I’ve begun reporting for City Limits’ new Brooklyn Bureau. Here’s my first story, an education piece about Medgar Evers College’s challenges in improving its performance and its brand.

“Science and Politics Collide in Medgar Evers Faculty Split”

The story about Republican students doing bake sales on various campuses is trending this week but it’s been done before, by me. So I’ve dug up the story I did back in March 2004 on this exact same topic when the idea had caught on at various campuses including Columbia University. My piece was posted on the now defunct Africana.com so all I still possess is a PDF version of it. Toward the end of it I speak with David Johns, a student active in Columbia’s Black Studies department:

According to Johns… very qualified people are admitted over other very qualified people, but the university still only admits “qualified” people based on GPA, test scores, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and an essay… “I think a diverse campus just challenges some people’s sense of entitlement,” Johns says, adding that he missed the whole bake sale. “Fortunately, I was in class earning my grades.”

This “stacked hierarchy” visualization uses the Statistal Abstract’s 2010 data via the Labor Department. It is the very same dataset that got me into stats and viz in the first place, I first came across it while editing and researching Black Enterprise‘s Facts & Figures section. A few of the numbers here are sobering.

Hit the ‘click to interact’ button then play with each group label on the left to see changes over time. A bar chart might show it better but the real stand-out oddity here is that since the late 1980s the total number of Black women in the labor force is greater than the total number of Black men, and this relationship is only flipped among Black Americans – for other groups the men still outnumber the women, even though women are catching up fast. This is crazy to me, it’s shocking everytime I think about it and at the same time I feel naive for being suprised at all, considering other social realities that aren’t missed on me. But still, it’s nothing to be quiet about. Dataviz is the least I can do.

Here I’ve pulled the figures for just the African American demo to show, in side by side bar chart form, the 1980s to 1990s swtich. The whole country and the whole world is shifting from industrial economies to information economies, so the nature of work itself is less physical, and therefore gender agnostic.

Other tidbits in the data: Hispanic women will surpass Black women before 2016. Hispanic men are joining at the fastest rate. White women are joining faster than white men (unfortunately the source doesn’t have Asian American labor numbers till 2000).

Produced using IBM’s Many Eyes and Google Chart Tools respectively.

I documented how heavy rains affected conditions in the subway station near my job, plus the alarmed reactions of other riders. I took a few moments to capture video once I saw the surprise waiting for riders at the east side’s 103rd Street subway station. Uptown riders were forced to contend with a serious hazard that went on for hours during a recent storm.

Video captured and edited with my iPhone and the iMovie app.

On August 5 I led a panel at the NABJ convention, along with the woman in blue, Serbino Sandifer-Walker. We explained mobile video reporting to the room of journalists, a handful of whom stayed afterwards to continue talking, so we all took the group shot. They said we had a great session.

Here’s a brief tech story of mine posted on the NABJ Digital blog about a robot technology that mimics sports reporting and other types. The people at Narrative Science offer an automated service that generates reporting that is indistinguishable from anything that real reporters write. Which is interesting because the new questions it forces us to answer are, are there certain areas of news reporting, i.e. statistical, straightforward, impersonal areas, that we actually ought to let machines do for us if they can in fact do it better than we can? I think at least it’s an inevitable debate.

UPDATE: Response from interviewee:

“Saw your article earlier this week, really well done. It’s the most even handed piece I’ve seen written about us so far. Many thanks”
Larry Adams, VP Product Management

One of Brooklyn’s state reps discusses our block association with me.

My local civic action organization had a street rally so I recorded the talks and interviewed the key people.

UPDATE: My friends at NostrandPark.com just posted this mention about my block association’s recent rally, which includes a link to my video report.

PBS’ American Experience program organized a traveling event involving young student activists of today, 40 of whom were selected out of 2,000+ applicants, to take a two-week journey with a number of elders who were student activists 50 years ago. This was in honor of the 1961 Freedom Rides. I was there to honor them as well because my parents were two among more than 300 Freedom Riders. So while American Experience’s chartered bus prepared to depart from Washington DC en route through the Deep South all the way to New Orleans, I asked a few students to explain reasons why they were excited.

Captured, edited and produced with my iPhone.

I had these and other rare pics handy because my wife and I recently put on a book club that covered the new biography on Malcolm X by the late historian Manning Marable. It’s definitely a cover to cover read, I raced through its 500+ pages in three weeks on my Nook. During our talk I used my Apple TV to pull up recorded speeches, photos and videos and add to the conversation.

In the montage I’m using a nifty iPhone app that creates frames around different photos to produce one image.

I edited this video because these are my parents! It features 1961 Freedom Riders, Robert and Helen Singleton in both recent coverage and also very rare historical footage of “nonviolence training” that civil rights activists underwent before engaging in actual protests. The Singletons present this video along with other media at their speaking engagements where they tell audiences their story. I edited down hours of film of my folks to produce a brief 15 minute presentation for their demonstration purposes.

I fully credit the sources: C-SPAN2 BookTV’s coverage of the Harlem Book Fair, 2008; MAD MEN Season 2 DVD featurette, 2008; KTLA-TV City At Night’s 1961 archived footage of nonviolence training.

A photographer friend, Angela Johnson Meadows, featured me in a photo project where she asked each subject to pose with ‘Just One Thing’, one material object that they’d try to quickly grab before escaping their home in a sudden emergency like a fire or a quake (that is if it was known that all people and pets were already safe). So since not all my data is completely up in the cloud just yet, I still say that my portable hard drive has to be a seriously valuable possession. I wouldn’t lug my computer out, just all the things I’ve created with it, most of which still exist on this drive.

I shot this brief video clip during a lively roundtable discussion put on recently by my friend Tahir Hemphill to discuss topics connected to his project The Hip-Hop Word Count. The Rap Research Group was a series of focus group discussions designed to add qualitative perspectives to Tahir’s largely quantitative work. He describes his Hip-Hop Word Count system as an “ethnographic database” of what Hip-Hop produces more of than anything else, and that’s lyrics. He saw published lyrics as a vast load of data because to a data manager, lyrics are just volumes and volumes of searchable and filterable text. So he began developing a project that analyzes everything that Hip-Hop has ever had to say by organizing every lyric in one huge database.

But he couldn’t treat lyrics as just data because language has context and meaning that computational analysis can’t fathom. So to make his project appeal to real people he gathered real people to discuss the human and cultural things that the data miss in these roundtables. At the table were people who Tahir describes as “Rap enthusiasts, historians, creative technologists, cultural critics, linguists, teachers, MC’s and academics.” The topic of session #4 was The (Im)Possibility of Quantifying Art & Metaphor in Rap, at least that’s where the conversation began.

This clip is from somewhere well beyond that. I’m sure that somewhere someone else has clips of me expressing my ideas but here in this clip I captured a moment during which Ken Montgomery, Mallie Mickens and General Steele dominated the conversation.

In the photo, I’m pictured on the right in red hearing a point being made at that moment by Mallie.

Photo by Raafi Rivero

I led a team of great people over the course of two days as we worked to initiate my app idea. From left to right we are me, Abhay Saxena, Mallie Mickens, Ida Benedetto and Jay Finch. I heard about this hackathon from my friend Tahir because he was working with Eyebeam at the time and he knew I’d be interested. This was also my introduction to Hack/Hackers and I’ve been an active member of the NYC group ever since. Read more about the hackathon event.

I spoke with the ‘hip-hop entrepreneur’ about his spiritual quest, his new book and his daughters’ reality TV show for TIME.com. He’s always busy, pretty hard to get a hold of so this was a phoner and of course the call dropped a couple of times, would’ve been worse if it was for radio or podcast, but it was just for this online Q&A. But speaking with him was cool, he’s actually an interesting person to learn a lot from so appreciated talking for as long as we did. I introed the piece with, “Russell Simmons revolutionized both rap music and hip-hop fashion by growing them from marginal street fads to mainstream must-haves, starting with the record label he co-founded (Def Jam) and his clothing line (Phat Farm). Now 50 and pretty much retired from both worlds, hip-hop’s original businessman is focused on charities and empowerment causes. Simmons spoke with Time.com about his politics, his recent book Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success, his fortune and his little princesses.”

The funniest moment from the Q&A was this:

Q: What in your book is new and fresh?
A: [Laughs ] Nothing! … Did Muhammad say something that Jesus didn’t say or that Abraham didn’t say before him? I’m not suggesting I’m one of those people, but [it's about] obvious truths. You already have everything you need.

TIME.com loves doing top ten lists, and as the Transformers movie hits theaters, Steve Snyder and I came up with a fun idea to look back at the most unforgettable robots ever created for the big screen. We researched the topic to develop the list and also drew from the films that we were each familiar with. Molly Stephey also worked with us to produce this clickthru, 80 Years of Robots in Hollywood.

The Psycho: HAL9000
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

The Mole: Ash
Alien, 1979

The Romantic Interest: Rachel
Blade Runner, 1982

Can They Be Trusted: Sonny
I, Robot, 2004