Saturday, April 19, 2014

Looking forward to meeting @jackandraka...

Inspiring and energetic young inventor Jack Andraka will visit me and the students at #UVa next week. First he'll visit my nanoelectronics class, ECE 4140, and then he'll give talk and do some Q&A on Monday at noon in the dome room of the UVa Rotunda. It'll be a lot of fun, and I am expecting a lot of other young inventors to attend.

Biomedical engineer Alex Zorychta, himself a clever inventor whose team recently won a UVa Entrepreneurship Cup and secured substantial funding, has set up a FaceBook Event to help me publicize this event.

Given the source of Jack's inspiration, the topic of his research, and the venue for his talk, I thought it'd be appropriate to comment about Randy Pausch, the brilliant computer scientist who inspired so many people with his "Last Lecture" and "Time Management" during his final days here in Virginia. Here are the introductory ppt slides that I will present on Monday:

Keith Williams' intro slides for Jack Andraka's visit on Monday April 21st

k.w.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Is #CNN wagging the dog over #MH370?

CNN has given me the motivation to blog again… and unfortunately not for a positive reason.

By now, almost everyone on the planet is familiar with the sad mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, lost for more than two weeks after departing Kuala Lumpur. Certainly, this is a tragic event and the families and friends of the passengers deserve our ongoing support and consolation.

There are two tragedies here: foremost, or course, the loss of the passengers. The second tragedy is the inexplicable and sudden loss of CNN’s credibility as a news organization. The network has been parroting wild speculation, and repeating the same news ad nauseum. Worst still, CNN appears to be manufacturing or at least repurposing old news, to give viewers the impression that they are delivering something significant... when in fact the story has barely advanced in weeks. And some details, presented as sufficient grounds for wild speculation, have been revealed incorrect, e.g. the famous "alright goodnight," now refuted. The truth is that this could be an approximate repeat of the Helios Airways Flight 522 tragedy... we simply don't know yet, and we may not know for months or years.

The tactics that CNN has used to boost ratings are rather obvious. At regular intervals, we see “Breaking News” splashed across the screen. This is accompanied, of course, by the familiar theme reinforcing the urgency. We see a checkerboard of ‘experts’ who, instead of clearly delineating what is known from what is not, as any responsible expert should do, often appear to attempt to outdo each others’ gut feelings. We see two “pilots” installed in a flight simulator, where they game all manner of scenarios, with no apparent relationship to evidence. CNN has entertained virtually (pun intended) every possible scenario… and a few impossible ones too. Anchors of several CNN shows have been pulled into the ratings frenzy, shoving aside many stories for which far more substantive information exists, e.g. the tragedy in Washington, and the annexation of Ukraine and subsequent massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border.

It’s not CNN shouldn’t report on MH370- of course they should. But shouldn’t the amount of coverage be proportional to the availability of newsworthy content? That this isn’t the case opens the door to the frightening proposition that CNN is manufacturing a story… wagging the dog, so to speak. Meanwhile, CNN’s ratings have indeed improved. But at what cost?

There is news, there are newsmakers... and then there are journalists. Does anyone at CNN know the difference?