Parse-Snips: "And I Mean It"

Much has been made about the Skip Gates / Cambridge Police imbroglio. The biggest drama in the aftermath of the press conference is of its diffusion -- not the completely predictable, almost mechanical, escalation of indignation between two sparring partners (and they are partners). I tip my hat to Obama's calibrated apology: I'm not taking any of it back but I did get in over my head. In the moment where the fear-harboring swells into the shouting match Crowley, Gates and the President were all consumed by passion and that's the boundary-smasher.

The spectacle was ripe for picking because:

(1) It was unscripted -- it wasn't about health care. Obama could have been just as easily asked about the newest wave of settlements in the West Bank. He could have struck the same tender chord of authenticity by invoking his parental instincts about his own daughters in harm's way. And everyone would have gone on talking about how a veto-proof Senate needs bi-partisan support for health care reform to pass.

(2) Obama departed from his game -- rather than the arbitrage he favors over the triangulations of the Clinton/Bush era, he put himself squarely in the middle -- not as arbitrator but victim. The third-person ID on "any one of us would have been angry" begged a color-based stencil. Yes, racial profiling is a fact of American life. So is pigment justice as the surest race to the bottom of any policy debate on race.

(3) Narrative tells itself -- The race card is runner-up only to the cult of celebrity and sex for marquee media value -- "if you want a crowd, start a fight" [and] keep the camera rolling long enough for the barkers to mount their soap boxes. There's no nuance necessary when the questions are so black and so white. Or are they?

In one corner we have the institutional clout of law enforcement teamed with the sensitivity training of a post white supremacist world view. In the other the venerable brand of glittering brains and policy-speak of towering Harvard backed with every unfinished agenda on the social left that gives voice to the "world's most opinionated zip code." Yes, try undressing those vagaries and then convince the scorekeeper there's a scoreboard big enough to hold all the debating points.

Full disclosure -- Obama and Skip go back together? Well the Cambridge cops should be on a first name basis with the streets they patrol. The block of the reported break-in is lined with the residences of sleep-deprived, prestigous, self-important Harvard professors.

The more substantive misstep to my thinking was Obama's stretch of self-conferring credibility. Here's the line:

"I have also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade - and I mean it."

Without delving into GAO reports, GAAP principles, or lies and damn lies let's look at the face of this: Part of the reason the man is so comfortable in his skin is that he can perform a feat that evades the vanity of elected officials. He can identify himself as a third party -- a major survival skill for anyone needing to function in a leadership role without compromising their own integrity. When Bob Dole referred to himself as Dole it sounded like we weren't going to have Nixon to kick around any longer. When Obama does it we float to the ceiling of the press room and undergo an out-of-body experience.

That's what's so shocking about the "and I mean it" part. That's the kind of defensive posturing I'd expect from a more shrill and less assured pol. It begs the question: what if you don't really mean it. The health care deficit water should be carried more presumably by HHS Secretary Kathy Sebelius or Joe the Biden: "And he means it," might have taken Obama's pledge one step closer to echo chamber gospel. But the 'crats are a squirmy choir regardless of the sheet music or the talking points.

For the good of the country I hope the next time the health care debate is not about Obama that the President doesn't personalize his candor or have those Senate lions let their donor base decide on the compromises that are baked into the final signing of the 2009/10 Universal Health Recovery Act.

On second thought I hope Obama reconsiders and does make the battle about himself. Like Reagan he's more popular than his policies. But no one but himself will be asking to face this kind of crucible; his allies because they believe he's irreplacable and his enemies because he scares them so.

For a punishment-happy republic as ours it is ironic and sobering how little sacrifice we have come to expect from our leaders. But is their cowardice that hard to question in the pursuit of our own narrow interests?

Parse-Snips: "And I Mean It"

Much has been made about the Skip Gates / Cambridge Police imbroglio. The biggest drama in the aftermath of the press conference is of its diffusion -- not the completely predictable, almost mechanical, escalation of indignation between two sparring partners (and they are partners). I tip my hat to Obama's calibrated apology: I'm not taking any of it back but I did get in over my head. In the moment where the fear-harboring swells into the shouting match Crowley, Gates and the President were all consumed by passion and that's the boundary-smasher.

The spectacle was ripe for picking because:

(1) It was unscripted -- it wasn't about health care. Obama could have been just as easily asked about the newest wave of settlements in the West Bank. He could have struck the same tender chord of authenticity by invoking his parental instincts about his own daughters in harm's way. And everyone would have gone on talking about how a veto-proof Senate needs bi-partisan support for health care reform to pass.

(2) Obama departed from his game -- rather than the arbitrage he favors over the triangulations of the Clinton/Bush era, he put himself squarely in the middle -- not as arbitrator but victim. The third-person ID on "any one of us would have been angry" begged a color-based stencil. Yes, racial profiling is a fact of American life. So is pigment justice as the surest race to the bottom of any policy debate on race.

(3) Narrative tells itself -- The race card is runner-up only to the cult of celebrity and sex for marquee media value -- "if you want a crowd, start a fight" [and] keep the camera rolling long enough for the barkers to mount their soap boxes. There's no nuance necessary when the questions are so black and so white. Or are they?

In one corner we have the institutional clout of law enforcement teamed with the sensitivity training of a post white supremacist world view. In the other the venerable brand of glittering brains and policy-speak of towering Harvard backed with every unfinished agenda on the social left that gives voice to the "world's most opinionated zip code." Yes, try undressing those vagaries and then convince the scorekeeper there's a scoreboard big enough to hold all the debating points.

Full disclosure -- Obama and Skip go back together? Well the Cambridge cops should be on a first name basis with the streets they patrol. The block of the reported break-in is lined with the residences of sleep-deprived, prestigous, self-important Harvard professors.

The more substantive misstep to my thinking was Obama's stretch of self-conferring credibility. Here's the line:

"I have also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade - and I mean it."

Without delving into GAO reports, GAAP principles, or lies and damn lies let's look at the face of this: Part of the reason the man is so comfortable in his skin is that he can perform a feat that evades the vanity of elected officials. He can identify himself as a third party -- a major survival skill for anyone needing to function in a leadership role without compromising their own integrity. When Bob Dole referred to himself as Dole it sounded like we weren't going to have Nixon to kick around any longer. When Obama does it we float to the ceiling of the press room and undergo an out-of-body experience.

That's what's so shocking about the "and I mean it" part. That's the kind of defensive posturing I'd expect from a more shrill and less assured pol. It begs the question: what if you don't really mean it. The health care deficit water should be carried more presumably by HHS Secretary Kathy Sebelius or Joe the Biden: "And he means it," might have taken Obama's pledge one step closer to echo chamber gospel. But the 'crats are a squirmy choir regardless of the sheet music or the talking points.

For the good of the country I hope the next time the health care debate is not about Obama that the President doesn't personalize his candor or have those Senate lions let their donor base decide on the compromises that are baked into the final signing of the 2009/10 Universal Health Recovery Act.

On second thought I hope Obama reconsiders and does make the battle about himself. Like Reagan he's more popular than his policies. But no one but himself will be asking to face this kind of crucible; his allies because they believe he's irreplacable and his enemies because he scares them so.

For a punishment-happy republic as ours it is ironic and sobering how little sacrifice we have come to expect from our leaders. But is their cowardice that hard to question in the pursuit of our own narrow interests?

KM is a Process and Not a Destination

I was visiting with Michael Mufson, a fellow Hampshire College grad who I haven't been in close touch with but always thought of as close-by in terms of cultural artifacts, life views, moral compass, etc. He mentioned how a former Hampshire Drama Professor (and marginal mentor) of his had thrown cold water on the idea that theater students receive any strong vocational backing for their tuition investments. Her point was a numbers game: how many theater majors become full-time actors. Now scale that argument to any creative profession in the age of cost-free content and we know where we stand. All the pithy patter in the world won't keep the lights on without the rationale that we leave more value than we take away.

On one hand it's an open-shut argument and it's a closed loop that predates starving artists. There are word people and numbers people and it's the liberal arts folks who put all their marbles on those graduate programs for crawling back into the job market. The engineers and the number-crunchers? They speak the language of cause-and-effect. Communications schmoomications -- the numbers tell the story.

But not all learning answers to the lessons of self preservation -- regardless of our personal economics. My son, for instance, just completed his second summer of theater camp with the US Performing Arts group out of San Francisco. He spent the entire year in between sessions reliving what a great first experience he had with an eye towards going back. The verdict? The second year eclipsed the first. It's not about boosting his professional prospects for acting. It's not even about the 5:1 girl to guy ratio, proving that the age of alpha males has passed for basking in a harem of girl power. It's not even about the breath of independence he takes in when needing to make spot decisions on his own.

The real power of his theatrical experience is about his belief in himself. His theater experience has combined with his own interests, passions and experiences to form his speaking voice, vocal tenor, dance steps, and non-verbal gestures -- that decoding instrument that gets left out of the receptor kits of so many Aspergers students. The point I was trying to make is that theatrical success is not limited to filling up auditoriums or credits in an actor's casting card. It's about finding the balance between a considered pose and an emotionally-charged script with the structure-resistant transitions we all make to adulthood.

In that version Michael Mufson gets to portray the brilliant director he had the confidence in becoming when I first met him. My son too will now have that chance in large part because of his theatrical training -- regardless of whether he ever "works" in the theater or not.

The same could be said for settling my piece with what Andy Partridge calls "rehearsing for the big, square world." I work as a word guy in an office park cube with the knowledge that my brain is calibrated to a song that few can hear and even fewer can monetize -- hence the cube! However for anyone who hates to search the pattern matching prowess of a solid KM guy delivers immediate payback. That benefit is part of a learning process -- not part of a final outcome, i.e. new customer -- I win! My new boss refers to KM as "a channel." This is enlightened leadership tag for functional support two or more steps removed from closing the next deal that we'll still be needing in the deal after that.

I've noticed that process-centric view of knowledge propagation in some recent SIKM discussions where practitioners were bolting their prior KM successes with more fashionable and established corridors of commerce. Carl Frapaolo and Dan Keldsen of Architected are now fusing their domain expertise with workshops targeted to innovation management. Kate Pugh is leveraging her expertise at knowledge harvesting to the legal community as a dispute mediator.

The central theme from all these examples is this -- us word people should take our natural talents to the next level. That's where theater majors, budding novelists, and knowledge expressionists of all abstractions and stripes can paint the big, square world into a corner we can all meet on.

KM is a Process and Not a Destination

I was visiting with Michael Mufson, a fellow Hampshire College grad who I haven't been in close touch with but always thought of as close-by in terms of cultural artifacts, life views, moral compass, etc. He mentioned how a former Hampshire Drama Professor (and marginal mentor) of his had thrown cold water on the idea that theater students receive any strong vocational backing for their tuition investments. Her point was a numbers game: how many theater majors become full-time actors. Now scale that argument to any creative profession in the age of cost-free content and we know where we stand. All the pithy patter in the world won't keep the lights on without the rationale that we leave more value than we take away.

On one hand it's an open-shut argument and it's a closed loop that predates starving artists. There are word people and numbers people and it's the liberal arts folks who put all their marbles on those graduate programs for crawling back into the job market. The engineers and the number-crunchers? They speak the language of cause-and-effect. Communications schmoomications -- the numbers tell the story.

But not all learning answers to the lessons of self preservation -- regardless of our personal economics. My son, for instance, just completed his second summer of theater camp with the US Performing Arts group out of San Francisco. He spent the entire year in between sessions reliving what a great first experience he had with an eye towards going back. The verdict? The second year eclipsed the first. It's not about boosting his professional prospects for acting. It's not even about the 5:1 girl to guy ratio, proving that the age of alpha males has passed for basking in a harem of girl power. It's not even about the breath of independence he takes in when needing to make spot decisions on his own.

The real power of his theatrical experience is about his belief in himself. His theater experience has combined with his own interests, passions and experiences to form his speaking voice, vocal tenor, dance steps, and non-verbal gestures -- that decoding instrument that gets left out of the receptor kits of so many Aspergers students. The point I was trying to make is that theatrical success is not limited to filling up auditoriums or credits in an actor's casting card. It's about finding the balance between a considered pose and an emotionally-charged script with the structure-resistant transitions we all make to adulthood.

In that version Michael Mufson gets to portray the brilliant director he had the confidence in becoming when I first met him. My son too will now have that chance in large part because of his theatrical training -- regardless of whether he ever "works" in the theater or not.

The same could be said for settling my piece with what Andy Partridge calls "rehearsing for the big, square world." I work as a word guy in an office park cube with the knowledge that my brain is calibrated to a song that few can hear and even fewer can monetize -- hence the cube! However for anyone who hates to search the pattern matching prowess of a solid KM guy delivers immediate payback. That benefit is part of a learning process -- not part of a final outcome, i.e. new customer -- I win! My new boss refers to KM as "a channel." This is enlightened leadership tag for functional support two or more steps removed from closing the next deal that we'll still be needing in the deal after that.

I've noticed that process-centric view of knowledge propagation in some recent SIKM discussions where practitioners were bolting their prior KM successes with more fashionable and established corridors of commerce. Carl Frapaolo and Dan Keldsen of Architected are now fusing their domain expertise with workshops targeted to innovation management. Kate Pugh is leveraging her expertise at knowledge harvesting to the legal community as a dispute mediator.

The central theme from all these examples is this -- us word people should take our natural talents to the next level. That's where theater majors, budding novelists, and knowledge expressionists of all abstractions and stripes can paint the big, square world into a corner we can all meet on.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

A new acquaintance recently published a provocative piece addressing the subject of social enterprise in an influential business media outlet. He was curious what kind of post-publication life his article was commanding in terms of press pickup, social bookmarking, reader feedback, and the resulting footprint of organizations and peer-experts linking to it on their own sites.

Most of the territory covered is aimed at the vain anxiety our names and effects will go public but escape our notice. There's more than a few utilities designed to consolidate our social media profiles: "our interfaces don't miss a single interaction, blah, blah, blah."

What I liked about this exercise was that it wasn't email or password-based. The only detail was the article itself. This is actually plenty if we're pursuing the power of an idea (as opposed to the browser used by our site visitors).

As far as recipes go the easiest and most literal way to trace an article on the web is to perform a link analysis. To do this you save the URL and then see who's linked to it.

A second more effective way is to allow for your keywords to appear in the "anchor." Anchor means the words that the linking party uses to describe the page it's linking to. As you'll see this gives a more thorough result -- including some cheeky tweets.

Capturing the social media piece is a little more fleeting than garnering page links. As we saw in the Yahoo example we're limited to the exact URL. URLs are becoming less static over time -- especially as they age and publishers pull them offline. This largely limits the amount of conjecture you'll get. It's not that Dashboard to end all buzz factors.

Again it helps to be less specific but there is no definitive source. Here's another example of a selective media universe where first and last name are the only terms in play.

When the promise of comprehensive profiling turns into the scattershot footprints of puny indexes I do what any rationale researcher does. I retreat back to Google. This is a Google query that focuses only on a news aggregation tool called Digg.

... and on Facebook.

Finally, here are two novel visuals for depicting links. The first from Google captures all links into ft.com that mention the author's name.

The second is not a search interface but a multi-dimensional view of recent media generation on the topic called Silo Breaker -- not specific to the original article but a big picture view to rival the most panoramic thought piece.

Happy fishing.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

A new acquaintance recently published a provocative piece addressing the subject of social enterprise in an influential business media outlet. He was curious what kind of post-publication life his article was commanding in terms of press pickup, social bookmarking, reader feedback, and the resulting footprint of organizations and peer-experts linking to it on their own sites.

Most of the territory covered is aimed at the vain anxiety our names and effects will go public but escape our notice. There's more than a few utilities designed to consolidate our social media profiles: "our interfaces don't miss a single interaction, blah, blah, blah."

What I liked about this exercise was that it wasn't email or password-based. The only detail was the article itself. This is actually plenty if we're pursuing the power of an idea (as opposed to the browser used by our site visitors).

As far as recipes go the easiest and most literal way to trace an article on the web is to perform a link analysis. To do this you save the URL and then see who's linked to it.

A second more effective way is to allow for your keywords to appear in the "anchor." Anchor means the words that the linking party uses to describe the page it's linking to. As you'll see this gives a more thorough result -- including some cheeky tweets.

Capturing the social media piece is a little more fleeting than garnering page links. As we saw in the Yahoo example we're limited to the exact URL. URLs are becoming less static over time -- especially as they age and publishers pull them offline. This largely limits the amount of conjecture you'll get. It's not that Dashboard to end all buzz factors.

Again it helps to be less specific but there is no definitive source. Here's another example of a selective media universe where first and last name are the only terms in play.

When the promise of comprehensive profiling turns into the scattershot footprints of puny indexes I do what any rationale researcher does. I retreat back to Google. This is a Google query that focuses only on a news aggregation tool called Digg.

... and on Facebook.

Finally, here are two novel visuals for depicting links. The first from Google captures all links into ft.com that mention the author's name.

The second is not a search interface but a multi-dimensional view of recent media generation on the topic called Silo Breaker -- not specific to the original article but a big picture view to rival the most panoramic thought piece.

Happy fishing.

Gender Specific

My wife and spent the fourth driving down from Boston to New Bedford for the decidedly low-key alternative-to-Newport folkie fest. There is always something redemptive about a sticker price within reach of those who get their Birkenstocks as knock-offs of high-end flip-flops. I had to squint through the high sun and low clouds to see a single corporate sponsor. I couldn't place any progressive causes piggy-backpacking to the summit trails of a crunchy, retro crusade. I'm not sure whether this was to keep the music pure or keep the marketing budget in line with the low entrance fee.

Still there's something oddly inspired about bringing a group of disconnected dinosaurs like us together to listen intently to words and music. And that's the point! No one was checking in on the half-dozen other glitzier events that they sacrificed for the trend-deaf folkies. And yes the average tent-hopper was white, smokeless, and a peroxide-free fifty plus.

The most interesting of the tents we attended was unified by the theme of songs for and about men. The songwriting panel included the likes of John Gorka, Stephen Fearing, Cliff Eberhardt, and Peter Mulvey. It was curious that with the exception of mock Zeppelin chord progression from Cliff we had to get through half the session before the manly theme wasn't seen through the female lens -- even the jokes. Mulvey recounted how Chris Smither had penned a song for Bonnie Raitt and thanked some woman who covered it at some club he was visiting. The woman, unaware of who the grateful guy was, corrected him. "You didn't write that," she said. "That song was written by some gal named Chris Smither!"

The part I find curious about the need for females to complete male stories is that the reverse is patently untrue. A round-table of women songwriters could go through cycles of sisterhoods, gal pals, and workplace versus homemaker dilemma-setting scenarios and never whiff the scent of a guy, even as a side dish. It reminds me of a recent factoid from Newsweek that talks about life expectancy: smoke and you lose 15 years right off the top. Floss and you gain two. But if you're a woman and you stay married the figure is zero, neutral. The editors chose to leave out the extra years that marriage puts on for men (this blog says it's +5).

One other addendum to this is just how major an entree lesbian folk is to the world of women singer-songwriters. Talk about a world without men. The telling parallel is this -- how many openly gay folkies are we talking about? My dimming memory can produce more right-wing folkies than gay ones.

Gender Specific

My wife and spent the fourth driving down from Boston to New Bedford for the decidedly low-key alternative-to-Newport folkie fest. There is always something redemptive about a sticker price within reach of those who get their Birkenstocks as knock-offs of high-end flip-flops. I had to squint through the high sun and low clouds to see a single corporate sponsor. I couldn't place any progressive causes piggy-backpacking to the summit trails of a crunchy, retro crusade. I'm not sure whether this was to keep the music pure or keep the marketing budget in line with the low entrance fee.

Still there's something oddly inspired about bringing a group of disconnected dinosaurs like us together to listen intently to words and music. And that's the point! No one was checking in on the half-dozen other glitzier events that they sacrificed for the trend-deaf folkies. And yes the average tent-hopper was white, smokeless, and a peroxide-free fifty plus.

The most interesting of the tents we attended was unified by the theme of songs for and about men. The songwriting panel included the likes of John Gorka, Stephen Fearing, Cliff Eberhardt, and Peter Mulvey. It was curious that with the exception of mock Zeppelin chord progression from Cliff we had to get through half the session before the manly theme wasn't seen through the female lens -- even the jokes. Mulvey recounted how Chris Smither had penned a song for Bonnie Raitt and thanked some woman who covered it at some club he was visiting. The woman, unaware of who the grateful guy was, corrected him. "You didn't write that," she said. "That song was written by some gal named Chris Smither!"

The part I find curious about the need for females to complete male stories is that the reverse is patently untrue. A round-table of women songwriters could go through cycles of sisterhoods, gal pals, and workplace versus homemaker dilemma-setting scenarios and never whiff the scent of a guy, even as a side dish. It reminds me of a recent factoid from Newsweek that talks about life expectancy: smoke and you lose 15 years right off the top. Floss and you gain two. But if you're a woman and you stay married the figure is zero, neutral. The editors chose to leave out the extra years that marriage puts on for men (this blog says it's +5).

One other addendum to this is just how major an entree lesbian folk is to the world of women singer-songwriters. Talk about a world without men. The telling parallel is this -- how many openly gay folkies are we talking about? My dimming memory can produce more right-wing folkies than gay ones.