Alexandra L. Taylor

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Profile on Alexandra L. Taylor

IT has been a year since she left The Daily Star as its reporter in Beirut, Lebanon, but Alexandra L. Taylor keeps herself updated with the news there.

She recently read online reports on the Lebanese government-run National News Agency [1] about low-flying Israeli planes over the eastern and western mountains of Lebanon, and on The Daily Star website [2] about the ban on energy drinks with alcohol.

Her Twitter account [3] keeps a record of articles she read and commented on.

@AlexLTaylor on Twitter

@AlexLTaylor on Twitter

Taylor is a first year graduate student at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy [4] in Tufts University.  She is expected to graduate next year with a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy degree [5], concentrating in International Security Studies, Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilizations.

She is 27 years old, born on November 3, 1986, in California, USA.

Her LinkedIn account [6] showed her employment at The Daily Star in Beirut where she started out in the international section as editor and also did some reporting.  She left the company in January 2013.

She wrote about social issues, health, lifestyle and politics.  She wrote about yoga as a way for the Lebanon people to seek inner peace [7], growing up amid instability [8], the displacement of families whose houses were destroyed by bombings [9] and many more [10].

Before being a journalist, Taylor worked as a research assistant [5] for schools and foundations.

At The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Taylor also acts as editor of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs and the Al Nakhlah Journal on Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilizations.  She too is teaching assistant at the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship at The Institute for Global Leadership.

She graduated cum laude from the Tufts University in 2009 where she got her Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and she was awarded the Peter Belfer Award in Political Science.  She also attended the Head Royce School from 2001 to 2005 [5].

She speaks a little Arabic and Spanish.

She gave a lecture last December at Tufts on interviewing techniques [11].

She recently co-wrote an article on the shifts in the concept of citizenship in the Arab world [12].  It was published in the Al Nakhlah, The Fletcher School’s online journal on Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilization [13].

After graduate school, she hopes to return to the Middle East to continue reporting from there.  But, if not in journalism or in the Middle East, she would like to work as some sort of a “conduit of communication between people who are making decisions in the United States and people actually living in the Middle East,” she said in a video interview [14].  “That communication gap is pretty huge.”

She has no family in Lebanon but she has friends there.  Her friends were the ones who convinced her after undergraduate education to try to work in the Middle East.  She thought she would stay for only six months but ended up living there for almost three years.

She is taking the Future of News and Participatory Media class at MIT as a cross-registrant.  Her final project would be a social media project analysis that she started at Fletcher [14].  She hopes to talk about it in class in the future.

Video interview:
Video-interview-photo
Alexandra L. Taylor video interview
She said I got everything correct.  My surprise find for her was the YouTube video of her lecture on interviewing techniques.

Notes:
The challenge of finding ‘Alexandra Taylor’

I first searched for “Alexandra Taylor” on Google and got many results of both male and female persons with the same name.

All I knew at that point were the following:
Female
At MIT
E-mail address

I revised my search and typed “Alexandra Taylor MIT” on the Google box.  I got mostly information about a different Alexandra Taylor, the track and field athlete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  I thought she was the one, but I wasn’t sure.

I Googled her e-mail address – alexandra.taylor09@gmail.com – and got too many unrelated results that brought me farther from my search target.

I then went on Facebook but also got several accounts.  I couldn’t be sure of which account was hers.  I got on LinkedIn but I reached the wrong account.

Checked her name on Radaris.com and it showed that there are 365 people in the United States with the name Alexandra Taylor or Alex Taylor.

I was tempted to pay for a people finder service but I decided it would be a waste of money and time unless I get more information about her.

When I wrote Alex for an interview schedule, I decided to ask for her middle name.  I asked if it was Bailey.  I thought I should at least get the full name as there are just too many with the same name.  She said her middle name is Lee.

Even with her full name, I still got different results.  On Google, I got links to accounts on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.  They didn’t seem to be by her.

On Facebook , there were at least two accounts and I couldn’t decide which was the right one.  There just was not enough information available.  I must have more clues about her.

I re-started my online search by going to information that I could easily access.  The class site.

I read her four-hour challenge with Elissar Harati and her media diary.  In her diary, she wrote – “My coursework at Fletcher keeps me reading hard copies. I spent approximately 8 hours on offline texts (I’m including my Kindle in this, but that might be a stretch). This material is predominately made up of books and journal articles related to my research and coursework at Fletcher. I’m not sure if this offline consumption is driven by the environment of being in graduate school, but it certainly cuts into the news consumption time that I spend online and on current events. It’s interesting that while I do consume offline media, very little of that media is news; rather, it is longer magazine or academic articles or books [15].”

With these, I finally got leads that proved vital to my search.

I saw her on the Tufts University website, on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.  I couldn’t get her correct Facebook account.

Lesson:  Before performing a Google search, get as much information as you can about the subject online or offline.

I am happy to get all correct information in my online search and additional data from the video interview.

-end-

 

Leslie’s four-hour project: Meet the musicians on the Boston subway

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For my project, I wanted to explore a new multimedia tool and see how quickly (or slowly!) I could create a simple presentation. I chose Meograph, which is free and online–and turned out to be nice and easy to use. The hardest part of the whole process was figuring out how to trim audio files in iTunes (the answer: use QuickTime instead). I spent just over two hours reporting, and about two hours editing, trimming, and learning Meograph. Here’s the result:

(Tip: If you don’t want to listen to the entire clip for each musician, click on the forward button in the lower left hand corner.)

http://www.meograph.com/embed/leslie2014/97242/boston-has-over-200-musicians-who-perform-in-the-subway-come-meet-some-of-them-use-the-forward-and-back-arrows-to-see-the-next-act

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Ali’s 4 hour news challenge

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The Lego Movie – review

“A totalitarian-capitalist fantasy,” I said to myself, after watching the “The Lego Movie”, a computer-animated movie that Fox News slammed as an anti-capitalist propaganda. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the movie is based on the LEGO line of construction toys and was released on February 7. With a 100-minute run time, “The LEGO Movie” is a roller-coaster commercial that leaves you kicking for more: the LEGO world is impressively well-rendered in the form of a plastic phantasmagoria, the storyline is packed with satirical zingers and the voice cast is exceptional.

Set in a clockwork world of LEGO elements, “The LEGO Movie” tells the story of Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), an ordinary LEGO construction worker with no special abilities. His life in his world— where everything is routine, mundane and predictable— feels like a cog in the machine. It is a world where he is happy to pay $37 for a cup of coffee and sing along to upbeat faux pop anthem “Everything Is Awesome.” In short, he is a model citizen of the LEGO world which is controlled by Lord Business (Will Ferrell), an evil tyrant who wants everything built in the world according to his vision and instructions. Life for Emmet is hunky-dory until he runs into Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a flamboyant and fearless LEGO female, and falls in with a group of extraordinary LEGO builders, called the Master Builders, who can construct anything without instruction manuals. The Master Builders—led by Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a white-haired wizard—mistakenly take Emmet for “The Special”, a Master Builder who is prophesized to save the world from the evil plans of Lord Business, who is conspiring to freeze the entire LEGO world so that people cannot tamper with the idealized vision of his LEGO world. The rest of the plot follows the journey of the archetypical hero who reluctantly accepts the call to adventure and, in doing so, realizes his heroic destiny.

Coming back to the capitalist vs. anti-capitalist import of the movie, I found the movie to be a cleverly-executed LEGO corporation commercial, which echoes the radical marketing of Apple’s Super Bowl advertisement in 1984.  While one can see streaks of a proletariat revolutionary in the protagonist of the movie, the ending of the movie suggests that the protagonist has a rather benign agenda— i.e. reconciliation with capitalism in the form of “balancing creativity with a follow-the-rules approach to life.”

Not surprisingly, Mark Kermode, a film critic, describes “the repositioning of luddite LEGO bricks [in form of this movie] as a saleable staple of the digital gaming revolution” as “one of the greatest marketing coups of the 21st century.”

So in a world of conglomerates and big money, if a global corporation produces a record-breaking commercial film with a commoditized narrative that makes a case for an anodyne individuality in a global business order, what would you call it? A successful product or propaganda marketing or an opiate for the masses, I leave it up to the reader to decide.

With a current IMDB rating of 8.5, the movie has grossed nearly $200 million worldwide in its first 10 days of release.

wordle_lego

 

Katerina’s 4-hour challenge

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Navigating the twitter bubble

I spent my four-hour challenge reporting on an online discussion on art. It spread through different social media after George Clooney argued twice last week that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece. The actor – who is currently promoting his movie “The Monument Men” in Europe – called for “an open discussion” about the ownership of the ancient friezes. The discussion on Twitter was heated, but fragmented and surprisingly…”local”.

Understanding the background story (1,5 Hour)

I first had to get the facts straight. I read, compared and contrasted different mainstream and independent media. The dispute between Greece and the United Kingdom over the artifacts lasts for almost two decades. It has constantly been on Greek mainstream media, but it never attracted much international publicity. Greece keeps calling for the return of its “looted” art and the British authorities claim that the 2000-year-old marbles were acquired legally in 1816 by the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Lord Elgin. In fact, the British Museum’s official position states that ms the place of Ancient Greece among the great cultures of the world.”

Clooney, who directed and stars in the movie, provoked a lively discussion on social media a few days earlier. At Berlin Film Festival the actor replied to a Greek journalist’s question whether Greece should reclaim its monuments from the UK. He said: “I think that is a good idea. I think that would be a very fair and very nice thing. Yeah, I think it is the right thing to do.” His co-stars Matt Damon and Bill Murray also backed his argument. The film is an adaptation of a nonfiction book by Robert Edsel. It is the story of a group of architects and artists, who are sent to Europe in order to protect art and historic monuments from being destroyed by the Nazis.

Gathering the reactions (2 Hours) 

The first question I wanted to answer was how such a story spread on social media. Was it a local or global?

I tracked it manually via advance search on Twitter feed. I went back to the first tweets on February 8 and observed the reactions of people and media organizations. The first comments a few minutes after the press conference in Berlin (‪#Clooney just said Britain should give the Elgin Marbles back to ‪#Greece) were followed by short media stories tweeted by the media companies from both sides of the Atlantic (‪#Berlin Film Festival: Monument Man George Clooney Tells U.K. to return Elgin Marbles to Greece Hollywood Reporter). It is not surprising that this was a story was mostly of Greek and British interest. The Embassy of Greece in the US ‪@GreeceInUSA‬ joined the discussion on February 9, followed by Greek and British media (The Guardian, The Times of London, Ekathimerini etc) that promoted their stories on the topic. On February 10, Twitter users who were following the the story  began taking sides. They commented on Clooney’s mistake (who said Patheon instead of Parthenon). The next trend was the reply of the mayor of London, Mr. Boris Johnson on Clooney’s comments. Both sides were retweeted part of his remarks and local articles. Most retweets we about Mr. Boris’ comment that Clooney “lost his marbles” over the Elgin affair.

I also used Hashtags.org and realized that most comments are time European zone sensitive. The times the same hashtags appeared was dropping during the early morning hours.

Slide1

My second question was whether the tweets were conveyed any kind of outrage. I used Sentiment Viz to track reactions and sentiments by specific #hashtags. I observed that the discussion of the topic was separate from the movie. Also, the main words associated by Sentiment Viz with negative feelings (anger, stress, depression etc) were “wrong”, “returned”, and “rejects”, “matt damon”, “murray.”

Observations (30 minutes) 

*There were certain limitations while reporting on an online trend under a tight deadline.

*There are not many free twitter visualization tools that can track hashtags. Even though there are websites that track twitter trends the overall picture remains fragmented.

*The discussion of George Clooney’s comments on the topic were discussed locally and had a smaller impact than the discussions on mainstream media. I was surprised that the Guardian featured a poll about the return of the marbles, but there was no fruitful discussion between twitter users.

*The twitter reactions were merely reproductions of media features, articles and commentaries. Almost no original content.

 

 

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I Opened a Zoo in Alaska: You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

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I find myself standing in front of my new enterprise. I’m not sure how I got here, but I’m determined to find out. The sun is shining, and I am clad in a starched khaki ensemble. The sign in front of the entrance says “Alaska Animal Sanctuary.”

My operating budget appears to exceed 30,000 Zollars, and climbing fast. However, I seem to be the only zookeeper. I walk over to the elephants who appear to be under my care, and offer several bananas. They are enthused. Then, I visit the Rhinoceroses and give them a bath.

Why am I here?

My days become routine. Feed the animals. Clean up the poop. An endless stream of challenges follow me each day, promising increased animal satisfaction, and increased guest happiness.

I sleep fitfully and recall in a rare dream that I used to manage large cities in a past life. I was the mayor of Sim City. And now I am a Zookeeper.

Suddenly, I am invited to leave Alaska and join a troubled zoo in the United Kingdom. Anything to break the monotony. I pack my bags, and head to Cambridgeshire Animal Park.

Upon my arrival, I learn that Scotty the West African Giraffe is lonely. “Why don’t I adopt a companion for him?” my advisor asks. I select Oliver the baby West African Giraffe. He is delivered in a crate by a magnificent helicopter.

I have found purpose. Oliver breathes new life into my mission to steward my animal companions. He wobbles on his tiny legs, and frolics around Large Savannah 2.

With my budget now at 50,000 Zollars, I am invited to invest in a Zoo Keeper Center. Might I finally be able to hire some staff to help me? And some fellow animal lovers to talk to? I hire Bonnie. Derik. Miguel.

Suddenly there is life in this zoo. We are a seamless team. I begin making much needed improvements to the crucial zoo infrastructure. A balloon and souvenir shop is erected near the Pale-Throated Three Toed Sloth exhibit. Burger Barn, strategically, is opened next to our extremely popular Asiatic Lion exhibit. Our zoo’s operating budget has doubled since I began my reign. I build a Breeding Center.

I discover a new feature of my world: I can, at my will, command myself to leave the confines of my body and view the entirety of my zoo at once. I am told later by my advisor that this is “Tycoon View.”

I purchase a motorized buggy to travel across the vast expanse of my zoo estate. I can reach the Tundra Small 01 from Rainforest Medium 02 in 30 seconds.

In a cruel twist of fate, Oliver is taken from me. Between upgrading the restrooms and starting an advertising campaign for this troubled park, I seem to have neglected poor Olver. The same helicopter that brought him swiftly ushers him away.

I sink into despair.

Review of Zoo Tycoon™, for Xbox One®, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft. February 18th, 2014.

Available exclusively at Wal-Mart.

————

For this four-hour challenge, I wanted to experiment with the genres of review, critique, and humor. I played this game for 2 hours, while pausing to write notes about the narrative arc of my play. I recorded and stored gameplay using the Xbox Game DVR feature, which allows you to record the previous 30 seconds of gameplay. I filmed the stored video clips with my phone because you need to purchase a subscription from Xbox to allow you to upload the video elsewhere.

My main challenge with this piece was to use humor and a fictional narrative while still conveying factual information about the game. If I had more time to work on this, I would have sharpened the critique of simulation games in general a little bit more.