Archive - 2010
October 22nd
In Defense of Juan Williams
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/22/2010 - 13:37Juan Williams comment, “if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous” and NPR’s decision to end his contract as a news analyst has got a lot of people talking.
ThinkProgress has a good post about this entitled, Juan Williams Admits His Fear Of Muslims On Airplanes Is Irrational.
They refer to a question that George Stephanopoulos asked Williams on Good Morning America, “should you have gone the extra step and said, “Listen, they’re irrational, they are feelings I fight?” Williams responded, “Yeah, I could have done that.” Although he did get upset when NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller suggested that his comments should have been “between him and his psychiatrist or his publicist”. Schiller later apologized, and she should have.
These days, psychiatrists typically spend minimal time talking to their patients. Their focus is on prescribing medications. Williams should talk with a good psychotherapist about his irrational fears. But I digress.
The real issue is whether or not his comments damaged his credibility as a news analyst. This is where Williams came so close to getting it right, and yet failing so miserably. For years the news industry has perpetuated a myth that news analysts can be fair and objective, that they can be unbiased. Personally, I don’t believe anyone can truly be objective.
It reminds me of when I attended the bloggers breakfast at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. One of the guest speakers was Walter Mears. Walter Mears has covered conventions for decades for the Associated Press. After he spoke, David Weinberger asked Mears whom he was supporting for president. Mears said that he wouldn’t say, because he had to remain objective. Weinberger pressed asking how people could compensate for Mears biases. Mears then claimed not to have biases and everyone laughed.
This is where Juan Williams came so close, and then failed. He admitted his irrational biases. He could then have said something like, “but you know, Bill, these fears are irrational. I struggle with them and I try not to let them affect my news analysis, but I know that they do, and people listening to me need to take that into consideration. You see, really, those of us in the news industry need to admit our fears and biases. We need to help other people recognize these fears and biases in themselves and rise above them.”
It is worth noting that according to NPR’s ombudsman wrote:
Later in that segment, Williams did challenge O'Reilly's apparent contention that every Muslim on the planet is an extremist bent on attacking America.
NPR was right in terminating Juan Williams news analyst contract, not for the words he said on O’Reilly’s show, but for his continued demonstration of his inability to be a credible news analyst.
Now, we have the battle over whether or not news analysts should be credible. Sarah Palin does not appear to believe that news analysts should be credible. She suggests that NPR should be defunded because “We get to witness Juan Williams being fired from NPR for merely speaking frankly about the very real threat this country faces from radical Islam.”
Unfortunately for Palin, that isn’t what he was talking about. He was talking about irrational fears, the sort of irrational fears that Palin pushes to promote herself. We need news analysts like Juan Williams could have been but failed to be. NPR plays an important role in this and should not be defunded. In fact, as Free Press notes in an email about their Don’t Let Extremists Defund NPR campaign:
The United States already has one of the lowest levels of federal funding of public media in the developed world — at just $1.43 per capita. Yet surveys show that the public considers NPR and PBS not just our most trusted news sources, but the most valued public institutions we have.
So, let’s see if we can get past the noise about Juan Williams. Let’s try to get to the meat of the subject. Can news analysts show their human failings and help us rise above our own? Standing up against islamophobia is a good starting point.
#ff @CaringBridge #pinkribbon #breastcancer @BCAPledge @HospStRaphael #domesticviolence #DVAM #hcr
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/22/2010 - 09:46For this week’s Follow Friday post I have selected the topic Social Media and Health Care. For people who don’t regularly read my Follow Friday posts, every Friday, avid social media users post people, or sometimes hashtags that they follow. People’s screen names on Twitter typically start with the at-sign, like @CaringBridge @BCAPledge and @HospStRaphael. Topics often start with a hashmark or pound sign to make them stand out, and are referred to as hashtags. The title of this post is made up of hashtags and twitter handles and might seem unintelligible, but is really conveying important information, especially to people who find this link on Twitter.
Perhaps one of the most important social media sites around health care is CaringBridge.
CaringBridge provides free websites that connect people experiencing a significant health challenge to family and friends, making each health journey easier. CaringBridge is powered by generous donors.
CaringBridge is a great site. However, some people are fighting health challenges that don’t rise to the level of ‘significant’. They might have a simple operation, like a knee replacement, where they will be up and running fine before they know it, but it is still helpful to have a discussion online. They might have a chronic, but not life threatening disease that they want to talk with friends about. Or, they might have a significant battle with cancer and want to talk about it to anyone that will listen. For some people like this, Facebook updates or blogs might be a better way to go.
One blog that especially touched me was Gotta keep on keepin' on........ At the top it says
Cancer again...that's 3 times in 2 years. This time it’s not breast cancer, but a new one called squamous cell carcinoma. New cancer, same old fighting spirit! My blog is still named for one of many songs that kept me going the first time around. Driving home from an upsetting appointment, I turned on the radio just as this line from Steve Miller Band's Jet Airliner was playing: "I've got to keep on keepin' on"....so I did just that. And I'll do it again.
Then, there is the most recent post from September
This is John. I just wanted to post a note on this, the first anniversary of Kate's passing. I am posting the same note on her Facebook page, so sorry to be redundant for those who see it both places.
Wow, it's hard to believe it has been a year now. In some ways it seems like yesterday and in others it seems like a lifetime ago. It's been a very busy, full year with school, sports, dance, piano and just normal-life stuff, then a very busy summer with swimming & travel and now getting ready for school again. We are all doing about as well as I could have hoped. The kids are amazing - their focus on happy memories and resilience have helped keep us all going. Kate is part of our lives every day...
On a more upbeat note, another friend wrote the blog My trip with breast cancer. She hasn’t written on this blog in close to two years. Instead she’s been busy with her family and work as a travel agent.
Besides support during difficult health situations, such blogs, and other social media campaigns provide an additional benefit, awareness. October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Many of the blogs I visit are participating in the The Pink Ribbon Challenge. It is a great way of reaching out to more people about breast cancer awareness.
October is breast cancer awareness month. As a health care worker, I see and dealt a lot of patients even friends going through the battle of breast cancer. This month I would like to join the pink ribbon challenge. Just click the pink ribbon to help one woman save life by getting free mammogram. If you may join with me and pass the pink ribbon challenge. These links are ONLY for "Pink Ribbon Challenge" participants, any links not related to the Pink Ribbon Challenge will be deleted. Grab the code at Things We Share and post it in your blog entry. Please post only the Pink Ribbon Challenge actual post link here and help The Breast Cancer Site and National Breast Cancer Foundation Inc. by spreading the Pink Ribbon Challenge.
There are also various breast cancer awareness drives on Twitter. The Estee Lauder Companies Breast Cancer Awareness campaign has @BCAPledge and #BCAPledge. Others are using #pinkribbon and #breastcancer as hash tags. Here in Connecticut, The Hospital of St. Raphael, @HospStRaphael is also using social media to raise breast cancer awareness.
Another health issue is domestic violence, and October is also domestic violence awareness month. People are posting about this with the #domesticviolence and #DVAM hashtags. One important campaign on this front is The Red Flag Campaign.
The Red Flag Campaign is a public awareness campaign designed to address dating violence and promote the prevention of dating violence on college campuses. The campaign was created using a “bystander intervention” strategy, encouraging friends and other campus community members to “say something” when they see warning signs (“red flags”) for dating violence in a friend’s relationship.
Then, there is the political level, with many discussions about health care reform taking place on the #hcr hashtag. All of these only scratch the surface of social media and health care and I hope to be exploring this in more detail over the coming months.
October 21st
Self
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:52Yesterday, I posted a Wordless Wednesday image which I left untitled and invited people to share their thoughts on. Today, I’ll explain it a little bit more.
First, I should talk about Wordless Wednesday. It is an old Internet meme. Every Wednesday, people post images, typically with no words or a minimum of words. Wordless Wednesday participants visit each others blogs and share comments and links. It is an important way of being part of a blogging community.
My blog is decidedly eclectic. I write about politics, technology, psychology, media, marketing, what’s happening here in Connecticut, and anything else that captures my imagination. For me, it is important not to be a niche blogger, but to be a connector. I want to get people coming to my blog for one reason to stop and spend a little time and perhaps read about a topic they don’t normally pay attention to. Wordless Wednesday is a great way to do this.
The image, ‘Self’, ties a lot of this together. It is an image I created with Graphviz. Graphvix is a popular graphing program and my tutorial on using GraphViz continues to be one of the most popular posts I’ve written.
The image is a combination of Graphviz images. Each of the eight larger circles contain an image I created in Graphviz, and Graphviz was used to combine all of them into the one image. The smaller images were created with a PHP script that randomly created connections between 25 nodes in a graph. These smaller images are meant to represent neural networks. In biology, a neural network is the network of connected neurons and are associated with how we perceive and learn things.
This has led to work in artificial neural networks. These are computational models especially well suited towards pattern recognition. I spent a bit of time looking into artificial neural networks back in the 1990s, and it struck me that when you combine various networks with one another, you end up with an ‘internet’ or simply a larger network.
Social networking is all the rage these days. Our social networks are, essentially, networks biological neural networks, or a larger neural network. I don’t find a lot of people thinking about the social networks this way, perhaps because it is a bit too geeky, but I do believe there is importance in thinking about our connections this way.
I explored this idea a bit recently in my blog post The Self at the Intersection of Podcamps and Group Psychotherapy . I quoted a line from one of the keynotes at the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington, "The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks."
I believe it is important to explore our social networks as an extension of our internal neural networks and think about how they are affecting us. How does your blog surfing, email reading, Facebook status, twitter tweeting affect and change who you are?
I felt that a good way to illustrate some of this was to create my Wordless Wednesday image. Each larger circle is a person in a social network. The links between them represent the links they have in their social networks. The images inside of them are their own internal neural networks.
Is your social network changing your internal neural network? Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Or neutral? What are your thoughts about this image now?
Footnote: PodcampCT was a great chance to explore connections in our social network face to face. Today, Wendy from Life With Wendy wrote about her social media experience at PodcampCT. Check it out as you think about further explorations into your social network.
October 20th
My New Nokia #N900 #Android Phone
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 21:11The phone itself isn’t new, nor is the idea of installing Android on a Nokia N900. However, I took a slightly different path which I figure some of my geekier friends might find interesting.
Recently, there has been a discussion about PR 1.3 coming out and supporting dual booting between Maemo and MeeGo. This isn’t really anything all that new. I wrote about configuring an N900 to boot Mer, MeeGo and Fedora back in April. In August, I wrote about Bootmenu, Kernel Power and MeeGo on the N900. Eventually, I bricked my N900 and recovered it as I moved from Bootmenu to Multiboot.
However, it did get me thinking again about trying to load NitDroid on my N900. After bricking my phone, I’ve been a little more cautious about undertaking a project like this, and I wanted to do it in a manner different than how the installation describes.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 08:17
Okay, I'm being wordless about this, but I don't want you to be. What does this image make you think of? What do you think it is? I'll write a blog post later explaining it.
