The dirt that splatters

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Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. 

Jonathan Franzen writing in the New York Times

Sometimes procrastination is a good thing

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I had a student who collected a bunch of data suggesting that those who procrastinate somewhat are more original and creative than people who never do it—and more creative than those who always do it. Of course, if you wait until the deadline, then you’re just going to have to rush to finish the simplest idea. But there is a sweet spot where procrastination helps with divergent thinking, with incubation, and with nonlinear connections.

Adam Grant Six secrets to true originality

Tuesday Tech Tools: 36 Writing Helps

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We all could use a little help with writing and editing text. Here are some wonderful tools (apps and online) that will help in unexpected ways. You'll more writing tools at the tech tools site. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

AAJA Guide to Covering Asian America

Associated Press Stylebook*
The most used reference guide to writing news stories, the AP stylebook is available both in print and online for a small fee.  It can improve general writing as well, especially for its alphabetically organized guide to the use of common and proper nouns.

Diversity Style Guide
Resource to help media writers nagivate through a "multicultural world with accuracy, authority and sensitivity."

Cliche Finder
Just what the title suggests. Free.

Copyscape
Check for online plagiarism.

Corpus of Contemporary American English
This BYU site includes transcripts of spoken language from radio and television programs and comprises academic writing from a range of disciplines allowing comparison of styles--spoken language vs.written academic language.

Coschedule Headline Analyzer
Analyze your headlines for SEO and share value. Free. 

Disability Language Style Guide
Created by The National Center for Disability and Journalism.

Dragon Anywhere
Voice to text app for iOS. Have to finish dictation before seeing the text. Free.

Flip Text
Flip text upside-down.  Use it on Facebook or Twitter. Free.

FontPair
Helps you pick font combinations for your resume, website, poster, etc. so your creation stands out from the typical Times New Roman on other material.

Gender Guesser
Cut and paste some of your writing into the the Gender Guesser and it will tell you whether you are male or female based on the writing tendencies of each.

Global Press Style Guide

Google Keyword Planner
Allows users to find and use words that are more likely to be used in searches for the content we are writing. Free.

the Grading Game*
App for practicing your editing skills and win points. Avail at the App Store.

Grammar Girl
Writing Tips from a grammarian.

Hackpad
Edit, organize and share documents. Merged with Dropbox in 2014.

HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator
Just write three nouns related to the topic that you'd like to blog about and this site will offer ideas.  

Lexicon Valley
Slate's grammar podcasts.

Limpert's About Editing and Writing Blog
A blog about how editors and writers do their work by Jack Limert was editor of the The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.

Medium
Created by Twitter co-founders to support good writing. Clean design and easy-to-use interface. For those who want to write but don’t want to maintain a blog or website. Intended to be a place where smart people plant their thoughts.  Share a draft of a post with friends who can make comments as marginal notes (rather than at the end of a post). Free, but Twitter account is required. No custom domains or customization.

NAHJ Cultural Competence Handbook
National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

The NLGJA Stylebook
The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Stylebook on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Terminology.

Online Etymology Dictionary
Gives you the history and derivation of any word. Free.

Power Thesaurus 
Crowdsourced thesaurus. 

Rhymer
Free rhyming dictionary.

SEOmov
SEO writing tips.

Svbtle
Writing platform. Minimalist interface. Encourages reader response. Must apply for membership.

Sync.in
Collaborative writing tool. 

TextExpander
Mac typing shortcut. Takes snippets of text and turns them into longer ones. Ideas for how to use it here. $44.95.

TextGrabber*
Extracts text from a variety of printed sources (PDF, books, etc.) by using the iPhone camera. Can translate text from many languages. $4.99.

Tone Analyzer
Linguistic analysis detects the emotional tone of your writing. Detect the levels of particular emotions it triggers and language style. Free.

Trans Journalist Association

Tribal Nations Media Guide

WatchFramebyFrame
Can also be used to play YouTube and Vimeo videos frame by frame, to see any inconsistencies in content.

Yoast SEO
A WordPress plugin to work SEO into your writing,

The unlived dream

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My father became a tailor because his father wouldn’t allow him to become a doctor. My father was good at his profession, he was commended and awarded for it—but he was never the one who wanted it, and he always regretted his unlived dream. It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval. 

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

9/11 at CNN

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Twenty years ago today, I finished an overnight shift at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta and left around 4 am to sleep a few hours before heading back. I was scheduled for a second shift that started at 10 am.  

I woke up at about 9 am and flipped on the television. I stopped brushing my teeth and stood in front of the screen. It took most of a minute for my head to clear and for me to realize what was happening. I had worked on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center for Voter News Service during the last general election so the scene looked familiar.

I raced back to work. It took twice as long to get inside because of the tight security. Everyone on staff who could get down to the CNN Center had come as well, whether they had a shift to work or not. 

I first walked into the CNN Headline News newsroom. It was surprisingly quiet. My shift was canceled because the network had stopped producing news reports and instead aired a feed of the CNN main channel. All the Turner Broadcast networks, including TBS, did the same thing. All except for one—The Cartoon Network. At Headline News, I overheard several people talking in hushed tones about friends and family who worked near the World Trade Centers. 

I took the escalators up to the main CNN newsroom. There were three times as many people there as usual, and they all seemed to be shouting at once. Rumors were flying about reported attacks against the U.S. (including threats to the CNN Center). Producers debated what should go on air, what we knew and what was speculation. I was used to spending my days in a noisy, volatile newsroom—but within a few minutes, the stimulus was too much. I retreated because the noise was overwhelming.   

A few days later, I wrote: 

We're all working double shifts and are exhausted. There are some video shots the network is not airing because it's just too graphic. Adding to it is the emotional element. One of the best producers here came over to a reporter I was sitting beside and asked if we could do something about stress on those who CAN'T turn it off.  He said he broke down several times last night after going home.  

We all just wanted to cry—every day.

Stephen Goforth

The Mirror Likes Us

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Consumer technology products are great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy social media interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us.

Jonathan Franzen, excerpt from Kenyon College 2011 Commencement speech   

Tuesday Tech Tools: 21 Research Tools

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Some tools that will help you with research.

Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

The Brookings Institution
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars that produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around.  It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitors blogs, social media, etc and filters the content based on keywords, etc. and sends you links. A free account is available but limited. Paid accounts (starting at $10) are based on the number of keywords you want to research. another.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Feedly
Web-based and largest RSS feed. Subscribe to get new posts from a site. Uses upvotes and downvotes to learn which new articles is most relevant to the user. Useful to academic researchers looking to stay on top of new papers but also for those who want to monitor news, RSS feeds, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Free, but a paid account offers more features such as the ability to follow more than 100 sources and hide adverts. $6 or more a month. Compare to Inoreader.

Fetching
Captures every site you visit automatically, so you can more easily find websites and articles you need now but didn't know at the time you would need them.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info. Break it down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

Research Gate
Sends email recommendations of scholarly papers and offers a feed of them. Users can also see a chronological newsfeed of papers posted by their ResearchGate contacts. Around 150 million publication pages and 20 million users. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful
Find and verifies stories on social media platforms for clients. Owned by News Corps.

More tech tools

Knowing the Why

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Viktor Frankl worked as a therapist in the Nazi concentration camps, and in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Communication Upward 

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Middle- and upper-level executive should recognize that they are dependent on information that has been filtered, analyzed, abstracted, sorted and condensed by other segments of the organization. It is hard for them to stay in touch with unprocessed reality. Every official must periodically step outside the executive cocoon and experience the basic realities that the system is presumably designed to deal with. 

Every organization has its front-line activities— selling, fighting, healing, teaching— and its bureaucratic or executive-level activities. Both are important, but the frontline activities take place far from the executive’s swivel chair. The front-line people who wrestle with action problems every day know a lot more than anyone ever asked them.

The layers of middle and upper management can be a formidable filter against creative ideas generated below; and there have been many attempts to create alternative opportunities for communication upward, such as the suggestion box and the inspector general.But there is probably no substitute for creating a culture— a set of attitudes, customs and habits throughout the organization— that favors easy two-way communication, in and out of channels, among all layers of the organization. Two key messages should be implicit in such a culture: 1. “You will know what's going on, and 2. “Your voice will be heard.”

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Data Science articles from August 2021

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