I grew up in the "Back to the Future" era. I was promised flying cars and hoverboards and holographic billboards -- all by 2015. You know the line: "Where we're going, we don't need roads." Cue dramatic music and roll credits! I'm a sucker for it all.

As 2009 comes to a close, with five years left before we catch up with Robert Zemeckis's vision of 2015, I wondered: How close are we? Well, flying cars are probably out of the question. I can only imagine what their carbon emissions would be, never mind fuel efficiency. Plus, I'm not too keen on the idea of getting in a fender bender a mile up and possibly plummeting to my death when the flying mechanism fails. It would be neat to zoom around the sky, sure, but I think we can safely rule that out. Hoverboards probably aren't happening, either, which may be for the best; everyone knows hoverboards don't work on water anyway. Maybe the "Back to the Future" future was just way off.

Then I came across a link to AT&T's 1993 set of ads known as the "You Will" campaign, which is remarkably on target for predicting our technological advances. If you don't remember the spots, take a look here.

Pretty close, huh? They got a few details wrong (Fax? Phonebooth? What the heck are those?), but they're remarkably on-the-money for almost everything else:

"Borrowed a book from thousands of miles away" -- Amazon Kindle.
"Crossed the country without stopping for directions" -- how did we live without GPS?
"Paid a toll without slowing down" -- ah, the magic of E-ZPass.

I'd love to see AT&T revisit this concept. Where will we be 15 to 20 years from now? What gadgets will have fallen the way of the fax machine?

What do you predict?

I feel like I might have been born for this.

I am just now going through a set of tabs from a recently completed quantitative survey, and working in my head on what the story is for the report. Over the past several years I haven't done as much quantitative work as I once did, and that's a bit weird because the fact is that my background is entirely quantitative. I studied and taught quantitative research methods for many years, and my subsequent professional "commercial research" training with Lou Harris was entirely quantitative.

But my interest began way before all this. It actually all started when I was 5 or 6 years old. I would roll bunches of marbles on the hardwood floor in the living room of our upstairs apartment, along the narrow four-inch or so channel between the area rug and the wall, and watch the marbles hit the far wall and roll back. I would set aside the top three finishers, grab another bunch, and repeat the process over and over, setting up a series of heats that led ultimately to a champion marble.

I would do it for hours at a time, and I get a little adrenaline rush, even now, just thinking about it.

Quantitative research, at its core, involves precisely this same process. It's all about counting, sorting, developing a compelling story along the way, and coming to a conclusion.

I love this stuff.

And I do believe that I might have been born for it. That's not boastful. As the great Dizzy Dean used to say, "If you done it, it ain't braggin'."

Monday marked the 22nd anniversary of The Taylor Group, which you may know (and if you're a frequent reader of this blog, you probably do know) started as a three-person company working out of Scott Taylor's basement in the spring of 1987.

I've been here for about half of that time, and I've seen some changes. Recently we've rekindled a relationship with a company for which we did a lot of work in the late '80s and '90s but lost touch with when some key contacts there moved on to other organizations. And so last week I found myself digging through six large storage boxes full of documents from our pre-internal-server days.

What kind of documents, you ask? Seventy-five-page, single-spaced reports. Pamphlets for "new shows for the upcoming television season" -- shows which were on the air for 10 years and have been off for the last five. And my favorite: transparencies of presentations!

And how un-green it all was!

It was a different time, for sure. But within these antiquated documents, not everything was unfamiliar. The handwriting, for example, is recognizable. Scott's is still the same as it always was; Peter's is still mostly illegible. And there are the familiar comments in the margins of report drafts, with suggestions for deeper analysis or observations for consideration. But what really struck me were some of the findings that hold true even today. For example, from a 1992 report:

"It is harder than ever to hold viewers' attention. People have less time, more choices, and shorter attention spans."

This was 1992! Before the age of cellphones, PDAs, and (for most people) the Internet. We always think we're getting busier and busier, yet we still find ways to manage our lives -- and, as researchers, we're always searching for innovative ways to help our clients "break through the clutter" as technology changes.

Lots can change in two decades, but I guess some things remain constant.

Last year I went through a brief period of panic about the world coming to an end.

Seriously. I think it was the residual memory of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, combined with the imminent collapse of our financial system, mixed in with election mudslinging and scare tactics. The massive California wildfires (whose effects I witnessed firsthand) and 10-foot-deep snow in New Hampshire may also have had something to do with it. And, what the heck, let's add increased outbreaks of Lyme Disease, Triple E, and Avian Flu to the mix.

With the end-of-days obviously approaching (well, in my mind, at least), I decided to go beyond recycling and reusable grocery bags. I did what any left-leaning twenty-something without too much money would do: I put my name on a few conservation group lists. I gave the minimum donation required to join (I think Nature Conservancy was free and Sierra Club was around $25) and sat back contentedly, knowing my staggering contribution would set the world back on a course toward harmony and balance.

Fast-forward six months. My knee-jerk environmentalist stint has brought me one thing: a permanent spot on a nonprofit mailing list.

You name the cause, I get the mailings: clean air, clean water, endangered species protection, the League of Women Voters, anti-coal, anti-clean coal, tightening emissions standards, and so on, and so on, and so on. Usually these groups send something with their donation-request letters to make me feel like I'm truly valued by them: address labels, a poster-sized world map, etc. Of course, what I'm really getting is more and more paper waste. I signed up for these organizations with the ultimate goal of reducing waste and environmental destruction, not creating more garbage.

The mailings also often contain "urgent" surveys that ask me to voice my opinion. But really, I think they're just a mask to make me feel empowered so I'll send a check to the nonprofit group. I don't mean to sound harsh or jaded here, but the surveys often contain questions like, "Do you believe the public should have an active voice in government?" or, "Do you think we are doing enough to preserve our drinking water sources, even though X% of Americans don't have access to clean water?" or, "The Bush Administration moved X number of species off the endangered list, despite decreased populations. Do you think we should do more to save these animals?" You'd have to have a heart of stone to honestly say "no." So what purpose does it serve for me to fill out and return the survey -- especially if I'm not going to send a donation with it?

So I've ended up with two questions. First, as an environmentalist, I wonder: Have my efforts to help the earth truly become counterproductive? And as a researcher, I wonder: Do mailings like these give a bad name to companies like us, who conduct legitimate surveys?

Unrelenting is right. We've all heard it: "Don't like the weather in New England? Wait five minutes!" And it's not grossly exaggerated: Both Saturday and Sunday delivered 50-degree, spring-like weather; Monday, we shoveled six inches of wet, heavy snow.

The way I feel about this winter is pretty much the way I feel about the economy -- just keep my head down and power through it. We're buried in snow and we're buried in negative news reports -- and I'm just trying to shovel out a path.

The other day I was (get ready for a confession of nerdiness) listening to "This American Life" on NPR, which has been doing a handful of really informative programs to explain the giant mess we're in. "TAL" did a show on the mortgage crisis, a follow-up on the credit crisis, and, most recently, a show on the banking industry crisis. They break it down into plain language that anyone can understand, and after listening to these shows, I feel like I have a better sense of what's actually going on.

And that's been the key thing for me: finding out what is happening. Not what Bill O'Reilly thinks is happening, not what Jon Stewart thinks is happening, not what Katie Couric thinks is happening. I mean, how long does it take to explain -- in plain language -- what's going on and what the proposed solutions are? If you listen to "This American Life," it takes about an hour. But the 24-hour cable networks have, well, 24 hours to fill, and an unrelenting storm of apocalyptic news is just not what I'm in the mood for.

I can't really sit this one out. None of us can. But I'm trying to keep in perspective what I can and can't control. I can't control the Dow. I can't control whether the government nationalizes banks or buys up toxic mortgages. To some extent, I can't even control my employment status.

But I can work harder than ever. I can go to the gym and sweat it out. (I take a kickboxing-type class in which the instructor always says, "Bring something to class that you don't want to leave with." I love it.) I can make dinner at home instead of going out, which is probably healthier for me anyway. I've got a great excuse for turning down invitations to things (concerts, movies, restaurants) I didn't really want to do anyway -- I just say I have to conserve.

And we all do. But I'm hoping all this will, sooner than later, relent.

We don't have a "word of the day" feature on Praxis. But if we did, I'd nominate the following:

Unrelenting. 1. Having or exhibiting uncompromising determination; unyielding. 2. Not diminishing in intensity, pace, or effort. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000)

While I'm at it, I'd also like to nominate unrelenting as the word of the month . . . and of this winter . . . and, what the hell, of this year so far.

Let me explain.

I read a story in The Boston Globe last week, the day after yet another "weather system" dumped a foot of snow on Boston (not to mention snow in the south and much of the eastern portion of the country). I began reading, fully expecting standard post-snowstorm pseudo-journalistic fare -- quotes from people unhappy with the snow but chalking it up to "life in New England," the obligatory quote from someone jogging outside in gym shorts, claiming to be beguiled by the "winter wonderland" and wishing winter would last into June (excuse me one second . . . "gag" . . . ), etc., etc.

But this piece wasn't like that at all. Everyone featured came across as weary at best, or angry at worst. They all offered some variation of the same theme: I'm sick of this winter. One person called this the "worst ever winter I've been through." There was nary a peep from any purported winter-lovers.

Although I haven't looked it up, I'd be willing to bet that statistically, this has not been the "worst ever" winter in New England. I don't think we've gotten as much snow as in other winters, nor do I think it's been the coldest winter, average-temperature-wise.

But I'm with the people in the Globe story. It sure feels like the worst winter ever.

Why? Well, the cold and snow have been, yes, unrelenting. During most winters, we usually enjoy at least some respite--three of four days in a row of temperatures in the 50s, the occasional freakish 70-degree day. Something to break up the sheer monotony of it all. That hasn't happened this year. This year has been dismally monotonous. Each day, it seems, is either freezing, or snowy, or ice is raining down, or all of the above. Day in, day out. It's been like Chinese water torture, with the water freezing as soon as it hits your forehead.

So if you happen to live in the Northeast, I think you'll agree that unrelenting pretty much sums up what this winter's been like. On the other hand, I'm not so provincial as to nominate a word solely on the basis of our own local weather conditions. No -- if there were a national (or even international) word of the day/week/month/year, unrelenting would still get my vote. And I say that on the basis of certain other phenomena, phenomena that have also been unyielding, not diminishing in intensity, pace, or effort . . .

I read a story in the newspaper last week, one day after yet another [stock market drop], [corporate layoff announcement], [unfavorable economic report] . . .

Drip, drip, drip . . .

I read today that Peter Falk's daughter has filed a court document seeking approval for conservatorship of her 81-year-old father, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The daughter claims her father no longer recognizes people.

Peter Falk is perhaps best known as the Emmy award-winning star of the TV series "Columbo." I was a big fan of "Columbo," and for me it is both sad and ironic that the disheveled, absent-minded detective Lieutenant Columbo, who immediately, instinctively, with few clues, always recognized the evil perpetrator, no longer recognizes anyone at all.

When I taught "Research Methods for Political Scientists" to undergraduates and graduate students in the 1970s, I found myself using what I called the "Columbo Method" to describe one of two ways to approach the research report writing process -- the other being the "Agatha Christie Method." I continue to use this distinction with my colleagues here at The Taylor Group (most of whom weren't even born in the heyday of the great "Columbo" TV series -- and so have no idea, typically, what I'm talking about).

In Agatha Christie murder mysteries, I explain, the audience never finds out "whodunit" until the very end. The viewer is given little clues along the way, building up to the climax where the murderer is finally identified--and all the clues along the way finally come together.

On the contrary, in every episode of "Columbo" the audience knows early on "whodunit," through the wily instincts of old, trench-coated, hunched-over, perpetually perplexed Lieutenant Columbo. And then the rest of the episode is taken up with just how Columbo figured it out so quickly and ultimately nabs the perpetrator.

The research report writing process can follow either the Columbo Method or the Agatha Christie Method. You either build a series of findings toward a grand conclusion for the reader, or you begin the report with the grand conclusion and spend the rest of the time presenting findings that explain to the reader how you got there.

I'll miss you Lieutenant Columbo, but I'll never forget you; and I'll bet from the raised eyebrows and "here-he-goes-again" expressions on my colleagues' faces when I describe the report writing process, neither will they.

Maybe it's because I work in research, or maybe it's because I know how it feels to cold call someone, or maybe I just like giving my opinion. But whenever I'm asked to take a survey, I do it.

This past summer I bought a new car, and about a month ago I received a follow-up mail survey. It asked me to rate things like vehicle features, comfort, performance, etc. And enclosed with the survey materials, as an incentive, was the newest, crispest dollar bill I'd ever seen in my life. This thing was so perfect, so untouched by gritty human hands, that I still haven't even put it in my wallet. It was so crisp that, as it sat on our coffee table for a few days, multiple people (friends, my mom) who'd come over actually commented on it:

"Look at this dollar! Where did you get this?"

"This is the newest-looking dollar I've ever seen!"

A one-dollar bill had become the biggest conversation piece in my apartment.

And for some reason, while I probably would have answered the questions anyway, this lovely piece of currency really was an incentive for me to take and mail that survey. If it had been old, torn, crumpled, or wrinkled, there's no way it would have had the same effect; in fact, I likely would have had the opposite reaction: "Wow, they want my opinion so badly, they sent me a whole chewed-up dollar."

It's a neat little piece of irony that in this down-the-crapper economy, a single dollar bill bought 15 minutes of my time. And perhaps it's even more ironic that we pay some of our hardest-to-get recruits upwards of $100, and I was willing to settle for a buck.

I realize there's a lot to like about the West Coast, but one of the small things I love about it is the way just about everyone there refers to the eastern part of the country. Back east. "I took a trip back east last month." "I have to go back east on business." Not, "I took a trip to the East Coast," or to the "eastern part of the country," or even just "east." Back east.

Okay, maybe "love" is a strong word for how I feel about an expression. But back east is just so evocative. Why do people consider traveling to the East Coast going back? To where are they going back? Back to where they once lived? Back to where they grew up? Back to where their family is from originally?

Maybe, but how does all that explain the fact that even West Coast natives refer to the east as back east, natives who have never ventured east of the Mississippi and have no family in the region?

It's fascinating. In our collective unconscious, is the East Coast somehow considered the cradle of American civilization, the U.S. version of Athens, Rome, Egypt, Africa? Does a trip to the East Coast mean going back to one's roots? To the country's roots?

If these seem like odd musings, consider this: Would you ever use the expression back west? It just sounds completely wrong, doesn't it? You go out west. And how about this: you'd never say out east, would you?

What explains it -- back east, but out west?

Fascinating.

While we're on the subject, here's an expression I outright despise -- "my bad." In my book, if you've done something wrong, if you've acted in a way that harms or inconveniences someone, you say "I'm sorry." Just "sorry" by itself is acceptable, I suppose, but to me that sounds more theoretical than personal -- as if you were just throwing out the concept of remorse, and leaving it up to the aggrieved to attach it to you personally.

"My bad" is in another league entirely. It implies no remorse or bad feeling whatsoever, just an acknowledgment of fact. "You caught me, I screwed up. Now go away so I can get back to 'Halo.'"

(Maybe I'm a little too close to this one.)

And finally, one last term . . . genius. I know I'm not alone in feeling the term is applied too freely these days. But in my humble opinion, David Foster Wallace was unquestionably a genius.¹ I've always had mixed feelings about his fiction (even though I recognize his enormous influence on writers I enjoy, like Dave Eggers). But his essays are pure, unadulterated, footnote-frenzied brilliance. ²

I'm still having difficulty getting past the shock of opening up Monday's newspaper and seeing his picture on the obituary page -- dead at 46, an apparent suicide. I suppose I have to accept the fact that someone so keenly observant -- someone whose writing regularly made me laugh out loud -- could also lead an unbearably tortured inner life. But I don't want to.

"He was . . . as sweet a person as I've ever known and as tormented a person as I've ever known." ³

RIP, DFW.

¹ Heck, he even won the so-called "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation -- so I guess my statement goes beyond MHO.
²If you don't believe me, read "Authority and American Usage," in Consider the Lobster.
³Jonathan Franzen, as quoted in The New York Times, September 14, 2008.

But then again, I felt such great pride when I read in the September issue of Radar Magazine that the school ranked No. 1 (for the second year in a row) on their list of the 50 Worst Colleges in America is . . . the University of Bridgeport! Here are the first two sentences from the Radar Magazine profile:

"We scoured the country for a more deserving dishonoree, we really did. But once again the University of Bridgeport has swept the competition in every category, not only for its meager academics, postapocalyptic campus, and downright shady administration, but because we simply can't imagine a more terrifying place to spend four years."

I speak of great pride because I entered UB in the fall of 1966 as a freshman. Truth be told, I left New Hampshire for Bridgeport, CT, to be close to my girlfriend, who lived just over the border in NY. Not that she was my girlfriend at the time, mind you; she had dumped me the previous winter. But the greatest fools have the highest hopes.

I lasted four semesters at UB before flunking out in the spring of 1968. (My girlfriend failed to see the error of her ways in that time, despite my lapdog efforts.) University officials allowed me to take two summer classes in the hopes I would get back over the flunkee hump. One course was a do-nothing English poetry class; I got a B. The other was a Japanese history course taught by a visiting Japanese professor who spoke little English. I did nothing in the class, except tell him at the end that I needed an A to stay in school. He gave me the A.

Back in the UB fold for the fall of 1968, I promptly flunked out again at the end of that semester. University officials thought better of any future matriculation on my part.

My 2-S student deferment status immediately in jeopardy (this was the Vietnam era), I enrolled back home in NH at the New Hampshire College of Accounting and Commerce. But seeing how I never went to a class and never paid my first tuition bill, my 2-S deferment immediately became 1-A (draft eligible -- Vietnam bound). Called by the military for my physical, I cut my hair so as not to stand out, tried my damnedest not to pass, but passed anyway and vacantly awaited the call to duty.

Fortune intervened, however, and the first military draft lottery picked me a very high number, and so I was pretty much assured of not being drafted.

Life, however, thought better of this good fortune when I totaled (having failed to purchase auto insurance -- then not required in NH) my one-month-old, two-tone purple 1960 Austin Healy 3000, bought for $800 -- the car of my dreams, still today.

Fortune intervened problematically yet a third time that summer when my new, old girlfriend (that girlfriend, after a three-year hiatus, was back) called to tell me she was pregnant and wondered what we were going to do about it.

We got married -- that's what we did about it. She was 19 and a high school drop-out; I was 20 and a college flunk-out.

And that's when everything began changing, and continued changing.

Everything except one thing:

39 years later -- same girlfriend.

In our work here at Taylor, we do a fair amount of TV program pilot testing. And a fair number of those pilots are reality shows -- or "real-life shows," as some of our clients call them. "Real-life shows" seems to have a much nicer ring to it. Since the barrage of reality TV shows began sometime in the late 90s, I think it can be safely argued that they've gotten steadily . . . well, trashier. (Anyone remember "The Littlest Groom" or "Temptation Island"?) "Reality show" has a certain connotation -- and it's not a good one. "Real-life," on the other hand . . .

We recently conducted focus groups on some raw footage that our client may turn into a series, a documentary, or a TV special -- based on real people. And prior to the groups, we watched and discussed the footage internally. We reached a consensus that our focus group participants later mirrored: that real people on TV are interesting only to the extent that they feel like real people.

I'm not into the shows that follow B-list celebrities trying to boost their careers. I could care less about "Living Lohan," "House of Carters," "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," or -- especially -- "Denise Richards: It's Complicated." (Thanks for spelling it out for us, Denise.) These celebrities are already known -- and I know their lives are not like mine. They're so far removed from my world that watching them is just a little piece of fluff, cotton candy.

Then there are the shows that, for me, cut to the bone of "real life." These shows are different from those listed above because they involve people who could be me -- or could be my neighbors, my friends, my coworkers. They are regular people made famous by an extraordinary quirk or quality.

I see three categories under this umbrella:

1) Shows featuring an extraordinary family:
"Jon and Kate Plus Eight" -- a couple with eight children: twins and sextuplets.
"Little People, Big World" -- a couple who are little people and their four children -- three of whom are of average height, one of whom is little.

2) Shows featuring people with extraordinary jobs:
"Ice Road Truckers" -- drivers of big rigs over the Arctic ice.
"Deadliest Catch" -- crab fishermen in the treacherous Pacific waters off Alaska.

3) Shows featuring people facing an extraordinary obstacle:
"Intervention" -- people dealing with various addictions whose families attempt to stage an intervention.

To me, these shows all have one thing in common -- people who are willing to expose their flaws, even it makes them look overbearing, strung out, scared, gritty, or ugly. Kate Gosselin is no Denise Richards -- and she certainly isn't always wearing make up. Then again, if she was, we wouldn't buy that she was successfully parenting eight children without a full-time staff.

"Intervention" is so emotionally raw that I often can't even watch it. I once saw an episode about a woman battling anorexia (her addiction was control), and I couldn't stop thinking about it for days afterwards. I even searched for information about her online -- was she okay? Did she recover? Did she die? The harshness of this reality is what draws us to these shows -- and what creates a successful connection with a viewer.

Do you agree? Do you wonder how the crab season will go on "Deadliest Catch," or are "The Girls Next Door" your guilty pleasure?

What makes you connect with reality shows -- and do you believe any of them actually portray reality?