field notes:

1.23.2003

I haven't had a proper walk in almost a week now. The rain, or should I say, the wetness, is unrelenting; an unremitting monotony of greys against a backdrop of greens from moss to ever. The wetness just surrounds. The sky and the shoes damp without the promise of sun or the release of rain that pours down and fills rather than merely wets.

A particularly beautiful Flicker caught my eye yesterday, bright orange like fungi on a fallen log. Work keeps me indoors dreaming of booted trails and waves of oar.

This Sunday we're leaving the super bowl world behind for a drive to the Cosumnes River Preserve to see the Sandhill Cranes. I'm hopeful for cartwheels of birds, skies of scatter and swoop, and leggy grasses of delta water.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 9:41 AM link | comments []

1.22.2003

One thing I don't understand about peace rallies and the press. Every story about every rally reports two figures for attendance, something like this from the San Francisco Chronicle:

The protest's organizers, an umbrella coalition called International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, estimated the crowd at 200,000. Police put the number at 55,000.

This is in no way atypical. It's hard for me to imagine another scenario where a news organization would report two such disparate figures in any other arena without weighing in with some hard data of their own. Is it that difficult to estimate crowds? Maybe they could hire some migratory bird counters to come in and give them some pointers.

I was there, and I know that people were constantly coming and going via Bart (underground trains) all along the marches' route. That has to make a count difficult.

Here's how I would begin, though. First, I'd estimate how many people it would take to fill the Civic Center rally area using helicopter shots, then I'd use the same photo source to estimate the number of people it takes to fill Market Street's four lanes the two miles from the Civic Center to the Embarcadero. That would supply the base number of people -- a number that both the police and the organizing groups would have to agree on.

Then, I'd get figures from the ferry lines, and from Bart about how many people came into the city vs how many come into the city on a typical Saturday. Those numbers would be rough around the edges, but they could be balanced using a typical bird count strategy: stand in one spot and count the passing numbers for a series of 15 minute periods, average, multiply, etc.

Seemingly, no attempt is made on the part of news organizations to get accurate numbers. How can they report such numbers without weighing in with an estimate of their own? Wouldn't that be good reporting? Or, how about addressing the issue head-on by reporting the difficulty of estimating crowds and the methods being used?

If anybody knows more about this than I do, I'd love to hear from you.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 1:36 PM link | comments []