In Which I Have An Imaginary Conversation About Yard Work

Fall means hot cocoa and warm sweaters and fires and leaves turning and great excuses to snuggle up with attractive young men.

Sadly, I've been rather bereft of attractive young men in my life lately. Not that I'm really trying... I keep telling myself I'll put a bit of effort into it once I recover from my surgery.

Or when I finish school.

Or when I am not working so much.

Or when I...

Le sigh. I've always got some sort of excuse. In fact, my excuses for absolutely any area of my life (not just men) generally fall into one of three categories:

I'm a basketcase.

Truth be told: I'm a bit of an introvert IRL. Social situations intimidate the crap out of me. I will speak in front of an anonymous audience of a thousand or more (and have) with no problemas at all, but if you put me in a more intimate setting - say, a cocktail party - with 20 strangers and/or mild acquaintances? Yeah. I'll be the one in the corner.

Or better yet, the one pretending to step outside to get some air. Here's a secret, just between us: I'm getting the fuck out of there.

When I tell most people this, they don't believe me. If you ever met my professional persona, you'd understand why. She's very much an "I'm-in-charge" kinda lady. She gets things done. She ain't skeered of nuttin'.

No one realizes that that's a character I play.

So, yeah. There's some issues there that might make it difficult to meet people. But I have been trying. I've been making a concerted effort to meet new people and make new friends. I started online - which I have to say is going pretty well if I do say so myself - and am starting to branch out into IRL areas as well. (If you see me at a Meetup.com gathering and I'm hiding in the corner, please do a sister a favor and help me find my way out of it.)

I overcommit my time.

On top of that I have had very little free time. I have this idea that tomorrow won't be perfect unless I'm doing all this shit today: career, education, creative fulfillment, writing...

At the end of the day, I end up botching most of it and having a nervous breakdown or a case of exhaustion like Michael Jackson had that time he had to check himself into the hospital.

So I've decided (just today actually) that moving forward that I'm only going to take one class a semester. Not six (which is what I started with when I went back... while working full-time), not three or four, and not two. Just one.

One is manageable. One allows me to have some free nights during the week. One lets me see my family and friends.

One does mean it will take me like four years to graduate even though I'm already a senior, but WTF does it really matter? I'm 32, I have a very successful career by most standards already, and was planning on working while I wrote freelance anyway until I had enough gigs going to support myself. What prevents me from doing that now?

(Answer: just me.)

I've got pretty particular standards.

I'm not religious. In fact, I'm an agnostic atheist. I can't stand stupid people. I love being a woman, but I'm not frilly. I don't want children. I think monogamy is anachronistic. I probably have a couple of other things I can't think of right now that are socially outside of the norm. And you know what? You don't meet a lot of people who truly appreciate all of those things.

I don't see many of those things changing, and I'm kinda happy with my choices.

And we've come full-circle...

So it was really no surprise today that - in the moment that I realized that fall also meant yard work - I was standing by myself in my front yard.

In a fit of rabid frenzy I pulled out my hedge trimmer and started whacking away at the bushes along the front of my house. Twenty minutes later, I trudged into the house.

My cat was there. He meowed.

I imagined if I was in a relationship that my attractive young man would laugh that I had just trimmed the bushes in my new crushed flannel grey ballet flats.

Then I would have laughed because he said trimming bushes.

He would comment that I was done fast, and then ask me if I cleaned up all of the leaves and branches or if I just left them sitting there on the ground in the yard.

Maybe, if he was real, he would shake his head and then help me rake them up.

For now, I think I'll just leave them sitting there. I don't feel like dealing with it today. Not by myself.

***

Ohai!

Life has not been conductive to blogging lately, which is a damn shame because I'm actually still quite excited about the Writing Skeptically series I had been working on.

Let's see... Where to begin? I've spent this week at home with "possible H1N1", which - as near as I can tell - is H1N1 with a lower fever and no Tamiflu perscription. No, my doctor did not elect to do the quick test... I guess the rumors about their lack of reliability are true. So... no. I don't actually know that I *really* had pig flu. But I feel safe saying I felt like ass more than I have ever felt like ass while not sitting in or seriously contemplating sitting in an emergency room. It hurt to do anything. Anything! Hold a phone? Pain. Read a book? Pain. Take a nap? Pain. Searing pain, even in the webbing between your fingers. Even in your hair.

My fever has subsided, and I've spent an entire 7 hours awake in a row today. It's like a world record. So I feel pretty safe saying that I will be re-entering the outside world with the doctor's note from behind door number 2. (I was given three options depending on how I quickly I got better: return yesterday, return Monday, or return on November 2. While the latter is tempting, it's not economically sustainable or even remotely called for at this point.)

Other than that, I have been awash with duties from work or school. I cringe to think of what I'm going to need to do to catch up from this last week. Especially as I am out again for DD-Day surgery three weeks from today.

I've been working on my kelleyclark.com site, and tossing some ideas around for a couple of other sites. If only I suddenly won the lottery or something... I think the world gaze with wonder if I ever actually had the time and money to do everything that I wanted to do.

I guess to win the lottery though one must play. Which I refuse to do on principle as it's stupid.

Unless you win. Then it's pretty cool.

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Writing Skeptically, Part Two: Increasing Transparency to Improve Credibility and Critical Thinking

One of the things that I love about being a student / academic is the ability to look at things from a still point of view. When you're in the trenches, so to speak, it's easy for principles to get thrown out of the window in the heat of the moment. Taking the time to think about things (like, oh say... transparency in the media and how it can improve journalistic credibility and overall critical thinking skills... just a thought...) can help fledgling writers like myself embed these principles deep within my psyche so that they're that much harder to forget later.

They also serve as a great reminder to established professionals on why they got into the business in the first place.

Or maybe I'm a cocky upstart who has no idea what they're talking about... Either way, I'm throwing down the gauntlet. If you disagree or if experience has taught you otherwise, please chime in.

In my last post I gave an overview of how using the scientific method could be useful for journalistic writing. Today I'm continuing my series on writing skeptically with transparency in the media and how it can improve journalistic credibility and overall critical thinking skills.

Slight rehash since this series of posts seems to be attracting more than my usual bit of attention (although I have added some new information / perspective since then):

Recently I attended a panel at Dragon*Con called Stealth Science and Skeptical Thought, which was sponsored by the SkepTrack. It was interesting because it looked at how the entertainment business can and is starting to bring science and critical thinking into mainstream life by incorporating it into things like television shows or novels or comic books. This sort of stealth infiltration will be critical to helping people make better choices through better reasoning, and promotes constant learning.

Personally I thought it was just as applicable to those of us officially in journalism or infotainment: the choices we make on what to include and/or not include in our writing help our readers understand how we make choices and what is involved with the decision.

The proposal I made was that for every dozen or so articles or blogs you write, also write a "behind the scenes" look at the process. Where did you get information? How did you put together data to make your case?

This can include things like source selection... How did you choose your sources? Why did you elect to go with some sources and not others? What bias might these sources have?

It can also include things like agenda setting... If you were dealing with multiple topics, how did you decide which got precedence? How did you determine what was important to readers? This opens a dialogue with them, and improves both your and your reader's critical thinking skills so that the decision-making process is constantly improving.

I think these things are very relevant to our role as thought leaders and overall improve the critical thinking skills of readers and the trust that they have in us as journalists.

Some of the above I included in a previous blog post that I had written in my Dragon*Con rehash, and it has picked up a lot of positive feedback from within the blogosphere, especially from the skeptics community.

(I also discovered via this process that for some reason you people prefer to email me rather than just leave comments... Either is fine! But if you post a comment we can start a public discussion... Just saying...)

Just recently Kylie Sturgess, the author of the Podblack Cat blog and a podcaster for the Skeptics Zone in Australia took me up on my challenge... You can see her original post here, and her (not one but) two follow-ups since here and here.

(Many thanks to Kylie - you've earned a loyal reader half-way around the world!)

Since then I have also learned that there are supposedly already some papers that are doing this... A book I'm reading (Elements of Journalism, details at the bottom of my last post) mentioned the Modesto Bee. I went and took a look at the Bee website and found an Editors_Desk blog... I suspect this is supposed to be what the authors were referring to, but the blog seems to have lost its way based on the content from recent posts.

(If there are any Bee editors, writers, or readers that would like to correct me, I'd be happy to be wrong.)

Whether it's out there or not already, it should be. And I think that publications can do a better job of tying the two together.

Many newspapers have adopted an updated "look and feel" that supposedly improves readability that includes the "sidebar" links to related stories, etc. that we are used to seeing online. Use this to direct people to the website for deeper stories, background information (we frequently take for granted that readers are aware of it), related op-ed pieces, and blogs on how content was generated.

I think that newspapers can use this to not only increase transparency and increase credibility by making methods of reporting more open, but that they can also use it to increase reader engagement, tell better stories, and bridge the gap between offline / traditional paper news and the online version.

I think it also offers a point of differentiation between the two products that can make both viable commercial pursuits. The paper version at that point almost becomes a high-level preview and a guide to navigating through the vast amount of content that any media company website generates.

I plan to continue to push for this level of transparency (both within the skeptics community as well as in the general news media). For skeptics, it erases the idea that we are biased because it fully exposes us and our decision making process. Skeptics by nature should not biased - they just have high standards for the criteria required to necessitate belief. For mainstream news media, it proactively combats a public that is increasingly (and probably rightfully) skeptical of modern journalism itself.

Next in the Writing Skeptically series will be a piece on self-skepticism and holding yourself up to your own standards. TTFN!

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Writing Skeptically, Part One: How Journalism Can Learn From Science

As you might remember, I attended a few events on the SkepticTrack at Dragon*Con a few weeks ago. Since then my brain has been marinating on a few things (and dealing with some others, but that's not what this is about). For me, in the end, it comes down to this: how can I as a journalist better present information to the public?

I found this excerpt of Thucydides's The History of the Peloponnesian War in a book (deets to follow) that I'm currently reading:

"With regard to my factual reporting of events... I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else heard of them from eyewitnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eyewitnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other, or else from imperfect memories."

A few thousand years later, this is still the same struggle that we journalists (or bloggers or insert your own moniker here) face on a daily basis:

Where is the truth? How can we find it?

For-profit journalism has, for the most part, failed us. The pursuit of profit is not the same thing as pursuit of the truth, and conglomerate corporations have a primary responsibility to their shareholders, not to their audiences. There is a direct conflict of interest in taking the time and investing the resources to discover the truth.

As Thucydides points out, the truth is in itself relative. As humans we bring our baggage with us, packed away inside our minds until it's time to make a decision or do any sort of reasoning. Then we filter through - subconsciously, most times - to determine what data is relevant to the situation at hand.

The job of journalists then is compounded. We have to use our own filters to devise what the truth is and then not use our filters to tell the story. That's just crazy. And impossible.

But… wait. Do we? Are the only options that we have to pretend that we're not biased or to embrace bias?

Science deals on an every day basis with discovering the truth of the world around us. Science does not (well, should not at least...) deal with prejudice or bias. Science doesn't make wild claims about how things are or are not. Science asks a question (it does not assume), it collects data from credible sources, it develops a theory, it tests its theory, it analyzes data and draws conclusions, and then communicates its results.

Is that so terribly different from what we as journalists should be doing?

It is not our job as journalists to say how things should be or should not be. We are the scribes, not the players (although celebrity personalities like the talking heads on cable frequently forget that). Our job is to find out what happened through asking questions. Our job is to collect data and information from credible sources. Our job is to analyze that information and then communicate those results.

...Drawing conclusions... Maybe. That's probably best left for the editorial page if we want to retain our integrity.

Like science, our stories should be a replicable experience. If a reader went out and did the legwork, they should - using the same "scientific" method - be able to come to the same conclusion.

And if they don't, it means that there's data that we didn't look at that we should have. It's time to ask new questions, find new data, and move forward. The pursuit of truth, just like the pursuit of science, is a never-ending battle.

Part two of this series, which I hope to have up this week, will take a look at how we can build transparency into journalism to increase trust in the media, improve our readers' critical thinking skills, and reclaim our industry from talking heads, sensationalism, and general quackery.

***

Further Reading:

Kovach, Bill, & Rosenstiel, Tom. (2007). The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers

Press.

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Dragon*Con 2009 Photo Montage Spectacular Spectacular!

At long last, I have finished going through the several hundred photos that I took at Dragon*Con... Le sigh. Without further ado I present to you...

Wait. I have a bit of ado. Just a bit. I have 95 pictures, see, and I had really hoped to have a clean 100 to give to you. It's more of a spectacular spectacular if you have a good round number. It's proven. By scientists*.

In the last week, I've dealt with several calamities, one of which was an apocalyptic laptop crash, in which I lost about half of my Dragon*Con photos. So before I share the photos I do have, I want to give a special shout-out to one guy who I know we lost...

Mr. Sperm Guy, I'm lookin' at you. And I salute you, sir. You were hilarious.

Alright. Now, without further ado (seriously), here are my favorite pics from this year's con:

As a disclaimer, I must add that I brought my crappy camera for portability and protect-the-good-camera reasons. Sadly, you can tell. I might bring the good one next year... Either way, I'm had a blast and that's really all that matters.

In other news:

1. I've got most of the skeptical journalism post finished already, so it should go up tomorrow evening.
2. NPH as Dr. Horrible and Jimmy Fallon were freakin' hilarious on the Emmys. Otherwise, it was a complete waste of time.
3. This week's gonna be awesome. For all of us.

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(*Okay, I made bit that up. I admit it. It was bullshit.)

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