PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • An internet dialogue about music, creation and ownership

    Emily White, an NPR intern, kicked off the discussion early in the week, stating she never made the transition from physical to digital consumption of music.

    I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.

    I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

    Then, Camper  Van Beethoven and Cracker founder, David Lowery, responds with a nearly 3,000 word essay regarding the ethics and philosophy of creating music (or art) and being compensated.

    Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.

    But Jonathan Coulton takes the idea further in a different direction, using Legos to speculate what may happen with physical goods if 3D printers proliferated.

    Your kid loves Legos. He’s got an X-wing fighter kit that he’s super excited about, and as he’s putting it together, one of the little pointy laser turret pieces on the tips of the wings slips out of his hands and falls down the central air conditioning vent. No problem. You fire up the old internet, and you find www.legowarez.to, the small crazy place where all of the Lego nuts go to obsessively upload and catalog 3D scans of every lego piece that has ever existed. This site is ad supported, and some douchebag in Nigeria is getting rich off it. But you find the file for the piece you need, you download it, and a few minutes later you’ve printed out a replacement piece.

    Jay Frank gets curious and uses Google Trends to seek out data about potential piracy.

    Google, as the worldwide leader in search results, is a strong indicator of actual file trade demand. In fact, industry watchdog Moses Avalon argued such this week at New Music Seminar. Yet, when I went to look on Google Insights to see the level of demand for free music by David Lowery’s group Camper Van Beethoven, the message I get is, “Not enough search volume to show graphs.”This basically means, from what I can gather, that less than 50 people per monthin the entire world are even showing intent to steal his music. Statisticians basically refer to this as essentially zero.

    In the broader sense, creators deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the medium or method of distribution. The transition to legal, digital services to do this is only a recent development. Upon discovering Spotify, friends marveled, “How is this legal? There’s so much.” But if there’s no demand for an artist’s work, irrelevancy seems a much steeper price despite whatever medium the art is in.

  • Creating more Caine’s Arcades

    In the 10 minute video, Caine Monroy shows the arcade he built using discarded card board boxes and other supplies behind his father’s shop. It’s a fully realized vision of an arcade with games, a fun pass and prizes. He adapted materials and conformed them into something new, and in a way, it was a means of play to him, to create a mini-business.

    Children like Caine should be nurtured. How to do this? Encourage interests in a playful manner. By this, get a child to describe what they’re doing or what they’ve done. Ask them about other ways to do things. Show them new experiences and how one experience can be combined with another. Creativity is all about making connections with disparate things or ideas and putting them into novel or different contexts.

    If something isn’t wholly original, point out what you find interesting and ask what if questions. If a child is challenged by a what if question, step back and ask about their favorite activities and how those activities apply to the task at hand.

    As a parent, it’s key to expose a child to different experiences. Early in life, reading to a child increases attention spans, curiosity, language skills to express themselves. Seek out field trips for hands on learning and showing them the world. Shy away from using rewards for creative acts–you want a child to develop a strong sense of self-motivation and restraint and to enjoy the process of being creative. Yes, celebrate and recognize the outcome of the creative work, but recognize what they had to do to get to the outcome. Always reframe a child’s failure as a learning experience for them. They can’t change what they did, but they can affect what they do in the future.

    Here’s a detailed list of creativity for children.

  • Google and Duck Duck Go search results comparison

    I couldn’t remember what Apple’s pricing was for their print on demand publishing for books.  So, I googled.

    That’s… not helpful.  Let’s try Duck Duck Go.

    Helpful, easy to see what I need, and answers my question. (Note: screenshots are same size.)

    Just for fun, I blocked out all the non-search result content for the Google version.

    Pitiful.

  • 50,000

    The truck surpassed 50,000 miles

    Good Friday. Heading south on Bryant Irvin under a clear, blue sky. An LCD readout on the rearview mirror tells me it’s 84 degrees, and a rolled down passenger window catches the breeze. After I cruise through the green light at Overton, I change lanes to the right and the iPod fades into the next song, ‘Ho Hey’, by The Lumineers. As I pass a red Nissan Xterra, my grey Chevy Silverado surpasses 50,000 miles.

  • Narrow the Gapp

    Gina Trapani built a data driven web app that displays the pay disparity between men  and women, called Narrow the Gapp. It uses stats from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics by job class.  A very simple design with built in sharing functionality that makes the point.

  • The weight of data

    All that data that we’re collecting and using, what does it all mean? It requires context and a human element. An excellent TEDx talk by Jer Thorp.

  • Quantifying baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos

    Craig Robertson of Flip Flop Fly Ball, noticed something interesting in Justin Bieber music videos–the Biebs wore different baseball caps in different videos. Craig meticulously watched the videos, took notes and made an information visualization of his findings of baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos. Screenshots included!

    Interesting: 20% of MLB teams (that’s 6 teams) are featured in the videos. Craig notes he didn’t include shorter, promotional trailer videos in his sample. The numbers would increase quite a bit if he had.

  • Kaggle and data prediction competitions

    Competitions, where all things being equal, brings out the best results. Nine players on a baseball diamond work through nine innings against nine other players. Open bidding for contracts in response to a proposal to meet a business problem puts companies against each other for the best solution.

    Kaggle is a competition market where players (yes, they call participants players) build the best predictive data model for a problem. In one case, individuals created a model to predict auto collisions nearly 3.5 times better than Allstate’s own models. An ongoing competition is seeking to predict health care admittances. That’s powerful stuff.

  • It takes work to become awesome at kicking ass

    Over the past week, the theme of posts in my RSS feeds revolved around learning, careers and personal growth. Some ranged from calls to action–we need to rethink our entire education system for todays world. Others spoke of self reliance, be aware and do your best to kick butt. A few were introspective, realizations of actions.

    Seth Godin released an expansive manifesto, called Stop Stealing Dreams. Every group imaginable related to schooling, learning, employing, policy making receives commentary.  Schools are holdovers from the industrial age. Parents and teachers are complicit in encouraging obedience instead of passion and imagination. Employers seek those who say yes. Policy makers make uninformed decisions that ignore real needs. Godin includes statistics when needed, references academic research and includes colorful anecdotes. One such anecdote recalls an email from a blog reader critiquing the use of bespoke, instead of custom.

    My blog is hardly filled with words most educated citizens would have trouble understanding. And yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level. This relentless push for less (less intelli- gence, less culture, less effort) is one of the boogiemen facing anyone who would mess with the rote rigor of mass schooling.

    It seems to recall[amazon_link id=”B000K7VHOG” target=”_blank” ]Idoiocracy[/amazon_link], where the future is a dystopian state of passive entertainment for the lowest common denominator.

    Andrew Olsen, takes a less passive route, believing the best skill you can learn, and possibly the only skill you need is the ability to learn. From this principle, he lists a 100 ways to be successful without going to college.

    In this world, the only skill you really need is the ability to learn new things. If you know how to read (really read) and absorb new information, your knowledge will be far deeper than the average college graduate who listened to lectures and filled in bubbles on tests.

    I agree with his principle of being able to learn is the best skill to have. It goes along with being able to figure things out–take the most basic thing you know about what you’re working on and build from there. Granted, this can’t be applied to every aspect of your life (how many people can repair an engine?), but for most knowledge worker tasks, it can.

    Where I disagree with him is the value of college.  College is a safe environment to learn about life and how to manage it. How do you balance work (classes) and life (social gatherings) and coping with the stress it brings. That should be emphasized more than the degree one works towards. As Therese Schwenkler says, “your college degree will not get you the job you deserve“.

    Her post led me to Charlie Hoehn’s Recession Proof Graduate. It provides interesting strategies to always be employable, the primary way, he suggests, is to work for free.  It’s a gamble and a method that should not be the norm. It’s sad that for someone to gain experience, employers can essentially receive free labor. Perhaps, one should follow Jessica Hische’s Should I Work for Free flowchart.

    Or, instead of a flowchart, how about Jesse Thorn’s Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success. It references his experiences and those mostly in the creative fields. The best takeaway:

    I hear from so many people who have a great idea. The difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is that the successful ones do it, then do it again and again.

    As we become successful, we’ll encounter others with ideas that are different than our own. Jason Freid suggests giving things 5 minutes.

    His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.

    Similarly, Dustin Curtis thinks of 3 questions to asks the individual.

    All this seems like a lot to take in. It is. Like driving a car, everything’s new and we’re hyperaware or don’t recognize patterns and habits. Over time, the things we learn, want to learn and apply to our daily lives, become innate habits we don’t even think about. This is true for bad habits, and with awareness, we can change them.

    Like good habits, tt takes work to become awesome at kicking ass.

  • Stasis promotes mediocrity

    When things remain the same, in a state of stasis, there’s no pull in any direction for worse or better. Yes. There are some things where you want the stability of stasis–your house’s foundation. But in a job, how many roles thrive on stasis, things inactive? Yes, harmony is good, but if inactive for too long, does a person really grow? Over time, they’ll seek out actions to remain in harmony, or stable, not really growing or changing or stretching themselves to be better. And that’s what mediocrity is–just ok.