A cat, a tooth, a dream...anxiety!

This morning I had a nightmare. My cat Murphy had crawls into my bag (obviously, because he stows away and comes with me undetected all the time...duh). So there we both are, in a coffee shop. Nothing weird about that, right?

The coffee shop patrons start cooing over Murphy -- who wouldn't? One of them notices something is not right: Murphy's bottom front tooth (do cats even have a tooth there?) is about to fall out. And it is green and slimy and rotting and putrid.

[Backstory: This totally preventable catastrophe is my fault. When I took Murphy to the vet six weeks ago I found out that he needs $400 worth of dental work. Right, I don't have that kind of money. So I did what I do best: I put if off.]

Ok, returning to the dream... A frantic search for the vet's phone number ensues. I can't find it. When I do find it, they don't answer. Time is ticking. All of a sudden it is 10 a.m. (or is it 11 a.m.? In my dream I forgot daylight savings...just like in real life) and I am late for class. And Murphy is trying to escape. And his TEETH ARE FALLING OUT!

...and I wake up.

Phew. So normally analyzing dreams is a futile yet totally unavoidable process. It's the grand goal of us instinctively pattern-seeking humans -- tease some sense out of a mess of images.Valiant efforts have been made (Freud, Jung, and, as Wikipedia tells me, a slew of neurologists) to explain dreams but, like trying to train a chicken, it's mostly futile.

Until, of course, Jordan Wirfs-Brock hits the scene. Ok, not quite. My dream made me realize something, but that something wasn't about the nature of dreams. It was about the nature of pets. Pets and people. People and pets.

Anxiety dreams are crazy common, and teeth falling out is a frequent target. I've had that dream countless times (and damn, it's frightening), but this is the first time I projected that anxiety on an external actor: my cat.

In my dream, along with the teeth falling out thing, I was nervous about:

• making it to class on time


• money


• fitting everything in to my schedule


• the BURDEN of carrying things around with me

Hmmm, funny, these are all things that were tugging at the corners of intricately woven quilt of worries this morning. I had set my alarm early to go and search for my lost USB data drive which held, yes, "important assignments". Gah.

So here's the revelation. Maybe one of the reasons we have pets (besides the companionship and the fuzziness and the adorableness) is so we can push the anxiety of our people problems on to our pets.

There is generally little emotional wiggle-waggling involved in this process. Does Fido or Mittens need something? OK, it's done...no need to worry about whether your dog emotionally and intellectually fulfills you, or whether you are living up to your full potential when you are helping your cat. It's a different, more manageable, less ambiguous kind of anxiety. This is, I maintain, distinct from another reason we have pets: the desire for unconditional acceptance.

If you, like me, most likely were a Baby 19 and have a form of anxiety disorder somewhere between mild and severe, having a pet lets you channel that anxiety in a way that at least feels productive. Is it exploitation of the animal kingdom? Probably. Is it merely a distraction from dealing with those real people problems I mentioned? Maybe. Am I ever going to stop having anxiety dreams about Murphy that are really about me? Definitely not!

P.S. Also, I just really love typing the word "anxiety." It is so strange.

Worfs-Brock

My name has been misspelled in fabulously inventive, seemingly infinite ways:

Wirss-Brock
Wirstbrook
Brock-Wirfs (yes, really!)
...

But never until today had I been a Worfs-Brock.

Today...it happened twice! Fancy that! I actually found it endearing, and it warmed my heart a little bit when it was very cold outside.

Other things that warmed my heart recently:

• The baristas at the library coffee shop talking about their hobby, library stalking. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. They trail someone around the library for 15 minutes or too and see how long they can do it before the stalkee notices.
• Journalists squiggly dancing to Balkan music at the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference.
• A man with mismatched socks going through airport security.
• Seeing not one, but TWO legitimate flat-top hairdos this weekend.
• The phrase "glow-in-the-dark great!"
• This passage: "Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece -- millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work." Ian McEwan, Saturday, page 3

Have a glow-in-the-dark great night. I know I will, most literally.

First day of class blues

As if the first day of classes wasn't already depressing enough (just kidding...I really do love being a student), I just found out my car needs a new power steering pump.

The damage? I'm too devastated to recreate the quote here, but let's just say it's brought to you by the letter "G".

Who needs some cheering up? I do, I do! How about some stories about the food industry. Oh wait...this will only drive my spirits even further into the ground.

Except that Nicholas Kristof has a cute anecdote about a chicken who thought it was a goose (an example of the soul that industrial food has lost).

And except that in TIME's expose of industrial food, they have this to say:

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."

They also have pretty photos:


So, things aren't that bleak. I'm going to go home, drink a beer and finish reading a Japanese crime novel about prostitutes, glass ceilings and social strata. Life is pretty good, actually...

Novelists get sober: the best thing in the world for some, the worst for others

Check out this article by Tom Schone on how writers fare when they sober up.

Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a “better listener”.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.

Come one, somebody's got to have written a similar article about great journalists.

(Thanks to Yiyan for the tip!)

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/12/2009

• Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com

  Interesting. Because of the "price of anarchy" when it comes to individual drivers trying to minimize their personal travel time, closing roads along a route can actually make everything more efficient during rush hour.
  
  See...expanding roads isn't necessarily the solution!

  tags: CSM, traffic, group behavior, congestion, driving, cars, urban planning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/03/2009

• The truth about grit - The Boston Globe

  "Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit."

  tags: no_tag

  • Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.

• Shouts & Murmurs: A Guide To Summer Sun Protection : The New Yorker

  The perfect thing to read on a Monday morning while nursing my crispy neck and serious racoon-face after a long weekend of burning -- I mean beach camping.

  tags: new yorker, zev borrow, humor, SPF

  • SPF 100—This is to SPF 99 and below as excellent heroin is to Capri Sun juice boxes.
  • SPF 175—Ever wanted to have unprotected sex with a prostitute in Haiti? Don’t answer. Doesn’t matter. The point is with SPF 175 that’s now an option.

• Dan Morgan -- Farm-State Democrats Are on the Rise in Congress - washingtonpost.com

  tags: washington post, agriculture, politics, farming, democrats, food safety, FDA, EPA

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/30/2009

• Marathons and Memory : The Frontal Cortex

  At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).
  
  Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.

  tags: memory, cognition, marathon, running, stress, jonah lehrer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/29/2009

• Re-Engineering the Earth - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

  tags: no_tag

  • Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering.

  • Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks we ought to test the technology gradually. He suggests that we imagine the suite of geo-engineering projects like a knob that we can turn. “You can turn it gently or violently. The more gently it gets turned, the less disruptive the changes will be. Environmentally, the least risky thing to do is to slowly scale up small field experiments,” he says. “But politically that’s the riskiest thing to do.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/23/2009

• Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today

  Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.

  tags: jonah lehrer, picasso, neuroscience, art, abstraction, symbols, hyperbole, peak-shift effect, herring gull, ramachandran, neuroaesthetics

  • Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

  • What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."

  • the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/22/2009

• Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception

  Whoa! Wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the left "shrinks" time, while wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the right "expands" time. I'm intrigued by the linguistic implications of this, since so many of our time/space/numeric perceptions are based on our language.

  tags: mind hacks, perception, time, space, vision, neuroscience, linguistics, prism glasses

• Scoring/Criteria | Smarter Cities

  (Ed. note: Gah! I wrote this already, then Diigo deleted it! Or I did by accident...)My pre-stated theme for the summer was "data visualization" -- although it kind of got pushed aside by the completely unrelated theme "fictiontion writing" -- so instead of commenting on the methodology behind NRDC's new "smarter cities" ranking, I'm going to comment on how they presented their data.Things I loved: the division of cities by size and the ease of moving between those groups; the division of the data by category/scoring criteria; the control the user has over the list (i.e., clicking on a category like "green spaces" and re-ranking the table); the use of size-graded circles to indicate scoring; the mouse-over titles combined with simple icons to display each category; the orange and teal color scheme (of course!)Things that I think could be improved: instead of just naming a category when you mouse over it, it would have been nice to have an easy link or pop up description of what that category means (instead of a hidden link at the bottom of the table); the sizes of the circles are discrete (small, medium or large) not actually reflective of the numberical score, and that's not indicated very clearly; the "city profiles" should list the scores in each category; although city profiles have maps, there is no map on the front page -- this would have been nice for looking at metro areas (i.e., Portland is in the large city category, Beaverton is in the small city category -- you have no way of knowing that those two cities are both ranked high and geographically adjacent unless you do some clicking)Also, this has nothing to do with data visualization, but isn't the preference for the term "smarter cities" over "smart cities" reminiscent of the recent shift in sex-ed-speak from "safe sex" to "safer sex"? Just saying ...

  tags: NRDC, urban planning, smart growth, smarter cities, rankings, data visualization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/21/2009

• SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World

  Audio slide show of mathematicians describing their craft -- which, as many of them note, has as much in common with creative arts than with hard sciences.

  tags: math, SEED, science, art, abstract thinking, visualization, slideshow, audio

• Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: GreenXchange: Sustainable Innovation Meets the Creative Commons

  Although Joel Makower's writing could, as always, use some serious editing, there's some good info here about GreenXchange. It's a meeting of two of my favorite ideas: open source and sustainable design!

  tags: GreenXchange, creative commons, nike, open source, joel makower, best buy, sustainability, design

  • A small group of companies spearheaded by Nike have partnered with the nonprofit Creative Commons to try to change that. Their novel initiative, called GreenXchange, aims to allow companies to share intellectual property for green product design, packaging, manufacturing, and other uses. If it succeeds, this budding coalition could accelerate innovation across companies and sectors. At minimum, it stands to rewrite the rules about how companies share.

• Meatloaf : The New Yorker

  Poem by Donald Hall ...
  "In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
  
  where I last clambered in middle age,
  
  while I sit in my idle body
  
  in the car, in the cool parking lot,
  
  revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
  
  counting nine syllables on fingers
  
  discolored by old age and felt pens,
  
  my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
  
  to Triple A, too slow for the bigs."
  

  tags: poetry, donald hall, new yorker, baseball

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

• The Neuroscience of McGriddles : The Frontal Cortex

  This blog post from Jonah Lehrer is an ode -- or anti-ode, as in this case they amount to the same thing -- to the McGriddle and the greasy, fatty, energy-filled satisfaction it brings mankind. He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert's recent round-up in the New Yorker of obesity books and research (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all which I read yesterday...) and adds in a Duke study. The money quote: "Let's imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories."

  tags: jonah lehrer, obesity, fat, calories, dopamine, elizabeth kolbert, mcgriddle, psychology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/20/2009

(Note 7/21/09: Oops, didn't realize Diigo was going to stick these "highlights" into my blog. Anyways...they are my favorite parts of my favorite writer's "fat" article. Oh, and a bonus quote from Ian Frazier's "Shouts and Murmurs.")

• Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • Undeniably, the fat—the authors of “The Reader” are adamant advocates for the “f” word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty. A 2008 report by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale, noted that teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children
  • To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.
  • it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly.
  • in the new world order, it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time
  • Collecting the maximum number of calories with the least amount of effort is, after all, the dream of every creature, including those too primitive to dream.

• Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • The movement known variously as “size acceptance,” “fat acceptance,” “fat liberation,” and “fat power” has been around for more than four decades; in 1967, at a “fat-in” staged in Central Park, participants vilified Twiggy, burned diet books, and handed out candy. More recently, fat studies has emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry; four years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association added a fat-studies component to its national conferences, and in 2006 Smith College hosted a three-day seminar titled “Fat and the Academy.”

• XXXL : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.”
  • Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”

• Shouts & Murmurs: The Temperature of Hell: A Colloquium : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • So when you look at your kids asleep in their beds after you return to your homes this evening, I want you to ask yourselves, “What kind of Hell am I leaving for them, and for my grandchildren?”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/17/2009

• The New Ambassadors of Science § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

  Evan Lerner's even-headed week in review contemplates the intersection of science and faith: what (if anything) does it mean that the future head of the NIH, Francis Collins, is deeply religious?

  tags: seed, evan lerner, francis collins, NIH, BigLogos, Obama, unscientific america, science, faith, religion, policy, space-x, NASA

• At Wal-Mart, Labels to Reflect Green Intent - NYTimes.com

  Wal-mart is going after the holy grail (Edit 7/21/09: Wired's science cliche # 1! Sorry...) of green: a universal sustainability index. I'm pulling for them, truly. They've started by boiling all of sustainability down to these fiften questions (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/16/business/WalmartSlide.pdf)

  tags: nytimes, walmart, sustainability, products, consumer information, green

  • “Nobody else could pull this off,” said Michelle Harvey at Environmental Defense Fund, one of the groups involved in the creation of the index.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday night was my third (and penultimate) summer writing class. My instructor, and the class, has a stealthy way of understating themselves. I somehow came out with so much -- and I'm not sure how.

Last week's book was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. It wasn't my favorite book ever, but not being a spy person (I haven't even seen a James Bond movie all the way through), I can confidently say it's my favorite spy book. So far, that is...

After receiving probably one of the best comments ever (that my writing reminded everyone of Raymond Chandler), I'm going to be reading a few more spy books. For next week's class, we're reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. I also have a personal assignment to read (at some point) James M. Cain's Double Indemnity.

But...I ramble. Here's what you really want, a glimpse at my stab at fiction. I finally have a direction and a plot in mind (astonishing!), and more important a project that I can't wait to work on, but for now I'll just give you this. The set-up is that Greg is on an airplane:

Finally, Greg’s eyes rested on the woman next to him in the aisle seat. Greg guessed that she was 66, maybe a young 67, judging from her orange hair, orthopedic sandals and too-small Club Med Turks and Caicos T-shirt. She had two glossy bottles of sickly sweet liquid enamel. It was a cheesy brand like “Slick and Hard” or “Wet and Fine.” She took the bottle between her glistening left thumb and index finger and gave it two hard violent shakes like she was snapping the neck of a fatally wounded animal. With a taxidermist’s precision, she applied a third coat, giving each nail exactly two and a half strokes. Then she placed all ten fuchsia fingertips flat on her tray-table, leaned forward and blew.

Greg is a fraud investigator, on his way to Las Vegas for the National Conference of Fraud Examiners. (Like a good journalist, I lifted this delicious detail from reality. As Jim Sheeler would say, "Reality is too good...you couldn't make this stuff up!") There, he'll end up on a case that he's completely ill-prepared for. I'll let you know how it develops...

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/14/2009

• On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar - NYTimes.com

  Beautiful reflection on what Apollo means -- and what it means to be a journalist covering it -- from John Noble Wilford, reporter from the New York Times who wrote the original moon-landing story. It actually made me cry. Really.

  tags: nytimes, apollo, moon landing, john noble wilford, neil armstrong, NASA, space race, 40th anniversary, lunar, apollo11, apollo8

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/13/2009

• Book Review - 'You Are Here - Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall,' by Collin Ellard - Review - NYTimes.com

  I want to go there.

  tags: collin ellard, book, book review, jonah lehrer, nytimes, navigation, evolution, you are here, science writing, biology, space, urban design

  • He describes, for instance, the research of Rüdiger Wehner, a Swiss scientist who glued tiny stilts made of pig hair to the limbs of desert ants. Because the insects with longer legs consistently overshot the nest and got lost, Wehner demonstrated that ants have an internal odometer: they carefully count their steps when searching for food.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/10/2009

• Photo: Armadillo-like Crocodile Fossil Found in Brazil

  Pre-armadillo alligator! Rad! It's the perfect balance between cute and scary.

  tags: armadillo, alligator, national geographic, archaeology, fossil, evolution

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/09/2009

• ‘Unscientific America’: A Review | RealClimate

  A review of "Unscientific America" on Real Climate: "As they point out, we ‘eat our own’, when it comes to colleagues engaged in public outreach and science popularization. Case in point: Carl Sagan–a hero to many of us who value science outreach. One of the darker episodes in modern U.S. science history was the blocking by Sagan’s fellow scientists of his entry into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Evidently, a majority of his colleagues resented his having become a household name–something they presumably considered unbecoming for a scientist. What sort of message does it send when the most effective science communicator in modern history was shunned by his colleagues for his efforts? Certainly not a good one."

  tags: real climate, unscientific american, chris mooney, sheril kirshenbaum, war on science, science, culture, science literacy

• TheStar.com | GTA | Green bins: A wasted effort?

  The Toronto Star uncovers that its city's composting program "is a sham." Haven't you always wondered about that whenever you've recycled? Waste managers could just put it all in the same pile without anyone ever knowing...

  tags: trash, garbage, waste management, compost, toronto, toronto star, moira welsh

• Matt Nisbet responds to Pew survey of scientists & the public: Framing Science

  There are a lot of interesting things that came out of this Pew survey, but this jumped out at me:
  "When asked to evaluate various professions, roughly 70% of Americans answer that scientists "contribute a lot" to society compared to 38% for journalists, 23% for lawyers, 40% for clergy, and 21% for business executives. Only members of the military (84%) and teachers (77%) rate higher in public admiration and esteem."
  Wow, right? Didn't mention the stats for doctors, that'd be interesting to include.

  tags: nisbett, framing science, pew, pew research center, science, media, public, survey

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On Running and Writing

So this summer I'm taking a writing class, Inspired by Literature, through the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Last week, we read Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. Inspired by his counter-intuitive yet completely insightful descriptions and themes of exile and strangeness, I wrote this inkling of an essay (building on one paragraph that I had written before). Perhaps I'll expand it at some point. I really want to explore the idea of that, to run or write seriously, you can't simply do it in moderation -- even if that requires flirting with insanity.

Three years ago I lived in Gwangju, South Korea. More precisely, I lived between a slaughterhouse, a sawmill and an expressway, on the fifth floor of an apartment building with walls like soot-coated cardboard. The first time it rained – no, monsooned, they said – thick black sludge seeped through the roof, slithered down the stove and submerged the not quite custard colored linoleum kitchen floor.

Every night I left that apartment and ran. I ran past a charred brick bus stop. I ran past a dog, with a bark that sounded like rust, standing guard on a rooftop. Then I dropped into a series of rice fields. It was always colder there, and quiet. Once in the rice fields, I disappeared. There, under a brown or orange or olive sky, I was no more or less strange than anything or anyone else. The first night, as I tentatively high-stepped through a dark tunnel that underscored the expressway, I remember thinking that soon the location of each pothole would be instinctively mapped in my brain. After several weeks, I felt completely comfortable. I understood my surroundings. My confidence in my environment was a rare blessing for a foreigner living in Korea, but it was gone the instant I climbed the last dirt slope into the floodlit street.

Of course, I ran during the daytime, too. But the dark, and everything I saw or couldn’t see in it, felt safer. One night, the stalks of the rice plants, waist high the day before, were shorn at the ankles. A few nights later, the rice stubble was smoldering. Still, the glowing embers and cellulosic smoke felt more manageable than the throngs of uniformed school children who would giggle, shout and follow me, or the old men who would silently stare.

Running makes every place seem more familiar. Taking in strange streets and woods and crowds at seven miles an hour instead of three doesn’t make me any less lost. But when I run, getting lost is an imperative, not an accident. In Bangkok, I ran loops around a steaming hotel parking lot near the airport. In Ohio, I ran through lazy canyons. Sweat squelched between my toes and the air was like a full, dripping sponge. In Detroit, I sprinted across busy streets and through smudged glass walkways. In Hong Kong, I found myself alone, surrounded by thousands of people, running a marathon. In Big Sur, I pounded up sticky fire roads that caked my shoes in mud. Pounding back down, mud chunks the size of hockey pucks and quarters flew off my heels. In Washington, D.C., I failed to startle clusters of grazing deer with the sound of my feet. And I failed to evoke a smile, wave, or even nod from passing runners.

I never know, on any given day, quite how running will feel. Sometimes, despite all the right training, nutrition and sleep, my legs move like a spoon awkwardly clutched in a round, too-small fist, not delicately balanced between finger and thumb. And other times, despite all the wrong sickness, or partying, or lack of training, I run like bubbles easily escaping to the top of a tall glass of Brut. Even when I run in the places I call home, I can feel at odds with myself.

Running isn’t a zen-like state where I lose my mind, but a lucid state where I can finally find it. As I run, I often write. While my feet hit gravel or pavement or dirt, words bounce around my head, uninvited yet welcome, though they rarely touch a page. The last thing I want to do when I get home, dripping and exhausted, is sit down and type. So, instead, I read what two of my favorite author runners, Haruki Murakami and Robert Sullivan, have written about these curious sports. They know, too, that tying a pair of running shoes and smiting a blank screen is half the battle, though not the hard half. Like writing, running something that is perhaps healthy in moderation, but no doubt pathological in immersion. But there’s not a writer, or a runner, who would stop because of that.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/06/2009

• Notes on Science Writing | Brandon Keim | Earthlab Notes

  Brandon Keim, freelance science writer, answers the question, "how do you handle the pressures of the job and what motivates you to get up in the morning?"

  tags: brandon keim, wired, science journalism, freelancing, motivation, writing

• On cheerleaders and watchdogs - the role of science journalism : Not Exactly Rocket Science

  I hope I ultimately become the type of science writer that Young describes:
  "To sum up, we have two possible ways of acting as a watchdog - uncovering the hidden stories behind scientific discoveries, and casting a critical eye on those discoveries either visibly through the actual text or invisibly through the process of selecting what to cover."
  But I also think I have a (possibly idealistic and flawed) dream of science writing that actually inclues some, well, science. I hope to combine data analysis of my own with story-telling ... is that futile? Or just off-limits for science journalists? If that's the case, then maybe I need to steer more towards investigative journalism, at least in name. And can journalism be both investigative and narrative? I sure hope so... Oh well, I've made kind of a habit of not fitting into intellectual boxes, so I'll just plan on making a career out of doing just that.

  tags: ed young, science journalism, media, watchdog

• Ruins of the Second Gilded Age - The New York Times > Magazine > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 13

  These photographs are amazing -- but what I find most interesting abou this series is how much it depends on context. If you didn't know the back-story of the credit/mortgage/real estate/economy crisis, you might think these were simple construction projects caught in progress, on their way to completion, as opposed to stunted buildings frozen forever in a state of never-ending gestation.

  tags: nytimes, edgar martins, housing, real estate, photography, construction

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/01/2009

• Judge Rules for Salinger in Copyright Suit - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

  Seriously? I really can't see how this could be considered copyright infringement. If it is, then any reference or illusion to any fictional character could be considered copyright infringement as well. And...hasn't the Swedish author's lawyer heard of fair use?

  tags: jd salinger, copyright, catcher in the rye, nytimes, fair use

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/30/2009

• It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado - NYTimes.com

  The Times covers water rights in Colorado -- with a distinctly "old Western water laws are so quaint and kooky!" attitude. I wonder what Justice Greg Hobbs (best guest speaker ever!) would have to say about that. They don't fully capture the way westerners treat water with an air of the divine.

  tags: water, water rights, colorado, nytimes, rain, rainwater, grey water

• Science journalism: Supplanting the old media? : Nature News

  I finally started digging into Nature's special issue on the future of science journalism. The most interesting passage thus far (and the one that also rings most true to me, as a former-would-be-scientist/current-aspiring-journalist/lifetime-reader-of-science):
  
  "But there is a problem: the online world, both in its bloggier reaches and elsewhere, is polarized; people go to places they feel comfortable. Many of the people that Timmer originally hoped to reach when writing about intelligent design and the Dover trial probably go elsewhere for their news, he says, because 'it's easy for somebody to pick their news sources based on their politics, and get that version of scientific issues'. Dykstra worries that in a more fragmented media world, 'environmental news will be available to environmentalists and science news will be available to scientists. Few beyond that will pay attention.'
  
  "Others worry about the less questioning approach that comes with a stress on communication rather than journalism. 'Science is like any other enterprise,' says Blum. 'It's human, it's flawed, it's filled with politics and ego. You need journalists, theoretically, to check those kinds of things,' she says. In the United States, at least, the newspaper, the traditional home of investigations and critical reporting, is on its way out, says Hotz. 'What we need is to invent new sources of independently certified fact.'"

  tags: science, journalism, nature, media, blogging, geoff brumfiel

• The Future of Science Journalism | MIT World

  Wow, something I actually REALLY care about came in this edition of the MIT alumni newsletter! I swear I will watch this video of a conference at MIT on the future of science journalism ... as soon as I finish the first season of The O.C. (It is summer, after all!)

  tags: journalism, science, media, MIT, andrew revkin

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Amen.

From Nature's special issue on the fate of science journalism:

In an 1894 edition of Nature, [H.G.] Wells wrote of the need to employ what today is called narrative non-fiction: "The fundamental principles of construction that underlie such stories as Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue', or Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' series, are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer." (See Nature 50, 300–301; 1894.)

[Science journalism: Too close for comfort]

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/29/2009

• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker

  Malcom Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's book, "Free" mentioned in a link I diigo'ed last week.Gladwell takes issue with Anderson's agrument -- and seems to really have fun dissecting it:"If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? "And later, I can feel Gladwell getting giddy and all riled up:"For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that 'crap is in the eye of the beholder.') But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the 'abundance thinking' that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds."

  tags: new yorker, chris anderson, wired, books, free, digital, media, communication, malcolm gladwell

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/22/2009

• "A way out of the woods: Stimulus-funded project helps find path to forest compromise"

  Sometimes, you need to cut down a few trees to save the forest...

  tags: forestry, land use, management, logging, oregon

• Where Detroit still reigns | GlobalPost

  Cuba is full of vintage American cars! This story includes a great slide show."When the Castro government placed strict restrictions on car ownership and essentially banned the private sale of vehicles, it made an exception for those built before 1960. This amnesty has assured a market value for the vehicles, guaranteeing they would remain on the roads as long as Cuban mechanics could keep them there.""Many of the estimated 60,000 classic cars that remain on Cuba's roads are ruined hulks that lurch and rattle through the streets spewing black smoke, their engines a hodgepodge of cannibalized Russian parts and Cuban adaptations. But others are kept in immaculate condition by ultra-fastidious owners — including some who await the day they might be legally allowed to sell to American buyers."

  tags: cuba, cars, chrysler, automobile, vintage, globalpost

• Climate Change, Crop Catastrophe : CJR

  The Columbia Journalism Review asks why, with all the media attention California's struggling economy and climate change have been getting recently, few people have put two and two together and written about what climate change means for California's major industry: agriculture.This is timely for me, personally, because I just finished summarizing a paper on how agricultural land-use in California influences local climate and air quality. Oh, feedbacks are fun, and it's clear that this is an important -- and complex -- issue.From CJR:"This dearth in coverage is partly understandable. The potential effects of heightened atmospheric CO2 on the efficacy of the herbicide glyphosate don’t necessarily make for sexy reading. Moreover, while a great deal of research has been conducted on ways the greenhouse effect may alter the production of global cereal crops (rice, wheat, corn), the same is not true for horticulture (fruit, vegetables, nuts, and flowers), which, along with livestock and dairy, comprises the bulk of California’s agricultural output. And then there’s the fact that California is home to many distinct microclimates, and that shifting weather patterns and increased CO2 concentration may harm some crops while benefiting others."

  tags: California, economy, agriculture, climate change, media, journalism, columbia journalism review, CJR, crops, drought, water, Central Valley

• Science/AAAS | Science Magazine: Sign In

  Here's an editorial from Cristine Russell (of Harvard) about the future of science journalism: not a crisis, she says, but an opportunity."Hopefully, the recent crisis in science journalism in Western countries will be tempered by optimism about the overall future of international science journalism and the importance of reaching a global public in dire need of the best science and technology information."One way she mentions that veteran science journalists (who she presents as an invaluable resource -- she doesn't really mention us noobs) can improve their ability to cover complex issues is to participate in fellowship programs:"Opportunities for professional development of international journalists are expanding. Mid-career journalism programs at places such as Harvard, the University of California, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seek fellows from around the world."Of course, she *forgot* to mention the Scripps Fellowship for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism!

  tags: journalism, science, science journalism, media, technology, new media, AAAS

• Critical Mass § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

  An update on the science of traffic jams, with some cool solid liquid phase-change metaphors interesting ideas about traffic's inherent ability to infuriate us:"According to the calculations of Fey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.""Long commutes make us unhappy because the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we never adapt to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic were always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with.) As the Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, 'Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'"

  tags: seed, traffic, commute, city planning, particles, flow, solid, phase change, jonah lehrer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/19/2009

• "Let's Get Small": High Country News article on distributed energy

  This article takes you from a hamster wheel to Hawaii and back again with a thorough look into distributed energy projects. Localized, distributed generators versus large, centralized power plants is a debate that is as old as DC versus AC. Great story.

  tags: High Country News, Judith Lewis, energy, distributed energy, generators, transmission, grid, biogas digester, geothermal

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/17/2009

• Gender Knot Ch. 1 Follow Up: Who Has The Power of the Gaze? : Thus Spake Zuska

  A post on the ScienceBlogs network fit for Jezebel: what does the gaze achieve in a patriarchal society?

  tags: scienceblogs, thus spake zuska, gender, society, hierarchy, power, control, gaze

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/16/2009

• Is There a Better Word for Doom? § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM - Annotated

  And here's the article from Seed that spurred the discussion re: communicating climate change.

  tags: SEED, Climate change, communication, media, framing, matt nisbet

• A Climate (Communication) Crisis? - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

  Andy Revkin posts Randy Olson's response to Seed's question: "Is there a better word for doom?" (with regard to climate change)That was a mouthful, but basically, it's a fascinating ongoing discussion about how we are (failing to) communicate the immediacy of the dangers posed by climate change.

  tags: nytimes, andy revkin, randy olson, climate change, media, communication, framing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/15/2009

• Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free | Epicenter | Wired.com

  Hmmm, what does "Anderson's Law" -- that in the digital age, the price of nearly everthing approaches free -- mean for journalism? Here's the most useful passage:"Anderson sees many areas of digital content as obeying this law, including music, video, and video games (the big three 'shiny disc' industries), news, books, and e-mail. Under Anderson’s model, people will continue to pay good money to save time (that is, those who have more money than time will), lower their risk (such as paying to assure that their Second Life land will still be there, or that their operating system will be supported), because they love something (such as buying virtual items in free videogames), or to increase their status in a community."So people pay for time, security and status -- not quality of information. However, news can perhaps *indirectly* provide users with some of those. That's the power of information, right?

  tags: wired, chris anderson, digital, media, price, markets, free, economics, digital economy

• N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab

  This would have been awesome if it had surfaced two years ago, when I was studying for the GRE and actually quizzing myself on words like "laconic" and "inchoat" -- most of which I haven't encountered since. I guess I don't read enough Maureen Dowd.

  tags: nytimes, vocabulary, dictionary, usage, users, words, nieman journalism lab

• Surprise! J-school grads are finding jobs

  Saw this article (via the Nieman Journalism Lab Twitter feed) by Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance. It says that people leaving journalism grad programs in New York (Columbia, CUNY) are actually finding jobs at newspapers, magazines, etc.And just as I was thinking to myself "duh, that's because media companies are laying off the old work force and hiring cheap, web-savvy youngsters" I got to the last graph of the article:"My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as 'restructuring,' but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year."

  tags: journalism, jschool, grad program, grad school, workforce, media, jobs, employment

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Eugene Marathon 2009 Race Report: Clouds break, sun comes out, Jordan gets a PR

The Eugene Marathon, by the numbers...

(Format is inspired by the race report my Girls Heart Rockets teammate Kelly wrote after her amazingly fast Phoenix Rock and Roll Marathon.)

Days before marathon I was diagnosed with Giardiasis: 16
Days before marathon I finished Giardiasis medication: 9
Training days lost due to Giardiasis: 4
Training days lost due to snow: 4 (3 in Portland, 1 in Boulder...huh?)
Number of 20+ mile training runs: 3
Laps around Boulder Reservoir in those runs: 7
Number of sit-ups I did during training: Not as many as Kelly
Number of times I listened to "O Saya" and "Paper Planes" from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack during training: Too many to count
Average hours of sleep/night pre-marathon week: 6.5
Number of final projects/articles due pre-marathon week: 4
Number of finals I had to take the week after the marathon: 1
5K time at the Canine Classic, 8 days before the marathon: 21:50 (and first female, what? I thought this was Boulder...)
Miles traveled to get to race: ~1260
Modes of transportation used to get to race: 4 (car, bus, train, plane)
Bib number: 1842
Pre-race trips to the restroom: 10 +/-3
Times I saw my family during the race: 4 (~200m, ~mile 8, ~mile 17, mile 26.1)
Average pace for first 30K (18.6 miles): 7:47 / mile
Average pace for last 12K (7.5 miles): 8:24 / mile (ouch)
Final time: 3:27:49
Place in the 20-24 F division: 1
Days (on race day) until I turn 25: 14
Place among women: 35 / 768
Place overall: 267 / 1715
Minutes faster than last marathon, Hong Kong, March 2007: 27 min, 36 sec
Minutes faster than previous PR, Boston, April 2006: 6 min, 6 sec

Until I get pictures from my parents and video from my Flip cam (my brother did a good job filming, even if he got 4 minutes of ambient footage for every 1 second of me...), take a look at the official race photos. Can you spot the one where my face is melting?

Overall I had a wonderful race weekend. I flew in to PDX on Saturday (thanks, Joanna, for giving me a ride to the bus station in Boulder!) on a teeny plane basically one size up from a Cessna. My seatmate was a woman with a chronic leg-twitch from a pinched nerve. Neither of us got much sleep during the flight.

After my parents and brother picked me up, we made a short stop to see my grandmother (who lives near the airport) then high-tailed it down to Eugene to pickup my number and some swag at the race expo. My mom bought a stick. Excuse me, The Stick. That made me really happy.

Then we drove a bit of the race course -- we couldn't find the so called "hill." I found it the next day. Maybe I've been running on the flat-as-my-hair South Boulder Creek Trail too much, but it was bigger than I anticipated (though still totally negligible). It rained off-and-on all afternoon. Ahh, Oregon.

We had dinner at Beppe and Gianni's Trattoria, which was apparently the hot spot for prom night. The place was full of high-school couples with coordinated outfits -- including some girls wearing "prom court" sashes -- and runners in warm-ups. We had to wait over an hour for a table, which meant I got to sleep a tad bit later than I had hoped...

...which ended up being ok, because my dad's snoring didn't wake me up until about 4 a.m, 55 minutes before my alarm was supposed to go on. For the next 45 minutes, I would intermittently shout something like "Jesus!" or "Gahhhhh!" my mom would kick or nudge my dad, and I would get about 2 minutes and 13 seconds of peace.

But now for the race itself. Usually I zone out during races, and can't really remember much, so I'll do my best to give you some details. For example, I remember that it was drizzling at the start. I was probably more nervous than I have ever been before a race so I couldn't stand still in the corralls. I stuck with the 3:30 pace group for the first mile before taking off -- and I never looked back, woo! At some point I got within sight of the 3:20 pace group and realized I had better slow down. I felt great for the entire first half and was playing the mental game of whether I should keep up my pace (which was consistently ~7:40, although I think at one point I got excited on the lone "downhill" and ran a 7:00 split...oops) or slow down.

The course was beautiful. The rain lifted and the clouds settled into the trees up on the hills above (which luckily we were not running to). We wound around the Willamette River, past plenty of water fowl. Go Ducks! I lost count of how many times we crossed over, and so during mile 25 I wasn't sure whether we were on the Eugene side or the Springfield side. But by that point it really didn't matter.

There were just enough people to focus on and pass without the course -- mostly narrow bike paths -- being too crowded. Oh, and the fans were great. My bib had my name on it, so I got lots of "Go Jordan!" cheers. Thanks! Some people were giving out Dixie cups of beer at mile 24-ish, but I didn't see the sign that said "BEER" until after I had passed them. Otherwise I would have totally gone for it.

The last 10K was hell, as always, but this was by far my least painful marathon to date. And at least the sun came out! I never got a side ache -- the first time in 5 marathons that's happened. The final 800m was great -- the crowd was wonderful. I passed a woman in the last 50m, hee hee. I didn't get my victory lap around the track at Hayward Field, but there are rumors that they're trying to arrange that for next year. If they do, I may just have to come back. My legs felt pretty good the next day. I did some aqua-jogging and swimming on Tuesday, went for a baby run on Wednesday. And now, five days after the marathon, my legs aren't even sore...huh?

I'm not sure what my next race will be. I'm definitely doing more marathons, but at the moment I'm also tempted to see how low I can push my half-marathon time and if I can get my 5K time to where it was when I was in college -- or even faster.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 05/06/2009

• Poynter Online - Three News Organizations to Subsidize Some Kindle DX Purchases

  I'm excited that The New York Times wants to experiment with using the new Kindle DX as part of its business model. That shows that they are acknowledging that readers' habits for consuming the news have changed.
  
  BUT...
  
  They aren't going far enough. They are only acknowledging the physical differences in the way people read news, not the more complex psychological ones. People aren't just reading static, stand alone stories anymore. They rely on links, context, and interactivity.
  
  People aren't eschewing papers because they are, well, made of paper. It's because they can't archive them, share them, and search through them with the ease that they can digital news. Unless the Kindle DX varies greatly from the Kindle 2, forming this kind of partnership is still ignoring that people interact with news differently than they did before. It's all about sharing, bookmarking and linking -- regardless of what physical device you are using.

  tags: poynter, kindle, kindle DX, nytimes, journalism, news, media

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Digital Newsroom: AP and the news copyright conundrum

Wherefore art though AP?

The Associated Press doesn’t have the (huge) overhead of printing a physical paper. That cost is eaten by AP members -- namely, newspapers. So why hasn’t the AP taken the lead in the digital revolution? After all, as a wire service, they actually kinda sorta predicted the internet before it happened. But the AP been shrinking instead of expanding. Why?

Well, if you ask Dean Singleton, chairman of AP, he’ll blame copyright law. Art Brodsky at the Huffington Post sees flaws in this, and I do too. Copyright law has nothing to do with it.

Copyright, copyleft, or copymiddle?

I'll come back to the AP, but first, let's talk about copyrights. Let me preface this discussion by saying that you could describe my personal views on copyright law as “information freeganism.”

Maybe it’s my background in science, which relies on the free flow of information. Or maybe it’s my background as a writer. (Although some people try to sweep this fact under the rug, art also relies heavily on sharing information.) I tend to hold an idealistic view that people should create content, and once that information is created, it should be freely shared. The problem with that, clearly, is that if information is free, who will make it? Well, I think we should pay for the creation of content, not the access to it. Yes, there are problems with that too, like, how do you determine the value of content before it is given to the public? But I don't have to have all the answers yet, do I?

You can see why it's called copyleft, right?

I'm not quite copyleft, I'm more Creative Commons. (And not just because the White House embraces it.) The wonderful thing about Creative Commons is that it's an opt in or opt system -- what you want done with your work is totally up to you.

Last week during the Conference on World Affairs I live-blogged a panel called “Who owns the Creative Commons?” A mathematics professor, a Hollywood screenwriter, a technology blogger and sci-fi author, and a web-radio producer/musician debated internet copyright law.
Some of the points raised are relevant to Brodsky’s criticism of the AP:

• Sanjoy Mahajan said that ideas are not the same as physical objects. Sharing them doesn’t take anything away from the person who originally had them. The original purpose of U.S. copyright law was to promote the progress of ideas, not hinder it.
  
• For some, like Andy Inhatko, creation is fundamentally different from sharing or modifying. (It takes more moaning and groaning.)
  
• Ultimately, society (not AP, not Napster) will collectively decide how copyrights will work on the web.

What the AP distributes are not just creative works (yes, I think that reporting is a creative process, so I will refer to it as a creative work), but are also ideas – namely, information and analysis about the world. I think it is necessary for people to cite and reference them...often. You simply cannot discuss an event without referring to a description of it, and in that sense reproducing a news article qualifies as fair use.
So, what is the AP to do, seeing as they don’t have a legal claim here?

All's not lost, AP

If I got stuck – planned or not – in an elevator with Dean Singleton, chairman of AP, here’s what I would tell him: You should rejoice because your position makes you more suited to adapt to the internet than other “traditional” news outlets.
Here’s what you have:

• a network of national and international reporters and editors,
  
• a time-tested way of distributing your information,
  
• a recognized and trusted brand

What don’t you have? Just one thing, but it’s kind of a biggie:

• a collection of individual users who are accustomed and willing to pay for its content.

The reason it doesn’t have that is because, until now, its users are newspapers. Big, old, dying, newspapers.

Singleton my friend, I’d say, it’s not you. It’s them. The AP is in a strange position where while it is losing its users (newspapers) -- and by doing so, it is atrophying and losing itself. But it isn’t by any means losing its audience, the people who actually read the stories. And that’s the major problem here, not the internet and not copyright law.

Let’s just imagine for a moment, Singleton, that all the newspapers are gone. Where will AP license it’s content? Well, websites, of course, he’ll say.

Great! But there’s a problem with that. On the web, why license when you can link?
In light of that, the AP, which has a goal of being the most ubiquitous, most trusted, “essential global news network,” should be happy people are already linking to their content willy nilly, right?

Well they would be, if they weren’t so good at blending into the foreground. The way the AP distributes its content to newspapers, it must blend in. But if it is going to survive when all of its co-op members crumble, it must learn to stand out.

To brand itself better.

To remind people that they read AP stories because they are well-reported, well-written, well-edited and most important, far-reaching.

As Brodsky writes, "The news business has a lot of problems, no doubt. Some are beyond its control, but some are self-inflicted."

So, Singleton…seize your power! Embrace and encourage the spread of your content – and it will spread – and you will succeed. You should be setting the new standard for your member newspapers, not taking a cue from them. As Mahajan pointed out in the CWA panel, when European works weren’t protected under U.S. copyright law in the 19th century, it actually turned out better for the artists. Publishers were able to make copies of their work cheaply, and sell them cheaply, and they outsold copyrighted versions by a large enough factor to blow away their profits.

And you, AP, can be a publisher too. A web publisher. If, of course, that’s what you want. Or rather, if that what your “owners” – the 1500 newspapers who make up your co-op – want. At the heart of this, you’ve got to win them over, too.

News organizations, which hold the transparency of information as one of their key values, are never going to survive if they insist on putting up a gate between the news and the people.