Disqus - Latest Comments for Christina Warren

Re: Will the Real Douchebag Please Stand Up?

Christina Warren — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:43:51 -0000

That's bad ass! Micah, you are awesome.

And Grant gets my Douchebag vote because of loyalty and whatnot -- but this blog entry clearly proved that the Douchebag Force is strong with this one. Or something.

Re: Should television and Internet ratings for shows be combined?

Christina Warren — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:12:56 -0000

Very interesting question, and one that is becoming more and more salient -- especially in light of Nielsen counting DVR play counts and whatnot.

A small correction regarding "The Office" -- NBC's then-President, Kevin Reily renewed the show in May of 2005, despite low ratings for the first 6 aired episodes. iTunes started selling episodes in January of 2006. Although the show had was a huge hit on iTunes, it's arguable if that had any direct effect on the ratings because in January 2006, NBC moved The Office from Tuesday to Thursday - which is still the most watched night for broadcast television. That, coupled with Steve Carrell's popularity boost due to The 40-year Old Virgin and the changes in the show from season 1 to season 2 probably had as much influence on rating increases as iTunes sales.

Speaking of iTunes sales, while I think NBC made a huge PR gaffe in how they handled the whole thing, the numbers Jeff Zucker reported as making off the downloads was pretty telling that at least in terms of legal downloads, there weren't that many eyeballs (something like $15 million from all content for the entire duration of the NBC/iTunes agreement was what they made - and that's just a pittance in TV ad dollars). Plus, I would argue iTunes sales are really at direct competition with DVD sales rather than watching first-run on TV.

I think actually determining how many people are watching full episodes of a show online and not just loading it and then going to another site is the difficult part in doing ratings aggregation for online streams. Downloads are another issue entirely, but for streaming viewers, I think they will eventually be weighted into the overall number (and it'll have to be weighted because oftentimes people rewatch part of an episode online, rather than watching it for the first time), it'll just be a matter of time for the statistical agencies to accurately be able to cull that data. Nielsen's current program is actually pretty spectacular -- it might not show at trend immediately, but it will show it within a few months and with frightening accuracy.

Re: In my day…

Christina Warren — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:05:34 -0000

Although it sound draconian (and it is), if a professor wants to force students to use actual research tools (and Wikipedia isn't and never will be), banning the outright use of the sites is the only way to actually accomplish that. I'm a student - if you don't set the parameters just so - especially for research sources - you will end up with utter crap as the results (I have watched peers do this for years). While banning Google might be a bit much - banning Google as a primary source seems totally acceptable to me.

None of my profeessors outright ban Google, but I guarantee that if I tried to use Wikipedia as or a generic Google queery as a source for ANYTHING, I would be laughed out of the classroom and given a failing grade. And that would be deserved. Plus, let's not forget that almost every college or university has access to systems like Lexis-Nexis (I can even access that from home using my student ID login - I have to be on campus to access West Law, but Lexis is a God-send) and other research databases that are not only much better and more reliable, but frankly, as easy to use as Google or Wikipedia anyway.

Students use Google and Wikipedia because they are lazy and they want to avoid real work -- if banning those sources is the only way to get them to actually learn/work/research, how can you fault that?

Re: In my day…

Christina Warren — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:37:22 -0000

Robert,
How did I contradict myself? I said that banning Google seems a bit much, but banning it as a primary source (which is what I think this professor is doing) seems perfectly reasonable. And yes, it is draconian to ban something, but that might be the only way that this teacher is able to enforce a no-Wikipedia sourced paper rule that doesn't mean automatically failing anyone who is using it. Granted, if you have to go to those lengths to get students to actually work, you are probably a pretty craptacular professor - I don't disagree with that, but the overall sentiment that Google and Wikipedia should not be primary sources for college research is something I fully support.