via vonderauvisuals

Maybe it’s the spring weather or the fact that my daughter asked me her The Robot and the Bluebird twice this morning but Roger Ebert’s death hit me harder this afternoon than I would have expected.  According to Twitter and Facebook, this sadness is shared by many other Chicagoans of my generation.

Perhaps our sadness is about more than Ebert. Look at the most evocative Ebert photos going around as we sit virtual shiva: many of them are black and white shots from back when we were kids. From back before cable (it came late in Chicago) and Twitter, when we were an audience, and watched TV and read newspapers and listened to the radio. When we were passive we watched and consumed and grew icons. And Ebert was one of the last ones we had. (And his Chicagoness lived in his Twitter handle.)

Ray Rayner and Bozo were there when we were kids, but that was fleeting. Siskel was always a bit distant. Steve Dahl hasn’t been the same since breaking up with Garry Meier, and hasn’t been on the radio in years. John Brandmeier was key to me, and is back in force, but he’s always been more Wisconsin than Chicago– save for when he went Hollywood.

Jesse Jackson never really was Chicago, at least not on the North Side- he was national. Most Chicagoans didn’t know much about Obama prior to the convention speech. Saul Bellow was a bit too old and a bit too distant. Harold Washington died so soon. Mayor Daley hasn’t been seen much in the two years since leaving office, other than in our previous celebrity civic mourning.

We have Ditka, the coach. Sweetness is gone. Jim McMahon turned out to be an asshole– or always was, and we just didn’t know. Michael Jordan was never ours. Pippen gave up on us when he refused to enter that game against the Knicks in ’94. Urlacher didn’t want us.

Derrick Rose is an icon in waiting, one of our own whom we follow for years. But that feels more doubtful each day that passes.

The joy of today is a celebration of Ebert’s fortitude– not just in his battles against cancer and alcoholism, but for successfully transitioning from the mass media age to our present fragmented one. Among Ebert’s mourners today are people who discovered him on Twitter as well as people who found him through Sneak Previews on Channel 11. (The duo began on public television.)

There may never be another Chicagoan read and watched by so many of our neighbors.

(Another Chicago institution, Kartemquin Films, has been working on Life Itself, a documentary about Ebert.)

Preparation

• Scheduling. I take a lot of early (I had a 5:30 am this week) and late evening (I had a 9:30 pm) flights, allowing me to restrict most trips to only one night away. (The downsides of this is approach is that I woke up at 3:45 am one day and returned home after midnight the other.)

• Packing. Mobility is my priority. When I land, I want to get straight to work and not mess around with baggage claim or dropping bags at a hotel. This week I inaugurated my new Square bag from Defy and, though a tight fit, it worked. For one night away I carry my always-packed bathroom ziplock, one change of clothes, a Field Notes book, two pens, a magazine, gum and an eyeshade, along with a Macbook Air, iPad and chargers. When I’m traveling to a place with a pool, I save space by bringing a bathing suit instead of gym clothes and shoes. (Swimming has the advantage of giving me a workout in about half the time I’d put in at the gym.) I try to avoid the added burden of a winter coat. If I’m worried about getting stuck in a frigid O’Hare cab line or El train I’ll bring a scarf or a hat, which I can tuck into my bag once I reach the cab.

• Content. I try to pick my gear the night before, so the day before a trip, I’m extra-conscious to ABC, Always Be Charging. I update my digital content: Pocket, iTunes for TV, podcasts, email and the 2-3 Google Docs that are most pressing. By adding the boarding pass to my phone early I remove one task that I need to remember on the day of travel.

• Provider role. One of my favorite things to do the day before leaving, particularly if I’m traveling on a weekend, is to make a grocery store run or cook a meal. I walk out the door know that the family is supplied, satisfying some Neanderthal urge.

The cab ride

I rarely journey to, or from, the airport during rush hour so I head for the airport 80- 90 minutes before a flight. (Tripit Pro warns me of delays.) Once I get on the road, I tuck my keys and my wallet away in my bag, keeping only my ID and phone in my pocket. If the hour is decent, and if I have no other calls scheduled, I may pop open Brewster, which lists the contacts with whom I’ve gone the longest without talking, and check in with some work contacts. If it’s late, I may open my iPad for some TV or check in with friends on the West Coast. My road warrior Kryptonite is that I cannot read in a moving car, which motivate me to take public transit when feasible.

The airport

• TSA: I have TSA Pre which is the greatest thing ever– if I get a green light, I can go through a pre-9/11 style security walkthrough in under a minute. Recently, as more passengers have become approved for the program, morning lines can be long and I may slide into the standard lines when they’re shortest.The TSA  does not require you to take small computers out of your bag, so I don’t. (It’s easiest for the screener if you lay your bag flat.) I don’t put my shoes in a bin– the fact that so many other people do so is gross.

• Vigilance. Once screened by The Man, I check the airport monitors to confirm my gate number. I also look for earlier flights that might have become delayed– a couple of times a year, I’m able to make hop one. When it happens, it’s a bonus of a couple of free hours.

• Coffee. If it’s morning and I have time, my next decision is whether to caffeinify or not. Boarding with a hot beverage can complicate things, but more often than not I am the better for it. If I have extra time I browse the newsstand.

• Anticipating the call to board. This is the most inexact part of my regimen. I travel enough that I’m usually in one of the early boarding groups. However, I haven’t found a way to divine when the call to get on will be made. When I’m not in a meeting or working on something urgent, I aim to be at the gate between 30-40 minutes before the flight time, but more often than not I end up hanging around the gate along with everyone else anticipating a signal from the gods. If you have tips on how to game this better, I’d love to hear them.

The plane

If I board early, I’ll break out my laptop and churn through some email– I can often get in 15-20 minutes of work while waiting for the plane to load. Or, increasingly, I’ll use Mailbox on my phone.

Once the superstitious call to turn off our phones comes, I’ll put on eye shades and zone out until we’re in the air and cleared to use electronics. (I’d give most of my naps if Sen. McCaskill comes through.)

I usually don’t buy wifi access– it’s expensive and I can usually manage to be offline for a few hours without anything breaking. So, while I’m in the clouds I can’t access anything from the cloud. If I forget to download that draft memo, I can sketch out a new project or do email. If I’m doing email, I’ll usually double up with TV on an iPad.

Seven concluding tips:

1. Every second can count. I’ve had the door closed in my face– and then cursed myself for buying that coffee or for not evading the family walking four-abreast in the terminal.

2. Don’t be that guy. Air travel is generally not fun, but we’re all in this together. On about every third trip there’s one traveler who rushes to be the first one off the plane on or complains loudly to the flight staff about something trivial. You don’t want to be that guy– though we all have our moments. (This can conflict with #1, above.)

3. Perspective. Your main goal is to get to where you’re going safely, and the workers at the TSA, the airports and on the airlines succeed at that 99.999% of the time. They deserve more thanks and less grief.

4. Release your inner mysophobe. I avoid touching anything in the bathrooms, make detours to hit every hand sanitizer and wash my hands every chance I get.

5. Hydrate. Lotion (see #4), water and nasal spray are great friends.

6. Snacks. You don’t need a lot, but bring enough to get by.

7. Don’t get stuck without a place to sleep. If a late flight gets canceled, Hotel Tonight has good deals, and a great sign-in process.

8. Traveling with a child is a whole other thing– none of the above may apply. It deserves a separate post.

(Also, check out these travel tips from Elise Hu and Ben Huh.)

[fixed a couple of tyops-- thanks @divideby0!

Neither O. nor I am are particularly handy– both of our first reactions to the drills, saws and wood glue was to split. Because I was with out-of-town guests who were into it, I put up a brave face and ended up learning a lot. 

The Lab’s staff were *way* into being there, but not garrulous about pushing their passion on kids or parents. I watched one of them warily eye a father and son precariously saw some wood, and asked him at what point he intervenes. “I try to wait for that point between after a kid begins to be frustrated but before they want to give up.”

Other things I saw while tinkering:

• Guidelines, not rules: They want to create a space that encourages learning through experimentation, and obedience and rote behaviors. For instance, they’ve established a guideline that kids leave what they create at the Lab to display to other visitors, but if a kid makes something they want to take home, that’s cool. (The two clear rules I observed were 1) parents are responsible for their kids, and 2) eye protection is a must when working a drill or saw.)
• Focus:  It’s rare that we’re fully focussed on a single activity. (Texting while driving, case in point.) When you’re using a real saw or drill, you’re focussed on that. 
• Injuries: It’d be inaccurate to say there was a casualness about injuries, but their was a pragmatic realization that when kids are around real tools, cuts and splinters are likely outcomes, and they deal with them as they arise. 
• Assessing impact and counting smiles: My day job focuses on the impact of social projects so I was curious how they’d evaluate the success of their project. As we spoke about what they might measure (attendance, repeat customers, consumption of materials), a boy broke out a smile just as we finished sawing a piece of plywood. “I did that!” the smile declared clearly. I wonder if the Lab could count those smiles and report them to. Boeing (the Lab’s main supporter).
• Parents and letting go: As with youth hockey and ballet, I suspect the Lab will find that corralling parents may prove to be as much work as working with the kids. There’s a moment as a parent where you step back and say “holy shit, my kid can do that!” It’s a scary moment, a moment that drums home, yet again, that this little person is not yours, but their own, and that your time with them is fleeting. It’s awesome and terrifying at the same time. 

The Lab has been open for less than three weeks and looking for volunteers who want to help out. Whether or not you have a tinkering kid, it’s worth braving Navy Pier to check it out. 

An hour before President Obama’s second term officially begins, the dominant media meme is: he’s older and different than he was four years ago. 

David Maraniss in the Washington Post:

He comes to this term in a new place as a man and as a politician, not only forged by the experience of his mistakes but also more integrated.

Jodi Kantor in the NYT:

Up close, though, those who know the Obamas say they can see an accumulation of small shifts in the president and the first lady since they walked the inaugural parade route four years ago.

Have you ever been in a job for more than four years? Were you surprised to realize “the accumulation of small shifts” in how you did your work or that you learned from mistakes?

To what degree does this psycho-analysis predate our micro-media age, and to what degree can we attribute it to 44′s unique place in history? In 1985, did Jack Germond wonder about how 73 year-old Reagan had progressed in the job. 

For my part, the buzz at National Airport Saturday morning, such as it was, felt more like arriving in Madison or Columbus on the eve of a big game than the emotional hajj-like scene I found at BWI four years ago. I take that not as an indictment of Obama for allowing hope to fade. Instead, I recall what the extraordinary tense few weeks that led up to that freezing Monday morning. Last night in DC there was no moment of jubilation equivalent last Inauguration-eve, when Jay Z hopped on stage to join Jeezy for My President. 

If circumstances had been different– if Obama had been #42 instead of #44 and oversaw the chilled out 90, if he we weren’t comparing him to the “protean” Bubba– I suspect we would not be so focussed on Obama’s level of comfort with pardoning turkeys and the degree of fervor at his basketball games.

Eddy Hartenstein. One tweet, c. 2009: “Reporters angry that I made LAT big $$ today. Lee suggested I use “new media” to assuage. Talking didn’t work; perhaps Twitter is the key?”

Craig Jacobson. No evident Twitter presence.

Bruce Karsh. No evident Twitter presence.

Ross Levinsohn. Active presence. 

Ken Liang. No clear presence.

Peter Liguori. There are two people with his name visible on Twitter, seems unlikely that either is the new Tribune CEO.

Peter Murphy. No evident presence. (But Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy *is* on Twitter.)

Harper Reed, fresh off his stint doing technology for the Obama campaign, was asked at NewsFoo if he had any advice for journalists, and answered “Fucking do math.” Silver was the most prominent mathematician in journalism this year. In Out Magazine (which named Silver Person of the Year) Nick Denton captured Silver’s key attribute: “He’s not necessarily the best statistician, but he might be the best stats geek who can also write—and perform on television.”

Silver’s predictive modeling was not just accurate– it was popular, too. During the last stretch of the election, Fivethirtyeight represented one-fifth of the New York Time’s page views. “A lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate, ” said NYT executive editor Jill Abramson.

Politics is the second journalistic field that Silver has disrupted. Creator of the PECOTA performance projection, he was a key part of the popularization of math-driven analytics in baseball. (In between he was a burrito judge.) “Nothing could have prepared Silver better for the slings and arrows of a surly and willfully obtuse pundit class than working on the fringes of sportswriting over the past decade,” wrote David Roher this fall.

Silver’s political analysis extends the progress made in baseball journalism over the last decade. Amateurs-led efforts like Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs have provided better coverage of the sport than the paid professionals in the newsroom. In an odd reversal, fans imbued in analytics are better informed than those who continue to be paid to cover the sport. (ESPN, the worldwide leader, splits the difference, employing both logicians, like Keith Law, and bloviators, like John Kruk. The latter get more airtime, the former are mostly found behind the subscription pay wall.) We saw some of the last manifestations of this gulf this year when the Baseball Writers Association of America, motivated by non-analytical attributes like “guts” and “clutchness” voted the American League Most Valuable Player award to Miguel Cabrera instead of Mike Trout. Silver commented on it here. Despite the vote, advanced sports analytics are becoming commonplace. Earlier this month stats-head blogger John Hollinger was hired to help run the Memphis Grizzlies; Baseball Prospectus’s Kevin Goldstein joined the Houston Astros earlier this year and statistics in like QBR have caught on with ESPN.)

Baseball and politics have lots of data to work with. Can other types of journalism being transformed by data analytics? Financial news? Education? The environment?

Jonathan Stray argues that his work “has obvious lessons for journalism about data-related topics such as statistics and uncertainty. But I think I also see wider implications for the evolving role of the political journalist. At heart, these changes are about the response of journalism to a world that is increasingly complex and networked.”

Silver gave his own take on his impact on journalism in this podcast interview with Bill Simmons in which he indicted publications like Politico. “In politics, you can have a month where nothing of any import whatsoever happens. But you still have to have Politico produce a paper seven times a week and that’s when they’re trying to start trouble.”

One frontier Silver has did not claim in 2012 is that of transparency. In 2008, Silver was up-front with his political proclivities: “I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama.”  In an October interview with Charlie Rose, Silver said he that he stopped voting after joining the Times. Silver started his political journalism in 2007 blogging as Poblano DailyKos.com—that, coupled with his avowed 2008 support for Obama suggest that his leanings are left. On the other hand, he told Rose “I’d say I am somewhere in-between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose.” It’s too bad Silver can’t be up front about his political opinions, that we can’t digest his analysis with clarity of his preferences.

Some other threads that stand out as the year ends:

• Alexis Madrigal’s real time fact-checking of Sandy-related photos. (The Nerds Go Marching In, his article about the Obama tech team was a stand out in the genre of Obama tech team coverage.)

• Mat Honan’s very personal piece about privacy and hacking. (Mat took three places on Pocket’s list of most saved articles-- Madrigal took a fourth spot.)

• Kony 2012, “the most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever” per Sam Gregory. Dayo Olopade argued that “the mundane march of progress in poor countries is what “awareness” campaigns often miss.” Ethan Zuckerman’s post stands as a key summary of the story and its implications; as does Gregory’s; I cited them both earlier this year.) Emily Yu has notes from an impromptu discussion on the phenomena that took place at SXSW.

Here’s what I remember seeing that extra-long summer:

The Princess Bride

No Way Out

Born in East LA

Stakeout

Who’s That Girl? (severely underrated)

The Witches of Eastwick

Dragnet

Hamburger Hill

Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll

Summer School

Superman IV

La Bamba

The Pick-up Artist

Three O’Clock High

• Derek Anderson, Founders Are Not Heroes. Let’s Get Back To Work: “Work life balance is less about keeping everything equal as it is making sure everything is in order.”
• Jackie Coleman and John Coleman, How Two-Career Couples Stay Happy: “The walls between work and a personal life are falling. Finding ways to integrate them thoughtfully can be a professional and personal boon.”
• Alexis Madrigal takes issue with Matt Richtel’s Silicon Valley Says Step Away From the Device, the latest NYT redflag about the dangers of technology.
  • Alexis argues that we have “a problem with the way we approach labor, not our devices. Our devices enabled employers to make their employees work 24/7, but it is our strange American political and cultural systems that have allowed them to do so.”
  • Richtel uncovers “a broader effort in the [Silicon] valley to offer counterweights to the fast-paced lifestyle. Many tech firms are teaching meditation and breathing exercises to their staff members to help them slow down and disconnect.

(As I put together this summary I’m watching the Mad Men episode, The Beautiful Girls, in which Don suddenly deals with the presence of his daughter Sally in his workplace. He tries, sorta.)

Netflix’s Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico provide the history:

In 2006 we announced the Netflix Prize, a machine learning and data mining competition for movie rating prediction. We offered $1 million to whoever improved the accuracy of our existing system called Cinematch by 10%….A year into the competition, the Korbell team won the first Progress Prize.

Amatriaan and Basilico go on to explain why Netflix will never use the code that won the prize. Basically, technology, and consumer preferences, progress, and “did not seem to justify the engineering effort.” “It wasn’t just that the improvement was marginal,” said Mike Masnick, ”but that Netflix’s business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too.”

The Netflix Prize was quite different from most philanthropic contests. Still, I wonder if we might discern lessons for those running contests today:

• Adapt quickly to market, technological and audience behavioral changes. 
• You don’t always get what you’re looking for. 
• Don’t outsource your core business. (Borrowed from my weekend reading of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness.)
  (I’m streaming Ballerina as a write this.)
   

via h.koppdelaney

This year, however, we have more material to scrutinize than just America’s best radio show. The Mike Daisy incident, coupled with ubiquity of Kony2012, has me thinking about the power of stories, and how our attraction to the narrative affects our ability to process pure data.

David Carr points out that the “the parts of [Daisy's] show with which his audience connected so viscerally were the ones that seem to have been based on nothing more than a need for drama.” And that shouldn’t be a surprise.

In 2006, Mark Breitenberg argued that the “narrative is the condition of memory. We remember stories better than separate elements because narrative structure is so deeply embedded in our history and in our brains.” The notion of our fundamental tie to the story underlies much of George Lakoff’s work. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff wrote, “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

If we are predisposed, through evolutionary or cultural forces, is Daisy being unrealistic when writes, in defense of his lying that “story should always be subordinate to the truth?” Did Jason Russell do anything wrong when he drew the attention of over 100 million people to events in Uganda– even if he did so by bending the truth, recasting the issue and by being, in Ethan Zuckerman’s accurate description, “emotionally manipulative?” Sam Gregory acknowledges that “simplification is necessary for some audiences. But when does it go too far?” Zuckerman worries that “if we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?” Are Sam and Ethan fighting an uphill battle against human cognition? It’s a question in which even the Pentagon is interested.

The roots of the Greg Smith phenomena also lie in our quest for a compelling narrative. His “Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs” missive quickly became a meme, most famously generating Darth Vader‘s Why I’m Quitting the Empire. Even at the height of the anger of the Goldman Sachs bailout, did any journalist or frustrated taxpayer produce anything that caught the public imagination in the way that Smith’s personal story has? (It was not a spook, but, inspired by Smith’s resignation, ProPublica’s Cora Currier looked at 10 years of SEC investigations of the company.)

As I did above, Dan O’Neil looked to his own archives to make sense of Daisy. He turned the Wayback Machine all the way back to 1997 to revisit “trut.” (Apparently, there were crazy conspiracies about drug dealing contras back in 1997.)

Tabloids like Star and Globe are leading practitioners in a new standard for honesty, and they don’t deserve to be held out with two fingers like a stinky rag…The quotes are completely made up but they seem to represent something true. The quotes end up being what the person would have said had they been honest and if they had actually spoken to the reporter who wrote the story.

I offer as an additional data-point the importance the story to my toddler who, before drifting into sleep each night demands “More story! More story!”

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