Update on SILS Skiing/Snowboarding Trip; CNN & Crappy

Unfortunately, the local weather is not cooperating again, so it looks like Hunter Mountain will be hard, icy and maybe even wet this weekend. Warm and crappy (see below). So you better head to Upstate, Vermont or New Hampshire to get yer ya yas on the slopes this weekend. I will continue to monitor the local weather situation and try to arrange a ski trip to Hunter on the following weekend, March 10 or 11 . If you have any questions you can send me an e-mail at kpetrici <at> pratt (see my previous post on this under the social calendar or the things to do page for more information).

I can testify that New Hampshire was fantastic last weekend. Did anyone else make it up north? Please send a post about it. My 16 year old snowboarding niece made plans for me to go late night skiing in western Mass Friday night before I even jumped off the train in Boston. She couldn’t wait for NH the next day (great slopes in NH are about 2 hours from Boston). I spent midnight to almost 5am on the slopes with her and a few hundred other teenagers and college kids. Fun, but cccccold. Sunday in NH was another story. At Gunstock it was sunny, low 30s, and you could see for miles–the nearby lake Winnipesaukee and Mt. Washington to the north and the Green Mountains in Vermont to the west. The slopes were powdery and wide and the lift lines were short. Perfect. I even did a lot of homework on the train.

Aside: I don’t know if you noticed, but CNN.com used “crappy” in a headline of a questionable story today about how students who perform crappy get over better in the hood than smart ones who “act white”. The whole crappy story seemed based on some crappy journalism or pseudoscience. It seems that the reporter interviewed a couple of people to come up with this masterpiece which seemed to say that no one in the hood looks up to minorities who study hard. Later I noticed that CNN changed the headline to “lousy”–I wonder who objected and if anyone lost their job.

By 11pm I could find no trace of the story. It might have been pulled for good. I did some web searching, but nothing. I did a search on the CNN site to see how often “crappy” could be found and landed 19 results (this story was not one of them). Most were opinion pieces on shows that contained the word, like “Why Survivor left me feeling sad and dirty”, or product reviews. But it is quite possible that this story might appear in a database near you some day.

I just finished reading Technopoly by Neil Postman, a great recommended book for LIS 654, and it highlights the same ambivalence to technology and related information and social sciences that many of us feel as we use them to find our place in information market. I wonder how much of the information that we are served (and that we serve up to others) in databases or other resources is based on such crappy research.

–Ken