So um, someday your laptop computer won’t roast the tops of your thighs, and it has something to do with nano light waveguide things. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go light my master’s degree on fire and hide under my desk while I try to process all that I heard in my brief visit to the Intel science & engineering fair today.
Next time you think of stereotyping teenage girls as omg lol txt American Idol w my bff, just say the phrase “quantum computing” to yourself and then realize that this girl will totally drink your milkshake.
Since everyone’s whining about gas prices on the MSM, I figured showing fit and attractive young cyclists out enjoying the fresh air would be a better way to report on the “crisis” than just a bunch of predictable stock footage at the gas station. You want biofuels? We gotcher biofuels: PBR in a can, man!
Personally, I think it’s about time we started paying what gas is worth — or more accurately, what gas costs us in the long run. We’ve got a pollution problem, an energy problem, a war-in-sucky-deserts-for-crap-reasons problem, and a national obesity problem. How hard is it to put two and two together to make get-on-a-bike-ya-softy?
For the record, filming while biking is not a simple task. Thanks to Rachael of SoPo Bike Collective for giving me a sound bite, so it looks like I actually did my job.
I went for short and sweet this week. After a while, one delegate candidate speech starts to look like any other, and like I observed this weekend, the speeches were relatively unremarkable in their uniform goodness.
Plus, I forgot my damn guest releases, and didn’t want to go chasing down any interviewees after the fact. Laziness trumps journalistic integrity. So here, you get Emily, John Lewis, canned music, and lots of b-roll:
It’s 10:30pm. I’m still in the lab. I’m going blind from squinting through a microscope at a blinding light reflecting off a polished metal bar, and I’ve got a skull-splitting headache.
But at least I’ve finally started acquiring the data that will get my ass out of this hell-hole. And this is what it looks like:
Shot & edited on the N95. Don’t know why the sound got out of synch. :-(
Last week, all I had to offer was camels on campus. This week, I got to talk to the former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders while she was on campus amidst a veritable storm of prophylactics. Apparently the GT Young Dems teamed up with Trojan’s national Evolve campaign (complete with “Roll Out” flagged mics, get it?) to promote, you know, liberal sexual health and whatnot.
It’s nice to meet someone like the Surgeon General, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the current marketing. From the bizarre misalignment of evolution in the pig-to-man schema, to the magical ability of buying a condom in a bar to make women jump your bones, to the inevitably bad pork-themed puns…it’s just weird. Bring back Trojan Man and lose the oinkers.
Anyway, I asked Ms. Elders if we were on a bit of a venereal downturn over the last, you know, few years, health policy-wise. She said yes, that after some good gains in the 90’s, we are once again headed in the wrong direction — though she blamed our lack of conscious fear of disease rather than anything going on in Washington, D.C. So politic of her. Scroll in to about the 0:55 mark:
In addition to a political celebrity, they had condom races (I dunno, there’s nothing very sexy about trying to best the record of 27 seconds), an inflatable theater shaped kinda like a reservoir tip, and much, much more.
There was some vaguely motion sickness-inducing film about space herpes on the attack featured at Reservoir Tip Theater; you can take a tour in this Qik video, after you watch two very serious faculty-looking types wearing pig-noses pull condoms off bananas.
Definitely cooler than the camels, if you ask me.
Pop quiz: calculate the relative increase in probability of sexual intercourse occurring at Georgia Tech tonight after all these free prophylactics put ideas in their technological heads.
As suspected, there was nothing particularly earth-shattering presented by last night’s panel on new media and ethics in journalism and business. What highlights there were — mostly coming from the Georgia State University professor of journalism (with a special focus on law and communications), Greg Lisby — seemed to be two steps forward only to take one step back a paragraph or two later when yet another unbelievably clueless assertion about the web was made by someone who’s had enough time to get to know better. Lisby came prepared with facts and figures and historical insight, and he had lots of us at the kids’ table looking at each other with raised eyebrows, nodding, and Twittering in unison that we liked what he just said.
No, there was no knife fight between a blogger and a PBA radio newser or anything remotely as exciting. I think the highlight of tension for the evening, in my mind, was around the 2:30 mark of the video below. A fellow asked a question that left the AJC Interactivity Manager nearly apoplectic, along the lines of, “Okay, so maybe most blogs are crap, but at least I know they’re crap, and as your content, which is supposed to be so refined and exclusive, starts sliding toward the crap end of the spectrum, why shouldn’t I just go read the people who specialize in crap from the get-go?” It obviously wasn’t that blunt, but it might as well have been for its effect, because as far as I could tell the AJC rep’s answer was, “But — b’gack — you — hey — we have blogs! And it’s not — we — that’s like, your opinion, man. And uh — I — somebody help me out here.”
Okay, so I don’t have the same detailed summary and analysis of the event as everyone else, but I provided the live video, damnit (though the acoustics of the large room leave plenty to be desired). Steve was much kinder to the AJC than I have been and has some other summary points from the panel, if you’re interested. GriftDrift is downright optimistic about how much better the conversation went last night compared to nine months ago. Sara is closer to my level of general “meh”-ness; same old story, still just admiring the problem.
On the inevitable “how do we standardize bloggers” issue, scroll to the 1:20 mark on this video for a Q&A about whether such a set of standards might possibly arise organically (but still very systematically and with structure) from the blogosphere itself — or rather, from some arbitrary subset of “ten or so” bloggers. Right, let’s start caucusing for the ten standard-bearers now.
Leonard Witt brought up his concern about media consolidation and offered up the blogosphere as at least a partial antidote to that winnowing of voices. But the panel came right back at us (the one moment where we disagreed with the good professor) with a study that said we’re less welcoming to opposing commentary than mainstream media sites. Given the crap that litters the comment sections of the AJC, I’m not yet worried about this point. Shortly after that is when the older gentleman got up and warned us that there were “forces afoot” at this “nascent stage of the blogosphere” who would want to take over the web and “use it for profit.” As Sara already said, Welcome to the twenty-first century!
Thanks to Twitter, I saw an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle taking Obama to task for proposing to pay for his education program with offsets in NASA’s budget, which could jeopardize our ability to get to the space station without relying heavily on Mother Russia. So for this week’s MTV gig I was inspired to do another
Sen. John McCain swung through Atlanta for a minimum $1,000 a head fundraiser on Thursday. The variety of protesters outside, though, from anti-illegal immigration conservatives to anti-war liberals, told the real story about the image problem McCain will face going forward.
In bringing people of diverse views together, however, if only to protest his presence, John McCain was truly a uniter.
This may sound like more sour grapes, but hey, it’s my blog — and I consider new media my party so I’ll cry if I want to.
At SoCon’s, Press Club Panels and Journo3G’s we new media rabble-rousers urge the journalism giants to evolve and adapt and make use of the wealth of information available in social networks online. So why are some of us so quick to criticize them for missteps and bad internet fashion? Because we’re dicks, that’s why!
Corporate giant CBS takes another step online today with the official launch of MobLogic, an online daily videocast about, um, news-ish. I say news-ish because as the hostess herself — Lindsay Campbell formerly of Wallstrip, where a good lookin’ babe and edgy edits brings sex appeal to business news — says, “I’m not a journalist. I’m coming at this like you: I read the news, I read blogs, and I wanna talk about the things that are going on around me in the world.”
Oh, good, you’re coming at this like me. Just what the internet needs: more of us. (Although truth be told, she does it much better, but c’mon, when you’ve got a real actress and a major corporate media studio backing you up, it’s hardly a fair contest.)
Why must I be so sarcastic? Because there’s something terribly artificial about such a “just like you” online “news” videocast whose host is “not a journalist” when it’s coming from a massive mainstream media outlet like CBS and a professional actress. Lindsay even uses the image of the Death Star to illustrate her affiliation.
I know, I know, I smell the irony in such criticism coming from someone who’s working on a corporate-giant-hipster-invasion news project that has a distinctly inorganic flavor to it as well, but c’mon, that’s always been MTV’s milieu.
Maybe I’m speaking out of turn here, but I think when we netizens urge the MSM to be more receptive and adaptive to online information networks, we’re not suggesting they completely reinvent themselves and bring us super-hip blog recaps on video podcasts with young babes (and whatever you’d call Itay). We want to see the same kind of solid [giving them the benefit of the doubt in some cases] news reporting, but to see it take advantage of new sources of information and methods of sorting and analyzing it that technology has made available. Learn from us, don’t try to be us, jeez.
In any event, this venture may be successful as hell. It’s already got the key ingredient as suggested by two of Lindsay’s man-on-the-street interviews (many of which, oddly enough, took place in front of other media giants’ buildings):
“Um, hot girls?” “Um, I don’t know…hot girls.”
Hot girl: check. Content: let’s wait and see. But the first part is a good start.
Obligatory Cloverfield post Cloverfield is what it is: a big, indestructible monster shows up out of nowhere, attacks Manhattan, and lots of people die. You should know already if this is your kind of movie or not, but if it is, definitely see it in the theaters!
