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That’s a question, sure thing

There is such a thing as a stupid question. Quora has found it:

Is it safe to do the ALS ice bucket challenge with liquid nitrogen instead of ice water?

But, hey, at least someone thought to ask. One wonders if they simultaneously have access to liquid nitrogen and were unsure about the specific properties of the stuff. Happily, most of the answers have to do with experience in laboratories and an explanation of the Leidenfrost effect. Only one answer goes superlative, along the lines of “sure, if you want to die.”

Mr. Freeze aside, the question was asked, and answered. The question even referenced Leidenfrost. So, yes, stupid question.

Glad it wasn’t asked over at Yahoo Answers, the land of enchantedly silly questions.

Class today. Meetings today. Meetings into the night. It was a full, full day. Quora helped. Yahoo Answers never helps.

Things to read … because even when you read only this much, it helps.

Cyber attacks on hospitals rising 600 percent:

The computer networks of hospitals and health systems that hold millions of patient records and valuable personal information are quickly becoming a favorite target for hackers.

A recent report from security research firm Websense finds that while attempted cyber attacks are on the rise in many industries, the amount of digital invasions on hospitals is unparalleled and has risen 600 percent in the last 10 months.

Just in time for all those medical records in the cloud. Should be fun.

Why Interactives are the Next Big Thing in Content Marketing:

Interactive graphics, or ‘interactives’ for short, are like the Transformers of visual content: They can take on a variety of forms. You can find an interactive that’s a microsite, dashboard, or a map, to name a few. But at the core, they’re all visualizations that allow viewers to explore the information presented for themselves.

By definition, interactives engage viewers in a very active way – and that engagement can be incredibly powerful to marketers. People viewing interactives spend more time on the page, seeing a brand associated with content that interests them, all at their own pace.

[…]There are three situations where making an interactive is the way to go: (1) complex data visualization, (2) personalized branded content, and (3) customized product explainers.

Fortunately, there is already a brilliant visualized explainer to answer the question above. Enjoy:

More tomorrow.

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31
Aug 14

Catching up

Did I mention the rain? It rained at the tailgate. The hot summer day turned into an impressively humid one. And then the sun came back out and we baked ourselves in the shade.

We loaded up on sunblock, went into the stadium and watched most of the game before the lightning came. Lightning means delays. And so they took everyone off the field. They asked the fans to go hide. Most of them did. The storm cells with the lightning passed.

And just before the teams came back on the field to resume play, the rain finally came. The stadium speakers blared rain-themed music, the hearty students that stuck around sang along:

That raindrop at the end of the video is pure art, no? Purely accidental art.

We’d talked to a guy earlier who recalled when he was in the student body during the great monsoon of 2009. He said that game, the West Virginia game, was the best day of his life.

I recall getting rained on once or twice when I sat in the student body. I did not have the same recollection of good cheer. But the football wasn’t quite as good at that moment, either.

Anyway, this was before the storm, the cheerleaders wave those giant flags after scores. They are quite cumbersome, even on a still day:

And this is the storm as it wrapped around the northern end of the stadium. It was an impressive site:

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28
Aug 14

It isn’t even mean tea

The beginning of every new school year brings about changes and good news. There have been a lot of positive ones at Samford. For instance, we saw this news just today: Samford creates $335M annual economic impact.

President Westmoreland got a little face time with the media, too:

There’s a new business building going up. There have been renovations in my building. And, of course, there are all those new faces buzzing about, too. The food service in the cafeteria is provided by a new company this year, as well. Food is important. I eat it every day. But feeding hundreds and hundreds of people each day can’t be easy, so I won’t say anything so far. Everyone is figuring out all of the new things, which might explain the weird, chaotic energy during lunch. And they might still be working through their menu as well.

But this … this …

There’s a cultural standard to be met here and it isn’t met with “plain tea.”

Who says “plain tea” anyway?

There’s a little sign that says Red Diamond is coming soon. Not soon enough.

Things to read … because this section always comes up soon enough.

Did you see the Star Trek selfie? Who is the guy in the background? There’s a story in that photobombing.

Here’s a great interactive infographic, Losing Ground:

In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year …

What a great story, and adventures, brave young reporters. High school journalists cover Michael Brown’s funeral after addressing legal, safety concerns

“We did not, and do not, advocate our students attending the heavily protested areas,” Goble said. “However, we felt there was an immense journalistic opportunity for them, and they could capture these stories without being in the midst of a protest.”

[…]

But even with the concern for the students’ safety, Goble and his students still felt that this was an important story for them to cover given the proximity and importance of the events.

Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two:

(S)tudents are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.

Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort according to every imaginable search criteria. Scheduling programs that allow someone to find the 47 different classes that meet Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., then narrow them down to those that have no prerequisites, then narrow again to those that count toward requirements in two majors. Or apps that allow you to see what courses your friends are considering, or figure out who has the same free periods that you do, or plot the quickest route between two far-flung classrooms.

But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.

Seeing the initiative is great, terrific and wonderful. Watching them struggle with information access is rather understandable. The really sharp ones will work around it all. And some of them will probably get very, very rich.

Here’s a little PR piece that points out that paying attention to social media pays off. Just ask the airlines! Southwest Airlines’ new listening center making an immediate mark makes perfect sense. You’ll wonder why more shops aren’t doing the same thing.

football / journalism / links / running / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
Aug 14

First down

Started my morning with a run. I got in a nice 5K before a series of meetings — fortunately, there were no meetings about meetings. My workday also ended with meetings about social media. In between, I gave a lecture on the “changing concepts of news.” I started around the muckrackers at McClure’s and worked up to the modern moment. In 2015, remember, Back to the Future II showed us flying robot reporters working for USA Today.

We talked a bit about the Oculus Rift work. I showed them the latest androids being developed in Japan:

Think about all of the changes that have taken place in journalism and storytelling in the last 40 years, I said. Imagine what it will look like toward the end of your career, in another 40 years.

That android, that so many of them thought to be odd or creepy today, will be positively old fashioned by then.

Things to read … because reading will never go out of style.

(We hope.)

How the news upstarts covered ISIS:

The rallying cry for those bemoaning the demise of newspapers was, “Without The New York Times, who would cover Iraq?” Well, quite a few places, it turns out.

As traditional media companies have scaled back their foreign bureaus, newer news organizations like Vice and BuzzFeed have expanded their mandate to fill the void. (Not included in this review is Global Post, the online startup that James Foley worked for, since it started with the express purpose of covering foreign news.) But can a bunch of relatively small upstarts cover the world’s hot spots? ISIS, one of the year’s biggest stories, is as good a test case as any to see how five have been doing it.

Here’s more pessimism for print advertising:

For newspapers, continued print advertising declines will mean more pressure on circulation (print subscribers and paywalls) or new revenue (digital marketing services, events) to make up the difference. Most likely, they won’t, and we’ll see more cuts.

If the rate of print ad decline does slow in 2015 (from 8.9 percent down to 6.2 percent down), that would be…semi-good news, I guess, after several years of drops in the high single digits? But there’s nothing here to predict a leveling off, much less a return to growth.

The ‘guiding principles’ of Quartz redesign

The Miami Herald’s new publisher is moving the paper a bit closer towards irrelevancy

VA ‘Oscar the Grouch’ training angers vets:

The beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs depicted dissatisfied veterans as Oscar the Grouch in a recent internal training guide, and some vets and VA staffers said Tuesday that they feel trashed.

The cranky Sesame Street character who lives in a garbage can was used in reference to veterans who will attend town-hall events Wednesday in Philadelphia.

“There is no time or place to make light of the current crisis that the VA is in,” said Joe Davis, a national spokesman for the VFW. “And especially to insult the VA’s primary customer.”

These people will apparently not get it. And its a delightful little series of events to which we can all look forward.

The first college football game of the year was tonight. This guy was the referee:

I hadn’t realized that Boyd Crowder had taken on a side job:

Justified should be back around January. But football is here now. Hooray football.

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22
Aug 14

The barber, the check writer and the pie maker

I made the mistake of getting a haircut today. Going to my barber on a Friday afternoon is like going to most people’s DMV, or my local post office.

He’s a nice fellow, good, easy small talker. There are nice family photos to study as he cuts your hair. He does a fine enough job of it and he’s the cheapest guy in town — those his prices are going up, and we’ll have to talk about that.

Everyone in town has figured this out, I guess, and everyone goes there. And so you wait and wait, but it is a break from other things, one supposes, and the television is on an endless loop of some sporting thing or another. He’s the kind of guy that’s on a first name basis with people and sometimes he remembers me, but my strategy is to cut short and ride on that haircut for as long as possible. So I could be easy to forget in the blur of faces he sees every month.

We talked about the VA and pensions and the Bulge and Iraq today. Once, when his shop was slower and he remembered who I was, he picked my brain about various shenanigans going on in the journalism industry. Another time he almost carved a junk out of my ear and sent me on my way home bleeding and, I think, with the haircut incomplete. Scared him. It bled so well it scared me too.

Today he nicked my neck a little just below the hairline and applied some demon-infused, artisanally crafted pain juice on it, smeared a white powder on top of that and then smacked my neck. He was a combat medic. He knows what he’s doing, I told myself.

After that I visited various book stores about town, with this weird white caking powder on my neck. No one said anything about it.

We went out for dinner. It is Friday. Friday is Pie Day:

“Clinkies!” as we used to say while trying to not stab each other with forks.

The server gave us fist bumps for ordering pie. Surely he was thinking “I didn’t even have to upsell these people!” And then he let us choose the color of pen used to sign the receipt. I went with the hunter green.

Things to read … and, sadly, none of these are written in a hunter green font.

Security for journalists, part one: The basics:

Just as you can take steps to reduce the physical or legal risks of journalism, it’s possible to protect yourself in the digital realm. This two-part post will cover the basics of digital security for journalists. It’s impossible to learn everything you need to know from a couple of articles, but my hope is to give you enough of the basics that you understand what to study next.

Even if you’re not working on a sensitive story yourself, you need to understand digital security because an attacker can harm other people by going through you. This post contains generic security advice that everyone in journalism should heed, with specific advice about simple things you can do right now to improve your security.

Govt-blacklisted journalists and the growing info grip:

David Sirota reports on “How Government Blacklists Journalists From Accessing the Truth” stating that “The public is being systematically divorced from public policy, which is exactly what too many elected officials want.”

[…]

“In recent years, there have been signs that the federal government is reducing the flow of public information,” Sirota writes, agreeing with a growing consensus from many Washington D.C. journalists.

Sadly, there’s no surprise there.

This thoughtful essay from a student-journalist, I will not be returning to Ferguson:

There are now hundreds of journalists from all over the world coming to Ferguson to film what has become a spectacle. I get the sense that many feel this is their career-maker. In the early days of all this, I was warmly greeted and approached by Ferguson residents. They were glad that journalists were there. The past two days, they do not even look at me and blatantly ignore me. I recognize that I am now just another journalist to them, and their frustration with us is clear. In the beginning there was a recognizable need for media presence, but this is the other extreme. They need time to work through this as a community, without the cameras.

Gov. Bentley announces creation of Alabama Drone Task Force

I read aloud a bit of Willie Morris tonight. I’ve been searching for examples of excellent writing to share with students, so I had to raid one of the bookshelves in our library. This won’t be the one of Morris’ that I share, but it is worth a read. This is when he was writing from Oxford, Mississippi and remembering his time and a love on Long Island, New York. The complete essay isn’t online, so a brief excerpt:

She would say, “You’re not too old and I’m not too young.” But she was the marrying age, and she wanted a baby. The love we had was never destroyed; it was merely the dwindling of circumstance. How does one give up Annie? Only through loneliness and fear, fear of old loves lost and of love renewed – only those things, that’s all. The last departure came on a windswept October noon of the kind we had known. We stood on the porch of my house and embraced. “Oh — you!” she said. She lingered for the briefest moment. Then she was gone, a Tennessee girl with snow in her hair again. She married a local boy and now has two little daughters, I hear on good authority from Long Island. The years are passing, and don’t think I haven’t thought about it.

The man could write. But he was perhaps never better than when he’s writing about home (which is why whichever Willie Morris piece I hand out in class will have at least two references to jonquils). Happens to a lot of us, I suspect.

Do you ever get the feeling Patrick Stewart is just cooler at everything?

I do.