The Artful Manager | sourcebook

Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.

Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.

(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)

But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.

But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.

These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/

For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16%  rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.

(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)

Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.

One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!

This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.

But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.

And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

So if the people in their 20s went to the opera  constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.

The City of Copenhagen recently launched a public bicycle counter [copenhagenize.com], completely equipped with an air pump for the convenience of cyclists. The urban display counts the daily number of cyclists that use the new Green Path that slices diagonally across the Copenhagen and Frederiksberg pathway system. There is a 'sensor line' in the asphalt on the bike lane a few metres in front of the counter which registers the cyclists, probably via a motion sensor.

The idea is to encourage more people to ride by showing how many are using it. The numeric displays show the total so far today and this year. On the barometer-styled display, the left side will show last years' total.

The #500,000s cyclist passing by will get a fancy new bike.

Image taken from Matt Blackett at Flickr.

The book Unseen Networks of Heathrow Airport [iancarr.net] is accompanied by a small collection of simple data visualization posters that illustrate the noise levels at different locations in and around Heathrow airport buildings and boundaries. The "Spheres" poster portrays noise levels recorded at a Sound levels (dB) location in and around Heathrow Airport by colored circles. The "Matrix" visualization displays the link between each Sound levels (dB) location and the type of sound recorded over two minutes. In "Density", each column portrays noise levels and each line represents when the noise level reached above the average of 57 dB. The "Map" poster shows areas with a specific dB level at Heathrow Airport runway 1 and 2.

Thnkx Ian.

It’s now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don’t blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that’s just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to change.

But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.

Gladwell (who, by the way, I both like and admire, so let’s call this an intellectual debate between corporate cousins) writes:

“[Anderson argues that] newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” [Anderson] predicts, and he goes on:

“There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.”

Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.””

Well, I wouldn’t propose this as the future of all newspapers, but my model comes from personal experience. About three years ago, I started a parenting blog called GeekDad, and invited a few friends to join in. We soon attracted a large enough audience that it became apparent that we couldn’t post enough to satisfy the demand, so I put out an open call for contributors. Out of the scores who replied, I picked a dozen and one of them was Ken Denmead (at right, with Penn of Penn & Teller).

Ken is, by day, a civil engineer working on the BART extension in the SF Bay Area. But by night he is an amazing community manager. His leadership skills impressed me so much that I turned GeekDad over to him entirely about a year ago. Since then he’s recruited a team of volunteers who have grown the traffic ten-fold, to a million page views a month.

So here’s the calculus:

• Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
• Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
• The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

It works great for all involved. Is it the model for the newspaper industry? Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level. And I can imagine far more subjects that are better handled by well-coordinated amateurs than those that can support professional journalists. My business card says “Editor in Chief”, but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say “Community Manager.” Both can be good careers.

Malcolm, does this answer your question?

[Image at top from The New Yorker. Photo of Ken Denmead from GeekDad.]

Last Thursday night -- June 25 -- was the first National Orchestral Institute concert in which the students tried out the ideas we've talked about here, here, and here. (And, more indirectly, here, too.)

The concert was, if you ask me -- and if you ask the students -- a great success. I'll describe it in a moment. But here's something to think about. Debate raged over the ideas the students put forth, a very raw collection, right off the top of their heads, the first day they'd thought about these things. Some people making comments here liked the ideas. Some didn't. Some liked some of the ideas, but not others. Some thought the ideas would lead to effective outreach, some didn't. Some worried that the ideas -- if carried out on any large scale -- would make too great a change in classical concerts.

But suppose the students hadn't been thinking of larger implications? Suppose they'd just been trying to please themselves?

Here's what happened. This was a concert called "New Lights," featuring contemporary music chosen by the director of the NOI, James Ross. He'd picked four pieces: Leon Kirchner's String Quartet No. 4, Elliott Carter's pathbreaking woodwind quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, Christopher Rouse's Ogoun Badageris, for percussion quartet, and John Adams's Chamber Symphony. A serious program, by any standard.

And part of the point had nothing to do with concert innovations. This was music the students mostly didn't know, and hadn't played, in styles they might not have had experience with. And they were challenged to put the program together without a conductor (for the Adams), or with any outside coaching. They had to figure it all out for themselves. Of course they could listen to recordings, but that's not at all the same as understanding -- in your mind, your ear, and your gut -- how the figure in measure 76 that you play on your viola fits into the larger texture. That's especially a problem in the Adams, which has complex textures, tricky rhythms, constant changes, and often goes at a breakneck pace.

So musically the students were challenged (a wonderful challenge, I think, which is bound to grow their understanding of music, just as it'd grow my own if I could be in their position). But they were also empowered, because they were in charge. Which surely made this concert a good choice for trying out the students' ideas for new ways to present music. Not -- an important point -- because the music might have been difficult for the audience, or for the students themselves, but because this was a concert in which the students took full charge.

The Kirchner opened the program, and the four students who played it chose to introduce it with a video, in which we saw and heard them rehearsing, and talking about how they put the piece together. The video was quite professional. The students shot and edited it themselves. They also decided to add some subtle lighting changes, to go with changes in the music's mood. These were unobtrusive, I thought, and if anyone didn't care for them -- or didn't care for the idea of lighting changes, under any circumstances -- at least these didn't hit anyone in the face. So the idea was, I thought, expertly executed.

Then came an addition to the program, rock songs -- by Yes, the Decembrists Decemberists, and Journey, plus one by a former NOI student (a good song, no way to tell it wasn't by a well known band), plus a last-minute addition, "Billie Jean," of course added as a tribute to Michael Jackson, whose death was in the news that day.

The instrumentation for this: marimba, acoustic bass, guitar, discreet flute, drums (or more precisely a drummer drumming informally on what looked like a wooden box), and finally, but not least, a bassoon, which took major solos, with a sound that could have been a slightly shadowy sax. This produced an intriguing kind of line-drawing sound, distinguished more by light and shade than by bright or changing colors. Again, the students' choice. Turns out that they could sing very well, two of them with complete rock-band professional skill.

And then came the Carter (or most of it; the students were told they were free to leave out some of the etudes, and just to play the ones they felt they'd really mastered in their rehearsals; they played most of them). I thought this would be a strange segue, that the Carter would seem like it came from some other universe, and especially that it would sound stiff after the rock songs.

But that didn't happen! For me, this was the happiest part of the concert. The students chose to give a spoken introduction to each etude separately (the etudes re short, and greatly varied). The flute player did this, and chose to emphasize the compositional techniques used in each piece. Which turned out not to be at all academic, because his genuine interest in those techniques was unmistakable, because the techniques are clearly audible, and finally because the techniques turn out to be a lot of fun.

So the piece came across as loose and colloquial, the kind of music anyone could listen to. The people in audience liked it all so much that they started applauding spontaneously after each etude, quite spontaneously, and happily continued applauding even after the flutist, not wanting them to feel any obligation, suggested that they didn't have to keep doing it.

Then came intermission. Student percussionists were supposed to play Ogoun Badageris in the lobby during the intermission, but that got canned, because an elderly woman in the audience fell and hurt herself (a broken bone, I was told, but she seemed alert and not too badly troubled). You can't play a percussion quartet when the EMS is about to show up. The Rouse was rescheduled, still out in the lobby, for the end of the concert.

Back into the concert hall (a small one, seating perhaps two or three hundred people; it was nearly full) for the second half. First came what the students called the "No Lights" Ensemble, eight musicians (trumpets, viola, tuba, harp, and horn) who announced that they'd play a free improvisation. And that we in the audience were invited to join in. Which many of us did.

There's a little more backstory -- at chamber concerts during the past couple of weeks, the audience was invited to submit material for the improvisation, either musical phrases (which they'd write down in musical notation), or else verbal phrases, which the students could interpret musically however they liked. From all of this, the "No Lights" players picked a single, simple rhythm, which they taught to the audience (it didn't take long), and which turned out to give the improvisation a clear and strong spine.

The results were a lot of fun. Hard to resist, and quite invented, from everyone involved.

Then came Adams, with a brief spoken introduction. Adams had been inspired, he said, by classic old cartoons, and so, we were told, cartoons would be shown on TV monitors, placed just beyond the two ends of the stage. The monitors were a little small, which might have reflected a not quite right decision, or else a limitation in available equipment. That helped make the cartoons unobtrustive, but I can't imagine how -- unless they were blown up to gigantic size -- they would have bothered anyone. They certainly went with the music, and a Washington Post critic (not my wife) thought they added a lot.

(And that the music added a lot to the cartoons. You can read his review here. Scroll down to find it. It's on my wife's blog, but that doesn't mean that she had any connection to it, other than to have assigned it as part of a selection of NOI reviews that the paper runs every year. All classical reviews in the paper show up in her blog; that's why it's there.)

And then, as people variously headed home or gathered to talk, the Rouse piece was rousingly played in the lobby. And that was it. End of the concert. As I talked to various students whom I'd met when I spoke at two sessions at the start of their program, what emerged is something I can't stress enough. They loved this concert, whether they were playing in it, or sitting in the audience. (And joining the group improvisation, with their voices, with clapping, or whatever sound they felt like making.) I can't guess what percentage of the students were involved, either way, but there seemed to be a lot of them.

And why did they love it? Not because they were trying to reach out to anyone, though I'm sure that if we asked them, they say they thought people their age might relate to what they did. But what they liked most was that the concert was theirs -- not just because they were in full charge (Jim Ross told me the only guidance he offered was that any innovations they tried should grow out of the music), but because the concert involved them as a complete human beings and musicians. In other words, it spoke to a wide range of things they like about music, and a wide range of music that they like.

Some of them, at least, truly felt empowered. One talked to me afterwards about what a high the concert had been for him, and how sobering it might be to get back into the normal classical music world, where he'd be much more limited.

So let's put aside, for a moment, any question about whether all classical concerts should morph into something like this one. Who knows? That question isn't even on the table yet, not in the real world. Only in some speculative discussions. And let's also agree not to worry much about whether any particular person, no matter how impassioned, might not have liked what was going on. This was only one concert. Nobody had to like it. Nobody had to go to it! And nobody said -- before, during, or after -- that this was perfect.

Just consider this. Some fair number of student classical musicians -- selected, after thorough auditions, for a very demanding special program -- chose this as the kind of concert they'd like to give, when they were given full control. Some people reading this might have made a a different choice. But what does it mean that the students chose the way they did -- especially if they're at all representative of classical musicians their age?

Footnote: I guess I had some role in getting things moving in this direction, but the best part of my involvement is that, when I was at the concert, I couldn't tell that I'd had a role. I didn't recognize ideas that were specifically mine, ideas I'd told the students about, or in any way urged on them. The event seemed entirely theirs, and that seemed like the best involvement that I could have had.

A second footnote: Jim Ross is a visionary. Not just for setting the students on the path of concert innovations, but for putting them in full charge. And for giving them tough music to learn, all on their own. This is how to produce empowered, self-motivated musicians, a human bonanza that goes far beyond anything that might be needed for the future of classical music.

The New York Times just released this interactive infographic about Jackson's Billboard Rankings Over Time [nytimes.com]. It show the timeline of how Michael Jackson's songs performed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and how Michael Jackson's Billboard rankings compare with other notable artists, just as The Beatles, US or Mariah Carey.

More information about how the NYTimes graphics department was able to churn out this graphic so quickly, can be found at the Revolutions blog.

Baseball Infographics and other Visual Treats [flipflopflyin.com] consists of a small collection of infographic illustrations of mainly baseball-related statistics. The collection includes sports facts such as a projection of when the Yankees might run out of double-digit numbers, a size comparison of lot of sporty balls, the highest and lowest price for individual game tickets, a map of all MLB locations and their ballpark orientations, basketball shorts then and now, the total length of 716,083 pitches and the performance of Mike Morgan, plus some demographic facts such as relative amount of native Americans in Cleveland Ohio, and many more.

See also Sports Statplot, Basketball Heat Maps and Emo + Beer.

Thnkx Nick.

DATELINE: July 25, 2009, Chicago The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) released a study claiming losses by charities in the Madoff Ponzi scheme are explained by small and homogeneous boards. When we see anyone talking about diversity and foundation...

Hell is other people, Sartre famously wrote.

But not in my life, and certainly not on this blog. When I posted my estimates yesterday of how much -- in real numbers -- the classical music audience has increased or declined between 1982 and 2008, I needed to know the 2008 adult (18 and over) population of the US. I couldn't find that figure, so I used 2004 numbers instead, figuring they'd be close enough. Using those numbers, I calculated a five percent drop in the size of the classical audience. See yesterday's post for details.

But then I thought I could do better. I asked both here and on Twitter and Facebook if anyone could find a 2008 number for the data I wanted, and several people did. Thanks, all of you! The page I wanted, with the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 population estimates was here. If you want the data yourself, download the second of the Excel files they offer. That's the one that breaks out the age of the population from 18 up.

So now I know that -- at least according to the Census Bureau's best estimate -- the 18 and up population of the US in 2008 was 230,117,876. That's a 41% increase from 1982. During that period, the percentage of adults 18 and over going to classical music performances declined 30% (from 13.3% to 8.3%). But the increase of population almost wiped out that decline, so the absolute number of adults attending classical music events -- the size, in other words, of the adult classical music audience -- declined only 1.3%, quite a bit less than the 5% drop I wrongly calculated yesterday.

Which would explain why the rate of attendance could drop so steeply without causing panic at the box office. See my last post for various footnotes and qualifications. This is very rough data. And see the post before that for my theory about the longterm trends at work here, which -- if they continue -- should eventually lead to shrinkage we can see and feel.

DATELINE: June 25, 2009, Chicago Today, the Commonfund released a benchmark study that provides statistics on foundation investment performance. Two hundred Ninety (290) private and community foundations responded. The average return on investments for the 2008 calendar year was... The...

The data visualization installation Realtime Information Graphics [zumkuckuck.com] at the "Product Experience Center" of the Deutsche Telekom in Darmstadt, Germany shows the real-time usage of the company`s network infrastructure.

The custom-made visualization software developed by Zum Kuckuck analyzes the international data interchange as well as the network traffic of the Deutsche Telekom in real time, and reproduces it three-dimensionally, creating a cinematic sequence on a large size plasma screen, prominently placed in the room.

As some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it.

First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of course, and checking the original source material whenever possible). I disagree with those who say it should never be used. But the question is how to use it.

In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL (something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson page viewed on July 8th, 2008), which struck me as clumsy and archaic. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely and I integrated the attributions into the copy.

In doing so, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:

• Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)
• Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)
• In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

Also note the VQR is not saying that all the highlighted text is plagiarism; much of is actually properly cited and quoted excerpts of old NYT times articles and other historical sources. And as you’ll see, in most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn’t go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors’ language remained (in a few cases I missed it entirely, such as that short Catholic church usury example, which was a total oversight). This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them.

So now we’ve fixed the digital editions before publication, and we’ll publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. [UDATE: A draft version is here. We’ll be moving that a proper URL when the book launches] That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

Here’s the statement that my publisher, Hyperion, released yesterday:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

As some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it.

First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of course, and checking the original source material whenever possible). I disagree with those who say it should never be used. But the question is how to use it.

In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL (something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson page viewed on July 8th, 2008), which struck me as clumsy and archaic. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely and I integrated the attributions into the copy.

In doing so, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:

• Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)
• Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)
• In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

Also note the VQR is not saying that all the highlighted text is plagiarism; much of is actually properly cited and quoted excerpts of old NY Times articles and other historical sources. And as you’ll see, in most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn’t go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors’ language remained (in a few cases I missed it entirely, such as that short Catholic church usury example, which was a total oversight). This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them.

So now we’ve fixed the digital editions before publication, and we’ll publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. [UPDATE: A draft version is here. The final version will live in the right column of this blog permanently] That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

Here’s the statement that my publisher, Hyperion, released yesterday:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

Followup to my "Dire Data" post.

The National Endowment finds a decreasing percentage of Americans going to classical music concerts. And it's a sizable decline. In the 1982 study, thirteen percent of American adults had attended a classical music performance during the past year. In 2008, the number had fallen to 9.3%, a 30% drop.

But does this mean that the classical music audience now is smaller, in absolute numbers? Maybe not, because of course the population grew. So a diminished percentage might not mean a smaller audience. The audience might even have grown.

Has it? No, as it turns out. A rough estimate I've made shows that, in absolute numbers, the classical music audience -- as measured by this NEA data -- has in fact shrunk, but only by five percent. The percentage of adults going to classical concerts dropped by 30%, but the size of the adult population increased by a higher percentage, 35%. Calculate the actual numbers, the number of actual people going to classical performances, and you get the five percent drop. Which means that population growth protected us from the 30% drop in audience that the attendance percentage, taken by itself, would predict.

In my next post, I'll answer some doubters, and show why a decline in attendance matters. Matters quite a bit, in fact.

Footnotes:

My numbers are rough estimates because I don't know what the adult population of the US -- people 18 and over -- was (or was estimated by the Census Bureau to be) in 2008. I'm sure that number exists, but, after extensive searches using Google, Ask.com, Wolfram Alpha,Wikipedia, and Bing, I haven't found it. I've found numbers for various other years, with various cutoff points (people 15 and over, people 19 and over, people 20 and over; I need 18 and over, because that's what the NEA meant by "adult"). So I give up. I just don't have anymore time to spend with this. I know the 18 and over number for 1982, and also for 2004, so I'm using the 2004 figure as a stand-in for 2008, figuring there won't be all that much difference. If anyone has a 2008 number for people18 and over in the US, please let me know!

The opera numbers, from the NEA data, work out the same as the classical music data. (The NEA surveys the audiences for opera and classical music separately.) Three percent of adult Americans went to opera performances in 1982, and 2.1% went in 2008. That's a 30% drop, just as the classical music numbers showed, which then leads to a five percent drop in the absolute number of people attending opera. By "classical music," by the way, the NEA means orchestral, choral, and chamber performances.

All of this data is raw. In my last post, I theorized about cultural factors that might have led to the percentage declines. I find my theories plausible, because of the way the declines hit people of different ages, over the decades. Attendance in any age group seems to drop when the people in that age group grew up in an era when interest in classical music seems to have declined. But people may also -- surely are also -- going less because there's more to do than there used to be, more live performances, and more competition at home (from DVDs, for instance). We also don't know the effects of marketing on attendance. My sense is that classical music marketing, especially at the big institutions, improved a lot over the past few years, in large part in reaction to what seems (especially at big institutions) to have been a decline in ticket sales from 1990 or so on. So maybe improved marketing is making the attendance percentages better than they might have been if marketing didn't improve.

And what do these NEA surveys actually measure? In 2008, people were asked: "With the exception of elementary or high school performances, did you go to a live classical
music performance such as symphony, chamber, or choral music during the last 12 months?" (And then similarly for others in their households, their spouse and children.) That makes the resulting figures ambiguous, to say the least. We don't know, for instance, what, exactly the respondents thought were symphony, chamber, or choral performances. And the answers also of course smoosh together paid concerts, free concerts, pops concerts, everything. Thus these numbers can only indicate really large-scale trends, which might not precisely mirror more nuanced behavior, for instance the percentage of people buying tickets to an orchestra's core subscription concerts. So we need to be careful in predicting any consequence from what these numbers show. Orchestra attendance, for instance, might not reflect the trends in the NEA's numbers, or might not precisely reflect them. There are indications that it does (and that data from opera companies mirrors the NEA's opera figures), but I'm giving this caution anyway.

BBC Memoryshare [bbc.co.uk] is a living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day. Users are invited to contribute, share and browse memories of all their memorable days and life experiences, and see them in the context of recent and historical events. Memories can include text, photos and videos.

Memoryshare is a web service across a number of sites on bbc.co.uk, such as local websites, radio and television. It was launched on the BBC Norfolk site on 8 July 2007, on the BBC London site on 23 July 2007 and on the BBC South Yorkshire site on 25 July 2007. It uses the DNA software developed for h2g2. The long-term aim for BBC Memoryshare is for a fully dynamic service which will enable users to find and search BBC content against date, to create content and to share multi-media content with other users.

The academic paper titled "The Event Tunnel: Interactive Visualization of Complex Event Streams for Business Process Pattern Analysis" [tuwien.ac.at] reports on a novel interactive visualization of event streams to support business analysts in exploring business cases and business processes.

The data visualization technique is based on the metaphor of considering the event stream as a cylindrical tunnel, which is then presented to the user from multiple perspectives. The "top view" looks into the stream of events along the time-axis, so that events on the inner circles of the tunnel are displayed smaller to simulate perspective projection. The angular position of each event is not implicitly defined and can be controlled by the business analyst with placement policies. The "side view" plots the events in temporal order, and resembles process charts such as GANTT diagrams without the depiction of dependencies.

The techniques presented so far are suitable for small and medium sized data sets of up to 5,000 events. A distribution analysis in the sector placement-policy can also be performed with data sets of up to 40,000 events. The Event Tunnel data visualization technique has been evaluated by applying to it to 2 different business applications: automated fraud detection in online betting and real-time monitoring of logistics processes.

Thnkx Christoph!

DATELINE: June 23, 2009, Chicago College, university, and other endowments certainly have taken a hit during the last year. We all know the numbers—25% to 40% declines in value. We all know the consequences—insufficient cash flows, inability to access principal...

Real-Time 3D Airtraffic Network Simulation [whitevoid.com] is a large-scale visualization installation that aims to reveal the local and global connections of international air traffic

A 14 meter long and 180 degrees wide projection, located in the flight control tower of the Lufthansa Brand Academy Frankfurt-Seeheim, allows visitors to dive into the fully navigable, real-time 3D visualization of about 16,000 daily Lufthansa and Star Alliance flights. The navigation interface provides 6 degrees of freedom, while time and content filters can be activated with buttons and sliders. The user can swiftly move from a macro view of a local hub to a global overview of the worldwide air traffic routes. All flight patterns are linked to spatial sounds that follow the visual representations through virtual space.

You can watch the documentary movie below.

Thnkx Christopher!

The project "Mapping Time based on Genealogy and National History" [flickr.com] consists off a simple but incredibly detailed mapping of 100 years worth of dates on a long paper canvas. Over a time period of more than 14 days, the author, "graphic musician" Haohao Huang, wrote the numerical dates on a long roll of paper completely by hand. After this accomplishment, he took 8 days to color-code his hand scribbled numbers based on historical records of modern Chinese history (e.g. Huanghuagang Uprising, Xinhai Revolution, New Culture Movement).

Unfortunately, details about the amount of dates, the length of the paper and the color legend seem to be missing, but the high resolution pictures are sufficiently impressive to appreciate the immense effort.

You can watch the documentary video below. Realizing the New York Times Headlines Wallpaper costs about $1,000 per roll, one can only imagine the potential price of this work.

Via datavisualization.ch

We published an excerpt from the book in Wired this month. Here’s how it starts:

“In 1969, the Neiman Marcus catalog offered the first home PC, a stylish stand-up model called the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, priced at $10,600. The picture shows an aproned housewife caressing the machine, with this tag line: "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." That image should be on every cubicle in Silicon Valley; it's a testament both to what technologists get right and what they get badly wrong.

To their credit, they understood that Moore's law would bring computing within the reach of regular people. But they had no idea why anyone would want it. Despite countless brainstorming sessions and meetings on the subject, the only application the Honeywell team could think of for a home computer (aside from the perennial checkbook balancing) was recipe card management. So the Kitchen Computer was aimed at housewives and featured integrated counter space. Those housewives would, however, require a programming course (included in the price), since the only way to enter data was with binary toggle switches, and the machine's only display was binary lights. Needless to say, not a single Kitchen Computer is recorded as having sold.

Today, of course, we have computers in every home—and in every pocket and car and practically everywhere else. But one of the few things the average person doesn't use them for is managing recipe cards.

Don't blame Honeywell—blame the computing world of the 1960s. In those days, computers were expensive mainframes. Because processing power was so scarce and valuable, it was reserved for use by IT professionals, mostly working for big companies and the government. Engineers both built the computers and decided how to use them—no wonder they couldn't think of nonengineering applications.

But as the Kitchen Computer hinted, computers would soon get smaller and cheaper. This would take them out of the glass boxes of the mainframe world—and away from the IT establishment—and put them in the hands of consumers. And the real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential.

All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons—icons, windows, pointers, and animations—became the graphical user interface and eventually the Mac. By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. But in doing so he made computers simple enough for all of us to use. And then we changed the world by finding applications for them that the technologists had never dreamed of.

This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.”

Read the rest here