Robert Niles

to Robert Niles.

Robert Niles' work in online journalism has been called "pathbreaking" by noted columnist Dan Gillmor. Robert's "Accident Watch" feature on ThemeParkInsider.com won the 2001 Online Journalism Award for Service Journalism, presented by the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It was the first example of a "crowdsourced" online report, built on reader-contributed content, to win a major journalism award.

Robert is a native of Los Angeles, and today lives in nearby Pasadena, California. He graduated from Northwestern University, where he majored in the school's program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, as well as in Political Science. He also holds a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University.

Along the way, Robert has worked as a Pirate of the Caribbean and Tom Sawyer Island raft driver (at Walt Disney World) as well as for the (Bloomington, Indiana) Herald-Times, the Omaha World-Herald, the Rocky Mountain News, the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California.

Today, Robert runs SensibleTalk.com, ThemeParkInsider.com and (with his wife, Laurie) Violinist.com.

I am an American.

In my country, there is no official language, so my government can't tell me what to say.

There is no official religion, so my government can't tell me what to believe or to think.

And everyone born here is a citizen, so the government can't pick and choose who gets rights, based on who our parents are.

These are not problems with America. These are the strengths that make our country great, and each of us, as Americans, should accept the responsibility to protect them.

I'm pasting the above to my Facebook profile today, and I invite you to copy-and-paste these sentiments around the Internet as well, as a statement against the religious fundamentalists in our country who disagree with them. Thank you.
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And I thought the electoral college was bad.

Here are the results from yesterday's Parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom. Note the number of votes each of the top three party received, then the number of seats in the next House of Commons they'll have as a result:
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These feathered friends joined us for a spell on our walk around the neighborhood today:

Apologies for the low-res iPhone photo quality. And, yes, I know that they are a peacock and a peahen.
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For 10 years, people bought over-priced houses they could not afford without borrowing extreme amounts of money that they would never be able to pay back. When that Ponzi scheme ended and the economy collapsed, the government chose first to bail out the bankers who made those loans.

The losers in that decision? Among others, the nation's kids.
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Which city's sports fans have suffered the most?

As a stats geek, I'm not happy with answers that rely on goats and curses. Nor can I accept that fans of one team have suffered too terribly when the other pro teams in that same city have racked up one championship after another. (Jets fans, I'm looking at you.)

So in 2007 on my ThemeParkInsider.com site I developed a quantitative solution to answering this question: The Sports Misery Index.

In short, here's how it works: A city gets one point for each season played its pro sports teams since the last calendar year in which one of those teams won a championship.
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This is for readers in the Los Angeles area (or anyone who's spent some time in LA).

Which of these old-school LA-area joints would you most like to go to for lunch?

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Tomorrow's BCS championship surely will bring with it calls from some newspaper columnists and TV and radio hosts for a college football playoff. Some of them might point to polls that report public support for the idea of doing away with the traditional bowl system in favor of a playoff.

But how many people would support a college football playoff if it meant, for example, no longer having a Rose Parade on New Year's Day?

Because that's exactly what a playoff system would do.
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