iPod Shuffle doesn't repeat? Then explain Lang Lang!

A blackjack card counter might not beat the iPod odds, but that doesn't make Shuffle random. Most likely it's an algorithm we haven't cracked but a formula just the same.

In any case the game's fixed: We choose what to load on the device, so patterns are there to be found. On my aging iPod Touch, it's an equal mix of roughly 7-minute classical selections I've been replaying for years and music of all sorts that caught my attention in just the last six months — stumbled-upon library CDs, Loop noon-hour concert selections, acquisitions for Brenda's gym playlist.

Today after recharging, the same shuffle started to replay. A random act? A failing battery? Steve Jobs' reach from beyond the grave? Whatever the reason, attention must be paid. Listen to the blues long enough, and odds are you'll find a shuffle pattern:

Lang Lang: Albéniz - Iberia, Fête-dieu à Seville
Jill Barber: If It Weren't for Loving You
Johnny Cash: If You Could Read My Mind
Kings of Leon: The Immortals
Artur Rubenstein: Chopin - Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat
Black Stone Cherry: In My Blood
Beach Boys: In My Room
OK Go: In the Glass
Cage the Elephant: Indy Kids
Decemberists: The Infanta
Artur Rubenstein: Brahms - Intermezzo in A-flat
Lacuna Coil: Intoxicated
Keith Jarrett & Charlie Hayden: I'm Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life
OK Go: Invincible
Jonas Kaufmann: Verdi - "Io l'ho perduta! ... lo la vida"
John Mayall: It Ain't Right
Airborne Toxic Event: It Doesn't Mean a Thing
REM: It Happened Today
Passion Pit: It's Not My Fault I'm Happy
Easley Blackwood: Ives - Piano Sonata #2

High school confidential: Web edition

The City News Bureau of Chicago maxim, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out," hangs on the wall in Room 226 at Benito Juarez Community Academy. A student who takes that advice seriously might stumble on this page investigating Friday's guest for the 7:59 a.m. Media Studies class. I'll be there on behalf of the News Literacy Project.

If you're one of Liz Winfield's students, congratulations! My high school did not have a Media Studies class. Ms. Winfield also advises producers of a school newscast, described this way in a video archive: "Guest anchors Zuleima Martinez and Felix Castillo bring you stories about the baseball team, the end of the world and the new Demi Lovato single." (The actual newscast leads with the 2012 end-times forecast. Good call. A bumper inadvertently underscores the topic, marking the last chance to enter an LMFAO ticket raffle.)

Anyway, I'm giving extra credit to the sharp Juarez student who land here trying to to find my bio. But good luck if she tries to follow my trail in social media. Why for instance do so many of my Twitter status messages mention tweeting itself?

Why Twitter, Facebook are brain candy: www.latimes.com/business/techn...

Nine disturbing behaviors on social media that people need to stop right now soc.li/8ym4IVS

RT @RexHuppke People will always remember where they were when they "liked" a Facebook link to a tweet about a blog about Obama endorsing gay marriage.

That last retweet repeats how news spreads in social media. Once the Tribune publishes a major story online, the next step is to tweet it. From there reporters and editors, listed in the Tribune's Twitter directory, may pass it along as well. Who knows what Juarez students will make of a retweet from Colonel Tribune, the newsroom avatar and raconteur.

Chicago project coordinator Mary Owen says only one girl in the back of the class is already on Twitter, but my guess is that enough are on Facebook to spark a discussion about sharing links. Does a retweet endorse a person or idea? Was the link even read before it was shared? And would students share likewise if they knew they were also sharing with their boss at Burger King?

Since this is a first-period class, I'll start with Twitter practice, no computer or smartphone required. I've asked students to tell why their classmates should be interested in Friday’s class, and write it in 120 characters or less, plus maybe one relevant URL. We’ll pick the best at the start of the class.

Reaching back to my days on business rewrite, I'll also arrive bearing McDonald's press releases for an exercise in how news propagates. Warning: Math ahead!

• PR Newswire, 7:58 a.m.: McDonald's Global Comparable Sales Rise 3.3% In April
• Reuters, 12:49 p.m: McDonald's sales up 3.3% in April, lower than expected
• Reuters, 4:18 p.m: McDonald's April U.S. sales miss estimates

From there, it would be worth following a trending story (today the name "rommey" prompts a Google recommendation for "romney bully," which is beyond where the Washington Post headline writers would go) and review the resulting mix of recovery, aggregation, analysis and opinion, often from the same source.

Finally, I can put on my neighborhood blogger hat and talk about hyperlocal journalism, near journalism and advocacy.

Wish me luck: Think I'll have to slow down.

The News Literacy Project came my way by chance as Owen was leaving the Tribune and circulating her new address. A creation of former L.A. Times reporter Alan C. Miller, the nonprofit aims to teach critical thinking about what to believe. What would you like to know about how teens view news?

A reporter's guide to project management

I've been moving between journalism and development for the past five years, ever since my boss ordered me a copy of "Project Management for Dummies." Nothing personal, he said, it's just a good book on how projects get done. Eventually the head of the Project Management Office told me I needed a more formal study of the project manager's body of knowledge. So I began reading "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management."

A newspaper is not the model environment for project management. Editors are focused on producing today's news. If the results fall short, there's always tomorrow's news. With deadline after deadline, this process is a little too agile. Even so, making plans in a newsroom looks pretty much like initiating a project in the code room. To move beyond day-to-day tasks, you need to look into the future and imagine where you want to end up. That's the first step to figuring out how to get there.

Outside the office, the same discipline can keep you from spinning your wheels starting things you can't finish. Every so often it's worth reviewing the basics of goal-setting. Don't take it personally, but let's assume you're a complete idiot, or a maybe a reporter:

Don't bury the lede. Editors warn writers not to obscure their central point. The Onion takes this to an extreme, writing the headline first. But a reporter often will draft the opening paragraph in her head as a working hypothesis, then calls her sources and find out if those hunches are grounded. This doesn't always work in journalism but it's how all good projects start, with a clear statement of the task at hand. A single-page statement of the objectives and who has a stake in them is often all you really need to launch a project.

If your mother says she loves you, check it out. So the editors at City News Bureau told cub reporters. Eyewitnesses don't always agree at a crime scene. It's too tempting not to compare a roomful of stakeholders to a crime scene, but there it is: If they can't agree on the final outcome, it's no use to even start. Here's where a project manager acts like a newsman and get a consensus on paper, including who's responsible for what, before the sales team changes its mind.

Follow the money. Often I have to get things done without people to do them. That means I'll be spending a long time negotiating with vendors. Good thing I'm an editor: A lot of contracts try to commit the vendor to as little as possible in as many words as possible. As it turns out, the contract that passes muster with the legal department will spell out the deliverables, what they do and who pays if they come up short. It'a also the contract where both sides are happy with the results.

"Give me a break!" How many times would "60 Minutes" show a politician's pat answer, then cut to Mike Wallace with a look of utter skepticism? In an interview with NPR he called that "a perfectly sensible thing to say to somebody: Give me a break, come on, let's talk seriously. Don't phony up your answer." Project managers do this all the time setting the scope of work. Goals have to be realistic and achievable to motivate a team to get behind them.

Obey the deadline. Most of my projects get handed to me with one aspect locked down: when the finished product needs to be done. That's a blessing -- without a deadline, an investigation or any other project can just go on forever. My job is to work backward from the deadline and figure out what has to fall into place along the way, what project managers call the work breakdown structure. To pass the Mike Wallace BS test, the job has to be something that can actually get done in time.

Recently I recommended a friend coming out of DePaul's digital media program for an IT job, and she wondered if tech resources cross over into the newsroom. That really doesn't happen, partly because there's more money on the engineering side. Either way she'd be doing a lot of writing. Stakeholders thirst for news from the project team. One thing makes a media company a good place to work, whether you're a journalist or a technologist: When things go bad it's part of the culture not to blame the messenger, whether she's carrying a notepad or a GANTT chart.

Civic engagement: Free symphony and Chicago blues

If the symphony is an acquired taste, the first step is to acquire cash. Main-floor tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra cost $47 and up even on a weeknight. Box seats go for $220 each. But there's a way to take in the Orchestra Hall experience for free. It could be ticket to a lifelong interest in classical music.

Symphony Center's tuxedo-clad ushers open the house of Riccardo Muti, Georg Solti and Fritz Reiner to free performances of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, an accomplished youth symphony. Its members also perform at Chicago schools and fieldhouses, but the full complement of musicians performs downtown several times a year. A friend introduced me to the group years ago with a performance of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony. The musicians got most of the notes right, and didn't seem to mind premature applause at the end of the third movement.

I'd almost forgotten about the Civic Orchestra till Brenda surprised me four years ago with Symphony Center jazz tickets for my birthday. Listening to jazz was an obvious sacrifice for her though, so since then I've been taking closer looks at the Orchestra Hall schedule to find concerts more to her taste. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra also handed out its calendar during Muti's revelatory 2010 concert in Millennium Park, when I heard the CSO lend unexpected subtlety to pops warhorses like Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet."

A concert series was still outside our budget, but on Thanksgiving weekend we sprung for Orchestra Hall tickets to watch the movie "West Side Story" in Cinemascope with the CSO playing the orchestral parts live. This symphonic spin on a DJ gambit made it hard to decide whether to concentrate on the Jerome Robbins choreography, Natalie Wood/Marni Nixon as Maria, the live musicians, their gilt-edged setting or the Bowery backdrop. Mayor Emanuel, the noted ex-dancer and a presumed Robbins fan, was waiting in the lobby afterward, with a force field of open space around him. That was a performance in itself: When a citizen dared approach, he simultaneously shook her hand and pushed her toward the door.

The Civic Orchestra doesn't get on the mayor's schedule but its concerts are in the Symphony Center fliers, and tickets can be ordered online for $1. This season our household was just comfortable enough to afford a CSO concert and a Civic engagement featuring one of my gateway drugs to classical music, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

In high school I played the trombone part in the violin-free concert band arrangement, which is what the marching band performs in the cafeteria for parents after football season ends. Mr. Folsom conducted the master-blaster last movement, but not at the breakneck orchestral pace. The finale's metronome marks are a point of musicological dispute, but our music teacher simply was trying to make it playable, the same way classmate Pat McCurdy's garage band slowed down Sha Na Na's "Duke of Earl" and accidentally sounded like Gene Chandler. In the bleak mid-winter friend and I would slip out of study hall to listen to Leonard Bernstein's LP Fifth. I learned there was more to this moody work than I knew, and more to my friend, who revealed thoughts of suicide.

In summer, on a lunch break from my messenger job, the Shostakovich Fifth joined the modest classical music library I was building from $2 LPs on the "Standard Repertoire" list in Stereo Review. It would have been in the collection much earlier if the record-club disc I ordered had not inexplicably arrived with a rock album packed inside the sleeve.

Not only do I have a history with this piece, the piece has its own history as well. I got a refresher course from Stephen Press' pre-performance lecture after a quick burrito at Chipotle. (Neither is a concert tradition, but it's a new era.) In 1936 Shostakovich had received a bad writeup in Pravda, and with the thought that Stalin thus had it in for him, billed his next year's symphony as "the creative reply of a Soviet artist to justified criticism." Such a plot line would be hard to swallow today but for the evidence of Stalin's brutal and mercurial nature.

The program notes had more along these lines, which I read waiting outside the hall for rehearsal to end. Civic Orchestra concerts are general admission, so patrons simply look for open seats, even those behind the orchestra. I chose fifth-row center, too close for clear views beyond the string section but great to take in sound under the domed stage. I've become a regular at Chicago Cultural Center chamber-music performances for the same reason: Live music and especially piano are far superior to the iPod even with stage-monitor earbuds.

Even with free admission, the classical music audience skews older -- I chatted with a Sun-Times retiree I knew, and many surrounding patrons seemed about the same age. But the two younger men next to me were taking iPhone photos of the brightly lit hall, and themselves in it. Many had saved space for friends and were discussing what they knew about the program. Everyone seemed to appreciate the music and their chance to hear it.

The Shostakovich has a lot to hear, a brassy hi-fi spectacular with two harps, timpani, xylophone, celesta and bells. In form it's a conventional, heroic symphony but like generations of loyal Soviets to follow, the composer seems to be delivering subversive messages between the lines. Martial music takes a fun-house cadence and odd dissonant chords undercut the triumphal notes. Jarring left-hand piano notes and pounding drums build a palpable tension.

Press' lecture encouraged the audience to dwell on the morose third movement and not the bombastic finale as the work's heart, and in his description of its D minor construction I recognized a blues scale. Conductor Cliff Colnot, a composer and arranger in classical, rock and jazz, seemed tuned in to the folk and blues overtones, and the musicians combined for a 45-minute blues that built toward not triumph but exhaustion: free at last, thank God almighty.

The result was the Civic at the most accomplished I have heard it, and the most affecting. Often I'll tear up at dramatic music, whether it's an aria, a bolero or Broadway, and here I felt that wave of emotion. Colnot kept the musicians onstage for a long ovation, pointing to each soloist to take a bow. On the trip home, a subway busker was playing "The Thrill Is Gone." The Civic Orchestra had something to teach him, and at the price of admission he should have been there.

The best concerts push the audience outside its comfort zone, or push familiar works into uncharted territory. This performance had both elements, and suggests good things ahead for the rest of the schedule, which includes Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" and a Beethoven piano concerto with Emanuel Ax as soloist. They should be hot tickets. They're already free.