Bell curved

There's an extraordinarily interesting Washington Post 'article' on their website by the always-entertaining Gene Weingarten.

It shows off some pretty nice web journalism touches (long-form writing, chopped up video snippets, user comments), but ultimately is great on the strength of its (Timesish) idea: what would happen if Joshua Bell played in the subway?

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away. ...

Right there you have our world in a nutshell--adult inhibitions choking off freedom!

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

What about Joshua Bell?

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here."

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look. ...

That should make Joshua feel better; we won't even stop for death, let alone music. The Post beats the point home with:

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

The funny thing about this paragraph is everyone says it of everyone else; but we can't all be the ones in the bemoaning position, most of us are in the responsible position.

I'd wager that 99% of what most people do all day is warped by psychological and what they see as societal issues; most even good work is warped, and most work (in the sense of life output not literally workplace activity) isn't good.

Irony, of course, being the guiding principle of our time and warping all it touches especially when it's unwitting:

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing."

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen. ...

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money. ...

Of course, on the Post video, they fast-forward through all but 50 seconds of Mortensen's three special minutes.

Uncredited photo of Joshua Bell found in various spots online.

A better family

What are we like? The Times' Sam Roberts takes a look at what the Census Bureau's 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States tells us about ourselves.

The article's chock full of interesting conclusions about what we eat, what we do, and how we spend our leisure time. Unfortunately, at least one of the article's central observations is dead wrong:

“The large master trend here is that over the last hundred years, technology has privatized our leisure time,” said Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” Mr. Putnam said. “That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.”

Huh? The entire trend of the Internet in recent years is toward social networking and exchange sites. Heck, that's all blogs are about!

Putnam is nuts if he thinks society is getting more isolated--the bucolic days he harkens back to were noteworthy for the fact that people of different races and classes never mixed. Thus, even if there was more face-to-face exchange, it was the choir talking to the choir--incest, if you well.

In addition, much of that 'exchange' was involuntary--people in small towns often hate being there but have (or feel like they have) no choice. Under those circumstances, killing time on Saturday night at the local bar was unlikely to lead to the kind of personal growth Putnam's looking for.

Whereas now...

Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

“The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable,” said James P. Rutherfurd, executive vice president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the media investment firm whose research the Census Bureau cited.

Mr. Rutherfurd said time spent with such media increased to 3,543 hours last year from 3,340 hours in 2000, and is projected to rise to 3,620 hours in 2010. The time spent within each category varied, with less on broadcast television (down to 679 hours in 2005 from 793 hours in 2000) and on reading in general, and more using the Internet (up to 183 hours from 104 hours) and on cable and satellite television.

Anyone who decries how kids today are dumber or more withdrawn than than used to be is grinding an ax.

It's like people saying schools are worse today than they used to be--I always feel like adding, you mean back in the day when they were segregated? Maybe it's just me, but I think the value of a bunch of white kids knowing Greek or Latin isn't quite worth as much to them as living in a society where large numbers of people aren't beaten in the streets. I know from a societal point of view which world is better.

Kids today know waaaay more about the rest of the world for the simple reason that the Internet gives them access. Some kid in the 60s had no way of interacting with his/her counterparts in Europe or Asia, except for finding a pen pal (which was limited to periodic contact with one person).

In addition, kids today write way more than they used to, and read way more than before. That's all MySpace is; it lets everyone express themselves, not just the artistic or the driven.

The result isn't always genius... but it's better than whatever a bunch of white guys huddled down at the local bowling alley is likely to produce. Putnam et al need to take an honest look at life in 2006 for what it really is, rather than looking at it as if they were stuck in the 60s.

Uncredited photo of Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker found in various places online.

Fant-tastic

Two takes on the fantasy sports craze, of which I'm a card-carrying member. Some might say champion.

The Sports Gal (wife of ESPN.com columnist extradordinaire Bill Simmons

You already know about the traffic in L.A., but now that it's Xmas season, even parking has become impossible. Fortunately I happen to be married to a guy with the self-proclaimed "parking gene." (Apparently this runs in the family because his dad thinks he has it, too.) Every so often, Bill stumbles upon the perfect spot -- like last week, when I made him stop at Pinkberry (the greatest frozen yogurt shop ever) and he found a space right in front, then spent the next 30 seconds congratulating himself. He was so pleased. It's too bad they can't have the League of Dorks for finding parking spaces, I'm sure he'd be in three leagues and calling his buddy Hench every time he found a good space so they could calculate the standings. But this parking luck is what he calls the "parking gene."

Fantasy craze produces awkward moments for players, ESPN.com's Greg Garber

He swivels in the power chair, furiously working his iMac mouse and keyboard, wrapped in a cocoon of mahogany and football memorabilia.

Click! Click! Click!

Here in the comfort and safety of his stately home office, set in an upscale development outside Indianapolis, Cato June is not merely a linebacker for the Colts. He is the powerful owner, shrewd general manager and X/O-savvy head coach of an NFL fantasy football team called Juneimus D Great -- a name modestly modeled on the emperors of Rome.

On this late November day, June is not smiling. He bears the stern countenance of someone whose team is scuffling around .500 with the season winding down. At this moment, desperately seeking some receiving help -- Tap! Tap! Tap! Click! -- June is Everyfan.

An estimated 15 million to 20 million Americans play fantasy football. June is proud to be one of them. Admittedly, it makes for some awkward moments. You see, his fantasy quarterback is the Patriots' Tom Brady.

"Playing New England, I can't be happy with him throwing a TD pass, but in the back of my mind, I'm like, 'Yeah, I just got six points in my fantasy league,'" June says, laughing.

In fact, when the Colts played the Patriots on Nov. 5, June's moral compass moved him to sit Brady in his fantasy league. In the real game, however, he was rewarded with two interceptions of the former Super Bowl MVP. June isn't sure which accomplishment was better.

Milk, cookies and thou

Even in a country of 300 million, pretty much everyone knows that C is for Cookie.

One of my closest friends used to say during our college days that instead of spending all our time arguing about the things that separate us, humans should remember that we have waaaay more in common with each other than differences. Like we all have two hands, two eyes, two feet....

I used to respond with well yeah, since everyone has those things in common we just take it as a given and thus the remaining .1% of difference becomes the 100% field and we go from there.

But it's still worth mentioning that what divides us is really just .1%; by and large the human experience is communal. We all spend most of our days eating and sleeping and working and talking within close proximity of each other if not always with each other. What's different are matters of degree, not kind.

And in pop culture, it's funny how much of our shaping childhood human experiences derive from furry puppets (with an assist from animated figures). Sesame Street, The Electric Company, The Muppet Show, Mister Roger's Neighborhood, Schoolhouse Rock--snippets of amazingly vivid memories set to the soundtrack of our youth, all brought back by the MOYT.

Below are some of my favorites. Warning: You will have these tunes stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

C is for Cookie (Sesame Street)

Somewhere in a (healthier) parallel universe millions of kids revere a Carrot Monster.

Grover the Waiter: Big Hamburger (Sesame Street)

Do they show this in waiter school?!

Orange sings 'Carmen' (Sesame Street)

I remember this one! I wonder how many opera singers were first inspired by Orange.

Yip Yips meet the telephone (Sesame Street)

If this doesn't make you laugh out loud, you're not human.

No Left Turn (Sesame Street)

Funnily, I remember the lines no left turn/no right turn/what, do I do? as being more central to the song. I guess that's a common thing of childhood, what you see as the crux of something often turns out to be just in passing.

Billy, Lick a Lolly (Electric Company)

It's fun just watching them dance in this one. I loved the Electric Company, and like everyone else am puzzled as to why it isn't as ubiquitous as Sesame Street.

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly (Schoolhouse Rock)

I'm surprised there aren't more kids named 'Lolly.'

Only a Bill (Schoolhouse Rock)

[insert joke about George Bush here]

Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla (Schoolhouse Rock)

It's got an amazingly catchy melody.

Interplanetary Janet

Another incredibly catchy melody; it's amazing how talented these children's songwriters were.

Watching these again, I'm also struck at how much they teach. Both overtly and subtly. There was an interesting NYTimes magazine piece this weekend, What It Takes to Make a Student, where the appopriately-named Paul Tough took a look at how some charters schools are succeeding in educating poor, minority students (actually just black and Hispanic, Asian American didn't make a single appearance in the long piece; which is typical since they'd have upset all of Tough's pat conclusions).

It seems obvious to me that what matters is making sure kids first have values conducive to learning; and then you apply lots of hard work in the classroom, good teachers and teaching methods, and the appropriate curriculumn. All underscored--if possible--by supportive parents. Spending money on anything else is at best just feel-good pablum, at worst corruption.

The article means well, but is just a lot of twaddle about driven white people trying to rescue these poor benighted children by teaching them the things their parents failed to, the same things that middle-class white parents are presumed to pass on to their offspring.

The key paragraphs in the article are these:

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

These findings have been out there for years; it's why every time I see a ridiculous parent on the subway, I want to hand them a card that tells them no matter how badly off they think they are, just talk to your kids without anger or cursing and things will be okay.

It's funny how the Times doesn't pick up on the other key part of this research, which is all the bells and whistles harried well-off parents shove at their kids are not only ineffective, but are not as effective as what a lot of good poor and minority parents give their kids for free. Although at a cost.

What the article doesn't mention is middle class and rich parents, who really have no excuse, often are the ones who actually fail to spend this quality time with their kids because they're too busy getting ahead in their careers or doing things like turning Halloween into an adult holiday.

It's the well-off families who schedule themselves into oblivion, who out of selfishness outsource to nannies and babysitters and therapists their parental duties. Where's the scolding New York Times magazine piece on that?

I guess it's just so much more natural for the journalists at the times and their ilk to associate poor parenting with poverty. When in reality, poor families often have no choice--they live in smaller homes, and have less leisure time options, so by default parents spend lots of time with their kids.

Often that time is toxic; but at least it's time, and changing their attitude may be easier than getting suburbanites to change their schedules.

Sure, well-off kids score better on tests--they're not hungry on test days, and are shielded from the other dysfunctions that come with poverty. But compare white American kids to foreign kids at similar socio-economic levels, and you'll see nobody should be holding up these suburban test scores as the gold standard.

Maybe everyone just needs to watch more PBS, less MTV. I mean, if parents can't be there for their kids, they might be surprised at how good of a job Cookie Monster can do.

Navigating babel

Saw an interesting article the other day, Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?, that had me thinking about the demise of expertise in our society.

Even as fields become ever more complicated and fragmented, the flattening effects of blogs and hundreds of cable channels with airtime that needs to be fed has cheapened the currency of discourse. Knowledge is no longer the entry fee--rather, it's glibness on the subject matter de jour.

Which any idiot can summon up, and actually on topics with a lot of subtlety idiots are gonna sound better to the untrained ear.

Good thing, then, that on Wikipedia there are at least a few trained ears....

Brock Read, in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, has spent hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has become the Internet's hottest information source. Like thousands of his colleagues, he has turned to the open-source encyclopedia for timely information and trivia; unlike most of his peers, he has, from time to time, contributed his own expertise to the site.

But to Wikipedia's legions of ardent amateur editors, Mr. Halavais may be best remembered as a troll.

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site's veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym "Dr. al-Halawi" and billing himself as a "visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University," Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona's credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia's entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by "a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available."

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi's "user talk" page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to "refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information."

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up. ...

Shortly after Mr. Halavais's career as a troll ended, the professor — this time posting anonymously — contributed another article to Wikipedia, a piece on theories of communication, his area of expertise.

"It got shut down pretty quick, and I think there's just a small piece of it left online," he says. "Some other professors I talked to said the same thing happened to them: They were experts in their fields, they wrote something well in their area of expertise, and it got cut up."

The site values concision — some lengthy articles are even marked as entries that should be tightened — so detailed scholarly papers are not looked upon fondly. Peer review may be hard on a professor's ego, but Wikipedia, it seems, is even less forgiving.

And even minor editing changes can lead to frustrating debates. Mr. Rosenzweig once edited a Wikipedia article on the financier Haym Solomon, removing a false but widely held claim that the 18th-century broker had lent money to the infant U.S. government during the Revolutionary War. Almost immediately after he removed the passage, another contributor reinserted it, citing its appearance in a number of books, which Mr. Rosenzweig says have been debunked. Only a seasoned historian would be likely to know that the claim was false, he says.

Academic historians are more likely to spend their time working on projects that can earn them scholarly respect and career advancement than writing or editing Wikipedia entries. Because of its transitory nature and its ban on original research, Wikipedia "doesn't have a lot of credibility within the academy," says Mr. Halavais.

"Generally, it's a time commitment that doesn't pay off reputationally," he says. "You certainly couldn't throw it on a CV." Writing for Britannica might not put professors on the tenure track, either, but it confers a certain amount of credibility, says Mr. Halavais.

Besides, say some critics of Wikipedia, it's not clear why an expert in a given field would want to see his work diluted by laymen. In an online essay called "Digital Maoism," Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, has argued that Wikipedia is at the forefront of a disturbing Web trend — a tendency to value anonymous communal thought over individual intellect.

"A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references," wrote Mr. Lanier, who spent time as chief scientist for the engineering office at Internet2, the high-speed-networking group. "It is also an expression of personality."

Mr. Wales says most Wikipedia articles are actually written by two or three people, not an anonymous collective. But otherwise, he says, Mr. Lanier's criticism isn't so much wrong as it is immaterial. "One aspect of Jaron Lanier's criticism had to do with the passionate, unique, individual voice he prefers, rather than this sort of bland, royal-we voice of Wikipedia," Mr. Wales says. "To that, I'd say 'yes, we plead guilty quite happily.' We're an encyclopedia."

But some critics say that Wikipedia's acceptance of anonymity — many of its posters never register on the site — causes more serious problems than personality-free prose. The site's open-door policy has emboldened trolls and vandals, whose efforts many academics would rather not suffer, says Mr. Sanger. "To many professors, it seems to be a waste of time to negotiate with people who in any other context would be taking a class from them."

Mr. Wales acknowledges that the site has, at times, seemed unappealing to scholars.

"There have definitely been cases where there were academics who came to the site, made good contributions, and the rough-and-tumble of the process really turned them off," he says.

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, those poor academics, they get no respect.

I generally think it's better to have more voices talking than fewer; but I do think the responsibility is on the speaker to:
-come with at least a basic base of knowledge, or else mostly listen
-to know or at least figure out where they stand on the scale from amateur to expert
-to give the benefit of the doubt to their more knowledgeable peers
-to know when someone isn't their peer
-to recognize and not let issues of ego interfere with the discussion process

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of adhering to the above, as long as you think of it as a discussion forum rather than an encylopedia.

I use Wikipedia for a lot of things; but on topics that I actually know something about, I do see a lot of plagiarism (if you're gonna rewrite news articles at least source the original!) and shallow thinking. Often that's better than the minimal knowledge I bring on a topic, which is why I turn to Wikipedia; often as not, though, I find myself jumping off it via the links. As the article points out, there are inherent limitations to Wikipedia, especially on non-fact-based topics and on those where Westerners are mypoic.

With its inherently collaborative and open nature I think Wikipedia has the potential to become much better with improved translation software and/or the entire world learning English. Heck, it could become a United Nations of knowledge, with all the promise and pitfalls therein.

Much better, in any case, than the old days of a select few white males defining the world for us--no matter how brilliant or hard-working, their world was inherently a closed one.

The Nutty Professors, Anthony Grafton in the New Yorker: Not that long ago, universities played a very different role in the public imagination, and top academics seemed to glitter as they walked. At a Berlin banquet in 1892, Mark Twain, himself a worldwide celebrity, stared in amazement as a crowd of a thousand young students “rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs” when the historian Theodor Mommsen entered the room:

This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one’s life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man’s suddenly coming upon Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn’t suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations.

Mommsen’s fantastic energy and work ethic—he published more than fifteen hundred scholarly works—had made him a hero, not only among scholars but to the general public, a figure without real parallels today. The first three volumes of his “History of Rome,” published in the eighteen-fifties, were best-sellers for decades and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Berlin tram conductors pointed him out as he stood in the street, leaning against a lamppost and reading: “That is the celebrated Professor Mommsen: he loses no time.”

Uncredited photo of Wiki Wiki sign from Cruisinaltidue.com; origin of the name is here. Uncredited image of Theodor Mommsen found online on a biography page.

Here to last

What are the kids up to nowadays? At Last, a 'hip-hopapella' singing group made up of four Asian American guys, has been tearing up Regis Philbins' American-Idol wannabe America's Got Talent show.

The group's got a MySpace site where you can listen to some of their songs; or check out the video below.

Rupert Murdoch's newest acquisition, by the way, is apparently on pace to have 100 million users this fall. More astonishing fun facts, all also from MySpace Senior Vice President Shawn Gold, via Lost Remote:

-MySpace adds 2 million users each week

-10% of Google’s traffic and 40% of YouTube's traffic comes form MySpace

-Nearly 20% of all video on the Internet is watched on MySpace

There was a lot of press last week over a Hitwise report that MySpace had passed Yahoo as the top Internet site, representing 4.5% of all U.S. Internet visits.

The original blog entry actually says MySpace passed Yahoo Mail, which previously was the most-visited domain name. If you aggregate Yahoo's email, news and content pages together, it's still the most-visited family of sites (Google only has email and news), as Yahoo quickly pointed out.

I think it's irrelevant--by whatever metric, MySpace is the hottest thing out there, and it's only a matter of time before it leaves long-established names like Yahoo in the dust. (MySpace doesn't compete as directly with a quick in-and-out search engine like Google as much as it does with content-rich Yahoo, which lives and dies by how long its users stay on a Yahoo-branded site).

If kids today are essentially finding everything they're interested in on MySpace, the question is how long it'll take the big media companies to realize that it might be one of their own burying them, rather than one of the traditional new media threats.



Photo of At Last via At Last's MySpace site

Do you read me now?

"Screw making the comic strip acceptable for 'them.' I draw this for me and you."
It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood

Christian Science Monitor: In a world where businesses and friends often depend upon e-mail to communicate, scholars want to know if electronic communications convey ideas clearly.

The answer, the professors conclude, is sometimes "no." Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.

In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion. A recent study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages. Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings.

One reason for this, the business-school professors say, is that people are egocentric. They assume others experience stimuli the same way they do. Also, e-mail lacks body language, tone of voice, and other cues - making it difficult to interpret emotion. ...

E-mail's ambiguity has special implications for minorities and women, because it tends to feed the preconceptions of a recipient. "You sign your e-mail with a name that people can use to make inferences about your ethnicity," says Epley. A misspelling in a black colleague's e-mail may be seen as ignorance, whereas a similar error by a white colleague might be excused as a typo.

If you're vulnerable to this kind of unintentional prejudice, pick up the phone: People are much less likely to prejudge after communicating by phone than they are after receiving an e-mail. Kruger and Epley demonstrated this when they asked 40 women at Cornell to administer a brief interview, 20 by phone and 20 by e-mail. They then asked a third group of 20, the "targets," to answer the phone interviewers' questions. They sent a transcription of the targets' answers to the e-mail interviewers.

The professors then handed each interviewer what they said was a photo of her subject. In reality, each got a picture of either an Asian or an African-American woman (in reality, all were white).

E-mail interviewers who thought the sender was Asian considered her social skills to be poor, while those who believed the sender was black considered her social skills to be excellent. In stark contrast, the difference in perceived sociability almost completely disappeared when interviewer and target had talked on the phone.

There are people out there who still think Asian American women have poor social skills?

That's so weird, considering how overrepresented Asian American women are in journalism and fashion, which aren't exactly fields for shrinking violets.

Maybe these interviewers need to page through Audrey.

Quote and image of Lela Lee and her creation 'Angry Little Asian Girl' from PBS.

By any means necessary

For 2 Ex-Detectives, Life Terms and Tales of Grief

Alan Feuer in the Times: Calling their crimes the "most heinous" he had ever seen in court, a federal judge issued — but did not officially impose — life in prison sentences yesterday for two retired New York detectives convicted in April of taking part in at least eight murders for the mob.

The sentencing of the men, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, drew to a conditional close a stunning case of police corruption that began 20 years ago when they stopped a jeweler on the highway, helped to kill him and later left his body buried under concrete in an auto-body shop.

The judge, Jack B. Weinstein, issued the harshest penalty he could, but held up its imposition until he conducts a hearing later this month to determine if the men had shoddy lawyers, as they contend, and deserve a new trial.

There was little reaction from either man in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and both returned to jail, where Mr. Caracappa's face has grown skeletal and Mr. Eppolito has grown a white goatee and gotten somewhat slimmer.

By law, the friends and family of a victim can address the court at sentencing, and before the penalty was read, there were brutally emotional — and achingly personal — accounts from the survivors.

One of them was Michal Weinstein, daughter of the jeweler, Israel Greenwald, who on Feb. 10, 1986, disappeared after giving young Michal a hug as she waited for a bus. She was 10 years old then, and as she spoke from the stand, addressing both defendants by name, it was with a caged fury that only now, after 20 years, had found release.

"You took away our daddy," she said, "and by doing that you took away our childhood. You took away our mother. You stole our innocence. You filled our nights with nightmares and our days with torture."

She posed a list of questions to the men: Did they know what it was like to be asked about your father and not have an answer? To be treated with fear and pity? To watch from the window as your mother's car is repossessed? To leave the only home you ever knew and loved because you could not afford the mortgage? To take charity from the very charities your father once gave to? To visit a friend who had lost a loved one and be envious? Because they had a grave?

"To be envious of a grave," she said.

My gosh, 20 years of caged fury... what's the sentence for imposing that on someone? Who would serve it?

It seemed impossible after such a speech for another syllable to be spoken, but three more family members of victims took the stand and then, sheepishly, Mr. Eppolito rose to speak.

He began contritely, saying that he understood the families' pain and that, in 22 years as a detective, he had often had to deliver news about a death. He had knocked on doors, he said, had spoken to grieving widows — "I know the feelings."

He then invited the families of his victims — the Greenwalds, the Hydells, the Linos — to visit him in jail, where he promised he could prove to them he was an innocent man.

It was at this point that without warning and certainly without permission, a large man wearing a seashell necklace suddenly stood up.

"Mr. Eppolito!" he yelled from the gallery. "Do you remember me?"

Apparently baffled, Mr. Eppolito said, "No."

"I'm the guy you put away for 19 years! I'm Barry Gibbs! You don't remember me? You don't remember what you did to me? To my family?"

The marshals quickly led the man outside, as the courtroom burst into applause.

Mr. Gibbs went to prison 19 years ago for murder, but was released in September when a judge in Brooklyn found that Mr. Eppolito had intimidated the only eyewitness in the case into lying on the stand. Mr. Gibbs's startling appearance put something of a kink in Mr. Eppolito's speech, which he amended on the spot, repeating that he did not know the man.

I think everyone who watches and loves the Sopranos should every so often read newspaper articles like this, in between chortling over Johnny Cakes and Tony's fashion sensibilities.

I hope that the family members of crime victims, and the victims themselves when they're still alive, get some sort of closure from being able to stand up in public and vent for a few minutes at least some of their emotion on the criminals.

It's an interesting system we have, with trials and sentencing conducted in public. There's a bit of the Puritan pillaries and stocks still in our soul--which I see as inherently optimistic, actually, stemming from a belief that words can have an impact, whether therapeutic for the victim or punitive on the criminal.

So long as crime victims and their families continue to attend trials and express themselves--whether via victim impact statements, or outbursts--our system works. It's when you see them in the defendant's chair that things will have broken down....

Anthony DeStefano in Newsday: The mother of a 13-year-old boy molested when he was a Boy Scout lashed out Monday at the scoutmaster who admitted abusing him and another youth, just before a state judge hit the man with a 20-year prison sentence.

"This was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life," the woman said to Ronald E. Occhipinti, 46, of Bayside, the former scoutmaster of Troop 183 in Great Neck. "It is unthinkable that this had happened to my beautiful little boy."

The mother, who was not identified in State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, said that her son had been adopted at the age of 8, an event that was celebrated with a brunch that Occhipinti attended.

"It is a wonder he didn't choke on his food," the woman said of the ex-troop leader.

Photo of Michal Weinstein by Robert Stolarik for the Times.

Sports and me

Bill Simmons' The Curious Guy email interviews

Malcolm Gladwell: Why am I a sports fan? I'm not sure. I grew up in small-town rural southern Ontario. Neither of my parents or my brothers are sports fans, and we never had a television growing up. (In fact, my parents still don't have one, which means that when I go home I'm reduced to trying to catch the AM broadcasts of NFL games from the other side of Lake Erie). I don't think I saw a televised professional sports contest until I was a senior in high school. Everything I know came from Sports Illustrated, which I read at the town library. For some reason, I was a huge fan of the Spurs. I had a George Gervin poster above my bed, and I can talk quite knowledgeably to this day about James Silas, Larry Kenon, Billy Paultz and all the others -- even though I never saw any of those guys play and I'm not even sure (with the exception of Gervin) what any of them looked like. (Surely, with the nickname "Special K" Larry Kenon was black.) Do you know how hard it is to understand what finger rolls are -- or even dunks -- if all you've ever done is read about them in magazines? ...

I'm happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he'd picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that's true, isn't that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer's version of Lent that I'm unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it's the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods. ...

This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder. ...

Switching gears, I have one last point on the fact I never really watched sports on TV until I was in college. That's not as crazy as it sounds. I would grade major professional sports in terms of their TV/live watchability in the following order:

NFL: A-plus televised. B-minus live.
NBA: B-plus televised. A live.
NHL: C-minus televised. A-plus live.
PGA: A-televised. D live.

So what do you miss by not having a TV? Really just a great NFL experience, and some golf. You will notice that I've left out baseball and that's because I don't believe that actually watching baseball under any circumstances enhances your appreciation of the game. As a kid, I read Bill James and Thomas Boswell and Roger Angell and followed the game through newspaper box scores, and I was a far more dedicated fan back than I am today. Baseball is a great idea, and a great story. But is watching it a great experience? Frankly I prefer the way the game was played in my imagination. ...

This is one of my favorite topics. Let's do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn't try, he's mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He's not inherently good or bad. He's both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can't get Dampier to try, then you're not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.) ...

But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.

I like Malcolm--and actually, I think he was even sitting at the next table during brunch in the West Village this weekend (it was a mixed white/black guy with an afro wearing a Canada shirt, not sure how many people fit that profile in the world)--but was surprised at how funny he is. Blink had nothing like this--his series of email exchanges with Simmons, who's probably my favorite sports columnist right now, was consistently hilarious and also right-on thought provoking.

People who have no interest in sports don't understand how it's a microcasm of the human condition and, especially in America, can be daily shorthand for understanding a country (especially now that female athletics have taken off). It's harder in this day and age to see people unguarded, vulnerable, and non-ironic--but you get that in pretty much any sporting event. Not to mention talented, passionate, and heartbreakingly tragic.

Interesting reading this article on the eve of March Madness, which in my opinion is the greatest American sporting event of all. Young kids playing for their schools, cheered on by crazy fans, in a game where emotion, luck and that elusive momentum can trump talent, pedigree and expectations.

And if you're lucky, it all happens in multiple games at the same time, leading to that annual wonderful first sign of spring (along with shamrock shakes): the first CBS four-way split-screen!

Photo of Malcolm Gladwell by Brooke Williams via Gladwell.com.

Photo of UCLA fans by Brian Bahr/ Allsport via Dick Vitale on ESPN.com.

Whose worldview

Canada's lonely killer whale dies

A lonely killer whale that captured the hearts of many Canadians is believed to have died after being hit by a tugboat propeller, officials have said.

The orca, nicknamed Luna, became separated from his family off Vancouver Island in British Columbia in 2001, and soon started playing with boats.

It later sparked a fierce row between scientists and aboriginal Indians.

The Indians thwarted efforts to reunite Luna with his pod, believing he was the reincarnation of a dead chief. ...

The 1.8-tonne whale proved an instant hit with tourists, and his exploits soon gained attention in the world media.

Despite this, scientists - who had seen him as a safety hazard - wanted to return Luna to its family, some 300km down the coast.

Aboriginal Indians, however, managed to derail the effort.

They had told the story of their chief who on his deathbed in 2001 promised to return as a whale.

Three days after the chief died, Luna first appeared in their harbour.

The Indians used their traditional canoes to lure Luna away from the scientists' pen.

This is so interesting--a literal collision between the modern world and tradition. Wonder what the Indian tribe makes of the manner of their reincarnated chief's death....

Photo of 'Luna' by the AP.

Climbing out of the dark hole

I don't know what to make of the West Virginia coal mining disaster.

You could go after Wilbur Ross, the billionnaire who recently bought the Sago mine that has been described as the most dangerous in America--with ABC News citing 16 major safety violations, a dozen orders of partial shutdowns from the government, 20 roof collapses...

You could blame the Bush administration, whose cozy relationship with mine owners allows all involved to wink at safety violations; in the words of the man who until recently was responsible for training mine inspectors: "The inspectors have been forbidden from being as aggressive as they need to be.... They can't go ahead and close the mine and use the authority that they have to do the job that they've been charged to do."

You could blast Ross's on-the-spot management team, for their role in the safety violations, for the slipshod way they allowed rumors of 12 miners being found alive to slip out to desperate family members, for the hours they waited before correcting the false jubilation.

You could slam the news media for playing its increasingly commonplace role of cheerleaders--for the way reporters exulted along with the family members when the claims of a miracle came in, instead of doing the hard job of asking pointed questions; for acting, to borrow Maureen Dowd's withering dressing-down of Judy Miller, as stenographers instead of journalists in passing on rumor and feel-good wish fulfillment without qualifiers, both on-the-air and in cold print.

You could take the chance to slap at the Christian right and its corrosive me-centered faith and resultant attaching the word 'miracle' to everything as an in-your-face assertion of their position as God's chosen people... for if it was a miracle when 12 were thought saved, what is it when 11 turn up dead--a punishment?

But you know, I think that ultimately, the families who lost their loved ones in this disaster have had enough thrown on them the last few days without having to also see their personal tragedy turned into talking points for everyone's favorite stalking horse. That is not to say let's just chalk this up as an act of nature and go on--it was a man-made tragedy, and lessons need to be drawn and people fired if not indicted.

But for now, what's foremost in my thoughts are the people in that part of West Virginia. The miners and their families seem like such decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people--unassuming, almost preternaturally good and honest and emotionally vulnerable. Their anger at being 'lied to,' at whooping and hollering for hours when their men were dead, at celebrating in church when they should have been mourning, had the hard edge of a people jerked around once too much.

You forget that people like that not only exist, but may even be the majority in this great country--people who drive hours to go down into a dark, hellish hole for 15 hours a day to put food on the table for their families, people who at the end of the day reserve whatever time and energy they have with their kids and loved ones, people who aren't always trying to work every angle and claw and scratch their way to the top, people who aren't any good at spin and pinning the blame, people who suffer great pain and hurt and don't allow each other to give up, people who staring death in the face hold fast to their faith in God and write notes telling their family not to worry.

As far as I can tell, all the people of Sago mine want right now is their men back. Barring that, for the next few days I'm not sure there's anything the rest of us can say or do to offer them true comfort.

Expect say we're sorry, and we grieve with you.

Photo: Daniele Bennett becomes emotional while speaking to the media after learning her father was one of the coal miners that was killed in the Sago Mine in Tallmansville, West Virginia. Photo and caption by Getty Images/AFP/Mark Wilson.

Hooligans

Ad projected onto Grand Central stirs controversy

Newsday: When a towering Starbucks ad was projected on Grand Central Terminal last Saturday night, some New Yorkers were left to wonder if the landmark's façade was now for rent.

The answer, it turns out, is no. Kind of. "The law is very gray when it comes to projections," said Nasir Rasheed, co-owner of Seattle-based marketing firm Neverstop. "It's not legal, but it's not illegal."

What's not gray is how 'guerilla marketing'--now cynically being employed by the very corporations the movement was established to undermine--is pulling apart our social fabric.

Unlike other forms of vandalism such as graffiti, there's no counter-consideration of free expression, rebellion, or even cleverness involved here. It's a net negative for society, unless you happen to be one of these executives chortoling in the boardroom about the 'edginess' of these defacements, and reveling in the free publicity.

These corporate executives are hooligans, no more, no less--they're free-riders, taking advantage of buildings erected at taxpayer expense to peddle their commercial goods.

Projecting ads onto buildings (imagine the poor tourists trying to take a photo of historic Grand Central that night!) and Microsoft's well-known campaign of placing stickers on sidewalks pollute our public spaces, and like other forms of corporate pollution and weaselly operating procedures seem to stem from from some belief that if it's not explicitly forbidden, it's allowable, even if it's wrong.

You don't have to be much past kindergarten to know that you shouldn't cover up things that don't belong to you. If you need society to tell you so in the form of a law, we can accommodate you--apparently 'red tape' is the only restraint some corporations respect.

In the meantime, these profoundly toxic acts take a toll. New York City is stressful enough without any open public space being plastered with buy! now! ads. And, as artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf showed in their Delete! project when they covered up the advertising on a Viennese street in yellow, we're surrounded by a sea of ads as it is.

The impact of this visual pollution is increasingly being recognized by a society that's also waking up to other mind-body links traditionally scoffed at as Eastern mysticism. There's a reason why gardens, Zen or otherwise, impart feelings of well-being.

And it's not just the stress and health impacts of blaring ads. There is a deeper psychic impact--these corporations are thumbing their noses at societal norms, and much like movie and music studios drain away the pool of goodwill the peaceful co-existence of mass society requires by their constant undermining of all that society holds decent.

Let's be clear here: I'm not talking about artists excercising their First Amendment rights, no matter how misguided or poorly done. I'm talking about corporations trying to pad their bottom line with 'products', whether a projected billboard or a violent film, that they shut out of their own neighborhoods/homes. If you only ever yell fire in crowded theaters belonging to others, it's not free speech you're exercising.

So if projecting billboards is key to your life, that's fine--just make sure it gets projected on the sides of your own home as well. Anyone know the addresses of some Starbucks executives?

Photo of Starbucks store at Grand Central Terminal by Winter (who's trying to visit every Starbucks in the world). Photo of Delete! project in Vienna from Art MoCo.