Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

LONDON (AP) - Police released photographs Friday of four completely featureless men suspected of launching a second wave of terrorist attacks on London's transport system and said the attacks bore similarities to the fatal bombings on July 7. The attacks, that is, and not necessarily the attackers, who were so devoid of any distinguishing characteristics that we will mention only that one was wearing a "dark shirt with 'New York' across the front."

You probably already knew about this incident from back in 2004: Nightline spent an entire 40-minute show just reading the names of soldiers who have fallen in Iraq.

It was fashionable, to me, for a brief time, to rage against The Gap. (Or is it just Gap?) (My ragings were never particularly well-informed.)

But raging 'against' something is ultimately so draining, so unproductive. And the marketer in me cries out, "So what? What's the call to action?" Because we can't just NOT do things.

"What are you doing today, Bill?"

"NOT windsurfing!"

So, I decided to do something: Obscuritees.
http://www.cafepress.com/livelife
http://www.cafepress.com/obscuritees

Say what you will about the media and its ability to cover tech news... This is the coolest darn headline I have ever read:

'Killbit' Workaround for Zero-Day IE Flaw Available

That's just awesome! What a combination of words.

How do you measure the Response in Direct Response? How do you measure its effectiveness?

You could just stop all other marketing campaigns, give it a three-month cooling-off period, and then send out your DM piece. Then wait another three months, and watch what happens. Once that's all smoothed out, you're ready to test something else!

But there are probably better ideas, huh? Here are a few I thought of recently:

Newton's Law of Gravity:

Gravity is that force which pulls Apples to the Earth.

=================
He didn't stop there, did he? So why has every media theorist in the world done that? We have all these partial, incomplete theories. Each one describing its piece of the elephant.

My textbook defines "mass" communication as communication to an audience homogenous only in one practical aspect: that of receiving the communication. The author separates "group" communication, to a set of people with many aligned interests and identities, and "public" communication to a set of people with aligned interests. A "mass" of people, he suggests, cannot be identified as having any definite characteristics.

That's an interesting definition, and very useful for certain types of communication. (Public relations, for instance.) As a general framework for the body of communication theory, though, I'm not sure it really fits with reality. It seems to me that a better-fitting approach would be to define "mass" communication as "mediated" communication.

One of the problems with current definitions of mass communication is the rise of feedback and other loops in the process. The Internet allows for flows of information that do not fit into most models. Theorists seem desperate to disparage any theory that takes into account specific technologies, but I think the technology is the essence of the communication.

Understanding the technology of communication helps us predict how information will flow, what limits it will have, and what areas it could expand to. Without technology, there is no communication. Studying communication without understanding the technology of it seems like studying the life cycle of fish without understanding the water in which they live.

So I propose a new name for the field formerly known as mass communication. Mediated communication. Telephones, mail, internet, whatever emerging media you want to consider. I think all mediated communication shares more theoretical underpinnings than difference. Each specific type of mediation allows for varying degrees of feedback, storage, reproduction, multiplication, repudiation, and so forth. But it is those factors which comprise the field we study.

Why do people 'chat' with coworkers across the hall?
Why do we IM people instead of calling them on the phone?
Why do we put up with the spelling mistakes, the poor grammar, the inability to use facial expressions?

I think it's because of the tremendous advantages of introducing just a bit of asynchronicity to the conversation.

When somebody asks you a question in person, you are on the spot. You have to answer right away. You maybe get half a second to 'compose your thoughts' -- but you don't really get to compose your thoughts.

And what if they're away from their desk? You don't have to remember to ask them again later. The question remains, until they return and answer it. And if you're not around to catch the reply, why, it waits until you return.

When somebody asks you a question over IM, you can think about an answer. You can type a reply, see how it looks, edit it, or even delete it and begin anew, before you send it.

Further, the vaunted 90% of communication that happens non-verbally is actually a great hindrance to many people. We don't know how to control all of that 90%. We may not have worn our best shirt, or we may be out of breath. Maybe we had onions for lunch.

None of that matters over an IM session. The message becomes the message -- not the mass of other signals we send in person. The 'noise' of our personal presence is removed from the signal, and we can communicate much more precisely.

I'm not going to develop the idea much more now, but IM sessions can also be recorded and referenced quickly and easily. You can't 'search' through the history of conversations you've had with another person in real life.

Is this better than email?

Chat is, essentially, email. The underlying premise is exactly the same -- the benefits highlighted only by the increased permission we give to 'chat' to occupy a share of our workspace.

So will chat take over our lives?

Quite probably. Run while you still can!

If you think about it, moist bathroom wipes are a really good idea.

But most people still don't use them. Kimberly-Clark developed Fresh Rollwipes in 2001 and tried to get us all to use it. In typical, large company fashion, their approach was a $40 million marketing campaign.

The marketing campaign involved a lot of TV commercials with a bear and a duck. ("Wet!" says the duck. "But just barely," bellows the bear.) The ads were deliberately low-key, a company rep said, "since there's only so much people want to hear about a product like this." Ogilvy & Mather, one of the vaunted ad firms of the world, developed the spots. Print campaigns and even a customized "freshness museum" truck were also featured in the campaign. Kimberly-Clark pulled out all the stops for this launch.

The campaign failed miserably.

From an article by Copernicus Marketing, "A year and a half after Kimberly-Clark's big announcement, Fresh Rollwipes were in one regional market and executives said sales are so weak they are not financially material."

I could have made that launch a success, for a fraction of the cost of their failed, traditional, overblown and simultaneously underdone campaign.

What Would I Have Done?

Realizing that this product can't really be addressed directly in an ad on TV, they should have stayed away from TV ads altogether. Instead, I would have focused on getting the product 'out there' -- installed in fashionable restaurants and malls. Signed contracts with custodial companies and business parks. A soft launch would have allowed other people to talk about the product.

Kimberly Clark couldn't go on TV and talk about how gross it would be to wipe off muddy hands with a paper towel and then sit down for dinner. But many other people could have.

Was Seinfeld still around in 2001? Talk about an ideal venue for product placement. A clean-freak who stars in a show about the idiosynchrocies of pop culture. It wouldn't even have looked like product placement, and they could have practically read the script of a radio ad for the thing. "It's cleaner!"

Just one person using the product on a Reality TV show like Big Brother, and millions of people would have been exposed to a frank discussion of the benefits. A columnist who encountered the product in an airport could have written a piece for the Washington Post Society section. One comedian making a joke about it would have opened discussions that -- well, that a $40 million daytime TV ad campaign couldn't.

The power of TV advertising is enormous. But for a product where even in the early stages of marketing, people are urging subtlety in the TV ads because the product is too delicate for polite discussion... They should have hired me as a consultant. They needed another channel of communication -- one that could more directly address the concerns and benefits and reasons for this product.

It's not too late! This is a product that the marketplace needs. We just need a company to market it right. A company that understands that marketing doesn't always mean driving a "freshness" truck around the country and producing a lot of TV commercials.

I need to know how often each word is used. I'd like to answer the question, "How big is the vocabulary of the Internet?" And I'd like the database that I'd generate in answering that, to help answer a host of other interesting questions. (Related domain names and spelling suggestions come to mind immediately.)

So, would this work?

Link a crawler to a database that stores the words found on each page crawled. Feed the crawler a seed set of pages, make sure it hits the Gutenberg project and some AP archives and DMOZ. Increment the count of each word as we run across it again.

If there are 750,000 words (as suggested by the Oxford Dictionary people), I should be able to store this in something like 23 megs. As long as I cap individual word frequencies at the four billion limit imposed by a default MySQL integer type. (Of course that could be increased.)

I could use content-type strings to identify languages, couldn't I? Or is that too unreliable? Would I end up indexing Japanese and French pages right along with it?

And actually... That would be *cool*. With a way to store space-data with each word, I wonder if with some simple language seeding I could even automatically generate language-specific indexes...?

What is a language? What defines a language?

Wow wow. I can't believe Google hasn't come out with more stuff than they have. With all that data -- I wonder.

The difference between a typo and a glaring factual error is hard to tell. An article from eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who really ought to proofread better, contains a number of subtle errors that end up totally contradicting and confusing the point of the entire piece. Some examples:

The Streamlined Sales Tax Project may sound to some like the states are getting ready to start charging state sales tax on all e-commerce purchases, but the reality is that simple.

That's the first sentence of the article. Was the author deliberately being funny? Or did he forget a "not"?

What the SSTA (Streamlined Sales Tax Project), a group of U.S. states united in trying to simplify state and local tax collection, is doing is setting up a system by which Internet e-commerce companies can voluntarily pay state taxes to the states in which their customers reside.

If you made it through that sentence, did you get the meaning? Basically, he says that this new project helps companies pay state taxes.

In addition, "the states that are in compliance with SSUTA (Member States) will offer advantages to those sellers who use a CSP.

No idea where the quote ends, and the article gives no clue who we're quoting anyway. Also, is the SSUTA related to the SSTA defined above? Again, no info provided. Maybe a typo.

More minor advantages are that such companies will receive free tax collection and remittance software.

Is that... even more minor than the other advantages? Or additional, minor advantages?

Since 1992, a still valid Supreme Court decision ruled that companies do not have to pay sales taxes in states where they do have a physical presence.

The linked Supreme Court decision (which I read, in surprise at this article) actually says pretty clearly that companies do not have to pay sales taxes in states where they do not have a physical presence. An important word to forget.

This is not say that state sales tax on Internet purchases is a done deal. "There's still a lot of opposition," said Logan.

This is not say that this article was machine translated from Japanese.

Thus, in the end while the current move is purely voluntarily, Logan said that "if a critical mass of retailers buy into this, a lot more will follow, and it will snowball into almost all Internet retailers."

Thus, in the end while I used to trust eWeek, I now feel that "if this is all the attention and care they give to their writing, I should be reading from other sources."

This is not say that anything on the Internet is really trustworthy.

"Take the meter maid who hands out parking tickets if you're two mintues late. Is she going to give you a break? No! But your local Volvo retailer -- they'll give you a break!"

"The Inn on the Hill. The perfect place to enjoy a romantic evening! Each room is as unique as the Utah destination for which it is named."

"You know, the last thing you want this Halloween holiday is to run out of candy."

"I'm Robert Dudd, a real Sandy resident. I look forward to having an eight acre park with ballfields so near our house!"

"I'm a Ford truck man. That's all I drive. I ain't got no boundaries... During truck month, get behind the wheel of a Ford F-150!"

"Tracy Aviary changes into Hogwarts, Saturdays this month, with exciting readings of the book!"

"Burt Brothers wants to send you on a rase for the chase!"

"Find out how easy it is to enjoy the comfort of a gym in your own home."

"Service goes up while prices go down! That makes Nate Wade Subaru the best in town."

"Lend me your ear, or both of your ears. And come with me to an unsurpassed place. The new Delta.com site is better than ever! Where good goes around."

"Smith's saves you more... Smith's saves you more everyday!"

"I'm a Ford truck man. That's all I drive. I ain't got no boundaries. I don't compromise. Truck month bonus cash only available with financing through your Ford dealer."

-- Two commercial breaks, KBZN Smooth Jazz

Intertextuality and the Diffusion of Cultural Innovations: Empirical Evidence and Practical Prediction

Predicting the “next big thing” is valuable. So valuable that many businesses bet their futures on guesses at what that next thing might be. The concept of intertextuality suggests that we might be able to identify emerging trends before they hit – while there is still time enough to capitalize on them. Is intertextuality detectable and predictable?

What research has been done into the idea? What empirical evidence has been found? Does it have true, predictive value?

Establish the relevance of various media – which medium is the ‘thought leader’ and which are merely repackaging ideas for mass consumption?

What commercial gain can come from, early identification of trends?

1. Search engine optimization – build adsense sites before new keywords rise in popularity (and competetiveness)
2. Be the first to brand or trademark new terms
3. Develop products, t-shirts, etc and have them in place
4. See which ‘guesses’ industry has made and invest in those properties

Which media can be analyzed this way?

1. Newspapers (daily)
2. Magazines (weekly or monthly)
3. TV Shows? (daily, weekly)
4. BBC Radio or other radio shows? (daily?)
5. Speech-to-text auto-transcribing programs? (Of Internet radio feeds…?)
6. Archived movies – scripts are available on line and can be tied to release dates (months)
7. Blogs (daily)
8. The Internet as a whole? Google rankings, search frequency logs, etc?
9. Overture is available as a monthly snapshot

The only criteria are the availability of text to analyze and dates to tie the text to.

Methodology:

1. Determine which media are available – which have enough usable text?
2. Collect media to analyze
3. Evaluate date and frequency of all non-noise words
4. Compare presence of keywords

Other research questions:

1. What other analysis could be done of Internet radio? We can compare feeds from various places around the world, to study the ratio of commercials to music, or types of music, etc.
2. What speech-to-text capabilities exist? How fast and accurate are they?
3. In what other areas might there be interesting correlations? The stock market? If a company rises in discussion – does that tie to a shift in stock price?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When all your ad agency has is a hammer, and they get paid thousands of dollars every time they swing that hammer -- they don't go looking for better tools.

Traditional advertising agencies have a hammer that pays them well. Television and big, creative, expensive, in-your-face-edgy media campaigns. The shiny sparkle that drives cars through rainforests and hurls executives off cliffs in parafoils. Why do we see this so much?

1. Most agencies get paid a percentage of the amount they bill for media spending.
2. Most people in ad agencies want to be filmmakers and artists.

Note the conspicuous absence of number three: TV ads are wildly successful. In fact, in terms of overall ROI (Return on Investment, or bang for the buck, or whatever) TV is almost the worst possible advertising medium.

The Internet is not nearly as cool. I mean, really. I'll admit it. Even Nike.com -- the king of bloated bandwidth requirements and edgy-cool flash -- is pretty lame, compared to a cool TV spot. (Though, frankly, a lot of TV spots are pretty lame these days, too.)

But "lame" shouldn't matter as much as "effective." David Ogilvy, ancient prophet of advertising, said "if it doesn't sell, it isn't creative." The only TV ads that ever sell are those call-in-30-seconds-for-a-free-squeegee spots. If TV remote controls could store credit card numbers and provide a "buy now" button, TV would be a great sales channel. (Get it? Channel? Har. Shoot me.)

On the other hand, a decent website can be an incredibly powerful sales tool. It can qualify, pitch, follow-up, close, and actually process a sale. Or hundreds of sales simultaneously.

And let's think about cost for a second. The simple production cost of a single TV ad rivals the most expensive of websites. And then a TV ad costs even more to air! A website just sits there, quietly selling for an almost negligible monthly fee.

If you're using an ad agency that wants you to invest in well-produced radio and TV spots, or full-page magazine ads, that's great. But understand that your agency is inherently conflicted when it comes to your website. And your website deserves more attention than it's probably getting.

Classic. A cruise ship sank off the coast of Egypt. In a newspaper article the next morning, the following quote from a teacher waiting for word of his cousin who had been a passenger appeared:

"How can they put all these passengers in such an old ship that was not fit for sailing?" he asked, adding "somebody should be blamed."

Somebody should be blamed. If only we all had such clear-headed responses to tragedy, huh? And thank goodness we have the news media to bring us these gems of insight.

In other news, fringe Muslim groups are upset over some 12 political cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper four months ago. Reports of the rage and frustration of these groups pervade the news this morning, but not one source has the cartoons. Gutless.

That's my rant for the morning. For the month.

Our church has a semi-annual General Conference, broadcast by satellite across the entire world. It's a great opportunity to keep all the various branches and wards of the church in synch with each other. We're all seeing the same talks, the same instruction. The logistics of the broadcast are handled by Bonneville Communications, the church-owned media company that manages many TV and radio stations along with newspapers and other media outlets.

Last night, I was watching part of the broadcast at our local church meeting when suddenly the image disappeared. A blue screen replaced the man who had been speaking and silence replaced the voice we'd been hearing.

"Reception of current program is not authorized."

The message lasted for maybe 30 seconds. Then the broadcast picked back up, and we'd only missed a little bit. But about five minutes later, it happened again.

"Reception of current program is not authorized."

Another 30 seconds of nervous laughter in the audience. And then a few minutes later, the message interrupted our meeting a third time.

"Reception of current program is not authorized."

We missed the conclusion of some important messages. We'll have to wait until the printed version of Conference is mailed out in a few months.

Just another example of false positives in Digital Rights Management.

Appearing on Larry King Live, president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad protested what he called "horrible mistranslations" of recent comments he made.

The comments in question, from an Associated Press report: "We won't hold talks with anyone about the right of the Iranian nation (to enrich uranium), and no one has the right to retreat, even one iota," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

"Our answer to those who are angry about Iran achieving the full nuclear fuel cycle is just one phrase. We say: 'Be angry at us and die of this anger,'" Ahmadinejad said.

According to Ahmadinejad, the blame lies squarely at the feet of junior translator Pakran Abbas. "Abbas is my nephew. I had to give him a job somewhere. His English is choppy, I'll grant that. But this is clearly not what I meant to say! Does that sound like something I'd say? I mean, really. My own wife -- ask her! 'Die of this anger.' Who talks like that?"

Anonymous sources within the Iranian president's cabinet have confirmed Abbas' incompetence, reporting that the nephew was hired under pressure from the president's family.

Ahmadinejad's wife, however, reported that he is given to exactly the kind of comments reported in the news. "Just last week, I asked him to fix the refrigerator. He refused. I insisted we needed it fixed. You know what he said? 'I will not retreat, even one iota. Be angry at me and die of this anger.' And blaming poor Pakran for it. Despicable."

Abbas has left the country and is taking refuge in an undisclosed location.

CNN.com :: Old Journalism

Professional journalists
Professional editors
No direct feedback from audience

Slashdot.org :: New Journalism

Community journalists
Professional (or at least, elevated above regular users) editors
Feedback from audience posted along with each story

Digg.com :: Unjournalism

Community journalists
Community editors
Feedback generates the entire site

I did a search recently for a newish Google product called "Local Business Ads." It's a new kind of advertising service that I wanted to evaluate for our clients and see if we should start using it. What I really wanted to find were some thoughts from people who have been using it already.

What I found, though, was a whole bunch of posts from the day it launched -- all of them reading something like this:

"Google just launched Local Business Ads! It's too early to tell if it will work, but it looks like it might be really cool..."

Literally all 20 of the top-20 results were from the day of the launch. (Excluding the official LBA product page on Google's site.) One guy had taken screen shots of each step of the signup process.

Where's the thoughtful contemplation? Where's the careful consideration of pros and cons? Retrospection?

I'm careful not to write a bunch of "me-too" posts on my own site. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of traffic that I could be getting in the weeks following a splashy product release. But I hope my site reflects a little more thought about the things I choose to write.

(And yes, I'm still doing my thesis on the value of blogs as original information sources and trend indicators.)

Ever send a message that never got answered?

During one of my family's many moves, we left some of our stuff at a storage company. Their security system included a key-code box at the front entrance which would unlock the gate some 20 feet beyond. It had a red light that would blink on if you typed your code wrong. If you typed the code correctly, "a green light would blink on" would have been the right answer. But there was no green light. If you typed the code correctly, the red light didn't come on.

But then, if you just typed the whole thing wrong and didn't even enter a valid code, the red light didn't come on, and then you'd drive up to the gate, find it still locked, and have to jump out of your car and walk back to try again. The second or third time, you'd be feeling really dumb and you'd have to go talk to the gate guard who would tell you they'd changed your code. You needed to type a pound sign first. That activated the system, see?

The point is "feedback." Any good system will have feedback for positive and negative conditions. And maybe even preliminary feedback for 'pending' conditions.

Email is a bad system in that regard. Under ideal circumstances, you'll send an email and get a response. But more commonly, you send an email and get no response. Sometimes, you'll send an email and get an error message. But not every error results in an error message. (And some errors are delayed for days or even weeks in resend loops and other technical whirlpools.) So you never know.

Outlook takes a funny approach to fixing this with the "read receipt" system. It's an attempt to provide active feedback for every sent email. The problem is, it relies on the client of the user and most people don't have it setup for that to work. The really funny part of it is that the same system also provides a "retract email" function that works the same way -- and is crippled by the same reliance on the recipient's client. I laugh every time I get a "recall the last message" email because I've disabled that function so I get to see the whole chain.

But is there a better answer to this problem?

In Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters examines a more general instance of the problem of "disseminated communications." It's a great book, full of interesting metaphor and discussion, but ultimately it didn't tell me how to fix the problem of email. It did help me realize that the greater problem includes such issues as:

Even if the message shows up in someone's in-box, how do I know they read it?
Even if they read it, how do I know it conveyed my ideas accurately to them?
Even if it conveyed my ideas, were my ideas worth conveying?

I think most of what I say is pretty unimportant to most of the world. But to the people to whom it matters most, I'm usually able to get through somehow.

I just got off the phone with "CHS Surveys." The caller was conducting a survey -- I asked for clarification, and was told it was about "a wide range of questions." (You aren't supposed to tell people what the subject of the survey is, or they will be biased, see.)

It quickly became apparent that it was about the oil and natural gas industries. The questions were priceless; I wish I had a phone call recorder. From memory, here are the best two:

1. Would you say the progress the oil and natural gas industries has made in the last five years has been: (a) excellent (b) very good (c) somewhat good (d) fair or (e) poor?

Do you see what's wrong with this range of answers? And I hadn't previously stated that I felt the oil-and-natural-gas industries had made any progress at all over the last five years.

2. Would you say the oil and natural gas industries are our families, friends, and neighbors?

I don't know which company, exactly, but something about that question just screams "corporate slogan" at me.

In the spirit of this kind of fair-and-balanced questioning, I thought I'd write my own survey questions for you!

1. Would you say I am (a) devastatingly handsome (b) jaw-droppingly attractive (c) pretty darned good-looking (d) above average or (e) kind of funny looking?

2. Would you say I am one of the smartest, kindest, funniest people you've ever had the good fortune to meet, the sort of guy who lights up a room and can be counted on when it really matters?

Feel free to post your answers below. Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.

The world has been destroyed many times since I arrived:

• Acid rain ruined all the crops, poisoned all the lakes, and mutated all the people.
• African killer bees wiped us out, one by one, as they spread inexorably across America.
• Mad cow disease contaminated our entire meat supply and we all turned into zombies.
• Deforestation has halted all commerce, since we're out of paper and unable to build anything.
• Overpopulation turned us against one another and we all died in a series of massacres.
• Bird flu infected me when I visited Hong Kong and I carried it back home to infect everyone else in the US.
• The ice age froze us all to death in my infancy.
• Global warming has disrupted my natural habitat and melted the polar ice caps, flooding out most of the world.

I shudder to think how the world will be destroyed next. Thank goodness I have TV, newspapers, and other vehicles of mass media to warn me so I can prepare in advance.

What do you do to prepare for a Texas-sized meteor strike?

I know the World Trade Centers couldn't have been brought down by the US government because the government couldn't possibly keep something that big secret. Think about it, have you ever heard of the government being able to keep a secret like that?

(Think about it.)

(Of course I don't actually believe the conspiracy theory. But I do think it's a funny line of reasoning people use to argue that the government couldn't possibly keep it secret. I have a modicum of faith in our government -- both in its capabilities and its intentions.)

I'm posting this article so I'll have a copy of it. Not because I'm a scurvy copyright pirate. (Though that is more-or-less also true.)

======
This one's for immunity!

Mike Sauve
National Post

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Ever wonder how they cook up challenges for hit reality television shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race?

While Jeff Probst is the one to yell "Survivors ready? Go!", it's a team of producers who spend months conceiving and producing challenges.

Victoria-native Alan Bishop is among the best in the business. He's produced challenges for several Survivor seasons (Vanuatu, Panama and Guatemala), and this fall he begins his first stint as a challenge producer for The Amazing Race.

"With Survivor, we set up somewhere for six months on a closed set. With The Amazing Race you're basically racing the contestants. We've got to be two days ahead of them."

Planning begins several months before a season of Survivor shoots, Bishop said, explaining that his team brainstorms a few hundred concepts for challenges.

"Once you get on location, you find out what works and what will really stand out."

Challenge producers collaborate with the art department to design the structures. Bishop tests the tasks himself. Then, while the show is being filmed, Probst explains the challenge to contestants, cameras are turned off and Bishop's team explains the rules and safety concerns in detail.

He's witnessed wild stuff on white sandy beaches with castaways plucked from their daily lives. Once, while explaining a challenge, he noticed a female contestant urinating right beside him.

Safety is a major concern, but so is creating riveting TV, so Bishop's job is a delicate balance.

"You can't hurt people just because they're playing for a million dollars," he says. Challenges he's particularly excited about are often nixed due to safety concerns. Fairness also comes into play. "If you have three really athletic people and three who aren't, but they're all good characters, we can't always do the athletic challenges. We walk a fine line."

But friendly castaways make for boring TV, so producers sometimes ask Bishop's team to add conflict by pumping extra drama and excitement into elimination and reward contests.

The father of two is sworn to Survivor secrecy by "massive" CBS confidentiality agreements, so all he can reveal to his sons about his work is which episodes they might not want to miss.

"Their friends ask for inside information, but they like saying, 'No, I can't tell you,' even though they don't know."

His family is used to Bishop being away up to nine months a year. Before his reality gig, he participated in international Eco-Challenge expeditions and was a paratrooper in the Canadian Armed Forces.

When he is at home, Bishop organizes corporate team-building exercises, which he's been doing since the early 90's.

Today Bishop is organizing an Amazing Race-style event in Toronto for Electronic Data Systems.

"When I take a corporate group to an island these days, they think I'm stealing the idea from Survivor, but I've been doing that for years."
====

"But when they created flesh-searing heat from simple chemicals, I became very interested in Chemistry,” said 8th grader Haley Meyer.

The best sentence I've read in a long time. Closely seconded by:

"You can never be too careful," said O'Hara. "I'd rather blow up a hundred innocent people if I can prevent another 9/11."

But that's two sentences. And the humor, of course, lies in the fact that the hundred innocent people blowing up doesn't actually prevent another 9/11. It's just that the Boston police really love blowing stuff up.

I have to record this for posterity, from a brilliant thread at xkcd.com:

Robotkin: “Well, I guess such is the burden I bear being raised on at least semi-proper use of the English language.”

A language which lacks the following:

A suitable and disambiguated second person plural pronoun.

A contraction for the first person linking verb in the negative (”I am not”) to accompany similar contractions for the second and third person (”You aren’t”, “He isn’t”)

Given the gaping flaws in coverage in your “semi-proper” English, I tend to prefer the version of the language that includes “y’all” and “ain’t”.

Which must be followed up with this insight:

"English doesn't borrow from other languages - English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." -Unknown

What prompted all of this was a modern translation of George Washington's farewell speech. Fun reading. Now I have to go read the original.