Category Archives: Technology

Google will do funny things sometimes

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me that if you search for “Nikki Haley” at Google images, you get, amid a sea of actual picturesof Nikki, a picture of Tina Fey linking to a blog post of mine from January 2009.

I forgot about it until I was looking for a certain image of Nikki this morning, and found the same thing. And in fact, as you can see above, it’s the seventh image that shows up out of 353,000. The six before it are actually of Nikki, as are the next 22, before there is the oddity of a picture of Barack Obama.

So, is there some quirk in the Google algorithms that free-associates, going “Nikki Haley… Sarah Palin… Tina Fey…?”

As near as I can tell, the reason this happened was at the top of that Tina Fey post is a link to the post that followed it, headlined “Nikki Haley applauds House action on roll-call voting.” But there is no mention of Nikki in the actual post itself.

Which is reassuring, I suppose. It’s nice to see that even Google can go off on tangents just as weird as the ones we fallible humans let distract us…

How much do YOU text? And why?

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There was a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal today, headlined, “Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls.” Cute, huh? Anyway, the short answer to the implied question was, “We Want to Reach Others But Not to Be Interrupted.” But there was more to it than that.

There were some pretty incredible numbers in there:

For anyone who doubts that the texting revolution is upon us, consider this: The average 13- to 17-year-old sends and receives 3,339 texts a month—more than 100 per day, according to the Nielsen Co., the media research firm. Adults are catching up. People from ages 45 to 54 sent and received 323 texts a month in the second quarter of 2010, up 75% from a year ago, Nielsen says.

100 texts a day? Yeah, kids are pretty nuts about these things, but 100 texts a day? And that’s the average, rather than a pathological extreme? Come on.

Still, its undeniable that for the younger generations, texting is far more important than using the phone as a, well, phone.

That’s true even for an alter cocker like me — although “texts” aren’t my preferred medium. I’m far more likely to use my Blackberry to send an e-mail, or post a Tweet, or send a DM, or respond to a blog comment, than I am to use it to talk to anyone. Enough so that I’ve crippled my thumbs. (The pain is still considerable; I see a doctor next week.)

In total, I’ve sent out 2,702 Tweets since I started a little more than a year ago. That’s a lot, but hardly 100 a day.

Texting is undeniably useful, particularly for communicating under certain circumstances with people who have cell phones that are not “smart.” Last night, for instance, I went to a reception at Rosewood’s at the fairgrounds. When I was leaving that, I planned to connect with my daughter, who had brought her kids to the fair. I tried calling her, and couldn’t hear her over the fair noise. So I texted, “Where are you? I couldn’t hear…” She replied, “We’re @ the picnic tables under a tent right outside entrance to grandstand,” and I answered, “OK, stay there…”

Undeniably useful. But as a substitute for other forms of communication, no, I don’t think so. And how on Earth is it appealing for people who don’t have full QWERTY keyboards on their devices? Talk about tedious…

Kids don’t seem to mind, though. Which provokes a thought: Back in the ’60s, many of us thought we were SO different from our parents. And outwardly, perhaps we were. But this latest development suggests that kids today are actually, cognitively different from us. They’re wired entirely different, and technology has done the wiring.

And what are the social, cultural, political and personal consequences of that?

Speaking the same language, but only technically

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You know how I just got HD? Well, this process all started with me wanting a Blu-ray player so I could watch Netflix without waiting for the discs to come in the mail.

That part of the project has been… tricky. I’ve spent several late nights in the past week trying to get that one simple thing done.

I thought I’d share with you my conversation — excuse me, “chat,” which isn’t the same thing — about the problem with a tech at Sony. As you read it, imagine unexplained pauses of five or 10 minutes while I wait for short, incomplete answers from the tech. Of course, when I took a couple of minutes to go try what the tech suggested (going through the process on a different browser), I got “Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.”

Note that, while it’s all in English, there is a distinct… disconnect… in the flow of communication. I get the sense that each comment is being run imperfectly through a translator. And it was amazingly frustrating. I was so desperate to work effectively with this person that I even slipped into a stilted version of English myself, hoping it would facilitate things (“Yes, it persists.” To which I got another deadpan, Hal-9000 answer):

Corinne_ > Hi Brad. Welcome to Sony Online Support. I’m Corinne. Please allow me a moment to review your concern.

Brad Warthen > Here is a full description of the problem:

Brad Warthen > I’m trying to get Netflix on my new Blu-ray player. I have an internet connection, but when it tells me to go to internet.sony.tv/netflix on my computer and enter a password, I run into trouble. That address asks me for my e-mail address and a password. So I enter my e-mail address, and the password that the Blu-ray player told me to use, and I get “The password you entered is invalid. Please enter a valid password.” So I try the password I created when I registered my player, and I get the same message. So I click on “Reset or Forgot your Password” and follow the directions, and you send me a new, temporary password. I’ve done this THREE TIMES now, and each time I enter the new, temporary password minutes (sometimes seconds) after receiving it, and I get “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website.” Every time, same message. So what in the world am I supposed to do now?

Corinne_ > I am sorry that the BD Player can not be registerred in the Sony Essential website.

Corinne_ > Thanks for waiting, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll be happy to assist you in this regard.

Corinne_ > Do you have a SonyStyle account?

Brad Warthen > Yes.

Corinne_ > Did you try using different Web Brower?

Brad Warthen > No. I just used Firefox.

Brad Warthen > Hello? Are you there?

Corinne_ > Yes, I am online.

Brad Warthen > I said no, I just used Firefox. Is there a preferred browser?

Corinne_ > Brad, it is recommened to open the Eseential website in either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Corinne_ > Please check the operation with a different web browser.

Brad Warthen > I’m using Firefox. 3.6.10. But I’ll go try IE as well.

Corinne_ > Sure, please go ahead.

Corinne_ > Please let me know if the issue persists.

Brad Warthen > … that is, assuming it still works… I never use IE; I always use Firefox or Chrome…

Corinne_ > Please let me know the result after using Internet Explorer.

Corinne_ > Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.

Brad Warthen > Yes, it persists.

Brad Warthen > I tried all my passwords, then requested a new one. When I entered the new one, I got “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website. ” Again.

Corinne_ > I am sorry to hear this.

Corinne_ > Thanks for the additional information.

Corinne_ > I am really sorry for the delay in response.

Corinne_ > This is a dead lock issue.

Brad Warthen > What does that mean?

Corinne_ > This deadlock issue can handled by our next level of support over phone.

Brad Warthen > OK, what’s the number?

Corinne_ > They are our next level of support and better eqipped to help you resolving the issue.

Brad Warthen > OK. What’s the number, so I can call them?

Corinne_ > They are available at: 239-768-7547.

Corinne_ > Their hours of operation is:

Corinne_ > Mon-Fri 8:00AM-12:00AM (Midnight) ET

Sat-Sun 9:00AM-8:00PM ET

Brad Warthen > OK, I’ll call, and tell them it’s a “deadlock issue.”

Corinne_ > I am sure that they will be more than happy to further assist you resolving the issue.

Corinne_ > Please mention that you have contacted Chat Support Team for the same regard before while contacting the.

Corinne_ > Hence, theyb will be further assist you fixing the issue.

Corinne_ > Thus, you can access Netflix fine in the BD Player.

Corinne_ > Are you able to take it from here?

Brad Warthen > Yes. I was trying to copy the text of this chat so that I’d have the number and times, but the text box doesn’t allow me to select it. Could you e-mail me the info?

Corinne_ > Sure, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll forward this chat transcript to your Email ID for future reference.

Brad Warthen > Thanks. Goodbye.

Corinne_ > This Chat Transcript has been sent to: brad@bradwarthen.com.

Corinne_ > You are most welcome.

Corinne_ > It was really nice chatting with you.

Corinne_ > Have great time ahead!

Corinne_ > Good-bye and thank you for contacting Sony Online Support.

Corinne_ > Analyst has closed chat and left the room

So I guess tonight, I’ll be on the phone for several hours.

You still have a landline? Haw! The AZTECS had landlines!

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OK, so I stole that line from Dave Barry, who said it once to make fun of people who had Betamax video recorders (“Beta?! The AZTECS had Beta!” — or something very much like that), which is made extra ironic because the triumphant VHS technology is now SO last century…

But you get the point. Landlines are rapidly going the way of buggy whips and, well, TV sets — at least in consumer’s minds.

TV sets? you say. Yes, TV sets. This from the Pew Center for Media Research:

Landlines And Television Sets Losing Importance

According to a new nationwide survey from the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project, reported by Paul Taylor and Wendy Wang with Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith, only 42% of Americans say they consider the television set to be a necessity. Last year, this figure was 52%, and in 2006, it was 64%.

After occupying center stage in the American household for much of the 20th century, says the report, two of the grand old luminaries of consumer technology, the television set and the landline telephone, are suffering from a sharp decline in public perception that they are necessities of life.

The drop-off has been less severe for the landline telephone. 62% of Americans say it’s a necessity of life, down from 68% last year, but 47% of the public now say that the cell phone is a necessity of life…

Note, first, that Pew, or at least the respondents, are using “need” and “necessity” in ways that would have puzzled our hardy pioneer ancestors. Note also that while fewer people see TVs as a necessity, they’re still buying them like crazy:

Even as fewer Americans say they consider the TV set to be a necessity of life, more Americans than ever are stocking up on them. In 2009, the average American home had more television sets than people, 2.86, according to a Nielsen report. In 2000, this figure was 2.43; in 1990, it was 2.0; and in 1975, it was 1.57.

The disconnect between attitudes and behaviors, opines the report, may be that the TV set hasn’t had to deal with competition from new technology that can fully replace all of its functions. If a person wants real-time access to the wide spectrum of entertainment, sports and news programming available on television, there’s still nothing (at least not yet) that can compete with the television set itself…

So don’t write the obit yet. But as for landlines — exactly why DO I still have one? So I won’t miss the telemarketing calls?

I see also that only 10 percent regard flat-screen HDTV as a necessity. It’s probably going to be in the high 90s before I get one. Mainly because, much as I want one, my sense of need is still pretty old-fashioned…

Another step into the Innovista…

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Mike Fitts chronicles this latest step toward achieving the potential of Innovista:

A company based on the engineering smarts at USC — in students and faculty — has been launched to commercialize that prowess.

SysEDA, a 10-employee company that provides engineering software, is moving into the USC Columbia Technology Incubator.

SysEDA’s software has been developed over the years principally by Roger Dougal, professor of electrical engineering at USC. Dougal estimates that about 50 students in the past 15 years have provided refinements to it, and many students in the engineering school use it regularly as part of the their work.

The software, called a Virtual Test Bed, is designed to simulate the inner workings of electrical engines. Once it is offered in the Internet “cloud,” it will allow different engineers from around the world to see how their proposed modifications to an engine affect the entire system before a prototype is built….

The company already has a client: the Office of Naval Research.

Dougal has worked with the Navy for more than a decade as it has explored electric power options for its ships. Now SysEDA has a $2.4 million contract to work with global engine giant ABB on such engines and design systems.

SysEDA is working with the incubator and is also receiving mentoring from Bang! Technologies, a company that specializes in boosting tech companies through their growth phases…

Congratulations to all involved as they take one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such steps that need to be taken for the Innovista to realize its potential over the next decade or two.

Pandora needs a “like it a LOT” button (although it’s doing pretty well without one)

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Here’s a conundrum…

Pandora, the “internet radio” site that attempts to use your feedback to shape “stations” that play stuff you like, has a pretty simple system for your input: After you enter a song or artist (or multiple songs or artists) that you’d like to hear, it guesses what else you might like based on that, and you click on either a thumbs-down button meaning “I don’t like this song,” or a thumbs-up meaning “I like this song.”

That’s it. No gradations of feedback. It’s way binary; ones and zeros. I try to click on one or the other on most songs. I don’t sit there poised with the mouse, but every few songs I ALT-TAB back to Pandora to catch up with my decisions (except when I’ve gotten lost in my work and lost track of what I was “hearing,” and even then if I’m familiar with the song, I render a judgment).

But I find this frustrating everyone once in a while. Most of my “likes” mean, “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix.” But every once in a while, they play me something I really, REALLY dig.

Examples… I have a lot of stations for different kinds of music, but recently I’ve spent a lot of time defining one called “Brad’s All-Purpose Station.” In the “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix” on that station, I’d include “After Midnight,” “Angie,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “It’s Money That Matters,” “Long May You Run,” “Oh! Darling,” “Smoke on the Water,” and so forth.

But there are other songs that I want to make sure Pandora knows I really like a LOT more than those songs. It may be an all-time favorite, or a really good song I seldom here and don’t own a copy of, or something I’ve occasionally heard and loved but didn’t know the name of… all sorts of reasons. Into that category I’d put: “Sexy and 17,” Another Girl,” “Baby, It’s You,” “Badge,” “Adagio for Strings,” “Bring it on home to Me,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Gymnopedies (3),” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (the Al Green version!),” “I’ll Cry Instead,” “In Germany Before the War,” “I’ve Got A Woman,” “Naked Man,” “New Amsterdam,” “Simple Man,” “Werewolves of London,” and others. Oh, and on that last one: I’d much rather hear “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” but neither has yet been offered.

When I hear one of those, I want to say, Whoa, I’m sorry I clicked “like” on those last 10, because this is what I REALLY like! Don’t just lump this in with those… But all I can do is click again on the “like” button.

OK, so I’m frustrated that I can’t give more nuanced feedback, but here’s the perplexing thing: In spite of that, Pandora does an increasingly excellent job of guessing what I’ll like. As time goes by, I hit that “don’t like” button quite seldom.

Contrast that to Netflix, which gives me five levels of feedback, from one to five stars — and yet remains pretty much clueless as to what I’d like.

Not that I haven’t put the time in… I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve rated 2,144 movies on that site. I keep thinking, Give ’em more data, and they’ll figure me out. But they don’t. You give “Casablanca” five stars, and Netflix assumes, “He likes any movie that’s more than 50 years old.” Yeah, it’s probably a little more sophisticated than that — but not much.

Frustrating. But kudos to Pandora.

“Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing”

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This post is about one thing — the fact that that headline struck me as funny. I got if from the above video, done by an Air Force pilot (a guy you’d think would be used to noise) who is really fed up with noisy chip bags:

Frito-Lay makes a lot of noise marketing its Sun Chips snacks as “green.” They are cooked with steam from solar energy, the message goes.

But its latest effort—making the bags out of biodegradable plant material instead of plastic—is creating a different kind of racket. Chip eaters are griping about the loud crackling sounds the new bag makes. Some have compared it to a “revving motorcycle” and “glass breaking.”

It is louder than “the cockpit of my jet,” said J. Scot Heathman, an Air Force pilot, in a video probing the issue that he posted on his blog under the headline “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing.” Mr. Heathman tested the loudness using a RadioShack sound meter. He squeezed the bag and recorded a 95 decibel level. A bag of Tostitos Scoops chips (another Frito-Lay brand, in bags made from plastic) measured 77….

I haven’t checked them out, but those must be some noisy chip bags. And as a guy who is hypersensitive to that kind of noise — it can drive me up the wall — I don’t think I ever DO want to check them out. Part of what amuses me about this story is the notion that there are people out there — such as the guy who made that video — who get more worked up about such noise than I do.

Here’s what I would love — chips that are guaranteed not to crunch, either when you eat them or when you handle the packaging. That’s something I’d be willing to pay for, and distribute for free to anyone around me who just has to have a snack.

Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations

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This is a way cool link that Stan Dubinsky shared, and I pass it on.

I would include some of the animations here, but I couldn’t figure out how to capture or imbed them. So you’ll have to go there to check them out.

These animations are very appealing. So appealing that they help me understand why someone would want to be an engineer rather than deal in political commentary the way I do. These simple illustrations ARE the way these things work (presumably), and no argument about it. (Unless, of course, these are hoaxes and they don’t actually work these ways. But they’re quite convincing nonetheless.)

Such certainty is very soothing.

My favorite animation? The sewing machine. I never could quite imagine how a needle going in and out, and not going all the way through, could possibly produce a stitch. Now I see.

Where’s Leighton? There he is!

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Did you ever see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”? If you haven’t, you should — it’s a classic. It’s also wonderfully goofy after all these years to see the ’60s notion of a hip young professional photographer in swingin’ mod London. See him drive around in his convertible sports car while talking on his extremely cumbersome car phone! Oooohhh. (David Hemmings’ character was one of the influences on Mike Myers in his creation of Austin Powers.)

Anyway, to summarize the plot (spoiler alert!), basically it’s about a photographer who takes some perfectly innocent pictures in the park, but when he processes the film and makes a print, he notices something odd in the background, in the bushes about 50 years behind his subject. So he blows it up. Then he shoots the print, processes that film, then blows it up again. And again. (Thereby severely straining the capabilities of 35 mm film, but hey, he’s a professional.) I won’t tell you what he saw, because I don’t want to spoil the plot entirely.

To my point: I often have that experience of finding unexpected things going on in my photos. It happened when I used film because film is a big mystery until it’s processed. Shoot a crowd or action when there’s too little time for your brain to take it all in, and the film will reveal secrets to you after it’s processed. For instance, take a look at the photo at right, which I shot on film at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. (This was a time of technological transition. I was shooting rolls of film at the convention, then taking the rolls to a Duane Reade to be processed and put on a CD for me.) I had just asked Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog to pose for a portrait (there I go name-dropping again), but only later did I notice Larry King in the background. At least, I think it’s Larry King. The grain and focus are such that I can’t be entirely sure, just as the character in “Blow-Up” had trouble being certain about what he was seeing.

Today, this happens with digital photography for a different reason. Sure, you can immediately look at what you just shot. But you can’t see detail unless you zoom in, and besides, who has time to stop and look at individual exposures? I certainly don’t, because I am shooting so many. I used to go through a roll of film in minutes, but that’s nothing to the number I shoot now. Film at least imposed some fire discipline; there was always a sense that your film was finite. But with an 8-gig card in my camera, discipline is gone entirely.

So it could be hours, days, or longer before I go through the images on my laptop and see what I have. And I find little surprises.

For instance, at the Gamecocks’ victory parade Friday, I happened to turn and take a picture of the two ADCO interns standing behind me in the crowd. I needed a picture of them to post on ADCO’s site, and this was an opportunity.

Only later did I spot our erstwhile candidate for attorney general, Leighton Lord, behind them. At right you can see what the picture would have looked like when Hemmings’ got through blowing it up (and yes, I created the blur, grain, and b/w effect in PhotoShop — the original was much sharper, even blown up).

And when I saw him, the irony struck me: Alan Wilson was much in evidence at the center of attention. He and his Dad had a regular convoy of vehicles in the parade — at least three, with kids passing out campaign stickers left and right. (I didn’t get a picture of Alan — I was too busy shooting the cars, especially the beautiful red T-bird — but here’s one of him from another parade over the weekend. Those Wilsons love a parade.)

But there is Leighton Lord, standing alone, looking away. Ironic. Poignant, one might say. Except that the camera doesn’t tell all. Actually, he was talking to his father-in-law Gayle Averyt, whom I spotted next to him in yet another exposure.

I’ve got so many thousands of exposures like this of crowds, sometimes with famous people here and there in them. Maybe I should do a “children’s” book for grownups, only instead of “Where’s Waldo?” it would be “Where’s Rudy Giuliani? Where’s George Bush? Where’s Bill Clinton?” and so forth. Think it would sell?

‘The new iPhone’s here! The new iPhone’s here!’

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In the 20th century, it was Navin Johnson and the new phonebook. (Phonebook! How utterly primitive!)

Today, it’s whatever the latest gadget Steve Jobs happens to be pushing.

If you check out the blog I help ADCO maintain (and yes, there will be more posts once the new Web site is launched), you’ll see a picture of my colleague Lora Prill using her old iPhone to take a picture of her new iPhone. Really. You can’t make this up.

And she is far from alone.

Personally, I think the grapes are sour, because my whole family is on Verizon, so unless I want every personal phone call counting against my minutes or whatever, I’m stuck with my Blackberry.

iPhones are cool, I’ll admit. But get a grip, people…

Today begins the great Convergence!

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Folks getting ready for ConvergeSE at ADCO last night. You'll note that I am, indeed, the only one around here who dresses like a Mad Man./Brad Warthen

No, I am not the Keymaster, and I am not awaiting the Gatekeeper. This convergence is a little less cosmic, but only a little.

I mentioned yesterday that I’m working at ADCO. Well, today things are fairly quiet here because the ADCO Interactive folks are over at ETV hosting a series of extremely advanced workshops in Web development and convergence and other mysterious new media stuff. These confabs are being conducted by some of the leading kahunas on the forefront of new media.

I’d be over there, except Gene Crawford (the jefe of ADCO Interactive) told me it would all be over my head. I am, however, allowed to attend the speeches that will be given tomorrow over at the Swearingen Center. Supposedly, they’ll talk down enough to me for me, a mere blogger, to follow.

If you want to know more about this event, check out the Web site. Or if that’s too inconvenient, here’s an excerpt from the press release:

ConvergeSE 2010 is intended for Web designers and developers, business executives, marketing professionals, content creators and students. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or a newcomer to the Web, you’re sure to discover something that will spark your creativity and get you motivated.

The conference, a southeastwide expansion of last year’s successful ConvergeSC, will feature such speakers as Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Robert Tolar Haining of Condé Nast Digital, Aarron Walter of MailChimp and Brandon Eley of brandoneley.com.

The conference “will take you from front-end design to the development technologies used to build websites and web apps, then also help you learn strategies to sell your services or application as well as build community around it,” says organizer Gene Crawford of unmatchedstyle.com and period-three.com. “It’s that well rounded, multi-disciplinary approach to Converge that makes it a little unique I think. We give each speaker 30 minutes to get their point across and then it’s off to another topic, fast and furious.”

Who should attend ConvergeSE 2010? “Anyone who works with the web or on the web,” said Crawford. Which today means pretty much anybody.

When and Where is it?
Friday, June 25, 8 am-5 pm, Workshop Day
ETV
1041 George Rogers Boulevard

Saturday, June 25, 8 am-5pm, Conference Day
University of south Carolina
Amoco Hall
Swearingen Engineering Center
301 Main Street

Yes, I DO have a job, thank you very much

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Where does Superman go when he’s not saving Lois and Jimmy? Well, sometimes he’s hammering out a story for Perry White in order to uphold his cover. Sure, he can write at super-speed, but not when others in the newsroom are watching. And sometimes they must see him being Clark Kent to believe in that identity.

So it is with me. I can’t blog ALL the time, and sometimes I’m actually working for a living.

“What? You? Work!?!?” you say, your voice rising in pitch on that last word, as did Maynard G. Krebs’.

Yes, indeed, and you shouldn’t be so shocked. I have been known to do work frequently. I even used to do it when I was with the newspaper, even though I was “in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working,” as Jake Barnes so rightly noted.

What am I doing now? Well, I’m in the ad game. I’ve joined ADCO, a full-service advertising and marketing firm here in Columbia. I’ve been ADCO’s director of communications/public relations for quite some time now. I joined in mid-February.

So why haven’t I mentioned it before? Well, it’s not like I’ve made a secret of it. I’ve announced it in some public forums, such as when I’m speaking to civic groups (they gave me a big hand at Rotary when I told them, probably because they were thinking, “Never thought he’d get a job.”). But mostly I haven’t done it because ADCO is undergoing a lot of very exciting changes (see how I’m learning the flack lingo?), and I sort of wanted to wait until all the pieces were in place. There are three big things happening with ADCO as I type this:

This year is our 20th anniversary, since Lanier Jones and Brian Murrell started the company in 1990.
Over the last couple of months we’ve been putting together a new (very exciting!) venture with Periodthree, a Web design and development firm. Gene Crawford and his gang have physically moved into the building with us here at 1220 Pickens, and will henceforth be known as ADCO Interactive. This greatly expands what ADCO can do on the Web.
The addition of Yours Truly. This, of course, is a big thrill for everyone, especially the aforementioned Mr. Truly. What will I be doing? Oh, this and that. Business development, for one. Writing stuff (such as some of the copy for the new Web site). Marketing consulting (which is remarkably like what I did at the newspaper — you’d be surprised; it’s all about shaping message). But the very coolest thing, as far as y’all are concerned, is that Lanier and Brian and Lora and the gang very much encourage me to continue doing the blog. Not many jobs I looked at over the past year would have encouraged that. In fact, most potential employers shuddered at the thought, which makes ADCO rather special.

The Period Three — that is to say, ADCO Interactive — team has been working on a new Web site that will incorporate all of these changes. For instance, if you go look at the old site, you won’t find me or any of the new Interactive folks. The new one goes live in a couple of weeks. So I haven’t wanted to refer you to it until all that was ready.

Also, if I told y’all I had a job, I’d have to go rewrite my lede on my “About” page, and I haven’t thought of anything I like as much as “Brad Warthen is an unemployed newspaperman, until he finds something else to be.” It’s way existential. I think it ranks up there with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Or “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” You get the idea.

Call me Ishmael.

But what the hey; I’ll worry about that later. I thought I’d go ahead and scoop the new ADCO Web site, if only by a bit.

By the way, to address what I’m sure you’re wondering about, this is just like “Mad Men.” Except that as I type this in my office, I’m drinking a Samuel Adams Summer Ale rather than a martini (I am not making this up — Gene and the gang are celebrating the fact that ConvergeSE happens tomorrow, and I “just happened” to step out of my office just as they were opening a few bottles in the corridor). And I’m the only one who dresses like it’s 1962. In fact, one of the Web gurus here for ConvergeSE just said “nice tie” to me in the hall — and it’s really not one of my nicer ties (hey, I know when these hepcats are being ironic; I’m way perceptive). And if you ask one of the young women in the office to fetch coffee, she just doesn’t hop to it the way they do for Don Draper. I figure I’m not saying it with the right tone or something.

But other than all that, it’s just like “Mad Men.” And I’m really getting into it.

Sorry about that little hiccup there

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Sorry about my blog being down for a little bit there. If you were like me, you were getting a “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” message instead of my blog…

It’s been fixed now, and my technical guru says he’s had to triple my capacity because “You’re getting more popular…”

Well, that’s a good problem to have, and I appreciate y’all’s patronage. But I’m sorry for the temporary inconvenience.

CNN’s birthday: And a dark day it was, too

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Kathryn brings my attention to a piece headlined, “The Day 24-Hour TV News Was Born.” To which I can only reply, and a dark day it was, too:

At first, it seemed an odd experiment, the sort of thing that a quirky gazillionaire could afford to blow his money on just to see what had happened. Who, after all, wanted TV news 24 hours a day? Well, Ted had the last laugh on that. And this piece concentrates rightly on CNN’s dominance of such huge, breaking news events as the Challenger explosion and the Gulf War in 1991.

But when you say “24-hour TV news” to me, I think of the harm that CNN and its imitators have done — and did pretty much alone before folks started getting their news via Twitter and the like.

Once upon a time, boys and girls, news organizations — even TV news organizations, which were always sort of on the fringes of journalism — had what was called a “news cycle.” What this meant was that a given medium would report to you, the reader or viewer, at given times each day. The rest of the day was spent reporting. And while it was all pretty rushed, there was time in the day before deadline to do at least some modicum of making sure you knew what the hell you were talking about.

Not any more. Now, something happens, and the 24-hour cable outfits start “covering” it, and what you see is a bizarre mix of raw legwork tarted up as reporting, and commentary based on pathetically insufficient information. The commentary comes in, not to put things in perspective for you, the viewer, not to foster an informed conversation in the society, but to fill dead air while we wait for the latest half-baked “fact” to come in.

How does one provide commentary under such circumstances? There are a number of techniques that work. One is to further blur the line between news and entertainment. Another — and this is the one that concerns me the most — is to embrace the most mindless kind of reflexive partisanship. You have a “liberal” and a “conservative” on and let them shout prefab opinions at each other — opinions that are in no way dependent upon the facts of the unfolding story; the talkers bought them off the shelf and brought them along to the studio. This is called being fair and well-rounded.

Gradually, all political discourse in America has taken on this kind of mindless, prefab, artificial conflict approach — talking not to reach some sort of conclusion, or synthesis, or consensus, but each participant playing a rigidly predefined role depending on which pigeonhole he allows himself to be identified with.

This approach became refined and concentrated in the blogosphere, which joined the 24-hour TV “news” crowd and the interest groups and the parties themselves in constantly spinning the wheel, oversimplifying everything as left or right, black or white, up or down, and so forth.

Daily journalism was never overly burdened with sober reflection. But now, what little thought went into the news has been subordinated to these pre-fab conflict dialectics.

And we are worse off.

‘Ideas… having sex with each other:’ The collective, interactive nature of human progress

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There was a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, which I particularly enjoyed because of the way it cut across the way we tend to group ideas, particularly political and philosophical ideas, in popular dialogue.

In particular, I liked the way it applied economics to evolution to explain how human progress — innovation, wealth production, and other blessings of modernity — is a collective, interdependent process:

The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

The piece started wondering why our ancestors, who could make tools for a couple of million years, didn’t really start to take off technologically or culturally until 45,000 years ago. The answer is that we are dependent on each other to move forward, and there have to be enough of us to reach critical mass if we’re really to take off.

The best part was right here:

But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book “The Nature of Technology,” nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.

I like the way this celebrates human achievement — from science to culture to capitalism — while at the same time blowing apart the fantasy that so many (the Mark Sanfords of the world) harbor: That we function best as little individual islands left alone by society at large. We are all in this together, or we simply don’t progress.

I don’t know about you, but I find it far more elevating to think about ideas having sex than certain, um, people:

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

Reading all this caused me to have a depressing thought, however. I think these ways of looking at human progress may help explain why political ideas in this country seem so counterproductive, so mutually canceling, like intellectual dead-ends, with the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” locked in perpetual battle with each having a slight majority for a time, but no progress ever being made (by anyone’s notion of “progress”)…

I think it’s because our political ideas no longer “have sex” with one another, borrowing memes from each other and changing and producing new, more vibrant and robust, hybrid ideas. Not only do the ideas of today’s so-called “liberals” and so-called “conservatives” not only don’t jump into the sack together, they don’t hold hands, or even look at each other across a crowded room. They don’t even listen to each other, much less join to be fruitful and multiply productive new ideas.

Our political system, centered around a legislative process that depends on deliberation — with real debate between people listening to each other in good faith — can’t function with all the dancers standing on opposite sides of the dance hall and refusing to speak to each other.

Maybe I should start marketing my UnParty as a political/intellectual fertility cult, and sponsor monthly idea orgies. Or something.

Just a thought.

I’ll say this for ‘Avatar 3D’: It’s better than ‘Inglourious Basterds’

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At the very last moment, as the DVD was being released, I went to see “Avatar” in 3D last Thursday night.

It certainly wasn’t as good as its besotted admirers would have it. Nor was it as bad as Jeff Vrabel claimed, although I enjoyed his iconoclastic take on it.

On the plus side, I’ve never seen anything like it, in terms of the visuals. It was richly beautiful, in spite of the Viewmaster distraction of 3D. Which is better than it used to be, but still not convincing — yeah, it looks like things exist in more than one plane, but the items that pop out in front seem themselves to be flat, 2D, like figures in a pop-up book, not realistic at all. You are conscious of the artifice of it at all times (not to mention the fact that anything I’m not looking straight at is out of focus — although maybe that was the effect of wearing 3D glasses OVER my prescription specs). If you want to make something seem real, give me the chiaroscuro cinematography of “The Godfather,” which went much further toward making me feel I was there than these cheap tricks.

I’ll also say the premise, the central plot conceit, is also intriguing — the idea of a character projecting his avatar into a reality (as opposed to a computer-generated virtual reality) that he can’t otherwise enter. Although I have to say that it SOUNDED better, when I read it in advance, than it worked in the film.

On the other hand, there’s the plot. As my son said as we left the theater, he thought it was better done in “Dances With Wolves.” I wouldn’t condemn it quite that strongly, since I regard “Dances With Wolves” as one of the worst films ever made (although nowhere near as bad as the David Lynch abomination, “Dune”). The problem with “Wolves” was it’s triteness, exacerbated by the fact that Hollywood acted as though it was profound and original. (Folks, Mark Twain thought the whole “Noble Red Man” theme had been done to death by James Fenimore Cooper in the first half of the 19th century, and I’m inclined to agree.) At least “Avatar” gives it a new twist, and the dazzling visuals help you forget that you’re watching yet another screed on how wicked white men are — especially corporate white men and military white men. Got it. People in positions of power do bad things sometimes. Noted.

It was particularly interesting for me that I saw this in the middle of reading Flags of Our Fathers, a thoughtful examination of a time in which this country actually celebrated its military and its core culture, to the point of exaggeration that was painful to the subjects of adulation — especially the real-life Noble Red Man Ira Hayes, who ended up drinking himself to death back in the days before we invented the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress. (Fascinating anecdote illustrating the complexity of actual heroism: When fellow flag-raiser Rene Gagnon was identified and was about to be whisked from the troop ship to Washington to be celebrated, Hayes warned him that if Gagnon told the brass that he, Hayes, was also one of the flag-raisers, he would kill him. When Gagnon ratted him out anyway, Hayes didn’t kill him, but never spoke to him as he gradually killed himself.)

But if you set all that aside, “Avatar” was quite enjoyable. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, without the distraction of 3D. I’m leaving it in my Netflix queue.

Speaking of Netflix, I’ll say this for “Avatar”: It’s far better than the execrable “Inglourious Basterds.” I’ve never liked Tarantino, but this took my dislike to a new level. Even as satire, even as self-indulgence, this was badly done, as Tarantino went out of his way to trample on any chance that the film had to redeem itself on even the lowest levels. The title, complete with deliberate misspelling, does capture the film perfectly. I’d far rather see a trite re-imagining of the Noble Red Man theme than this desecration of everything in sight, including the Holocaust. That’s all I’m going to say about it.

On the other hand, to end on a high note, the wife and I (thank goodness I wasted my time on “Basterds” while she was out of town) watched “Fever Pitch” — the original with Colin Firth, not the American remake — Saturday night, and it was wonderful. It made me wonder how much better “High Fidelity” might have been had it adhered to the original setting of Nick Hornby’s masterpiece. But then there would have been no Jack Black as Barry, and pop culture would have been poorer…

WVa paper turns three lawmakers into unpersons

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Big Brother would definitely love this:

May 18, 2010 · Last weekend, the Morgantown newspaper The Dominion Post ran a front-page story about the governor signing into law, Erin’s law. But the picture that accompanied the story has turned into a news story of its own.

The law toughens penalties for deadly hit and run car accidents and is named in honor of Erin Keener, a WVU student from Marion County who died in a hit and run accident in 2005.

The Dominion Post decided to remove from the picture three delegates who sponsored Erin’s Law…

You’ve got to go look at the picture, before and after. Shades of Nikolai Yezhov.

And why did the paper do it? Get this: “due to the newspaper’s policy not to publish pictures of candidates running for re-election during the political season.”

I kid you not. Now you know why, during my career in newspapers, I was generally opposed to hard-and-fast rules about what we would run and what we wouldn’t. They are no substitute for what SHOULD be an editor’s most important asset: judgment.

What a classic case of rigid adherence to a simplistic rule leading to a stupid, laughable, unethical action.

This is double-plus ungood, folks.

First-hand account of oil rig disaster

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Bart brings to our attention this transcript of a radio interview with a guy said to have been on the scene when the Gulf oil rig blew. He certainly sounds like a guy who knows what he’s talking about; you may get a bit bogged down in the technical details. But it’s there if you’re curious. An excerpt:

James: Well obviously, the gas blew the sea water out of the riser, once it displaced all of the sea water, the gas began to spill out on the deck and up through the center of the rig floor. The rig, you have to imagine a rectangle, about 400 feet by 300 feet, with the derrick and the rig floor sitting directly in the center. As this gas is now heavier than air, it starts to settle in different places. From that point, something ignited the gas, which would have caused the first major explosion.

Mark: Now, what might ignite the gas, do you know?

James: Any number of things, Mark. All rig floor equipment is what they consider intrinsically safe, meaning it cannot generate a spark, so that these types of accidents cannot occur. However, as much gas that came out as fast as it did, it would have spilled over the entire rig fairly rapidly, you know, within a minute. I would think that the entire rig would be enveloped in gas. Now a lot of this stuff, you can’t smell, you can’t taste it, it’s just there, and it’s heavier than oxygen. As it settled in, it could have made it to a space that wasn’t intrinsically safe. Something as simple as static electricity could have ignited the first explosion, which set off a series of explosions.

Mark: Alright, so what happened? You’re standing where? You’re sitting somewhere? What happened?

James: Well, I was in a location that was a pretty good ways from the initial blast. I wasn’t affected by the blast. I was able to make it out and get up forward where the life boats were. The PA system was still working. There was an announcement overhead that this was NOT a drill. Obviously, we have fire drills every single week to prepare for emergencies like this (fire and abandonment drills). Over the intercom came the order to report to life boats one and two, that this was not a drill, that there is a fire, and we proceeded that way.

Mark: So, the eleven men who died, were they friends of yours?

James: Yes sir, they were….

Bart says, “Suggest you read it and hopefully, we try to put the accident into proper perspective, not become another political event for the uninformed.”

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