Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
9
Feb 12

The cleverness of Mississippi lawmakers

A retiring Mississippi lawmaker says there’s a method to his madness in proposing a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

Mississippi Rep. Steve Holland in a phone interview that he authored the bill in order to fight “a litany of assaults on immigrants and poor people,” introduced by the Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature.

“I just thought I’d give them some more red meat to throw at their base,” Holland said, adding that the bill would give Mississippi residents “no reason to ever have to refer to someone who looks different from us.”

Step 1: Come up with a concept that toes the line between novel and sublimely ridiculous.

Step 2: Never mind that you’re a state lawmaker who has no power to change the name of an international body of water. You’re retiring. Who cares?

Step 3: When you get a little more blowback than you anticipated … reach for any old talking point that you’ve heard your colleagues talk about the last few days and make a tenuous connection.

In other news, legislators in Mississippi have solved all of the problems in their great state and have moved on to international waters. So that’s a nice development.

Grading today, and read a bit. Managed to ride for a while. Spilled my milk after I got finished. I wasn’t sure how to react to that. Milk is so expensive these days you almost have to cry, no? And it wasn’t even milk, but chocolate milk!

Made my Valentine’s Day plans: Waffle House!

Not really. Though a waffle does sound good. (And you have to love that there are three shots of the jukebox in the first 13 seconds of B-roll. The man knows his Waffle House iconography.)

Auburn / baseball / football / Glomerata / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Feb 12

The oldest graduate

When he walked at his graduation at Auburn William H. Holley, like many before and since, shook the hand of the university’s president, Dr. Bradford Knapp. The governor was Bibb Graves. Know those names?

The oaks at Toomer’s hadn’t been planted yet. Toomer’s Drugs was still competing with Homer Wright as the local top druggist. (Wright’s phone number: Nine.) S.L. Toomer simply referred to his place as The Store On The Corner.

Here’s Holley in his 1927 Glomerata:

Obligatory sports references: George Bohler was coaching both the Auburn football and basketball teams that year. The football team was 1-8, beating only Howard College. Snitz Snider — Olympic track star and future legendary high school football coach — was hurt much of the season. Another key player Babe Taylor — who, as a tackle, dressed at 6-feet-2 and “around two hundred pounds” as a tackle (Auburn’s current punter is bigger) — also had nagging injuries during the down year. Bohler’s basketball team went 3-13. At least the baseball team was posting winning records! Cliff Hare Stadium? Hardly.

The Bank of Auburn, in the back of Holley’s senior Glomerata, advertised four percent on your savings. Burton’s Book Store was the place to get your dusty tomes. J&M was decades away. Samford Hall, Comer, Mary Martin, Smith and Langdon Halls were all a part of campus. Ramsay Hall was brand new. Perhaps you’ll have heard of Holley’s dean: Bennett Battle Ross of Ross Hall fame. That building was still being erected when Holley graduated.

If those things don’t sound conceivable, don’t worry. Auburn’s oldest living alum has a few years on you. Holley celebrated his 105th birthday Wednesday at the Henry County Nursing Home in Dothan (Auburn stuff was everywhere).

His walk into the real world coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. The 1929 graduate would work as a pharmacist in Abbeville and soon after helped soldiers get their prescriptions in France during World War II. When the Army let him go he settled with his wife and family in Headland, Ala. He became a pillar of that community where he handed out medication until he retired in 1973. His son Bill, a 1971 Auburn graduate, took over the druggist desk. His son has since retired.

Holley’s Auburn kids: Elizabeth (’59) and Bill Jr (’71):

But the elder Holley refused to slow down long after retirement. He has maintained two farms, one in his hometown of Samson, Ala. and another in Headland. He was famously building fence lines by hand well into his 90s. He has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren in his life. He maintained his driver’s license well beyond his centennial, “just in case.”

His API diploma, made of sheepskin, still proudly adorns a wall in his bedroom.

As he told Auburn Magazine, learning about Newton’s first law in a physics class has played a big role in his long life. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Living Right, he said simply, is the key. He’d know.

books / cycling / friends / journalism / links / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off
26
Jan 12

When ex- isn’t necessary

Twitter is set to censor content to their service in some countries when necessary:

The company announced Thursday that it could start censoring certain content in certain countries, a sort of micro-censorship widget that would pop up up in a grey box on the Twitter feed.

“Tweet withheld,” it would read “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country.”

Twitter explained the change in a blog post on Thursday: “We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.”

Twitter is growing up. There’s some censorship angst among the commentariat, but people have to remember: Twitter is a business. They’re not in the business of changing laws that we’d find unpalatable here at home.

When you look into the details there is a degree of transparency to the process Twitter is putting in place.

Information wants to be free. People need to speak with other people. This move by Twitter might limit this particular tool in times of domestic turmoil in hotspots, something else will always emerge. Or work arounds will be found. (Indeed, it seems that took just a few hours.)

In short, Twitter could have done far more here, which would have been far less.

This is reckless and frightening:

Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.

The bill was introduced last week and a legislative committee met this morning to discuss the bill, which is even more far-reaching than the federal analog.

The legislation was abandoned by its author sometime around that committee meeting:

Rep. Kymberly Pine, an Oahu Republican and the House minority floor leader, told CNET this evening that her intention was to protect “victims of crime,” not compile virtual dossiers on every resident of–or visitor to–the Aloha State who uses the Internet.

“We do not want to know where everyone goes on the Internet,” Pine said. “That’s not our interest. We just want the ability for law enforcement to be able to capture the activities of crime.”

Pine acknowledged that civil libertarians and industry representatives have leveled severe criticism of the unprecedented legislation, which even the U.S. Justice Department did not propose when calling for new data retention laws last year. A Hawaii House of Representatives committee met this morning to consider the bill, which was tabled.

What will they think of next? Brain erasing? Oh yeah …

For decades scientists believed that long-term memories were immutable—unstable for a few hours and then etched into the brain for good. Research now suggests that recalling a memory causes it to revert temporarily to an insecure state, in which the recollection can be added to, modified, even erased. “Memory is more dynamic, more fluid and malleable than we thought,” says neuroscientist Daniela Schiller of Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

That idea, brought to the fore about a decade ago, has opened up a new controversial research area exploring the possibility of deleting, or at least muting, parts of human memory with drugs or targeted therapies. Some experts have found that a drug used to treat high blood pressure works to unseat recollections; others are testing novel biochemical means or behavioral interventions to interfere with unwanted remembrances

The application is still limited in trials, but the implications are fascinating.

Unemployment numbers: This came from Todd Stacy, an aide to Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard. The speaker presented numbers showing Alabama’s unemployment percentage diving below regional and national averages. One hopes the good news continues.

(Disclosure: Years ago Hubbard was my employer. Nice gentleman, too.)

I did not ride today. The Yankee pronounced it yucky, and I had no desire to ride in such a condition. (She did though.) Truthfully, the conditions didn’t bother me much, but I noticed my legs were sore before I even put my feet on the floor this morning.

Better to take the day off, I figured. Clearly I have a lot of work to do towards realizing my larger cycling goals. Tomorrow, though, I’ll have a big day in the saddle.

So I worked instead. Emails, syllabi, networking, reading. I do so much reading that someone should write a book about it. No one would read the thing, though. Except me.

The fun reading is fun, at least. Last night I finished Mark Beaumont’s The Man Who Cycled the World. Eyeing a plan of about 100 miles a day, Beaumont started in Paris, rode through Europe, the Middle East, across India and part of Asia. He suffered through the barren portions of Australia, raced through New Zealand and then crossed the U.S. (He got mugged in the States, perhaps making Louisiana as memorable as his experience in Pakistan.) Finally he made it to Portugal, Spain and back to Paris. He shaved two months off the world record.

It is an interesting premise, and a Herculean feat of speed and endurance. The read becomes a bit repetitive. That’s hardly a fault, though. The guy is writing about the most repetitive thing one can conceive: “I pushed my feet around in circles for six months. And, also, saddle sores!” So the intriguing part is the mental grind, and that’s probably one of the hardest things to write about. By the time he reaches the southeastern U.S. his point is made.

There are a few inaccuracies in his recounting, and it feels like he was still writing the thing while trying to overcome the bicycle burnout. The thing that amazes me is how much of his trip he managed to not research, because you think you would devote a great deal of time to that.

I was hoping for more people and vivid descriptions, but he’s an adventurer who wrote a book rather than an author who developed great calves and cardio. If you aren’t intrigued by cycling or ultra-endurance sport this book probably isn’t for you.

Had dinner with Shane and Brian tonight. We visited Logan’s, where they have a new menu. You can gorge on peanuts and rolls and get the marrow of a steak bone along side a sodium supplemented potato, all for $7.99.

I told a joke.

Shane: “Country people don’t say ‘extension’ they say ‘stension’.”

Me: They don’t need ‘straneous letters.

The waitress thought the joke killed. Of course, she was new. Maybe she didn’t know any better.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — 2 Comments
19
Jan 12

Another lovely Thursday

Thirty-five miles on the bike today. I stopped around mile to do a little bike maintenance, looked up and saw this sky. (As with all panoramas on the site, click to embiggen.)

And that’s winter in the deep south to me. The high was 59 today, but I waited until it got to 57 before taking a ride. Even then I wore a jacket. It was chilly in the breeze and the late afternoon shade. Riding in the sun, or huffing up a hill, the temperature was perfect.

But 35 miles was a great distance for the day. It took me to the other side of little wide spots in the road that I have, on occasion, thought were too far to drive to.

Elsewhere I dabbled in spreadsheets and emails all day. Did some reading. Lot of that coming up tomorrow and beyond, as well. It was a full and lovely day in almost every way, except for the things I did not get done. But what doesn’t get done today will be on the list tomorrow. That’s always the way of it. Tomorrow is often a good second chance.

In the small world department: At dinner tonight we ran into the young lady who last week lost a wheel off her SUV. (We found it in our yard.) She had gotten it back after a rotate and balance at the dealership, but someone neglected to properly mount the front-passenger wheel, which, as gravity insists, is important.

When we saw them last her father had called AAA and was hauling the SUV back to the dealership. She told us tonight that they’d paid for all the repairs. She got it out of the shop and then, immediately, the radiator went bad.

That makes three visits to the dealership in less than two weeks. She needs to catch a break.

Things to read: Textbook publishers? Apple is looking at you:

Digital textbooks available for iBooks 2 on iPad will come at a significant discount over regular paper-based books, with prices at $14.99 or less from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson.

The implications will be widespread.

Who? Whom? Geoffrey Pullum will tell you, in just 786 words.

Is HDR photography acceptable in journalism? Interesting ethical question. Is it news only if it is in the human visible spectrum? (No.) Is it acceptable to publish a photograph treated in any number of techniques as NASA frequently does? (Yes.)

The old-school photojournalism professor — like the man I studied under, a talented old veteran who spent his formative years covering civil rights marches — would say that what is in the viewfinder is the news. His point was that cropping a picture is editorializing. (We all know that even the presence, if not the interaction, of a photojournalist can impact the news event, so in that strictest sense this becomes a thorny issue: any opened shutter is potentially changing the story.) I spoke with a younger photojournalism professor about this recently and he laughed at the notion. To him that is an ideal of a photographer who hasn’t had to get a job in years.

Ultimately, if you open a photo in Photoshop or video in After Effects or your software of choice you can improve the shot, or you can alter your story. After the Iranian faux-missile launch story a few years ago Guardian leapt into the debate. Others have similarly chimed in on both sides of the Photoshop/photojournalism “Does it lie?” issue.

It can, but this is increasingly difficult to get away with. (So don’t be tempted.) It doesn’t even take long to get caught. (To be fair, that one was on the hands of a stringer, and not a staff pro. And herein lies the key, it comes down to trust. It comes down to credibility. So hard to earn, so easy to lose.

Scrupulous photogs, scrupulous people of any industry, know that and guard it credibility with zeal.

And then you get into grey areas. The court won’t let cameras in, so a television station is re-creating “the more absurd aspects” of a corruption trial with muppets. (Video is at the link.) I’m sure it is useful and captivating and will probably be remembered by the newscast’s audience for a good long while, but I could see it also making people queasy, though it is just another way to reach audiences. I bet a lot of the people working on that project never imagined themselves as puppeteers.

Pew research says it is the economy:

The public’s interest in news about the economy far outreaches media coverage of it for the second week in a row this year, with 20 percent of people surveyed saying it was the story they were following most closely, while only 6 percent of news coverage was devoted to it. The week before, 19 percent of people said it was their top story, while 8 percent of coverage was devoted to it. This discrepancy continues a trend from last year, during which the economy was one of the most closely followed stories 32 out of 52 weeks, and was the top story of 2011 with 20 percent of coverage devoted to it. And yet in December alone, there was about twice as much interest in the economy as there was coverage of it.

Even during weeks when the economy was the top story, interest surpassed coverage.

Smart comments on that Poynter story, by the way.

All of these journalism topics land on my Samford blog, should be so inclined. Over there I don’t talk about riding my bike!

I also didn’t talk about the possum that brought the New York City subway to a halt:

The D train was evacuated after arriving at the West Fourth Street station in Manhattan, where a group of police officers, armed with heavy-duty gloves and a canvas bag, were on hand to nab their perp. The officers were turned back, however, after the animal bared its teeth and snarled, the police said.

This, apparently, was a job for the experts. The officers arranged for animal control agents to meet the train in a subway yard next to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, according to Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman. Normal D train service was then resumed, after a 27-minute delay.

I could tell you about The Yankee’s experience with a possum just after we got married. She grew up 45 minutes from New York City and had a similar run-in.

I should probably get her permission before telling that tale though …

journalism / links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
12
Jan 12

To clarify and other things

I’m not pessimistic about the media. The opposite is, in fact, true. Instead I see the changes continuing, mediums shifting as we alter the way we consume news. Vocus, mentioned here yesterday, is optimistic about the present media because they are a PR firm and they cater to media outlets. They have to be.

Look, brands change, businesses change. People that acknowledge that in the media industry are the ones that can survive and thrive. If you see disruption as an anomaly, a one-off to endure, you’re writing your own fate. This is confusing revolution and evolution, still and again. Transitioning to the Internet was revolutionary (and unnecessarily slow in many respects) for traditional media. It was evolutionary for customers.

For example, look at the newspaper data. Sadly there was a surge of newspaper job cuts in 2011. Advertising sales slid again, far from the golden age of 2005. Almost 4,000 newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2011, according to Paper Cuts, which reports almost 40,000 job cuts since mid-2007. Individually, economically, journalism/community information — no matter how you look at it there’s no good news in that.

Alan Mutter wrote about it recently in E&P:

Barring a miraculous turnaround in the economy, a sea change in the thinking of media buyers or a late-breaking proclivity for print in the sub-geezer population, publishers in ever more communities are likely to reduce the number of days they provide home delivery – or print a newspaper altogether.

Nowhere is the demise of daily delivery more dramatic than in Michigan, where more than two-thirds of the households will be unable get seven-day service after the end of January.

[…]

Anecdotally, we know there are many more cases across the country. We just don’t know how many. Although you would think that ABC, the industry-supported group that audits circulation, and the Newspaper Association of America, the industry’s principal trade group, would want to keep an accurate count of something as important as the dwindling number of daily newspapers, they profess not to know.

[…]

In five-plus years of ever more vigorous retrenchment to salvage some degree of profitability, publishers have trimmed staff, crimped newsholes and outsourced everything from call centers and accounting to production and delivery. With scant behind-the-scenes economies left, publishers now are being forced to make the most conspicuous cuts of all: Reducing the number of days they publish or deliver papers.

It is hard to be optimistic about that. Newspapers are important, yes. Once they were much more important — which is to say, they once played a more prominent role in our civic lives. If enough news outlets of any medium disappear we’ll soon recall how important a service they provide.

The way we get information is necessarily changing. Mutter, again, writes about the next step: big tech companies swooping in over local outlets. “Most local media companies have no idea what’s about to hit them – much less a plan to respond.”

There are reasons to be optimistic, singing the praises of old media because they didn’t disappear last year as fast as the year before that is not optimism. (You can see shades of that, among some newspaper historians at least, since radio first burst into our homes.)

But there are reasons for optimism. Here’s one: we are a part of a great sorting out period of media.

Other things of note: I believe that, a generation from now, we’re going to see a group of great leaders based on the experiences life has put them in. I submit Daniel Rodriguez.

And here’s your rebuttal to that belief. Birmingham was the feature city on The First 48, A&E’s program on real homicide investigations. They were detailing the apprehension and conviction of a guy tied to five murders. There are four members of his family. They’re all in prison on various murder charges.

There is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance here:

Froma Harrop took it in stride, replying “Sure, much of my careful reasoning ended up on the cutting-room floor, but it was fun.”

Meanwhile, on Stephen Colbert’s show he’s announced an exploratory committee to consider the possibility of running for the president of the United States of South Carolina:

And then:

We’re writing a paper about this. I’ve grown more and more convinced that the entire gag is a stunt conceived of making fun of our current election laws. He even nods to it at the end of the segment.