You Know What Happens When You Assume…

So if i were to be a journalist (and that’s a big if – like 34 million point font), then I’d have to be a journalist for the Pentagon, FBI, White House, NYPD, or another sweet organization.  If I am dealing with information, I want to work for a bureau that puts information at a premium and has secrets that the public doesn’t know.  From my limited exposure to SECRET material, I must say, it was the coolest thing ever.

Assuming I were to be a journalist, I would’ve had to plan out my future a long time ago, and I have no idea how i would enter the field I find so fascinating.  However, we are talking in hypotheticals, and I hypothetically am disgusted by “the new media ecosystem.”  I’d try to find a position that would not be influenced by it, for job security’s sake.

Grow Some Balls

I am a mechanical engineering major and journalism minor, and there’s always one day each semester I take a journalism class that reinforces my belief that I made a brilliant decision four years ago when I declared my major.  I have yet to understand why journalism professors talk about, or bring in speakers, who deliver the sad news about their profession and hiring rates.  The day Rosenblum visited our class was that day during the semester when I wondered why so many students are pursuing a journalism major and what will become of them in 5 years.

Rosenblum said journalists need to grow some balls and own their business.  But they won’t.  As I will most likely have no future in the field of journalism, listening to Rosenblum tell the class what’s really out there was fascinating not just because of all the dynamics taking place in society, but because everything that was coming out of his mouth was authentic and passionate.  I’ve never had a (I’m assuming) multimillionaire come and speak to me in a classroom like that and it was cool.

I disagree with his belief that newspapers will go the way of the dinosaurs – he said that the main reason print publications were going down was because of the operating costs – so God forbid someone figures out how to reduce those costs, and the newspaper should survive quite a while longer.

If people were motivated by his speech, I wonder if it would be more advantageous to drop out of college and pay whatever price i is to take one of Rosenblum’s courses.  I neither know what the opportunity costs are nor the long term effects, but I would be curious to know.  I don’t know how all of the graduating journalism students are going to compete for jobs, and I wonder how many of Stony Brook’s undergraduates are considering, what would be, a “major” change?

Mr. Farnham, like Mr. Rosenblum was a journalism student, so I guess that shows me what can come of a degree in journalism.  I really thought his idea was brilliant and given enough time and resources, his idea could challenge the newspaper industry.  Think about it - every local area could get in-depth local news from the site, there could be a national tab for everyone to click on, and there could be some sort f interactive portion to combine twitteresque elements.

What I was wondering, is what is stopping a bunch of twenty-somethings from starting their own patch.com.  It would be an imitation brand, but the idea isn’t original in it’s own right.  One thing I took away from his presentation was a deep sadness for the editors of the patch sites.  The amount of work they must do, and for the pittance they must receive, is probably not very rewarding.

My mind hurt after each spoke, and now again after writing about all these innovative ideas.  I feel like there’s so much going on technologically nowadays (says the mechanical engineer), and I wish I were born 50 years ago.  Although, I guess even then there were a whole bunch of technological breakthroughs surfacing.  Well, we’ll just need to adapt, journalism students included, to excel during these inclement times.

Farnhamville (Not a Facebook Application)

I believe if the entire country were “patched,” that could legitimately exterminate newspapers and broadcast news as we know it, do you agree?

What is stopping our class from creating a similar website, stealing your audience, ad revenue, etc.?

If you had to prioritize your goals, where would making money rank?  Would Rosenblum believe you?

What are the next steps you will take to improve and evolve patch.com to enable it to compete with every local media outlet, and eventually replace it?

Rosenblum & Gloom

What advice would you give to two freshmen entering college with lofty goals in the journalism profession – one wants a Pulitzer, the other wants to make $10 million?

What would world look like if every newspaper in the world didn’t print anything tomorrow?  Would that stop people from predicting the so-called eminent extinction or expedite it?

If you could invest $1 million in journalism, where would you place it?  Or would it be better off in the bank?

What advice would you give an engineering major with a journalism minor?

Yo, You Wanna Play Foursquare?

Sitting in MEC 585, crossword puzzle, sudoku, wordy gurdy, jumble, and cryptoquote completed, I was forced to read the paper.  Having finished today’s mind games, I began reading about another type of game played by many urbanites in their twenties and thirties – foursquare!

Not that foursquare!  http://foursquare.com/

It’s the new Twitterbook – just seven months old, with about 60,000 users, Foursquare is a social network that doesn’t ask the question, “What’s on your mind?”  Rather, it’s more of a “Where are you and can I come join you?”  When I first navigated to the site it looked kind of corny, but my initial instinct was that I wanted to join… go figure.

Basically you register your mobile device to the website and “check-in” to tell your friends your whereabouts.  The site will inform your friends, recommend places to visit, and even awards sweet badges for accomplishing certain things!

If you want to find out what those badges represent, or to find out how you can become mayor of the Lake Grove Diner for instance, check out the site and play some foursquare, yo!

A Byte of Information

Would you bet me $1000 a kilobyte had 1000 bytes?  What if I said please?

My MEC 102 professor told me 3 years ago that there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte.  Wikipedia says so too, so it’s a fact.

1024 is 2^10.  As discussed in class, computers use base 2 as their language.  Since each “bit” of information comes in twos, information can only be written in powers of 2.  Since 1024 is relatively close to 1000, they peg 1024 bytes to a kilobyte.  Neat, huh.

Gather Round the JiffyPop

October 15th’s unidentified flying popcorn was brilliant.  I have spent a few days trying to come up with something that could hold all the cable news stations hostage for over 2 hours… and failed.  It had everything – some whacked out flying thing floating on and on, a cut little child’s life in danger, and utter disbelief that something this strange could happen.

As I sat watching the news unfold on the various cable news networks Thursday afternoon, eating my lunch and flipping back during commercials on ESPN, I never once thought to myself, there’s no way that volume of helium could carry a child.  The only thing I could think of was, I gotta see how this turns out.  After I saw the lame conclusion, I switched back to ESPN, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how everyone and their mother were going to be talking about it for days.

And now reports are coming out about how it was all a hoax and the father is a felon.  Maybe someone should hire him because although he may be insane, it helped out the cable news ratings.

You know what, I’m happy

I thought this was retarded at first.  According to a NYT article in the Business section today, Facebook has developed a happiness index based on the number of times users use happy or sad words in their status updates.  Please.

According to their findings, people are happiest on the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Halloween.  People are happier  on Fridays as compared to Mondays by roughly 9.7 percent.  And on days when celebrities die, such as Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger, people are sad

While superficial to me, there is more to the Facebook status that meets the eye… apparently.  These studies are what psychologists and sociologists have been trying to collect for decades.  An incredible amount of data has thus far been collected and can provide great detail into Facebook users’ lives.  Scary.

I don’t know how much this reminds me of Big Brother, but it kinda does (no thanks to Selvin harping on it in class numerous times).  Facebookers (totally just made that up) should know by now their information is being viewed and should act accordingly.  I think it’s kinda neat, and if God forbid people kept private information to themselves, then there wouldn’t be that much complaining.

The potential for this amount of information is unknown.  I’m not a social psychologist, so the analysis should be left to one, but we should all keep an eye on this fascinating prospect.

Accuracy

IF 99% IS GOOD ENOUGH, THEN …

- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

- 811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.

- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.

- 2,488,200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.

- Two plane landings daily at O’ Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.

- 3,056 copies of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strip.

- $761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and CDs that will not play.

- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.

- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

- 315 entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will be misspelled.

- $9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

- 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

- Homes would be without electricity, heat, water, and telephone service for 15 minutes every day.

- Every page of the telephone directory would contain four wrong numbers.

Source: http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001pZE

Hey, You’re on the Crash Cab!

Epic brawl: pedicab versus taxi cab.  Fox just happened to be there to capture the fun!

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/cab_pedicab_fight_in_times_square_irK6W3egAoNqKgPlt1TZ4O

Crazy blondes on the cash cab: