How To Report The News

In case you were wondering how to become a TV journalist, here’s how it’s done:

The Evolution Of Interaction

I guess today is my day for following up on earlier posts… Last week I posted about claim chowder, and in particular the following assertion by PC World’s Bill Snyder about the impending Apple tablet announcement:

[If] you run a small business and want to avoid wasting money and brain cells on superfluous technology, forget about the iSlate or whatever Apple is going to call its tablet computing device. It’s going to be too expensive, it does things you don’t need to do, and it will add a messy layer of complication to your company’s computing infrastructure.

Sure, the tablet we expect Apple to launch on January 27 will probably have more than its share of cool factor. But do you want to spend $1,000 or so for bragging rights? For that price, you could buy two perfectly serviceable Windows netbooks, four iPhones, or–if you want to go the Apple route–cover most of the cost of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, getting proven technology that’s useful right out of the box.

So, was it more claim or more chowder?

Now everyone under the sun has chimed in with their thoughts on the device but indulge me, and allow me to share some thoughts about why this device is more important than you may think.

The iPad changes the way we relate to media and content.

The ENIAC - 1946

In the earliest days of computing we related to technology and the media contained in that technology (why we call it ‘content’ remember) symbolically. Toggle switches would be flipped, lights would turn on and off and a code would be returned to us to decypher. This was, in a way, much like the ancient abacus. It had the potential to process certain linear tasks more efficiently than our own minds and pointed to the possibility of processing power to extend our abilities, to prove out our theories, and to make tangible our imagination. We gained greater efficiency within this structure – cards contain series of input commands replaced step-by-step manual manipulation & early printers could print results that could be studied later – but we remained at a distance from the machine and from the content. We had to adopt the language of the machine, even if it was a language we created.

By the early 1960’s, scientists had merged the teletype technology of the time with cathode ray tube displays and used them as an input/output system for computing. This moved our interaction with computers from primitively symbolic to  linguistic. We could enter commands in language and the computer could send responses in language. We moved into a dialectical relationship to our technology. We could describe what we wanted to have happen and the computer, in response, could describe what happened. It lacked the ability to represent, unless what it was representing was language. That was fine, even amazing, except that it separated the computer from whole parts of the human experience. It was a device for the sciences. Explain a problem and it will explain the answer.

Then, in the 1970’s, researchers began experimenting with new ways to represent information and control your interaction with computers. Out of this research emerged the general purpose Graphical User Interface (GUI) created by the legendary Xerox Parc laboratory. (Yes, for those of you who don’t know the history of computing, it’s that Xerox company. Xerox was also responsible for creating the mouse, the WYSIWYG editor, bitmaps, object oriented programming and ethernet. But yeah, the copier company…) In 1981, Xerox released the Star  (aka: the Xerox 8010 Information System), a computer that used as it’s primary form of interaction a non-textual visual representation of content which you interacted with visually and manually (pointing and clicking). It was this system that a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak saw at the Xerox Parc labs and took them from the early Apple computers to the launch of the single most groundbreaking machine in the history of personal computing. The Macintosh.

The Macintosh

The Mac became wildly successful and was the blueprint for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Over the following 2-1/2 decades, we related to our content primarily in a visual and mechanical way. However, we remained abstracted from our content and the information contained in our devices. The mouse became second nature, but it was always second nature. Think of all the times you struggled with mouse pads, the mouseball became jammed with lint, the cord got snagged on the keyboard, the button wouldn’t click, or clicked too easily, the line you were dragging wasn’t precisely where you wanted to go. These frustrations were all mechanical in nature and they kept us as a distance from our content. We came up with solutions to each (the mouseball and trackpad disappeared with infrared, the cord vanished with trackpads and bluetooth) but we remained abstracted.

The first commercial touchscreens emerged in the early 1980’s. These primitive devices relied either on infrared grids positioned around the edge of a screen – a solution that was not truly a touchscreen as the sensing device was not part of the screen itself- or on resistive touchscreens which were based on pressure sensitive pads – when you touch a spot on the screen a slight gap between two layers is closed and the screen registers that touch. Both of these systems are, again, mechanical as one requires you to physically block rays of light and the other requires you to physically manipulate a circuit into closing. But then came capacitative touchscreens.

Capacitative touchscreens have a light charge running over the surface and when your finger comes in contact with that surface the electrical conductivity of your body creates a capacitor and the device can respond to that. You are now no longer mechanically manipulating and instead you are gesturing.

This move to the gestural changes how we interact with content. The last physical bridges between us and content in our devices begin to crumble. Gestural control is intuitive, it is fluid and it is no longer needing interpretation. I pinch and it shrinks. I drag and it follows. I tap and it zooms. I remember standing in the Apple store in Soho after the iPhone was first launched and watching people playing with the device. It was a fascinating experience and I made two observations:

1) People who walked in off the street and started playing with it smiled. And I mean smiled immediately. The device amazed them. It was fun to make gestures and to see a computer respond. To make gestures and watch your content respond. When I was in elementary school my parents made my brother take a typing class. He would go to a teacher, then he would come home, put blank stickers on his typewriter and practice touch-typing until he had mastered the skill. In order to have the most basic interaction with a computer he had to learn a new way of communicating and he would then have to channel his thoughts into that communication methodology. With the gestural computing of the iPhone (and a big part of this is the iPhone OS, Apple figured out how to build an user interface to match the technology) you no longer needed to be taught, as you already knew.

2) It was the first technology device I have ever seen that seemed to equally amuse and entertain men and women. Men thought it was cool and women thought it was cute. Why? Because it was comfortable for both. We do think differently, we view the world differently and we interact with the world differently. But we innate knowledge, reinforced by our entire lifetime of experience, as to how to gesture. Yesterday I visited a friend’s house. His one-year-old daughter was in his arms when he answered the door and, when she saw me, she reached out her hand and pressed on my nose. I laughed, she laughed and then she pressed again. She had learned a gesture. She won’t learn to type for years. Which way of communicating will be more intuitive to her…

The iPad - Gestural Computing

The iPad is the gestural idea brought to the next step. It is large enough that we don’t feel constrained and limited – when using an iPhone you have a perpetual sense that you’re watching part of something larger (the rest of the email is off the screen, the rest of the web site is off the screen) and the device must, at it’s core, serve as a phone so it’s operating system gives primacy to it’s phone features. The iPad breaks down those limitations and opens up more surface for our content and more space for our gestures. We now can interact with all our content through direct motion and movement, no longer moving proxy instruments like keys and mice. This proximity to our media makes it more personal and frees our methods of expression.

I played music for a long time and studied jazz through high school and into college. I listened to interviews with great jazz musicians and they would talk about practicing and practicing until the instrument became instinctive. Until they no longer thought about the note they wanted to play but, rather, they thought of the note and the sound came out of the instrument. Musicians at the top of their abilities talk about the instrument becoming part of their body and, when improvising, reaching the point where they can turn off their brain and just connect their soul to their hands. Few people ever have the talent and spend the time to reach that point. The point where they no longer have an idea, think about how to execute it and then execute it but, instead, think and perform. Gestural computing lowers the bar to proficiency. It removes the conscious thought of technique from the act of creation. It opens a whole new world and this week we moved one step further towards it.

Cinematic Grade Inflation – Part II

A brief follow-up on my previous post about Cinematic Grade Inflation. In that post, I noted that the average grade of the top 100 rated films (with at least 20 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes had risen substantially from 2000 to 2009.

Following up on my post, Scott Macaulay over at the Filmmaker Magazine blog asked an interesting question:

I’d be curious to see the sample set of critics analyzed over the decade. I bet it’s a lot larger now, and I wonder if the new breed of critic is more disposed towards positive reviews than the critics we entered the decade with.

In an effort not to let that question be rhetorical (and out of personal curiosity) I decided to follow up and take a look.  What I found was not quite what I expected and, frankly, asked more questions than it answers:

So the average number of reviewers was higher in 2009 than in 2000, but if you look at 2000-2008 it actually appears to drop. Also, what was the reason for the extremely high average in 2004? And why so low in 2008?

Any ideas?

TV’s Financial Salvation: Freedom Of The Press?

Last week, in a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States may have just saved the TV industry – at least for a few more election cycles.

The case was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and concerned a documentary that Citizens United produced and aired that was against Hillary Clinton. A provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law said that corporations could not air political political ads within a given period of an upcoming election. It is likely that this ruling would also overturn a similar prohibition on Union-financed political ads as well.

This is a win for free speech.

This is probably a loss for the clarity of election campaigns.

This is an enormous win for TV networks. This probably keeps many of them in business for a long time to come.  Why? Follow the money…

Even before this ruling, analysts were predicting that 2010 would become a near record-setting year for ad spending at close to $3.3 billion, and over $2.2 billion of that going to TV. But with the floodgates removed from corporations, that number could surge massively. The gloomy forecast for TV ad revenues just got a tiny bit brighter.

That being said, it might just send more people to their DVRs because the only thing worse than car ads are political ads.

My name is Noah Harlan, and I endorse this message.

Claim Chowder

Step 1: Open Mouth, Step 2: Insert Foot

There’s a term called Claim Chowder that was, as far as I can tell, coined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. It refers to when someone makes a prediction with an aura of certainty and knowledge that turns out to be horribly wrong. A good example from the film business was last May, when one Wall Street analyst, after seeing 20 minutes of Pixar’s UP, downgraded Disney’s stock. As the New York Times reported:

Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for “Up” as a reason. “We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character,” he wrote, adding a complaint about the lack of a female lead.

UP did $293 million domestically and $727 million worldwide theatrically.

That is claim chowder.

So next week Apple will be announcing a new product. It is widely expected that it will be some form of tablet computer. Nobody has seen it. Nobody has any specs on it. Nobody knows the price. To borrow William Goldman’s words, nobody knows anything.

But that’s not stopping the claim chowder. PC World published this piece by Bill Snyder today. Mr. Snyder, apparently, is clairvoyant because he seems to know a lot about something he’s never seen. To whit:

[If] you run a small business and want to avoid wasting money and brain cells on superfluous technology, forget about the iSlate or whatever Apple is going to call its tablet computing device. It’s going to be too expensive, it does things you don’t need to do, and it will add a messy layer of complication to your company’s computing infrastructure.

Sure, the tablet we expect Apple to launch on January 27 will probably have more than its share of cool factor. But do you want to spend $1,000 or so for bragging rights? For that price, you could buy two perfectly serviceable Windows netbooks, four iPhones, or–if you want to go the Apple route–cover most of the cost of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, getting proven technology that’s useful right out of the box.

Now he may turn out to be right. I’m not a betting man. But if I were, I wouldn’t bet against Apple.  Let’s take a look at some of Mr. Snyder’s predecessors in the claim chowdering of Apple:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in 2007 on the iPhone:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

John Dvorak writing an article entitled “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone” on Market Watch, also in 2007:

As for advertising and expensive marketing this is nothing like Apple has ever stepped into. It’s a buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies

The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.

There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.

Stewart Alsop writing in Fortune Magazine in 1997 on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Jobs’ Next Software company:

Let’s get this straight right away: Apple Computer did the wrong thing. On December 20, Apple announced that it would spend $400 million to purchase Steve Jobs’s company, Next Software. The company said it would adopt Next’s NextStep operating system for future versions of the Macintosh computer. Most of the commentary I’ve seen about this decision is off the mark, especially the talk about Jobs coming back to save Apple. That is sheer nonsense. He won’t be anywhere near the company. People seem to have a real desire, perhaps even a need, to make excuses for Apple. Everybody wants to find a way to justify what Apple did.

You can’t justify it. Apple did precisely the wrong thing. Now the only future for the company is to get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left. In fact, the only sensible conversation to have about Apple is the one in which you argue about how long it will take to die.

[snip]

It takes a long time to kill an $11-billion-a-year company. Apple’s already down to around $8 billion a year. I give it another three years, until the millennium, to fall the rest of the way to the ground.

And another piece from John Dvorak (how does this guy still get work?), this time from the San Francisco Examiner in February 1984 following the debut on the original Macintosh (the first computer with a mouse and graphical user interface – before this, everything was done at the command line):

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation – as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.

As Samuel Clemens once said, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Apple will introduce something next week, it may not change the world, but fair warning to those that bet against them.

King

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that icons were just men. And King, well he was cool. Happy MLK Day.

The King Of Cool

via: The Impossible Cool

Data Underload

For Sunday morning – a nice, amusing little data viz via FlowingData:

Putting Things In Perspective

There’s been tons and tons of chatter, much of it very entertaining, about the situation going on between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno over at NBC.  It definitely seems like Jeff Zucker got himself into a situation, entirely of his own making, and now is flailing trying to find a way out and it’s going to cost NBC and GE a lot of money to sort out.  I mean A LOT of money.  For what it’s worth, I agree with Conan & David Letterman that if you move “The Tonight Show” back to 12:05AM that it is no longer “The Tonight Show”.

That being said, I think the most under appreciated host on late night, the hysterically funny and wonderfully charming Craig Ferguson, put things into real perspective. Take a look:

Rule Of Unintended Consequences

There’s an old statistics joke about terrorism:

Q: How do you ensure there will not be a terrorist’s bomb on your plane?

A: Bring your own bomb! The odds that there are two bombs on a plane is so remote…

LifeHacker has a tip today on how to ensure your camera equipment flies safely to your destination. Pack a gun in the bag! Apparently if you pack a weapon (in this case, a starter pistol) and declare it then the TSA registers your bag and takes special precautions to track it. Result? Your bag gets personal attention and is certain to arrive. Very clever…

One more example of the absurd security theater that we are enacting. Eventually we’ll have to study how real airline security works but for the time being, we’ll keep doing the absurd.

Haiti

The scale of the tragedy unfolding in Haiti today is unimaginable. For those looking to support the relief efforts, the White House is advocating donations to the Red Cross. You can donate $10 via your cell phone by texting “HAITI” to 90999.

I exchanged emails a short while ago with Haitian filmmaker Michelange Quay who made one of the most cinematically breathtaking and entrancing films of recent years, “Mange, ceci mon corps” (“Eat, For This Is My Body”).  Michelange has taught film to Haitian students and, though he lives in France, much of his family and friends are back there.  He writes:

I wanted to thank all you friends who wrote out of concern and
solidarity for me, my family, and the country of Haiti to be rebuilt.
My family is safe, but many close people have died or are missing, in
the chaos, as night falls again on the country.

That’s it, thanks for the positivity. We need every thought, because
they count. Let’s keep the faith and stay focused. Let this
catastrophe remind us, unite us. One Love.

Haiti has lived a long and sad history. There is something about this small half-island that seems to struggle time and again with how to get on its feet. I remember a section from PJ O’Rourke’s “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty” about Haitian history that speaks to the endless cycle that seems to consume that country.  Here is hoping that out of the rubble a new, more peaceful and stable country can be born. A synopsis of Haitian history picking up in 1818:

Jean Pierre Boyer was elected to replace Petion and took over the whole country when Christophe died.  He signed a stupid treaty with France agreeing, in return for international recognition, to pay Haiti’s ex-landowners huge reparations.  When the bill for this came due, Haitians, yet again, were sent to the plantations by force. They rebelled.  Boyer resigned and sailed for Jamaica in 1843.

Major Charles Herard replaced Boyer.  According to ‘Black Democracy: The Story of Haiti’ by H.P. Davis, Herard “entered the capital on march 21st amid an extraordinary demonstration of popular approval.”  He promptly invaded the Dominican Republic, lost the war, blew his popularity, and in April 1844 “sailed for Jamaica.”

Three presidents followed in the next three years until General Faustin Soulouque was elected in 1847, supposedly because he was too idiotic to bother anybody.  Soulouque crowned himself “Emperor Faustin I,” named 624 princes, dukes, and other nobles, and initiated a court etiquette so elaborate that after a joke the chamberlain would announce, “His majesty is laughing.  Gentlemen, you are invited to laugh also.”  Soulouque sailed for Jamaica in 1859.

Then came General Fabre Geffrard, who sailed for jamaica in 1867.  And Major Sylvain Salnave, who was tried and shot in 1869.  And Nissage-Sagent, who actually served out his constitutionally mandated term and left office peacefully.  This so confused the nation that there was a coup d’etat anyway.  General Michel Domingue sailed for Jamaica in 1876.

The next president, Boisrond-Canal, sailed for parts unknown.  (Jamaica being, apprently, full to the brim with ex-leaders of Haiti.)  J.N. Leger, in ‘Haiti, Her History and Her Detractors’, says the people showed great sympathy for Boisrond-Canal and “cheered him as he left the wharf.”

So it went for Haiti through another eleven chief executives, only one of whom gave up power on purpose, until we arrive at the case of Guillaume Sam.  ”General” Sam was “elected” “president” in 1915, that date being the only thing in his career which doesn’t require quotation marks.  Once Sam was installed, the usual rebellion got under way outside Port-au-Prince, and the usual political opponents were locked in the national prison. Revolutions in Haiti don’t normally involve much fighting.  The standard procedure is for the leader of the rebellion, when he feels strong enough, to send a small force of men into the capital.  The rebels attack various government buildings, and the government troops either fight back or don’t according to whether they think the revolution is likely to succeed.  Sam, however, committed a rules-book violation and had all his political prisoners slaughtered.  The public was wroth.  Sam had to hide in the French legation.  A mob gathered there. In the words of H.P. Davis:

“The mob remained without the gates, but a small body of well-known citizens, after courteously explaining to the French minister that the people were no longer to be baulked off their revenge, entered the house and, finding Sam under a bed in a spare room on an upper floor, pulled him down the stairs, dragged him along a driveway, and threw him over an iron gate to the mob.”

Sam was torn to pieces.

It was then that the United States bowed to the kinds of pressure the United States is forever being pressured to bow to – in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti right now, for instance – and intervened.  The U.S. Marines were sent to straighten things out in short order.  They stayed nineteen years.  And everything in Haiti has been hunky-dory ever since.