Month: September 2012

Information fanaticism

On finding alternative sources of news in the pre-web era (this quote comes from ~1992):

The information is there, but it’s there to a fanatic, you know, somebody wants to spend a substantial part of their time and energy exploring it and comparing today’s lies with yesterday’s leaks and so on. That’s a research job and it just simply doesn’t make sense to ask the general population to dedicate themselves to this task on every issue.

[…]

Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that’s required to get outside of MacNeil/Lehrer or Dan Rather or somebody like that. The easy thing to do, you know — you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day, you’re not going to spend the evening carrying on a research project, so you turn on the tube and say, “it’s probably right”, or you look at the headlines in the paper, and then you watch the sports or something.

That’s basically the way the system of indoctrination works. Sure, the other stuff is there, but you’re going to have to work to find it.

Continue reading Information fanaticism

The End of PowerPoint

Edward Tufte is the father of modern information visualization. If you don’t know who he is, you probably should, and you can get up to speed by reading this profile in Washington Monthly, The Information Sage.

Last year, I attended one of Tufte’s one-day courses in NYC. I even showed him an early, prototype version of Parse.ly Dash. His feedback — even if it came quickly in 5 minutes — was helpful in understanding how to move the product forward.

I thought, when attending his presentation, that my main takeaways would be in the field I associated with him, namely, information visualization. But actually, my main takeaways were about communication, teaching, and journalism.

Continue reading The End of PowerPoint

Fully distributed teams: in lists

Things fully distributed teams need:

  • real-time chat
  • hosted code repos and code review
  • async updates
  • email groups
  • basic project management
  • bug / issue tracking
  • customer support tools
  • easy way to share files
  • standard way to collaborate on documents and drawings
  • personal task lists
  • personal equipment budgets
  • wiki
  • team calendar
  • webcams (caution: use sparingly)

Things fully distributed teams are happy to live without:

  • constant interruptions
  • long commutes
  • “brainstorming sessions”
  • all-hands meetings
  • equipment fragmentation
  • slow, shared internet
  • 9-to-5
  • “that guy”

Things fully distributed teams do miss out on:

  • face time
  • a good, group laugh
  • after-work beers
  • office serendipity

The New Novel

Salon.com has an interesting article about the craft of writing. It’s from 2010, but still interesting.

… far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”

When I was younger, I thought there was no greater ambition than becoming the writer of the next great novel. However, this article made me reflect on my own media consumption habits, and what a small audience I would affect even if I did write such a work.

I think similarly about painting and sculpture and classical music. These expressive forms are certainly demanding of skill, but who is the audience?

It would be unfair to consider television programming or film the new novel. Certainly, these media have the capacity to change people’s ideas and have a wide impact. But, even with the technology and cost barriers breaking down on film production, it lacks the visceral nature of writing. Anyone with an idea and a pen (or laptop) can pursue writing, but you have to be a technician of sorts to make a film.

By this disqualification, software — though increasingly recognized as an art form — is definitely not it, either. So, what is?

The Sullivan Ouster at University of Virginia: a retrospective

The NYTimes features UVA on its Sunday Magazine cover today, reflecting back on the Sullivan ouster and what it means for higher education.

Three months ago, I put together a summary of the best links discussing the ouster as it happened. Today, combined with the NYTimes piece, it’s easy to get a full context and perspective on this story.

Trying to reach Storify.com ... 404: Not Found
Update from the future in 2024: Unfortunately, when I wrote this post back in 2012, I chose to use a third-party service, Storify, to do my summary of the news story. Unfortunately, not even Internet Archive has a trace of this now, and Storify has fully shut down. I leave this post here only as a reminder of the annoyance of Internet bitrot and the importance of supporting the Internet Archive and its mission.