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January 28, 2008
Twitter: Nighthawks at the BPP Diner
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Rob Paterson wrote a blog post about the new NPR show, The Bryant Park Project, and its use of the community messaging system Twitter. With the subtitle "My Diner in the Morning," Rob's post talked about how he's experienced the show via Twitter - in particular, the slow progression of observing, and then interacting with BPP staff. And it really got me thinking about the role of Twitter in developing community around radio programs.
BPP has had a Twitter presence since just before the show launched on October 1 of last year - a feed of all of their blog posts and radio stories, for Twitter users who wish to be notified each time something new is posted, and a BPP staff account. My thinking behind the staff account would be that the show's producers, editors and hosts would use it to post quick updates about what was going on behind the scenes, as well as to develop a more personal rapport with the audience. They were already doing a great job interacting with the public over their blog, but those interactions always had to be on topic for each particular post. A Twitter-based conversation could be more free-form, spontaneous and immediate.
At first, not much happened. BPP online producer Laura Conaway jumped into the fray, posting notes via Twitter from the beginning. Over time, other BPP staff began posting over the Twitter account, too. But not many people were paying attention; it was tough getting other Twitter users aware of BPP. So I convinced Laura to add a Twitter feed directly to their blog, so users could see their notes right there, and hopefully be enticed to follow them.
Meanwhile, as Rob notes in his post, Laura began to find her voice. For a while, her posts were more like notifications - what was going on at the show and so on. But Rob and others began to reply to Laura's posts - and Laura started replying back. Rob likened it to visiting a diner. The first time you go, you may not interact much with the waitress behind the counter. But after a few visits, you develop a rapport, develop a routine. Next thing you know, it's an essential part of your community life.
I've struggled for a while trying to come up with the right metaphor for Twitter, but Rob's diner metaphor pretty much nails it. As people begin using Twitter, there's often hesitancy, a sense that it's just an absurd broadcasting of the banal. That's not surprising, for when you first join Twitter, you need to build up a list of friends and acquaintances, then begin to read their tweets to get to know them. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself. And it's only when you start opening up - soliciting their ideas and replying to their comments, that Twitter transforms itself from a simple microblogging medium to an ongoing conversation. For users of IRC and other chat media, this may seem obvious, but if you're new to these types of conversations, it takes a while to get a hang of it.
And that's what's happened with BPP. From October through December, Twitter was mostly a notification tool. Since the beginning of this year, you can really feel how it's evolved into an ongoing conversation between BPP staffers and its community of participants. (I'm trying hard to avoid using the cliché of "listeners" and "audience" since they really don't apply to BPP in the same way they do to traditional radio shows.) Now, the tweets fly back and forth between Laura and other Twitter users - and it's a marvel to watch.
Laura recently invited Rob on air to discuss the phenomenon, and in their conversation he suggested we find a way to make it easier for followers of the BPP Twitter account to communicate with each other as well, and not just with BPP staff. They spontaneously started collecting the account names of other Twitter users and encouraged each other to follow each other. Meanwhile, I decided to create yet another Twitter account - named BPPdiner, in honor of Rob's analogy - that would automatically aggregate every post within Twitter that mentioned the word BPP. That way, users could simply follow the BPPdiner account and include BPP in any tweet. This would allow them to keep up with each other's BPP-related tweets. Think of it as an email list, but over Twitter.
It's not a perfect system - I'm using the Twitter search tool Terraminds and the rss-to-Twitter tool TwitterFeed, which can only process a maximum of five posts per 30 minutes - but it's a start. Every time a new person joins the group, it's like another person climbing onto the stool at the diner. You may not know if and when they'll open up and have a conversation. Maybe they'll just sit their and talk to themselves while reading the paper. But you can be sure that the waitress, short-order cook and their fellow customers are ready to chat. -andy
Tags: BPP | Bryant Park Project | community | conversation | diners | NPR | Rob Paterson | Twitter
Posted by acarvin at 10:06 AM
January 27, 2008
The Living Goddess Retires
For those of you who followed the trials and tribulations of Sajani Shakya, the kumari of Bhaktapur last year, you might be interested to know she has just retired from her status as a living goddess. I got an email a few days ago from Marc Hawker, co-producer of Living Goddess, the documentary that featured Sajani, who wanted to pass along news of this milestone.
"Sajani this week performed a ritual to become a 'teenager' and to retire from being a goddess," Marc told me while on a shoot in Bhutan. "She is really happy and we are working with her family to get her into a good school in Nepal."
I'm glad to hear Sajani has graduated to goddess emeritus, if you will, and can begin the process of returning to a normal teenage life. As you may recall, Sajani briefly lost her status as a living goddess after local religious leaders were furious about her visit to the United States, which they felt impurified her. Eventually she was restored as kumari following a re-purification ritual, and because of this, she gets to retire with a modest kumari pension that will help support her family and education.
There was no word, however, on whether she received a grandfather clock as a retirement gift, or whether the other local kumaris got together for a roast at the Kathmandu Kiwanis Club. Either way, congratulations, Sajani! -andy
Tags: Bhaktapur | Kumari | living goddess | Nepal | pension plans | religion | retirement | Sajani Shakya
Posted by acarvin at 5:42 PM
January 26, 2008
A Charge to Keep, A Horse to Steal
On this week's broadcast of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me they opened the show with what I thought was a joke about a painting owned by President Bush. But it wasn't a joke.
Here's the story. For years, President Bush has owned a painting he's referred to as "A Charge to Keep," in reference to the Methodist hymn by Charles Wesley. Here's a picture of the painting:
According to Bush, the picture shows a man on horseback trailed by a group of followers - in other words, a Methodist evangelist spreading the Good News across the American West with his flock. The painting has been so influential on Bush he's even used it as a name for one of his books.
White House commentator David Gergen wrote about the painting and its symbolism in a 2003 article:
As Bush recalls in his memoir of the same title, he then sent a memorandum to his staff: "When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."Bush's personal identification with the painting, which now hangs in the Oval Office, reveals a good deal about his sense of himself as a political leader--who he thinks he is, the role he plays, and the centrality of his religious faith. But the way we respond also reveals a good deal about us, his intended followers, and about the effectiveness of his leadership style.
His followers today tend to see in Bush what he sees in the painting: a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley's hymn, "to do my Master's will." They see him as a straight shooter and a straight talker. They take comfort in his religious faith and think he is leading us toward a mountaintop.
His critics can look at the same painting and see something very different: a lone, arrogant cowboy plunging recklessly ahead, paying little heed to danger, looking neither left nor right, listening to no voice other than his own. They think he is careless, even deceptive, and often says one thing while doing another. That he believes he is doing the Lord's work only increases their apprehension. He's not taking us up a mountain, they fear, but over a cliff. Indeed, some believe he is the most dangerous president in a century or more.
It turns out, though, that the story behind the painting isn't exactly correct. In his new book on the Bush White House, Jacob Weisberg conducted research on the painting's provenance.
[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled "The Slipper Tongue," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."
You can't make this stuff up. Read more in Slate and the Carpetbagger Report. -andy
Tags: A Charge to Keep | art | Charles Wesley | George W. Bush | horse thief | irony | paintings | provenance | White House
Posted by acarvin at 12:13 PM
January 17, 2008
Alan Alda on Science, Improv and Richard Feynman
After wrapping up a trip to Los Angeles for an NPR retreat at the University of Southern California, I had the pleasure of catching an on-campus appearance by Alan Alda. Perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning role as Hawkeye Pierce on the TV series M*A*S*H, Alda has also dedicated a great deal of energy towards the sciences - in particular, making science more accessible to the general public. As the host of the long-running PBS Series Scientific American Frontiers, Alda has interviewed some of the greatest scientists of the modern age. He spent more than an hour covering everything from his admiration of Richard Feynman and the use of play in scientific discovery, to the role of government in funding the arts and sciences.
The conversation, moderated by science journalist K. C. Cole, began with Alda talking about the historical relationship between art and science, and how they've diverged in recent centuries.
"There was a transition period, even when people were just experimenting," he explained. "They were just trying to figure things out, just like the other philosophers were. They were one thing at one time.... then science and art started to pull apart and become oppositional.... We're faced with two different cultures now - the culture of science, the culture of arts and humanities, People would say proudly, "Oh, I don't know any mathematics,' like it was a badge of honor."
But artists and scientists still have one important commonality, he noted; they both recognize the inherent value of research. "They're always in the process of noticing," Alda said. "They both have to do research. They both have to really dig into what they want to work on.... They get grounded in some version of reality. They're both rigorous. And often you don't think of artists as rigorous. But just any color won't do on a painting, and any word won't do on a paragraph... And just being off a little bit means something entirely different."
"The scientists will have an outcome that's testable and repeatable by other people," he added. "But the artist, in my opinion, gives you a view of reality that does something to your understanding of reality, that in many ways puts you in close touch with it, but not in a way that's testable."
"There's a real effect that art creates; if it doesn't make an effect of any kind, it's hard to say that it's art. You can take a person that's really good at metaphor. I'd rather cross a bridge with someone who's studied engineering than someone who's studied metaphor. Though I'm sure the person who studies metaphor could build a really interesting bridge."
"In inspiration, in inventiveness and discovery - that's where science and art overlap."
Alda dedicated much of the conversation talking about how he was influenced the late Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman. "I did this play about Feynman named QED," Alda began. "Feynman is sort of a hero of mine.... He was so honest and so smart and so able to understand things and getting people to understand them.... He was avid about communicating - an extraordinary communicator. It took six years to get this play ready about Feynman, because he was such an extraordinarily varied person - 18 people in one."
 |
Example of a Feynman Diagram |
"These diagrams make you see interactions between subatomic particles - photons hitting each other, what happens when they break up.... things that are happening that can usually only be expressed numerically. He let us see with these diagrams things that can't ordinarily be expressed. The scientist uses his brain the same way to make these diagrams that he uses to see the Louvre and the Mona Lisa."
Of particular interest to Alda is the role of play in inspiring scientific discovery. He described the way scientist James Watson used the metaphor of Tinker Toys as a way to describe the structure of DNA, but then pulled back from it. "I think he was afraid that it would sound like uninformed play. But there's a difference. You can steep yourself in it so much, back off, then mess with it, put it in different positions.... For example, I play a word game on my iPhone.... If I hit a button that puts them in a different order, I see more words.... And I think Watson was playing in the same way I'm playing."
But when it came to play, Feynman was in a class of his own. "Feynman is the Himalayas of play," Alda said with a smile. "After he worked on the atomic bomb, and after they set it off and he realized the destructive power.... he became very depressed. And he was teaching at Cornell, and he got so depressed he couldn't do his work: 'What happened? It used to be fun. I want to get back at it and have fun.' And soon after he said that to himself, he was in the cafeteria and he saw a kid, a student, playing with a plate, and he could see the Cornell symbol on the plate go around and wobble. 'I wonder if there's a relationship between the spin and the wobble. That would be fun.'"
"So he went home and started doing calculations - a month of them," Alda continued. "He started to see there was a two-to-one relationship, and he went to [fellow atomic scientist] Hans Betha, but Betha said, 'Fine, but how is that important? It has no importance!' But from that point onwards, he only did things that were both interesting and fun.... Those calculations he did on that plate led to those diagrams and the work he did to get him his Nobel prize. That's play - that's pure play."
The conversation shifted again, this time focusing on Alda's own role in science, as host of Scientific American Frontiers. At the beginning of the series, he would prepare rigorously for every interview, wanting to appear intelligent both on camera and in front of the scientists he met. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until scientist Carl Sagan called him on it. Following one of their first encounters, Sagan asked bluntly: "So I was wondering why you were trying to act smart?"
"The uncomfortable look on Sagan's face was that I was boxing him in with misunderstandings of what he had said," Alda realized. "I was really arrogant to think I could do that." So from that point forward, he altered his interview technique. "Instead of prepping like that, why don't I let myself be as dumb as I actually am, and ask questions from square one? Let them explain their work from the very first layer.... They then had to make me understand what they were doing.... and once I got it, it was a real television moment."
"I would ask the simplest of questions. 'What is it you're doing? How does it work? Why is that so important?' And then, I find that it's really useful to say, 'Wait a second - you just said this. How could that be true?' Any question I could ask that could make them to get personal would bring them to life."
Sometimes, though, even the simple questions fail to provoke the right response, as Alda recalled interviewing a scientist in Boston. "I saw she started to drift off into lecture mode.... She actually turned toward the camera, away from me.... And it was a little dead.... And I just sort of jogged her back by asking naive questions, and she had to turn back to me, and as soon as she did, she'd get human again. But then she'd drift off again. It was the best visual for me of the two ways to communicate."
Sometimes, he noted, the inability to explain a scientific concept easily may mask the reality that the scientist, too, is struggling with comprehending it. "Somebody at Caltech asked Feynman to give a talk on quantum mechanics, but to a freshman class," Alda recalled. "He came back after a few days and said he didn't know how to do it, 'That must mean we must not really understand it,' he said. If he couldn't explain it to a freshman class, he really didn't get it."
The previous day, Alda spent some time teaching improvisational games to a group of USC engineering students, as he was curious to see if the act of improvisation could improve the way they communicated their complex research work to laypeople. He had the students describe their research before introducing them to improv techniques. Once that was done, they'd explain their research once again. The results, Alda explained, were striking.
"We had a wonderful session; it was an attempt to see if we could make the process of communicating science more vivid," he said. The essence of the games is that they take your attention off of yourself and put them on to other actors. You have to observe them very carefully. The rules of these games require you to be aware of what's happening. Because you're not watching yourself, stuff comes out of you that you didn't know was there. Your real voice comes out. Your body becomes more available to you. And you can see their faces get flushed with the exertion of playing the game, and moving away of thinking of themselves. That lack of consciousness lets the unconscious out.... All of this stuff that's being worked on at an unconscious level comes out, and it's shocking to see how interesting it is."
"At the end of playing these games, everyone who'd spoken was asked to give their presentation again," he continued. "What was amazing was every single one of them was elevated. There was so much true animation in the way they spoke. There was the sound of their own real voice - not the voice of someone lecturing - talking in a pure, intimate way, directly to you.... You heard them deep in your head because they were warmed to you; they were human.
"I was really grateful to these young people... I was interested in seeing these improv games would be useful to improve the communications skills of these young scientists. Every one of those young people last night, you could see how much they loved what they were talking about. They didn't censor [themselves]. It was thrilling to see that. There are people who are naturally gifted at talking about science, and you see their love of science pour out of them. And when they talk like this, you begin to love it too."
Quoting actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith, he added: "When the person's syntax starts to break down, that's when the real person starts to come out."
At this point in the conversation, a cell phone went off in the audience - probably the third or fourth time it had happened in the theatre. Alda shook his head and laughed to himself before launching into a brief story about cell phones going off while he was on stage. "We were in Glengarry Glen Ross and every now and then a phone would go off, and I thought it'd be great if every actor on stage took out their phone and started asking each other, 'Is it you? Is it you?'"
For the bulk of the talk, Alda managed to avoid straying directly into politics, but there was the occasional moment. "I really have sympathy to the guy who's the science advisor to the president," he said. "It's like being the Shakespeare advisor to Wakko the Chimp." He did, however, address in greater detail the role of the government in promoting and funding the arts and sciences.
"I think it's a good idea for public funds to go towards these efforts that might not be able to raise money other ways," Alda said. "You could never have expected to have had a Manhattan Project based on a free market. On the other hand, what I'm not crazy about is when the government is too directive. I know a lot of great artists that've come out of the support of the NEA, but I think it may be a little restrictive too."
"There are also a lot of government agencies that want to censor art," he said. "We used to have animated discussions on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation because of a desire to give grants to artists working on diversity, for instance. How about encouraging artists who represent diversity and let them do what they want?"
"Any time you direct research or discovery, it's not discovery anymore. I'd like to see art and science go in directions that seem useless. I think that's the way human inventiveness and inquiry work: 'That looks interesting - what's that?'"
"When evaluating a proof, elegance is a key element. Elegance? It seems as though higher mathematics can be a kind of art, a kind of poetry in itself, one that yet gets the plane from LA to New York. Now that's interesting. It seems that some mathematicians know that you get it - that there's this clarity that comes over you - because one proof is simpler and more elegant. And that's what you get with art. It transforms you. But I think that it shows that it's not easy to put things into words about science, either, just like art."
"To be comfortable with uncertainty - that's what I admire about scientists," he said. "They don't cling feverishly to the last thing they were unsure of.... The story of the universe, of the cosmos, of the multiverse... The story keeps getting endless, like the Sheherazade stories.... The scope keeps getting bigger and bigger."
Tags: acting | Alan Alda | improv | journalism | play | QED | Richard Feynman | science | USC
Posted by acarvin at 10:01 PM
Feeding the Giraffes
Tags: animals | Brevard Zoo | giraffes
Posted by acarvin at 1:26 AM
January 16, 2008
Los Angeles Panorama
Watch the Video
Tags: California | Getty Museum | Los Angeles | paonoramas | QTVR | vistas
Posted by acarvin at 5:55 PM
January 15, 2008
Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008
Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.
"By pooling content produced locally and nationally -- for radio, television, and online -- we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public," said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. "We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting."
"This grant underscores CPB's support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are," added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. "This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms."
The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn't have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.
The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR's annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn't take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn't get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work.
At the encouragement of CPB, we organized a May meeting at NPR laying out all the possible ways we might collaborate, and get that SWAT team going to pull together a plan. By the end of July, we submitted our plan to CPB, which today has been christened with this $1.36 million grant.
So what exactly are we doing? For one thing, we're going to take all of the cool online election activities we've got planned for 2008 and we're going to make them available as widgets, including:
- An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;
- Localizable news modules from Public Radio International's Public Interactive;
- A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;
- Election-related video from PBS;
- An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;
- A collaborative content initiative entitled "Global Perspectives on Election 2008" from PRI;
- User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;
- Capitol News Connection's interactive 'Ask Your Lawmaker' widget, enabling citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;
- Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from American Public Media and KQED.
Some of these tools, like the NPR/NewsHour map and CNC's Ask Your Lawmaker widget, are all ready up and running. Others, such as NPR's user-generated political commentaries project, will be launching in the coming months. (You have no idea how excited I'm am about this one. We're working like gangbusters to get this puppy launched - more soon.) In each case, the projects will exist wherever they originally resided, but they'll have widgets, too, so stations can take these tools and localize them for their own uses. Some of the projects, like our user-generated commentaries, will be embeddable on blogs or wherever else you'd want to place them.
Meanwhile, underlying all of these projects will be an experimental social network - a "knowledge network" for public media entities to share election resources and data, find tutorials and best practices for utilizing these tools and other social media activities, and coordinate their election coverage. It's basically an extranet for PBS and NPR stations, along with other public media partners. Last but not least, PBS will be creating curricular materials for some of these online modules so they can be used in classroom settings.
I am so glad to see this project announced publicly. I've been working on this for the better part of the last nine months, and it's so gratifying to see so many entities across the public media system coming together to improve our election coverage, while providing the public with interactive tools to help them make a more informed decision when going into the ballot box. This year is going to be a total blast. -andy
Tags: Capitol News Connection | collaboration | CPB | election 2008 | grants | journalism | KQED | Minnesota Public Radio | NPR | PBS | PRI | PRX | social media | widgets
Posted by acarvin at 6:19 PM
January 10, 2008
The Potential Impact of Polls and Punditry on the New Hampshire Primary
Like pretty much everyone else, I totally blew it. Before the voting wrapped up in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, I posted a note on Twitter predicting that Barack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton by 10 points. Talk about missing the mark. (I nailed the GOP race, though, calling it for McCain over Romney by five points, but who's counting.)
At least I was in good company, as pretty much every pundit, professional and otherwise, predicted an Obama blowout. And they based that assumption on the polls. These polls leading up to the primary were generally consistent, showing Obama leading Clinton by double digits. Yet in the end, Clinton beat Obama by three points. So for more than 48 hours now, the media has spent an inordinate of time analyzing what went wrong with the polls.
On the one hand, there's the issue of margin of error; when you hear a talking head on TV saying "So-and-so leads the other candidates by a seven-point margin," they don't always follow it up by noting that the poll had a margin of error of four points, making that seven-point lead more like a three-point one.
On the other hand, we can't forget that this is New Hampshire, a place that places much pride in helping kick off what's perhaps the our ritual of civic engagement. Some New Hampshire voters consider the casting of their ballot as a strategic decision, in which they vote for a candidate whose inclusion makes for a better race, if not a winning one.
Jon Greenberg, executive editor of New Hampshire Public Radio, believes that a certain percentage of New Hampshire voters, particularly women voters, decided to vote in a particular way directly because of the wide margin in the polls.
"My thesis is simple," Greenberg told me earlier today. "The polls gave many women a tangible sense of what primary night might be. They didn't like that picture and acted to change it. Put another way, the polls, which we think of as describing reality, became a factor that changed the outcome. Ordinarily, I would not think this possible but never before have we had a primary with a strong, entirely credible, female contender. There are two elements of the NH primary that I think play a key role in explaining the outcome.
"In the traditional framework of the NH Democratic primary, Clinton was not just a woman candidate, but an establishment candidate," he continued. "If you know the work of Dante Scala, the establishment candidate always has the edge with working class voters. In Dante's typology, it is part of the definition of that sort of contender. In that light, Clinton's edge among those voters was typical.
"The other factor that is peculiar to NH is that NH voters can be much more strategic than voters elsewhere. I don't want to exaggerate this, but I don't think you can see the NH electorate during a primary as using the same decision rules as voters elsewhere. There is a systemic difference for some appreciable portion of the population - at least 10% and possibly more. They game the system.
"My theory is that you take these two conditions and throw in gender politics in a way that's never existed before in a presidential race and it's plausible that the polls themselves generated a groundswell reaction among women - and Clinton's edge over Obama would reflect that - that ultimately altered the outcome."
In particular, Greenberg takes note of the voting results from the southeastern portion of the state, and the so-called gender gap. "In terms of polling data, I'd point to the 12-13% margin among women that Clinton had over Obama. She enjoyed equally great margins with lower income and less educated voters but as I said, that's typical of establishment candidates. Less precise but intriguing data comes from the town by town breakdown. Clinton won in the southeastern quadrant of the state where you have many towns with above average household incomes. It's just my guess, but I don't think it was the lower income folks in those towns that put her over the top. I think it was the women."
And then there is the growing number of stories from the voters themselves. Greenberg has spent the better part of the last year involved in Primary Place Online, a community media initiative in which New Hampshire Public Radio created a website for residents of the town of Exeter to publish their thoughts on the election in the months leading up to the primary. Greenberg has examined posts from local women voters on the site, some of who have noted how the polls changed the way they and their friends ended up voting.
One post from a user going by the name Alewife comments on how she's begun to hear from other people who changed their votes due to the wide margin in the polls. "It's noon and I have already met three people who were undeclared voters who chose to vote for McCain so that Romney would not win, but wish now they had voted for Obama," she wrote on the site the day after the primary. "They thought, BECAUSE OF THE POLLS that Obama had it locked up over Clinton." Another commenter replied to her remark by adding, "I have also heard Obama supporters say that because Obama was doing so well IN THE POLLS, they used their vote 'strategically' elsewhere, namely to vote for McCain because they hate Mitt Romney so much."
Another user going by the name MMF explained in great detail how she shifted from being a Clinton supporter to a Richardson fan, then settling as a Clinton voter at the last minute:
Richardson was here on election eve and he was fantastic. I agree squarely with him on almost every issue. I was persuaded to vote for him and keep him in the race too. But then, a student of mine told me of these last polls putting Obama ten points ahead of Clinton. The news confirmed this even yesterday morning. Ultimately, I think it's more important to keep Clinton in the race than Richardson. These polls made me think Clinton might really need my vote and voting for Richardson would help Obama to a big win. That sealed the deal for me. I walked downtown and voted for Clinton.
Another woman named Bricci described how she was one of those voters who didn't make up her mind until the very end:
I myself saw all the candidates speak and studied all the issues that I felt were pertinent. After doing all this I decided to endorse the person most suited for the position of leading our country and that was Christopher Dodd. My second choice was Joe Biden (can anyone see where this is going)? So after the Iowa caucus I was at a loss. I read and reread everything I could get my hands on. I went and saw senator Edwards, governor Richardson and John Mccain. Still as I entered that booth and the curtain closed I was not sure what circle to darken with the sharpie. Taking a deep breath, I filled in the oval next to Hillary Clinton's name. After all the rhetoric, all the speeches, all the reading, I voted with my heart and instincts.
"Are they just anecdotes?" Greenberg asks rhetorically. "Sure, but I think they are relevant." And he's right: three or four examples don't exactly make an empirical data sample. Yet their stories are informative nonetheless.
Assuming there's a connection between the media playing up the wide margin in the polls and some voters changing their mind about how they planned to vote, it raises questions as to what responsibility, if any, the media should have when it comes to how they report their polling results. In some ways, the New Hampshire primary results almost seem like the journalistic equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, working in combination with the so-called Observer Effect. With the Uncertainty Principle, the more accurately you try to measure the position of a particle, the less precisely you can measure its movement. And in the case of the Observer Effect, the very act of attempting to observe something causes an inadvertent interaction with it, thus leading to an unintended change in its behavior. In this case, the media tried to offer as accurate an assessment as possible regarding potential voting behavior. And by touting both their findings and the consistency of those findings, again and again, they may have directly impacted voter behavior when they punched their ballots.
"The media will continue to pay for polls and they will continue to report the results," Greenberg added. "However, I do think the media have an obligation to present polls more carefully. If I were to make any suggestion for the media, it would be to break the rule of putting the lead of the story first. If the elements that show the uncertainty of the poll were presented first - for example, 45% of voters say they have yet to make up their minds and no difference smaller than 8% should be taken seriously - and the simple comparison numbers were presented second, it might lead the audience to see the polls more realistically. I have a hunch that if the media did something like this, they could effectively encourage the public to treat all polls as hazy shadows of reality rather than as accurate representations of what's really there."
It's certainly an interesting theory. What do you think? -andy
Tags: Barack Obama | Heisenberg | Hillary Clinton | Jon Greenberg | New Hampshire primary | New Hampshire Public Radio | Observer Effect | polls | Uncertainty Principle
Posted by acarvin at 9:03 PM
How Frozen Peas Started An Online Cancer-Awareness Movement
The Washington Post has a great story today on how the Twitter community mobilized around Susan Reynolds' breast cancer diagnosis last month. Please check it out when you get a chance.
read more | digg story
Posted by acarvin at 11:10 AM
