No Contest Communications

Vocativ: News from the deep web

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Robert Basil

Another new top-of-the-morning visit these days is Vocativ. It’s a news site that reports on stories I often haven’t seen elsewhere. What sets is apart from traditional online reportage is how it finds stories. From the website:

Vocativ is at the nexus of media and technology. We use deep web technology as a force for good and go where others can’t to reveal hidden voices, emerging trends and surprising data. We turn exclusive insights into visual stories that
offer our audience new perspectives and connect us more deeply to a changing world.

At the heart of Vocativ is our exclusive technology, a place where science meets storytelling. More than 80% of the Internet sits beyond the grasp of Google, in an area called the deep web. Vocativ explores this vast, uncharted space that includes everything from forums, databases, documents, and public records to social platforms, chat rooms, and commerce sites. Our proprietary technology allows us to search and monitor the deep web 24/7 to spot news quickly, detect early signals of online movements, identify key influencers and share meaningful analysis of ongoing events.

This morning I learned how in the United States the daily fantasy sports industry is in trouble. (Note: Your author acquired and published one of the first fantasy-sports books back in the day.)

Vocativ has a refreshingly international focus. Today’s ‘front page’ has stories on Iceland, Greece, Syria, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as on the many Central and South American nations.

Follow Vocativ’s very busy twitter feed.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged journalism, publishing | Leave a comment

Aeon: Intellectual Culture

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Robert Basil

My new favourite place to go very morning is Aeon, a marvellous multimedia site devoted to intellectual culture: “big ideas, serious enquiry, a humane worldview and good writing.”

From the About page:

Aeon has four channels…. Most weekdays, it publishes Essays – longform explorations of deep issues written by serious and creative thinkers.

From Monday to Friday, it also publishes Opinions – short provocations, maintaining Aeon’s high argumentative standards but in a more nimble and immediate form.

Aeon’s Video channel streams a mixture of curated short documentaries and original Aeon content, including a series of interviews with experts at the forefront of thought.

Finally, Aeon’s Conversations channel invites the reader in to put their own arguments and points of view. With Conversations, old-style web comments give way to a new form of collective inquiry.

This morning I read a lively, lucid opinion piece by Cory Powell arguing that Galileo’s reputation might be more hyperbole than truth – the author chooses “is” for “might be,” no surprise. (Hint: Kepler was the real giant of science who explained heliocentrism and the laws of planetary motion.) A 4-minute animation directed by Sharron Mirsky showed me how to enjoy a blackout. Reading an essay by Frank Furede called “The Ages of Distraction,” I learned that moralists and philosophers have complaining about how distracted humans are for hundreds of years:

Attention was promoted as a moral accomplishment that was essential to the cultivation of a sound character. The philosopher Thomas Reid, the foremost exponent of 18th-century Scottish ‘common sense’, argued in his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788) that ‘there are moral rules respecting the attention’ which are ‘no less evident than mathematical axioms’. The moral rules of attention required cultivation and training and it was the job of educators to ensure that the young were protected from acquiring the ‘habits of inattention’. Inattention was increasingly perceived as an obstacle to the socialisation of young people.

Countering the habit of inattention among children and young people became the central concern of pedagogy in the 18th century. Educators have always been preoccupied with gaining children’s attention but in the 18th century this concern acquired an unprecedented importance. Attention was seen as important for the nourishment of the reasoning mind as well as for spiritual and moral development. Advice books directed at parents, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), insisted that the cultivation of concentration and attention required effort and skill.

After reading this wonderful essay, I quickly zipped over to The Drudge Report, alas, to see what crazy things were happening all over the world – well, mostly all over the United States. Shame on me!

Returning to Aeon I got caught up with a high-toned and truly friendly discussion that addressed the question, “Can a mystical tradition within a religion be said to express its true spirit.”

As an author, editor, and publisher, I could not be more impressed and gratified by this initiative. Salut to co-founders Brigid and Paul Hains.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged gratitude, plain English, publishing | Leave a comment

News Literacy 2016

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Robert Basil

While we’re talking about Jay Rosen, let me introduce you to an initiative he started the other day with some of his graduate students at NYU: NewsLiteracy2016. This is a wonderful project.

Jay’s announcement on his Facebook feed:

One of the first things I teach my students is: “Online, the simplest way to add value is to save the user time.”

That was the principle behind a project we launched today, called NewsLiteracy2016. Each of my 11 graduate students took a key trend or disruptive force that is changing journalism and studied it until they knew it cold. Then they reduced all that knowledge to a series of time-saving features: a short 500 word introduction, a list of the best links for further reading, good people to follow for that topic, key charts and graphs to illustrate trends, a “why is this important?” box.

The cover image (below) is a single paragraph summarizing what’s changing in journalism, and each clause links to the one-page study guide for that topic. So it’s both a condensation, and a table of contents.

We made this especially for teachers and students, and anyone who wants to understand why people keep talking about a “crisis” in journalism. My Studio 20 students built the site and did the design. I hope you will check it out, and “like” this post so it spreads on Facebook, or even consider sharing it with your network. It will save your friends a lot of time!

Here’s the picture with the links working: As news consumption moves to mobile^ONE and publishers lose control of distribution,^TWO business models have to evolve with changes in the larger ecosystem.^THREE Wise media companies are focusing more on products,^FOUR exploring how to personalize the flow of information,^FIVE and engineering a smarter newsroom workflow.^SIXMeanwhile, journalists are realizing that data can help them find better stories,^SEVEN and they’re making friends with automation.^EIGHTThey understand that users can assist in news production,^NINE that if you can’t have scale it’s better to be niche,^TEN and that excelling at explanation can interest more people in the news.^ELEVEN

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged for educators, for students, jay rosen, journalism | Leave a comment

Self-revision

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Robert Basil

It is hard to edit one’s own work into its final version; you always need a second pair of eyes.

One can, though, review and recast one’s work using intelligent techniques. My former mentor NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen mentions two such techniques in a piece called “We temporarily lost our minds.” Some thoughts on SB Nation’s Daniel Holtzclaw debacle. (Holtzclaw is the “now-notorious Oklahoma City police officer convicted on 18 counts of rape and sexual assault, crimes he committed while on duty and against the people he was supposed to protect.”)

The writer and non-fiction master Gay Talese used to describe for anyone who asked how he would pin the typed pages of his articles to a wall, in order to step back and re-read the draft with binoculars. That’s right: binoculars! Why did he do this? Because it was the only way he could think of to examine his creation at the sentence level and as a completed whole: simultaneously. To perfect what he made, he needed distance from, and intimacy with. He felt he couldn’t sacrifice one for the other. If he planted a bomb on page 2, he wanted to see exactly how it went off on page 22, and assess whether that was the right story arc. I mention this because it is one answer to the mystery of how the Vox editors temporarily lost their minds. They didn’t have any equivalent to Gay Talese’s binoculars. They didn’t know what their creation added up to. They couldn’t see it whole.

There are other ways to get distance on a text you are too intimate with. One of them is so simple, so artless, so obvious that I’m convinced it is under-employed because editorial people — who think of themselves as sophisticated manipulators of text — are embarrassed to use something we might recommend to a sixth grader. Read the work aloud, preferably to an “average” or non-specialist listener. Just vocalizing a problematic text brings the problems with it much closer to the surface. There is no way “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” could have survived being read aloud to a husband, wife, girlfriend or boyfriend. No one who loves you would have let you publish it on the internet.

Jay’s entire piece is well worth reading. It begins:

On February 17, SB Nation, the founding site in the Vox Media empire, did something so inexplicable it amounts to an editorial mystery.

For about five hours the editors had up on their site a 12,000 word article weirdly sympathetic to Daniel Holtzclaw, the now-notorious Oklahoma City police officer convicted on 18 counts of rape and sexual assault, crimes he committed while on duty and against the people he was supposed to protect. This was a piece of writing so wrongheaded, noxious and ill-conceived that the editorial director of SB Nation, Spencer Hall, said later that day in a note to readers: “There is no qualification: it was a complete failure.”

A true statement. I cannot put it any better than Deadspin’s Greg Howard did: “The tone of the entire piece is fawning and forgiving; by the end, the terrifying, spectacular spree of rapes exists as little more than an unfortunate occurrence, and a 263-year sentence as an unjustly harsh burden Holtzclaw has to bear. Holtzclaw destroyed 13 women’s lives; ‘Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?’ told the story of how they destroyed his.”

Photo by Robert Basil

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged editing, jay rosen, journalism | Leave a comment

Puzzling Advertising: Who is the intended audience?

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Robert Basil

This advertisement by Vanda Pharmaceuticals (shown a dozen times a day, it seems, on MSNBC) is for a drug called Hetlioz. (It’s very expensive.) Vanda says Hetlioz helps blind people who have a rare condition called Non-24. These folk have trouble sleeping through the night and staying awake during the day.

It made me wonder: Who is the audience for these ads? Blind people, who can’t actually watch TV? Their doctors, who might prescribe this drug?

My favourite new theory is that the pharmaceutical company’s strategy is three-fold: To create awareness of an essentially unheard-of disorder; to make the millions and millions of people who are not blind but who can’t sleep at night and who fall asleep during the day believe that Hetlioz could help them out, too; and to promote this medication to these people, to their friends and family, and to their doctors – without doing so explicitly. (In the United States “Pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to promote their medications for an off-label use, which has led to several large settlements for illegal marketing.”) We all know how utterly awful sleep problems are, so imagine how enticing the hope engendered by these ads is.

Great tidbit: “How obscure is Non-24? There are only 146 citations for the disorder in the entire US National Library of Medicine. By comparison, there are 8,463 citations for the plague.”

—

Addendum: My NoContest co-founder Tierney and I had a good back-and-forth after she read this post.

Here’s the link to the “Sandy’s View” post Tierney mentions.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged advertising, communications | Leave a comment

Practice

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Robert Basil

As a teacher and as an editor, my counsel to students and writers often seems too obvious even to say. For instance: “You can’t complete a large project in a short time. Proceed bit by bit” (or “bird by bird“).

I have found, though, that repeating such counsel, many times, loudly and then quietly, and in different contexts, can reduce its obviousness to reveal its plain urgency.

What is more obvious than “practice something to get better at it”? Here is my friend Jonathan Mayhew in a post called “Jazz Piano” from his superb blog “Stupid Motivational Tricks: Scholarly Writing and How to Get It Done“:

Every thing begins with an idea. I have always wanted to play jazz piano, and now I am doing it, albeit at a lowish level. I see no possibility of getting worse with practice. There will be a plateau or two, with steady progress between the plateaux, and then a point at which I won’t get better.

It strikes me that the key with these kinds of things is neither to underestimate nor to overestimate the difficulty of it. If you think it is going to be easy, then it is easy to get frustrated. If you think of it is impossible, then you won’t even imagine doing it. My approach is just to get lost in it when I am doing it. I could spend 15 minutes trying out variations of a few chords. The other day I closed my eyes and I could still play some of my songs fine.

Most things, you can probably do. Ride a bike, make ceramics, or grow plants. If you are interested enough in it, that is. I am quite sure that I could be a crossword puzzle constructor. Some day I’ll want to do this, though not now.

Mayhew’s blog slices into the topic of practice again and again – lucid, brilliant, entertaining, and always very useful variations upon a theme. It is profound stuff. What one says about getting better at playing piano, writing books, constructing crossword puzzles – one is saying about living life.

“I see no possibility of getting worse with practice.”

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged clarity, mental hygiene | Leave a comment

Smart/Dumb

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Robert Basil

In my profession some colleagues believe that marking hard – giving more D’s than B’s, for instance – correlates with a high level of “rigour” in teaching. To my mind, though, there is often no connection between grade distribution and rigour. If you are handing out a dozen D’s, you need to look at both the quality of instruction and the level of preparation students have received prior to taking that course; something is wrong.

The most “rigourous” – that is, demanding and detailed – professor I ever had was Lionel Abel. He gave everybody A’s, yet almost nobody took a class from him more than once. He was too tough. He would read student essays aloud in front of the class and make brilliant if sometimes lacerating comments. One time he stopped after reading just the first paragraph and gazed, smiling, at the lady who wrote it, asking, “Did you take Freshman English?” She nodded yes, turning red. “Did you pass?” I had to look away. Abel finished his analysis of her work by writing a big A on the student’s front page.

I didn’t receive similar treatment until my second class with Abel. “Mr. Basil, do you mind if I read your T. S. Eliot essay in front of the class?” I said I would be pleased. Then the professor added: “May I be frank?” What could I say but yes? The professor showed the first page of the essay to the class, with several words circled. “I believe that you don’t know what these words mean,” he said, then went through them, one by one. It was very embarrassing. After class Professor Abel told me that I was trying to sound smarter and more educated than I was: a foolish endeavour, which made me sound dumb. “Don’t approach great poetry with big statements; come to it with questions. You’re never dumb when you ask questions.”

From that moment I resolved never to be embarrassed to be the “smart dumb person” in the room, asking questions when no one else raises their hand. At the very worst, this is entertainment for my colleagues. To my mind, it is also essential mental hygiene.

—

A lovely Lionel Able quote: “We realize we have made a friend when in a relationship we are able to suppress that special disappointment which follows getting to know him, her, anyone – even oneself – well.”

It is sweet to remember those first resigned sighs, from my loyal friends. The essence of friendship is neither correction nor therapy.

—

The New York Times titled its obituary of Lionel Abel “The Last Bohemian.”

reposted from basil.CA

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged for educators, mental hygiene, obituary | Leave a comment

L’Esprit D’Escalier

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Robert Basil

Things have changed, if just a little bit, in ten years. From January 2005:

I’ve been hearing dialogue everywhere, dialogue that seems to be coming from the same play.

At the end of party I went to recently, a woman told me that I talk too much. I didn’t know how to respond, and left the party shortly afterwards, a bit confounded and mute, and afflicted with what the French call l’esprit d’escalier – “the wit of the staircase” – i.e., my mind began filling with all sorts of things I should or could have said.

So: a mind rewind.

Here we go: “Bob, you talk too much.”

“True, true, true, true.”

“Not ‘too much,’ just ‘much.’”

“If you subtract the number of times I repeat myself, then you know that at least I don’t say too much.”

“I can tell you why: You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

“I just keep going until I find a word that makes you friendly.”

“Does that mean you don’t think I’m interesting?”

“What would you suggest I not have said?”

Or, finally: “Oh throw me away and call it a day.”

[A friend wrote me later, charmingly: “You don’t talk too much. People talk too little.”]

repost from basil.ca

photo by Robert Basil

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged conflict, courtesy, playfulness | Leave a comment

Mental Hygiene

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Robert Basil

In a post called “Cognitive” my good friend Jonathan Mayhew explores one of NoContest’s recurrent themes:

There is the idea that you can prevent decay in cognitive function by doing inane, mindless games on the computer, such as those peddled by lumosity.

I do the NY Times Crossword most days, and usually try to use five minutes per degree of difficulty (Monday 5, Tuesday 10, Wed. 15, etc…). I do a puzzle called kenken as well. Then I compose music or work on previous compositions. I try to work on my research every day, not breaking the Seinfeld chain. I have to figure out how to teach what I know to groups of students…

I have another goal of being able to read novels in all the romance languages. That’s another cognitive stretch. If someone can find me a novel in Rumanian or Provenzal I would appreciate it.

Really, though, my whole life is devoted to the cultivation of intelligence. That’s all I’m about. There are two or three ways of doing this. Learning to do novel tasks stretches the mind in different ways. So I have tried to teach myself to draw, to compose music, to read Italian. Delving deeply into a subject matter that is not novel, that you know very, very well, is also good. So writing a third book on Lorca… A third way is to solve puzzles or memorize poetry.

I hate that this sounds arrogant, but if I am intelligent it is because I do these things, not the other way around. If I am stupid about other things, it is because I haven’t cultivated thoses sorts of intelligences. Put me in a home depot, and I am a blithering idiot.

Jonathan’s blog is one of the best places in cyberspace. You need to put it in your feed.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged for educators, for students, mental hygiene | Leave a comment

No Contest Communications

Vocativ: News from the deep web

Aeon: Intellectual Culture

News Literacy 2016

Self-revision

Puzzling Advertising: Who is the intended audience?

Practice

Smart/Dumb

L’Esprit D’Escalier

Mental Hygiene

Universal Design for Learning

Education and AI

Social Media Policy

Kwantlen

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