“If the news is important, it will find me”

“If the news is important, it will find me” – - mathewingram.com/work:

Think about that for a second — or longer, if necessary. I think that sums up, in ten simple words, what has happened to the way that many people (and not just young people, but those who use RSS readers and blogs and social networks as well) consume the news. Not only is there just so much of it out there that it’s virtually impossible to consume it all, but the very fact that someone you know — or trust — has passed on or blogged or Twittered or posted a link makes it more likely that you will read it.

And here is one of the great differences — and changes for the worse — of the move to online and social network news distribution. It’s news by echo chamber.

If you get news from the circle of friends (or “friends”), you’re being fed information from a group of people that at a first degree of interpretation have the same, or similar, interests as you do. So the news that finds you is most likely news that reinforces your existing interest areas and knowledge set.

One aspect of the traditional media that’s being lost is the ability to tell people things they need to know but don’t know they need to know.

Where does “The Jungle” or “Silent Spring” or “The Pentagon Papers” — or hell, Watergate in its totality — exist in the new reality? If you’re not already interested in the environment, will your RSS feed push at you until you become interested in global warming? Or will you unsubscribe to the feeds that keep annoying you wtih stuff you don’t think is relevant?

How will those issues that are important but not already on your radar GET on your radar?

My worry is we’re creating an environment that doesn’t inform as much as reinforce.

Is the best we can do in the future Michael Moore? Or will even that fade as people lock themselves further and further into the echo chambers they choose to be a part of?

ICING – NEVER A GOOD THING

Dallas Stars Blog:: ICING – NEVER A GOOD THING:

I’ll tell you what I’d do. Instead of altering the rules that govern icing I’d just do away with icing all together.

Why do we still have it in our game? What purpose does it serve? Would the game suffer without it?

I don’t know. I’m not sure. And no it wouldn’t.

you know what? I really like this idea. Let ‘em play.

Work life balance – good. Working with no balance – bad | Technovia

Work life balance – good. Working with no balance – bad | Technovia:

If working hard means never having time for your family, you are in the wrong job, or you don’t deserve to have your family.

Amen.

I ran down that particular rabbit hole for Apple — made a commitment to a project I really believed in, with the support of Laurie, although if we’d known just how far that rabbit hole I was going to fall, I doubt either of us would have been so enthusiastic (well, I might have, but I shouldn’t have been…).

And as I’ve noted before, when I hauled myself out of the rabbit hole and pointed out the tens of millions of dollars a year that project was tossing at Apple’s bottom line, I was told if I found something interesting on the job listings, I could apply for it and we’d all see…

I’m not saying that to piss on Apple — but to point out that unless you happen to be in one of those positions (founder stock of a startup, for instance) where if it all works you can get a really nice payoff — you won’t. Apple never promised me anything I didn’t get, and I actually got things that weren’t part of the original agreements — the only thing I didn’t get was the Tracy Kidder reward: winning the game means you get to play the game again.

But when you sit back and think about the hours you put in, and the physical and emotional and relationship costs that kind of “work uber alles” mentality brings on, this is one of those places where you ought to think long and hard about what you’re doing, because the reality is, you’re donating a good chunk of your life to a company that is very unlikely to make that investment pay

I don’t regret what I did — but I”m a lot more interested in life balance now, and I think one of the big problems in silicon valley and the tech industry today is that so many companies do build projects and schedules around an assumption of the people involved giving up their life for the project — and increasingly, they don’t make it worth your time to do it, but they still presume your willingness to jump down that rabbit hole for them (because we do). And for them, that’s great — and after, they can outsource it to india or bulgaria and lay you off.

Hey, nothing personal, just business.

So my suggestion is simple: make sure you know what the payout is before you jump into that rabbit hole. you’ll never get that life back if you hand it over to the company. Is it worth it? only you can answer. And it should be your decision, not your manager’s. Is it?

what’s your life worth, anyway? I found out mine was worth a lot more than what a company was willing to pay to rent it from me. That’s a lesson that is much better learned before you jump down the rabbit hole — if you can.

Why automatic icing is the wrong solution…

I wasn’t at the Minnesota game where Kurtis Foster was injured on the icing race — Laurie’s at Spring Training, we had three games at home this week, I had things to do, and so the tickets went to a friend (besides, I usually find Wild hockey anything but… yawn.).

But I was watching it on TV, and saw the injury in all its glory. It was a very sad, unfortunate thing. I’m not sure it was avoidable, Foster to me already looked to be losing control when Mitchell pushed him (and he did, but it seemed to me to be part of a legitimate play, not an intent to cause a problem).

And as expected when something high profile and graphic happens, the calls for “fixing” the problem are coming out fast and furious. For example:

The NHL Broke Kurtis Foster’s Leg – FanHouse – AOL Sports Blog:

But that debate is a distraction from the real issue at hand, which is the League’s refusal to protect its players by instituting a no-brainer policy of “no-touch” icing.

and

james mirtle: Foster’s big fall – A hockey journalist’s blog:

Yet another incident that screams for the league to introduce no-touch icing

to name just two.

Dan Rusanowsky sees it differently:

San Jose Sharks -> Tough Break:

Some say that the incident is an illustration as to why automatic icing should be instituted in the NHL, but I disagree, as I did after Marco Sturm ended his season after a chase-collision with Adam Foote in Colorado in 2004. A similar injury could happen on a simple dump-in from center ice, or a mid ice collision, or one of any number of possibilities. It was an extremely unfortunate occurrence, to be sure, and is a reminder that the road to the Stanley Cup can be filled with potholes.

And I have to admit I agree with him. At one point — especially after a similar situation where Marco Sturm was injured — I was a strong advocate of automatic icing, but as I’ve studied and thought about it more, I’ve changed my mind. Automatic icing isn’t the solution here.

We saw a similar reaction when Richard Zednik had his throat cut — calls for mandatory throat guards, even some people calling for changes to skates and other “out there” solutions. This despite that in the NHL, it was 19 years between incidents. Fortunately, that drum has been mostly silenced as people put the injury back in the larger perspective of the game and the risks involved, and so should this one.

Stop and think about it for a minute: the chase for the icing is, in fact, an exciting play that can change the momentum of the game and give a fast team a significant advantage. It creates fan interest and it can decide a game. Because of this, I think doing away with it is sending the game in the wrong direction.

And while I don’t have stats handy, if you look at how many careers have been ended in the last five years to concussions or eye/face injuries, if you look at the number of man-games lost to those injuries and compare those numbers to injuries that happen during an icing play, I’m sure you’ll find that concussions impact teams and players MUCH more than icing plays, and so do injuries that could be minimized by mandatory visors.

So before the league goes off “fixing” icing, it really should stop and figure out how to stop hits to the head and how to keep players from getting their bell rung. Nick Kypreos and the Lindros brothers could have some input here, I think. And players should quit talking about personal choice and put the stupid visors on.

Fact is, if I sat and thought about it, I could likely find five or six injury types much more common and damaging to players and teams than icing incidents. In the larger scheme of how to protect players and reduce the impact of teams on player injuries, “fixing” icing seems to me like painting the bathroom while the stove is on fire in the kitchen. Go put the stove out, then talk to me about painting.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think the league should do NOTHING here; I just don’t think automatic icing is the answer.

What I suggest instead is to make penalties during icing plays more serious. For instance:

• Any penalty taken during an icing play behind the goal line where the icing is not washed out by the play is an automatic five minute major.
  
• Any play taken during an icing behind the goal line where the icing is not washed out by the play that causes a player injury is an automatic game misconduct.
  
• Any place taken during an icing behind the goal line where a player is taken off on a stretcher is an automatic match intent-to-injure.
  

The point of this is to make the area behind the goal line a relative safe zone for the player attempting to make the icing. The chasing player trying to wash it out has to make a judgment coming in whether to pull up from the chase or whether to make the attempt to wash; if he knows that he’s at risk of costing his team a major penalty because the play is too close or there’s a risk of taking a penalty, he’ll play it more cautiously — which is what we need here.

What’s needed here isn’t radical surgery — doing away with icing plays — but giving a chasing player more incentive to be cautious and pull up unless they know they can make the play and do is safely. You do that by making the repercussions of taking a penalty at the end of the play more serious. By mandating that any penalty taken in that zone during that play a major, that’ll be enough for players to pull up and not force the play unless they’re sure it’s safe to do so.

Mostly. Will there be bad choices? injuries? yes. But hockey is a fast and physical game. Injuries are part of it, and we can’t legislate total safety into the game, even if we turn it into ringette, which nobody wants. What we CAN do is create incentives and disincentives to certain actions that encourage injuries, which will reduce both the frequency of those happening and the severity of the injury they cause.

Which the league really ought to get serious about doing in other parts of the game, too. Say, starting with hits to the head. But that’s a different post…

There’s no need for radical changes to the game. We can manage this problem with more thought and less impact. And should.

Arthur C. Clarke, dead at 90.

And so we lose another one. Sad.

I got to know Clarke a little back when I was involved in SFWA, to the point where we exchanged christmas cards for a while, and a letter or two, and he was an occasional commenter on the zine I was publishing back then. He was one of those pros that was always accessible and friendly and willing to stop and talk to people (and trust me, not all pros are like that). Fascinating writer and interesting person, one of the key writers who got me involved with science fiction as a kid, so getting to know him later on was a real trip.

I don’t think we can under-estimate the impact he’s had on our lives and society. Not necessarily for the things the obit writers are going to talk about — yes, he wrote about things we take for granted today, like geosynchronous communication satellites, but others had those ideas, too. it’s that he inspired a generation of people to actually go out and figure out how to build them and make them happen.

In many ways, Jack Kennedy got us to the moon, but it was Arthur Clarke who got the bodies on the ground who could build the rocket when it was time to build it. There are very few bigger names in the field and in society in general. And now he’s moved on to whatever’s next.

Knowing him, he did it smiling.

The Bill of Rights for Photographers

Pro-Imaging | The Bill of Rights for Photographers | Rights,:

Pro Imaging have set out conditions for photographic competition organisers and sponsors to be guided by when constructing terms and conditions for their competitions. We call this set of conditions The Bill of Rights for photographers. Pro Imaging believes The Bill of Rights represents best practice to the photographic competition industry and our intent is that it should be adopted as a standard code of practice.

This is a great idea. Unfortunately, their listings of good and bad contests has no RSS feed, so there’s no way to track them other than manually pinging the site. Which means for most of us, this information will go unseen. too bad.

hoooray for MAMP

Just a quick shout out to let folks know about something I found recently:

MAMP.info: Macintosh-Apache-Mysql-PHP. It’s a site that builds an environment you can download and which runs right off the bat without any significant work, with PHP4 or PHP5.

I was able, within well under an hour, to go from “damn, I need a Drupal sandbox NOW” to a fully running Drupal with a bunch of extra modules I’m evaluating. Very nice. And if you keep the MAMP DMG around, you can simply toss a sandbox into the trash and start from scratch by trashing the base folder. Even nicer.