Jenna and I both love to watch this video of a slow loris:
So, why do we like this thing so much? Check out this chart:
According to “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse” by Stephen Jay Gould [PDF]:
Humans feed affection for animals with juvenile features: large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins (left column). Small-eyed, long-snouted animals (right column) do not elicit the same response.
So let’s examine the slow loris. Large eyes? Check. Bulging cranium? Check. Retreating chin? Check. Cutest animal ever.
I just watched this video interview with Jay Rosen from The Economist’s Tea with The Economist series. The interviewer asks Jay, “What would be the job description of a journalist in the future?”
I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.
I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.
So basically, every Wednesday for a bunch of weeks now, I’ve been going to the Corktown Ukulele Jam. It’s just down the street from my house at the Dominion on Queen, and it’s awesome.
A few weeks ago, the videotaped the whole night and put it on YouTube. Here’s me, doing a ukulele cover of “She’s Dead” by Jim’s Big Ego:
There’s a contest for these YouTube videos — the most viewed after a month wins a dinner at the Dominion, if I recall correctly. So feel free to watch this multiple times.
Via Robert Paterson’s weblog, a great video of NPR’s Adam Davidson, explaining how they approached the incredibly complicated subject of the housing crisis for This American Life’s The Giant Pool of Money and the Planet Money podcast:
As you’ll see in the video, Davidson thinks that journalists are too reluctant to acknowledge their own ignorance when approaching complex stories. “The Giant Pool of Money,” on the other hand, felt like a learning process for Davidson and Blumberg as much as their listeners.
