2–0

That is the record of the Gophers. It has been a long time since that has occurred. It feels good. I finally know what it is like to feel like a USC or LSU fan. To even make the weekend better, the Vikings also won, and the Badgers and Packers lost! When is the last time we had a Gopher/Viking win and Badger/Packer loss in the same weekend???

On a more somber note, my condolences to Iowa fans. Your neighbors to the north know exactly what it feel like to lose to a team you should beat, and in that loss realize that you need a running back, a quarterback, a defense, a wide receiver, and a secondary. We know the agony of three quarters of hope followed by a quarter of disaster and pain–seeing your season turn from a bowl-bound 7-5 to 2-10 on a single interception or failed first down. Been there.

I read a few excellent articles and blog postings over the weekend. One such blog entry gave a great answer to the question that is asked to all faculty members at one point, aside from teaching, what do academics do? [Read the blog here.] The author, a USC faculty member, has categorized our work into five dimensions that nicely summarize what we do:

• Learning
• Discovering
• Sharing
• Helping 
• Fund-raising

These dimensions, as he points out, are waaaay more useful then teaching, research and service, the big-three that universities seem to have coveted for years. The last two (helping and fund-raising) I would like to see changed, not because they are incorrect, but rather because they don't have the "humph" that the others do. They are quite descriptive, and encompass what we do, but you would never see the universities starting a campaign of "Driven to Help" or "Driven to Fund-Raise". Maybe citizenship would be better than helping. But, I do like the participle "ing" on the end of each noun....and citizening doesn't cut it.

Another awesome read last night was Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” Verse 2: A Close Reading With Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps. This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of Jay-Z's masterpiece written from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. He examines the ins-and-outs of various case law relating to the legalities of a traffic stop as documented by Mr. Z. For example, he writes

A traffic stop is a legitimate seizure of the person, for purposes of investigating the violation of the traffic law and writing up the citation. But it cannot be prolonged for longer than reasonably necessary to complete that legitimate activity...And the Fourth Amendment rule is very clear: if the police detain you after they’ve finished processing the ticket—or if they simply dawdle over the ticket processing for an unreasonable length of time—in order to get a K-9 team there, then the eventual dog sniff will be the fruit of an illegal detention, and any evidence found will be suppressed. The officer in Jay-Z’s case apparently knew this, and so released Jay-Z after the stop when the K-9 unit he’d called was late in arriving. I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one...

Lastly, I have been reading the Nieman Journalism Labs review of J-schools. They have had big-wigs comment on what these schools are doing well and what they wish students would have learned. The most common wish has been that journalists learn some coding. Here are two takes.

Brian Boyer, the head of NPR’s news apps team, suggests a course in Hacker Journalism 101. He provides a reading list and some assignments. He also offers three virtues of a programmer that the students would apply to all of their work in the course,

• Laziness: I will do anything to work less.
• Impatience: The waiting, it makes me crazy.
• Hubris: I can make this computer do anything.

Miranda Mulligan, executive director at Northwestern’s Knight News Innovation Lab, also promoted learning to code, arguing that journalists need to learn how to code if they want to become better (and employable) storytellers. [Read Miranda's take here.]

And yet if you attend any event with a collection of jouro-nerd types, inevitably the same question will come up. Someone will ask...“How can we tell better stories on the web?” and proceed to bemoan the tedium of reading a daily newspaper and a newspaper website...It is our job as educators to remove fear of learning, a fear notoriously prevalent in journalists...For me, there’s only one response to this: Journalists should learn more about code. Understanding our medium makes us better storytellers. For an industry that prides itself on being smart, tolerating ignorance of the Internet is just stupid.

Forgot one other thing. Saw this and thought every undergraduate should be given an orientation to the information on searching with Google in these slides.