Vacuum

Retraction watch: Joe Paterno

2012-01-22T02:00:13-05:00

Note to self: never ever report anyone is dead. (MGoBlog, via Twitter)

UPDATE: Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died January 22, 2012, of complications from lung cancer treatment. He was 85. Hours before, his death was prematurely announced by multiple news services, prompting retractions and apologies from those organizations.

CBSSports.com extends apology to Paterno family:

Earlier Saturday night, CBSSports.com published an unsubstantiated report that former Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. That mistake was the result of a failure to verify the original report. CBSSports.com holds itself to high journalistic standards, and in this circumstance tonight, we fell well short of those expectations.

Onward State Managing Editor Resigns After Paterno Death Report, Knight News:

The twitter account that first reported former Penn State coach Joe Paterno died just posted an update linking to a letter of resignation from its managing editor, Devon Edwards.

Once the normally reputable national CBS Sports outlet picked up the student news source’s story, the now-retracted report of Paterno’s death went national.

Inside Breaking News: The Paterno story: What went wrong

Our editor noted that CBS Sports — a trusted source — reported Paterno’s death around 9pm ET. The CBS Sports headline and story was based, seemingly, on erroneous reporting by the Penn State student publication ‘Onward State.’ The original CBS Sports obituary didn’t directly attribute the student paper. The Huffington Post followed with a story.

SB Nation: Explaining The Reports Of Joe Paterno's Passing And An Apology

Before publishing, we waited for multiple reports from national outlets. The reports spread to numerous trusted sources, sparking our own decision to publish a post as a result. It was based not on our own reporting, but on the reporting of others.

Jeff Sonderman has a chronicle on Storify of the false reports and retractions. Many in the news media waited for the AP report before running a story, and thus they were spared the need to reverse themselves. Penn Live has the family's reaction:

Joe Paterno is not dead.

That's about as blunt as it gets, as sources close to the Paterno family say that the family is tremendously upset with CBS Sports and other news media who have erroneously reported Paterno's passing.

As of this writing, though, People Magazine still has an obituary online, citing the CBS Sports article as its source.

The title of this post is a nod to the weblog Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions in the scientific literature.

AIS and the Costa Concordia, a ship off course

2012-01-16T22:16:57-05:00

In a BBC News report, "Costa Concordia cruise ship captain 'went off course'", this map is presented.

It's credited to the shipping newsletter Lloyd's List, which on its web site further credits the detail to data from AIS. Here's a few trackers that keep measure of ship locations from AIS, the Automatic Identification System:

More detail on AIS from the US Coast Guard, and from the ever-handy Wikipedia.

This animation is credited to data from Vessel Finder.

Personal, public, and team wikis

2012-01-09T22:44:39-05:00

Personal wikis are a source for endless fascination, and they would lend themselves towards machine learning to the extent that you can imagine personal information management as a machine-assisted process. These are as individualized as snowflakes and about as durable.

Public utility wikis come in a variety of flavors, and don't always share an equivalent management structure or function. Sometimes there is a very small team of creators and a large periphery of consumers, and it's possible for a suitably designed personal effort to extend to public use if approached with care. Arborwiki fits the bill for this for me; I've made a lot
of edits there, but the most popular pages have the most diverse edit base.

Team wikis appear in this decade to be embedded in some other bigger system that needs a shared editable place but that also has some other explicitly transactional work going on. Wiki nature does not include the verbs "assign", "delegate", "report on", or even really "decide", and if you are doing any kind of process work you often land on something beyond a
simple "edit this page".

The World Calendar: every year the same (1935 calendar reform proposal)

2012-01-05T20:16:48-05:00

A proposal to reform the calendar system, circa 1935, would have simplified the seasons by making every single year have the same calendar, every single quarter have 91 days and 13 Sundays, and every January 1 always fall on a Sunday. Leap years are accomodated with a mid-year extra Saturday, and the end of the year is celebrated as Year End Day, also as an extra Saturday.

This image is from Why reform the calendar? : A symposium of opinion prepared for the Special Committee on Calendar Reform of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, as found on HathiTrust.

Remarkably, the World Calendar Association is still going strong. A word from their web site on the origin of this proposal:

Elisabeth Achelis spread the New York Times out on her desk, momentarily blanketing the plaque dear to her that bore this quote of unknown Persian origin. On that Sunday, September 8, 1929 (a date she never forgot and one she revisited fondly in her 1961 autobiography, Be Not Silent), Elisabeth found a letter to the editor of the New York Times by Lewis E. Ashbaugh of Denver, Colorado. In a brief, almost casual tone, Ashbaugh suggested that the then-unofficial National Committee on Calendar Simplification should consider the adoption of a twelve-month, equal-quarter calendar (perhaps suggested as early as 1745 and published by Abbe´ Mastrofini in 1834) over that of the thirteen-month one that was rapidly gaining popular favor. Elisabeth saw much in this simply revised calendar plan, and instantaneously knew that her five-year search for something to help the world in which she lived had come to an end.

I suppose that calendar reform is no less exotic than speling reform, and that a 12 month rearranged calendar is less exotic than a 13 month calendar where every month has a Friday the 13th.

Ann Arbor plow trucks: public tracking

2012-01-02T23:01:33-05:00

The Ann Arbor plow truck public tracking page shows where the snow plows are out and about in Ann Arbor.

This view shows 4 of the 5 trucks that were out on Monday evening, January 2, 2012.

Plow routes are color coded, and plow trucks are numbered. One tip: if you are using Chrome, turn on and off the "label" field to get the trucks to show.

The system is build by Radio Satellite Integrators, and uses ESRI map technology. I don't have an explanation for the US-12 shield on Jackson Road.

2012 Water Hill Music Fest: Sunday, May 6th, from 2 to 6 p.m. (rain date May 13th).

2012-01-02T22:34:24-05:00

From Paul Tinkerhess, organizer:

The 2012 Water Hill Music Fest is set to happen Sunday, May 6th, from 2 to 6 p.m. (rain date May 13th). All residents of Ann Arbor's Water Hill neighborhood are invited to play music on their front porches during this unique celebration. Expectations are high this year after thousands of visitors attended last year's inaugural event.

More information: www.waterhill.org and www.facebook.com/waterhillmusicfest .

From last year's event, as documented by Michigan Radio:

Great weird ideas vs. slow accretion of interesting things

2012-01-01T15:08:49-05:00

From time to time I have great weird ideas, but those don't happen every day. So instead of using this weblog just to catch the brainstorms I have to be also prepared to have it slowly collect the ordinary things that catch my eye long enough to be worth saving.

Missing maps lead to gas leaks in PG&E network

2011-12-31T14:58:37-05:00

The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about how important it is to keep an accurate set of maps: Missing maps mean PG&E lines weren't inspected. The story is from December 31, 2011:

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. failed to check nearly 14 miles of gas distribution pipelines for leaks for up to two decades when it lost track of 16 maps needed to guide mandated safety inspections of its system in eastern Contra Costa County, company officials acknowledged to state regulators Friday.

The result of the missing inspections: long-overdue discovery of seven leaks along over 13 miles of pipeline, including one repair that was "urgent".

5 most popular maps of 2011 for this blog

2011-12-28T23:26:26-05:00

Here's the 5 most popular mapping pages on Vacuum over the past 12 months - these are all in the top 10 most popular pages on this blog overall in that time span.

1. Power outage maps for 50 states. I only really have about 44 states with maps, but the collection is otherwise excellent, and it gets lots of search traffic when there are big storms. Peak storm action of Hurricane Irene and of the Halloween snowstorm that hit the Northeast both saw 3000+ visits per day of people looking for outage maps for their area.

2. Australia flood maps for January, 2011. Brisbane got socked with floods in January, and the maps capture the weather at the time plus links of the day and some astounding flood footage.

3. Vermont flood maps for Hurricane Irene. When Irene hit Vermont, roads were washed out, travel was disrupted, and towns were cut off from the world. A number of organizations put together rapid response flooding maps, and some of these are saved here.

4. Tsunami maps and maps of Fukushima after the nuclear disaster in Japan. It was easy to be glued to the net for news in March about the Honshu earthquake and its impact on Japan; this post was put together the day of the quake as news slowly emerged about tsunami risks.

5. Central Texas fire maps. Put together for friends and family near Austin, Texas, this collection of maps includes the Weather Underground fire layer map, one of the best near real time fire watching tools out there, as seen for the Bastrop County, Texas fires in September.

What do I conclude about this?

If all I wanted to do was maximize the number of page views that I got, I would be consistently pulling together maps about every modern day meteorological disaster. Fire, flood, power outage, tsunami, hurricane, snowstorm, have at it - every single one of them has a map to go with the story, and every time there's a story someone looks for the map to go with it.

Most news reporting doesn't pull in anywhere near the richness and detail that a good set of map searches will do, and most map sites that display real time data don't save every possible newsworthy map event. Combine these two, and you can be certain that the maps you collect will tell a story that's otherwise hard to illustrate.

Pasta with leeks, cashews, and feta

2011-12-28T20:15:05-05:00

Dinner tonight was surprisingly good, especially because I didn't have a recipe. All measurements approximate.

one leek, white parts only, cleaned and cut into thin strips
olive oil
oregano
rice wine
cashews
feta, cubed
pasta (we used farfalle)

Heat the olive oil. Add the leeks to the pan, with a sprinkling of oregano on top. Cook the leeks until just browned. Deglaze the pan with a little rice wine. Add cashews and feta, return to the heat, and cook until the feta is warm and just starting to melt.

Serve over pasta.

Yum! Serves 2.

Addicted to feedback

2011-12-28T19:54:00-05:00

If I read Facebook for too long, I want to post short quips, "like" things, and generally let people know that I exist.

If I read Twitter for too long, I want to post short quips, "favorite" things, and generally let people know that they exist.

When I sit in front of Typepad ready to type, it's not always for the short post, and often it's not even for an audience. My working assumption is that unless I'm writing about something that the world cares about, only a handful of people will see it. The other working assumption is that I really don't know before I write it how it will be received, so it better be good enough for me to want to refer to again just for myself.

I've referred to Vacuum as an unpolished open notebook. It's also a place to capture "interior stories", internal monologue that makes sense about how you do things.

(Christina) Baldwin says that if people aren’t attached to their interior stories, they get addicted to feedback. Although I would have considered myself attached to my interior story, I also recognize a social-media feedback addiction in myself. I’m always curious about what kinds of comments that my, for example, Facebook status updates, have generated. (from A Storied Career, a blog by Kathy Hansen).

Sometimes you write to inform yourself, and the goal isn't to create or please your followers, or to get new ones, or to up your page view count or close a new lead. It's just to write, and to capture what's going by in your head to the level that you can recreate it later.

Writing in a blog has always been for me an exercise in locating other people's words to help illustrate my point. That gives it some measure of similarity to a commonplace book, a traditional way to copy out bits of prose that you wish to make your own into a kind of clippings book or scrapbook of words.

I'm content, really, to be "addicted to feedback", but I reserve the right to look for the right kind of feedback to tune into. The feedback of blogging is the long, low rumble of old notebooks that have just the right relevant bits to tune into, and not just the shrill, high ping of social media contacts.

The challenge of dinner

2011-12-23T19:47:04-05:00

Cooking dinner while I'm hungry just makes me hungrier.

Anoche cuando dormía - three translations of the Antonio Machado poem

2011-12-23T01:37:35-05:00

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvelous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from all my old failures.

(Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly)

Last night I had a dream—
a blessed illusion it was—
I dreamt of a hive at work
deep down in my heart.
Within were the golden bees
straining out the bitter past
to make sweet-tasting honey,
and white honeycomb.

(Antonio Machado, translated by Alan S. Trueblood)

Last night while sleeping
I dreamt, - blessed illusion!
that a beehive
within my heart;
and the golden bees
were making,
from my bitter disappointments,
white wax and sweet honey.

(Antonio Machado, translated by Chris Cavanagh)

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé, ¡bendita ilusión!,
que una colmena tenía
dentro de mi corazón;
y las doradas abejas
iban fabricando en él,
con las amarguras viejas
blanca cera y dulce miel.

The full text, in English and in Spanish, is here at Goodreads. Thanks to Joanna Hastings for taking note of it in a post to Facebook.

Power outages follow Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake #eqnz

2011-12-22T23:55:29-05:00

Ann Arbor, December 22, 2011 - Three strong earthquakes of more than magnitude 5 hit Christchurch, New Zealand today, disrupting the power and telecommunications networks in the area and damaging roads and structures because of liquefaction of the soil. Damage and injury estimates are incomplete as of this writing.

According to USGS, three earthquake hits christchurch today , 5.8 at 01:58:36 PM, 5.3 at 02:06:25 PM and 5.8 at 03:18:02 PM #eqnz

Power grid operator Orion New Zealand is providing network updates via Twitter on the status of the electrical grid during the aftermath of the quake; follow @OrionNZ for details. The updates via Twitter are happening in addition to their normal reporting on their web site:

Due to the extent of outages on the Orion network at present, we are unable to update this page. We will resume usual updates as soon as possible. In the interim, please see our home page for general updates about power supply following the December aftershocks.

5:20pm: We are unable to update the outages page at oriongroup.co.nz at present, as we are still scoping #eqnz works

Telecom New Zealand issued this update, also via Twitter

Full update from us - some congestion, some sites on battery backup, pls txt instead of calling if you can: http://cot.ag/rF9daM #eqnz ^RI

The NZ Raw weblog has photos and video of the damage, which includes liquefaction of the soil.

(A geologist) was keen to use the photos in a paper he was writing and said (and I more-or-less quote) “I’ve been to substantial earthquakes all over the world for the past 30 years and I haven’t seen liquefaction anywhere near as bad as it is in Christchurch. You guys are pretty interesting right now!”

The hash tag in common use for the event is #eqnz, and usage of that tag is nearly universal.

The lumineria of upper Brooklyn Avenue

2011-12-21T21:42:04-05:00

Note to self: next year, on the solstice, arrange that lower Brooklyn Avenue joins in the collection of lumineria that grace upper Brooklyn Avneue (between Packard and Lincoln) tonight.

(photo to follow)

Grand resolutions vs tiny habits

2011-12-21T21:40:08-05:00

BJ Fogg is hosting an online program in which he encourages people to produce three tiny habits that they can learn to do in the span of a week. One of the ones I'm trying to do, for instance, is to take my medicine after the kitchen is clean. That's not a huge task - after all, the medicine cabinet is i the kitchen - but it's one that anchors a little task in a place where I know I can make it happen.

I don't know if that's a perfect example of a tiny habit, since cleaning the kitchen can take a while.

The practice of tiny habits is radically different from the typical New Year's Resolution which is grandiose, sweeping, and hard to fulfill. "Be a better person" is really different from "brush your teeth after you floss them" or "go to bed after the computer goes to sleep".

I'm trying to figure out the tiny habit that will get me writing regularly. Ideally, in some perfect world, I'd write more regularly. I don't want a "write a page every day" goal, because that's largely unmanagable - when would I do it? But perhaps I can set myself a tiny goal, that's more like "when I sit down at the computer after the kitchen is clean, open it up to my blog and start writing until I stop."

At the very least, that will ensure that the kitchen will be clean before bedtime.

Kim Jong Il (1941 ? - 2011), North Korean "Dear Leader"

2011-12-18T22:36:58-05:00

Reports:

Bloomberg News, quoting Yonhap News.

The news came in a radio broadcast at noon local time, Yonhap reported, citing North Korea’s official media. Kim probably had a stroke in August 2008 and may have also contracted pancreatic cancer, according to South Korean news reports.

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Kim died from fatigue during a train ride on Saturday, a weeping television announcer said.

Yonhap News:

(URGENT) N. Korean leader died of fatigue at 8:30 a.m. Dec. 17 during train ride: KCNA

Yonhap News: (LEAD) N. Korean leader dies at 69 after decades of iron-fist rule

Associated Press obituary:

North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, one of Korea's most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star.

Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia, in 1941.

KCNA (Korean Central News Agency): no web updates as of 10:26 pm Dec 17 EST.

Voice of Korea (offical news, via shortwave radio): no web updates as of 11:12 pm Dec 17 EST.

From time to time, North Korean state television is available streamed on the Internet, according to the weblog North Korea Tech. The address given is http://112.170.78.145:50000/chosun ; it was not up and running as of this writing, as the popularity of the site outstripped the maintainer's ability to keep it running after it reached the attention of the South Korean media.

If you are trying to monitor North Korean state media, here's a good guide from North Korea Tech.

Vaclav Havel on Kim Jong-Il, from the Globe and Mail, 2004.

The Northern part of the Korean peninsula is governed by the world's worst totalitarian dictator, who is responsible for taking millions of human lives. Kim Jong-il inherited the extensive Communist regime following the death of his father Kim Il-sung, and has shamelessly continued to strengthen the cult of personality.

To follow on Twitter: @northkoreatech , @nknewsorg , @yonhapnews. The New York Times has a Kim Jong-Il twitter list of reporters and news agencies covering the story.

The Onion: Kim Jong-Un Privately Doubting He's Crazy Enough To Run North Korea. (This is satire.)

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA—In surprisingly candid remarks Thursday, Kim Jong-un, heir apparent to North Korea's highest government post, expressed doubt that he was sufficiently out of his mind to succeed his father, longtime dictator Kim Jong-il.

Weblog: Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things. A Tumblr blog of photos of Kim Jong-Il.

The mental rolodex

2011-12-17T21:47:37-05:00

There's a great use of the term in an LA Magazine review of "Run Lola Run":

Lola tosses her red phone up in the air and instantly goes through her mental Rolodex of possibilities. Faces flash on the screen. She decides to hit up her banker father and darts out of the house.

Credits: the "mental rolodex" term is one I heard first from Terry Bean, who used it at an LA2M presentation. It's also from Rebekah Burgess's weblog of the same name, where she is doing a daily photograph and filing that away for reference.

And kids, if you don't know what a rolodex is, it's from the days when people had land lines phones only and their phones were so dumb that they didn't have an address book built into them. Instead, they wrote down phone numbers on little pieces of specially shaped paper, and those pieces of paper fit into a clever device that could be flipped through or (in ultra cool setup) spun like a Ferris wheel.

My draft folder is overflowing

2011-12-11T22:44:00-05:00

Typepad has a very convenient "drafts" folder into which you can write things that aren't ready for publication yet. My drafts folder is overflowing. I suppose that means that the editor in me is looking forward to reviewing them and sending them back for revisions.

If you wait long enough between the time you write something and the time you publish it, it's possible that you can make your writing enough better to be worth the wait. Generally, though, the work that I like the most has been edited in public. If my writing doesn't escape the draft folder quickly, chances are pretty good that it isn't ever worth publishing, even in an open notebook.

Paul Courant, “Changes in Communications that Derive from New Information Technologies”, December 13 2011

2011-12-11T12:00:00-05:00

This lecture series at the U has always looked good - Paul Courant's talk should be no exception. Bring a sandwich!

U-M Institute for the Humanities
Brown Bag Lecture Series
Featuring the Digital Humanities
“Changes in Communications that Derive from New Information Technologies”
Paul Courant; information, public policy, economics
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
12:30pm, 202 S. Thayer, room # 2022

Watch past Brown Bags online at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities/medialibrary

Digitization is seen variously as a boon and scourge, depending on the viewer, the issue at hand, and sometimes even the time of day. As with many polarizing phenomena, there is merit on both sides. If we look carefully at the functions that we want libraries to perform, we see that although most (but not all) are made technically easier with digitization, many are made organizationally more difficult, both within libraries and within the institutions that support them and use them. Preservation, which I will argue is an essential function of academic libraries, is the most straightforward example of something that is much more difficult to organize with digital media than it was with print. Scholarly publishing, without which libraries would have little to do, is stuck with a set of institutions and practices that are ill-suited to take advantage of digital technologies. And then there is copyright. Taking as given that we now live in a world where it extremely inexpensive to copy, distribute, search, mix, and remix, it is still not entirely clear how best to respond to what should be good news. The answers depend on what we want and how willing we are to collaborate in the interest of achieving it. As in many cases, successful exploitation of changes in technology requires changes in the way activities are organized.

Paul Courant is the university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan. He is also Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Economics, professor of information, and faculty associate in the Institute for Social Research. He has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy. More recently, he is studying the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the changes in the system of scholarly communication that derive from new information technologies.