue.

Back behind him, and seen in that picture, there were two guys sitting on the equipment in the paper’s loading bay. Those aren’t seats, but they’ve probably been used that way for generations, the job done, the rest won, the pressure off the feet. Behind them is that billboard for the Chronicle’s tablet app.

Make of all of that what you will.

We parked near this mural. This is a part of a four picture arrangement, a quadtych, if you will. It is old and in disrepair and it wouldn’t have looked any better if it was still brand new:

We had that late lunch, followed by an early dinner with lots of carbs. Tonight we’ll try to go to sleep early. Tomorrow, we wake up early.

Oh, I walked by this sign, too:

Indeed.