Author Archive

  • 25 Jul

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    Propublica and The Opportunity Gap

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    This is somewhat similar to a post I did on mining education data back in February—clearly, the topic is a real interest of mine.

    Propublica, with its story package titled, “The Opportunity Gap,” has taken data on public school districts fairly similar to that offered by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, but the nonprofit news organization made a conscious effort to make the data more social:

    Sharing — the Facebook aspect of the app — is a big part of the behavior ProPublica’s news apps team wanted to encourage for its users…One small-but-key feature: With that integration, users who are signed into Facebook can generate an individual URL for each cluster of data they dig up — the Cambridge [MA]-versus-Medfield-versus-Lawrence comparison, say — to make sharing and referencing the data almost seamless. The resulting page has a “share on Facebook” button along with a note: “Use this hashtag to share your insights on Twitter: #myschoolyourschool.”

    Since last time I was a bit nepotistic in picking my own high school, this time I looked at data from schools close to where my family currently lives—Dallas, Texas.

    W.T. White high school would be our local public school. The percentage of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty, is 68 percent—well below the average of  86 percent for Dallas Independent School District as a whole (side note: seriously? Eighty-six percent? And this is the state that voted to cut $4 billion from the education budget).

    If you look at the custom link I created, comparing nearby schools, there is one surprising data point: Highland Park high school, a mere seven miles and 15-minute drive away, has zero kids on free or reduced-price lunch. More kids, though, at W.T. White take advanced math. I would love to find out why—perhaps a Jaime Escalante (of Stand and Deliver fame) is at work?

    In order to paint the full picture of Dallas high schools, you would need to include private school data. I’ve yet to find a database for that. A goal for the future, to be sure.

  • 30 Jun

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    Through The Lens: China

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    Congratulations! You just graduation from college! What are you going to do next? For me, the answer was to embark on a 19-day trip across China with Sharon Mei, a friend of mine from Duke. Sharon was born in China and speaks Mandarin fluently, so I essentially had a built-in tour guide/translator/event planner the entire trip. I wouldn’t recommend going to China without someone who could communicate fluently.

    My parents gave me a Nikon D7000 as a graduation gift, and, as you can see below, I was able to instantly put it to use. I toted it and the 18-105mm lens that was included across the country. I tried to shoot photos that were aesthetically pleasing enough to appear on a quality travel blog (try is the key word). It was my first attempt at shooting a non-sports event, so any feedback would be appreciated!

    Fish swarm to catch food thrown into the water by tourists at the Chengdu Panda Base.

  • 17 May

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    More Duke Baseball

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    Better late than never, I suppose—here’s pictures from my second attempt at shooting baseball on April 19th. Click the photo below to see a 12-picture slideshow. Duke unexpectedly lost to UNC Greensboro 5-4 with the go-ahead run coming in the top of the ninth inning. All shots were taken with a Nikon D3 and a 300mm lens.  As always, comments are appreciated.

    Right fielder Anthony D'Alessandro avoids getting hit by a pitch in Duke's 5-4 loss to UNC Greensboro April 19, 2011 at Jack Coombs Field.

  • 17 Apr

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    Duke Baseball and Women’s Lacrosse

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    Over the last two weeks I’ve learned something about myself: I like shooting sports. I actually like it a lot.

    My first assignment was a Friday night baseball game on April 8, featuring Duke against Boston College. I grabbed a Nikon D3, courtesy of The Chronicle, and headed out with Tyler Seuc, one of our staff photographers who was assigned to show me the ropes (and make sure I didn’t break anything). I’d never shot an event of any type before, so I think I snapped a few good shots. For a rookie, at least. Click the picture below to see a 12-photo slideshow.

    Dillon Haviland winds up against Boston College on April 8, 2010 at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. He pitched 5.2 innings and earned the win in Duke's 10-6 victory.

    I was on my own this past Friday night for the Duke vs. UNC Womens Lacrosse game. I took the trusty D3 and also dragged along our awesome 300mm lens. I could tell I was getting better shots than I did last week—and, needless to say, had a bunch of fun shooting with the 300mm. Tyler taught me last week the importance of getting a player’s feet into the shot, which is something I focused on during this game. Click the picture below to see the slideshow from the game.

    Christie Kaestner attempts to shake her defender in Duke's 11-10 victory over North Carolina on April 15, 2011 at Koskinen Stadium.

    Please leave any tips or critiques in the comments section! I’m (obviously) just beginning to learn.

  • 13 Apr

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    Data Wrangler

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    If this works anything like it does in the promotional video, it’s one of the coolest tools I’ve ever seen.

    Data Wrangler is the brain child of a few geniuses at the Stanford Visualization Group, which specializes in, well, organizing data. What I love about the looks of this is that the interface seems extremely intuitive. Too often when you try to use a tool designed to make your life easier, you end so frustrated that you waste more time than you would have originally. Check out the video for yourself.

    Wrangler Demo Video from Stanford Visualization Group on Vimeo.

  • 31 Mar

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    Using Data Mining to Dig up Dirt

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    I’m in a few classes this semester for which I read several academic articles each week from fields ranging from behavioral economics to anthropology. More often than not, I’m frustrated by their lack of practicality and ability to be applied for the real world*. The silver lining to my blood pressure-raising annoyance, though, is that I now appreciate the fact that journalism works with real people on concrete issues astronomically more than I did previously. And technology is helping us do this job more effectively every day.

    One great example that I recently came across is this pothole mapping tool/smart phone application from the Des Moines Register. Think about it: how frustrating is it to ram your car into a crater-sized pothole that you didn’t see until it was too late? The smart phone app allows Iowans to turn their frustration into collective knowledge instantly.

    Potholes are color coded according to their severity, and recently filled holes are marked as well.

    More than just providing practical information, the Des Moines potholes map keeps the local government accountable. It also gives credit when credit is due—potholes filled within the past week show up in gray on the map.

    Newspapers need to find ways to become indispensable to their target audience. Providing practical information that you can act upon is a great first step.

    *For example, this sentence is from Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed on problem posing education, his solution for how to educate the lower classes: “It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’—consciouness as consciousness of consciousness” (79). Yes, I stopped reading halfway through, too.

  • 28 Feb

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    An Intro to CAR

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    I had the chance to meet up with two friends from my Poynter fellowship last summer this past weekend. They were in town for the 2011 Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) conference in Raleigh, N.C. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend, but I was able to gain some second-hand knowledge from my friend Katelyn Polantz, an education reporter for the Roanoke Times.

    As an education reporter, she was obviously drawn to the session looking into education databases. One of the databases mentioned, the Common Core of Data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, has a wealth of information on public school districts and their respective K-12 schools. I decided to take a jog down memory lane and pull data from the fine public school that gave me my diploma—Pine-Richland High School.

    Now, we always joked that we lived in a white picket fence-type “bubble”—and the demographic data certainly supports that notion. Out of 1,442 total high school students in grades 9-12, there is/are:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 14 Jan

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    Best and Worst Jobs for 2011

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    Now that 2010 is officially in the past, we can look forward to the year that is to come. This exercise can be particularly painful for those of us with impending May graduation dates (just typing those words made my blood run a little colder), but knowledge is power, and knowledge in this instance is CareerCast.com’s 200 best and worst jobs for 2011.

    It’s no secret that traditional journalism jobs are considered career cancers to all but a few of us idealists. As this website puts it:

    Some workers might find that their “dream job” actually ranks much further down the list – the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is especially true when it comes to employment.

    To find Reporter (Newspaper), you have to click through several screens until you finally get to No. 188, right below jobs such as dairy farmer, sheet metal worker and garbage collector. Photojournalists only fare slightly better, coming in at No. 185, and  Newscaster (broadcast journalist) lands at No. 128.

    This poor ranking isn’t shocking to anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the constant bemoaning of the decline of the media. CareerCast says this about the jobs at the bottom of its list:

    Jobs that fall into the bottom 20 out of all 200 surveyed professions tend to suffer from a combination of fatal flaws – low salaries, difficult working conditions, serious risk of injury or death, and poor employment prospects over the coming years.

    That last reason—poor employment prospects—spells doom for journalism as a profession on this list. The other four core criteria are environment, income, stress and physical demands. Reporter scored 1106.250 in the environment category, which is below the more than 3,300 points the firefighter profession racked up for worst work environment. The midlevel income for reporters is computed at $34,000 (the lowest I saw was something like $18,000 for waiters and waitresses). Its stress level is fairly elevated at 44.750 for reasons such as deadlines, working in the public eye and competitiveness, but, in a slice of good news, the job scores very low on the physically demanding scale!

    Like I said, nothing in this evaluation is unexpected. I already gave my vow of poverty my freshman year when I definitely decided on this career path. And I’m not exaggerating—with a salary of $30,000, it would take about seven years to just break even with what I paid to go to Duke. Money isn’t everything—right?

    Maybe I'll have to live in a tent after graduation, but if that's the case, I will at least have some experience thanks to my time spent in Duke's famous Krzyzewskiville waiting to get into the annual Duke vs. UNC basketball game.

  • 28 Dec

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    Digital Imaging: Eigenface

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    One of my last projects in my digital imaging class through Duke’s visual studies department was titled, “Blurring Identities” and involved layering my face along with the faces of four of my classmates. The idea was to mimic the eigenface facial recognition technology.

    Each member of the class was photographed against the same background under the same light conditions. I was given a set of five faces—my own, an Asian female, a black female and two Caucasian males (one of whom wears glasses).

    I created three different images—one containing equal parts of all five faces, one made up of 50 percent of my face and 12.5 percent of the other four and a third mixture that was supposed to be the last point where you could still see my face as the dominant.

    Naturally, the explanation makes more sense if you can see the finished products:

    Each face was placed in its own layer in Adobe Photoshop, and the transparency was set to 20 percent. To start, I lined up all the eyes as closely as possible. At the end, I used an easer brush to clean up the excess hair.

    For this image, the transparency for the layer with my face was set to 50 percent. For the other four layers, the transparency was set to 12.5 percent. I left a bit more of my hair this time and used a feathering effect to draw more attention to my face.

    With so many faces competing for domanince, I found that I couldn't go lower than 44 percent and still be the principal face in the image. The other four faces were set to a transparency of 14 percent. I also got rid of the feathering effect from the previous image.

  • 13 Dec

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    Media Coverage of Duke and Virginia Lacrosse

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    My foray into quasi-graduate level academia.

    This semester, I took the capstone course for my policy journalism and media studies certificate with Professor Laura Roselle. For the class, I completed a formal research paper examining and comparing the coverage by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine and Sports Illustrated of the Duke lacrosse case in 2006 and the Virginia lacrosse tragedy in 2010.

    I chose the first three months of each case as my time frame and looked at how each article was framed. Framing is a communication scholar’s term for the idea that the media makes aspects of an issue more salient (i.e. accessible) through different modes of presentation and therefore shifts people’s attitudes. I was interested in how the two cases were reported, so I didn’t include opinion columns or editorials. I looked for these five generic frames:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

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