On The Media [transcript] has a fascinating exploration of what makes a story on a news website climb up the “most e-mailed articles” list. The most common factor among them? Awe:
We had a number of research assistants read stories and we described to them what the concept of awe is; it’s something that opens the mind and is inspiring. And we made sure that they had a good understanding of this concept. We had them read some articles with us and come to a conclusion about what an awe-inspiring piece would be. And then they rated about 3,000 stories each on how much awe they inspired…
One is “Rare Treatment is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient.” Another story was called “The Promise and Power of RNA.” A final example would be “Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul,” a story about the archeological discovery of an inscription on a Turkish monument from the eighth century, indicating a belief that the body and the soul were separate. What we find interesting is the connectivity issue. People tend to proselytize about awe-inspiring experiences. This is one of the main ways that religion has been thought to spread. When I have an amazing experience, I tell others about it.
Sure, Charlie Sheen has been making the rounds non-stop on the talkshow circuit, but for my money, his Today Show interview is still absolutely astonishing. It was one of the first ones he did and not only does Sheen look like complete and utter crap, but the interview also shows him spouting off his incoherent babble before it became extremely rehearsed:
Here are some of my favorite takes on the topic of Charlie Sheen and the media frenzy he’s stirred up. First up, James Poniewozik:
Sheen’s problems may be psychological, pharmaceutical, moral—but above all, he’s a poster boy for that most dangerous and common of celebrity intoxicants, entitlement. He was “tired of pretending I’m not special,” he said. He had decided to embrace his “rock star life,” and while he claimed to be clean now, he was proud of his epic run of partying: “I exposed people to magic.” Was that drug lifestyle dangerous? Oh sure—for “normal” people. For losers. Overdosing, he said, “is for amateurs.”
Where could he have gotten that sense of entitlement from? Oh, maybe from being essentially celebrated for the same lifestyle that brought him down. From being a notorious playboy paid a couple million an episode to play a notorious playboy, named Charlie, on TV. For continuing to stay thus employed even after abuse complaints, rampages and an assault plea—things that might get you fired if you were a normal person, a loser, an amateur.
Jeff Jarvis writes on how the media is doing a disservice to mental illness:
So why are they interviewing him? Not because they expect him to say smart things that give insight. Neither are they trying to give a picture of mental illness, for they give no context. On Piers Morgan’s nightly exhibition of ratings neediness, the star dismissed doctors’ mentions of bipolar disease and then Morgan stepped up to give him a clean bill of mental health, telling Sheen he is “alarmingly normal.” I think in the field they call that enabling.
But my favorite take comes from Linda Holmes over at Monkey See:
There could hardly be a starker contrast than the one between Ferguson’s treatment of Sheen and the treatment Sheen got from Piers Morgan last night on CNN, where Morgan poked him and enraged him, coddled him and encouraged him. It’s exactly like paying your penny at Bedlam, only Morgan gets the penny.
The people who watch his show are, in effect, paying Piers Morgan to provoke Charlie Sheen for them. To push his buttons, ask him about the women he prefers, coyly compliment him on his benders, all because it’s so easy to get him to brag about all of that. Sheen wants to say “epic” and “winning” and “the scoreboard doesn’t lie.” He’s got a pocket full of speed-related metaphors — he returns over and over to rocket fuel, jets, bombs, the let’s go of it all — and he wants to share all of them.
Launched by Amazon just a month or two ago, Kindle Singles offers “compelling ideas, expressed at their natural length.” It’s a new, curated program that emphasizes long-form reading, with works lengthier than a magazine article but shorter than a full-on e-book (and priced accordingly). As a huge fan of services like Instapaper, I’ve grown to love the long-form reading I can do with my Kindle, and I’ve found that Kindle Singles are an awesome way to consume these bite-sized nuggets of high-quality writing.
The easiest way to get the new story is just to head on over to Amazon and buy it right now. It’ll be automatically delivered to your Kindle, wirelessly. But what if you don’t have a Kindle? No problem. Amazon has released Kindle apps for every conceivable OS, including iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, or even for your Mac or PC. Basically, if you’re reading this blog post right now, you can also buy and read Stephen’s new story (which, by the way, has a super cool cover created by artist Mark Crilley).
Working on the Tobolowsky Files has been a joy, but it’s also been an intensive process that has consumed hundreds of hours of my life over the past year. During that time, we’ve put out about 30-40 hours worth of content and done so completely for free. Buying this Kindle Single not only gives you a great new piece of content from Stephen, which you won’t be able to find the podcast (I’ve read the story and, as usual, it’s hilarious and profound), it also helps support all the work that Stephen and I do together. If enough people chip in the $1.99 it takes to buy this Kindle Single, it will ensure we can keep hearing Stephen’s stories continue for many months to come, both in podcast form and in Kindle form.
The LA Times tabulates exactly how much money Charlie Sheen’s on-air meltdown MIGHT cost Warner Bros. in the form of lost royalties and fees from Two and a Half Men episodes:
Warner Bros., which produces the show, has the most to lose if “Two and a Half Men” is over. Currently, CBS pays about $4 million per episode for the show. Warner Bros. uses that money to make the show, pay the cast, etc. But there is always money left over to keep in its pocket. Given that eight episodes won’t be made this season, that translates to $32 million in lost license fees, several million of which would have been pure profit. People close to the show say Warner Bros. would lose about $10 million in profits from the four episodes alone
Contractually, CBS is on the hook for one more season after this one, so if Sheen’s character has indeed drank his whiskey and bedded his last broad, then that is an additional $96 million or so in license fees gone — assuming that 24 episodes would be made next season. Then there is the rerun money. The cable channel FX pays about $800,000 per episode. That’s $3.2 million right there that’s gone for the episodes that won’t be made this season. If the show is gone for good, then that number jumps to more than $22 million after factoring in the 24 episodes that would have been made next season.
Just based on the numbers above, they are already looking at well over $130 million in losses, assuming the show gets canceled. That this many livelihoods and this much money can be subject to the whims of one notoriously unstable man seems the height of ridiculousness. But hey, that’s show business baby.
Jezebel’s piece from awhile back about the lack of female talent at The Daily Show really must have struck a nerve with Tina Fey. Fey devoted a substantial amount of time to addressing some of its criticisms in last night’s episode, and Rebecca Traitster at Salon has written up a staggeringly insightful response to it that describes how Fey manages to have her cake and eat it too:
Mesmerizingly, practically the whole half hour of network television was dedicated to slicing and dicing nearly every angle of the arguments that crop up any time anyone tries to talk about gender, popularity and perception. It was a testament to the fact that these arguments have been cropping up ever more frequently in recent years, thanks in no small part to the ascension of Fey and her generation of talented (and very often beautiful) comedians, as well as the rise of a critical and popular feminist-minded blogosphere that keeps a celebratory and often cutting eye on the gender history being made in media, politics and entertainment.
Speaking of Slate, they’ve just published a piece on the lost art of pickpocketing. It makes a good, interesting point, but it seems odd to glorify any sort of crime that deprives people of their money and probably instills a significant degree of psychological distress.
Stuttering, in my mind, is a word that conjures beiges and grays: the feeling of always being lusterless and square in conversation; of woozy headaches brought about by gasping through my sentences; of childhood boredom in stuffy, cork-tiled offices where speech therapists told me to slow down and read long lists of words aloud. Somehow, I never wanted to slow down, and still don’t; and in this respect stuttering also signifies a bargain I have spent adult life trying not to make. The disorder is not what might be called “a given” from birth for me, though it’s been a looming specter for as long as my memory reaches. I started speaking in sentences shortly before turning 1. At 3, those sentences first met with some resistance on my tongue, the way a car moves off asphalt, onto dirt—and then, finally, across rocks that jolt the tires and make it hard to track where you are headed. Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations. In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud, and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other students whether I’m “OK” and “always like this,” and while I continue fighting with a pr sound, my ears tune in to every judging shudder in the room—the creaking chairs, the restless exhalations, the uncomfortable shifting, in the desk beside me, of a girl with many colored pens who seems to me in some way very beautiful. In high school: A medical assistant taking down my charts asks whether I just have a problem with my speech or whether there is mental retardation, too. (“As far as I’m aware …” my answer begins.) In college: I slow down several seminars trundling through fragile language meant for clever tongues. And so on. In each case, what I feel most impelled to explain to the people who can hear me is just: This is not my voice.
Reddit has a fascinating Q&A with the guys who created the machine that will one day enslave us all, AKA Watson. The most interesting part of this discussion is how Watson interacted with the buzzer. I’ve seen lots of accusation on the internetz about how unfair it was that humans were being pitted against a machine in terms of knowledge AND response time. Here’s what the creators had to say:
Jeopardy! and IBM tried to ensure that both humans and machines had equivalent interfaces to the game. For example, they both had to press down on the same physical buzzer. IBM had to develop a mechanical device that grips and physically pushes the button. Any given player however has different strengths and weakness relative to his/her/its competitors. Ken had a fast hand relative to his competitors and dominated many games because he had the right combination of language understanding, knowledge, confidence, strategy and speed. Everyone knows you need ALL these elements to be a Jeopardy! champion.
Both machine and human got the same clues at the same time — they read differently, they think differently, they play differently, they buzz differently but no player had an unfair advantage over the other in terms of how they interfaced with the game. If anything the human players could hear the clue being read and could anticipate when the buzzer would enable. This allowed them the ability to buzz in almost instantly and considerably faster than Watson’s fastest buzz. By timing the buzz just right like this, humans could beat Watson’s fastest reaction. At the same time, one of Watson’s strength was its consistently fast buzz — only effective of course if it could understand the question in time, compute the answer and confidence and decide to buzz in before it was too late.
The clues are in English — Brad and Ken’s native language; not Watson’s. Watson analyzes the clue in natural language to understand what the clue is asking for. Once it has done that, it must sift through the equivalent of one million books to calculate an accurate response in 2-3 seconds and determine if it’s confident enough to buzz in, because in Jeopardy! you lose money if you buzz in and respond incorrectly. This is a huge challenge, especially because humans tend to know what they know and know what they don’t know. Watson has to do thousands of calculations before it knows what it knows and what it doesn’t. The calculating of confidence based on evidence is a new technological capability that is going to be very significant in helping people in business and their personal lives, as it means a computer will be able to not only provide humans with suggested answers, but also provide an explanation of where the answers came from and why they seem correct.
Also, this:
Watson contains state-of-the-art parallel processing capabilities that allow it to run multiple hypotheses – around one million calculations – at the same time. Watson is running on 2,880 processor cores simultaneously, while your laptop likely contains four cores, of which perhaps two are used concurrently. Processing natural language is scientifically very difficult because there are many different ways the same information can be expressed. That means that Watson has to look at the data from scores of perspectives and combine and contrast the results. The parallel processing power provided by IBM Power 750 systems allows Watson to do thousands of analytical tasks simultaneously to come up with the best answer in under three seconds.