Homebrewers Going Pro

This podcast episode had a few things about homebrewers going pro, including a comment, by Brewers Association director Paul Gatza, that 90% of professional craft brewers started as homebrewers. IIRC, the same statistic was mentioned by Ken Wells, of Travels with Barley fame on the July 16, 2005 episode of The Beer Show. This statistic must be listed somewhere on the Brewers Association website.

Language Ideology in France

Pod Mag #12 Part II interview Melting Pod
Among other things, some interesting comments about language ideology in France, its effects on the perception of French-speakers who podcast in English and even a hypothesis on the role of the French language in UN diplomacy.

Measure Happiness

Money can buy you happiness but only relative to your peer’s income

Happiness was measured using a self-report response of ‘very happy,’ ‘pretty happy,’ or ‘not too happy.’

Gender Differences in Computer Science

Why aren’t more girls ‘geeks’?
With special emphasis on differences between “countries.”

Wonder what Summers has to say about this…

How to Choose Good Friends for Teenagers

Parents can help teens choose ‘good’ friends, study finds
Describes a U.S. model of friendship and the impact parents may have in their teenage children choosing “the right friends.”

The results showed teens are more likely to have good friends – ones who don’t fight and who have plans for college, for instance – if they have a warm relationship with their parents and if their parents choose to live in a neighborhood with high-quality schools.

Wonder what Penny Eckert has to say about this.

As for of how parents and their children should interact:

A good-quality relationship is one in which parents and teens participate in activities together, communicate frequently, and express affection for one another.

Wonder what they would say about family relations in, say, Mali or the Philippines.

Podcasting Tips

oreilly.com: Ten Tips for Improving Your Podcasts
From Jack Herrington, author of Podcasting Hacks. Part part teaser, sample chapter, part summary, part discussion.

Emphasis on the audio portion of podcasting. Mostly from the context of “citizen radio,” with few ideas that are really specific to podcasting. Alludes to the diversity of viewpoints in podcasting. Still some notion of what a successful podcast might be like.
Format, schedule, and script are probably the ones which warrant the most discussion. Herrington’s tone is non-authoritative enough that discussion would be possible. Maybe in the Comments section. One major advantage of podcasting in contrast to radio is that duration isn’t so much of an issue. Of course, a show shouldn’t be so long as to discourage download or listening. But if a good discussion is happening in a podcast, there’s little reason to cut it short. At worse, it could be split into shorter pieces. This is rather similar to the open-ended interviews we do in ethnographic research: getting people to talk. Herrington’s tips still allow for this type of freedom but seem to make little difference between a radio show and a podcast.

Granted, podcasting is still emerging and much of its development does relate to radio shows. Yet the advantages of podcasts over commercial or public radio can also be discussed lest we reproduce the mistakes of “Old Media” mimicking their regular content in online form. Podcasting differs from radio as web pages differ from print pages. With the added dimension that podcasts can in fact include video, text, and images.