Beer and Localism

My blogger acquaintance at Twelve Mile Circle is a traveling beer connoisseur, among other things. I wonder what he thinks about a recent post at the Atlantic called "5 German Beers Worth Trying."

I am not familiar with any of these. Should I be?

Here's the abbreviated list:
1.) Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock Technically a cousin of Bud Ice & Co., in that they all use a freeze distillation process to remove some of the water and thus increase the alcohol content.

2.) Uerige Sticke Alt One of the more bizarre results of German localism is that this beer is one of the hardest to find inside the country, but only relatively hard to find in the States.

3.) Herforder Pils I include it not because it's a fantastic beer--though it is--but as a stand-in for all the hyper-local beers across Germany, the kind so fresh and fragile that no one should ever drink outside a 20-mile radius of the brewery, the kind that rarely if ever gets bottled, the kind that people an hour away have never heard of.

4.) Andechs Doppelbock Dunkel I've already sung the praises of Andechs, so I won't repeat myself. But for me it's the king of the doppelbocks.

5.) Schneider Weisse This legendary brewery, among Germany's best, makes several beers (including the Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock), all of them fantastic.

Interestingly, what this post (there is more if you follow the link above) illustrates is the inherent geography of good beer. Of course, the AAG has caught onto this, and there is now an affinity group devoted to the geography of wine and spirits (or something like that).

Various items we consume, but especially beer, has a local identity that confers meaning and symbolism to products that, in reality, could come from anywhere.

flickr/fensterbme

Mapping China's Pollution

The Wall Street Journal links to a map of China's pollution sites. The cool thing about this map is that it is user-generated content. As you can see, the map's coverage now extends even beyond China.

Not sure what the metric is for deciding what constitutes a pollution site, but this is an interesting way of addressing the problem in the restricted media environment there.

The chart (developed on Google Maps) allows viewers to mark spots associated with high levels of pollution or incidents of contamination, based on publicly available information. Since it was open for public participation last week, the number of views has more than doubled to about 5,000 compared to a week earlier, when it was first displayed online.

“My goal is to get as many people working on the map as possible so that everybody can help to expose the pollution problem,” said Guo Baofeng, the Fujian-based blogger and founder of the program.

Now, the map shows roughly 40 pollution sites, ranging from villages in Shanxi, where birth defects thought to be caused by toxic pollutants have been found, to a place in Fujian recently reporting a large group of children being tested with excessive lead levels in their blood. A major clue that Guo used to start up the map is a photo album of Lu Guang, the Chinese freelance photographer who won this year’s Eugene Smith prize for photos of scenes from Chinese pollution disasters and their victims.

From @evgenymorozov

More on Teaching

The other day I posted my thoughts about being a graduate instructor for university classes. I mentioned that if I've learned anything this semester, it's that the way I've been using PowerPoint is all wrong.

My realization was that most students just pay attention to the text on the slides. The problem is, the text is really there for me so I'll remember what to talk about. Once they write that down, they don't listen to what comes after that, which is what's really on the exam. When the exam comes around, guess who gets blamed for not "going over the material in class."

You get the idea. The point is that I have let PowerPoint take over my class. Next semester, I am vowing to take that power back.

A conversation on the Fast Company blog really illustrates the way I feel about PowerPoint in the classroom. Here, the setting is more from the business world than from the academic world, but I think the lesson still applies.

Q: Next week I'm making a presentation to some colleagues at work. (It basically outlines an approach for promoting one of our products in 2010.) My first draft of the presentation was 42 slides, and my team hit the roof. They say we should present 15 slides max. I say it's not the quantity that matters, it's the quality. What do you say?
- Maximum Verbosity

Dear Maximum Verbosity, you're colleagues are spiritually right and you're conceptually right. (And, by the way, that last sentence was an unprecedented and frankly ingenious advice-column hedge.) Let me explain.

Your colleagues are terrified of long, soulless presentations, so they're trying to set an arbitrary limit ("15 slides max") that will cap the pain. It's a noble instinct to prevent human suffering. That's why they're spiritually right.

But you're conceptually right about the matter of quality vs. quantity. For instance, my brother Chip and I routinely give hour-long speeches with over 100 slides. But those 100 slides have no bullets. Instead, we use lots of photos and graphics, and every now and then, we'll pluck out a key phrase or quote--e.g., "IT'S A NOBLE INSTINCT TO PREVENT HUMAN SUFFERING"--for emphasis.

There's a fork in the road when it comes to PowerPoint or Keynote presentations--you can use the visuals in one of two ways. The first approach is to use the visuals as an aid for you, the presenter. You can use them to provide structure to the talk and to remind you what to talk about. Outlines, headlines, bullets, etc.

This approach can provide a great comfort to a presenter who's not crazy about public speaking. But from the audience's perspective, it's a real bummer. It's drab and dense. It also strips control of the pace (and drama) away from the presenter, because you're letting the audience look ahead. In 10 seconds, they'll read through your outline and see everything you're going to talk about in the next 3 minutes. That makes them think they're way ahead of you, even if they're not. They'll start to do that hateful, watch-glancing, butt-shifting Antsy Dance.

The other approach is to use your PPT/Keynote as an aid to the audience. It allows you to show them things that are hard to describe verbally--for instance, the looks on your customers' faces when they use your product, or the look & feel of your new promotional materials. And it allows you to use the visuals for emphasis (Pay attention to this point!) rather than for signposting (Here's where we are in the talk).

So back to your question. If you're using the presenter-aid approach, listen to your colleagues. Keep it short. Or if you're using the audience-aid approach, hang onto those 42 slides--your audience will appreciate the visuals (unless you're showing vacation photos or lolcats, in which case refer to the point about human suffering above).

Makers Release

I'm very excited to learn that "Makers" by Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) is out. Below is the description.

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

I have approximately 3,200 pages of other reading I had planned to do first, but uh, it can wait, right?

The North Pacific Gyre

Previously I wrote here about what many people refer to as the North Pacific Gyre, or the giant trash heap that sits in the middle of the ocean.

This situation has garnered interest from many sources, including This American Life in their program called "Middle of Nowhere."

Another one is Good Magazine, which recently linked to a photo collection related to the gyre.

This photographer is Chris Jordan, and these photos are from Midway Atoll. On his website are many photos just like this.

Here's his description of the project:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

It's a haunting, terrible reminder of something I teach my geography class on the first week. The "economy" that we talk about and see is a tiny fraction of the real thing. All the stuff we consume comes from somewhere and ends up somewhere when we're done with it. The part we grossly undervalue is that last part.

Academics and the Public

An article in the NYT yesterday asked whether or not we need Political Science as an academic discipline.

After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects,” political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year’s Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.

Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the field’s direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is.

Like zorks Scoobs! The government is on to us and our cushy academic jobs!

I guess it's reassuring to know that geography isn't the only self-loathing, self-doubting discipline. One of the shots against political science as a discipline in this article is that the research does not influence policy as much as it should.

I understand that concern. Every discipline, especially in the social sciences, runs into that. We advance research within our own discipline and write for an audience that is doing the same thing. When (if?) an outsider reads the papers, he or she will likely end up asking, "So what?" When most research, in the US anyway, is funded by the public, we should do a better job of making our research accessible and clearly beneficial to them.

Having said that, there is a delicate balance that must be maintained. While our work should benefit public knowledge and policy, it should not be dictated by the need to produce for those venues.

Another issue is that public policy is often influenced by things that are not academic concerns. For example, the biggest public policy issue this century, arguably, is health care. Very influential voices shaping that debate in the public sphere are not medical professionals or public policy scholars. Instead, we get people showing up to "town hall meetings" with guns, effigies of the president made to resemble Hitler, and an untold amount of blatant misinformation intended to scare people. Those tactics are highly influential, but also nearly impossible to model for the academic.

So what's the future hold? Social sciences will no doubt experience cutbacks in the coming years, just like the arts and humanities are already used to. Meanwhile we get new luxury boxes in the football and basketball stadiums, which clearly advance public knowledge, but that's a different complaint for a different time.

There probably are too many publications that 1) only exist because they have to for tenure or 2) are only interesting to people within the academy. I'm not so sure that's a problem by itself, though. If academics are committed to their responsibility to the public, which I think we have mostly neglected, and are advancing knowledge whether the government cares about it or not, I think we've done our job.

Good luck Political Science, I had no idea Geography had company in this "why do we exist" debate.

Great Teaching Resources for China

In the World Regional Geography course I'm currently instructing, we cover Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. It's hard not to just spend the whole time, however, talking about China.

What a fascinating place. Today a came across a series of videos and helpful links that may be of use to you if you're also teaching East Asia. These come from The Atlantic, and more resources can be found here.

Learning on the Job

If you're a graduate student at a big university, you likely have taught at least one big lecture course. These courses are great for picking up valuable teaching experience, even if they do take up a lot of time.

But usually, we get thrown in front of a class of unsuspecting undergraduates with little or no training in pedagogy or teaching. We have to learn on the job. Sometimes that works out well, other times it does not. In the best case scenario, you're a natural and start off strong. Most of us do our best, but still struggle at first and get better over the course of a few semesters.

After teaching a few semesters as a graduate student with no training myself, I am no expert by any means. I have, however, had some time to reflect on things I can improve. Some of those experiences may be of use to those of you just starting out as graduate instructors.

Like many of the teachers I have had, I've been using Power Point to lecture. It has its merits, but after a few consecutive semesters of experiencing the same problems, I'm mostly dropping Power Point from my future classes. Here's why.

First, most students will write down everything on the slides. It doesn't matter if you post those slides in full later to a website, they will still do that. That's fine, but then they don't take notes on other, probably more important class points. The focus of the class becomes not what you say but what the Power Point says, and that can be problematic, especially come test time.

Second, as an acting (as in theater) professor pointed out to me, Power Point shifts the power you have as a presenter from you to the projector, which diminishes the chances you will meaningfully engage students in conversation. A great initial difficulty for me has been accepting the power that standing in front of a room full of expectant students affords. Power Point is not helping in that regard. Again, the text or the images become the focal point of the room, not the instructor.

Third, I find that Power Point restricts how I want to dictate the class. If a topic comes up that I want to delve further into and I know that I have a few slides about it later on, I am reluctant to pursue that discussion to its fullest to avoid future redundancies.

Like I say, Power Point has its merits, but my learning on the job experience thus far has taught me to use it sparingly. You may feel differently, as I am sure there are a range of ways to use it well or poorly.

Another point I've come to appreciate is just how much new undergraduates enjoy the chance to produce something creative. For example, some of the best received assignments I've come up with are photo essays, making Google maps with photos or even videos, stuff like that. Spend some extra time coming up with assignments that they can have fun with but also learn from.

The great thing about geography is that we study humans in every day life, which is of course something students can relate to. Usually they just haven't thought about their daily lives as any having any relationship to things we deal with in social sciences.

I've also figured out that even though I personally don't like group work, they pretty much do like it. In-class exercises in which they can talk to their peers or come up with answers together seem to work well. This is especially the case in large lecture classes where you cannot personally interact with a large proportion of the students.

I'm still learning how to do this well. Hopefully some of these experiences are useful for others, especially if you're a graduate instructor looking for some resources from others in your situation.

Maybe just a little evil?

One of the tough issues facing neogeography today is balancing information with privacy. Mixed feelings over Google Street View is at the forefront of that balancing act. There are those who feel that the company whose motto is "Don't Be Evil" has a little too much information about us.

We voluntarily turn a lot of information over to Google already. By using their search engine and other services (like Blogger) we grant them permission to collect and analyze data about us that even close associates don't know.

Google Street View changes that "voluntary" part because no one is asked if the Street View team can drive by your house and take a picture of it.

Most people seem to have made the decision that the benefits of Street View outweigh the costs. For example, how else could we randomly capture hilarious street scenes, like this one?

Besides, Street View doesn't have any more access to your life than anyone else with a car. But that could be about to change. As the Fast Company blog writes:

Google has a trike. It's 250 lbs., has GPS and a Street View camera. And it goes off-road.

Sure, it's been around in Europe for a while. Sure the company's playing nice, asking us all to suggest ideas about where, exactly, it should roam, but if there ever were fodder for folks who believe Google is the CIA, Big Brother, and Skynet all rolled into one, this latest digital-eyed gizmo is that fodder ... on three wheels.

The categories in which Google is seeking View suggestions are: Theme Parks & Zoos, Trails, Landmarks, Sports Venues, Universities, Pedestrian Malls, and People Seen Taking Showers Through Their Open Windows.

Okay, we made up that last one.

The last point, while obviously a joke, does speak to one of the fears people have with this new "view." Where does the line between public and private start and stop? Should Google have to give people the opportunity to opt out?

I don't claim to know how to weigh the costs and benefits of Trike View, but these are questions we should be asking.

RegrEtsy. Best. Website. Ever.

For my dissertation research I am studying the handmade arts and crafts movement.

Briefly, I'm interested in trying to understand where the movement is strongest and how people use the web to create what I call an alternative cultural economy.

Etsy, the main online store for handmade goods, features prominently in my research. Etsy decentralizes the marketplace for arts and crafts and makes us as geographers re-evaluate what we know about how cultural products are produced and traded.

Anyway, I'm looking on the Fast Company blog and much to my delight come across a review for RegrEtsy, the hall of shame list of Etsy products.

You'll notice in the description of this (surprisingly high-priced) minotaur sculpture, the creator asks: "How much crueler a sport would bullbaiting have been with minotaurs," which I think we can all agree is something the great institutions of philosophy are discussing at this very moment.

Check out RegrEtsy for more regrettable products, but beware, the website has some language and images that prudish workplaces might object to.

If you're in the mood for a good Friday laugh, though, it will deliver, both with images and commentary. Like this commentary regarding the "awesome fashion must have" poncho:

Whenever I think “awesome fashion”, I immediately think, “brushed fleece”. I mean, it’s just automatic at this point. Kind of like, “one-size-fits-most” and “must have”.

I’m not sure about “elegant and “poncho”, but then, I haven’t seen it in “Blue Moose in the Woods”.

The App Store

Newsweek has an interesting article (finally!) about the relative success of all those people creating apps to sell to Apple. When apps were first taking off, they were often held up as an example of what struggling media producers could do to diversify their revenue streams.

Even more intriguing was the possibility that seemingly anybody could create an app, sell it to Apple, and retire to Baja, or whatever they want to do.

Like a lot of new developments in the rapidly changing world of technology, however, things aren't quite what they seem. Yes, the App Store is a big money maker. Yes, a few people have gotten rich. For the most part though, the people doing really well are the usual suspects, the Goliaths of the industry. Most would-be app developers never really get off the ground.

More than 125,000 programmers have flocked to write for the App Store, lured by its generous revenue-sharing deal, as well as Apple's feel-good promotional videos buttressed with motivational slogans ("Make This Your Year," "Come Code with the Pros"), blow-out conferences (Norah Jones performed at one this year), big-deal design awards that are covered throughout the tech world, and a download counter that calls to mind McDonald's boast of "100 BILLION served." Last month, Apple claimed to surpass the 2 billion mark. The App Store, as Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of iPod and iPhone product marketing, said in a keynote address last spring, "levels the playing field and it makes it so the small guys can succeed as well."

The App Store, which launched in the summer of 2008, is thought to be a portal to big bucks for code geeks looking to make a mark. They sell their wares online, setting their own price and keeping 70 percent of the proceeds. But how many programmers really strike it rich? Apple doesn't release individual sales figures for its App Store, and it declined NEWSWEEK's request for comment. But 18 months after it launched and online prospecting began, the App Store isn't developing many new millionaires. Not only have most sellers failed to turn a profit—a fact that is perhaps not surprising given the difficulty of making money in any retail environment these days—even developers with high-ranking games and applications have made far less than commonly thought. Many come nowhere near recouping their investment at all...

In almost a dozen interviews conducted by NEWSWEEK, Apple consultants and programmers jettison the idea that the App Store is a world of easy opportunity, or a fast track to quitting the rat race. Instead they describe an anxiety-wracked marketplace full of bewildering rules, long odds, and little sense of control over one's success or failure.

This story reinforces a point: just when you think you've got this brave new world of socio-technological change figured out... it changes again.

One thing seems certain: There is no simple way to succeed in the world of new media. The internet creates new problems as quickly as it solves them.

The Newsweek story brings me back to a criticism I had of Chris Anderson's concept of "Free" and Zephyr Teachout's triumphalist statements about the future of digital education.

While we rightly explore new ways of doing things on the web, such as the App Store business model or web-based classrooms, we must also carefully and honestly examine the costs. While the App Store business model opens the door for little guys to get a piece of the revenue stream, it also destabilizes employment for many skilled people and has an abysmal success rate. While web-based education is more efficient and probably cheaper than classroom education, it also creates an uncertain employment landscape that does not offer much upside for someone who invests 10 or so years in their higher education.

Are these costs too high? There is, of course, no one answer that can adequately address that question. But so far, it seems that very few people are even asking it. If the future of employment is unstable, short-term, and mostly independent, who is really benefiting? This is an especially important question in the United States, where do not have public health insurance, limited unemployment compensation, and probably no public retirement option in the future.

The App Store example suggests an unforeseen paradox in the digital age. By decentralizing the power to contribute to the high-tech economy from big industry to distributed, independent individuals, we may have actually reaped the worst of both worlds. My fear is that people who are already well-off and in a position to take big risks will be the ones who can invest time developing an App that is likely to fail. Conversely, people who may be skilled but less well-off would be considered foolish to take such a risk, thus killing this image of a decentralized, democratized opportunity structure that many people associate with the web.

Clearly, the old way has its problems too. But I think the best way forward is a more measured mix between old-style stability and digital-age opportunity. Otherwise the power of the millions of Davids will be too diffuse to actually challenge the Goliaths. Worse still, the wide open world of digital innovation may become too unstable for too many people.

Fantastic Mr Fox

Been wanting to see this ever since I read about it 2 year or so years ago on imdb. Of course then it was called Fantastic Mr Fox project (announced).

I especially like the part at the end of this clip when Owen Wilson is describing wackbat. I'm showing that part to my class when we talk about South Asia and their love of cricket. That sport is weird.

Is Hanover Street turning into Landsdowne Street?

A friend asked me for a resident's opinion on this Globe story:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/29/residents_fight_loud_late_night_bar_scene_in_north_end/?page=2

So here it is. In the time I've lived here, I haven't noticed the neighborhood getting more rowdy. We still only have only three bars in the neighborhood, while the rest of the establishments are restaurants who happen to also serve wine/beer. The 11 convenience stores that sell alcohol aren't a problem, I can only count two that are new in the past year. Saying that "the neighborhood is more awash in liquor than any other corner of the city" may be the North End/Waterfront Residents Association's (NEWRA) personal view, but I'd like to see some geospatial data to back that claim up.

NEWRA is an interesting group. They are a social club that pressures city hall to deny building/renovation permits for anything other than upscale Italian dining, gelato stands, and luxury condos. NEWRA's members seem to be largely gentrifiers themselves, non-Italians from the Boston suburbs and beyond. They renovated buildings and brought housing prices up to the level that the local private college students desire. The claim that "college student grab up more affordable apartments" is nonsense, as that population has arrived precisely when the neighborhood moved upscale, scared away in previous decades by the shabby condition of the neighborhood.

We're a long way from Landsdowne Street, but every time an old Italian couple dies and their middle-aged kids sell their modest apartment building for conversion to luxury condos for undergrads, I suppose a little piece of the old North End also dies.

Craft Shine

In the last few years, something I've been interested in is rising popularity of niche or craft consumer goods.

Mark Penn, of Clinton campaign fame, wrote about these small market forces in a 2007 book called Microtrends.

I often wonder what microtrends would have emerged without the web. Probably very few. Indie arts and crafts, old-time Appalachian music (this is something I've written about before on my music blog), home beer brewing, and now, apparently, moonshine.

Correction: make that craft moonshine. As Salon.com reports, "Moonshine Returns!"

I saw this on a New York Times blog that describes craft moonshine like this:

“It’s more about culinary experimentation than it is about cheap hooch,” says a spirits blogger quoted in Salon, commenting on what appears to be an Internet-fostered vogue in small-batch, but still illegal, home-distilling, a trend that extends well beyond the fabled rural southeastern American roots of the practice. For sure, brazen Junior Johnsons outrunnin’ the “revenooers” these new moonshiners ain’t.

In her article, Catherine Price reports that they’re apt to attend distilling workshops and count among their number software developers, lawyers and accountants. And since police budgetary constraints mean enforcement “is more lax than it used to be,” most small-batch distillers of home hooch — everything from New Orleans absinthe to New Jersey applejack — don’t have to worry about getting caught. So never mind cuing the banjo music. [Salon]

Turns out that lots of people have an interest in craft moonshine, and the internet enables them to find each other, exchange recipes, make videos of how it's done so their fellow shiners don't blow themselves up.

It would be a shame to write about moonshine and fail to mention the most famous real-life moonshiner.Perhaps you've heard of Popcorn Sutton?


He was a real-life moonshiner who recently took his own life after being arrested for, well, moonshining.

Here's the story:

PARROTTSVILLE, Tenn. – Legendary Haywood County moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton took his own life because he couldn’t stand the thought of going to prison, his wife said today.

Pam Sutton said she found her husband Monday afternoon dead of carbon monoxide poisoning outside their home in Cocke County, Tenn.

“He got his letter to report Friday, and he just couldn’t handle it,” she said. “We tried everything we could to leave him on house arrest, and they wouldn’t do it. So I thank the federal court for this.

“And he was really sick. He was depressed. I didn’t know he was that depressed.”

Sutton, 62, spent much of his life making moonshine, a craft that brought him fame and a string of criminal convictions dating back to the 1970s. He was facing 18 months in federal prison on moonshining and weapons charges and had told a judge at his sentencing he was in poor health and would rather die at home than in jail.

Pam Sutton said she went into town to run errands and couldn’t find her husband at their house when she returned. She found him at the rear of their property inside his beloved old Ford Fairlane, which was running, she said.

“He called it his three-jug car because he gave three jugs of liquor for it,” she said. “He had painted it John Deere green and it had yellow wheels. He had drove it to California and back.

“He was a good man, he really was."

Federal authorities arrested Sutton a year ago on charges of running a moonshine operation that produced hundreds of gallons of liquor.

A judge in January sentenced him to 18 months in prison, rejecting arguments that Sutton had learned his lesson and was too ill to serve time.

“I'd like to die at home instead of in a penitentiary,” Sutton said in court at the sentencing.

Nearly 1,500 people had signed petitions asking for leniency in his sentence.

Born near Maggie Valley, N.C., Sutton was revered by some for preserving a dying piece of mountain history.

His reputation grew beyond the mountains through a book and film he produced about his craft and Internet and cable TV documentaries in which he demonstrated how to make his famous liquor.

Sutton evoked curiosity from people around the world, drawing tourists to places like the Misty Mountain Ranch Bed and Breakfast in Maggie Valley, which has a suite dedicated to the moonshiner.

He's quite revered around these parts. Some people feel quite strongly about him in fact. That picture above... it's real. Had he survived, it would be quite a funny "worlds collide" moment to put him in the same room with a few "craft moonshiners."

Sadly, we'll never know what's that like.

Flickr/BluegrassAnnie

Colloquium Personalities

Most academic departments have some sort of speaker/colloquium series that everyone is expected to attend.

After having attended my fair share of speakers at a variety of institutions, I have noticed that there are some striking similarities in how people behave at these talks. Let's face it, most people in attendance do not want to be there and have lots of other things to do. So they show this sentiment in diverse ways.

Based on my extensive field observations, I have compiled a list of colloquium personalities that are remarkably consistent.

You have the attentive suck-ups, who listen to every single word of every single speaker.

You have the person who invited the speaker who is way too excited to be hearing the talk and can barely contain himself or herself. The "inviter" will then ask too many questions, possibly even extend the talk into an overtime period. The overtime period is a regrettable fact of academia. If your colloquium ends and 5:00 and it's 5:05 and someone is asking questions... well, nothing really happens, but it's annoying.

You have the uncomfortable starers. They pay attention for a little while, then look around the room, lock eyes with someone, and stare. They're not trying to be funny, that's just what they do. At times the uncomfortable starer may look lost, or confused... but do not be alarmed. That's just their nature.

There is always someone who comes late, and always a different a person who consistently leaves early. The late person is ridiculed, the early leaver is assumed to have an important engagement. You occasionally get people who double dip, and they draw a special kind of ire. They lose their assumption of important place to be status and drift into 15-year graduate student status.

There is iPhone person, and picture drawing person, and sudoku person, and crossword person, and "I never remember to put my ringer on silent" person. There are fidgeters and sleepers alike.

There are those who write notes, and whisper questions that can't be answered in a yes/no manner, forcing the other person to either look rude by answering while the talk is going on or look rude by ignoring the question.

There are half-sleepers, homework doers, and web surfers.

And then there's list-making person. This person has special powers because to the untrained eye, they appear to be taking notes during the talk. Notetakers are a rare, particularly dorky kind of colloquium species, so to be passed off as a notetaker when in fact you are a list maker is a grand accomplishment.

Having said that, where do you think I came up with this blog post?

Census Homocide

If you're a dork like me, you might actually be excited that the census is coming around. You get to participate in our democracy, you know there will be new data coming out soon, it takes like no time at all and is a minor inconvenience once every 10 years.

Sadly, other people, including this one egregious example from my home state (Kentucky), disagree:

The FBI is investigating the death of census worker Bill Sparkman, who was found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the word "fed" scrawled across his chest.

That's seriously crazy. I'm at once horrified at this murder and depressed it's associated with my state.

One has to wonder, as Atlantic Monthly has done, if this type of action is in any way associated with the virulent tone many fringe conservatives have taken since Obama got elected.

The presence of an anti-government slur is already sparking a debate over whether right-wing conspiracy-theorizing is becoming irresponsible. Paranoia about the census had been spread by a handful of conservative leaders, including Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who suggested she would not be completing the census because it could be used to establish internment camps like those constructed for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The key line in all this: "The presence of an anti-government slur is already sparking a debate over whether right-wing conspiracy-theorizing is becoming irresponsible."

Let me think about that one for a second... YES!

As for Bachmann, here's what she is referring to:

Bachmann: Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up and put the Japanese in internment camps.

Do you need to guess which fair and balanced network this interview took place on?

So let's just dissect this. Clearly the suggestion is that Obama has a plan to round people up so he can put them in a concentration camp by using the census data. Who is he rounding up? That's left open,but who needs facts when you can just say what you want and have a large constituency that will believe anything you say?

Not that reason matters, but let's think about this for a second. Bachmann is a U.S. Representative. The reason she has a district to represent is because.... drum roll... of the census.

The primary purpose of the census is to know how many people are living in what areas of the country so we can know how many Representatives to assign to those same areas. Wyoming, for example, does not need 100 or even 2 Representatives. California, with its 30-some million people, needs a lot more. Is that so crazy? Is that worth killing someone over?

The federal government (under Bush the Second no less) already has the power to investigate your personal life, down to the books you check out at your public library. Corporations already have immense reach into your personal life. That GPS in your car or your phone? It can be used to find where you're going, or to find you where you are now. Data get sent from your car to corporations, informing them of your daily routines, so they can market to you better. If the government wants it, they can get it.

But of course, off-the-wall comparisons to how things were in the 40s and how things are in 2009 are much more informative.

The government asking you to account for yourself once every 10 years is not what you need to worry about, especially if you depend on the accuracy of that census for your job.

This would be the ultimate irony. If, inspired by her keen wisdom, Bachmann's district is under-counted in the census because of their strange census paranoia, the data will indicate that they do not need as many Representatives in that area and Bachmann will lose her seat.

I'll one up that: lose her seat to somewhere in (dah dah dah/scary violins) MASSACHUSETTS!

How far can you get?

I haven't been posting lately on the things people really expect out of geographers: maps.

But I saw this on Fast Company and thought it was interesting.

This infographic is a depicting urban sprawl as measured by "distance to the nearest McDonald's."

Here's the summary:

Just how far away can one get from the generic convenience of Starbucks, Subway, or OfficeMax at any given time? Turns out, not very. Stephen von Worley at Weather Sealed set out to chart the urban sprawl of America by mapping the 13,000+ locations of McDonald's across the lower 48 states. With the aid of Agg Data, he created a striking map of the US, colored by distance to the nearest domestic Mickey D's. Gorgeous, but terrifying.

Interesting take. No doubt McDonald's uses GIS and multi criteria decision making tools locate new stores, so this map shouldn't be a surprise.

One thing I was fairly interested in is the AggData provider. They have similar information on all kinds of stores, from Blockbuster to Target to Victoria's Secret locations that you can download for free. So it's moderately useful if you're looking for some spatial data on corporate locations.

Takes on the Big Sort

The Atlantic has four takes from the popular media about why, after what was supposed to be a post-partisan electoral victory for Obama, Americans are back to tearing at each other's red and blue throats.

The first take comes from Chris Matthews, who cites leadership failures for allowing fringe voices to dominate discourse. Elected officials are not doing their part to condemn the actions of outspoken groups with extreme viewpoints.

The second take, from David Gibson, suggests that the "God gap" is the source of the growing divide between liberals and conservatives. In other words, conservative religious concerns are being matched by liberal religious concerns, but on very different issues.

NYT columnist David Brooks offers yet another take, eloquently drawing a comparison between the political legacies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

Alexander Hamilton, Brooks said, inspired today's liberal movement of "urbanism, industrialism and federal power," while Thomas Jefferson godfathered the "populist" movement of "small-town virtues and limited government." Brooks noted that, although today's Jeffersonians are conservative, they have at other times been liberal, as with the labor movement. Obama's strong Hamiltonian tendencies, Brooks suggested, "guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash" which was sure to be "ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top."

The fourth take offers a simpler rationale: people today are more confused and scared than ever.

"The thwarted decency in them is trying to find a political home, a sense of civic standing that is slipping away," he wrote. "And now, such individuals are looking for someone or something to blame." Sleeper points to misplaced anger that, lacking an easy target, is easily directed by partisan figures and pundits. "Anything will serve, if it spares them having to face being had by the unaccountable powers and riptides that are destroying their dreams."

All of these opinions surely have some merit. One thing I'm surprised about, however, is the lack of reference to what Bill Bishop has termed the "Big Sort." The Big Sort hypothesis is that more so than ever before, like-minded people are clustering and interacting with each other, at the expense interacting with people who may challenge their beliefs.

He points to evidence that this process is happening at a variety of geographical scales, all the way down to the choice of neighborhood within a city. Looking around during an election cycle, it's easy to see that Bishop is on to something. Even in Republican Knoxville, there were Obama neighborhoods, and they all shared a certain Jane Jacobs characteristic.

Surely our collective failure to meaningfully engage people in every day conversation with different opinions is hindering reasonable debate.

I also would suggest two additional reasons why strong partisan divides exist, or at least have appearance of existing.

First, perhaps the post-partisan notion never developed past the stage of hopeful rhetoric. Obama's victory was no doubt a momentous occasion that I think deserved all the media coverage it got. It was quite easy to get caught up in the excitement and optimism of this new era. I think a lot of commentators let that sense of optimism influence how they wrote about what the future might entail, leading to many musings on our post-racial, post-partisan future.

Others have pointed this out, but it is quite apparent that those calls were premature. Should we therefore be surprised that our post-partisan future is not bearing out if it was not going to happen in the first place?

Second, how big of an anti-Obama movement are we talking about in reality? I don't mean just people who disagree with the president... I'm talking about the gun-toting, hammer-and-cycle fearing (mostly middle-aged, mostly white) faces you see on TV. Does it just seem like a big movement because people yelling, holding a rifle in one hand and a picture of Obama made to resemble Hitler in the other, are getting most of the news coverage? It's hard to say.

I can add this. I live in a sea of red politics, and I have not seen any indications that the histrionics so often depicted on national news even exist off-camera. If this were a true, grass-roots movement, I would expect to see signs of it everywhere, and especially in a part of the country that is so Republican that during the Civil War, when the rest of the South broke away to side with the Democrats, Knoxville stayed true to the Union and the Republicans. While the rest of the South turned Republican in the 1970s or so, Knoxville had a 110 year head start. But I digress.

To wrap this up, I'd like to see some data on the size and composition of these big demonstrations. I don't how one would go about getting those data, but it would be useful to see. Right now, I'm still not convinced that this isn't mostly a fringe movement.

Digital Education: Part 2

Yesterday I started a post about why I think we should be more critical of how society is changing in the digital age. Not critical in the sense of finding disparaging things to say and pointing out negative aspects of technology. But I do think we should be critical in the sense of looking at data and combating statements that have intuitive appeal but not necessarily empirical appeal.

In my research, the statement I'm most interested in criticizing goes something like this: "now that we have the internet, geography is of little importance because information is decentralized. You don't need to be in New York or London to be a publisher, and you don't need to be L.A. to carve a niche for yourself in visual media..."

I could continue, but you get the basic idea and have heard the popular phrases. The internet "lowers the barriers to entry" in once closed societies like broadcasting and entertainment. Now that everyone can create a free blog or post their video to YouTube for free, us little guys can compete with big media because we have the same audience and broadcasting ability now, right?

Theoretically, this makes total sense, and there are a few examples of amateurs who have been able to get "big media" scale attention. Take this video, for example, which in two months has gotten over 24 million hits and even a mock follow-up:



Other than a few outliers like that, however, big media dominates, even on YouTube.

This line of reasoning goes hand-in-hand with a recent post on the Atlantic called "The Rise of Professional Bloggers."

The article presents statistic after statistic demonstrating that while blogging may have started out as a way for independent "Davids" to be heard, tens of millions of blogs later, most of the "Davids" either work for Goliath or have become a Goliath themselves.

For the little guy, then, it’s clearly true that, in Hindman's words, "There is a difference between speaking and being heard." In their effort to be heard, smart new writers are trying to lash themselves to major online brands, as they would any traditional print publication. Even some of the bloggers we’ve come to admire as bootstrap-heroes are in truth products of the farm club. The Internet's favorite Cinderella figure, Nate Silver—the statistician-outsider turned political prodigy—cut his teeth not at some hinterland Word Press blog, but at the Daily Kos. Conversely, many brands have become strong enough to outlive the loss of their marquee talents. Gawker burned through such gifted early editors as Elizabeth Spiers and Choire Sicha, while traffic continued to multiply. Today, the romantic notion that solitary, untamed bloggers are running the Web is more fantasy than fact—nearly as apocryphal as old myths about stoic Western sheriffs killing 11 outlaws with six bullets.

Clearly, I enjoy amateur blogs, and I think they're a great way for independent people to connect. I think they can be especially useful if you're an educator and you want to put up links and personal commentary for your class (whether or not students read them is a different matter).

I certainly seems time for the discussion of the brave new digital world to evolve and face the numbers.

Digital Education: Part 1

If you've read posts here before, you know that I am quite interested in how the digital age changes, and doesn't change, society. Usually this debate takes place within the context of the newspaper industry.

It's a pretty simple premise: newspapers are cutting back substantially and some are flat out dying because they cannot compete with online alternatives to news, which are updated in real time and are mostly free to access. In the future, the thinking goes, instead of having traditional journalists bring us our news, we will increasingly rely on amateur reporters, bloggers, news aggregators, etc.

This type of reasoning extends to many other facets of society that are touched by digital technology. One notable attempt to sum up why and how digital content will change culture is Chris Anderson's "Free," which I've talked about here before.

To this point, most of the digital futurist-type arguments I've read concern media, journalism, and especially music. Now, add education into the mix. Here's one take (from Zephyr Teachout on Slate's Big Money) on why the web will indelibly change higher education:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.

Yawn. I have another business model that won't survive: Confident journalists predicting the end of people physically interacting because of technology. With each new technological paradigm, there is no shortage of people ready to herald a new age. Here's how one commenter put it on the website:

The printing press doomed the university too. Once the knowledge of a professor could be encapsulated in a permanent document, the man himself became obsolete. The last university closed in about 1700. The telephone doomed the university. Once a professor's voice could be sent to another location and amplified, the need for more than one professor in any given field was removed. The last competitor to Harvard closed in 1906. Television did in the university. Now that lectures can be broadcast widely into every home, there is no longer a need to have a physical location for higher learning. The closure of the last University campus in 1965 (around about the time of the last commercial steam train in the US) was the end of an era. Need I go on?

Well said, jesnow. I think we get your point. Just for the fun of it, allow me elaborate further.

When the phone became popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, guess what journalists predicted:

"Within three years after the invention of the telephone in 1876, the London Spectator predicted that the new device would substitute for personal meetings." From "Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age," Sola Pool 1990, p225

The phone did not supplant physical contact, but rather created the need to have even more meetings because professionals were more connected and making more transactions.

Similar to the argument that the phone would kill meetings, Teachout reasons that the web will supplant physical universities because the commodity universities trade in (information) is now online, easy to reproduce, and available anywhere:

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters’ pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise—a degree, a better job, access to brilliant minds and training in the art of thinking. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere.

This line of reasoning makes a common mistake: the failure to distinguish between different types of information. Codified information, the type of information Teachout is identifying, is quite easy to reproduce online. Codified tasks are good for conveying basic knowledge. Low-level core courses, like in a 101 series, would be ideal candidates to codify and put online.

But the real value of university education is from the tacit knowledge you glean in-person. Tacit knowledge comes from physical interaction with knowledgeable people.

Tacit knowledge is the type of interaction that builds trust, conveys deep understanding, and signals to others that you know what you're talking about.

Scholars often use this concept to explain why firms continue to cluster in the digital age. For example, Google trades in information, they have no need to be located in any particular place. However, rather than set up shop in the middle-of-nowhere North Dakota, where it would be cheap, their headquarters is in Silicon Valley.

Here's an excerpt from a paper I wrote explaining why place and physical contact continue to matter in the digital age, and why we still see brick-and-mortar institutions in physical places:

Tacit and complex knowledge are locationally “sticky” because they are transmitted in a face-to-face manner (Storper 1997; Asheim and Gertler 2005). Morgan (2004, 5) argues that cyberspace is unlikely to supplant the benefits of physical proximity because “it is difficult to imagine the rich diversity of physical proximity, where the nuances of body language and face-to-face communication convey as much as (if not more than) verbal communication, being matched by virtual proximity.”

Think of it this way: you can codify basic Spanish words and sentence structure and teach those skills online. Students would get to the point where they can pass a class and feel reasonably confident in their Spanish skills.

But that does not necessarily mean that they can go to Mexico tomorrow and just jump right into conversations, because language fluency is about more than vocabulary. Likewise, higher education is about more than exams and homework. It's about learning the language, culture, and mannerisms of academics.

I'll continue with this topic in my next post.