My college courses, if I could do it all over

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Beau Dure

Duke was a great experience for me … apart from the classes.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. I had some great teachers, but I had a lot of lousy ones. The academic advising wasn’t great except within the music department, from which I think I could have had many recommendations for grad school had I gone in that direction.

And it’s unfair to look back with regret in comparison to what Duke offers today. Duke now has minors or certificates that I don’t believe they offered in the past.

So the modern-day Duke experience is surely better for all. I hope the teachers are better. I know the course selection is better.

Let’s break down what I took …

WHAT I TOOK

Philosophy major

One note here: I only took two of the required eight classes by the end of sophomore year, when you’re supposed to declare. At the time, everything seemed fine. The classes were fine, and I had couple of solid B-pluses that I figured I’d pull up to As down the road. If I’d taken a third (not counting logic), maybe I would’ve realized this wasn’t for me.

Intro to Philosophy: required, and I had a good grad-student teacher
History of Ancient Philosophy: required, another good teacher (Michael Ferejohn)
Logic – required, easy A, took it in the summer with the late, great Rick Roderick, called “the Bill Hicks of philosophy”
History of Modern Philosophy – required, difficult. I made a C. Again, if I’d taken it sophomore year, maybe I wouldn’t have majored in this
History of Law – I fancied myself pre-law. This class, with a pipe-smoking drone teaching, may have talked me out of it. Had a solid B before I screwed up the final because I was desperately studying for the final in …
Symbolic Logic – This was a ****ing math class. A bunch of math majors were taking it to meet their humanities requirement. I sat there on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, not comprehending in the least what was being written on the board and not able to ask afterwards because I had a Chronicle budget meeting. Frankly, that was a better priority. No one in journalism cares that I made a C-plus in this class and probably should’ve done worse.
Philosophy of Music – Very cool class with another late, great professor in Ben Ward, whom I had met in my freshman dorm, where he lived as an Artist in Residence and frequently played his grand piano. I did a terrific final project on cassette, using audio clips to illustrate my points. One of two classes I took in my last semester while I was pulling about 50 hours a week at The Chronicle.
Plato – a 200-level class was required, and this was hard-core. I’d registered for a class on Hegel with Rick Roderick, but he had to change the time and day of the class, and I couldn’t make it. I quickly scrambled over to Dr. Ferejohn’s office. He said he remembered me from History of Ancient Philosophy (he probably didn’t) and would gladly sign off on my switch to this class. I’ll always be proud of the fact that I got an A-minus in a class that required serious scholarship in a seminar with a bunch of grad students.

Music major

Fundamentals of Music Theory: I hadn’t planned to be a music major, but I took this on a whim in my first semester and didn’t flinch when I discovered it had a lab component and didn’t give credit for it, unlike those wimps in science classes who get an extra credit for being lab. Rodney Wynkoop and my classmates encouraged me to keep going. I was hooked.
Tonal Harmony: Basically the second semester of theory, another class with Rodney, another solid A.
Modal Counterpoint: Considered the organic chemistry of the music major, with complex math involved. Started to sour on things here.
Tonal Counterpoint: Still difficult, but I liked this better and did better.
Composition: Took concurrently with Tonal Counterpoint. A two-person class — me and Joe Zellnik. Joe is a brilliant composer to this day. I’m not. Enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I realized my limitations.
Percussion (three semesters): Music majors have to study an instrument, and I enjoyed this quite a bit. Still playing drums to this day. Can’t store a tympani set at home, unfortunately.
Chamber Music (percussion ensemble): Thanks to the people who formed a percussion ensemble with me. This was fun.
Four freaking semesters of Music History: You don’t even get to Bach for a few months. Oddly enough, my lowest grade (B+) was in Music History III, which covered my favorite era of classical music. I think. I never listen to classical any more, and no, Music History IV didn’t cover the Beatles.

Requirements

University Writing Course: Salem Witchcraft: I will one day sarcastically dedicate a book to the grad student who gave me inconsistent instructions and gave me a C-minus. I didn’t choose the topic, but I found it interesting. I also apparently contradicted the grad student’s thesis. I like to think I was right.
History of Civilization: Intro to Art History: a backup choice in my first semester, and it couldn’t have gone worse. I took this after a PE class, so I raced from the PE buildings to the West Campus bus stop and immediately went into a dark room to look at slides. Along with the UWC above, I had really bad grades in my first semester and spent the rest of my time at Duke climbing into the middle of my class.
Empirical Natural Science: Astronomy – not bad, not exactly Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Foreign language requirement: Met with my achievement test in French, even though I couldn’t speak it to save my life.
Literature: AP credit FTW, which is good, because I might have lost my mind in a Duke English class.

“Division II”

Not really sure what the “divisions” entailed, but we had to pick one in which we took four classes, one of them at the 100 level (at the time, slightly advanced — 200-level classes were for a mix of seniors and grad students). All I know is that I took a lot of history.

Two semesters of American history: AP credit FTW
Germany: 30 Years’ War-1871: Great professor in Claudia Koonz, who’s actually kind of controversial (I didn’t know Historikerinnenstreit was a word). The subject matter was kind of dull, but I learned how to do longer papers, which helped down the road.
Socialism and Communism: Blow-off summer class with Warren Lerner, who literally wrote the book on the subject. Not bad, and I don’t know why I only got a B-plus.

“Division III”

I guess I needed two classes in another area of concentration, so I chose math and science-ish?

Calculus I: AP credit FTW
Calculus II: Grad student who struggled with English and didn’t get through all the material. This is on Duke. They should’ve done better. I actually didn’t need to take this. And I shouldn’t have. There’s no need to take second-semester calculus unless you’re going into engineering or something similar. See below.
Fundamentals of Computer Science: I didn’t think it was supposed to be an easy course, but when I saw a bunch of football and basketball players, I figured it might be pretty simple. It was indeed very easy, though we AGAIN didn’t get extra credit for the lab, but I learned quite a bit.

Electives

Three semesters of PE – Badminton/Racquetball/Squash, Endurance Swimming, Racquetball: Two of these were for fun. The third was gaming the system. You can’t apply more than two PE classes to your total number of credits for graduation, but I was way ahead on credits, anyway. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to take an underload, and percussion was only a half-credit. So I took the third semester to give myself a full load, even though it didn’t count toward graduation. Loved the racquet sports. Hated swimming in a freezing pool.
Comedy: Theory & Performance – One of the freshman seminars offered second semester, and I was lucky to get my first choice. I ditched what the writing instructor had tried to teach me and went back to my old writing style. A LOT of reading dating back to Aristophanes, but I didn’t mind at all. The A-minus restored my faith in my writing ability.
Advanced Intermediate French: I did OK, but I STILL can’t speak French.
Chemistry and Society: People joke about this, ranking it alongside “Physics for Poets.” Yeah, it was easy. So what? I learned more from this than I would’ve learned in a lab, suckers.
American Political System: Figured I needed another pre-law-ish class. Lecturer was pretty good, as was the TA who taught my breakout group.
Introductory Psychology: Awesome, and not just because it was an easy A. Wonderful class to take in a breezy summer term.
Organismal/Environmental Biology: My dad was a biochemist, so maybe YOU were wrong on that test, grad students.

So what did I like or find worthwhile?

Philosophy: Intro, Logic, 200-level
Music: Theory (2 semesters), Percussion, Composition
Science-ish: Computer Science, Psychology, Chemistry and Society
Humanities: Comedy

That’s it? Roughly 11 classes, adding together a couple of half-classes of percussion?

Yikes. Let’s try again …

WHAT I WOULD TAKE TODAY

I wouldn’t major in philosophy. I wouldn’t major in music, but the music minor (not available in those days, and yes, I love the fact that music has major and minor) appeals to me. I almost completed what you’d call a history minor today, but I don’t think I’d do that, either. (I loved my grad-school history classes, though.)

There’s no journalism major, nor would I take one. I could get a journalism certificate, which means I’d have a major, a minor (music) and a certificate. A major has at least 10 courses (12 plus an internship in Public Policy), a minor has at least five, and the journalism certificate has six. Yikes.

But it would make more sense for me to major in public policy, which offers a “policy journalism” concentration. (Or, as the Public Policy department calls it because they just have to be different, a pathway.) That would give me the flexibility to take journalism as far as I could and then bail into something useful like law. Besides, the certificate would require me to take “News as a Moral Battleground,” which doesn’t seem fun.

You can only apply two AP courses toward the 34 needed to graduate, though AP courses can knock out specific requirements. That’s four per semester, but I may do some extra stuff to give myself a chance to take an underload junior year to be Chronicle editor. Or managing editor — Matt probably would’ve been editor, as he was in real life.

Miscellaneous requirements: There’s overlap between the “Areas of Knowledge” (must meet five) and the “Modes of Inquiry” (six) — the same class can count for both. I’ll list the Areas and note which Modes are met along the way. I’d also need one seminar class freshman year (no problem), two more “small group learning experiences.”

The “Modes” are: Cross-Cultural Inquiry, Ethical Inquiry, Science/Technology/Society, Foreign Language, Research, Writing. All require two classes except Foreign Language (see below) and Writing (two in addition to the dreaded UWC).

I’m assuming classes for the major and minor count toward the Areas and Modes. If not, I basically wouldn’t have any electives outside the requirements.

Finally, two things I’d really want to do — take a stats course (required in public policy) and do an internship (also required in PPS).

Public policy major, basic requirements (9)

Introduction to Policy Analysis
Political Analysis for Public Policy: OK, maybe this is getting dull. (Writing mode)
Policy Choice as Value Conflict: I can sub in Global Health Ethics but probably wouldn’t (Ethical Inquiry mode)
Microeconomic Policy Tools: OR Intermediate Microeconomics I
Economics of the Public Sector: Typically taken senior year. Great.
Data Analysis and Statistical Inference: OR Probability and Statistical Inference. (Research and STS modes)
History: I’d have to choose from the list linked here. I’d lean toward the sports history class.
Internship: Apparently, Duke can now pretty much place people in journalism internships. Wasn’t so easy in my day. You have to take all “core” courses (the first five above) before doing this, so this would likely be between junior and senior year.
Independent study: All sorts of possibilities here. In real life, I did a history of objectivity in American journalism in grad school.

Public policy electives / Policy Journalism pathway (4)

Four electives required for the major, all above 160 level, one at 400 level or higher. The pathway requirements aren’t really clear. I think this list is just suggestions. Hope so, because I’d really want to take the first three listed here, and none is 400 level. Bear in mind that my independent study would probably be journalism-related.

Some of my other electives farther below (Oral History, Data Visualization) would be journalism-related.

News Writing & Reporting: I’ve never considered myself a good reporter. Writer, yes. Gleaning info from data, yes. Reporter, no. This would help. I hope. (Research and Writing modes)
Journalism in the Age of Data: Gotta learn data. (STS mode)
The Art of the Interview: Cross-listed with Documentary Studies.
Environmental Politics: Meets the 400+ requirement.

Music minor (6, including one from a set of electives and two above 213-level)

Theory and Practice of Tonal Music I: Required; basically my freshman theory course.
Music History III (Beethoven through WWI): Yes! Only ONE of these is required! (CCI and Research mode!)
Percussion (two semesters, each 0.5 credits): Fills performance requirement.
History of Rock: My choice from the set of electives.
Writing about Music: Everything is journalism. Above 213-level. (Writing mode)
Theory and Practice of Tonal Music II: Sure, why not. Above 213-level
Could also take Wind Symphony and/or Marching Band for credit just to nickel-and-dime my way to a full class load.

General requirements (3)

University Writing Course: As long as I have permission to change teachers
Intermediate French Language and Culture: My achievement test (SAT II) score and AP score put me here. To meet the Foreign Language mode, you have to take three classes OR a 300-level course. (Duke has renumbered everything so that 100-levels are intros.) This is 200-level, so …
French for Current Affairs: Also meets seminar requirement and CCI mode.

That’s already 22 classes. For the Areas below, the number of parentheses is the number of credits I’ll get outside my major and minor. For example, I knock out Area 1 with my music minor, but I’ll also have an AP credit.

Area of Knowledge 1: Arts, Literature and Performance (1 non-major class)

English literature: AP all the way
(Music): Yeah, it’s covered.

Area of Knowledge 2: Civilizations (2)

American history: I could theoretically use both AP credits to take care of this. But I’d like to take another history, anyway.
Introduction to Oral History: Loved my oral history class in grad school. Would also meet my freshman seminar requirement IF I got into it first semester because it’s fall-only. (Research mode, seminar)

Area of Knowledge 3: Natural Sciences (2)

Chemistry, Technology and Society: It still exists! (STS mode)
Intro to Psychology: I can meet the Natural Sciences requirement with this? Oh, hell yeah! (STS mode)

Area of Knowledge 4: Quantitative Studies (2)

Foundations of Data Science: Computer Science class (STS mode)
Data Visualization: Found it on the journalism list.

Area of Knowledge 5: Social Sciences (2)

(Most of the Public Policy courses could meet this requirement)
Fantasy, Mass Media, and Popular Culture: Cultural Anthropology, cross-listed elsewhere, not always offered. Could also meet Civilization requirement, but I’ve got that covered (CCI mode)
Gateway Seminar – How to Do History: History department. (Ethical Inquiry and Research mode, seminar)

That’s 31 courses. I could only apply two of the three AP credits (calculus, English, American history) toward that total, so make it 30.

Four more …

Electives:

Everything Data: 200-level computer science course; might be tough without a 200-level math. Could meet Qualitative requirement
Ethics and Philosophy of Sport: 300-level! (Ethical Inquiry and Writing modes)
Introduction to Philosophy: Could meet Civilizations requirement. (Writing mode)
PE: Can count two classes, each a half-credit. I’m thinking Tai Chi and tennis. They don’t do racquetball any more!

So not much problem covering the Areas. Music and Public Policy knock out two of them, most history classes would take care of Civilizations, my two Natural Science classes are two that I actually took and enjoyed, and I’d take a couple of data-related courses to take care of Qualitative. I wouldn’t mind taking one more Arts course if they won’t let me count my music classes there.

Let’s make sure I’ve taken care of the Modes:

Cross-Cultural Inquiry: Music History III, French for Current Affairs, Fantasy/Mass Media/Pop Culture. Wow, little margin for error.
Ethical Inquiry: How to Do History, Ethics/Philosophy of Sports. Only two? Good think I’m taking the sports one!
Science/Technology/Society: All data and Natural Science classes. Easy.
Foreign Language: See above.
Research: I count five.
Writing: Too many to count.

So I’d consider that an improvement, though I’m a little iffy on some of those Public Policy classes.

personal, politics

Unraveling the Confederate flag

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Beau Dure

Our town has a pretty big Halloween parade, and it’s an annual tradition to toss blankets and chairs along the parade route to stake a good viewing spot.

Yesterday, I saw this:

Yes, that’s a Confederate flag blanket on the main street in my town, which is not exactly a Trump hotbed. (It is, though, quite white, and Asian and Hispanic residents far outnumber African-American residents.)

I was shocked, to say the least. I posted it to Facebook and instantly had several volunteers to go toss that thing in the trash.

But I did have to go back and question myself …

I watched The Dukes of Hazzard as a kid, like many kids of the 70s did. I played Dixie on the clarinet — the melody is a pretty good exercise for beginners. In college, my roommate one summer actually had a Confederate flag — he was in a fraternity that occupied part of my dorm building and had “Old South” events. At some point, I wrote a Chronicle column that was essentially a “live and let live” plea that included a paragraph about letting people show the flag for “Southern pride” if they wanted.

So am I being hypocritical?

I’d like to think people can make progress. Exhibit A: Tom Petty, who used to show the Confederate flag at his shows and later renounced it, quite eloquently:

The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant.

Some of us on Facebook said the same thing. More Petty:

To this day, I have good feelings for the South in many ways. There’s some wonderful people down there. There are people still affected by what their relatives taught them. It isn’t necessarily racism. They just don’t like Yankees. They don’t like the North. But when they wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a black person. I blame myself for not doing that. I should have gone around the fence and taken a good look at it. But honestly, it all stemmed from my trying to illustrate a character. I then just let it get out of control as a marketing device for the record. It was dumb and it shouldn’t have happened.

My dad actually had a good way of looking at it. He was an old-school Southern gentleman, also influenced by a life of traveling the world as a prominent biochemist. He believed the flag was not offensive but, if others found it offensive, a gentleman’s good manners would dictate that we shouldn’t fly it. I agreed with that at the time, but I think the next step was to recognize parts of the history that had been, to put it mildly, de-emphasized.

Only as an adult did I learn that a lot of Confederate flag-waving and monument-building took place in the 20th century, not the 19th. And it was done for specific reasons — basically, whenever black people made noise about injustice. Even if you can somehow rationalize the flag as some sort of historical affectation for a “states’ rights” cause without that knowledge, I can’t imagine a decent human being who’d rationalize the flag with that knowledge.

Today, there should be no excuse not to have that knowledge. Tom Petty and I grew up in the South before people talked about such things in public forums. In the Internet age, how can anyone not understand what the Confederate flag means today? Again — even if you can somehow rationalize that it’s OK to fly it given what it meant in the 19th century, how can you rationalize it when it is quite clearly a symbol of hate?

(I wonder how many people who objected to a mosque in New York because it was some sort of “triumphalism” see no problem with the dirtbag who flies a giant Confederate flag on I-95 knowing full well it’s going to be seen by thousands of slaves’ descendants every day.)

I did have a quick conversation with my walking companion. See the man in the picture? I have no idea whether the flag blanket was his. But someone walking with me figured it was, based on his pronounced Southern drawl.

And so I had to explain that we shouldn’t stereotype — at all. I’ve known thousands of people with Southern drawls — some of them fulfilling every stereotype Family Guy can toss out, some of them brilliant and progressive.

So we all have a lot of progress to make. I’m not done just because I’m less ignorant about this ugly collection of stars on a cross than I was when I was 14 or 19. And I’m not sure of the best way to encourage whoever laid this hideous blanket on the main street of my town to start making some progress, too.

personal

About my name

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Beau Dure

“Beau” has passed “Bo” in popularity as a male name, according to Social Security records:

beau

personal, philosophy, politics

On gender, bubbles, sociology and prejudice

Posted on April 27, 2017April 27, 2017 by Beau Dure

There’s a fine line between prejudice and sociology.

I can’t remember when I first said that, and I can’t remember if someone else said it first. Google can’t help me with that because the thought somehow got in my head so many years ago. I found an interesting piece on the fine line between profiling and stereotyping, but that was obviously written much later.

That’s not to say I don’t respect sociology. It’s not just an easy major for Duke athletes. In grad school, I learned a lot about identity and explored the intersection of sociology and economics.

Sociology and other academic fields are very good at pointing out who lives in a bubble. We learn about white privilege, male privilege, etc.

Here’s the issue:

We are ALL flawed in our perceptions. We ALL have valid but partial experiences to share.

I emerged from grad school with some skepticism about postmodernism. The theme in some of my classes was that academia and the media had, over the generations or even centuries, typically overlooked the voices of people who were not in places of power. And that’s true. But many academics take this noble idea to an extreme, dismissing expertise in favor of experience, even if that experience only covers a small part of the complexities of a given issue.

The right wing, of course, has hijacked this notion. “Don’t listen to those pointy-headed East Coast elitists talking about global warming and citing stats on economics and crime that refute your perceptions. You live in “real America,” so your viewpoint is more important than theirs.” And in the media, we fall for it — fanning out to understand and empathize with Trump voters even when they’re blaming immigrants and supposedly unneeded government regulation for their economic woes.

We all bring unique flaws to the table. Men can’t fully comprehend what it’s like to be a woman, which we realize when we share pictures of ridiculous all-male panels discussing women’s health. We may be too old to understand youth culture. We may be too young to have experience. We may have insecurities that force us to reach for convenient labels to dismiss views that make us uncomfortable.

In short — we all have bubbles.

At the last meeting of one of my grad-school classes, our professor (a sociologist) said she enjoyed teaching our liberal-studies classes more than she enjoyed teaching undergraduate classes because we were more diverse. We weren’t. We were nearly all white NPR listeners. Yes, we had a wider range of ages — some fresh out of undergrad life, some in their 60s — but that’s just one of many metrics.

The perception this professor had was that Duke undergrad students were all ridiculously wealthy, moreso than the people who had spent their own hard-earned money to take these grad-school classes on top of their regular jobs. But I also went to Duke as an undergrad, and that wasn’t my experience.

Duke, being a well-known and often infamous university, spills out into the mainstream at times. New York magazine recently ran something about Duke’s role in the birth of the alt-right. Richard Spencer spent time in grad school there. Stephen Miller had a column at The Chronicle and the good timing to be there when the rape accusations against the lacrosse team turned out to be Exhibit A for identity politics run amok.

That piece included a few comments from Shadee Malaklou, who was also a Chronicle columnist overlapping with Miller’s time. It does not cite Malaklou’s recent piece taking her classmates to task for their letter criticizing Miller as abhorrent to Duke values. Duke shares the blame for Miller, Malaklou argues, because his columns ran in the school newspaper and people didn’t adequately protest against him or controversial statements in the lacrosse case. Those who regularly castigated Miller in the Chronicle’s letters section, or those who remember that Duke punished the lacrosse team so severely that it wound up spending the better part of the last decade in court, may beg to differ.

But this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Malaklou’s perceptions not aligning with mine. I remember her Chronicle columns well. She wrote extensively on Duke’s hookup culture, participating in it but finding it unsatisfying.

As a retired sex kitten, I understand the appeal: The echo of a pounding beat in a dimly lit room, the triumph of a dry hump, the print of rosy lipstick on a frat guy’s cigarette and the sound and fury of college life, a la Old School and Animal House. It’s almost irresistible. until about midway through college.

When it comes to sex, Duke women don’t have much of a choice. It’s either hookup or bust. Duke is not a sexually predatory campus, but in the words of Donna Lisker, director of the Women’s Center, men set Duke’s social rules.

Malaklou’s Duke exists, though I don’t think that many students smoke. But it’s not my Duke. And my Duke also exists, and it shouldn’t be dismissed.

On a larger scale, studies show a big gap in perception and reality when it comes to the hookup culture. Like misinformed voters who think the federal government spends most of its money on foreign aid and PBS, we think everyone else is doing it, but the numbers just don’t back that up.

My Duke, the one Malaklou and my grad-school professor may have missed, included a bunch of people on financial aid with work-study jobs. It included Muslims and Christians whose religious views weren’t compatible with getting drunk and getting laid. It included all the people in my artsy coed dorm (or The Chronicle) who dated each other, in some cases leading to happy marriages.

Today’s Chronicle neatly captures Duke’s diversity. One column is a fond but slightly cynical look at the “secret society” that pops up to do weird things at the end of the school year. Another is written “to the sorority girls I never talked to.”

None of this means Malaklou’s experience is invalid. (And thankfully, she’s a much better writer than most academics.) It’s merely incomplete.

And that brings me to a a long PDF file on “emotional labor,” shared by a wonderful senior at a California college who has the intellect and idealism to make a difference in this world, for which we should all be grateful.

The rough definition, according the first paragraph, is “the work of caring.” But not just caring — it’s also figuring out what to do to make caring work.

The assumption here is that women do this “work” and “figuring out,” while men do not. Ouch. And it depicts a lot of would-be male feminists as the femi-bros in the great SNL sketch with Cecily Strong at the bar.)

The experiences shared, mostly complaints and realizations that women are expected to carry more of the “emotional labor” burden in our society, are valid. But as with everyone else in this discussion (and in the real world), it’s prone to bubble-thought.

I can counter one post with my own experience. A woman says that her husband who always took their daughter to ballet got “pity or adulation from women for doing this stuff.” I can relate to a point — I do most of the pickups at school and other activities. But I didn’t get pity or adulation. For a while, I got a lot of standoff-ish body language, as if I shouldn’t be there. After a couple of years, people got used to me, and I’m generally more accepted. I’m still not pitied, and any adulation I get comes from the fact that I have a reputation as a “dog whisperer.” It’s still not easy for me to start or maintain conversations with women at school pickup — I’m often ignored and frequently interrupted by other women on the assumption that their conversation is going to be more important than whatever I was saying.

I’m the one in our family who keeps up a lot of social contact — and frankly, it’s sometimes awkward. I’ve sometimes felt uncomfortable setting up a playdate with a friend’s mom — not because I’m unwilling to do the emotional labor, but because I sometimes get the sense that the mom is creeped out by this conversation with a heterosexual married man.

And there are a lot of specific examples from which you simply can’t draw a general conclusion. One example: A woman frets that her husband was mad that she wasn’t sending birthday cards to all of his relatives. I’d argue that guy isn’t that way simply because he’s a guy. He’s just a jerk.

My fear in this case is that men — all men — are simply the scapegoat here. She married a bad guy, and she doesn’t want to ponder the possibility that she made a mistake. If she’s able to chalk up her man’s faults as an issue that all men share, then voila, she couldn’t have done better. Men are labeled as the faceless, dehumanized “other.”

Again — this discussion has plenty of valid points, and no, I’m not empathizing here with the whiny “men’s rights” movement. Women are under tremendous pressure to be the workers in the emotional labor force. And it’s a pressure I can never fully appreciate, just as I can’t fully appreciate what it’s like to pulled over for Driving While Black or to struggle with gender and sexual identity issues. Having an identity forced on you seems like a really terrible experience to me, but that’s about the extent of what I can say about it, because I haven’t lived it first-hand. And I have to accept that limitation and just try to empathize as best I can.

But we ALL have to do this. AND we have to recognize that the people with whom we’re empathizing are as error-prone as we are.

Should we listen to people who voted for Trump out of economic fear? Absolutely. Should we accept their scapegoating of immigrants and others? No. It’s not even the empathetic thing to do. They’re actually voting against their own self-interest because they think government programs benefit federal workers and lazy “others,” failing to realize how much those programs do for them and their neighbors.

Should we listen to the sorority girls and fraternity boys? Sure.

Should we listen to the academic left, which is so underrepresented in modern life that we actually consider Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “liberal”? Yes.

And should we listen to middle-aged white dudes who are laden with all sorts of guilt (I’m Anglican, which gives me some residual Roman Catholic guilt as well as the knowledge that we basically broke away so Henry VIII could marry someone else, and I’m descended from Confederate officers) and would like to contribute to any discussion that makes us more enlightened? I hope so.

Not that everyone deserves a platform. I wouldn’t invite Ann Coulter or Richard Spencer to speak at my campus. I also objected when some Duke students promoted a speech by an African-American man who was a little less than enlightened about Jews.

But when we tally up all the issues in modern society, we rarely find that we’re listening too much. We don’t have to accept everything outside our safe space, but we should at least take a peek.

journalism, personal

Lent’s over. So where should I post and share?

Posted on April 16, 2017 by Beau Dure

Being a freelance writer of diverse interests is a bit like being a dog in a yard full of squirrels. Focus is always going to be a challenge too often attacked with snacks.

My social media restrictions over Lent were designed to impose a bit of discipline. I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ve learned something.

But I still have a lot of choices to consider as I try to find the sweet spot between satisfying editors, satisfying readers and satisfying myself. I have the luxury of being self-indulgent if I want, but I don’t want to be in a cocoon writing only for myself. I’d like to make people (especially, but not limited to, my friends) laugh and think.

Professionally, I’ll certainly keep writing for The Guardian, and I plan to do more youth soccer for FourFourTwo. I’m intrigued with the new sports section at OZY, and I’d like to write more for Bloody Elbow/SB Nation after the last installment of my old Inside The Ultimate Fighter book.

Speaking of books, I’m on the verge of finishing How the Hell Did I End Up Cageside?, though it’s going to be a mini-book, circa 30,000 words. I’ll likely put it up at Amazon in the next month or so.

Then there’s the stuff I write for fun — the now-monthly “What’s THAT Supposed to Mean?” series at Popdose and what I write here at Mostly Modern Media. I don’t expect any money from any of that.

That said, the line between what I do for fun and what I do for work is blurry. When I’m talking sports on Twitter, it’s fun, but it also affects my writing. And that’s one reason I can’t give up Twitter entirely, as tempting as that seems at times.

So I have to sort through a lot of priorities, not the least of which is “stuff I can do with my kids.” You might think it’s a distraction to tinker with keyboards, drums and GarageBand, but it’s a fun way to spending creative time with a son who is quickly surpassing me in every musical skill except reading music, which he rarely needs to do because he picks up melodies so quickly by ear and practice.

I won’t go through every single thing I’m considering. That seems a little self-indulgent, and I’m trying to get away from that. But I have a couple of questions:

Does anyone still use Flipboard? I hope so, because I’ve started using that as my medium for sharing global (mostly Olympic) sports news, and I’ve found I can toss a feed from it on SportsMyriad.
Am I right in thinking Medium is essentially a new-wave Huffington Post without the strident political overtones and anti-vaccine nonsense? I’m thinking of using that the way I used to use HuffPo — writing medium-length pieces that promote what I’m doing.
Does anyone have a Twitter-client alternative to Tweetdeck or Hootsuite?
If I decide to open up a library for public viewing on Diigo, will anyone know what that means?
SurveyMonkey or Google Forms?
What’s the best way to do voiceovers on PowerPoint slideshows and turn the end result into an animated YouTube video?
Is anyone doing good data journalism independently — say, on a one-person blog?
Why the hell does Snapchat still exist now that Facebook and Instagram are also offering temporary “stories” so you can put stupid artwork over inappropriate photos and not have a potential employer dig it up a couple of years later?

Those are my questions for now. I’ll check back after I eat, get my teeth drilled, write two stories due to run Tuesday, and do the PTA newsletter. (Geez, for someone with no actual job, I have a lot to do.)

journalism, personal

Getting started in data science: One journalist’s journey

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Beau Dure

Let me first say up front what you will not get in this blog post: A step-by-step guide to using whatever data tool you want. Using spreadsheets is beyond the scope of a blog post. Using R (and, I’d guess, using Python) is beyond the scope of the classes I’ve taken that purport to teach me how to use R.

What you will get is one person’s take on how to dip your toes into an ocean. I hope you’ll be able to get some advice on how to go from the occasional spreadsheet user to Data Journalism Deity and perhaps get some idea of where to go next. If this is the first thing you read about data science or data journalism, fine — I’m assuming no prior knowledge.

First: Reconsider what you mean by “education.” Seriously.

Remember back in college when you knew a bunch of annoying dudes who had figured they just needed to make a lot of great contacts in school, and the classes themselves were secondary? While you busted your butt studying and working, they were shaking hands and drinking beer?

I’m not going to say they were right. But they were on the right track. Here’s why:

Working with data is less about learning how to do it and more about learning where to ask.

Don’t believe me? Ask Vik Paruchuri, who made the liberal arts-to-data leap himself and has this to say about it:

data-problem

Check out his whole video. It’s 32 minutes, but you can skip the first couple of minutes because he took it from a Google Hangout and spent the first bit of it waiting around. (Expert on data science but doesn’t edit video in YouTube? Knowledge is specialized.)

He devoted a year or so to learning data science. But he also just jumped in. He started doing projects (because you learn by doing in this field) and going to meetups, all before he knew much code.

On the other hand, here’s how *I* did it:

I signed up at Coursera, an online-learning hub, for a nine-course series offered by Johns Hopkins University. I figured I would plow through the courses and get a spiffy certificate at the end, proving to myself and everyone else that I know my way around R (the en-vogue data programming language today) and everything else in the world of data.

Around the 13:30 mark of Paruchuri’s video, he says MOOCs (like Coursera’s content) are not the best way to learn. But by the time I watched his video, I had already gone past the “no refund” part of the Hopkins specialization. Oops.

That’s not to say I’ve wasted my time and money. Check that: I do think I’ve wasted quite a bit of time trying to pass quizzes that I really didn’t need to pass.

In retrospect, I wish I knew there are two ways to approach the Hopkins specialization:

Make this your life, as if you were a full-time student, particularly if you don’t have a ton of prior programming experience or stats background. (The Pascal I learned in college and the JavaScript I learned 20 years ago weren’t enough. In stats, I’m comfortable talking about medians, means and even standard deviations, but I have little idea what a “linear regression” even means.) You’ll finish up with a certificate that might get you employed somewhere.
Browse. Learn what you want. Attempt a few quizzes, but feel free to bail.

The seductive part of data science is that it seems so accessible. It seems like everyone’s doing it, from political bloggers breaking down government data to 14-year-old fantasy football wizards. But in reality, they’re just doing a small part of data science. When you start digging around and finding powerful data applications, you’ll find they’ve been developed by people with “PhD” in their LinkedIn profiles, not “BA in philosophy and music.”

Consider a music analogy. As Radiohead sang, anyone can play guitar. It might be a high school kid figuring out Rush songs (like me, many years ago) or your friend’s dad who suddenly whips out an old acoustic and plays Classical Gas. But how many people do you know who can sight-read just about anything on piano? Or teach band in an elementary school, helping kids learn every woodwind and brass instrument?

You don’t go to Berklee for four years to learn how to play Purple Haze or even to write your own guitar riffs. So why would you work your way through everything in the Hopkins data specialization to learn a few tools to use in journalism?

The funny thing here: The quizzes in the Hopkins sequence helped teach me that lesson and the importance of knowing where to look for the answers. Those quizzes — at least, once you get past the simple multiple-choice stuff in the intro class — are programming assignments. And the classes don’t teach you how to do them.

Kind of a weird way to approach teaching, isn’t it? And very frustrating if you, like me, don’t know what you’re getting into.

To pass the quizzes, you have to look around the Web for help. You may quickly find that the regulars at StackOverflow, an impressive online forum for sharing programming tips, are getting sick of answering questions from people who are stuck on the Hopkins programming assignments. But you can often find a couple of things that help.

The course itself has an online forum that substitutes for the interaction you’d have the teacher if you were taking this class in person. But they can only give you general tips, not answers. You click an honor-code pledge with every submission, just like we did at Athens Academy. (All together now: “I have neither given nor received any aid on this work, nor have I observed any infraction of our Honor System.” One kid made a rubber stamp with all those words to speed along his test-taking.)

The forum is manned by mentors who have survived the class already. And the general message is to get used to “hacking.” Get out on StackOverflow and other sites, then figure it out. Because that’s what you’ll be doing in the real world.

“Sure,” you may say, “but what am I paying for?” You’re really paying for the lectures, a nifty set of online tutorials, and a basic intro to some of the tools you need, like RStudio (a bit like Notepad with a whole lot of tools to help with your code) and Github (a sharing site). And if you have hours upon hours — other students have reported spending months on quizzes with an estimated time of “30 minutes” or so — you may be able to plow your way through and get the specialization.

At some point — and I’m writing this so you’ll do it before you take the course rather than partway into it like I did — you have to stop and ask what you really want to accomplish. Even if you want a full-time data job, there are so many different ones. Data scientist? Data engineer? Data journalist?

panther

You’re probably better off playing around with online data tools first, and then signing up for a course. That’s true whether you’re just looking to supplement your knowledge and skillset (like me) or going become a Full-Time Data Science Person (like Paruchuri).

One example: Paruchuri says 90 percent of the work is data “cleaning” (if you’ve ever seen a spreadsheet in which some entries say “Miscellaneous” and some say “Misc,” you get the idea). You could use R for that. It’s powerful. Or you could use a former Google tool called OpenRefine. Knowing a bit of programming logic may help with that, but it’s not as intense as learning complex operations in R.

So now that I’ve spent four months learning what I can, I’ve managed to define my goals.

First, what do I want to do?

Find an efficient way to do Olympic medal projections. I’ve used spreadsheets to track past results and use a few formulas to do them in the past, but it’s safe to say I spent far too much time gathering and processing data.
Learn enough to try other projects on my own, perhaps a survey of North American curling clubs, for example.
Learn enough to tell a potential part-time or full-time employer that I might not be a full-fledged data scientist, but I know the tools and have a good sense of what’s feasible.

Now bear in mind everything else I want to do in the next 2-3 years:

Continue writing epic soccer pieces and other content for The Guardian.
Finish retooling parts of my unpublished MMA book into a series of posts at Bloody Elbow.
Finish retooling the other parts of that book into a small self-published book.
Write another book on youth soccer.
Write a bit more for FourFourTwo and OZY.
Maybe find a steady outlet for Olympic-sports content (which could include a lot of data work).
Maybe start working for a nonprofit (maybe even with data).
Maybe even start the definitive book (or multimedia project) on creativity.

I’m not including high priorities like “be a good parent” or even low but unavoidable priorities like “mow the danged lawn.”

So from a data perspective, here’s what I should be able to do:

Understand what I’m looking at when I check Kaggle, which turns data-science sharing into fun things like a March Madness contest.
Navigate github.
Use OpenRefine and any other good web tools I can find.
Scrape data from reputable sources.
Present the output in some coherent and engaging form.

I’ll pick my way through the rest of the Hopkins courses. I’ve also enrolled in a cost-friendly course at Udemy, which I started taking so I could figure out enough to pass the R programming course at Hopkins. (I passed two. The rest? You may consider me an auditor.)

And then I’ll just explore, like I did when I was figuring out Rush songs on my guitar. (Hmmm … can I process songs in R?)

Mostly Modern Media