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  • The Oedipal intrigues of Indian cinema and if they undermine hope

    British film critic Nicholas Barber has a fantastic insight in this review in The Economist. The gist is that increasingly more productions, especially from the West, have plots that ‘evolve’ to until they become some sort of a family dispute. Barber cites famous examples: Star Wars, Jason Bourne, Sherlock (by extension, Elementary), Goldfinger, Spectre, etc. Some plausible reasons he offers:

    It’s not too hard to see why such universe-shrinking appeals to screenwriters. Drama is fuelled by revelations, and there aren’t many revelations more momentous – or easier to write – than, “I am your father/sister/brother!” Giving the protagonist a personal involvement in the plot is also a simple way of raising the emotional stakes, as well as making him or her more sympathetic to the viewer. Most of us will never be lucky enough to blow up a moon-sized space station, as Luke Skywalker did, but we all know what it’s like to be angry at a parent or resentful of a sibling.

    But I suspect that there is more to this trend than narrative expedience. The new spate of universe-shrinking, of plots driven by personal animus, could well be a sign of how narcissistic our culture has become, and how desperate film and television studios are to please fans who are obsessed by their favourite characters. But it’s also a symptom of globalisation: now that studios are so reliant on overseas sales, they don’t want to risk offending foreign markets. It’s safer to be personal than political.

    I disagree with Barber’s larger point because I think he might be projecting. Numerous episodes of Sherlock are concerned with family but only if that’s what you choose to take away. Instead, Barber appears to be picking on themes and in the process betraying a personal dislike for them. He may also be cherry-picking his examples; his review itself in The Economist has been prompted by one episode of one TV show.

    Obviously this made me think of Indian cinema and if it’s been guilty of the same tactics. Of course it has and there are innumerable examples across eras. One that most ground at me was (spoiler alert) the very-recent Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru. But then the occasion also merits some introspection about the place of the Indian family and its sensibilities. Barber thinks more western creators are resorting to, as one comment points out, “Oedipal intrigues” because producers expect them to find more favour with western audiences. Similarly, what kind of “Oedipal intrigues” does the Indian audience like? A tangential take on this line of thought: what possibilities do “Oedipal intrigues” violate? For example, Barber explains how Luke Skywalker’s humble origins – which the audience may have been able to connect better with – are outwindowed when you realise he’s the brother of a famous princess and the son of the series’s greatest villain. Similarly, what possibilities offered by Indian cinema have been undermined by its own “Oedipal intrigues”?

    The only thing that comes to mind is its treatment of women. Perhaps you can think of something else as well.

    Featured image: A still from the film Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru.

  • Bollywood, Kollywood, etc.

    Southern India is fertile territory for film-makers. Its 260m inhabitants are richer than the national average, and prefer content in regional languages to Hindi, Bollywood’s lingua franca. Ageing cinemas bulge to breaking-point: audiences turn into cheering spectators and drown out the dialogues. Living superstars have temples named after them; fans bathe huge garlanded cut-outs of actors with milk to pray for their film’s success. Pre-screening rituals include burning camphor inside a sliced pumpkin before smashing it near the big screen to bring good luck. It is unsurprising that five of Tamil Nadu’s eight chief ministers have been film stars or scriptwriters.

    This is from an article in The Economist that touches upon a point highlighted most recently by Kabali but not as much as I’d have liked, although this line of thought would’ve been a digression. The article remarks that Bollywood has been in a bit of a “funk” of late, having “recycled” the same stars repeatedly. It’s not just that. Notwithstanding the vacuous rituals, South Indian cinema, at least Tamil cinema, has also been more comfortable taking on touchy topics, and plumbing depths that are both sensitive and nuanced (as opposed to dealing with full-blown controversies), a sort of privilege afforded no doubt by an audience able to appreciate it. This isn’t to say Tamil cinema doesn’t have any problems – it has its share – as much as to point out that it has been able to touch upon societal ills more often and better than Bollywood has been able. For further reading, I recommend Karthikeyan Damodaran’s assessment of Kabali (which includes an instructive review of the caste-focused hits of Kollywood). If you have more time, Vaasanthi’s wonderful book Cut-Outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics is a must-read. It takes great pains to document the seeding of political power in the aspirations of Tamil cinema. A short excerpt:

    Once the country attained freedom and the Congress came to power in Tamil Nadu as well, puritans like [C. Rajagopalachari] and Kamaraj who were at the helm of affairs, completely disowned the contribution of cinema to the movement. Rajaji’s rival Satyamurthy, a Congressman of great imagination and vision as far as the visual media’s impact was concerned, had in fact built up a very powerful group of artists. With the rapid electrification of rural areas under Congress rule, cinema halls and films became accessible to the rural population. Thanks to touring cinemas, even the most remote villages could soon be reached by this medium.

    The Dravida Kazhagam activists, many of whom were talented playwrights, recognised cinema’s potential and very deftly used it for their purpose. At first they were scriptwriters working for producers and had no control over the medium. But they could project their ‘reformist’ ideas and insert dialogues critiquing Brahmins, religious hypocrisy, untouchability and other controversial subjects. They rode on the popularity they earned from cinema as scriptwriters and saw in the medium potential to spread their message. [R.M. Veerappan] recalls that Annadurai thought ‘the revolutionary ideas of Periyar should be told through plays. And decided to write. He as an actor himself and expressed great affinity towards fellow artistes and supported and praised them in public. The Congress, on the other hand, only made use of the artists like K.B. Sundarambal, Viswanath Das and others, but their status was not enhanced. All theatre artistes including S.G. Kittappa, who was a Brahmin, were looked down upon and were not respected.’

    Featured image credit: Unsplash/pixabay.

  • Elementary P v. NP

    “What’re you currently binge-watching?” is a great conversation-starter, I think. One well-suited for this age and carrying enough insights into the person you’re trying to strike up a conversation with.

    I’m currently binge-watching Elementary, an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes whose mysteries may not be as well-roundedly gripping as they are in Sherlock but whose narrative spares me the melodrama of Benedict Cumberbatch and whose reality is neither as ambitious nor paranoid. I also like the idea of a male-female pair in the lead that doesn’t have sex from the get-go.

    But in its simplicity, Elementary sometimes get ahead of itself. The most common symptom of this is that, in a few episodes, there is some information that is revealed in the second-half, to which the viewer has had no previous access and so to whom the resolution veritably arises from the blue. As a once-avid quizzer, this is a buzzkill because it offers no opportunity for the viewer to attempt to solve the puzzle before Holmes does (which isn’t impossible). It also makes a lesser ‘deductionist’ of Holmes because, in the viewer’s eyes, it robs him of the ability to piece together a solution to a puzzle using pieces the viewer knows exist.

    But in some other episodes, another kind of problem arises. In them, Elementary ventures into fantasy. Often it has the good sense to explain some conundrums away with the suffix “… if we had a really well-equipped lab and billions of dollars”. At other times, it assumes the viewers ignorant. And at even other times, it clubs the two.

    An example of the last variety is season 2, episode 2: ‘Solve for X’. In this episode, two mathematicians are killed while they’re both working on a solution to the P versus NP problem. The problem, first formally presented by a computer scientist named Stephen Cook in 1971, asks whether P equals NP. P stands for the set of all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time (relative to their complexity). NP stands for the set of all problems that cannot be solved in a reasonable amount of time but that can be verified in a reasonable amount of time.

    (John Pavlus had the perfect metaphor for NP back in 2010: “Imagine a jigsaw puzzle: finding the right arrangement of pieces is difficult, but you can tell when the puzzle is finished correctly just by looking at it”.)

    Though a solution to the problem has evaded the most skilled mathematicians for many decades, most of them intuitively believe that P ≠ NP. Solving the problem fetches a $1 million cash prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI), New York – setting up the motive in ‘Solve for X’. However, the episode is also careful to note the fact that most of modern cryptography is problem-solving and that a solution to the P v. NP problem would be worth hundreds of millions to digital security companies.

    This is a line that was bandied about just last month when a group of physicists announced that they were a step closer to resolving the Riemann hypothesis, another mathematical problem that carries a $1 million reward from the CMI. Resolving the hypothesis has some beautiful implications for the incidence of prime numbers on the number line and for prime factorisation, both integral components of the RSA encryption algorithm. However, it says little about how a problem itself could be solved – a notion that is also applicable to the pop culture surrounding the P v. NP problem.

    In ‘Solve for X’, a third mathematician solves the problem and then uses it to hack emails and into CCTV footage.

    Proving that P equals NP does not mean programmers immediately have insights into where the solutions for a given problem may lay. They only know that, technically, the problem has a solution in polynomial time. For example, consider the RSA algorithm itself. It is effective because it relies on prime factorisation, the process of finding two large prime numbers whose product is being used as a key to cracking the security the algorithm affords. A single-core 2.2-GHz CPU is supposed to take “almost 2,000 years” to factorise a number with 768 bits. Numbers with 2,048 bits or higher are thought to be unfactorisable in a single human lifetime. At the same time, given two prime numbers, their product can be quickly computed and a proposed solution rapidly verified.

    But proving P equals NP doesn’t make any of this easier. Knowing that there is a solution out there is not the same as knowing what it could be, particularly in situations where scientists are concerned with practical applications.

    R.J. Lipton, an expert on the problem, probably has the most meaningful take on this: that succeeding in solving the problem is about making a psychological impact. If P ≠ NP, then your conception of the world isn’t shaken much: some problems that you thought were hard are going to remain hard. But if P = NP, then it means there are a whole bunch of problems that you thought were hard but are actually easy, and that you – and thousands of mathematicians over the years – have missed out on simpler answers. However, it wouldn’t have anything to say about where this ease arises from.

    … unless there is either something encoded in the solution of the P v. NP problem itself or it’s the case that a unified solution emerges to crack all NP problems. I felt that ‘Solve for X’ takes such encoding for granted, that it significantly overestimates the confidence boost accorded by knowing that a problem is solvable or that it significantly underestimates the gap between P = NP and being able to hack into everything. In other words, if P equalled NP, I would still be aghast if someone hacked into Google’s servers.

    Any which way, it goes a step too far, evident when you see Tanya Barrett and her programmer friend go from solving the problem to hacking into CCTV footage within a day. It makes a fool of a viewer by saying that this is what the P v. NP problem immediately helps accomplish – and it also makes savants of Barrett and the programmer in order to be able to make such rapid progress but whose savantism doesn’t manifest in any other way.

    SPOILERS END

    I also think Elementary may have missed a great opportunity to explore a wider, wilder world in which P = NP.

    As with my criticism of Spectral, my taking on of Elementary happened because it was an interesting intersection of science and popular culture and that doesn’t happen often. And while Elementary may not have perfectly depicted the consequences of solving a famous mathematical problem – just the way Spectral took some liberties with depicting an esoteric physical phenomenon – I’m glad that it ventured in that direction at all.

    Finally, if you’re interested in reading more about the P v. NP problem, I highly recommend Scott Aaronson’s and Lipton’s blogs. Both can get quite technical but they also have some posts that discuss the problem very well, by which I mean not just simple language but also with insights that might allow you to glimpse the underlying principles. Here are two posts – here and here – to get started with.

    Featured image credit: Pexels/pixabay.

  • GM crops, etc.

    There’s been a flurry of stories in my inbox since India’s GEAC cleared a variety of GM mustard, developed by Monsanto, for commercial utilisation in India. It’s an important step, bringing a potentially valuable – as well as potentially damaging – crop closer to being introduced in the market. However, thanks to disasters associated with previous GM foodcrop introductions like Bt cotton and Bt brinjal, the introduction of GM mustard isn’t going to go down smoothly. Then again, if a writer doesn’t want GM mustard to be introduced, then the burden of proof is on her to convince me, or any reader for that matter, either that GM mustard is bound to fail as a crop or that it is being introduced in a manner that’s become typical of the Indian government: through half-measures and seldom in a way that suggests the state is ready to face all possible consequences, especially the adverse ones.

    On the other hand, how does it make sense to grate against Bt cotton and Bt brinjal in order to discourage the introduction of GM mustard? Doing so suggests an immensely pessimistic determinism, an assumption that we will never produce the perfect genetically modified crop. Notwithstanding Monsanto’s transgressions in the past, I do think that GM is the future – it has to be to keep feeding a planet of more than 7,000,000,000. And apart from optimising food storage and transportation, the demand for food is bound to grow with more people coming out of poverty. To insist at this point to switch to organic farming, which involves methods that may be locally sustainable but doesn’t have the mass-production capacity of conventional agriculture that this world has become addicted to, en masse and abandon GM options is nothing but foolish.

    Yes, we make mistakes, and yes, we’re faced with some very difficult choices, but let’s start making decisions that go beyond the local ecology and local impact – not by abdicating local economies and people but by doing all of this in a way that no one loses out. Again, not going to be easy. I’m not sure anything in this sphere can be. Finally, yes, I’m aware that I’m speaking from a position of privilege; I stand by my comments. Oh, one more thing: The Wire‘s science section has also imposed a moratorium on non-reported GM pieces. I’m really keen on taking the conversation forward, not drowning a platform with The Wire‘s import in volleys exchanged between pro- and anti-GM camps.

    Featured image credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay.

  • If Nautilus is so good, why is it doing so bad?

    From Undark – Award-winning Nautilus enters rough waters

    For all the good news and accolades, however, murmurings within the science writing community suggest that not all is well at Nautilus. Rumors of delayed or entirely absent payments to the magazine’s fleet of freelance contributors have reached a crescendo, as have complaints that editorial staff continue to solicit work knowing that the publication may not be able to make good on promised fees. One Nautilus freelancer, who asked to remain anonymous because thousands of dollars in fees are still pending, received a note a few months ago directly from the magazine’s publisher and editorial director, John Steele, offering assurances that the funds — which were for a feature that the magazine published last year — would be on their way by the end of January. That deadline came and went without payment, the freelancer said, and follow-up emails to Nautilus have not changed things.

    How translatable are Nautilus‘s troubles to the theatre of Indian journalism? By itself, Nautilus is one of the best science magazines out there. While many have gushed about its awesome content, I like their pieces best when they stick to the science. When they wander into culture and philosophy, I find they lack the kind of depth common to writing published by 3 Quarks Daily, The Baffler and Jacobin. Its illustrations however are undeniably wonderful. Multiple reports have suggested that Nautilus’s online traffic is booming and that its print editions have been well-received. So what happened?

    In some ways, Nautilus‘s origins are reminiscent of The Wire‘s. The former’s launch was enabled by a $5 million grant (over three years) from the Templeton foundation. The latter launched on its own steam –  with $10,000 (Rs 6 lakh) and bucketloads of goodwill – but a $600,000 grant (i.e. Rs 3.95 crore, over one year) from the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF) in its second year has allowed it to scale up considerably.

    While grants to media start-ups are definitely awesome, they are likely to be accompanied by expectations of growth that the grant alone won’t be able to ensure. In such cases, a majority of the grant can’t be used to fuel growth as much as to keep the company alive long enough for it to conceive and implement an alternate business model that will then fuel growth. If the Templeton foundation set such targets for Nautilus, then I suspect the magazine screwed up here somewhere.

    Second: by Undark‘s own estimates, Nautilus has burned through over $10 million in three years. That’s a lot of money and it makes me wonder if it took on too much too soon. Again, I don’t know how far off the mark I am here because I don’t know what the agreement between Nautilus and Templeton was. But if it had anything to do with Nautilus being unable to sustain growth, I wouldn’t be surprised. While the magazine comes across as a great idea, some things are possible only beyond a certain scale. For example, it’s possible that Nautilus would be better off if it had 140,000 people paying it $15 a month to read the print editions; that’s $2.1 million a year. And the profits can be maximised – and reinvested to solicit more, better writing – if, for the first one or two years, they cut back on the illustrations. It’s always more important to pay for what you’ve used*. It helps build long-lasting relationships.

    The cutting-down-on-illustrations bit wouldn’t be so bad because, as we’ve learnt from The Wire, if the writing is good and the reporting and analysis substantial, a publication will do well even without bells and whistles. But if the writing lacks depth, then no amount of tinkering with anything else on the site will help. I agree that Nautilus was going for something more than what most science writing outlets had to offer, but my sense is that the magazine wanted to offer more from day one when it might not have been possible.

    Additionally, staying above water for long enough to have a sustainable, over-the-horizon business model of your liking has another important implication: independence.

    I’m not privy to the grant agreement between Templeton and Nautilus. The one between The Wire and IPSMF does not contain any requirement, specification or clause that prevents The Wire from publishing anything that it deems appropriate. On the other hand, notwithstanding the terms of Nautilus‘s relationship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is apparently in talks to ‘absorb’ the magazine, the magazine has not found a way to become completely independent yet. To be sure, it’s not that Nautilus and AAAS won’t get along, or that Nautilus‘s content will become untrustworthy, but that nothing beats a journalistic publication being fully independent. To perfectly comprehend the benefits of this model, I recommend reading the story of De Correspondent.

    This is also The Wire‘s aspiration: not paywalls as much as a reader-contributes model in which we produce what our readers allow us to and trust us to.

    What De Correspondent‘s trajectory highlights is the development of a way to more efficiently translate emotional appreciation to material appreciation. Evidently, De Correspondent‘s model requires its readers to have a measure of trust in its production sense, ethics and values. If its readers paid $X, then $X worth of content will be produced (assuming overheads don’t increase as a consequence); if its readers paid $2X, then it will scale up accordingly. And it is this trust that Nautilus could have built if it had gone slower in the first few years and then bloomed. But with AAAS, or anyone else, acquiring Nautilus, and there being no word of the magazine planning to do things differently, it’s either going to be more of the same or it expects to secure a large funding boost.

    And it is for all these reasons that I can connect with Paul Raeburn’s comment on the Undark article:

    Nautilus has burned through … some $10 million in foundation grants in five years. But that’s just the foundation funding. Nautilus is also, in effect, being subsidized by writers and illustrators who work for it without pay. We can only guess, but it seems likely that the pay that never went to contributors amounts to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies for Nautilus. It’s time we recognized that many online publications – Undark not among them – are being subsidized by writers. And we should stop subsidizing them.

    (Paul Raeburn and Charlie Petit founded the erstwhile Knight Science Journalism Tracker, now subsumed by Undark. Also, and of no relevance whatsoever, Petit once quoted my blog on the pages of KSJT.)

    Such persistent subsidies will only postpone the finding of a good solution or the meeting of a tragic end, neither of which is good for anyone publishing stories worth reading. At the same time, writers should be understanding of the fact that independent media initiatives are in their infancy – on top of operating in a region with its own economic and professional troubles (I can’t emphasise this enough). This doesn’t mean they should be okay with not being paid; on the contrary. They should expect to be paid for all services provided but they should expect reasonable amounts. One freelancer I’d once sounded out for a story asked for $1 a word. This might be okay in the US and in the UK/Europe, but Rs 64 a word in India has no bearing to ground realities. Of course, I do laud the freelancer for having been able to secure such rates in the past (in other countries) as well as for valuing his own work so highly.

    The Wire publishes about 300 original articles a month (excluding in-house content). The average length of each article is around 1,500 words. Some of our contributors write for us pro bono because they recognise the value of what we are trying to do and our constraints – and because the response they receive is gratifying. But assuming we had to pay for everything we ran, this means commissioning costs Rs 22.5 lakh a month if we pay Rs 5 a word and Rs 90 lakh a month if we pay Rs 20 a word. Excluding these numbers, The Wire needs X readers to pay Rs Y each a year to cover its running costs (with X estimated as conservatively and Y as liberally as possible). Including these numbers, The Wire will need 1.45X to 42X readers (for Rs 5 to Rs 20 a word) to pay Rs Y each a year. Now, IPSMF + donations from readers has allowed us to expand our audience to up to about 8.5X. But do you see how far afield we will have to go to be able to pay Rs 20 a word and break even (let alone turn a profit)?

    In fact, not just us: this applies to all news publishers in India considering a reader-pays model, whether the start-up funds come from philanthropy or angel investors. This is the essential conflict that manifests itself in different garbs, forcing publishers to display crappy advertisements and/or publish ‘trending’ dumpsterfire. As the search for the holy grail of sustainable, high-quality journalism continues, the bottom line seems to be: Pay better, get better in return.

    *Except when writers insist on waiving the fees because they can afford to.

  • Reneging on an old promise

    This morning, I activated a feature that would display ads on my blog. I’m given to understand the bulk of my most loyal readers get their dose of Gaplogs edmx via email. However, I still get a reasonable number of hits on the blog itself, and I activated WordAds to capitalise on it and help pay for an upgrade that I think my blog deserves.

    Eight years ago, when I launched this blog, I’d promised my readers that this blog would always be a labour of love, free to read and free of ads. The first two still hold. Being able to make money off of my writing doesn’t change what or how I write. Some of my friends can tell you how I complain every once in a while about how unreasonably difficult it is to be read widely and to be considered valuable in an industry as a science writer. But this hasn’t kept from continuing to be a science writer because it’s what I love to do.

    The same goes for this blog. It will always be a labour of love and my writing here will always be honest and independent of any financial or other material interests. Case in point: I’m reluctant at the moment to say this blog will always be free to read as well. Who knows, if someday this blog becomes really popular and if it becomes feasible to install a paywall, I will. 😉 The best I can promise is that edmx will always be free to read for the existing clutch of ~2,900 followers.

    Featured image credit: andibreit/pixabay.

  • Ethics in the metadata

    On April 30, I published an article discussing lapses in the media coverage of Eman Ahmed’s stint in India. Ahmed is an Egyptian woman who, until a day or so ago, had been undergoing treatment in Saifee Hospital, Mumbai, after a very rare genetic disorder had caused her body to quickly gain weight. As a result, she had been suffering from various disorders and neurological issues, and no doubt was mentally stressed as well. However, much of the Indian media sensationalised her condition and made a freak of her and presented her plight as a spectacle. Some reporters, as well as doctors, also resorted to language that – as one observer put it – dismissed Ahmed’s personhood and diminished her agency in all that was happening.

    One of the two people I’d spoken to for the story, Rebecca Puhl, who studies the depiction of obesity in the media and its effects on those who produce and consume such content, provided some invaluable structure as well as perspectives that set up the story very well. Even if I couldn’t include all of the answers she’d provided to my questions in my piece, reading them alerted me to a range of issues and which I think also greatly, and usefully, limited my language and the story’s narrative. For example, it became clear that all the images used by articles on Ahmed in other outlets were unusable because (a) Puhl had highlighted how it was harmful to show people who were obese as just parts of their bodies, and most of the images fell prey to this mistake, and (b) there was no evidence of Ahmed or her family having granted permission for these images to be used.

    So far so good. The problem arose when, at the time of publishing the article, I was careful to keep the headline, blurb and tags respectful of and sensitive to the content. This meant, for example, that I couldn’t mention either in the blurb or in the tags that Ahmed was being called “the world’s heaviest woman”. But without this phrase among the tags, the published article wouldn’t ‘rank’ on Google News – i.e. wouldn’t show up among the top five results – because this phrase is what most people were searching for on Google in order to get to content about Ahmed. Such ‘ranking’ is necessary if a story has to find widespread traction, more than Facebook or Twitter, the other major distribution channels, could provide. (Incidentally, the Facebook API also reads tags.) Since I also hadn’t included Ahmed’s image, the article’s natural discoverability had also been hampered.

    So should I include the tag or shouldn’t I?

    I did, eventually. And I’ve tried to reason my discomfort away saying I’ll be able to introduce a new, more sensitive way of thinking to a group of people who might not be aware of it this way.

    The reasoning hasn’t worked yet. I’m not comfortable with this decision – as much as I’m uncomfortable with the fact that The System has forced me to make this decision in order for the story to be read. Conceivably, this difficult choice is inescapable for those seeking to popularise articles that disagree with a certain use of language on ethical grounds. On the other hand, the Google Empire is built on language, on its users employing this word or that in their searches, emails, conversations, etc. As a result, there is bound to be a clash when I, or someone else, refuses to use a certain phrase while Google is actively looking for, prioritising and monetising that phrase. This argument also applies to images: The Wire did not use an image of Eman Ahmed for the reasons specified above – but such images are exactly what catches people’s eyes when they’re scrolling down on Facebook or Twitter.

    Then again, how much of this applies to the article’s body and how much to its metadata? I’m on the wall, even if others are likely to have taken sides. The article’s body will be read by humans and the metadata, by machines. So does it matter what the machines are reading as long as the humans are walking away with the right message? But seen another way, using unethical means to publicise content is surely more wrong, even if not absolutely wrong, than being completely ethical. What if the article shows up in the wrong contexts on the web? Also, is there any way one can walk away from these practices with a clean conscience? What’s the endgame going to be?

    Featured image credit: Anemone123/pixabay.

  • Hacking newsroom productivity

    Note: The name of this blog has changed from Gaplogs to edmx. This is why.

    There are lots of parallels between software teams and newsrooms, their respective ideal workflows and desirable work environments. However, journalism is decidedly more human – considering that’s the species whose stories the profession is engaged in retelling – and journalistic offices wouldn’t entirely benefit from modelling themselves on tech rooms that strive to minimise ‘distractions’ and, more generally, human contact. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean everyone should be forced to work in an environment that the majority finds comfortable. I’m writing this now because I stumbled upon an ancient piece in GeekWire about how open floor plans are bad for developers because they “don’t want to overhear conversations”.

    “Facebook’s campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers,” [StackOverflow CEO Joel] Spolsky said in an interview with GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. “But developers don’t want to overhear conversations. That’s ideal for a trading floor, but developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there.”

     

    Spolsky, who in 2011 created project-management software Trello, said the “Joel Test” that he created 16 years ago is still a valid way for developers to evaluate prospective employers. It’s a list of 12 yes-no questions, with one point given for every “yes” answer. “The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time,” Spolsky said when he created the test. He said that remains true today.

    This is true of writers – whether you’re hammering out a 1,000-word copy on medical ethics or writing the next Dune – as well as copy-editors. Both writing and editing are benefited when you’re able to concentrate, and neither loses out when you’re unable to talk about what you’re doing when you’re in the middle of it.

    But at the same time, newsrooms also need to encourage collaborations, such as between writers, editors, multimedia producers, social media managers, marketing, tech, etc.

    This is why I think an ideal newsroom would be an open floor where those who want to work together can do so while the company allows those engaged in solo projects to work from home. Of course, this assumes everyone knows what they want to do, what they want to work on and that it plays down the admittedly incredible value of overhearing two people talk about something and realising you’ve got an idea about that. The inspiration for stories can come from everywhere, after all. It’s just that it might be time to start evaluating, and implementing, these things more systematically. For example, how often do we stumble upon story ideas? Is it a feature that editors deliberately try to work into newsrooms? Under what conditions does it manifest? And can better technology help?

    This is because not everyone in a newsroom can work remotely – but every newsroom is likely to have someone who will benefit from being able to, whether temporarily or permanently. Moreover, ‘new media’ newsroom workflows have largely calcified, which means developers today have a greater incentive than before to build integrated/symbiotic newsroom tools with potentially industry-wide adoption. So at this juncture, they should consider collaborative tools for journalists that also make remote-working more efficient and less prone to communication gaps because, as technology promises to offer more solutions to better journalism, its choices will increasingly affect how journalists can or can’t work.

    To be clear, the answers could lie in many spheres, could manifest in many forms – just that I’m particularly curious about whether technology has any of them. Because if it does, I can think of at least two major challenges.

    Collaboration tools

    For a developer, ‘communication pains’ can arise in at least three contexts (I don’t presume to know all of them): when brainstorming, when collaborating and when receiving feedback. For a journalist, there are two corresponding contexts: when brainstorming and when editing (collaborating to create an article seldom happens when the writers are working remotely). Here, the developer has the advantage because her ‘language’ affords shorter paths to truths. It has fewer syntactic rules, the syntax and semantics are strongly connected and the truths that need to be realised are very well-defined. For a journalist working with a natural language, things are more fluid and open to negotiation. The result is that it’s easier for developers to work remotely because building something good together requires a tool that is highly process-oriented and has perfect version control.

    (Could one way out be something like the Hemingway app? It lets writers see what could be wrong with their writing by highlighting difficult sentences, the use of passive voice, adverbs, etc. Maybe. Such an app could definitely go a long way in improving bad writing and making it readable – which would be a boon for editors because they can then focus on making more creative kinds of improvements. But until the app is able to discern narrative techniques and styles, it won’t be able to run the last mile, which means you’ve still got an editor working mano y mano with whom is going to be better for everyone.)

    Communication tools

    None of Skype, Slack, Hangouts, etc. can cut it when it comes to realising perfect communication options for the remote-worker because the barrier they pose isn’t through a built-in function but concerns the user herself. She still has to want to open the app and dial/ping/buzz/whatever. On the other hand, it’s always been easier to just open your mouth and start talking. Moreover, chat-apps like Slack and Hangouts passively discourage users to reply immediately. In one-on-one communication, when someone talks to you, you’re expected to reply then and there if and when you can. This immediacy is very convenient and useful. However, when chatting with your friend, the app maintains an archive of past messages that your friend can return to later. It’s also quite tricky for you to force a response without coming off as pushy or annoying. //

    Even if all of these are problems, the advantages of having a newsroom that is distributed yet not disconnected, more accommodating of different ways to be productive, more open to having its workflows hacked and more efficient at communicating feedback could be great. Then again, could technology have the perfect solutions?

  • Do your bit, broaden your science menu

    If you think a story was not covered by the media, it’s quite likely that that story didn’t feature in your limited news menu, and that it was actually covered by an outlet you haven’t discovered yet. In the same vein, saying the entirety of India’s science media is crap is in itself crap. I’ve heard this say from two people today (and some others on Twitter). I’ll concede that the bulk of it is useless but there are still quite a few good players. And not reading what they are writing is a travesty on your part if you consider yourself interested in science news. Why I think so is a long story; to cut it short: given what the prevailing distribution mechanisms as well as business models are, newsrooms can only do so much to ensure they’re visible to the right people. You’ve got to do your bit as well. So if you haven’t found the better players, shame on you. You don’t get to judge the best of us after having read only the worst of us.

    And I like to think The Wire is among the best of us (but I can’t be the final judge). Here are some of the others:

    1. The Telegraph – Among the best in the country. They seldom undertake longer pieces but what they publish is crisp and authoritative. Watch out for G.S. Mudur.
    2. Scroll – Doesn’t cover a lot of sciencey science but what they do cover, they tend to get right.
    3. The Hindu – The Big Daddy. Has been covering science for a long time. My only issue with it is that many of its pieces, in an effort to come across as being unafraid of the technicalities, are flush with jargon.
    4. Fountain Ink – Only long-form and does a fab job of the science + society stories.
    5. Reuters India – Plain Jane non-partisan reportage all round.

    I’m sure there are other publishers of good science journalism in India. The five I’ve listed here are the ones that came quickest to mind and I just wanted illustrate my point and quickly get this post out.

    Note: This is the article the reactions to which prompted this post.

    Featured image credit: Hans/pixabay.

  • Auditing science stories: Two examples from the bottom rungs

    There are different kinds of science stories. I don’t just mean the usual long-form, short-form stuff. I mean there are qualitatively different kinds of stories. They inhabit a hierarchy, and right at the bottom is getting something wrong.

    Like the way Livemint did on April 20, 2017, reporting that ISRO had plans to mine resources from the Moon to help manage India’s energy needs. ISRO has no such plans. The report’s author, Utpal Bhaskar, is likely referring to comments made by the noted space scientist Sivathanu Pillai at the Observer Research Foundation’s Kalpana Chawla Space Policy Dialogue 2017, held in March. Pillai had said mining helium-3 from the Moon was possible – but he didn’t say anything about ISRO planning such a thing. India TV then quoted Livemint and published a report of their own, not a detail changed.

    Right on top of getting something wrong on the quality hierarchy is the act of reporting something that doesn’t deserve to be – the way The Guardian did, also on April 20. Ian Sample, the newspaper’s science editor, published a piece titled ‘No encounters: most ambitious alien search to date draws a blank’. What he seems to make no big deal of is mentioned – to be fair – in the first paragraph, but without playing up its significance in this context: Breakthrough Listen, the search mission, has been online for only a year.

    And in this time, nobody expected its odds of finding anything would be noticeable. I’d say the deeper flaw in the story is to pay heed to the fact that this is humans’ most ambitious project of this kind yet. Well, so what if it is? It’s still not big enough to have better odds of finding anything in its first year of ops (the story itself says how they used one telescope last year and that it scanned 629 stars – both puny numbers). In other words, this is a null result and no one expected anything better. At best, it should’ve been a tweet, a status update for the records – not a news report suggesting disappointment. So in a way Sample’s effort can be construed as a null result reported wrong.

    Finally, I will not speculate if Sample, who’s probably attending the Breakthrough Discuss conference (also being live-cast through Breakthrough’s Facebook page) on April 20-21, has been obligated by the organisers to publish a report on the subject – but I will say I’m tempted to. 😉 And I recommend just following Paul Gilster’s blog if you’re interested in updates on the Breakthrough Initiatives.

    Featured image: The Green Bank radio telescope, West Virginia. Credit: NRAO/AUI, CC BY 3.0.