I’m still in Denver, at NICAR! And I’m feeling SO much better than yesterday. I feel like I’m making bad decisions regarding which sessions I am attending, but besides that, I like getting to know people and ideas.
Input: 8
Output: 3
Learnings?
Journalism is reporting on the human condition.
If technology advances, we need to think more high level and make decisions with a higher impact and more responsibility. Eg when we’re building an algorithm that creates thousands of news articles, then we have more responsibility than when we write just one article. The more we look into history, the more people were working on a low level. More automation and the same of everything (brands etc.) leads to more responsibility based on less people and less time.
Line charts let you see the slope. Bar charts emphasise the individual bars.
It might be great to ask myself and write it down: which are the decisions you’re making and what makes you confident to make them?
The beauty of doing a side project is that you can set your success metrics by yourself.
I should see the 10 months of my fellowship as my lab, where I’m producing failure and experiments. I should acquire a mindset that makes failure possible, and therefore experimentation.
“Great stories always trump great technology” @adamplayford - that’s great in two ways:
- non technical people feel like they “just” need to find a good story instead of needing to learn programming languages to achieve something meaningful
- technical people get reminded that the content is more important than the highly technical form the content comes in
SQL is actually easier than R. I had the wrong idea that it’s more complicated, for more advanced use cases. Turns out, it’s not, and easy to learn.
Questions?
Is journalism good or bad?
Would I be a better human being if I would read the news? Or worse? Would the society I live in be better or worse?
Should I learn programming or wait for tools that make programming redundant?
Will I get rid of my jetlag eventually, even if I continue my daily afternoon naps?