Neverending story: the B-school admissions issue

Boston Globe: Divide grows on treatment of students in online breach. Pluses on the story: they bring most of the cogent points, including the “students have to take accountability” argument and the “that’s not really a hack, it’s editing a URL” argument. Plus they cite Philip, though they don’t link to his site or get into the comments thread. Minuses: no one asked how one could “accidentally” stumble across the URL in question; the story doesn’t make any new points that the extensive discussions on line didn’t already cover, plus it’s about two weeks late. We’ve already talked about all of this.

Interesting points:

  • There were 32 students at Sloan who were affected, compared to 119 at Harvard. That’s disproportionately high; HBS has about double the enrollment of Sloan, but I don’t think it has four times the applicant base. This could be because (a) Sloanies are more honest, or (b) more HBS students were inclined to look because Harvard actually had data on the server.
  • Corporate ethicist Robert A. G. Monks of Portland, Maine, says, “I wonder if you want 20-year-old kids traumatized for life over this.” I wonder how many business schools he’s seen recently. Most top tier schools aren’t accepting applicants straight out of undergrad. They want students with a few years’ experience under their belts. I think the youngest person in my class at Sloan was about 24, with most of the class in their late 20s. Someone who’s that old, who’s seen the business world, should understand that actions might have consequences and shouldn’t need to be coddled.
  • Total numbers of intrusions: total pool is “at least 211 applicants,” which includes 119 HBS, 32 Sloan, 17 Tuck, 41 Stanford, 1 CMU, and 1 Duke accounted for. While it’s not clear that each of the 211 only violated one file, or how students who applied to both Sloan and HBS and tried to peek at both files are counted, if you make the naïve assumption that the 211 counts intrusions rather than students, that means all the intrusions are accounted for.

Blogpulse Conversation Tracker

Micro Persuasion: Tracking How the Blogosphere Spreads News. Use Blogpulse’s conversation tracker to understand the spread of conversations about hot stories online. Might be overloaded right now…

One thing I noticed—if everyone links directly to a URL without linking their source for it, the “conversation” looks pretty flat, with a bunch of links that point directly to the source and only a few that show deeper conversation.

Bringing it all back home: segregation-era local TV news

Virginia Center for Digital History Research: Television News of the Civil Rights Era. This new archive at the University of Virginia provides film and primary documents from two local Virginia television stations between 1950 and 1970. The archive gives you a chance to explore one of the Old Dominion’s least proud moments in recent memory, the so-called “Massive Resistance” campaign that sought to fight desegregation and generally resist federal civil rights initiatives.

Particularly shameful to me: a 1958 clip showing then-Superintendent of Newport News’s public schools R.O. Nelson explaining that having three applications from black students to enter a segregated school meant that the city didn’t have to take more direct action to end segregation, and that it planned to continue with business as usual. (There is to this day an elementary school named after Superintendent Nelson in Newport News. In my day, we nicknamed it “B.O. Nelson,” not knowing the deeper reasons we should have had for feeling antipathy to it.) Also: the glossary entry for Newport News noting its role in resisting salary equity for black teachers.

As I learned in 1993 researching the archives of the Daily Press for a paper in Julian Bond’s civil rights class, there’s nothing like finding out what little bits of nastiness were happening in your own home town to really bring home the magnitude of injustice.

(In the interests of completeness, here’s that paper.)

Microsoft Blog Portal 2.0

Jana’s Joint: Blog OPML. The updated version of the Microsoft.com Blog Portal (which I worked on right before I left the company—I was there to ship the 1.0 version) brings OPML for collections of Microsoft blogs out of the realm of “easter egg” and into the user interface in an incredibly intuitive way:

The fun part is you can go create your own OPML feeds by using the search function on the page. Each product search for blogs will generate a feed.

So, cool stuff. Next: incorporate the blog search results into regular Microsoft.com search. Right, guys? sideways smiley

Mourning: becalmed electric (home improvement projects)

I found a great post on one of my favorite houseblogs, The Old Man and the Street, called Rewired about a total rewiring job that he did. As I read I felt a great sadness, because it was a project I would never be able to do in this house. Apparently Arlington requires that all wiring projects be done by a licensed electrician.

I can understand the rationale for doing that (fire safety, etc.), but other localities take care of those issues with a permit+inspection process. All I really wanted to do was to wire my workshop/storage room, which would require:

  1. Installation of a subpanel in the shop.
  2. Connecting the subpanel to a breaker on the main board (requiring me to fish cable across the ceiling—not a big deal as the access holes in the plaster have already been made at both ends).
  3. Installing two 20-amp GFCI circuits to the subpanel, one dedicated one for the miter saw and one to feed the electrical outlets near the workbench. (I also need to have an emergency switch on one or both of those circuits.)
  4. Install a separate circuit for an overhead light (badly needed)

Not trivial, but certainly manageable, and a project that I was looking forward to doing. Now I need to pay a contractor instead. Sigh.

Old South Church

old south church, boston

Last night was my first service as part of the choir at Old South Church. It felt a bit like a homecoming, somehow. We’ve been looking for a church since we got back to the east coast. The challenge for us has been to find a church with a traditional liturgy (in our opinion, a PowerPoint slide showing the lyrics to the song that you’re to sing along with the Christian “praise band” up front does not better a hymnal and an organist) and progressive theology.

Our challenge was made more difficult because, as our Seattle pastor noted when I asked him about Boston area churches, “we Presbyterians aren’t too strong in New England.” There are fewer than ten Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations in the greater Boston area, and after visiting them all we were disappointed. Either they had no music program, or their pastor didn’t challenge us, or we just plain didn’t feel at home.

So it was that we returned to Old South, which is an old, old Congregationalist cum UCC church. How old? The congregation dates back more than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence, to 1669, and their current church building, which is the “new building,” since it was completed in 1875. The pastors are challenging and progressive, as befits a congregation about whom John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote “So, long as Boston shall Boston be,/And her bay-tides rise and fall,/Shall freedom stand in the Old South Church/And plead for the rights of all!”. The new senior minister, Nancy S. Taylor, is already gaining something of a reputation in Boston for her clarion voice on matters of social justice (you can read some of her sermons, such as this recent one on St. Valentine and the conscience of the church, and judge whether it’s a deserved reputation).

Further, the church has a solid music program. I’ve been consistently impressed with the choices of repertoire, and though the choir is a bit small (with me, there are four tenors—maybe five) it’s musical. I’m looking forward to continuing to sing with them.

(S)no(w) more

Another day, another 1 to 3 inches of snow. Never mind that it’s almost April. —As I stood in the shower this morning, I came up with the best snow song ever, but I can’t remember it now. Just as well, as it talked about plowing and the snow is melting too quickly into slush to be plowable.

Followup: singing again

I wrote a week or so back about auditioning for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which is the chorus in residence for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I had more or less resigned myself to not getting in. After all, I was feeling a little burned out on symphonic choruses in general, and (more to the point) I have standing engagements through May that interfere with my ability to attend rehearsals.

So I was unsurprised when I got a thin envelope from the BSO today. I figured it for the proverbial “thin envelope,” but opened it anyway. And saw to my surprise that I was accepted in the chorus—albeit as a second tenor. There were also lots of notes about how the director has the option of asking an individual singer to be in every concert for a season or just one concert…

So the bottom line: I’ll be singing something, possibly at Symphony Hall, possibly at Tanglewood, definitely with the BSO, sometime in the next year. God, definitive knowledge is great.

And the irony? On Sunday, not knowing whether I would get in or not and not much caring, I decided to talk to the choir director at Old South Church. I’ll be singing with that choir tomorrow night for Maundy Thursday services (singing the Byrd “Ave Verum Corpus”—how could I resist??). After Thursday we’ll see. From 0 to 2 choirs in four days. Not bad. Too bad job offers don’t work that way.

Review: Music from the O.C. Mix 4

music from the oc mix 4 cover

At some point in the late 1990s, as radio sank further into irrelevance and Clear Channel-approved playlists created a stranglehold on airtime for new artists, television started to come into its own as a way to “break” unknown musicians. One of the best programs for showcasing new artists’ work is—gasp—“The O.C.,” whose strangely moralistic take on the teen melodrama is accompanied by intelligent, thoughtful soundtrack selections. Many of the musicians on the soundtrack would be just at home on an alternative station like KEXP. The show’s soundtrack series—as evident in its latest incarnation Music From The O.C. Mix 4—does what a soundtrack must do: provides memorable musical moments from the show in a musically consistent format. It goes beyond the call of duty by doubling as a new artist compilation.

The collection ranges from quirky rock (the Futureheads, Modest Mouse) to bright and shiny (the New Pornographers’ A.C. Newman, Imogen Heap) to slowgroovy (Flunk). There’s even an old favorite, the Reindeer Section’s “Cartwheels” (from their superb 2002 release Son of Evil Reindeer). The biggest coup? A new Beck song, “Scarecrow,” in advance of his forthcoming new album Guero (see this VH1.com article for the backstory). The one slightly false note, sadly, is the Matt Pond PA cover of Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova.” While still yearningly evocative, the cover lacks some of the grit of the original and feels a little too much like it’s been sweetened for television.

Still, for a collection of soundtrack stuff to be that coherent, there’s got to be a master mix-maker behind the scene. Thank Alexandra Patsavas, the show’s music supervisor, whose job it is to line up new tracks for the show’s writers to audition and slip into the show, and to assemble these mixes. It’s due to her work that the compilation feels less like a “compilation” and more like a really good mix tape.

If I have one complaint, it’s that, for listeners of the aforementioned KEXP and other hipsterati, too many of the artists come with all their indie cred pre-assembled. Imogen Heap, Sufjan Stevens, Carl Newman, Flunk, Modest Mouse, the Reindeer Section, and of course Beck are all familiar names to most indie rock fans. On the other hand, Pinback, the Futureheads, Aqueduct, Bell X1, and Matt Pond PA are all the sort of lesser known discoveries that I was hoping for from a groundbreaking indie compilation series. Hopefully the next series will showcase a few more promising unknowns rather than relying so heavily on known quantities.

Originally published on BlogCritics.

Happiness…

…is seeing your friend’s album in the iTunes Music Store. I was irritated at iTMS yesterday because the New Releases and Just Added pages weren’t updated, and how can one go and salivate over new music on Tuesdays without information? But this morning when I checked, there was Justin Rosolino’s Wonderlust.

For some general background on Justin and the album, check out my past writings about him. Briefly: if you like singer-songwriters, or performers with amazing voices and senses of humor, go check out some of the clips from the album.

So: one down, one to go.

Other iTMS happiness this week: new Nine Inch Nails single, reissues of a flood of classic Brian Eno albums, and remasters of a bunch of 1960s Atlantic jazz including one of my favorite Coltrane albums and a ton of important early Ornette Coleman recordings. Pardon me: I have some listening to do.

Joining the tagging revolution

As you might have noticed/wondered from my last post, I’m experimenting with tags on this blog. Garrick Van Buren released Tag Maker for MarsEdit, a quick AppleScript that makes Technorati and Del.icio.us tags from selected text in posts. I like the for making the tags, but not necessarily the end result—the scattered parenthetical tags are, I think, a little distracting.

Unfortunately, on Manila, I can’t use the suggested alternative, Laura Lemay’s script that places all the tag links at the bottom, because Manila blogs don’t get the Keywords field in MarsEdit.

So I’ll probably end up altering my workflow and hacking Garrick’s script to make it do what I want it to do. Still, some tags are better than none.

Tags: tagging (), MarsEdit (), Manila (), AppleScript ()

The other shoe drops for Manila enclosure support

UserLand () Product News: Frontier and Manila: New Enclosure macros and updates to Manila RPC and MetaWeblogAPI. This is the other shoe whose dropping I anticipated last week when UserLand rolled out a new enclosure support feature. By extending the support for the new feature into the API and into user interface macros, Manila () now gives users an unprecedented level of flexibility for managing the creation and display of content (such as podcasts ()) that contain enclosures. Bravo.

A second, very big, bravo, is due for the long-anticipated full support of the MetaWeblogAPI () for creating new binary objects such as pictures or audio files, using the standard MetaWeblogAPI.newMediaObject. By adding support for this cross-vendor standard way to upload non-text content, Manila bloggers can take advantage of tools like MarsEdit () to manage image uploads. (Note that this announcement is the one that Brent Simmons calls out on the Ranchero blog.)

Now, if my kind host will update our Manila installation so that I can work with these new bits, I’ll be a very happy camper.

It ain’t the absolute height of the spike…

Boing Boing: Infographic of blogosphere traffic spikes. Xeni points out a curious feature of the Technorati infographic, where a point labeled “Kryptonite lock controversy” is as high as “Indian Ocean tsunami.” I say: it’s not the absolute size of the spike, it’s how it relates to its surroundings. (Uh, bow chicka chicka bow bow.)

Based on my experience interpreting online traffic, the metric of merit when comparing two events isn’t absolute amount of traffic (posts, page views, unique users) but the delta they cause from the normal volume of activity. Look at the time period around “Kryptonite lock controversy”—the spike, while high, is part of a consistently high series of spikes that appears to run from July through shortly after the election. In other words, not dramatic, considering the overall blogosphere activity at that time.

The tsunami, on the other hand, reached the same peak of activity in the middle of a seasonal down period in blog posts—in fact, as I recall, a seasonal down period for Internet activity as a whole. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot more impressive that a bunch of bloggers got off their haunches after the holidays to post about the tsunami—when they weren’t inclined to blog—than that they posted in a period of otherwise high post activity.

(This is the second in a series of occasional posts where I offer my meager expertise to interpret a BoingBoing post about online traffic trends. Maybe I should make this a series. Maybe even a sidebar.)