a thaumaturgical compendium

Chuck has a response to a recent article by AO Scott on dumb audiences that don’t seem to follow critics’ advice. Case in point: Pirates, which was suffering at the <60% mark over on the Tomatometer.

I went to see it, and yes it was dumb, and I still enjoyed it. Just like I hated King Kong, which the critics thought was super. So what’s going on here? Chuck suggests that critics need to look at the build-up to a movie as much as the film itself. I think it’s more than that. I think we walk into a theater with a set of expectations, and if the film doesn’t deliver on those expectations, we are disappointed. We (being the seething masses) are not measuring films against some universal aesthetic mark, but against our expectations.

So how were my expectations set by Pirates?

• Disappointing popcorn movies so far this year. Superman was predictable and boring, Scanner visually interesting and boring. So, after these and a few other disappointments, I was hoping formulaic Pirates would pull things out.

• That said, as Ask A Ninja noted in his review, how much can you really expect of a movie based on robotic themepark characters. So, I think one of the reasons audiences like the first one is that they expected it to be so bad.

• I also expected that this one would be bad, because, you know, it is a sequel.

• It’s pretty hot out. Expectation was that the movie would be cool. Not in any sort of aesthetic or (gods forbid!) McLuhanesque way, but in a temperature and iced drink way. I am sure opening weekends are correlated to weekend temperatures.

• I expected a sword-fight or two, several buckles to be swashed, and some arch Depp comments. (As an aside, I think it could have been improved with a battle between Depp-as-Keith Richards and Hoffman-as-William-F.-Buckley.) On this mark, I wasn’t disappointed.

In other words, the difficulty factor was a 1 or 2, and it was reasonably well executed. When films manage to exceed our expectations we like them. The trick that advertisers need to pull off is getting our expectations up high enough to go into the theater, but not raising them high enough that we are disappointed by the result. As such, our experiences of popular film are complex, and may be only marginally related to the quality of a film in terms of editing, story, dialogue, and the other elements that make a film both technically and artistically great.

I can look over the AFI’s list of the 100 greatest films and agree that most really are excellent. But that doesn’t mean that personally I am going to rank Gump over Léon, Tootsie over Lord of the Rings, Raging Bull over Sonatine, Jaws over Holy Grail , or Midnight Cowboy over Le mari de la coiffeuse. Actually, when I compare AFI’s list with IMDB’s, I know why I am more likely to listen to my friends than I am to the critics.

Pew has released a new survey of bloggers. The idea is to get a feel for who blogs. I worry a bit about the whole idea of a “central tendency” among bloggers, since I suspect that there are several central tendencies. I am reminded a bit of the Perseus claim a few years back that the average blogger was a 14-year old girl blogging about her cats. Luckily, this report provides us with a window on that diversity.

8% write blogs

Pew’s report, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers, starts out by noting that while blog writers may skew young, they are demographically diverse. They update previous numbers, indicating that 8% of internet users in the US blog, and 39% (or about 57 million adults) read blogs.

Not surprising to many bloggers, I suspect, they found that the most popular topics in the long tail of blogging are individuals’ lives and experiences. This was the topic of 37% of blogs. (I suspect that it is also the topic of this blog!) This was followed by relatively small numbers who blogged about entertainment, sports, current events, business, technology religion, or health. They generally spend an hour or two on their blogs each week, and do not think of it as a central part of their lives.

But why?

They keep blogs largely for a variety of reasons, and I found this part of the report particularly interesting. A few things of note here:

• The most popular major reason for keeping a blog was creative expression and sharing a document of your life. Half of bloggers saw this as the major reason for blogging, and 78% were driven by personal experiences to blog.

• A large proportion saw blogging as a way to stay in touch with friends or family (37% major reason), or network and meet new people (34% minor reason).

• Only 15% thought of it as a way of making money.

• Of particular interest to some of the work I’m doing now, 34% saw “sharing practical knowledge or skills” as a major reason for blogging, and 30% found it a minor reason.

Interestingly, over-30 bloggers tend to have one-topic blogs, while younger bloggers are a bit of everything. When people ask me how to have a popular blog, I generally tell them to narrowly specialize. I wonder if this is a genre bias of us old folks. I mean, it may just be that wide-audience blogs need to be topically narrow, but it may also be that this is true mainly because of our assumptions about media.

One third of bloggers say they post for their audience, but most say they post for themselves. This particular question is a bit difficult, I suspect. There is a natural (defensive?) tendency to say “Oh, I just do this for me.” Sure, there is a balance there, but even though, for example, I do not blog primarily to drive an audience—if I did, I would stick to items that get the most hits/links, like building rafts, political rants, and the like—it is also true that I am blogging for you, my assumed audience, in some way. I think this is reflected by how many bloggers track their audience, and know who they are. (Despite more than half of the surveyed bloggers blogging pseudonymously, more than half knew that their families read their blogs, for example.)

Also, 9% say they have had their blogs mentioned by news media, a number the authors suggest is small, but I find to be impossibly large. The question they asked was

Skewed young, urban, non-white

54% of bloggers are under the age of 30, and are more likely than the average internet user to live in an urban area. We found that blogs, in terms of raw numbers, were far more likely to be in urban than suburban areas in the early 00s, but this survey suggests that the majority of bloggers, like the majority of internet users, tend to be in the suburbs. This might suggest a gradual hollowing out of blogging, though that might be too much to draw from such very different ways of measuring this.

They found, surprisingly, that the blogosphere is only 60% white, and evenly divided among men and women. This probably runs counter to the intuitions of many bloggers, who assume the blogosphere is a white man thing. (An intuition that is supported by Wei’s recent survey of blog commenters, and perhaps demonstrates the limitations of that study.) I suspect that this again is an issue of too much attention being paid to A-listers.

But wait, there’s more

I encourage you to read through the full report, and not just the executive summary (which is bound to be what gets spread around). There’s some great info in there about journalistic practices, blog tools (less than half have a blogroll, very few know if they even have an RSS feed), non-text posting (30% have posted audio!), and news-seeking.

There were some things I wished they had asked. For example: of all those bloggers getting their news from newspapers (the majority, surprising because of the youth of the group), how many actually read it on paper?

The winner of the Bulwer-Lytton prize has been announced:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Ze Frank has recently been getting more didactic in his Show, but in a good way. He does a short blurb on Friday about the democratization of ugly. He’s running a contest for the ugliest MySpace page, which, as some of the commenters note, may be a bit redundant. But it does give him an excuse to expound on the history of taste, in bite-size form, in an interesting way. He did something similar with gerrymandering in an earlier show.

I’ve been thinking a bit about new forms of learning on the Internets lately, and this strikes me as an interesting example because it is really pretty far toward the traditional institutional learning model, though it certainly doesn’t feel like it. It includes a lecture—though elements clearly mark it as part of a different genre. It is, in some ways I suspect, a particularly effective lecturing style for new media saturated students (“You’re soaking in it!”). I can’t imagine watching, or wanting to watch, an hour-long “The Show.” Nor can I imagine the prep time it would require to produce. But it may be that this is paradoxically one of the areas in which massification still has a run. I doubt Frank would continue to produce the videos if he had an audience of a few dozen, but a large audience in some way justifies what must be a substantial investment in time.

Beyond the lecture, he also now has assignments. OK, perhaps the audience considers the ongoing chess game, the earth sandwich, and the contest for the ugliest MySpace page to be games, but many of my assignments are structured that way too. It really can be homework and still be fun to do. Designing the ugliest page possible has been a mainstay assignment in my classes where we do web production, as well as in graphic communication (make the worst infographic possible), for many years. So let’s get this down: here is someone producing a daily talk, which is viewed by a large group, who ask questions and comment on the talk, and who are periodically given assignments.

In sum, while Ze may claim that he is “thinking so you don’t have to,” I am beginning to suspect he might just be joking.

I talked to someone today who had a list of names in Excel, and wanted to sort them by last name. Unfortunately, they were not split into first / last names. What is the (non-programmer) to do? It’s actually a good opportunity to talk about doing stuff in Excel, since it tends to be a tool I end up using a lot to work with data. And this is a surprisingly common problem. It is also a nice way to talk a little bit about functions in Excel beyond “SUM”. (If you want to cut to the chase, hereis the Excel document.) So, let’s get started:

First

For reasons that may not appear immediately obvious, I’m going to treat this a bit like a programming exercise. Before starting to write it out in Excel, let’s figure out what we need to do. Take, for example, the following name:

	A	B
1	George Bush

How is it that we figure out what we need to do. Even though we are going for the surname, let’s start with the slightly easier version of finding out the first name.

First, we need to state what we want to do as clearly as possible:

In B1, put the left-hand word from A1

The LEFT Function

That’s good, but unfortunately, Excel doesn’t have a function “left-hand word”—it doesn’t even know what a word is! It does, however, have the function LEFT which takes a number of characters from the left-hand side of a string of characters. So, we have a solution:

	A	B
1	George Bush	=left(A1,6)

If we type this in and hit ENTER, we end up with “George” in B1. Which is great for people with 6-letter surnames, but not-so-great for people with 5-letter surnames. So we need to rethink our specification, and make it more detailed:

In B1, put a string of characters representing everything left of the space in the string of characters in A1

OK, Excel doesn’t know what a “word” is, but we can tell it explicitly what the space is. Unfortunately, again, there isn’t a function “everything left of the space.” We have “LEFT” but it needs a specific number. So clearly, we need to find out how far from the left the space is. Luckily, there is a function that does that: FIND. Let’s try this:

	A	B
1	George Bush	=find(” “,A1)

(Note that there is a SPACE between those two quotation marks.) If you hit enter, you will have a 7, since the space first shows up in position seven in the string. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The Two-Step

So we know where the space is, and we have a way of getting strings of arbitrary sizes from the left-hand side of something. What if we put these two together. Let’s add a column.

	A	B	C
1	George Bush	7	=left(A1,B1-1)

So, what the formula in C1 does is take the string in A1, and chop of the first n letters, where n is taken from the formula in B1. Why are we subtracting 1 from that number? A first name doesn’t include the space, right? So we take one shy of the number up to the space.

Putting It All Together

In this case, you can probably see how to smoosh everything together. As we shall see later on, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes, you need interim solutions. But here we can put it all together in a single formula in a single cell:

	A	B
1	George Bush	=left(A1,find(” “,A1)-1)

If you enter this formula and press enter, you have the first name.

Right!

What about the last name? If you think there might be a function RIGHT to go with LEFT, you would be right. So, all we need to do is figure out how many characters on the right we need. First, let’s make a useful mistake:

	A	B	C
1	George Bush	7	=right(A1,B1-1)

If you enter this formula, you will end up with “e Bush.” The FIND function only gives us the location of the space as a number of characters from the start (left-hand side) of a string of characters. How do we find the number from the right-hand side. Naturally, it is the total length of the string, minus the number of characters on the left-hand side. Luckily, we can get the total length of the string with the LEN function:

	A	B	C	D
1	George Bush	=len(A1)

This gets us the length of the string. We still need to know where that space is:

	A	B	C	D
1	George Bush	11	=find(” “,A1)

Now we have the two pieces we need, and we can get the right-hand part of the string we want:

	A	B	C	D
1	George Bush	11	7	=right(A1,B1-C1)

And we end up with Bush. More importantly, just about any first-last combo you put in A1 will yield the correct last name. (If you try “Sting” or “George W. Bush” you run into troubles, but we’ll deal with one of those in a moment.)

Of course, we can again smoosh this all into a single-cell for economy and neatness:

	A	B
1	George Bush	=right(A1,len(A1)-find(” “,A1))

Assuming that your list of names has only one space, you are in good shape. Just copy the formula in B1, and copy it down the whole list of names:

	A	B
1	George Bush	Bush
2	Mickey Mouse	Mouse
3	Benedict Arnold	Arnold
4	Judas	#VALUE!
5	George W. Bush	W. Bush

Uh, oh! Some problems toward the bottom there. But generally, we have a solution as long as there is a single space with a first and last name. If that’s your case, you can stop now. Otherwise, things are going to get…

A Little Bit More Complicated

What do we do with a problem like “George W. Bush”? Since FIND looks for the first occurrence of a space, we end up taking everything right of the first space. Well, we could do that again and again until we had no space. That might work. What would that look like? Well, we start with our initial plan:

	A	B	C	D
1	George W. Bush	=right(A1,len(A1)-find(” “,A1)

This gets us “W. Bush”. Now, we can copy the formula in B1 to C1. When we do this, it automatically adjusts so that it is looking at B1 instead of A1, so we end up with:

	A	B	C	D
1	George W. Bush	W. Bush	Bush

Alright, so we’ve solved the problem of the middle initial!

Mixing It Up

But what if, like in the earlier example, some of our names have middle initials and some do not. Let’s try copying our formulas in B1 and C1 to a list of names:

	A	B	C	D
1	George W. Bush	W. Bush	Bush
2	Jimmy Carter	Carter	#VALUE!
1	Che Guevara	Guevara	#VALUE!

Well, it is getting the names, but they are all over the place. Sometimes, the correct name shows up in the B column, and sometimes the C. But we’re nearly there.

Getting In Line

OK, so shouldn’t we be able to put these all in the same column somehow? Of course we can! Let’s try again to state what we want to do as clearly as we can in English:

If there is an error in the C column, use the name in B; otherwise, use the one in the C column.

Naturally, computers are really good with statements like that. We have two new functions we’ll use to make this happen: IF, and ISERROR. IF is just that, it checks whether something is true and if it is, it puts something in a cell. If it isn’t, it does something else. ISERROR tells you whether an error appears in a cell. So we now have everything we need to make that statement. (We could do this in two separate cells, but I’m going to make a great leap forward, and just put it all in one. Generally, though, if something isn’t working, for example, you want to try in multiple cells first.)

	A	B	C	D
1	George W. Bush	W. Bush	Bush	=if(iserror(C1),B1,C1)

In D1, up pops “Bush.” Why? Because the cell checks to see whether an error appears in C1. If it did, it would print out the contents of B1. But since it doesn’t, it prints out the contents of C1. What happens if it does find an error in C1? Well, we can copy and paste to find out.

	A	B	C	D
1	George W. Bush	W. Bush	Bush	Bush
2	Jimmy Carter	Carter	#VALUE!	Carter
1	Che Guevara	Guevara	#VALUE!	Guevara

If you are thinking that there is a way to mush this all into a single cell, you are right, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Also, we haven’t made the world safe for the single named, like Madonna and Sting. If either of these people are on your list, you should just remove them; they are already on plenty of lists. (NB: If you extend the logic we have used above, you can avoid deleting them.) Also, if you use Che’s real name (Ernesto Guevara de la Serna), you run into real problems, but parsing out extended names in the Hispanic tradition is something best left to humans.

Cleaning it up

Truth is, in many organizations, if you give this to your boss, he or she will be unhappy. Trust me, I know from experience: folks often do not like formulas in their spreadsheets. Especially if they didn’t write them, they often find them to be confusing or capricious. So, it may be worth locking these down as values. Highlight all the formulas that have generated your last name. Copy, and then Edit>Paste Special, selecting “Values.” Now you have a column that looks to all the world like you spent the afternoon typing surnames.

Derek reveals an early (1844) example of the term flash mob. Makes the term “smart mob” perhaps more appealing.

A book chapter is about to come out in a collection entitled Media Diversity and Localism. When I get proofs, I generally read them out loud, to catch any errors. This time, I recorded it, and if you have a spare half hour, it would make a good bedtime story. Here’s the gist:

There is much hand-wringing—and rightfully so—over the fact that a small number of companies own much of the news media we see. So, does that result in a shrinking set of perspectives. I looked at coverage of the presidential elections of 1992, 1996, and 2000 to see whether and to what degree the perspectives of this coverage changed across eight newspapers.

The results were a bit complicated. Generally speaking, the largest, most “national” of these papers started out pretty similar and grew more similar over the period. The more local (but still very large circulation) newspapers remained a bit different. This was excluding, naturally, wire stories. In other words, if you want a diversity of news, it’s not enough to read the New York Times and Washington Post—you should read your local paper as well. OK, that may not be exactly mind-blowing news, but it was an interesting project.

What made it interesting: the way I figured this out was to compare the word frequency in several thousand articles. I don’t think anyone has taken a similar approach. So, that was kind of cool.

I don’t think I’m allowed to republish the article here (same with upcoming book chapters), but I don’t think anyone will object to the readthrough. So, if you are interested, here’s the mp3.