Monthly Archives: December 2005

Have to Give the Journal Some Props

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In the past I’ve given the Winston-Salem Journal a hard time about their online initiatives and I’ve also compared them unfavorably with the Greensboro News & Record so I feel a need to give them some props when I find something positive about their online work.

Newslink, a compilation of news sites, ranks the Journal is the third highest ranking newspaper website in North Carolina and number 85 in the US.  The News & Record is fourth in the state and 105 in the US. The two highest papers in NC are the Charlotte Observer (#20 in the US) and the Raleigh News & Observer (#43 US).  FYI, the top 5 newspaper sites in the US are:

  1. The Washington Post
  2. Los Angeles Times
  3. The New York Times
  4. Miami Herald
  5. USA Today

Even though this is not an internet-wide sample I still felt I needed to give the Journal some love. FYI, here’s how Newslink describes their rankings:

Local news sites in the United States
are ranked by the total number of times each is accessed via NewsLink by human
users of NewsLink’s publication lists. Results from the 1,000 most-accessed newspaper,
television station and radio station sites are tabulated weekly, typically on Fridays.
When sites are categorized by type, the listing employs the same listings
criteria as are used in creating NewsLink’s lists.

The ranking makes no attempt to measure the total audience served by any  site —
a number very difficult, if not impossible, to measure with any
certainty. What it does attempt to measure is the market share
currently going to each site from among a diverse audience of web users
who probably are not already habitual users of those sites. In other
words, it is more a measure of current, sponteneous interest and
potential growth among new users than it is an absolute measure of
traffic.

A strong site would doubtlessly have a core of habitual
readers who would simply go directly to the site rather than "find" it
through other links. This list measures how many people seek out sites
that have not already been bookmarked or memorized. This is an
important factor since one-time use of a site has about a 45 percent
market share while habitual site use has only a 13 percent market
share, according to other research.

With about half a million unique individual users monthly
and upwards of a quarter of a million links off our site weekly, the
NewsLink audience whose behavior is tracked by this ranking is composed
largely of non-journalists, including a large number of new-to-the-web
users. The audience does tend to be overly representative of people one
might call "opinion leaders" — politicians, executives, professionals, non-journalism educators, media relations people and the like.

My College Degree is Worth Less Today

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I’m sitting here on Christmas Eve doing a little reading and I just came across this post (Business Week) about how the real wages of those with college degrees has declined for the fourth straight year.  I can’t say that I find it surprising, but it is a little depressing.  I’d say that it is evidence that today’s college degree is equivalent to a high school degree in my parents’ day.  Back in "the day" you could be pretty certain that you could get a good job with a high school degree, but as the US economy shifted away from manufacturing and towards "knowledge work" it became more important to have the skills equated with a college degree.

Of equal interest to me was a comment attached to the blog post that was written by someone who obviously graduated from college in the 70s with a degree from a liberal arts college.  She blurted  that old saw about how going to college isn’t about making more money it’s about being able to ask questions, expand your mind, etc.  Then she said that she’d recently been an adjunct professor at a state college in the south and all the students cared about was passing the test, not "learning", and if that was indicative of today’s students then colleges are in trouble.

That cracked me up.  Does she really believe that students in the 70s were that different?  I guarantee you there were as many students just looking to pass the test in her day, but maybe she didn’t know them or hang out with them. Her observations about college in the 70s were just as anecdotal as those about today’s students.  And does she really think that college is just about expanding your mind for the sake of expanding your mind?  No, it’s learning how to think so that you can be more successful later in life (notice I didn’t say wealthier, although that’s often a consequence of being more successful) and essentially a more productive contributor to society.  Believe me, if the average student didn’t expect a positive economic impact from earning their degree they wouldn’t go to college.

And let’s not forget about networking.  As another commenter to the post said it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know.  While that’s simplistic it is partly true.  If two qualified people are in the running for a position or a deal then if one person has a personal connection to the decision maker then they have an inside track.  There’s no doubt that you begin the "who do you know" game in college and it definitely provides a leg up in your professional life.

Unfortunately, it seems from the data provided by the post’s author that the old BA/BS is less valuable today than it was five years ago.  Still, I’d certainly rather have a less valuable BA than none at all.

Mark Cuban Comes Up With a Very Relevant Statistic

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Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise, is one smart dude.  He’s also a pain in the butt to the other NBA owners, but I think that’s more because he is willing to rock the boat and ask hard questions than because of his almost instant success reviving down-and-out franchise.

Mr. Cuban asked a question that I can’t believe has not been asked before: What is a team’s won-loss record in the second game when that game is played the day immediately following another game?  In other words what is a teams record in the second game of a back-to-back?  He recruited Elias Sports Bureau to help him come up with the answer, which is pretty interesting (W-L records of each NBA team over the last few years are at the bottom of the post).  He also is looking at the teams’ records in the last game they play when they play four games in five days, but he doesn’t have the W-L in the post.

My question is whether or not this is new information.  From the post I gather that it is, so my next question is how can all the people managing NBA teams not already know this?  I’d think it would behoove them to know this kind of stuff so that they can take steps to try and alleviate the problem.  From trying to negotiate better stadium deals to prevent the need for this kind of scheduling to figuring out ways to help the players deal with the situation when it arises you would think they would want this kind of data to back them up when they make requests/demands for the sake of the team (when negotiating with stadium owners) and the owners (when trying to justify expenditures on behalf of players who already make gobs of money).

I guess that’s what makes Mr. Cuban so smart; he asks the questions that no one else even thinks of.

“Dad, what’s a master debater?”

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Yesterday was the last day of school for my kids before the Christmas holidays so my daughter, Erin,  invited two friends to sleep over.  Last night I was working on my computer and the girls were on the kids’ computer which is also in my office.  They found some website that was dedicated to kittens so I had to endure a seemingly endless string of "Oooooh, he’s so cute" coming from three sixth grade girls.  Then, after about 10 minutes of this Erin suddenly asks me, "Dad, what’s a master debater?"  What follows was our discussion:

Me: "Huh?"
Erin: "What’s a master debater?"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Erin: "Well it says here that any time someone master-debates a kitten dies so I was wondering what a master-debater is."
Me: Chin on floor.
Erin: "Well, what is it?  Is it a bad thing?"
Me: "I don’t want to talk about it right now."
Erin: "So it’s a bad thing?"
Me: "It’s a play on words, but it’s not something I’m gonna talk about right now."
Erin: "Okay."
Erin, to her friends: "When Dad won’t talk about it that means it’s bad and probably something about sex."
Me: Trying to type, but have no idea what I was typing.

The girls quickly moved on to something else and forgot all about it. I however couldn’t forget it.  I had visions of the girls’ dads showing up at my door and belting me in the nose for their daughters being exposed to ‘master-debater’ on my turf.  Yikes!

I don’t know how this happened but over the last few years I’ve become the de facto birds-and-the-bees speech-giver in this family.  A couple of years ago I was sitting in the car with the kids while Celeste ran into the grocery store to get milk and bread.  In the five minutes she was in there I managed to get cornered into giving the whole "how babies happen" speech after Erin informed her brothers that she would never kiss a boy because she didn’t want to get pregnant.  She was operating on the assumption that she had a multitude of eggs stored in her belly and that a kiss was like watering those eggs and causing one to grow.  So much for the much-vaunted "You and Your Body" class the kids had at school.  Anyway, when Celeste got back in the car she took one look at me and asked, "What happened."  I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

And just last week my oldest son, who’s in 7th grade, laughingly told me and his siblings about a boy who had to get up in front of his class to do a presentation with a full tent-effect going on in his drawers.  That led to a private half-hour conversation between Michael and me that began with why it’s inappropriate to talk about that kind of stuff at dinner (and in front of his 9 year old brother) and progressed into practical advice on handling such situations for himself in the future.

I told Celeste (my wife) about the master-debater incident and she agreed that I seem to be the one who gets stuck with all these questions/issues.  We also decided that she needed to have a little talk with Erin since there’s no way I’m talking about master-debation with my daughter. 

It’s times like these that I wonder if I can resign my commission as a dad.  We definitely don’t get paid enough for this.

State of Offpissment

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Over at Blog on the Run there was a little spat in the comments for one of Lex’s posts about the whole Bush administration spying thing, and one commenter described himself as being in a "state of offpissment."  Maybe I’ve had my head in the sand, but that’s a new one for me and it has joined "constant state of perturbation" as the only two accurate descriptions of my emotional state since becoming a father of almost-teenagers.

Pop Quiz: US Constitution

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Okay, no cheating.  Here’s a pop quiz about the US Constitution.

  • How many articles does the US Constitution have?
  • How many amendments to the US Constitution are there (as of December, 2005)?
  • When was the last amendment ratified?

I could make it easy and give you the answers, but instead check out this page that has the text of the Constitution in its entirety.

Use the comments to tell me how you did. BTW, I failed miserably.

One More Reason Winston-Salem is a Great Place to Live

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The whole silly "war on Christmas" thing that’s been going on so some guy (John Gibson) could sell his book and Fox News could jack up its ratings has had an unexpected, but pleasant effect on me.  I’ve read more in the last two weeks about the history of celebrating Christmas in America than I’ve ever read before, even in my religious education classes at Capital Lutheran High School West in Arlington, VA.  I was reading this Slate article when I came across this paragraph:

Observance of Christmas, or the lack thereof, was one way to differentiate among the Christian sects of Colonial and 19th-century
America. Anglicans, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Lutherans, to name
just a few, did; Quakers, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and some
Presbyterians did not. An 1855 New York Times
report on Christmas services in the city noted that Baptist and
Methodist churches were closed because they "do not accept the day as a
holy one," while Episcopal and Catholic churches were open and "decked
with evergreens." New England Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward
Beecher remembered decorative greenery as an exotic touch that one
could see only in Episcopal churches, "a Romish institution kept up by
the Romish church." (Emphasis on Moravians mine).

You’ll notice that the Moravians were one of the Christian sects that celebrated Christmas all along.  Winston-Salem is located in what was originally a 100,000 acre Moravian settlement called Wachovia, and is currently home to historic Old Salem.  Anyone who’s lived here for at least one Christmas can attest to the fact that the Moravians have been practicing the art of celebrating Christmas for a long time.

For evidence you only need to attend a Moravian Christmas Candlelight Lovefeast to get a sense for what I’m talking about.  I could try to describe it, but it is beyond my capabilities as a writer.  Just take my word for it and if you’re ever near a Moravian church on Christmas Eve make sure you attend.  What I can say is that you get the feeling that this is what Christmas is all about.

Chalk that up as one more reason that living in Winston-Salem is great.

Christian Nudist Resort

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Down in Florida (where else) there’s a guy spending millions of dollars to build a camp for Christian nudists.  As described in a London Times article the 200-acre resort, named Natura, will feature 50 houses built around a non-denominational church (services will be clothing-optional), a hotel, a campsite and a children’s water park.

The founder of Natura is a 67-year-old Quaker named Bill Martin who made his money building retirement homes in Washington.  He’s managed to tick off the religious fundamentalists and other nudists which has to be some sort of record.  He also owns and runs the Naturist Christians website, which supposedly has 19,000 registered users and averages 35,000 hits a day.  Quite frankly this just boggles my mind.

Personally I have no qualms about a bunch of adults cavorting around in their birthday suits, but I can’t see having kids involved. To be clear here, there seems to be a lot of family oriented naturalist sites out there, so these guys are breaking any new nudist grounds on that front.  Apparently the big deal isn’t running around naked with kids, the big deal is going to church naked with or without kids.

As for sitting in church naked I would hope that they have bottles of Lysol at the end of each pew, for obvious reasons. And doesn’t this whole scenario sound like one of those bad dreams like wearing your pajamas to school, but way worse?  And I don’t know about you, but I find listening to the average sermon hard enough without other, uh, distractions.

And here I thought people playing guitars and bongos in church was a radical concept.

I Wonder if Teachers are Using This Stuff

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The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission has a website that features a report they’ve published about the epononymous event (thanks to Ed Cone for the link).  It is still exciting to me that I can get this kind of information without leaving the confines of my own office and the thought it sparked is how wonderful it must be for teachers in this day and age to have these resources available to them.  My next thought wasn’t so pleasant: do teachers even use sites like this as a resource, or more accurately, given the atmosphere of "teaching to the test" that they work in today do they have the flexibility to incorporate this kind of resource into their curricula?  Unfortunately I suspect the answer to the latter is a negative.

I know for a fact that my kids use the internet to do their own research (with a lot of guidance from their parents seeing as they might be tempted to quote Runescape as a historical reference), but I can’t think of any recent occurrences of a teacher pointing them to a web-based resource.  Is it because the teachers don’t want to use the web in this way or is it because they can’t?