“Well-known speakers are too accustomed to longer speeches, with room for anecdotes and the introduction, and should be avoided for this service in favor of young lawyers and business men who will present messages within the four-minute limit…”

The volunteers attended cinema screenings and spoke during the interval while the projectionist changed reels. It took, on average, four minutes to change a film reel: hence the time limit for speeches on topics such as the Red Cross, food conservation, “Why We Are Fighting”, the importance of speed…

The entire program cost US$102,000. They certainly got value for money:

“During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.”

Garber summarises tips for public speaking that were published in a newsletter for these volunteers. The tips are as relevant to today’s Powerpoint presentation as they were to last century’s propagandists.

begin again in earnest - photo br flickr.com user found_drama, Rob Friesel, CC-licensed

Dipping your toe into academic publishing can be a daunting experience. Rob Weir offers some practical tips for researchers who want to publish without perishing.

Many of Weir’s tips are the stuff of common sense: have something substantial to say; pay attention to grammar and punctuation; write clearly; avoid waffling.

Another useful tip: beware the curse of knowledge. Understanding too much about your subject can sometimes get in the way of good communication. It’s less likely to happen when you are writing for a peer-reviewed journal in your academic field; writing an opinion piece for a daily newspaper requires more care for clarity and explanation.

Activity-independent nuclear position of cancer genes (green and purple) in cells of a model breast tumor. See footnote for details.

Sarah A Webb profiles Franziska Michor’s work in applying mathematical modelling to gain a better understanding of cancer.

Based at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Michor is using mathematics, computer science, biology, and medicine to investigate the origins of cancer, relationships among cancer types and the emergence of drug-resistant tumors.

“While her work has attracted the attention of collaborators and funders, publishing her research has proved less straightforward, she says. Even though computational work can be done relatively quickly, Michor’s work relies on experiments done by her collaborators to verify that models are biologically or medically relevant. Because of these cross-disciplinary methods, a paper can include sequencing data, gene expression data, and growth data alongside the mathematical models. As with some other interdisciplinary fields, it’s often difficult to find the right journal or reviewers who can evaluate the combination of mathematics and biology as a cohesive whole rather than as individual components.” [my emphasis]

Consider how such a research paper could be published in an open-access repository along with original datasets and mathematical models. Identifying appropriate data storage, metadata and effective cross-linkages would be an interesting challenge.

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Footnote: The image above shows activity-independent nuclear position of cancer genes (green and purple) in cells of a model breast tumor. (JCB 180(1) TOC1) This image is available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Reference: Meaburn and Misteli (2008) J. Cell Biol. 180:39-50. Published on: January 14, 2008. doi: 10.1083/jcb.200708204. Read the full article at: jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/180/1/39 Image published on flickr.com by The JCB

If there really is an upward trend, how can we explain the result from Convenienceville? (Graph by Chris Lawson)

Chris Lawson demonstrates five ways to emphasise the positive.

Because of their inherent structure — small panels of art presented sequentially to tell a story — comics are a natural fit for new technologies like phones and iPads.

Creators and publishers are already finding ways to provide an enriched reading experience through these devices. What hasn’t yet emerged is a business model that will pay for the sustained development and production effort — unlike a novel, a strip comic never reaches “The End”.

This unusually candid blog post describes the process and the financial returns of expanding one of the web’s most popular strips into new mobile apps.

The Book Seller - photo by flickr.com user dropscu, CC-licensed

Oddly hypnotic, this Book Depository mashup displays a flag on a world map each time somebody purchases a book online.

Watch for a few minutes as your gaze is directed to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Canada… feel a small rush of camaraderie when someone chooses one of your favorite books…

Photo, above: Hidden Woman by flickr.com user turboalieno, CC-licensed

The Inspector General of the US Defence Department defines three types of public relations activity:

1. PsyOp (Psychological Operations) is “selective information” intended “to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals.”
2. Public Affairs is “truthful and factual unclassified information” intended for audiences that may include Americans.
3. Information Operations (IO) are intended “to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp” an opponent’s “decision making while protecting our own.” Information Operations can incorporate PsyOp, but not Public Affairs.

A Pentagon official, cited by Aerospace Daily in 2009, defines three types of “miscellaneous foreign contractors”:

1. signatories to classified contracts
2. vendors, like translators, who might be put at risk if their work with the American military were made public
3. small overseas transactions with vendors who do not have a unique business ID, called a DUNS number, on file with the US Government – “the donkey-rental guy in the middle of the desert,” for example

White desert near to Baharia, Egypt, photo by flickr.com user neijs, CC-licensed

Rendon company logo: not a donkey-rental guy

Imagine the confusion and amusing hijinks that ensue when some government PR contracts are redacted to replace the names of legitimate US companies with the generic term “miscellaneous foreign contractors”.

It is especially amusing when you realise the redactions are happening in the database that underpins usaspending.gov, a US Federal Government web site intended to increase the transparency of government decision-making and spending.

In fact, it seems spending on defence-related media and public relations contracts has become so transparent, it’s invisible.

In writing about these contracts Mark Prendergast consulted only public sources. No military, government or corporate official warned him off:

“Nonetheless, since detailed information was shared with various government officials in the course of making and explaining these inquiries, data that had been publicly accessible before has now been made more difficult or even impossible to find.”

Since 2000, US$41.6 billion has been paid out to “miscellaneous foreign contractors,” according to usaspending.gov. Tens of millions of dollars have been paid to PR companies for work in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. Prendergast points to several instances where the definitions above are being blurred or actively ignored by those contractors and the Defence Department that engages them.

Prendergast wrote four articles reviewing Stars and Stripes‘ coverage of the Rendon Group’s media-analysis work for the military in Afghanistan. The articles were published on 12 February, 24 February, 17 March and 12 July 2010. A fifth article was published on 15 July 2010 after the Pentagon protested that a recently-issued memo would not restrict public or Congressional access to defence-related information.

Related: in 2008 the New York Times published an article describing how retired Pentagon officials are employed as ‘military analysts’ to comment in mainstream media about the US Government’s military activities. These commentators’ financial ties to defence organisations are rarely, if ever, mentioned in relation to their commentary.

“…the job of the copy editor is to do the first pass on a piece, when the manuscript is ‘set up,’ that is, set in type for general distribution… The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes… [Next] One of the query proofreaders, on a day when she is not OK-ing a piece, reads the galleys of a piece that is scheduled for a future issue, fixing spelling and punctuation, of course, but also making more subtle suggestions… When a piece is scheduled to run in the magazine, we read it again, twice… The OK-er then has the duty of reading the piece yet again…”

That’s a total of five copy-editing passes for each article. “This takes as long as it takes,” says Norris, “and we don’t rush out at 6.00pm” when the working day is officially over.

Lori Franklin suggests the ideal copy editor is someone who worries about details and is comfortable with absurd conversations.

“The job has its perks—an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance—but it also has its side effects… Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a ‘pubic’ figure.”

Though she has moved on to another type of editing job, Lori Franklin confesses there’s still a strong copy-editing streak within:

“I can’t help it if I think unnecessary quotes are funny, as if signs are trying to be ironic. Or if I’m turned off by guys who spell it ‘definately.’”

Danielle Corsetto illustrated this personality type perfectly in her online comic, Girls With Slingshots — click image to see the full-size original:

Web comic, above: Girls With Slingshots, by Danielle Corsetto - episode 849

Photo, above: BJ945 Cuneiform by listentoreason, CC licensed

Centuries ago, says Clay Shirky:

“There was no point in educating people to read and write who weren’t also going to have access to books, and the people who had access to books were generally in centers of learning or churches. You couldn’t have mass literacy without also mass availability of things to read, which didn’t happen until after Gutenberg. So literacy went through this curious transition where it became more critical to society, and you could no longer make a living just by the ability to read and write.”

A similar transition is now happening for publishers, those who own the means of printing and distributing a written work. They must find a new way of making a living. Publishing has become the new literacy, says Shirky. Now that writers can publish their own work with little effort or expenditure, we readers must find new ways of determining the value of a piece of writing.

Clay Shirky sees broader implications in this cultural shift. Over the last several centuries mass communication and mass education produced a flood of information and activity in academia. To make the flood manageable, boundaries emerged between academic disciplines.

“These kinds of boundaries become really significant in two different areas. They become significant intellectually, and they also become significant for the development of things like tenure. So the really mundane [and the profound]… all get bound together tightly, and nobody inside the system can really imagine a change.”

Social media at a global scale, powerful search tools and other features of the Internet are lowering the disciplinary fences and changing the shape of academic inquiry:

“There are people who are willing to dive in and try stuff and are getting things done. But as people get better at things, we are starting to see the return of some kind of discipline–people specializing in different aspects of the service…

“But are the disciplinary models of the new medium going to be more like a network or are they going to be more like a series of silos? I’m going to bet on the network model, which is to say it’s likelier that disciplines in the world we’re entering are going to have not so much a canon that says, ‘This is the edge of what’s important,’ so much as, ‘This is the core of what we’re interested in wherever the currents come from.’”

Image, above: Radiation Infographic by byDavvi, CC-licensed

Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is, in part, the message. That, says Jan Swafford, is why ebooks will never completely replace print:

“E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

Some messages, of course, don’t require an emotional investment on the part of the reader.

Health of England - The New York Times iPad infographic -- click to see more images on Flickr

Known for the quality of its ‘infographics’ — visual representations of information that explain events or concepts — the New York Times is experimenting with new ways to present data. An ‘interactive infographic’ accompanied a recent NYT article on the north-south gap in England’s health care:

“The different ‘Health Wheels’ distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators. A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a ‘traffic light’ colour code identifying which regions score ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ or ‘average’ compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.”

You don’t need an iPad to see it — the NYT published a video and Flickr set of photos to show the infographic’s development process and the final product.

Other online publications have also experimented with animated infographics to explain complex concepts.