Jeremiah Stanghini

The Time I Saw Nelson Mandela and the Earth Quaked

When I was in elementary school, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to see Nelson Mandela in person — at the Skydome. It was a very impactful experience for me and it’s one of my shiniest memories. It happened about 15 years ago when Mandela came to launch the Canadian Friends of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. I was in a Kindergarten to Grade 8 elementary school and two students (one male and one female) from each grade were getting the opportunity to go to the event at the Skydome. I don’t quite recall how I got picked, but at the time, I remember thinking that it was pretty cool I was going to get part of the day off from school to go see Nelson Mandela.

Early I said it was one of my shiniest memories and it was an impactful experience. I don’t really remember many of the different events that happened that day, but a few things are quite clear in my mind. On a side note, it seems I wasn’t the only person who doesn’t remember everything from that day. One of the things that I remember clearly is the song or at least one of the songs. After some brief searching, I was able to find it on YouTube. You can hear it in the beginning of this video:

Those singers continuously repeating his name and then when he makes an appearance by way of a golf cart. I remember that. Also, when he made his entrance, I remember this roar overcoming the crowd. I remember that in our section, we were banging our feet on the stands to add to that excitement in the crowd. I’d been to baseball games at the Skydome before, but I didn’t remember ever hearing the crowd become so loud. That whole experience, I remembering being a bit awestruck. I was a bit young to really comprehend everything that was part of what happened to Mandela, but I suppose part of me knew it on a visceral level and that’s what made the event so impactful.

On the topic of crowd loudness, when we got back to school later that day, in the playground, I remember folks asking me if we felt the earthquake. Earthquake, I thought. They continued on by saying that there was an earthquake (!) while we were at the Skydome seeing Nelson Mandela. This, along with that song, are the two things that really stick out in mind about this event. I had thought that the crowd was just “that” loud to Nelson Mandela, but maybe part of our loudness was amplified by some sort of rumble in the Earth.

So, whenever I think about Nelson Mandela, I remember that song and the joy that we all had singing his name. I also remember that the first time I saw Nelson Mandela, the Earth moved.

Cable TV in Trouble? 43% of Young Adults Subscribe to Netflix

I’ve written a few times about TV, but a post from Mashable (with data!) convinced me even more that TV, or at least the viewers of it, are headed elsewhere. Take a look at the graphic below:

Pay close attention to the % of American adults who subscribe to Cable TV and Netflix. In particular, notice the 18-36 age category. For cable TV, 46% of this age group subscribes and for Netflix, 43% of this age group subscribes. The difference is negligible. We can also look at the subscription rates for satellite TV (16%) and then two other online sources: Amazon Prime (17%) and Hulu Plus (8%).

No doubt, some of the folks who subscribe to Cable TV may also subscribe to Netflix and other online sources, but it seems pretty clear where the trend is headed. In fact, if we look back at the Cable TV subscription rates across all age groups, we see a sloping line from the bottom left to the top right. If you’ll notice, there’s a decided decrease in Cable TV subscription rates from the older age groups to the lower age groups. Similarly, there’s the inverse relationship when we look at online places like Netflix and Amazon Prime. There’s a decided increase as you get into the lower age groups.

Could Markets Have Predicted the Civil Rights Movement?

Author’s note: It’s been quite some time since my last post. In fact, it’s the last day of November and this will be my last post this month. It’s been a bit hectic getting settled in Ottawa, in addition to some other things that have been going on, but I do hope to get back into a regular habit of writing posts again.

I came across an article recently that espoused the value of the efficient-market hypothesis through the success of InTrade — when it was still functioning. In case you’re not familiar, InTrade is a betting site that would post contracts, for instance — “Mitt Romney will be the Republican Presidential nominee” — and then people could ‘buy’ that contract if they thought Romney would be the nominee or (sell) that contract if they thought he wouldn’t. There’d be all kinds of questions, not just political. There are questions about world events (the US will find Saddam Hussein) and questions about awards shows (Avatar will win Best Picture).

In the article, there was a small blurb about futarchy:

The potential of prediction markets to aggregate and reveal information is so great that some have surmised they might remake whole political systems. Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, has endorsed what he calls “futarchy,” a form of government that would use prediction markets extensively as a policymaking tool. If the aggregated predictions of the market are better than the individual predictions of a few appointed experts, why not let citizens bet on, rather than submit to professional opinion on, for example, which tax policy is more likely to bring prosperity?

For the most part, there certainly seems to be something to the argument in favour of the wisdom of the crowds, but as I’ve written before, the wisdom of the crowds can’t always be trusted. When thinking about the wisdom of the crowds in the context of policymaking, I wonder about the crowd’s ability to divine the need for civil rights. That is, I wonder if, during the time leading up to the civil rights movement, the crowd would have accurately predicted it was beyond time to implement a new level of equality in the United States. Or, what about in the time of Lincoln? Would the wisdom of the crowds have decided that black people deserved freedom?

How to get your Op-Ed in the New York Times

For as long as I’ve been reading the New York Times, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing an Op-Ed and sending it in. As the Op-Ed’s in the Times that I usually come across are written by people much more well-known than I am, I figured that my chances of getting in were pretty low. As it turns out, this just might not be the case.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an “Op-Ed” from the Op-Ed and Sunday Review Editor, Trish Hall. In it, she details how to get an Op-Ed in the Times:

We get a flood of submissions, but there’s never too much good writing in the world. There is always room for more. So what makes the cut? That’s what people always ask me, so I’ll try to explain the process. Most pieces we publish are between 400 and 1200 words. They can be longer when they arrive, but not so long that they’re traumatizing. Submissions that are reacting to news of the world are of great value to us, especially if they arrive very quickly. Write in your own voice. If you’re funny, be funny. Don’t write the way you think important people write, or the way you think important pieces should sound. And it’s best to focus very specifically on something; if you write about the general problem of prisons in the United States, the odds are that it will seem too familiar. But if you are a prisoner in California and you have just gone on a hunger strike and you want to tell us about it – now, that we would like to read. We are normal humans (relatively speaking). We like to read conversational English that pulls us along. That means that if an article is written with lots of jargon, we probably won’t like it.

Some of what Trish has said should be comforting to folks who were worried about writing something that was high-brow. She specifically asks that you write in your own voice. So, let’s say that you get something together, submit it to the Times, and it’s accepted. Does your Op-Ed get published just like that? Not exactly:

First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.

It’s really great to see that even the Op-Ed’s are fact-checked. I’ve never worked at a newspaper, so I don’t know if this is standard practice. Either way, it does makes sense that if something’s going to be printed in your publication (The New York Times, no less) that you’d want to make sure it was truthful.

I hope after reading this post, the veil of mystique has been raised on how to get your opinion published in the New York Times. More than that, if you were holding back, I hope you’ll now consider writing an opinion and submitting it.

What Will My Generation’s Version of Racism Be

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop. While working on a project, I couldn’t help but overhear a couple of older gentlemen talking about immigrants. Now, I currently live in Ottawa, Canada, so their discussion about immigrants was probably a bit different than I might have heard if I were in a coffee shop in a different part of the country, but more notably, the conversation would have likely been different had I been in an coffee shop in the USA.

I’m going to overgeneralize for a second, so I hope you’ll stay with me.

For the most part, younger generations are less racist than older generations. My guess is that this is because younger generations grow up having people from different ethnic backgrounds around them all the time. For instance, when I was in high school, it was normal to see people from very different backgrounds. There were people from China, India, the Middle East, Brazil, a whole host of European countries, and many more. If we rollback to the previous generation, scenes like this weren’t as common.

So, for generations like mine, it’s normalized to grow up with people who look different from you. In previous generations, this wasn’t the case. My guess is that this contributes to some of the latent (or otherwise) hostility that we typically see from older generations.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about my generation in comparison to generations past, but the true purpose of this post is a juxtaposition of the generations to come. As I said, it seems that past generations had a harder time than mine digesting the mix of cultures. For kids growing up today (in certain countries), it’s abundantly clear that there are people who look different from them and it’s just normal to grow up and be friends with people like this. My question, what is it that my generation will have a hard time with that future generations will see as natural?

I’d like to think that I and my generation will be able to handle whatever comes our way in the future, but I’m sure that’s what previous generations thought. As a result, it seems to me that there will likely be something that some folks from my generation have a hard time handling. Will it be something like what we see in the Men in Black movies? Meaning, will we coexist on Earth with beings from another planet? If that were to happen, it’s quite plausible that there’d be an echo of what’s happening now.

The next time you see someone being ethnocentric, consider the possibility that you might be exhibiting a similar behaviour in years to come.

Why Posting Duplicate Content to Social Media is a Good Idea

When I first connected my website to my Twitter account, I worried about reposting the same link. That is, when I tweeted, I didn’t necessarily want to be sharing something that I had already sent out. I figured if people had already seen what I had said, they wouldn’t need to see it again, right? Well, that might just not be the case.

Yesterday, I came across a creative answer to a question on Quora that I’m going to share below. A quick lead-in: the question asks about bizarre (and small) social experiments that lead people to the opposite conclusion of their hypothesis. There are some great answers on the question, but this one in particular, applies to sharing content on the web:

We all get countless happy birthday message from acquaintances (veritable strangers) on Facebook.

Out of personal and professional curiosity, I decided to perform an experiment with 2 parameters:

1. I edited my “Facebook” birthday to the current day every day
2. I did this every day until not one person wished me happy birthday

A few people — mostly my closest friends — immediately noticed, but for the few first days, the volume of birthday messages hardly diminished day-to-day.

After a couple of weeks, I started getting a few people who were in on the “joke” wishing me happy birthday every day, along with a handful of “stop it, this isn’t funny” messages.

A few weeks later, a few people just went ahead and un-friended me (on Facebook only … I think). But more interestingly, a couple people who had just recently wished me happy birthday, did so again. And did so very sincerely! They had merely forgotten. More on that in a bit.

A couple months into it, the messages were still coming in (genuinely), but were down to just a couple or a single every day — along with the requisite friend who wished me HB every chance he got.

Finally, after just 103 days, I got no new happy birthday messages.

The span crossed 3 “major” holidays: Christmas, New Years, and Valentine’s Day. My favorite messages were the “I had no idea your birthday was on Christmas!” types from pretty close friends.

The “wasn’t it just your birthday? Oh well, hope it’s a good one!” types were fun as well.

What to take away from this? I occasionally coach/teach people how to use social tools for marketing/whatever and one important lesson is that not everyone sees every message every day, so you shouldn’t be afraid of posting duplicate content, especially if it’s an important message or one that resonates well with a big audience.

And when people occasionally express concern over that concept, I tell this story 🙂

Of course, this is just one small social experiment, but it is certainly something to keep in mind when you think twice about sharing that blog post on social media more than once.

Revisiting Using Pitchers on Short Rest: Long-Term Ramifications

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Los Angeles Dodgers’ strategy of using their best pitcher (and one of the best pitchers in baseball) on short rest to pitch in a non-elimination game. The Dodgers ended up winning that game and the series, but the debate over the strategy doesn’t end there.

In my post from a couple of weeks ago, I compared the Dodgers’ decision to my younger years when I was playing baseball in double elimination tournaments. This wasn’t a perfect comparison, but I the spirit of the decision to use your best pitcher was there in both. A few nights ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers were eliminated from the postseason. All but one of the thirty teams are eliminated, so this isn’t earth-shattering news. However, the fashion in which they lost is.

In Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers started Clayton Kershaw. Yes, the same one who started in Game 4 for the Dodgers in the National League Divisional Series. This time, Kershaw’s start didn’t go so well. In fact, Kershaw only pitched 4 innings before pulled by the manager, Don Mattingly, but not before Kershaw gave up 7 runs. So, the question might be warranted: did using Kershaw on short rest affect his ability in Game 6? It turns out, this was a thought that had crossed some minds before Kershaw made the start in Game 4.

Tonight wouldn’t be the concern for Kershaw. It’s later in the postseason if they advance. Fatigue builds, so it’s a risk to speed that up.

— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) October 7, 2013

As they say, hindsight is 20-20, but it does seem a bit prescient. McCarthy’s hypothesis makes sense, but it’d be hard to test. One may point to Kershaw’s start in Game 2 of the NLCS. He tossed 6 innings and allowed 1 unearned run. Shouldn’t he have unravelled in that game if he were fatigued from the short rest start in the NLDS? One could argue that, but the way that McCarthy’s argument is setup leads one to believe that the “fatigue” could happen later and later. So, if the Dodgers won Game 6 and won Game 7, would McCarthy have expected Kershaw to unravel during one of his starts in the World Series?

Let’s see if we can apply this lesson to decisions in other arenas. The analogy I used for the other post doesn’t really hold anymore. We’d be better off thinking about a decision for a business. Using Kershaw in the way the Dodgers did was almost like using a certain machine in the factory to fill some rush orders. The machine might only be able to fill a certain number of orders per week, but because it’s the holiday season, the boss thinks that running it on overdrive is necessary. Initially, the machine churns out the widgets just the way the boss would have expected, but next week when you use the machine, the widgets aren’t as high a quality. And then the week after that, the widgets aren’t even of a high enough quality to give away. It’s clear, the machine needs a break and some recalibration. In weighing the risk, the boss thought that using the machine more than usual was worth it for it potentially shutting down.

There are other ways we can map out this scenario, but I want you to think about how you might be overdoing it. Maybe the machine you use at work is fatiguing. Maybe you are fatiguing from working too hard.

It’s More Than Just Body Image, It’s How We Relate to the World

A couple of weeks ago, someone passed along an excellent video of a woman describing her experience with the pressures of body image. It’s an important video and I hope you take the time to watch it (whether you’re a female or a male). As I’ve talked about before, it’s important to understand just how the media is unintentionally reinforcing certain beliefs about the way we think, act, and feel, as a society.

There is one particular piece that’s not explicitly stated in the video that I wanted to highlight: the way of being in the world. Lily Myers talks about this sense that men were taught to “grow out” and women were taught to “grow in.” In a sense, it was okay for men to take up space and not okay for women to take up space. This is important and we should consider this in more contexts than body image. For instance, we often hear about how men are more likely to get promoted quicker or have better salaries. There are myriad reasons for this, but what if wrinkle to those debates are because women are taught to, from a very young age, that taking up space is ‘not okay.’

Of course, I’m not saying that women are actively being taught that their existence isn’t warranted, (though that’s the case in some parts of the world). It’s the subtleties that Myers speaks about in her video. This idea that she is watching her mother and understanding that ‘this is how I should behave, too.’

When I watch a video like this and hear the powerful message, I can’t help but hope that many people will see it. That many people will take this opinion in and consider that this is actually how someone else feels in the world. That this experience could be shared by many. If after watching this video, you’re wondering just how Lily Myers and our society came to be this way, I’d encourage you to check out Miss Representation, which came out a couple of years ago and, in February of 2014, The Mask You Live In.

Here’s the text from the poem:

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.
She says she doesn’t deprive herself,
but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork.
In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it.
I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so.

Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional.
As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast.
She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit.”

It was the same with his parents;
as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach
and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking
making space for the entrance of men into their lives
not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.

I have been taught accommodation.
My brother never thinks before he speaks.
I have been taught to filter.
“How can anyone have a relationship to food?” He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.
I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas,
you have been taught to grow out
I have been taught to grow in
you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much
I learned to absorb
I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself
I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters
and I never meant to replicate her, but
spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits

that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.
We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit
weaving silence in between the threads
which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house,
skin itching,
picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again,
Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled.
Deciding how many bites is too many
How much space she deserves to occupy.

Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her,
And I don’t want to do either anymore
but the burden of this house has followed me across the country
I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry”.
I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza
a circular obsession I never wanted but

inheritance is accidental
still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

On the Absurdity of Celebrity: To Rome With Love

It’s been a little over a week since my last post as I’m still settling into Ottawa. As a result, I’ve accumulated some things to write about. I’ll try to get through them all in the next couple of days as I’m really excited to get back to writing posts that are appropriate for Research Blogging.

As you can see from the title of today’s post, I happened to watch To Rome With Love (thank you Netflix!) I had seen Midnight in Paris some time last year and folks recommended that I might enjoy Woody Allen’s next film (actually, it was his next next film, but who’s keeping track?) To Me, Rome seemed to be a lot different from Paris, but I won’t really talk about any of the differences in case you haven’t seen either and might want to. However, I do want to talk about one of the subplots of Rome — celebrity.

Leopoldo Pisanello, played by Roberto Benigni, is a clerk who lives an otherwise mundane life. However, one day, he wakes up to find himself a celebrity. Reporters and paparazzi swarm him at his front door asking questions and snapping pictures. He ends up on TV and the host asks him about what he ate for breakfast, whether he wears boxers or briefs, and if he thinks it’ll rain. He gets a promotion at the company he works at and the boss’s secretary sleeps with him. He goes to fancy movie premieres, but the attention wears on him. You start to see the character become fatigued from answering so many mundane questions about himself.

Towards the end of this subplot, the character has a bit of an outburst. During this outburst, the press spot another man who looks “more interesting,” so everyone floods over to that man as paparazzi snap pictures and reporters ask questions.

I’ve never been a celebrity, so I can’t speak personally to the experience, but I think that Woody Allen does a great job at poking fun at how we, as a society, have created this absurd culture of celebrity.

Markets and Morality: Why We Shouldn’t Trust Markets with Our Civic Life

About a month ago, I finished up a series about Michael Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy. I really enjoyed reading through the chapters and chewing on the material. As you may recall, I also highly recommended watching Prof. Sandel’s course: Justice. A few day ago, I noticed that one of Sandel’s more recent TEDTalks was published online. After watching it, I thought I’d pass it along to you as a great way to get a quick understanding of some of the things that Sandel talks about in his book. The talk was filmed this past summer.

As I think about markets and morals, I can’t help but seem to agree with much of what Sandel is saying. I’m also aware that not everyone shares his opinion about markets and morality. Do you agree? Do you think that allowing markets to decide everything is crowding out morals? I’d be really interested to hear your opinions.

I do as best I can to take in opinions and information that is contrary to my opinions, but it can be difficult. Especially in the internet environment, it’s quite easy to get caught up in the echo chamber of your own thoughts and beliefs. That’s part of the reason that I try to write posts that provide a new perspective on issues.

On this matter in particular, I’d like to your opinions on Prof. Sandel’s idea of markets and morality. In fact, I’m hoping that some of you disagree with Prof. Sandel and you think that markets are truly the answer to everything. I’m hoping that you think that markets should operate in every part of our lives. I’m hoping that you think what Prof. Sandel is saying is wrong. Most of all, I’m hoping that you can offer a cogent response that’s at least half as well-sourced as Prof. Sandel’s book.