You have questions. I have some answers.

Q: How do they accurately measure TV ratings nowadays? Just in our household, we have traditional cable (they never turned it off), YouTube TV, multiple streaming services; and even something called a Super Box.

A: As your question indicates, how we watch TV has changed dramatically over the years, and so have the TV ratings — far beyond just diaries where people wrote down what they watched, and the early versions of “people meters” tracking your TV set.

These days the Nielsen Co., the hallmark of ratings, uses a combination of viewer input (“panels” of sample viewers representing the audience as a whole) and “big data … from cable, satellite set-top boxes and smart TVs across 45 million households and 75 million devices,” the company says. “Nielsen is also incorporating first-party data from participating streaming services to help measure audiences for live streaming events. These are massive datasets that capture TV viewing at the device level.”

You might wonder why it still uses panels when it has all that data. Nielsen says data “can tell us what’s playing on screen, but not who is watching, or how many friends and family might be sitting on the couch and watching too. In fact, it’s impossible to tell from big data alone whether a show or a movie is playing to an empty room. ... What’s more, big data isn’t representative of the full media audience. The only way it could be is if everyone used the same technology and had access to the same content available to them.” Panels, then, share personal details to more precisely reflect the makeup of the audience for a show.

You can read A LOT more about this at Nielsen.com.

Q: I have been watching a lion documentary on National Geographic and one of the main lions has a right-front broken paw. In fact, she is named just that. How can a TV crew not capture her and have her broken paw fixed? I know in true nature the lioness would suffer with the broken leg, but a FILM crew was THERE and could have helped her. It’s very uncomfortable to watch her suffer and don’t understand the thought that this makes for good TV viewing.

A: An oft-quoted rule in wildlife documentaries is “observe, record, but never interfere.” The idea, of course, is that doing something like rescuing the lion you saw changes the natural world being presented. Some documentarians have stepped in during extreme hardship for animals, but it’s relatively uncommon.

A similar dilemma involves reporting on or documenting people — where do you draw the line between observing and participating? And how does participation change the report?

Q: I saw a photo of Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale in the newspaper. Cale looks like Candy on the old Western “Bonanza” and Adam Chandler of “All My Children.” Is this the same person?

A: You get two out of three. The actor David Canary (1938-2015) played Candy on “Bonanza” in 1967-70 and 1972-73 (the show’s last season). He also had a long run as Adam Chandler as well as Adam’s twin Stuart on “All My Children,” winning five daytime Emmys. But he is not the same as J.J. Cale (1938-2013), the fine musician who wrote “After Midnight,” a hit for Eric Clapton.

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