Five Seconds of Fame

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Thanks to my job I'm occasionally interviewed by local TV stations. It's cool in the "I never thought I'd be on TV" sense, but on the other hand it's a little like jumping off a cliff because you learn pretty quickly that the TV folks can make you look as good or bad, smart or stupid, as they want.

Last Friday I was fried. We had our annual banquet the night before and my brain was little more than Jell-O as a result. Luckily I had a light schedule so I was cruising through my day until the phone rang at 12:30. It was the local Fox affiliate looking for some background on a story they were working, and also looking for a soundbite if at all possible. Knowing I was in no shape for an interview I claimed a full schedule. Nominally true, but I really just didn't want to do the interview. Eventually the reporter persuaded me to talk and we set a 2:30 appointment. 

The result? A half hour of prep work followed by a total vapor-lock of the brain as soon as the camera was on. Luckily they took mercy on me and only used about five seconds of the interview, thus minimizing my on-camera freeze. 

Here’s What You Should Know

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A good suggestion for news organizations from Jeff Jarvis:

So the opportunity: If I ran a news organization, I would start a regular feature called, Here’s what you should know about what you’re hearing elsewhere.

Last week, that would have included nuggets such as these:

* You may have heard on CNN that an arrest was made. But you should know that no official confirmation has been made so you should doubt that, even if the report is repeated by the likes of the Associated Press.

* You may have heard reports repeated from police scanners about, for example, the remaining suspect vowing not to be taken alive. But you should know that police scanners are just people with microphones; they do not constitute official or confirmed police reports. Indeed, it may be important for those using police radio to repeat rumor or speculation — even from fake Twitter accounts created an hour ago — for they are the ones who need to verify whether these reports are true. Better safe than sorry is their motto…

* You may have heard reports that there were more bombs. But you should know that we cannot track where these reports started and we have no official confirmation so you should not take those reports as credible. We are calling the police to find out whether they are true and we will let you know as soon as we know.


 

The Law of Two Women

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From Sasha Dichter's post titled Four tips for better group decision making we find this interesting tidbit:

The Law of Two Women.  “One night I was having dinner with an executive at Google, and I asked him to tell me the most significant change he’s seen in how his company runs meetings.  Without hesitating, he told me they always make sure there is more than one woman in the room.  He then told me about the study that led to this principle…”  I won’t summarize the subsequent MIT study – the punchline is “groups that had a higher proportion of females were more effective.  These groups were more sensitive to input from everyone, more capable of reaching compromise, and more efficient at making decisions.”      This one is fascinating and, again, very easy to implement.

Virginia, We Have Liftoff

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Who knew that the Commonwealth of Virginia was home to the newest entrant to the commercial space race?

"A privately owned rocket built in partnership with NASA to haul cargo to the International Space Station blasted off on Sunday for a debut test flight from a new commercial spaceport in Virginia. The 13-story Antares rocket, developed and flown by Orbital Sciences Corp, lifted off at 5 p.m. EDT from a Virginia-owned and operated launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island."

And where is Wallops Island?


Loophole Hits Close to Home

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Fox8 has a story about a family in Lewisville, NC that’s experiencing hard times due to a loophole in our country’s safety net. We can argue all we want about how our social safety net should function and how we should pay for it, but I think any of us would be hard pressed to argue against families like this being able to tap into it. This is exactly the kind of situation it should cover:

Striking Oil

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Here's a really cool story about an old LA hotel that was sold and during the liquidation process an old mosaic mural was found behind some wall paneling:

During the clearance sale, a puzzling discovery was made: a fifteen-foot mosaic mural commissioned by The Los Angeles Petroleum Club was found behind some old wood paneling. The Club had at one time maintained a posh member’s suite at the hotel. This is where the intrigue and mosaic sleuthing begins.


Oilmural

Free the Sisters

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A French scientist (of course) has done a study that shows that women probably shouldn't wear bras. Well, okay, just young women:

His preliminary results on 330 women aged 18 to 35 suggested that wearing a bra from an early age does nothing to help a wearer's breasts and going without could improve firmness.

"The suspension system of the breasts degenerates," Rouillon said, explaining that bras also unnaturally hamper circulation.

"But a middle-aged women, overweight, with 2.4 children? I'm not at all sure she'd benefit from abandoning bras," he added.

 

Push Button Publishing

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Here's a very cool little piece at Wired showing how Blogger spawned a lot of the current "push button publishing" services we know today:

At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed? Pyra Labs launched Blogger, the online tool that gave push-button publishing to the people. It was a revolutionary web product made by a revolutionary web of people who went on to build much of the modern net. Here’s how Pyra propagated.

The "family tree" you find when you click through to Wired does a great job showing how the people behind blogger went on to create/influence Twitter, Square, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.

Be Not Afraid

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Lex has an excellent post about the bombings in Boston and what our reaction to it says about us as a society :

The cowards who planted the bombs want us to be afraid. But so do many of our leaders. “Be afraid,” they told us after 9/11. “Be afraid,” they told us after 7/7. “Be afraid,” they told us after 3/11. And why not? For the more afraid we are, the more of our freedoms they can take, and the more they have taken already. If you doubt me, look at what has happened to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments after 9/11. And yet we worship the Second as if it were some Aztec idol into whose bloody maw the still-beating hearts of our countrymen must be thrown for appeasement, even as we know that no number of firearms could have prevented what happened today.

But no. Let us not be afraid. Not this time, and never again. This time, let us bury our dead, minister to our wounded, and comfort our bereaved as best we can even though we know for some there is no comfort and never will be. And then let us go live as the best Americans and the best human beings we can be, knowing that the time may come when any or all of us might have to run into the fire, like the cops and firefighters and EMTs did today, whether that fire be caused by a bomb or by the sociopathy of those, domestic and foreign, who would destroy what is best about America and who have run wild for far, far too long.