Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Due to a server migration, you may have noticed some scrambling of the archives. When they moved my files to a new location, they all got new timestamps--and since Blosxom sorts my content by date, that's pretty much reordered everything. I'll be taking a short break while it's fixed.
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Fabulous Links Were Revealed To Me
Now I have the He-Man intro speech stuck in my head. Thanks, Dan.
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IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS:
Keep up the good work, guys.
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For future reference: Brian Michael Bendis's graphic novel Powers is available online for free at Newsarama, here.
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Forensic Evidence: Basic Delivery
In the interests of space (avoiding monster posts like the previous speechwriting harangue), I've decided to break delivery into two topics, basic and advanced. Many people won't actually need the techniques I'm putting in "advanced," like walking points, because they give most of their presentations from a single place or podium anyway. I discourage that practice, but I also discourage use of Powerpoint and clip art. Let's see how far that gets me.
If writing for speech is all about respecting the constraints of realtime communication, delivery is all about power--and if ever a statement deserved to be qualified, that one does. There's nothing overtly sinister about it: I don't necessarily mean that the speaker is in a position of power (although they may very well be) or fighting against power (equally likely), and I'm not trying to say that the speaker seeks to dominate the audience. But as we'll see, the basics of speech delivery often rely on tricks that either evoke positions of power or are common to those in power. It's not hard to see why: probably 99% of the time, a speaker is trying to project authority and trustworthiness to the audience, in order to effectively communicate the message. Not every delivery lesson is tied to this goal, but many--most?--of them are.
Let's take a few areas of good delivery one at a time:
Facial Expression
I kid you not, if there's one thing that I tell everyone coming into the studio, it's that they need to smile. You can hear a smile in a person's voice. The physical change--even one that's completely faked--creates an emotional change. It doesn't just work for smiles, actually. Matching your expression to your subject matter almost always produces a noticeable improvement in delivery, but since most people who go for "profound" end up at "bored," you're best off smiling when in any doubt.
Note: do not smile for most speeches about violence against women, inhuman slum conditions, or starvation. Sometimes it's better to sound bored than "happy to be here." I have learned this from experience.
The other important expressive element on the face is the eye. We attribute a great deal of nonsense to eyes, in my opinion. They are not windows to the soul, but they are extremely important non-verbal communicators, and we have a lot of circuitry built into our heads for interpreting their movement. Much of this has evolved in close conversation, where we look to another person's eyes to read their attention level, their reactions to new information, and (of course) their power relationship with us.
Like many of the power relationships being expressed here, these are culturally-specific, and I wouldn't want you to think otherwise. In most Western cultures, a direct gaze is considered important for being trustworthy, whereas in other cultures it may be challenging or even hostile. You'll note that either way, there is a power gradient being expressed. What I will say about eyes, as well as other non-verbal communication, should be evaluated in a Western cultural environment only and may in fact be counterproductive in an intercultural setting.
With that said, the role of the eyes in public speaking is to establish contact without being overbearing. You need to make each listener feel included in the message, but not intimidate them. In order to make this happen, your eyes should meet directly with everyone in the room at regular intervals. Obviously for very large crowds, you'll just have to look in the direction of a group of people, but the principle still stands. I recommend that you maintain that gaze as if you were speaking directly to the target audience member for the length of a short sentence (or in long sentences, for the length of one of its clauses). Finish the sentence (or clause), and move your eyes smoothly to the a new person in the room as you start the next words. You will need to practice this, but in time it becomes very natural.
Gestures
Make an invisible line across your chest at around your armpits. Now make another line at your belt or waistline. Look at the space between them--this is where your hands live for gesturing. When they are not actively communicating, they should hang naturally at your sides. These are mostly aesthetic considerations: big gestures or overactive gestures will make you look spastic. Depending on your frame, you may also want to be careful with how far out from your body you move your arms--when I first started speaking, I tended to reach out in a very exaggerated fashion, and it made me look like a scarecrow.
The role of gestures in interpersonal rhetoric should be to accentuate and illustrate points. For example, when using an internal preview (I said that it'd be relevant later!), each point should get a its own location in space, indicated by a gesture that "places" them or indicates them. This helps the audience understand that there are three separate points and mentally associate them with a physical process for better retention. You may also want to associate movements with particularly important points, or to walk the listener through a process.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PRECISELY MIME AN ACTION AS PART OF A SPEECH. It never ends well. If you can't do it in words, use a printed visual aid.
Gestures actually play very well into the power dynamic of public speaking. Making small gestures, for example, is a long-standing trait of many tyrannical administrators, since it forces their subordinates to pay attention to the slightest move. You shouldn't go to that extreme, but keeping your body under control with clearly-defined and limited movements is a sign of confidence and authority. Some gestures also signify power in greater or lesser degrees. For example, gesturing upward or toward the body with hands in a cupping motion is like a plea for help. It's considered a weak gesture. Pointing is another weak gesture--it looks accusatory (and a bit like the vaunted finger-guns). Spread fingers come across as conciliatory or defensive.
You're better off with gestures that move down or out, with the hands in a natural, relaxed position (all fingers out, but fairly close together). It's almost like a very mild karate chop. The movement should have a definite end, hold for a second, and then relax back to your sides. Above all, nowhere is it more important to tape yourself than when it comes to gestures. It is hard to explain these kinds of things in text--but when you see yourself making mistakes, you'll cringe and then you'll fix it. Self-recording is the answer for a number of speaking sins, but particularly here. Webcams are cheap. Take advantage of it.
Voice
If the most common advice I give to people in the studio is to smile, the second most common is that they need to slow down. Nervous people speak faster, and they won't even notice. They may even feel like they're dragging through the text, because the adrenaline in their system has them hopped up so much.
So you probably need to slow down. Technically, you should be speaking at about 120 words per minute, which is easy enough to test: grab a random 120 words from a newspaper or magazine article, stand up in front of some friends, and time how long it takes to read from start to finish. Speaking slowly accomplishes a couple of purposes. First, it ensures that the audience can follow you easily. Second, it's another sign of your authority: high-status individuals are allowed to manipulate the time of lower-status individuals, which is why VIPs are often notoriously late or dismissive of schedules. Take your time and claim that credibility from the room.
Now there are many vocal styles for public speaking. They not only vary from person to person, but from venue to venue. Jesse Jackson's oratory-from-the-pulpit approach stands in sharp contrast to Bill Clinton's one-on-one lovefest, but both are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations and audiences. They are making a connection with the audience. I would propose that the easiest way for most people to make that connection is to speak to an audience the same way that you would speak to a single person. Make it conversational.
If you've been practicing your eye contact, you may find that this comes naturally. Each sentence should not only be directed with a smile and a direct gaze to that person, but you should talk to that person. Live the sentence as you speak it, as if it wasn't written hours or days before, but as if it's something that you really want that individual to know, between friends. Because to be honest, isn't that the point? You want your message to get out. You want the audience to trust you. So speak to them as your friends, not as if you're the great speaker and they are a passive listening body. Keep it conversational.
Still to come
Good thing I split it up: Pico says I'm up to 175 lines already here. Here's what I'd like to talk about next time: using the physical space of a room, memorizing speeches, and speaking on camera. In the interests of conversation, feel free to ask questions and debate points in the comments for this post, and I'll do my best to respond.
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Corvus's gaming Round Table this month asks about goals. I'm guessing he's talking about goals inside games. I'm more interested in the ones outside.
I just finished writing the documentation for Basin IT, a water policy simulator that the Multimedia Center put together for some clients. As a game, it's not terribly captivating--the primary aim was to provide a more accessible front end to the existing river basin model. But the goal for the designers was to teach a certain skill and let people explore a situation. The goal for players is to learn how to effectively manage their water policies. To some extent, although it is (as far as I know) factually based, Basin IT expresses a judgement about what management is effective, and that too is a goal.
This may be true of so-called "serious games," that they have a real-world goal, but it is also true of entertainment to a greater or lesser degree. We discuss fictional movies and books not only in terms of their story, but also the worldview that inspires them. Spielberg's War of the Worlds is not just a movie about Tom Cruise and his alien friends (no easy jokes! we are classy joint here!), but is also (supposedly) a comment on our reactions to September 11th. Snow Crash (like much science fiction) is stuffed full of opinions on religion, libertarianism, and private enterprise. Do these works say how the world is, or how it should be? Probably that's why they're art.
It's hard to get past the initial impressions of a video game to even ask the question of its worldview. You might be tempted to ask if Super Mario is Nintendo's expression of hatred for turtles. I suppose that's possible. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Crackdown review that PeterB wrote a while back, where he refuses to excuse its racist point of view just because the mechanics of the game are enjoyable. In fact, it raises the question of whether the subject matter is even more despicable because the designers have made it fun to be a fascist supercop.
I am hard on games that waste the player's time or give simple answers to simple questions. But I think we should be. Even if it's condescending to state that violence in games causes violence in real life, it isn't improper to ask what the violence is trying to say about the real world. Nor is it impolite for design teams to come out and place both their gameplay and storylines into a real-world context, as has happened before (Metal Gear) and may be increasingly common (BioShock, by all accounts, is partly a satire of Ayn Rand's capitalist Utopia).
But it is also to remember that popcorn entertainment is not devoid of goals and implications. Michael Bay's movies may be vapid and anti-intellectual, but that doesn't mean that they don't present a desired worldview--they most certainly do, evoking goals of misplaced machismo and derision for the weak or the cooperative. It's unclear whether this is how Michael Bay sees the world, or (more likely) how he wishes it could be. It is clear that something of the same worldview does dominate in electronic entertainment, although to what extend it has been either percieved or critiqued by its audience, I couldn't say.
Who wants to talk?
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Direct from the Dark of the Basement
When reading the pundits on the editorial page or watching them on the news channels, do you ever find yourself asking: "Who do these people think they are? What qualifies them to speak in front of all of us?"
I do. All the time. And it's not just the looming prospects of job-hunting behind that thought. About a month ago, The New Republic's Jonathan Chait wrote an article criticizing the liberal blog community for being insufficiently concerned with the truth, to which (of course) every leftist on the Internet responded by asking "so who was pro-Iraq War, again?" Lance Mannion also drew attention today to a few writers who continue to trade in the idea that bloggers and writers online are all just delusional losers in their basements, whose rantings are only marginally more coherent than the average sandwhich-board-wearing lunatic.
Who do these people think they are? the writers and pundits ask, not realizing that we've been asking the same thing in return.
But here's the dirty secret for pundits and journalists and movie critics who stand aghast at those angry bloggers: their job is not special. And they know it.
I'm not a blog triumphalist. I don't think wikis will save the world. But the simple fact of the matter is that there's no particular training to become a journalist, or a pundit, or a movie critic. There's no reason to believe that these jobs can't be done as well as anyone--and indeed, once upon a time, they were. There's a reason that movies like His Girl Friday depict journalists as a bunch of slovenly, low-class opportunists: they used to be a bunch of slovenly, low-class opportunists.
Nowadays, if you can find a journalist amid all the cutbacks at major newspapers and media outlets, there seems to be this idea that journalism has become a higher profession. The attitude betrayed by Chait and others is that these writers are better than the public somehow--better informed, better read, and probably better-looking. They're more public than the public, if you believe the hype behind David Broder. It's even infected relatively niche journalism, which is the only way that you could possibly find people like Gregg Easterbrook masquerading as "science writers."
There's nothing wrong with being an unspecialized journalist (Chait's employment history, for example, is a collection of writing credits but no direct political experience). Plenty of people have done it before. Hunter S. Thompson, one of the great heroes to the profession, started working as a news writer because it let him supplement his army wages. The honest truth is that most journalism, for all its mystique and prestige, amounts to picking up the phone and calling people for information. Occasionally, it requires the reporter to get up and actually go somewhere. This is not brain surgery. And obviously, punditry is even less rigorous--got an opinion? You're good to go.
The implication of writers like Chait, or Brian Williams (who commented recently that he didn't like competing against some guy named Vinny in a bathrobe somewhere) is that they've got something we don't. And indeed, they do: you don't get to be a staff writer for TNR or an anchor for a major news network without a lot of connections and a lot of luck. But self-publishing means that now any dog on the Internet could potentially oustrip their audience, while a lot of us have started to think that those tightly-knit political connections are what's wrong with the media in the first place. And frankly, as news has been cut back in the profit-driven environment, I don't think very much of the argument that they have some kind of journalistic integrity that no-one else can claim.
It astonishes me to read pieces by media professionals that trumpet their ignorance of the blog network. They're missing out, and they're missing the point. Bloggers may just be parasites on the journalists who go out and gather the days events--but there are an awful lot of people who get paid to do the same thing, except in print. An editorial page is just a blog without the links (or in some cases, the readership). In many ways, it's a classic irony of economics--the jobs of the "knowledge workers" can now be outsourced, and they don't even have to leave the country--or get paid.
In other words: Who are these people? And why should we care?
* * *
In the best tradition of a post that quotes from Lance Mannion, a fine writer known for saving his recommended links for the end of his posts, I really do recommend his writings about credentialism and the media.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/ethics/online x link x 0 comments
Forensic Evidence: Writing for Speech
Writing something to be read aloud is much different from writing for print--just ask the average commencement speaker. There are many places where they coincide, as many great writers also read well (Douglas Adams, rest in peace, comes to mind as someone who probably wrote better dialog than actual fiction). But after watching some people at work struggle through writing for speech, I think that it's a definite stumbling block.
As with all aspects of public speaking (and really, with most skills), one of the best ways to improve the writing side is to practice it. Write a lot, and as you write, read it aloud. You'll pick up on a lot of the following points yourself as you do, and you'll start to get a feel for the kinds of phrases that look stupid on paper but sound great or vice versa.
Why is writing for speech different from print writing? Let's look at the audience and the environment. Writing on a page is static, and the audience can interact with it at leisure. They can look up words they don't understand, and they can jump back through the clauses of complex sentences until they piece together the whole meaning. There's much less interference between the reader and the symbols on the page, existing in a black-on-white, high-contrast medium.
In contrast, spoken presentations take place in realtime. They can't be paused, and the viewer can't go back if they didn't understand something. Environmental noise and distractions can detract from comprehension. On the other hand, a good presenter can be far more captivating than text, and has the advantage of a number of non-verbal and pan-verbal cues.
So far, this is pretty basic stuff. But believe it or not, this is where I see most people tripping up, because they don't take into account the difference between realtime and static. That difference informs a great deal of the art of public speaking--from structure to gestures to sentence complexity. It is all about making sure that the audience a) is not lost, and b) if lost, can easily pick up the thread again. Once we understand that theoretical shift to realtime communication, we can start putting it into concrete practice.
Start by writing shorter sentences. This is hard for a lot of people to do, because they are in love with commas and parentheticals. I love subordinate clauses myself. It's also been hard in B-SPAN work for the podcasts and video blogs, because VIPs may have absurdly long titles. By the time you finish the title, a listener might have forgotten the preceding part of the sentence. A good rule of thumb should be that an audience member can always repeat the last sentence back to you verbatim without any prompting. And don't forget to make it something that you can repeat in the first place--alliteration and elaborate metaphors may look good on paper, but they're tongue-twisters up in front of all those eyes. I promise you, the time that you spend trying to untangle ambitious phrasing after a stumble will seem like the longest moments of your life. Keep things simple for your audience's sake and for your own.
Next, don't forget to introduce with an attention-getting device--also known in most circles as a snappy introduction. This is a good tip for most writing, but it's especially important for speech to grab someone's attention. It will also flatter your audience if you can weave it throughout the rest of the piece, just with occassional references. They'll feel clever, and that will incline them to pay attention.
The other key to working with the realtime constraints of public speaking is to pay close attention to structure--and that means more than just putting together an outline when writing, because most good writers will do that anyway, but specifically you need to signpost and make it explicit to your listeners so they can find out where you are. There's nothing worse than watching a speech where the structure is badly explained or nonexistent, because it will usually come across as rambling. If nothing else, listeners want to know how soon you're going to stop talking, for a variety of reasons.
First, let's go over some basics for putting an argument together in the first place. In competitive speech, which has a 10-minute time limit, the most common way of structuring a speech was generally referred to as 3.2. That means that the overall outline had three main points, each of which had two sub-points. Forensics dorks stick to this religiously, even when they shouldn't--I still catch myself laying out my freelance work this way. The real number of points and sub-points isn't really important, although I think people have trouble following if either one gets too numerous.
For the purposes of this discussion, though, let's use 3.2 as a good starting point. I actually think there's a lot of rhetorical strength to this structure (particularly compared to the other forensics stalwart, 2.2 structure). For one thing, Western culture tends to be very receptive to the number three. We're unconsciously primed for it, from three little pigs to the old formulation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It tends to resonate with an audience, and it's easy to put together a number of easy-to-remember outline points for your speech:
Each of those points then gets two sub-points (the ".2" of 3.2 structure). So, for example, if I were giving a speech on dangerous electrical wiring, my first point might be to talk about the causes of faulty home wiring. My first sub-point would be how most older homes are designed for a much lower load than our modern appliances demand. My second sub-point might talk about the now-obselete fad of using aluminum for home wiring, which proves highly flammable at contact points. In doing so, I've broken down my main point into a series of smaller subjects so the audience can follow me through them. You don't have to have only two--you might have many more--but two points is a nice number for someone to maintain mentally under their map of the three main points. It's also easy to gesture to them, as I'll discuss under delivery.
But either way, once you've worked all these points out and added an introduction and conclusion, you've got yourself a structure. Now you just have to communicate it to your audience. You can do that through internal previews. Basically, you're going to take every possible opportunity to rermind the audience of where you are, what you just finished, and where you're going. It will help them follow you, as well as giving them a mental layout of your argument so that they'll remember it later.
The way I was taught to do internal previews, and I think it works well, is to place them at the end of the introduction (for the main points), at the start of each main point (for the sub-points), again at the end of each main point (to review the sub-points and preview the next main point), and before the conclusion (refresh the audience's memory of the overall structure before driving your argument home). It sounds repetitive. It looks repetitive on the page. But trust me, if you do this for your audience, they will thank you.
Let me show, rather than tell, now. Here's the intro and previews from my most successful Forensics speech (a persuasive number that really was about home wiring):
According to the National Electric Safety Foundation web site, last updated March 11, 2002, faulty or aging electrical wiring causes more than 40 thousand house fires each year, taking more than 350 lives. Even worse, faulty wiring isn't just a problem on Green Acres any more: instead, the aging of American homes is turning it into an epidemic that's wired for fire. If you live in a dorm, cheap student housing, or a low-rent neighborhood because the pay in education is just on this side of abysmal... pay attention, as we first flip the switch on the problems of aging electrical work, then curse in the dark at the causes, and finally fumble for the circuit breakers to turn on the solutions.
The problem with this wiring crisis can be summed up simply: it burns your house down. Apart from that surprise, the problem is rooted in two key areas: older houses, and improperly wired systems.
[...explanation of the problem...]
Now it's true that these firetrap electrical systems are partly caused by age, but that's not the whole story. The causes also include rising electrical demand, and widespread public ignorance.
[...explanation of the causes...]
So the solution is bound to be expensive, right? After all, electricians aren't known for their charity work or low, low prices. Luckily, keeping older houses electrically safe isn't a serious drain on your pocketbook, as long as you take proper precautions and use some common sense.
[...explanation of the solutions...]
Denny Morgenstern doesn't see a lot of exploding electrical meters-and that's just fine by him. But the fire hazard from aging electrical systems makes him nervous enough, and it's a problem that more of us should be worried about. After seeing how older homes are wired for fire, and then seeing why this problem keeps blazing up, we can cool things off with some easy-but effective-solutions. As Morgenstern states, "those fires shouldn't happen." There's no way to predict what could happen, but home fires are among the easiest disasters to prevent.
I know, it's probably more than a little cheesy. That was kind of my shtick (still is, if you listen to the B-SPAN podcasts). Still, it works, and the use of a little cute wordplay makes it less egregiously blatant for the listener. You can even use these previews in written writing, and many do (particularly in academic papers), but they're essential for realtime speech.
As I was writing this, I realized that I'm not really qualified to teach anyone to write brilliantly. I'm proud of my writing, but that takes some serious hubris. But if I'm not prepared to instruct on stylistic brilliance, I am confident of the basics of rhetoric. These two main areas (simple sentences and previewed structure) are the foundation of good speechwriting. They'll rarely dazzle--only speech dorks will come up to you later and say "wow, I really loved your preview to the second point"--but they give you the rhetorical framework you need for the fireworks. As we'll see, these basics serve two roles: they not only provide redundancy for the fleeting speed of the spoken word, but they build room into your speech for the use of effective physical delivery. That's a post for another day.
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I can maintain the puns forever, Internet. Don't try to stop me.
Positives:
Negatives:
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Forensic Evidence: Why Speech?
I know some people might be thinking "Why should anyone write about public speaking online? More importantly, why should I read it? And where are my pants?" These are valid questions--where are your pants? Most people would probably rather watch Carrot Top gargle hedgehogs than spend time public speaking, and so they don't see the relevance. But the truth is that you can't get away from speech. It's still one of our most basic forms of communication, it's a huge cultural touchstone, and I'll argue that its skills translate into more than just corporate earnings reports and geeky undergraduate competitions.
If nothing else, learning to speak well makes you a better writer. Many good writers already speak well, so they don't initially see the connection. Yet as I will point out later, writing for the page and for the spoken word can be very different disciplines. But in general, the kinds of tricks that you learn when writing a good, easily-understood speech in terms of phrasing, structure, and audience appeal will serve you just as well in print. They'll certainly help with editing.
But consider this: as certain parts of our culture mutate in response to the Internet, one of the innovations in online style has been the use of punctuation and capitalization to mimic the rhythms of verbal conversation. Not that this is entirely new, since books and articles have been written in the vernacular before, but I think the casual tone of blogs and chat have helped to turn what used to be dialect showboating into actual conventions. See Heather Armstrong, AKA dooce:
Armstrong isn't the only person to do this, but she's a good example and most people online have probably heard of her. The point is not that this is great writing, although I think dooce deserves a lot of credit. What I'm trying to point out is that as culture has moved online (and that means text-based, despite the hype around podcasts and video blogs), our use of that text is moving in a couple of different directions. One is that lazy IM-speak that causes despair among high school educators worldwide with its brb, lol, c u l8r nonsense. The other is a definite trend of casual communication, which I believe comes partially in response to the dry and impersonal nature of the medium. It is writing that evokes speech, hand in hand with the "conversation" of a good blog/comment system.
But even if you're not a writer and you don't want to be a writer (I sometimes forget that not everyone enjoys hitting the keyboard as much as I do), I think you might still find some of these tips useful. Good public speaking is as much about the rhetoric as it is about the delivery, and today we find ourselves surrounded by rhetoric--ads in everything, an accelerating presidential election, news coverage that's barely news or coverage. The best way to avoid being fooled is to learn how to do it yourself.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/communication x link x 0 comments
The #1 fear of most Americans is public speaking. I know this through numerous public speaking courses--although now that I think about it, they may have had an agenda. If it's true, personally I think it says more about a lack of imagination on the part of the pollster than anything else. I can think of six or seven scarier things just off the top of my head. But I watch a lot of horror movies. If we rule out over-elaborate scenarios better suited for Saw IV (franchise motto: "We're Se7en for people who hate plot, or character, or movies."), public speaking probably does top the list of rational fears.
I never really had a problem with public speaking. While I was in college chasing down a degree in Communication, I spent two years on the Mason forensics team (not autopsy forensics, but speech forensics--the common term refers to a logical process of explanation). College forensics has two national-level tournaments per year. Although I didn't get very far my first year on the team, in my second I placed in the semifinals (top 12) for persuasive speaking at AFA Nationals and the quarterfinals (top 24) for extemporaneous and impromptu speaking at NFA Nationals. Like most opportunities in college, this probably sounds more impressive than it is. And it doesn't sound that impressive.
Regardless, one of the reasons that I started this blog was to add to the overall knowledge base of the Internet in some small way. I hope that people might be helped in some small way with their problems when they stumble onto Mile Zero--I got a lot of positive feedback for my tutorials on Electroplankton, for example, and (oddly enough) I get a steady trickle of trackbacks after interviewing and writing about the ucus.us script spammer. I'm always looking for something else to write about that way, but I'm young and not yet an expert in very many areas. A while back I had lunch with an old friend from the team, and I realized that maybe I could write up some of my experiences so that other people could benefit from them. As a typical comm student, I was always better at talking about how to do things than necessarily doing them. If I can help just a few people knock their top fear down a few notches, that can be my good deed for today. I also feel like I need to preserve my lessons learned from those experiences, before I forget them. I use many of these skills every day at my job, some more than others, and I think they are valuable to distribute.
So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to write a series of short takes on how to write for speech and present that writing effectively. These are not definitive--feel free to disagree--but I'll be trying to cover what I think are the essentials, and where I see most people trip up. My current plans are for four entries (writing for speech, structure, delivery, and improvisation), but I'm open to suggestions for others if anyone has any ideas, and I may uncover new topics as I go along.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/communication x link x 1 comment
I thought I'd been locked out of parts of my work computer's hard drive because it had previously been used by Arseny, our programmer from the Moscow office. Now that he's in DC for a week, I asked him to log in and help me clear out some 13 gigs of space that he's not using.
Turns out that I'm actually locked out of them because the hard drive's bad and has been for probably more than a year now. So now they're busy reimaging and getting my files back online, putting me mostly out of commission for the day except for e-mail and some Excel work that I was putting off. I'm just upset that I'll have to go and recreate all my old keyboard shortcuts.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
Better Cooking through Chemistry
Fans of molecular gastronomy geek Marcel from season two of Top Chef may enjoy looking through this slideshow of his recipes, including the coffee faux-caviar from the finale. Sadly, they don't actually give any details on the recipe, although you may be able to find those at Bravo's site. I'm still not entirely what's up with the "cyber egg" recipe, though. Is it a shot at Wired's logo? Or did "bullseye egg" just seem too simple?
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/top_chef x link x 0 comments
The Islamic Development Bank's lecture series is a bit of an oddball on B-SPAN. It's not directly World Bank sponsored, and it's not your typical economics lecture. It may also seem a little odd as a feature here: I have no love lost for any particular organized religion, much less the orthodox variety. But these are fascinating glimpses into a new perspective on commerce and banking--one that many Americans, steeped in the pro-market ideological slant of Christianity, have probably never considered. It's been a real education for me. You can watch the lectures here, although as usual you must have RealPlayer to view them.
The basic dilemmas at the heart of Islamic banking, and forgive me if I get any of these wrong, are that the Koran forbids charging interest or trading in financial risk as part of its prohibitions against usury and gambling. There is also an element of socially responsible investing here: the Islamic banks put their money in halal enterprises, and profits and losses are to be shared as an extension of charity. In other words, the goal is not to take advantage of customers, but to reach a win-win arrangement for them.
Nevertheless, it is hard to actually be a bank without charging interest or some kind of compensation for loans, which leads to arrangements like murabaha, in which the bank purchases an item for the lendee and sells it to them at a higher agree-upon price, with the implicit profit making up the role that interest would have played for a conventional bank. This is not an uncontroversial method, since some have claimed that it is just a legal workaround.
I recently finished reading Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which calls for more evangelical Christians to become scholars and lead a "life of the mind." It is, for the non-evangelical reader, often a confusing book. When Noll states that the titular scandal is that no mind arises from evangelicalism, we can all think of the three Republican presidential candidates who disbelieve in evolution and nod in agreement, but when he speaks of an "evangelical life of the mind," it is much less clear what exactly he means--how does one conduct "Christian" science or research, at least in any valid form? Oddly, the Islamic Development Bank lectures have helped me get a firmer grasp on what he seems to want in terms of applying religious thought and frameworks to intellectual challenges. I am of course not in favor of religiously-run financial institutions for myself, but I do have to say that the basic principles being followed--charity, empathy, and protection from risk--hold a certain appeal.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
As far as I can tell, NitroTracker is the top of the DS homebrew world right now, if for no other reason than sheer physical convenience--any decent software really requires the GBAMP add-on for storage, and it sticks out about an inch from the DS, making it an unattractive package for MP3s or relatively shallow gaming. Music is more stationary.
Which is not to say that the experience is flawless, but the problems with it still lie mainly with the nature of the software and not with the program itself. NitroTracker is, well, a tracker. That means that it programs its sample-based music by stepping through a grid of notes like a piano roll, but less flexible. It's like writing a song in Excel (and I would know). For some genres of music--techno and house come to mind--having strict grid patterns of 4/4 eighth notes works well. But if you need to swing at all, or work in different time signatures, it gets ugly fast.
For example, the first slightly elaborate production I tried was the Galactica theme, because I knew that in 9/8 time it would be just slightly larger than a standard NitroTracker measure. It turns out pretty odd--partly because of the samples I used, but also because it's really hard to do decent timing this way (listen for yourself). This morning, on the Metro, I also put together a short version of Dave Brubeck's Take 5, which is even more difficult--not only is it 5/4 time, but it has a definite swing groove going on, which meant that I had to use 15 grid spaces to represent the song in triplets, and even then it sounds odd. To really get good exact timing, you'd need to break each quarter note into at least six grid spaces to get eights (every three spaces) and triplets (every two). That's a clumsy way to build a song. (here's an MP3 sample)
But for all that, I can definitely see this as one of the few applications where it is actually worth the hassle of putting homebrew together. After all, that Take 5 cover uses the DS microphone to sample my voice and whistling, which is pretty cool. A clever and patient programmer could use this to build songs out of ambient noise wherever he or she went. It's quick and fairly cheap, all things considered. As of version .3, it loads samples correctly (the Galactica snippet was built using .wav files I took from Ableton Live) for expandability, and it understands MIDI over WiFi. You could conceivably build a whole row of electronic instruments out of a PC and set of homebrew-capable DS's, especially if you used the other DSMIDIWiFi apps for control and simple synths.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/software/homebrew x link x 0 comments
Little Brother's Watching You Too
How is it that delivery companies (and cable installers, and a variety of other house-call services) always manage to call when you're away from the phone? Do they have cameras? Indeed, their timing is the envy of funk bands worldwide.
I especially suspect DHL of bearing a grudge. They have always managed to find the flimsiest of excuses for hiding my packages away in the dank depths of their transportation network, while working flawlessly for everyone else I know. The first time that I sent my laptop away to be serviced via DHL, it languished in a warehouse on the return trip for three weeks for no apparent reason. Once we got that straightened out, the shipment was five miles from my house when the driver was sideswiped in a traffic accident, sending him to the closest hospital and the laptop back to Richmond for another day. I've always felt a little guilty about that, as if he were an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire between his employer and myself.
14:50 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
After several months of stopping in at retail outlets every now and then and being told "well, we had them just yesterday," I broke down and bought a Wii on eBay. It should arrive today or tomorrow. The eBay premium on this comes to about $50 after you consider sales tax, so it could be a lot worse, I guess.
I looked at the XBox 360, and it's still tempting. But it's a bit high-priced for an impulse buy, and there's nothing I'm really dying to play. The media center functionality would probably be more appealing if we didn't have TiVo and Netflix. And I'm pretty sure Belle and I will get more enjoyment together out of the Wii than we would another system (where it would basically just be for me).
I'm still just amazed by how scarce the units actually are. I'm no industry analyst, but it's been almost a year now and I still haven't even seen a box on the shelves anywhere. The hardware isn't that complicated, from what I understand. The Freakonomics blog thinks it might be artificial, but no-one really knows.
But what's undeniably true is that there's more than a couple thousand of them up on eBay at any given time, selling for (including shipping) at least 130% of the retail price. How that figures into the shortages is hard to say--two thousand isn't a very big number, spread across the whole country--but it's a little galling to see the grey market flourish like this.
10:11 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/wii x link x 1 comment
One of the weirdest parts of my job is that I know all the VIPs at the World Bank, and nobody knows me, since I watch them speak at conferences every day for B-SPAN. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that: in Belgium, a senior economist came by to speak to my manager at the hotel breakfast, and I had to stop from greeting him by name. How creepy would that be? "Hi, you don't know me, but I watch you all the time."
Anyway, another perk is that I also type a lot of international names, which is great touch-typing practice, since they often step outside the English letter frequency and ordering rules. Some names are just tongue twisters for an American. Rarely you run into one that's just a joy to say. And I'm proud to say that Haja Nirina Razafinjatovo, Minister of National Education and Scientific Research for Madagascar, has one of the latter. Razafinjatovo. A little hard on the fingers, but so much fun to speak aloud.
Too bad I can never tell him that. But then, that's probably another odd conversation starter. "Hi, you don't know me, but your name amused me for hours." Doesn't come across as terribly respectful, I think.
15:05 x Thomas x /bank/experience/bspan x link x 1 comment
I'm playing the open mike at Front Page Grill in Ballston tonight at around 10pm, partly as a way to meet up with a prospective drummer. The sets are long at this one--20 minutes instead of the usual 2-4 songs--which can be good or bad. Luckily, nobody last time rocked the jazz oddyssey and most people played originals, and I hope that will continue. It's not that I dislike covers (I don't), it's more that people who play open mikes tend to pull out the same twelve covers of acousticized 90's rock or classic rock staples, and I lose interest fairly quickly.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/performance/gigs/open_mikes x link x 0 comments
Awful. What an awful, awful book. It's obtuse, condescending, and redundant. Barber should be ashamed of himself.
The basic argument behind Consumed is that markets have spun out of control, and at this point have begun to shape the culture itself by creating false "needs" for which more products can be sold. In doing so, says Barber, the market both seeks to "empower" children into good little consumers, but also hopes to retard the emotional growth of adults in order to keep them impressionable and easy to manipulate.
Now, I am always up for a good critique of market capitalism. But Barber's stiff, ultradeclarative prose rubs the wrong way, not to mention his inability to define what this "infantilization" actually means in anything more than the most vague or hysterical terms:
Peanut butter without jelly! Rock without rhythm! Color without texture! One might as well declaim any of those three as any of Barber's ranting, or for any amount of evidence that he provides to back up his points. Most of it is anecdotal, and most of it in support of what seem to be a curmudgeonly set of dislikes: Barber apparently doesn't much care for birth control, video games, or most of Hollywood's output. He blames David Hume, of all people, for unleashing hedonism on the world. For someone who claims to be concerned about children, he doesn't seem to like the young very much. In one bizarre passage, he even takes potshots at the childless as being childish, of all things.
Damned if you do, and all that. The book's ability to claim support for its thesis despite all common sense to the contrary is practically Freudian in its magnitude--but perhaps a better comparison is to Tom Friedman, whose market philosophy Barber may abhor but whose writing bears a similar tendency for the pedantic and sloganeering (the word "puerile" is massively overused, ironically, as though Barber is a precocious five-year-old who recently learned it).
But of course, there's no chance that he could fill 350 pages with statistics about how many people search for "Britney Spears" online. So the book devotes a chapter to the mythical "precapitalists" that paved the way for monopolists like Bill Gates or John Rockefeller, then spends the best part of 200 pages rehashing better anti-globalization works like Naomi Klein's No Logo. The themes of infantilization largely disappear from this part of the book, since Barber can't find an easy way to bring them back in.
The entire book is exhaustively footnoted--but then, so is Ann Coulter's trash. Just because something has a citation, it doesn't mean that it was well-researched, and in this case it may mean the opposite. I think it's more than a little ridiculous to claim that John Perry Barlow or William Gibson had anything to do with the rise of Bill Gates, for example, and the footnote on World of Warcraft is clearly referring to another game entirely. That kind of geeky, pop-culture error would feel less striking if it didn't make up a significant part of Barber's argument against pop culture.
And at the end, what are the solutions to this problem that we are assured will soon destroy our perfect capitalism? Why, such bold steps as: ...a boycott. Or "cultural creolization," what most of us probably term cross-pollinization. Even better, let's form "global citizenry." After so much ado, such weaksauce solutions and bargain-basement utopianism are worse than nothing. It's insulting. There's an attempt to appeal to the plight of the developing country--but since Barber argues in another part of the book that the poor have been excluded from this entire system of manufactured desire, it's unconvincing at best.
It's a shame that the argument is so mangled and the results so scattershot, since there's a valid critique to be made of global free market boosterism. Every now and then, Barber stumbles over an interesting point, but he's mostly just casting about. Reform needs to start somewhere, but it's certainly not going to start here.
09:02 x Thomas x /politics/issues/economy x link x 1 comment
Thank You for Being Strongarmed Into Not Smoking
Let's take a moment to appreciate the DC smoking ban. Over the last two years, the District of Columbia put a blanket ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, and other public places. The rationale that eventually pushed it through, from what I understand, was that workers in smoke-filled rooms should be protected from lung cancer and second-hand smoke. Business still seems to be thriving, even though critics feared a total economic collapse.
The difference it has made was really driven home to me last night when I went to an open mike at Front Page Grill just down the road in Arlington. When I got home at the end of the night, my clothes smelled awful, my skin felt dusty, and my throat was starting to act up. This was directly compared to concerts that I've attended lately in DC at the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat. To be honest, I'd forgotten about the smoking ban. It took a visit back into a venue outside its effects before I realized how great those shows had felt.
There are plenty of problems with live music. Sometimes I think I actually hate everything about rock shows except for the music--I hate being jostled by a drunken crowd, loud volumes hurt my ears, and I detest encores (mental note: this kind of statement makes you sound like you're 85 years old). The smoking ban at least takes emphysema out of the equation. I can also remember, in my college band, coming home with my guitar strap and amplifier smelling like an ashtray for a week after a gig. It'll be nice, as I start playing out again, if I can pick up the instrument sans tobacco odor.
Verdict: Smoking bans are highly recommended to the rest of the country. Get started on that before my next road trip, okay?
08:53 x Thomas x /dc/local_flavor x link x 1 comment
Add this one to the bad signal file: while commenting on a BoingBoing story about the shutdown of Cryptome.org, Teresa Nielsen Hayden mentions this oddity:
Anyway, what this guy said was that Reader's Digest has deep old connections with the intelligence community, and that they use it to launch ideas and articles they want to have in circulation. I have to say that Cryptome.org isn't the sort of thing I expect to see written about in Reader's Digest.
I expect there's nothing to it.
Whether or not it's true, I find the juxtaposition captivating. Maybe it's just the mundanity of the outlet--which, admittedly, is the point. I used to read my great-grandfather's large-print copies of Reader's Digest as a kid. The idea that some of it was a form of propaganda or an under-the-radar public influence campaign is so deliciously paranoid that it almost circles back around to plausibility.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/brainjuice x link x 0 comments
One of the dilemmas for environmentally-conscious Americans is using compact flourescent lightbulbs, or CFLs. They use less power, but contain hazardous mercury. This leads to the fear that CFLs may save energy, but end up poisoning the environment when they finally wear out.
Luckily, it looks like the risk from this mercury source is far smaller than you may have heard. PZ Myers has a post with more information, as well as the details of how conservative pro-industry groups are using this line as part of a wider campaign of global warming denialism.
19:36 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 1 comment
I find this Rolling Stone article on Second Life's founder disturbing, to say the least. The man sounds like a classic charismatic leader, and Linden Lab comes across as more than a little cult-like. The genesis of the project in Burning Man, nationally-renowned festival for annoying neo-hippies and technophiles, also leaves me queasy.
One of these days I'm going to have to re-download the client and go digging around Second Life again. Until then, Warren Ellis continues to produce good, critical coverage of it for Reuters.
05:55 x Thomas x /culture/internet/second_life x link x 1 comment
For my own future reference, but others may find it interesting: FilmSound is a site devoted to sound design and scoring for films, including foley and post-production. There's a large section on Star Wars that's fairly interesting, including the method of creating the lightsaber (a mic was placed inside a long tube, then that was waved between speakers playing the lightsaber "drone" to create its doppler-like movement).
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production/post x link x 0 comments
The shorter version of The Descent goes something like this:
Indeed, there are lots of places where the movie shines: it's well-acted, solidly directed, and written intelligently with a set of strong and interesting female characters--a rarity in horror. But its real strength is that it maintains a constant level of tension and dread for practically the entire film, yet doesn't overstay its welcome. It does this by layering and gradually introducing new stresses, starting with a vague but definite unease between the main characters. Once in the cave, that unease is magnified by the claustrophobic confines and some clever tricks of the light--at times the characters are lit as normal for a film, however unrealistic, but in other cases the frame is almost entirely black, with only a few outlines and bobbing headlamps visible. It's only when the audience gets adjusted to the dangers of spelunking that The Descent introduces deformed cave monsters to the mix. With a running time of less than 100 minutes, there's just enough time to develop the scares, but not enough for "villain fatigue."
All in all, The Descent is one of the best horror movies I've seen in a very long time. It's not particularly original, but it displays a mastery of the genre and pacing that similar niche horror films (including the ridiculous Hills Have Eyes remakes) would do well to study.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/horror x link x 0 comments
