Quite possibly the coolest iPad app EVER: Matthew Modine's Full Metal Jacket Diary app:
Matthew Modine's FULL METAL JACKET DIARY iPad App – Trailer from Cinco Dedos Peliculas on Vimeo.
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Author Archives: Jon Lowder
Just Do Your Job
Greensboro blogger Roch Smith, Jr. has been taking local CBS affiliate WFMY to task for passing off press releases or stories from other outlets as having been written by WFMY staffers. Roch calls it plagiarism, which I don't agree with IF the other parties are in agreement that it's okay for WFMY to do it. On the other hand it's incredibly lazy on the part of WFMY and it likely diminishes their reputation as a news outlet.
There's also a hidden danger to the practice of simply regurgitating press releases with the station's imprimatur: mistakenly giving credence to an organization, or even missing a story, because the station didn't bother to do any background on what it was sent. Today Roch found a perfect example of this at WFMY's website:
Here's why. When WFMY vomits up a glowing press release that touts a local sheriff heading off to some "border training" sponsored by Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) without any of their own investigation, they miss the rather important fact that FAIR is tied to white supremacy and bigotry.
WFMY not only gives their poor audience the impression that everything is just peachy with the sheriff's trip — just as the press release promises and just as they've affirmed by putting a staff person's name to it — but they also fail to see the news right under their nose and ask the obvious question which is why the hell are local sheriffs attending a "training" event sponsored by this group?
So here's a lesson for you kids: laziness in your work almost always comes back to bite you. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.
Don’t Quote Me
Anyone who has ever been interviewed for a news story has experienced that "Oh God I hope I don't sound like and idiot" feeling and the related "I hope they don't use what I say out of context to make me look like an idiot" feeling. It's terrifying and a primary reason that there's an industry built ar0und media training.
Related to the fear of being misquoted is the desire to control the story and as a result there's a growing trend for people to demand quote approval as a condition for being interviewed. Some traditional news people argue that it's bad for the news reporting business, but Dilbert creator Scott Adams thinks it might actually be a good thing:
I've been interviewed several hundred times in my career. When I see my quotes taken out of context it is often horrifying. Your jaw would drop if you saw how often quotes are literally manufactured by writers to make a point. Some of it is accidental because reporters try to listen and take notes at the same time. But much of it is obviously intentional. So much so that when I see quotes in any news report I discount them entirely. In the best case, quotes are out of context. In the worst case, the quotes are totally manufactured.
I've also been in a number of interviews in which the writer tried to force a quote to fit a narrative that's already been formed. The way that looks is that the writer asks the same question in ten different ways, each time trying to lead the witness to a damning or controversial quote. It's a dangerous situation because humans are wired to want to please, and once you pick up on what a writer wants you to say, it's hard to resist delivering it…
Quote approval is certainly bad for the news industry because it reduces the opportunities for manufacturing news and artificial controversies. But on balance, I'd say quote approval adds more to truth than it subtracts.
Over the past few years I've been interviewed a few times for news stories related to my job, but they were mostly "friendly" stories that didn't carry any "gotcha" risks. Then a few weeks ago I was interviewed for a story and it was apparent throughout the interview that the reporter had a pre-conceived narrative and she was trying mightily to get me to give up a juicy quote to support that narrative. I spent the better part of 20 minutes trying to not give her that quote and then spent eight agonizing hours until the story was aired to see how anything I might have said would be used. I've never been happier to end up edited ott of a story in my life.
To Post or Not to Post
An infographic that is most worthy of sharing with our children, spouses, siblings, coworkers and parents (especially parents):
Found at onlineclasses.org
Lonely Highways
My commute from home in Lewisville to work in Greensboro is spent primarily on I-40 and almost every day I pass the spot where a decomposed body was found today. As a pretty avid fan of mysteries (I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, became a fan of the Spenser novels in college, and have long been a devotee of Ross Thomas, Gregory McDonald, Elmore Leonard, etc.) it has occurred to me as I drive the highway that although thousands of people pass by every day, it's rare that anyone walks those grounds and thus the wooded areas between the exits would make a pretty good place to hide a body or many other kinds of wrongdoing.
Along the same route there are also dozens of bridges and multiple creeks, and in at least a couple of spots it's pretty easy to imagine how someone could run off the road in the middle of the night and, if no one else is in sight when it happens, not be discovered for a very long time. We tend to think of those kinds of stories as happening in the Everglades or in rural, mountainous areas, but the nature of our interstates being what they are it can easily happen just about anywhere.
Food for thought during the drive home, eh?
Remember the Carolina Cougars?
Folks of a certain age from around these parts (Piedmont Triad of North Carolina) might remember the Carolina Cougars of the old American Basketball Association. The Cougars were based in Greensboro until 1974 when they were purchased by Ozzie and Daniel Silna, moved to St. Louis and renamed the Spirit. That's when this story starts to get really interesting:
Four of the A.B.A.’s seven teams merged with the N.B.A. in 1976, but the Virginia Squires were a financial wreck and the Kentucky Colonels were placated with a $3.3 million payment. But if the Spirits couldn’t join the N.B.A., the Silna brothers wanted to share in what the A.B.A. didn’t have: national TV revenue. They settled with one-seventh of the television money generated annually by each of the four surviving A.B.A. teams — the Nets, the San Antonio Spurs, the Indiana Pacers and the Denver Nuggets…
In 1980-81, the first year the Silnas were eligible to get their share of TV money, they received $521,749, according to court documents filed by the N.B.A. For the 2010-11 season, they received $17,450,000. The N.B.A.’s latest TV deal, with ESPN and TNT, is worth $7.4 billion over eight years. Soon, the Silnas’ total take will hit $300 million.
That's what you might call a heckuva deal, but the brothers are looking to maximize it:
In Manhattan federal court on Thursday, lawyers for the Silna brothers and the league argued over whether the men are owed money beyond what they get from the N.B.A.’s national broadcast and cable television contracts. They want to tap into the money the league gets from international broadcasts, NBA TV, the league’s cable network, and other lucrative deals that could not have been imagined in the three network television universe of 1976.
If Federal District Judge Loretta A. Preska agrees, the Silna brothers — Ozzie, 79, and living in Malibu, Calif., and Daniel, 68, and living in Saddle River, N.J. — stand to receive millions more, all without having assembled a team or used an arena for more than three decades.
As the article pointed out the brothers' original investment in a struggling team in a struggling league was quite risky, but it's hard to imagine that they imagined it would pay off to this extent.
9/11 Memorial Photos
Thanks to Rex Hammock for pointing to these 9/11 memorial photos on Flickr:
The Battle for the Southern, White, Evangelical, Working Class Vote
Reuters has an interesting article about the challenges Romney and Obama face with lower income whites in the south. Let's just say that being rich and Mormon complicates things for Romney:
Reuters/Ipsos polling data compiled over the past several months shows that, across the Bible Belt, 38 percent of these voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is "very wealthy" than one who isn't. This is well above the 20 percent who said they would be less likely to vote for an African-American…
According to Reuters/Ipsos polling data, however, 35 percent of voters overall, and the same proportion of lower- and middle-income white Bible Belt voters, say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is Mormon.
Even the fact that a (rather shocking) number of Republicans believe President Obama to be a Muslim (the horrors!) is somewhat offset by Romney being a Mormon:
In a survey conducted this summer by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, almost a third of Republicans said they believe Obama is Muslim, compared with 16 percent of independents and 8 percent of Democrats. The falsehood is a frequent theme of conservative talk radio.
Still, the challenge for the GOP is to ensure that white evangelicals, most of whom voted for other candidates in the primary, are sufficiently enthusiastic about Romney to make it to the polls…
In 2008, Parrish was a fan of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who was defeated in the GOP primary. She counts him as a Facebook friend. She has yet to "friend" Romney, although she plans to vote for him.
"I'm not extremely excited," she confessed. "I'd prefer not to have a Mormon."
Nonetheless, she added, "Romney seems to align himself with conservative values."
Long story short, what would normally have been a slam dunk demographic for a Republican in 2012 ain't necessarily so. The Republicans certainly did themselves no favor by nominating a rich Mormon with the charisma of stale Wonder Bread.
myWinston-Salem.com
The folks behind Winston-Salem-based Contract Web Development just announced the launch of Cover Story Media, an online publishing company "that focuses on original content founded in reader engagement." One of their products is mywinston-salem.com and after taking a quick trip around the site I'd say it looks like a good new player in the local online content game.
Congrats to tennis buddy Alex Schenker and his team on their new venture. Here's a video they created for the launch.
Pooplant
So what could sound worse than a fecal transplant? A DIY fecal transplant at home:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. [He] mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon.
The transplant was a success — the patient’s diarrhea cleared up within a day and did not return… Khortus was able to demonstrate that we can move colonies of microorganisms from one person to another.
With an estimated 10,000 different species of bacteria living in our bodies, and with bacteria outnumbering cells ten to one, this discovery may have implications for health care more generally. And if the fecal transplant treatment is any indicator, it could lead to fewer doctors’ visits, too. Why is that? Because as this scientific study notes, bacteriotherapy for CDI can be done at home.
Befuddled 