Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Ties To Be Fit
See what results when a very creative mind, that of my wife, is handed all the ties
of her late father. The birthday present for our daughter came together
only after hours of trial and error, many evenings spent sewing, and a
lot of finger pricking yelps.
Name That Tune
("Pop Goes the President")
To answer Mr. Bruni's question, it says more about us. It is an indictment of many in the voting public who can be swayed more by the number of times that Vice-President Biden smiled (53 by one count) during his debate with Congressman Ryan than by the content of his words. A public that is attracted to style and distracted by substance. A public that cares more about peeking into private lives than policy pronouncements.
President Obama, from all that we read about him, is a serious politician who studies and considers each issue with great care and concern. Yet his future may well be decided in the next 2 debates not by what he has accomplished, or failed to get done during the past 4 years, but by how often he grimaces or looks down at the floor while former Governor Romney goes off on one of his "I never said any of those things" or "if I did say any of those things, I didn't mean it" rambles.
To far too great an extent, ours is a nation of very little concern for detail on the issues and a great deal of interest in playlists. We demand appearances on "The View" to keep us entertained, not informed. If President Obama is a day time TV regular, the fault lies not in this political star but in ourselves.
To answer Mr. Bruni's question, it says more about us. It is an indictment of many in the voting public who can be swayed more by the number of times that Vice-President Biden smiled (53 by one count) during his debate with Congressman Ryan than by the content of his words. A public that is attracted to style and distracted by substance. A public that cares more about peeking into private lives than policy pronouncements.
President Obama, from all that we read about him, is a serious politician who studies and considers each issue with great care and concern. Yet his future may well be decided in the next 2 debates not by what he has accomplished, or failed to get done during the past 4 years, but by how often he grimaces or looks down at the floor while former Governor Romney goes off on one of his "I never said any of those things" or "if I did say any of those things, I didn't mean it" rambles.
To far too great an extent, ours is a nation of very little concern for detail on the issues and a great deal of interest in playlists. We demand appearances on "The View" to keep us entertained, not informed. If President Obama is a day time TV regular, the fault lies not in this political star but in ourselves.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Data Can Be Fun and Musical
This is a guest post from Richie Jay.
I was talking to a friend last night about data. Specifically about how modern technology makes it so much easier for us (and, for better or worse, other people and companies) to collect tremendous quantities of data about each of us.
Most of that data is boring. Or necessarily private in the hyper-connected world (birth date, social security number, income, credit report, etc). But some of it can be quite fun. And very revealing if shared.
In Summer 2004, in the early days of iTunes and Internet 2.0, I started using a little software plug-in called Audioscrobbler (later renamed to Last.fm and purchased by a giant media conglomerate), whose sole purpose was to keep track of the music that I listened to (to 'scrobble' it, in Audioscrobbler parlance), and to use that information to provide music recommendations. Initially, it only worked with iTunes, but later it incorporated many streaming sites and portable players (although Pandora, Songza and some other sites that I frequently use are not supported or require creative work-arounds).
Long story short, 8 years later I'm just a few songs short of 17,000 individual pieces of data about my listening habits. This is actually only a partial sample of my total music consumption in 8+ years (misses some ways I listen to music at home, online, and on portable devices, plus concerts, radio, PA systems, parties, friends' houses, and other places I hear music; occasionally has data errors, like double-counts or missing 'scrobbles'), but probably a pretty good representation of my overall musical preferences.
Obviously, my tastes have changed over the years, and I also can't be blamed for the capricious whims of the oft-used shuffle feature, so this list does not necessarily represent a present-day ranking of my favorite or most-listened-to artists. Furthermore, any time you share this much data about yourself, there's bound to be something 'embarrassing' in there (perhaps, in this case, a total lack of certain genres high on the list, even though I aspire to broaden my musical predilections, and like to think of myself as musically diverse and adventurous).
Beyond that, because the technology now exists (and is often used) to correlate various sets of data, this data set begs a few additional questions: What do my music listening habits say about me? What other information can be gleaned from this data? Can it be used to determine any number of seemingly unrelated (but most likely highly-correlated) things like my age, gender, race, political leanings, religion, education level, income, profession, home state, favorite sports team, favorite ice cream flavor, hobbies, boxers vs. briefs, cats vs. dogs, and/or blood type?
Without further ado, here is the list of the Top 50 Most Listened to Artists by me, Richie Jay, since August 2004, according to Audioscrobbler / Last.FM:
RANK ARTIST
I was talking to a friend last night about data. Specifically about how modern technology makes it so much easier for us (and, for better or worse, other people and companies) to collect tremendous quantities of data about each of us.
Most of that data is boring. Or necessarily private in the hyper-connected world (birth date, social security number, income, credit report, etc). But some of it can be quite fun. And very revealing if shared.
In Summer 2004, in the early days of iTunes and Internet 2.0, I started using a little software plug-in called Audioscrobbler (later renamed to Last.fm and purchased by a giant media conglomerate), whose sole purpose was to keep track of the music that I listened to (to 'scrobble' it, in Audioscrobbler parlance), and to use that information to provide music recommendations. Initially, it only worked with iTunes, but later it incorporated many streaming sites and portable players (although Pandora, Songza and some other sites that I frequently use are not supported or require creative work-arounds).
Long story short, 8 years later I'm just a few songs short of 17,000 individual pieces of data about my listening habits. This is actually only a partial sample of my total music consumption in 8+ years (misses some ways I listen to music at home, online, and on portable devices, plus concerts, radio, PA systems, parties, friends' houses, and other places I hear music; occasionally has data errors, like double-counts or missing 'scrobbles'), but probably a pretty good representation of my overall musical preferences.
Obviously, my tastes have changed over the years, and I also can't be blamed for the capricious whims of the oft-used shuffle feature, so this list does not necessarily represent a present-day ranking of my favorite or most-listened-to artists. Furthermore, any time you share this much data about yourself, there's bound to be something 'embarrassing' in there (perhaps, in this case, a total lack of certain genres high on the list, even though I aspire to broaden my musical predilections, and like to think of myself as musically diverse and adventurous).
Beyond that, because the technology now exists (and is often used) to correlate various sets of data, this data set begs a few additional questions: What do my music listening habits say about me? What other information can be gleaned from this data? Can it be used to determine any number of seemingly unrelated (but most likely highly-correlated) things like my age, gender, race, political leanings, religion, education level, income, profession, home state, favorite sports team, favorite ice cream flavor, hobbies, boxers vs. briefs, cats vs. dogs, and/or blood type?
Without further ado, here is the list of the Top 50 Most Listened to Artists by me, Richie Jay, since August 2004, according to Audioscrobbler / Last.FM:
RANK ARTIST
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