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 2002.10.13 EPISODE 6, in which gas pumpers quake
eing sick, it's easy to feel severely put-upon. Your body's being assaulted from within, every movement an Olympian effort, every breath suffocating; meanwhile, all the healthy people are laughing and playing in the meadow of bliss. I've been sick for the past week and, truly, I can't remember the last time an illness has hung on this long. Hence, I didn't go see OK Go or Karate at their various venues this weekend and I didn't go see the travelling Found Magazine show. Somehow the classwork made its way out through the germs. The big thing was the 658 exam, which turned out to not be that big a thing after all. A few pages of multiple choice, a list of terms of which we had to define half and a simple essay question. We haven't gotten grades yet but I can say that if the entire class was like this I wouldn't have to actually go anymore. Sadly, the entire class isn't like this. No, now we're moving into the project phase of the semester. At Thursday night's lab we spent an hour generating random numbers from a cut-up phonebook. Jotting down numbers, line after line, until we had 750 each. Now, granted, it wasn't some chaotic thing where we just grabbed whatever number until the pages were full: there was a system by which the numbers were selected. But still, that's a long time to write down numbers, especially when it's followed by a discussion of how we get to call these people are try to get them to participate in an on-line survey. The upside is that this assignment used to involve 40-minute phone interviews with cold callees; the downside is that, you know, we're still having to call and bug people. At the same time, the 970 project chugs along. We got our revised questionnaire sections together for compiling, though the final draft doesn't seem to have been e-mailed out to us just yet. Hopefully that'll happen quickly, because I have to use it to interview somebody from the East Madison Community Center this week. This is just the early testing for the study -- we've got four of us interviewing representative groups from our larger pool so we can see if the questionnaire really works like it should. I'm not convinced it's going to work for the entire range but I guess we'll see. Throughout the week I've been ducking into computer labs whenever I can to catch up on the sniper story. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I was on the job now instead of reading about social networks and population sampling. There's nobody in the national spotlight to counter the effect of the mass media's broadcast run-off, to break down for the audience what they're seeing and hearing. I want to be in Washington. Instead, the best I get is a Congressional debate next Tuesday. But soon. Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
