Seth Godin, an exceptional marketing mind, writes about the recent changes in airport security that should have air company executives shuddering:
When you need an additional 90 minutes, can’t bring your laptop (or even a book on some routes) and can’t have a bottle of water, the calculus for most trips is fundamentally changed. Years ago, Tom Peters argued hard and long for the value of showing up, of being there in person, of establishing a face to face relationship with the person on the other side.
The prevalance of online video, constant skype connections and the multiple threads of data we get online, combined with the enormous overhead that flying now brings might just change the story for a long time to come.
I know that I was not too thrilled about the long wait at airports *before* this recent incident. Now, knowing that I won’t be able to use a laptop or iPod for the duration of a trip (not to mention worrying about what’s going to happen to that sensitive electronic equipment once it’s stowed under the cabin) makes me even less a potential customer for the airlines.
Many of my trips have been made in rental cars just because I don’t want the hassle of an airport. I suspect car rental companies are going to see booming business in the coming months, even with the high gas prices.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Chatting online with Kiyoshi Martinez, Daily Illini alum, and noted this post tonight. Just to show how old I am, I remember owning the tape of the Violent Femmes album that "Gone Daddy Gone" appeared on originally!
Check out the YouTube video. YouTube is a great resource for old band videos.
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Filed under: Misc
Okay, so this is probably very old, but I found it today using StumbleUpon, the extremely addictive plug-in for FireFox. Steve Jackson’s version of "Politics Explained."
I especially enjoyed this one:
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
I apologize for the lack of posting these past few days. I’ve been moving from South Carolina to Virginia where I’m set to begin my new job at Emory & Henry College.
Today, via cdharris, I found this neat story about a photographer who uses old flatbed scanners to make unconventional large format photographs. Check out this mirror of his site – fascinating stuff, although it takes a bit of technical skill to take the scanners apart.
Filed under: Sports
Apple’s web site has a profile of cycling photographer Graham Watson. Apple Pro Profiles – Graham Watson.
What’s even cooler is that they have a gallery of his images from this year’s tour available to view (link). There are supposed to be new images every day.
In other tour related news, the New York Times reports that Floyd Landis is looking at hip replacement surgery after the Tour.
CHÂTEAUBOURG, France, July 9 — Second over all in the Tour de France and a strong favorite to win the race when it ends July 23, Floyd Landis confirmed on Sunday a report that he had been riding in severe pain for four years because of a degenerative hip condition he had kept secret. He said he was planning to have his right hip replaced in an operation.
“If I hadn’t had a bicycle-racing career, I would have had the hip replaced two years ago because I don’t really want to deal with the pain,” said Landis, the 30-year-old American leader of the Phonak team from Switzerland.
Describing the pain, he said in an interview at his team hotel in Châteaubourg before the Tour’s eighth stage, “It’s bad, it’s grinding, it’s bone rubbing on bone.
“Sometimes it’s a sharp pain,” he continued. “When I pedal and walk, it comes and goes, but mostly it’s an ache, like an arthritis pain. It aches down my leg into my knee. The morning is the best time, it doesn’t hurt too much. But when I walk it hurts, when I ride it hurts. Most of the time it doesn’t keep me awake, but there are nights that it does.”
He said he intended to compete after the operation.
If Landis were able to come back and seriously compete in the Tour after having hip replacement, it would be almost as impressive as Lance Armstrong’s return from cancer treatment.
technorati tags:tourdefrance, floydlandis, grahamwatson, photography, cycling
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Filed under: Sports
My friend Eric Siegmund reminds us that the Tour de France starts today, and it’s off to an inauspicious beginning, as this AP story details – Doping scandal strips Tour de France of its favorites:
STRASBOURG, France (AP) — A doping scandal knocked Tour de France favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso out of the race Friday and threw the world’s most glamorous cycling event into chaos.
The decision to bar Ullrich, Basso and others implicated in a doping probe in Spain also sent a strong signal that cheating, or even suspicions of cheating, will not be tolerated.
Tour director Christian Prudhomme said organizers’ determination to fight doping was “total.”
“The enemy is not cycling, the enemy is doping,” he said the day before the start of the Tour.
Riders being excluded will not be replaced, meaning a smaller field than the 189 racers originally expected.
Spanish rider Francisco Mancebo (4th last year) was also pulled from the race.
All in all, that’s a huge chunk of the top crop of riders who won’t be riding in the next few hours. Add that to the absence of the greatest of them all – Lance Armstrong – and the TdF organizers surely are hoping for a miracle winner to redeem this year’s race.
Eric sums it up well in an addendum to a longer post about the TdF – But…what a black eye for the world of professional cycling.
Filed under: New Media
Lost Remote, a great resource for video and broadcast-related news, writes about Comcast’s move into the online video space – Comcast to build web video portal.
The original story is from the Wall Street Journal, which means it’s not available to those of us who don’t subscribe. But this is the key quote for me:
… writes WSJ’s Peter Grant. “They raise the prospect of two cable companies competing against each other for viewers, one providing traditional TV and the other offering videos to computers. Indeed, some cable operators have expressed concern about Comcast’s plans, noting that cable operators currently work on ventures together and don’t compete with one another.”
(emphasis added)
That seems to really be part of the problem. Cable operators operate in what amounts to a competition-less vacuum. I’m think of the word “collusion.” And it’s been that way ever since the mid-70s when Cable began rolling out and locking up monopoly licensing deals with local municipalities.
As Eric Frenchman wrote earlier this week, the solution to “Net neutrality” is to break the stranglehold on the “last mile” of Internet access, the point where the Internet enters your home.
What this should be about is the competition for the last mile to your household. That’s what the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) promised us a long time ago per the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The first paragraph on that link says it all: “The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business — to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.”
Ten years later, this is still not true. I live 35 minutes in rural NJ from the former HQ of the Old and Better AT&T’s and Verizon’s current HQ in Basking Ridge NJ and I still have no real competition for local. I can either choose Comcast (bad service and constantly changing fees) and Embarq the local phone company formerly known as Sprint. That’s it. What we have now is nobody trying to enter local because the RBOCs and Cable companies protect their ownership of the last mile to the house.
What does this have to do with Net Neutrality? Everything. Since the duopoly of cable/RBOCs control the last mile we are held hostage to whatever rates they want to choose for access. Since they can’t or won’t squeeze consumers anymore they are going after the big content providers. The problem is that since they wiped out real competition, we have no upgrades to our access and they can charge whatever they want, all the time protecting their turf.
What is even worse is that some of us are limited by pitiful rural access. For the past five years, I have lived in an area where Cable does not reach, and BellSouth has not upgraded the telephone service to allow for DSL. The only way I could get high-speed access is by satellite, which is ridiculously expensive for the limitations on uploads and the delay that prevents online real-time activities (like gaming).
Here’s hoping the cable companies begin to get a taste of real competition, as the result can only be an improvement.
Filed under: Misc
MacZOT is offering iClip, a clipboard app for Mac OS 10, free until July 2 (the regular price is $19.99).
Thanks to LifeHacker for the tip.
Monday, Washington Post media critic Jack Shafer pointed out a “mythical number” related to the “cost” of identity theft to the economy.
Reporters have so much faith in the pure power of numbers that many will inject into a piece any ones available as long as they 1) are big; 2) come from a seemingly authoritative source; and 3) don’t contradict the point the reporter is trying to make.
The magic number for journalists covering the identity theft beat has been $48 billion—the estimated annual losses suffered by identity theft victims—which carries the Federal Trade Commission’s imprimatur. Since its arrival in 2003, the number has appeared in hundreds of news stories, including a May 30 New York Times piece.
Shafer notes that academics have been decrying the use of mythical numbers by the press for decades.
The Shafer story reminded me of a recent “On the Media” broadcast that looked into the “Prime Number” phenomenon, in which there seems to be approximately 50,000 predators online, but the number 50,000 seems to resurface as an estimate in abberant social phenomenon over the years, like child abductions, and satanic cult sacrifices.
The reason such illogical numbers keep cropping up is because journalists use numbers as proof like some preachers use biblical citations as “proof texts.”
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Steve Ross, a former professor at Columbia University’s School of
Journalism, who taught a class on reporting numbers, says journalists
have their own reasons for ornamenting their stories with digits.STEVE ROSS:
Look, 30, 40 years ago, ever since I’ve been in the business, the
editor will come down to you and say, add a number. It builds
credibility. Got to have a number in there.BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But when it comes to crime, a good number is hard to find.STEVE ROSS:
The only reasonably accurate national crime statistics come out of
something called the Uniform Crime Report. The Uniform Crime Report
only tracks eight different crimes – rape, murder, auto theft, that
sort of thing. If it’s not a crime that is tracked – child pornography
is not tracked, for instance – there is no hard and fast national
number that comes out of that. At the very best, it’s a number that’s
extrapolated from a more limited survey.
You can read the transcript of the OTM program, or listen to the report (mp3).
Two great resources for deconstructing some of the mythical numbers are: Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists and More Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues, both by Joel Best. Best uses practical examples of current social issues to illustrate how different groups distort numbers (intentionally or not) to suit their interests. They are a very readable introduction to the topic.
Shafer story found via the institute for analytic journalism
Today’s Greenville News front page had a perfect example (perhaps “perfect” isn’t the operative word here) of what I call the law of unintended consequences. Here’s the front page:
(click on the thumbnail to see a larger version)
You might notice the two mug shots in the center of the scan (above the fold in the full page). You also might notice the large headline next to those mug shots – “Bauer comes back to win.”
If you guessed that those mug shots and that headline were related, you’d be wrong. I’m not going to try to get into the mind of the designer of the page, but I’d be worried that a reader just glancing at the page would associate the “Bauer” headline and the two mug shots.
Ordinarily, this bit of layout confusion would be a trifling thing, a minor chuckle. Except that the two mug shots are of two people who were convicted of killing a Greenville businessman in cold blood. Not the sort of image/text confusion that you want.
The layout itself is understandable. The designer was most likely trying to avoid having butting headlines, or butting photographs in the two elements. But the confusion of association is an unintended consequence of the layout.
There are several ways to correct this point of confusion. The easiest way to ensure there is no confusion about the association between text and photo is to place a hairline divider between the two page elements. Another way to resolve this confusion would be to put the “Bauer” headline below the associated photo and place the two mug shots within the associated story as thumbnails.
