The Revolution Will Not Be Twitter-ized

The medium is the message.  Books and pamphlets gave us depth of thought and expression.  Newspapers gave us context, but also sensation.  Radio gave us intimacy.  Television gives us sensory overload and 30-second sound bytes.  The Internet gives us community and the ability to “drill down.” 

Twitter gives us spitballs. Exhibitionism and spitballs.  

Don’t feel sorry for Ezra Klein.  As the cops would say, he had no expectation of privacy. 

Besides, there is a huge constituency of Tim Russert-haters out there who will turn him into a martyr if NBC decides not to keep him around.  This might be the making of Ezra Klein’s punditry career.  

What CDs Did To Pop Music

It was 25 years ago this month that the first commercially-available compact disc was manufactured, according to WSJ.com’s Jason Fry.  (Link is to subscription site.)  It was what turned out to be ABBA’s last album, “The Visitors.” 

It is ironic and suggestive that ABBA, known primarily as a singles group (What album does “Take a Chance on Me” come from?  I have no idea either.) would be the pioneer of a format that killed the LP.  The “concept album” as developed by Frank Sinatra and perfected by the classic rock bands of the 60s and 70s, started as a manufacturing spec but evolved into a musical form as prodigious and supple as the sonata.  And the CD crushed it.

The LP’s limitations imposed a helpful form on the musical design of albums. Each side could be about 20 minutes long — maybe 25. So the entire experience lasted only 45 minutes or less; there wasn’t much room for filler. Then, it was divided into two parts (or four parts for a double-LP). Typically that mean 4-5 songs on each side; two suites of 15 to 20 minutes, a brief enough period to hold the listener’s attention. You had to have a strong Side One Track One, a strong closer for Side One, a great track to kick off Side Two, and a great closing track. This imposed a discipline on performers and producers alike.

With CDs, this structure disappeared, and was replaced by an endless temptation for indulgence, as Fry also points out.  And that, he says, has had fatal consequences for the music industry.

Dang, Why Didn’t I Think of the iPhone?

How many times have I talked on the telephone in my life?  At least 100,000, starting back in the 1950s.  Not to mention the hours I spent staring at the telephone, waiting for it to ring. 

Every place I’ve ever lived, I’ve had to consider the telephone.  Where should it go?  Major furniture placement decisions rested on the location of a phone plug.  At work, my desk might be covered with piles of paper, but there was always space cleared for the phone.

In all those years, why didn’t I ever look at my telephone and envision its real possibilities, like Steve Jobs did?  Why didn’t I meditate on this humble piece of technology and say, even once, “Hey the phone would be a great place to watch TV, store my record collection, get my mail, read the news, do research and go shopping?”

In retrospect, the iPhone makes so much sense.  But I didn’t have the vision to see it.  I’m such a loser. 

If I’d thought of the iPhone first, I’d be so rich, I could afford to buy one.

Why Not Just Make Everything a Crime?

As I said a few posts ago, it’s time for Americans to realize that our leaders have gone a bit jail-happy.  No better example than this, which I thought was from The Onion, but is, in fact, true, and is, in fact, supported conceptually by that bastion of liberalism, the motion picture industry. From C|NET News Blog:  

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.

“To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated,” Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with prerelease piracy.

(snip)

The IPPA would, for instance:

* Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department’s summary of the legislation says: “It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.”)

* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are “attempting” to infringe copyrights.

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC “intended to be used in any manner” to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and it is problematic and controversial.

* Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention regulations. Criminal violations are currently punished by jail times of up to 10 years and fines of up to $1 million. The IPPA would add forfeiture penalties.

* Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes. Certain copyright crimes currently require someone to commit the “distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period of at least 10 copies” valued at more than $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were “intended to consist of” distribution.

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with “unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance” are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder, such as photographers, playwrights or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment.

A representative of the Motion Picture Association of America told us: “We appreciate the department’s commitment to intellectual-property protection and look forward to working with both the department and Congress as the process moves ahead.”

Wired’s Mathew Honan thinks Gonzalez’ bill “faces a tough haul in Congress.”  He reports:

Before the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 can even go to Congress, it will need to be sponsored by a member of the House or Senate. The Justice Department has yet to find a sponsor, although it’s hoping that a meeting with Hill staffers will flush one out. And while the DOJ claims to have bipartisan support for its bill, a similar measure introduced last year failed to make it to a vote.

“We’re still reviewing the bill, but based on our initial review, we have some concerns,” said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “One of our biggest concerns is that it criminalizes attempted copyright infringement.”

McSherry said this is unprecedented in copyright law, and noted that the bill is ambiguous: “It’s not totally clear what would count as attempting copyright infringement.”

Essentially, the bill would turn copyright law into something more akin to existing drug laws: The government could seize personal property, wiretaps would become legal for the first time, violators could face life in prison and, in an ambiguous and far-reaching provision, the mere attempt to violate a copyright would become a crime.

Annalee Newitz from the Wired-affliliated blog Underwire says:

If this legislation becomes law, here are some things you could look forward to: 1-10 years in prison for attempting to engage in copyright infringement that would bring no profit to you (i.e., trying but failing to copy Doctor Who DVDs for your girlfriend); prison for life if you endangered someone by using pirated software (if a hospital got somebody’s medical records confused while using an infringing copy of Windows, for instance); being wiretapped by law enforcement investigating cases of attempted copyright infringement (now that your efforts to infringe Doctor Who DVDs for your girlfriend have been discovered, your cell phone has been tapped).

Sounds great, huh? But wait, there’s more. The IPPA promises enhanced sentencing for violating the DMCA, and will allow law enforcement to seize computers more easily. Buckle up, techno-wonks. It’s gonna be a rough ride if this bill makes it through Congress.

This is the problem with “get-tough” policies that allow politicians to posture against crime by lengthening prison sentences.   There’s always a constituency to “get tough” on white collar crime.  There’s always a constituency to “get tough” on drug dealers.  But once you’ve let the political community establish the “get-tough” precedent for unpopular sorts of non-violent crimes, then here’s what happens:  Well-connected big businesses are given a wide-open path to plead that actions they don’t like are crimes, too, and should get the same “get-tough” treatment. And as the unanimous bipartisan Senate vote for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act demonstrates, when business blows its horn, the politicians all come running.  

“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

No, that quote isn’t from President Bush’s press statement today.  And it’s certainly not from Harry Reid.

It’s Digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose, forecasting possible doom for his high-profile Web 2.0 site over its decision to rescind an earlier decision to pull all posts that featured an HD-DVD hack:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The “bigger company” to which he refers is a video licensing authority that enforces copyrights on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs — the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which was working with the Motion Picture Association of America.  They sent cease and desist notes to other websites where the code was posted, including Google.  For a time yesterday, some of the sites complied.

Imagine a flood.  Imagine you want to stop the flood.  Imagine throwing seven pebbles into the flood and waiting for it to stop.

This from TG Daily:

Copies of the cease and desist letters started appearing on the web yesterday and as we’ve seen in so many previous cases it was “Game On!” for the hackers.  The processing key in its full hexadecimal glory  sprouted like a weed all over the Internet.  Users of popular websites like Digg and Slashdot thumbed their virtual noses at the MPAA by posting the key into the comments sections, often using decimal, binary and other permutations.  Some users have also been creative enough to make up a shopping list using the numbers, 9 oranges, 9 fruits, etc.

The leaking of the HD DVD processing key isn’t a complete doomsday for the high-definition movie industry because the key only affects some players and presumably the movie companies could push updates that would prevent copied movies from playing.

This might sound very familiar.  Some years back, when I was in PR, MPAA was a client, and our assignment was to support its litigation to stop spread of a DVD copy-protection code hack — the famous DeCSS.  Only a three or four sites existed then that would post the hack, but I was told there were kids walking around New York City with the hack code printed on their t-shirts.  Now…fuhgeddaboutit.

Imagine if you really wanted to stop this flood.  What would you use?  That’s what should  really worry us.  What kind of bill are the copyright owners’ lobbyists writing now to reflect this new world?

PR By Association

Let’s say you’re a PR professional. Like I was, you’re interested in public affairs and crisis work. Most of your clients were controversial — to somebody. You looked at your job — or serving your client, if you worked in an agency like I did — as a craft, a profession. You do your job with integrity, you play the role of honest broker between your client (boss) and the media, you implement various tactics to help make sure your target audience hears an accurate version of your client/boss’ position and, hopefully, the audience is persuaded by it. You do your job well, you move on to bigger and better things.

Not so fast.

There is a trend afoot of judging PR people by all their past clients/bosses and what they did for them. Here’s an example, from the hugely popular blog Boing Boing:

DNC appoints RIAA shill to run Public Affairs for convention

Today, Jenni Engebretsen was named “Deputy CEO for Public Affairs,” for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver — but she is better known as the Director of Communications for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA is the most hated “company” in America, according to a recent poll on the Consumerist. The RIAA’s campaign of suing thousands of American music lovers has been the single biggest PR disaster in recent industrial history — which is why Engebretsen’s employer beat out Halliburton, Blackwater and Wal-Mart for the coveted “Worst Company” slot.

Engebretsen’s PR approach is centered around stonewalling and avoiding difficult press calls. She contacted me in 2005 to deny that the RIAA had sent a takedown notice to a website called RPGFilms.net, and promised to answer my followup questions in a day or two. After four months of emailing and calling her, I finally got through to her (by calling her from a different phone, so she couldn’t see who was phoning).

She said that the RIAA had no comment.

The liberal blogosophere is united on many fronts — not just disliking US foreign policy. We also hate the RIAA — for suing our friends, for lobbying for laws that suspend due process rights of the accused (the RIAA’s favorite law, the DMCA, was used by Diebold to suppress information about failures in its voting machines), and for demanding the right to “pretext” (commit wire fraud) in order to catch “pirates.”

Worse still, the RIAA are part of the initiative to corrupt net neutrality, imposing centralized controls on the transmission of information across the network.

It has been Engebretsen’s job to sell these initiatives to the American public. She’s failed to sell this to the American public. Not only does she take a paycheck for selling gangsters to the public — she’s not very good at it!

The DNC can do better. This represents a potential shear with the left-wing blogosphere. I hate what the GOP has done to this country, but the RIAA isn’t much better.

Funding for the Democratic National Convention comes from a different pool than general DNC operations. Here’s a list of the largest donors to the DNC for the past two election cycles. If you know these people, you can contact them and urge them not to contribute to the DNCC.

You can also contact the DNC directly, using the information on its website.

And it goes on from there. Obviously, the intent here is for the blogger and his supporters to put pressure on a friendly entity, the Democratic National Committee, to fire the former flack for an unfriendly entity, the RIAA.

I don’t know Engebretsen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if helping the recording industry justify its policies was not her passion or her calling. It was her job. I don’t know whether she was “good at it,” which the blogger Cory Doctorow questions. What was her objective? Maybe Engebretsen told the RIAA “no matter what I do, they’ll hate you,” thus lowering expectations. The RIAA is still in business, and no one has stopped them from suing music fans.  Maybe that’s all she was supposed to accomplish — to prevent adverse regulation. 

I think PR people who stonewall the media are misguided, but there are a lot of prominent PR people who do it and get away with it.  So that’s just a matter of taste, style, or strategic thinking.

The question is, should Jenni Engebretsen be tarred for the rest of her career for the work she did at the RIAA?  Is it fair to demand she be fired?  Is it fair to call for a boycott from contributing to the DNC if they don’t?

The answer is: People will do whatever they want to do.  Cory Doctorow and his blog are a major force now.   They can hang a scarlet letter on Engebretsen and any other PR person who works for an entity they don’t like.  If it sticks, it sticks.  But I bet Engebretsen and the thousands of PR people like her weren’t expecting anything like this to happen.  Maybe Engebretsen wouldn’t have taken the RIAA job if she’d known their perceived misdeeds would follow her around like this.

Or maybe this is another sign of the end of the PR industry as we know it.  PR people can’t be “hidden persuaders” anymore. Transparency kills them like sunlight kills vampires. In a polarized political world, PR people are in the free-fire zone, getting strafed by all sides, for what they do, what they did, and what they might do in the future.

For companies, it could become a huge disincentive to engage hired guns who made their names elsewhere.  After Doctorow’s post, all the RIAA baggage has landed on the DNC’s doorstep, and will go away only if Engebretsen goes with it.  How long will she be radioactive like this?  Is she now faced with only one PR career path — back to the RIAA?

This story has a medieval quality to it.  It’s worth watching. If Engebretsen in fact loses her new job, I predict the consequences for the PR industry, and for especially the fieldworkers like Engebretsen, will be immense.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street: Lining Up to Run America

Joel Kotkin sees a new power elite and a new political paradigm emerging from behind the ruins of George W. Bush’s failed administration.   The whole essay is worth reading. Here’s a taste:

How much things have changed in the past few decades! Hollywood once split its loyalties carefully among the parties; its only president came from its right. Now, as much as 80 percent of its largesse flows to the Democrats. The schism between Obama supporter David Geffen and those hanging tough with Clinton is important, not only because of how it reflects Hollywood’s endemic pettiness, but because much of the party, instead of regarding these wealthy prima donnas as deluded minstrels, now treats them as enlightened policy gurus.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans like former Congressman Ed Zschau. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st Century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, whose power extends deeply into both Hollywood and Silicon Valley and which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating along with the implosion of the Republicans.

(snip)

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of George W. Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Donors from this group of businesses propelled the careers of such substantial figures as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, and California’s Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arguably, their final triumph, helped by the demographic shift to the South and West, lay with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 congressional takeover.

Back in the late 1970s, founding fathers of the Sun Belt power grab, such as oilman Henry Salvatori and Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, shared with me their conviction that the old Eastern establishment lacked the power and conviction to lead the country. They felt America needed to be guided by more vital, more clear-headed leaders. Economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as well as the perception of America’s weakness both against the Soviet Union and terrorist states such as Iran, lent credibility to these beliefs among a large part of the public.

Like most successful elites, these leaders possessed a relatively coherent agenda. It centered on gaining a free hand over the nation’s natural resources, a low-tax economic policy and support for a strong national defense. The divisive moral agenda, particularly helpful in wooing working-class and Southern voters, was grafted on later but was never widely embraced by the right’s corporate funders.

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

(snip)

Once they recover from their post-Bush euphoria, however, traditional liberals should realize that the ongoing power shift does not necessarily signify the rise of a populist agenda. The wealthiest fifth of Americans are now equally likely to be Democrats or Republicans, a shocking shift from the nearly 70 percent Republican cast of this same quintile just two decades ago. The “party of the people” increasingly now must appeal as much to the affluent as the working-class voter.

I’ve been struggling for a “big picture” that explains the changes in politics in the past couple of years that goes beyond the tactical novelties like the netroots and YouTube.  Kotkin’s is pretty coherent. 

A possible flaw, however, is that his analysis completely omits 9/11, the jihad against the West, the “war on terror.”  Or, is he implying that 9/11 is no longer pertinent, the war on terror is quiescent, and that whole policy arena doesn’t cut politically anymore?  That would come as a huge, rude surprise to the blogospheric right, who think the war on terror is the only issue.  But maybe that’s the case.

Do Macs Make You Cranky?

Then you will love this post from the Guardian’s Comment is Free page.  Apparently those Bill-Gates-but-with-a-pot-belly vs. Jimmy-Fallon-except-smart ads migrated to the UK last month, with different actors; David Mitchell and Robert Webb, respectively.  They are a comedy duo of some repute over there. 

The ads backfired on Charles Brooker, and then some.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

(snip)

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with “work stuff” (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at “fun stuff”. How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at “fun stuff”, my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal “adventure” in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-’em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac’s relationship with “fun”.

Yeah, that Mac mouse button has been a barrier to my switching for a long while.  I love to right-click.   And count me as one who would be more likely to spend $1200 on something made by the glasses-wearing nerd, than $2000 on something put together by the hipster, who was probably out all night nightclubbing and still hadn’t come down from that hit of Ecstasy when he put the machine in the box for shipping.

(Thanks, Assymetrical Information.)

The LA Times Goes Tut-Tut-Tut*

Oh, give me a break, Christopher Hawthorne!

What would a wireless Los Angeles look like?

In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.

A more likely effect, frankly, is a noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens. And given the sort of Angelenos who are most obsessed with being always connected, wireless access might fall far short of creating a new kind of social interaction or a revamped notion of communal space in the city. Ultimately, it might do little more than let a thousand PowerPoint presentations bloom in the open air.

The only thing worse than a religious scold is a secular one.

I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop right now, a Starbucks in Rolling Hills Estates.  I’ve visited every Starbucks in the South Bay and San Pedro, and quite a few in LA, including one in Little Tokyo where I waited for the jury, but this one is the most convenient, the biggest and equipped with the most electrical outlets.   Lately I’ve been working at home more, but this environment is almost as cozy.  I talk to people all the time  — brief conversations to be sure, but occasionally more.  I also run into people here, including friends and relatives of my wife and son.  I’ve arranged to meet people — “I’ll be working, you’ll see me, come whenever” — including my mother.

At any given point in the day, I might be the only wi-fi guy, or one of a dozen.  When I used to park here for entire days, I’d note cycles of activity:  Young Moms with their pramfuls of baby in the mornings, ladies taking a break from shopping at mid-day, realtors searching the listings, salespeople doing deals, day-traders, high school kids after 2 (they seem to prefer the noisy frozen blended drinks — so no phone calls then) madly flirting and flopping their skinny bodies on the cushiony seats six to a chair, and the friendly baristas taking their cigarette breaks at the outdoor tables.  I’ve overheard conversations in Spanish, Mandarin, various Arabic dialects, Japanese, Farsi and our native tongue down here, surfer-ese, which of late has taken on some hip-hop overtones. 

I love the idea that I could go almost anywhere in LA, open my laptop and rejoin the blogosphere, and/or do my work.  It completely opens up the day.  How many social and cultural engagements do we avoid because we think we’ll be on the road for too much of the day, out of touch from work?  In wi-fi LA, your life becomes more flexible.  If you know you could, say go to LACMA for an hour at lunch, then stop off somewhere nearby to see if you’ve missed any e-mails from your clients rather than waiting an additional hour to get through the traffic, you’re more likely to go to LACMA, no?  So what if we are “packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens….”  At least we’re out and about. The possibility of connection is immeasurably increased.

I don’t get what Mr. Hawthorne thinks we did before wi-fi.  Certainly, the length of the average stay at wi-fi enabled cafes was a lot shorter; and we probably did a lot more drive-through.  Very few of us have the social skills required to have a personal adventure in a coffee shop every day, or the time, unless we have another reason for being there — our work.   You will see much more use of public spaces — isn’t that a good thing? 

No, nothing’s good enough for the reflexive “if they’re enjoying it, there must be something wrong with it” mindset.  To ensure we all feel good and chastened, Hawthorne throws Mayor Villaraigosa’s ”digital divide” rhetoric in his face.

But free wireless service doesn’t mean a whole lot if you can’t afford a laptop. And the structure of the plans that have been taking shape in other cities suggests that ours may not match the populism of the press-conference talking points. The service in Houston may cost as much as $21.95 per month (with possible discounts for low-income residents). San Francisco may offer parallel services, a subscription plan from EarthLink and a slower, free alternative from Google loaded with targeted advertising.

That sounds quite a bit like the digital equivalent of a highway system split between private toll roads and sluggish public freeways. And it raises the question of how precisely to measure civic progress as nearly every corner of city life undergoes commercialization. If you put a drinking fountain on every corner but allow a private company to charge for each sip, even if it’s only a few pennies, can you really make a case that you’re improving access to clean water?

Actually, I think you can easily make that case.

In that sense, what rings most hollow is the claim from the mayor and his allies that universal wireless is designed primarily to help the city’s electronic have-nots. If that’s the goal, why not take full advantage of the fact that L.A. owns its utility poles, turn this into a wholly public project and make access universal and free? The answer, of course, is that cities feel they can’t manage even a moderately ambitious initiative these days without the capital and marketing muscle the private sector can provide.

Strike the words “these days” from his last sentence, and take away the negative connotation from what is, in fact, a rational awareness of government’s limits.  Even the most liberal mayors and governors realized about 20 years ago that the public sector is unable to compete with the private sector, especially when the private market for a good or service is already well-established.  Where does Hawthorne think the cliche “reinventing the wheel” came from? If the point of Villaraigosa’s wi-fi plan is to deliver wi-fi to as many people as inexpensively as possible, of course the city should tap the wi-fi industry!  It shows great common sense! Does that mean the contractor gets to make some money?  Yes!  Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

What moral nannies like Hawthorne should focus on is the city’s procurement process. Who is going to get these contracts and by what process?  How can we avoid the “two shades of blue lights on the Vincent Thomas Bridge” effect?  (The result of a lobbyist-brokered compromise to allow two firms to get the lighting business, resulting in the lights on the span being a slightly different shade of blue than the lights on the towers.)  Granted, Hawthorne might not have the opportunity to opine on the Decline of the West, but it’s the details of this project – the marriage of the public and private sector — where you need to be focused.  

*Edited slightly, 3/12/07

Vote for Mono

Besides their nominations for 2007 Grammy awards, what do Mary J. Blige, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, the Flaming Lips, the San Francisco Symphony and Lynn Marie and the Boxhounds have in common? 

Answer:  Without a doubt, all their Grammy-nominated recordings were made in stereo — stereophonic sound, which, according to Wikipedia, 

is the reproduction of sound, using two or more independent audio channels, through a symmetrical configuration of loudspeakers, in such a way as to create a pleasant and natural impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing. 

Note the loaded language in this definition:  Stereo is superior — “pleasant,” and “natural.”  Anything else is presumably unpleasant and unnatural.

To achieve this “natural” effect,

Stereophonic sound attempts to create an illusion of location for various instruments within the original recording. The recording engineer’s goal is usually to create a stereo “image” with localization information. When a stereophonic recording is heard through loudspeaker systems rather than headphones, each ear of course hears sound from both speakers. The audio engineer may and often does use more than two microphones, sometimes many more, and may mix them down to two tracks in ways that exaggerate the separation of the instruments to compensate for the mixture that occurs when listening via speakers.

To prove their skills in this area, recording engineers used to do tricks, like having a guitar solo start in the left speaker than swing over to the right and back again.  Who doesn’t love that?   Dig the condescension in this anecdote from an audiophile blog entry about Bob Dylan:

Dylan, it seems, has never really gotten over the juke box age. When he recorded a live album with the Grateful Dead in the late 1980s, members of the band were astonished that he made the final track selection on the basis of a playback of the material not on state-of-the-art studio quality speakers but on a 30 dollar cassette player. Their conclusion was that he stills listens to music with the ears of the teenage boy who discovered the glory of rock’n'roll in mono in the L&B Café back in Hibbing, Minnesota in the mid-1950s.

Ah, mono — monaural sound.  What does Wikipedia say about that?  Not much:

Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or, in the case of headphones or multiple loudspeakers, they are fed from a common signal path, and in the case of multiple microphones, mixed into a single signal path at some stage.

Monaural sound has been replaced by stereo sound in most entertainment applications.

Horrors!  How did we ever live that way?  Well, most of us didn’t.  The first stereo records started coming out in 1958 (the technology was already 20 years old by then, but was not commercially available).  For about a decade after that, the two modes were incompatible; your record changer could play stereo or mono, not both.  To those of us who grew up during the 60s, stereo vs. mono was like color vs. black-and-white TV.  Stereo was clearly better, just as color was clearly better.  If you were stuck with a black-and-white TV and a mono hi-fi, you were missing out.  It was like being partly blind and deaf.

However, Bob Dylan isn’t the only music legend who in the past 50 years avoided jumping onto the stereo bandwagon.  The Beatles issued mono versions of all their records until Sgt. Pepper, and John Lennon at least believed the mono mixes were superior.  Phil Spector’s 1991 remastering of his run of great hits like ” Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” was titled “Back to Mono,” in honor of the recording format that allowed him to build his amazing Wall of Sound. 

I can’t find the exact quote, but Spector once said he didn’t like stereo because a stereo recording gave too much power to the listener.  In mono, the particular mix of sounds was up to him.  By sticking to mono, he wasn’t looking backward.  Spector was probably the greatest sonic innovator in pop music.  Accounts of his recording techniques — his unusual orchestrations, his use of echo, his compelling percussion sounds, the way he fed sounds from a recording studio full of musicians into an empty one for another set of microphones to pick up – are almost as astonishing as the results.

Brian Wilson was another musical genius who preferred mono.  One might retort that Wilson’s whole world is in mono – the Beach Boys resident genius is deaf in one ear.  My response would be that, at least in his case, his one functioning ear could find more beautiful sounds in a recording studio than almost anyone else could find with two.  Stereo and mono mixes exist of his masterpiece, ”Pet Sounds,” and if you ask me, the astoninshing blend of instruments is not helped by stereo.    

For years, I’ve read that the Zombies’ “Odessey and Oracle” is a lost 60’s classic, a British heir to “Pet Sounds,” so I finally picked it up the other day.  It’s pretty great, and I agree it’s amazing that of the album’s 12 tasty songs, only the hit “Time of the Season” is familiar.  The version I got has both stereo and mono mixes, and to my ears, even listening on earphones, the mono mixes sound better. 

Classical and jazz remasters from the 1940s and 50s recover the pristine origins of these old recordings, but present them in mono, because monaural masters are what they have to work with.  If you want to hear Charlie Parker or Artur Rubenstein, or the original cast recordings of shows like Oklahoma! or Kiss Me Kate, you have to settle for mono, but if that’s the music you want to hear, you won’t feel at all deprived. 

Frank Sinatra worked with the greatest pop orchestral arrangers in the world through the 1950s when he was on the Capitol label, and produced some of pop’s best recordings.  He worked with many of the same arrangers in the 1960s, and I think most Sinatra fans would agree, the results were inferior.  The “natural” separation of instruments that stereo allows sometimes calls more attention to the recording techniques and distracts from the music.   

To be sure, there are beautiful stereo recordings out there.  I’m not advocating that recording artists all reverse course.  But just as some movie-watchers apparently avoid great movies solely because they are in black and white, I hope music fans aren’t avoiding older recordings strictly because they’re in mono.  Mono is not inferior to stereo.  It’s not “unpleasant” or “unnatural” — it’s just different.  And it must mean something that so many of music’s legends seemed to prefer mono. There’s nothing stopping today’s studio whizzes from trying it again.

A Generation of Wired Shadow-Boxers; or “Wii are the World”*

I raised a son and a step-son during the age of the video game console. I saw video-games become the contemporary symbol for all of what’s wrong with today’s youth, and joined in the worrying. One of the raps against electronic games was players were “sedentary,” just sitting on the sofa for hours pushing buttons rather than enjoying the fresh air outside. (“Fresh air,” a phrase only used by parents.)

Apparently, Nintendo listened to us. (I know I’m late to covering the Wii, but under the rules of blogging, if it’s new to me, it’s news.) Anyway, according to a couple of stories I saw today in the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo designed the Wii’s controller so that players’ body movements control the game, not just their button selections. You have to play it standing up.

And now, parents have a new worry: Their kids might hurt themselves.

But as players spend more time with the Wii, some are noticing that hours waving the game’s controller around can add up to fairly intense exertion — resulting in aches and pains common in more familiar forms of exercise. They’re reporting aching backs, sore shoulders — even something some have dubbed “Wii elbow.”

More fear:

Another hazard: collisions. All those flailing arms can sometimes inadvertently smack into lamps, furniture and even competing players. IGN.com, a popular site that reviews videogames, said one player testing the Wii lost her grip and sent the controller flying into a wall. Blaine Stuart of Rochester, N.Y., mistakenly whacked his fiancée, Shelly Haefele, while playing tennis and also accidentally hit his dog while bowling.

Even the physically fit are challenged by this thing:

Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn’t helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. “I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe — I had to go take a shower,” he says. And the next morning? “I had trouble putting my shirt on,” says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

Nintendo has several videos on Youtube that illustrate what players must do. Here’s one of them:

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think these kids were suffering from advanced case of Tourette’s syndrome. But this is obviously a coming thing. The Wii is outselling the Sony Playstation 3 so far.

And I want one.

*Update: I just came across a fascinating blog post by Michael Zack Urlocker, guest-blogging on his “brother” Michael’s site. Michael is a “disruption consultant,” which sounds like a growth industry to me. (Zack “is a pseudonym for a Silicon Valley software executive rapidly approaching his mid-life crisis.” He is also a busy blogger.) Zack analyzes Nintendo’s business strategy brilliantly.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a tidbit.

The Nintendo Wii is the runt of the litter when it comes to hardware specifications. It doesn’t have the HD graphics, surround sound or DVD drives of its more expensive competitors. But it’s outfoxed both Microsoft and Sony by packing more fun for a fraction of the price. Nintendo Wii sells for $250 compared to $500 for the Sony Playstation and around $400 for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Nintendo also includes throws in a set of 5 simple but addictive games dubbed Wii Sports with every console, making the Wii a much better value and a more complete offering out of the box. More importantly, Nintendo has parlayed their lower cost hardware into two further competitive advantages: games are cheaper to develop and they make money on every console sold. While it sounds like basic common sense, for the gaming industry this goes against all of the conventional rules.

It’s always instructive to watch a successful business innovation unfold before your eyes. “Zack” is a good guide to this one.

**Another Update.  I came across a blog that specializes in California insurance law and, after reading the same WSJ story I read, the writer came to this unsurprising conclusion about what the flailing arms and flying controllers might lead to:  

Sony has included warnings against these and other perils in the product manual [PDF], but little details like that never need to reach the jury if you pick the right venue and play your cards right.  So to our friends of the plaintiff’s bar we say: Fire up the word processors!  Nintendo’s put a shiny new cause of action under your tree! 

Nothing Better than Griffith Observatory

Is there any public space in Los Angeles more wonderful than Griffith Observatory?

It is an architectural gem set against a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of Los Angeles. It is a celebration of a branch of science, astronomy, to which Southern California can stake a proud claim. In a few weeks, it will reopen after a five-year renovation project, but because our friends Todd & Robin Mason have gained the affection of both the scientific and science-history communities in this area, they were invited to a preview opening Sunday morning — and let my wife and me tag along.

The Masons are finalizing a documentary, “Journey to Palomar,” the story of George Ellery Hale’s creation of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Telescopes that profoundly expanded humankind’s understanding of the universe, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s first observations of  the universe’s expansion, which led to the development of the Big Bang theory that is now almost universally accepted. The Mason’s documentary will be one of the films you can see at the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, a new theater that the “Star Trek” actor and his wife made possible.

As will the public after November 3, we met a shuttle bus on the Orange Street side of Hollywood and Highland and presented our tickets there. The Observatory will accept visitors via a registration system, but as before the renovation, admission will be free. Waiting for the bus gave us a minute to check out the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater:

We arrived to hear a talk from a volunteer who was clearly excited and proud of what had been done to bring the observatory back — and asked us not to take pictures of the few still-uncompleted details. Rather than going into the front door, which is what past visitors are familiar with, we were guided down a flight of stairs on the observatory’s west side, which leads to a new exhibit area — the Gunther Depths of Space, which covers a lot of information — our solar system and what we know about each of the planets; the stars, galaxies and nebulae; and “The Big Picture,” a 152 x 20 foot image of the “cosmic wilderness” — the Virgo cluster of stars and galaxies.

Here is what the Gunther room looks like:

And here is a detail from “The Big Picture,” which in its entirety shows you a million stars. Each lighted object on this image represents not a star, but an entire galaxy:

Upstairs, you’ll find some of the exhibits you recall, such as Foucault’s Pendulum, and the arresting murals in the rotunda, all nicely restored and probably augmented. But for me, when I got to this floor, I was less focused on the scientific information, and more on the sheer artistry of the building, indoors and out:

You probably remember this monument that depicts Gallileo and Copernicus and other early explorers of the heavens:

…and the walkways around the domes, up on the roof, opening up fantastic views of the city…

…as well as beautiful little architectural details like this:

I am really grateful we got to see this. It felt like a pilgrimage to the L.A. of old, the city and region with a spirit of adventure and discovery–a better place and a better time than L.A. now. But Griffith Observatory is here now, so the present-day is ennobled by it.

(Photo credits: From the top, #1 and #9 are by Todd Mason; #2-8 and #10 are by yours truly. And I hope the volunteers at Griffith Observatory will note that everything shown here is ready for public consumption!)

Wind Energy at Sea

A German company, SkySails, has developed an intriguing application for wind energy: Powering ships at sea; from yachts to, eventually, the giant freighters that fill our Wal-Marts and Home Depots with stuff to buy, and our air with contaminants and greenhouse gases, in particular sulfur dioxide.

Beluga Shipping of Bremen announced it would be the first shipping company to use SkySails’ huge mechanized kites. By next year SkySails will have installed a 1,500-square foot nylon kite on a 12,000-ton Beluga vessel, which will run routes between Europe and the Americas.

A kite? Think about what happens when you fly a kite. Even though you don’t want the kite to pull you, its force suggests that maybe it could. Your wrist and hands make subtle adjustments to catch the most wind so you can keep your kite aloft and your line tight. By dipping or circling the kite, you can generate more force. Same thing happens with a SkySail, only the steering of the kite is done by an autopilot that constantly feeds wind information to a computer on board the ship.

This Popular Science article (which the SkySails site links to) discusses several wind energy ideas for shipping vessels, including polyurethane-coated sails attached to masts designed to mimic the bone structure of a bat’s wings, and blimp-like kites that would act like aerial tugboats. The pitch to the notably conservative and highly cost sensitive shipping industry: Reducing fuel costs, which are the largest single cost borne by freighters.

I don’t know if the International Maritime Organization is studying kites and sails for its members, but last week they did announce a review of its emission standards. Local officials in port cities like Los Angeles and Long Beach have despaired for years about their limited ability to control pollution from shipping as the traffic (and its importance to the economy) grows. Even the U.S. EPA has been pretty much helpless, they say, in controlling an amorphous industry whose ships will change flags at the drop of a hat.

But, according to the LA Times, the IMO’s new look at air pollution “is the result of pressure from European nations.” It certainly was my observation over the years that U.S. officials tended to shrug at the complexity of regulating the shipping industry, and that individual ports feared offending customers who might bolt to another port that wouldn’t hassle them.

The idea of having a kite help pull a freighter is a quantum leap beyond the discussion of marginal reductions of sulfur in fuel. But it would certainly make shipping cool for the first time in a long while.

P.S. Thanks, Todd, for the tip!

Global Temperatures, Political Temperaments

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson is getting slagged all over the blogosphere for saying this:

From 2003 to 2050, the world’s population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that’s too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world’s poor to their present poverty — and freeze everyone else’s living standards — we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).

The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent — and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do “renewables” (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.

Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.

…and for concluding this:

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it’s really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don’t solve the engineering problem, we’re helpless.

Among the many responses to Samuelson’s argument, there was this from Charlie Cray on Huffington Post:

If Global Warming teaches us anything, it is that as a public policy tool we need a new type of economic way of thinking. Otherwise economics will become increasingly irrelevant to the facts as they exist. Key to this is the economists’ blind devotion to growth: Just as growth at all costs was the culture of corporations like Enron, so in living systems it is the ideology of the cancer cell. In a world of limits, it is a destructive paradigm.

Therefore, pretending that global warming is merely an “engineering problem” is to ignore the failure of economics to address the systemic causes in the structure of the economy. I agree with Samuelson’s that we have to address global warming as an engineering problem, but it’s much more than that. The problem is unlikely to be solved merely by a series of drop-in technologies, like Thorium-powered nukes. That’s just a convenient excuse to dodge these dicier political questions about the structure of our economy and the significant consequences of its failure to account for the common good.

So I ask myself, of two possible solutions to global warming, which is more likely to actually occur? A solution to “an engineering problem?” Or addressing “these dicier political questions about the structure of our economy?” Cray goes on:

Global Warming is the great challenge to this generation of Americans, just as the challenge for the last one was the defeat of communism. Our ability to develop a renewed sense of collective security — a security that is almost fractal — i.e. replicable at the local and global levels — will require us to toss out the old ideas of unity around national purpose at the expense of local health and global citizenship — i.e. the enterprise of war.

This is a big challenge. One that we have yet to even define very well. And one that will require all of us — economists as well as everyone else — to be courageous enough to take strong action and stretch our imaginations much further than we have so far.

I would have to agree with Cray that “we” have yet to “define very well” what he’s proposing. The comparison with the “defeat of communism” suggests he’s looking for an overthrow of the current economic system. Here’s the difference: When communism was overthrown, there was another model ready to be plugged in — the economic philosophy of the victorious side in the Cold War, democratic capitalism. Looking ahead, if — in the name of preventing a global environmental catastrophe — we overthrow the “old ideas” about the necessity of economic growth without knowing how we’ll replace them, how can we be sure the next system will work any better at limiting CO2 emissions?

I don’t see why an intelligent person can’t embrace both Al Gore’s sense of mission to wake up Americans and the world to the dire potential consequences of global warming, and Robert Samuelson’s search for technological answers. Why must we take on the additional mega-challenge of developing an entirely new economic system, especially when no one can tell us what it will look like? This is a test that intellectual, political and economic elites have failed in the past, and there are lots of reasons to lack confidence in those who occupy elite positions now.

One of Cray’s commenters, “runninute,” hits the nail on the head. (He’s a better thinker than speller):

China and India are not part of Kyoto. That doesn’t mean they haven’t signed up yet (they have) it means that Kyoto places no restrictions on their emission of greenhouse gases. How can expect to reverse greenhouse effects if the two largest populated nations with fast-growing economies do not have to participate in reversing the effects of man? It is for this major oversight that the US , Russia, and Britain refused to sign the Kyoto treaty. If China and India had been covered, the US government pledged to follow the guidelines. Wouldn’t that be fair?

Should we ignore Kytoto and other nations (third world or otherwise) and take independent action while we lobby others to join us? Yes. And we are doing this. However, we have a large group of environmentalists that oppose US initiatives at every turn. They files lawsuits to halt construction of wind farms, solar farms, nuclearl power plants, geothermal power plants, hydro-electric power plants and tidal power generation. They halt construction of plants that produce materials for use in “alternative energy” (such as solar cell plants which can’t be built in the US because of environmental protection laws and so must be built overseas).

Where is Al Gore on alternative energy? He has opposed nuclear energy, but he hugs Kennedy who shut down wind farms off Nantucket. Al kisses up to the environmental groups who shut down wind farms in California and Nebraska. Al makes speeches to groups who closed hydro-electric power plants and who opposed new plants. So what alternative energy are we to use?

Don’t tell me fuel cells or electric cars (EV1). Those technologies require generation of electricity to make them operate (you need electricity to get hydrogen and you need electricity for your EV1). We have to construct power plants in order to use those “emmission-free” technologies. Problem is, the electrical generation plants that make the technologies possible burn fossil fuels and there is a net energy loss due to entropy and the law of thermodynamics (ask a physicist).

Can we conserve more? Yes. Can we use less? Yes. All of these require increased costs and less public choice. We can say “you can’t have an SUV and all cars must get 80 mpg and carry only 2 people”, but is that the decision we want to make? Do we want to restrict choice in that manner? We could all live in “honycomb” houses (large high-rises that recirculate energy and are build out of materials that are energy efficient) which would save energy. We could restrict floor space to 300 sq ft per person. But do we want to place such limits on ourselves and limit choice to that degree? We could turn out street lights and advertising after 10 PM and put curfews of 11 PM on people to conserve energy, but are we willing to restrict individual decision-making to that degree?

Bureaucrats at Kyoto came up with a politically unsustainable solution to global warming. Environmental groups take internally contradictory positions that both push and retard the growth of alternative energy. There is a romantic element to all political elites, right and left, who think the answer to everything can be found in the beauty of their philosophy. The flip side of that romanticism is that “compromise” becomes a dirty word.

The attraction of Robert Samuelson-style “engineering solutions” is they are ideology-neutral. Go ahead, Charlie Cray, work up a blueprint of a new economic system, and then we can put it up for a vote. But in the meantime, Al Gore and others say we can’t delay acting on global warming. Is your new economic system going to be ready first, or will a new technological/engineering fix?

My bet is on technology. That doesn’t make me the enemy of the planet.

Solar Power Meets Nanotechnology at Caltech

Cal-Tech and BP Solar will collaborate on a project to deploy nanotechnology to provide cheaper and more efficient solar energy. From a joint press release:

For an initial five-year period, researchers at Caltech and BP will explore a method of growing silicon by creating arrays of nanorods rather than by casting ingots and cutting wafers, which is the current conventional way of producing silicon for solar cells. Nanorods are small cylinders of silicon that can be 100 times smaller than a human hair and would be tightly packed in an array like bristles in a brush.

A solar cell made up of an array of nanorods will be able to efficiently absorb light along the length of the rods while also collecting the electricity generated by sunlight more efficiently than a conventional solar cell.

The Caltech solar nanorod program will be directed by Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, and Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and professor of applied physics and materials science. In addition, eight postdoctoral researchers and graduate students will work on the project.

“Nanotechnology can offer new and unique ways to make solar-cell materials that are cheaper yet could perform nearly as well as conventional materials,” says Lewis, an expert in surface chemistry and photochemistry.

Lewis’s group will investigate uses of nanotechnology to create designer solar-cell materials, from nanorods to nanowires, in order to change the conventional paradigm for solar-cell materials.

“Using nanorods as the active elements opens up very new approaches to design and low-cost fabrication of high-performance solar cells,” adds Atwater, an expert in electronic and optoelectronic materials and devices.

I’ve been joking with friends lately that the solutions to global warming are going to come from nanotechnology. But it looks like I might’ve been right!

Just on an intuitive level, look at it this way. All energy systems operate inefficiently to some degree. Some of that inefficiency translates into pollution. Inefficiency also stands in the way of conservation.

Nanotechnology, in particular molecular manufacturing, has the potential to produce products at a minuscule fraction of the energy required to make those products today. (Look at this video for a sense of what the molecular manufacturing gurus think is coming in the next 20 years or so.) Or, assuming we continue to rely on fossil fuels, nanotechnology could be used to filter out greenhouse gases at power plants, trapping them for disposal. It can also be used to greatly reduce the inefficiency of transferring energy from its natural source into its end use — by changing, say, the molecular structure of what we use to transmit energy.

Some potential exists, perhaps, for nanotechnology to be applied directly to reducing the existing, dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Many scientists believe we are already “past the point of no return” to avoid the dramatic effects of global warming — that in fact we are already seeing them.

If so, it won’t be enough to cut future emissions, even at dramatic levels, although it is no less vital that we do so. The logical consequences of such a view is that we need to focus more attention on getting carbon dioxide that is in the air now, stripped out of the air. Nanotechnology would surely play a role in this admittedly outlandish idea, because of the large amounts of energy required. But wouldn’t it be just too elegant if the Caltech/BP research project resulted in an applicable solar solution to the energy needs of an air-stripping project?

I don’t want to sound like P.T. Barnum or Jimmy Swaggert about all this. Nanotechnology sounds many alarm bells, even among its advocates. For all its potential to shift our economy away from its reliance on high-energy manufacturing, this magic genie poses a host of other environmental, economic and global security threats. But it often surprises me how low on the news media’s radar screen the march of nanotechnology appears.

For example, the story at the start of this post about Caltech, a major local university, and BP, the successor-by-acquisition to LA’s own Arco? Big news here, here, here, and here. But in Caltech’s hometown media? This story in the LA Times, buried on the bottom of page 2 of the Business section. Nothing in the Daily News. Nothing in the Pasadena Star News.  Nothing in the San Diego Union Tribune, in the city where the announcement was made.  From what I can tell, both Caltech and BP Solar put out a news release on this yesterday, and paid PR Newswire to distribute it. The editors saw it and said “ehh.”

But there was lots and lots of room for this. Nothing like Hooters, puppies and an outbreak of prudish hypocrisy to distract our media from what we used to call news. Maybe Caltech should talk to Hooters about setting up a foundation for global warming research.

(I’ll run a pilot program right here. I’ll tag this post “Hooters” (along with the more appropriate tags) and see how many extra hits I get.)

Camera Obscurer

How much of the motion picture industry's $3 billion piracy problem is due to audience members capturing movies on their digital cameras for subsequent reproduction and distribution? If it's a lot, then this will be good news for the movie studios: Scientists apparently have found a way to neutralize digital still and video cameras in confined spaces.

According to this post on Science Blog:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have completed a prototype device that can block digital-camera function in a given area. Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras.

The prototype device, produced by a team in the Interactive and Intelligent Computing division of the Georgia Tech College of Computing (COC), uses off-the-shelf equipment – camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer — to scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras.

Gregory Abowd, an associate professor leading the project, says the new camera-neutralizing technology shows commercial promise in two principal fields – protecting limited areas against clandestine photography or stopping video copying in larger areas such as theaters.

"We're at a point right now where the prototype we have developed could lead to products for markets that have a small, critical area to protect," Abowd said. "Then we're also looking to do additional research that could increase the protected area for one of our more interesting clients, the motion picture industry."

Abowd said the small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings — for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken.

(snip)

(M)ovie theaters are likely to be a good setting for camera-blocking technology, said Jay Summet, a research assistant who is also working on the prototype. A camera's image sensor — called a CCD — is retroreflective, which means it sends light back directly to its origin rather than scattering it. Retroreflections would probably make it relatively easy to detect and identify video cameras in a darkened theater.

The current prototype uses visible light and two cameras to find CCDs, but a future commercial system might use invisible infrared lasers and photo-detecting transistors to scan for contraband cameras. Once such a system found a suspicious spot, it would feed information on the reflection's properties to a computer for a determination.

"The biggest problem is making sure we don't get false positives from, say, a large shiny earring," said Summet. "We need to make our system work well enough so that it can find a dot, then test to see if it's reflective, then see if it's retroreflective, and then test to see if it's the right shape."

Once a scanning laser and photodetector located a video camera, the system would flash a thin beam of visible white light directly at the CCD. This beam – possibly a laser in a commercial version – would overwhelm the target camera with light, rendering recorded video unusable.

If your local movie theater starts banning patrons with large shiny earrings, that might be a dead giveaway that this technology is in use.

Plastic Fantastic Newspapers

Here it is, your newspaper of the future. It's a hybrid, halfway between an iPod mp3 music player and a laptop, and its developers promise you'll be able to fold it and put it in your pocket.

From a Reuters story on Publish:

(As) early as this year, the future may finally arrive. Some of the world's top newspaper publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the Web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.

Flexible versions of these readers may be available as early as 2007.

The handheld readers couldn't come a moment too soon for the newspaper industry, which has struggled to maintain its readership and advertising from online rivals.

Publishers Hearst Corp. in the U.S., Pearson Plc.'s Les Echos in Paris and Belgian financial paper De Tijd are planning a large-scale trials of the readers this year.

(snip)

Sony and iRex's new devices employ screen technology by E Ink, which originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Investors include Hearst, Philips, McClatchy Co., Motorola Inc. and Intel Corp.

The company produces energy-efficient ink sheets that contain tiny capsules showing either black or white depending on the electric current running through it.

Some of the latest devices apply E Ink's sheets to glass transistor boards, or back planes, which are rigid. But by 2007, companies such as U.K.-based Plastic Logic Ltd will manufacture screens on flexible plastic sheets, analysts say.

Separately, Xerox Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing methods to produce flexible back planes cheaply. Xerox, in particular, has created a working prototype of system that lets manufacturers create flexible transistor boards much like one would print a regular paper document.

Production costs are expected to be low enough soon for publishers to consider giving away such devices for free with an annual subscription. Data on subscribers could also help publishers better tailor ads.

This new newspaper fills a niche I'm not sure exists. It seems like many news consumers have already decided they are willing to give up the portability of the print edition in exchange for all the advantages of online news surfing. Will the new devices let you aggregate your own content choices from multiple sources, or would you be stuck with one publication?

I understand the need to get subscribers to commit to a full year's subscription. The devices are $300 each. But that seems like a barrier.

Frankly, I like the way things are now. The newspaper used to slow me down in the morning. It would come to my house, and I'd race through it over coffee before getting ready for work. Now, by the time the paper arrives at my door, I've already read much of it online the previous night, and I know I can catch up with the rest of it whenever I want, on my laptop or a desktop. I only continue letting the LA Times pile up in a corner of my apartment because my wife likes to save the Food and Home sections.

The new device sounds cool, technologically. Maybe if I took a train to work…

But what do I know? When the iPod mp3 player first came on the scene, I didn't see the point. You can only listen to one song at a time, so I wondered why was it so critical to be able to carry 1,500, or 3,000 or 10,000 songs with you? Well, when I walked our dog this morning, I listened to a random mix that bounced from Stan Getz to Bruce Springsteen to Cat Power to Sammy Davis, Jr. to the Decembrists. I might love this new thing, too.

Scoble Ankles

Robert Scoble's decision to leave Microsoft for a podcasting start-up generates a lot of comment today in the blogosphere. Scoble, an intelligent guy and a fine writer who conveys a winning personality in his blog Scobleizer, was characterized as the guy who "put a human face" on Microsoft. His departure from Microsoft was amicable, but from the media reaction, one would think this is a grievous loss for the software behemoth. From FT.com:

The internet was buzzing on Monday as bloggers digested news that Robert Scoble, the technical evangelist” whose Scobleizer weblog made him one of the foremost ambassadors for the world’s biggest software group, is to leave the company to join a Silicon Valley start-up.

The move, reported at the weekend, raises fresh questions about the importance of high-profile bloggers to companies that encourage employees to talk about work in their online journals.

(snip)

The move illustrates the challenge facing companies as they try to get to grips with a world in which the reputation of individual bloggers can come to be closely associated with – or have a big impact on – the reputation of a company’s own brand.

This is pretty silly. Scoble was an alternative source of information about Microsoft, and it spoke well of the company that it didn't fire him for filing posts that had a candid tone to them. But he was not Microsoft's "human" face. That honor still belongs to founder Bill Gates, one of the most recognized humans on the planet, and Steve Ballmer, the current CEO whose utterings are carefully parsed in the business and technology press.

Robert Scoble's left pinky was warmer, fuzzier and more "human" than Gates and Ballmer combined, but that doesn't change their relative impact on Microsoft. If Scoble's job was to take the focus off these two gentlemen, he failed. But I don't think that was the idea.

I think Scoble was driven to blog because he genuinely loved Microsoft and the people who worked there, and had a knack for articulating his passion about his company–and about his life. When I think about Scobleizer, I think about his incredibly honest posts about his mother, who died recently, and how the experience affected his view of his family and his life. I enjoyed his dispatches from the tech-conference circuit. They were human and humorous.

Frankly, I tended to discount whatever Scoble said about Microsoft, for two reasons. He was a marketing guy. You can't sell a product you don't believe in, and part of the psychology of salespersons is the ability to auto-generate the kind of belief needed to sell. Secondly, I'm not obsessed with Microsoft. I know Vista's coming, for example. But I won't be the first to try it. I realize I live in Microsoft's world, but I don't think about it much.

I want to see more businesses–big, small, and not-for-profit–hosting blogs. But over-reliance on one individual — and a lower-level employee at that — doesn't make much sense as a strategy.

To me, one point of a company blog is to dramatize the firm's expertise; to take its potential customers on an intellectual journey that parallels the company's growth, evolution, and new offerings. Another point is to demonstrate the commitment to transparent decision-making that companies' stakeholders increasingly demand — as Elizabeth Albrycht discussed in this required-reading post, and this follow-up. (I wrote about her ideas here.)

Scoble did some of the first, although it was mostly his intellectual journey. He wasn't in a position to do the second, because he wasn't a decision-maker.

The kind of blog I would envision as helpful to a company would be highly customized. There is no off-the-shelf strategy, and never will be, for this kind of communication. It must be flexible — a place where conversation about a new product could comfortably share space with responses to a crisis, or outlines of a decision-making process underway in real time.

I would look at a company blog as a cyberspace auditorium — a place targeted readers will want to go to hear from, and interact with, interesting people with relevant information to offer, whether they were executives, academics, customers or employees. Sometimes it might be an arena, where adversaries debate. The blog would become an essential experience for anyone who envisioned themselves as a potential customer, or who had any significant relationship with the company in question.

Above all, a company blog has to give its audience a reason to come back frequently — a hook. Robert Scoble's hook was: "How honest is he really going to be?" After awhile, the hook became Scoble himself — a guy we liked and rooted for. But as he said himself many times, he was just one person at Microsoft. For businesses, non-profits, public-sector agencies and others, the trick will be to create your own blog format, one that allows us to read and hear the many voices that make up your universe — and help us figure out how you fit into our lives.

Surf’s Up

If you ponder the mysteries of the universe, check out morning’s LA Times story about LIGO – the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Caltech operates in Hanford, Washington and an identical twin managed by MIT in Livingston, Louisiana — which scientists hope will allow them to demonstrate the truth of Einstein’s theory that “large bodies moving through space would give off waves of gravity, traveling at light speed, that would shrink and expand space-time itself.”

After Einstein, our conception of the universe changed. It is not empty space, it is a fabric. Space, and everything occupied by space, can be bent and stretched by waves of gravity, which Times’ author John Johnson Jr. likens to the ripples from a spoon stirring milk, or the indentation a bowling ball would make on a trampoline.

Today, such waves exist only in theory, the product of cosmic events like supernovas or pairs of neutron stars whipping through each others’ orbit and then smashing into each other.

According to theory, if our planet came close to the source of a gravitational wave, Earth would stretch to twice its normal size, then shrink in half before returning to its original shape — a scenario worthy of a Road Runner cartoon. Have no fear, however. The waves that could reach Earth are very weak, too weak to be measured — until last November when LIGO “reached a level of sensitivity at which (Caltech physicist Kip S. Thorne) and other experts believe they might detect waves.”

Here’s how Johnson describes what’s involved for LIGO to measure gravitational waves:

Down a twisting side road, LIGO appears out of the Russian cheatgrass and mustard plants, a bulky apparition with two tubes extending at right angles into the desert.

The 2.4-mile-long tentacles are the heart of LIGO. They are at right angles so that incoming gravity waves will shrink one arm while lengthening the other. An identical facility sits in a forest in southern Louisiana, so that the readings made at one observatory can be cross-checked almost 2,000 miles away.

(snip)

Inside the arms is a laser interferometer, which works by splitting a laser beam and sending one of the two resulting beams down each arm. The beams then bounce around 100 times on a set of mirrors before being sent back to a photodetector.

The two beams should recombine at exactly the same time since they travel an identical distance.

But if a gravity wave passes by, the beams will be thrown off as the arms are alternately stretched and squeezed.

Detecting such a minute signal has required extraordinary steps.
Because the site had to be as flat as possible, satellites were used to survey the land, which was eventually graded to within three-eighths of an inch over five miles.

To get around the problem of air molecules shaking the mirrors, workers sucked the air out of the tubes down to a billionth of an atmosphere. But that still wasn’t good enough to make sure the speed of light would be constant throughout the tubes. So the team had to get the tubes down to a trillionth of an atmosphere.

The surface of the four 10-inch mirrors in the arms is so smooth it doesn’t vary by more than 30-billionths of an inch. Thirty control systems keep the lasers and mirrors in alignment. The vibration isolation system is so sophisticated, the only thing approaching it is the mechanics used by semiconductor chip makers to etch circuits on the chips.

Read the whole thing.

Click on a Virus

My wife went on WebMD yesterday, looking for information about a condition a relative might have. She went through the usual drill — typing the name of the condition into WebMD's "Search" field, and then reviewing the results to see where to click next.

WebMD links to outside sources of information as well as information they create, and they rank search results by some percentage/relevance algorythm. My wife picked one of the top two or three results. She got sent, instead, into one of those porn sites that opens two new windows every time you try to close one, each one more repulsive than the one before. She finally stopped the madness, but then a cartoon bubble popped up from the toolbar saying the computer had been infected with a virus.

I got on the computer this morning to see what was up. According to McAfee, a "medium-level worm" type of virus had infected our computer. McAfee could identify it, but could neither remove nor quarantine it.

After searching around, I found a scanner for this specific type of virus, and apparently that did the trick, although, as I write, McAfee is scanning my computer again, and has found some other area of infection that we didn't have before. So I'm not quite done yet.

Apart from having anti-virus software, to keep your computer free of viruses, the best practices are generally said to be — don't open attachments to e-mail from sources you don't know; don't open executable files. Right? My wife did neither of these things. She just clicked on an innocuous link. A link tagged with the name of a medical condition.

It could happen to her, it could happen to you. I don't know what advice to give you. Don't click in unfamiliar territory? But that's the whole point of the Internet. Distressing.

Un. Be. Liev. Able.

This story — about a Microsoft salesperson trolling for a consulting contract by threatening a big customer, making the scary but bogus suggestion that their software licenses were "out of compliance" — left me speechless. 

Here's how the most recent story (from Computerworld) starts.  You should also jump to the link embodied in this quote:

It's sleazier than we thought. In last week's Computerworld, Don Tennant spent his editorial going ballistic about an attempt by Microsoft to intimidate its customers. Tennant recounted how a Microsoft manager named Janet Lawless sent a series of increasingly threatening letters to Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co., about how Frantz's company appeared to be using unlicensed software and how Microsoft wanted the issue resolved (see Rotten Effort ).

Frantz figured this was about his Microsoft software licenses, so he kept offering evidence that he was in compliance. Tennant concluded that Lawless was trying to intimidate Frantz to land a software deal.

They were both wrong. It's sleazier than they imagined.

See, Janet Lawless doesn't work for a part of Microsoft that enforces licenses. Frantz thought she did. You'd think so too if you got a letter saying "a preliminary review … indicates that your company may not be licensed properly," then a follow-up saying "since this is a compliance issue, I am obligated to notify an officer of Auto Warehousing of the situation and the significant risk your organization may be subject to by not resolving this situation in a timely manner."

Lawless kept insisting that Microsoft should send a consultant to Auto Warehousing to inventory its software.

But Lawless doesn't enforce licenses. The clue is her title: She's an engagement manager. That's right — Lawless's job is to drum up business for Microsoft's consulting operation. In this case, that's Microsoft's software asset management consulting business.

This wasn't about confirming license compliance or about a software deal. It was about securing Microsoft a paid consulting gig.

Yikes!  And the amazing thing is, given two opportunities to make some kind of public move toward remedying this appalling situation, Microsoft demurred.  Nothing wrong here — and expect nothing to change.  From the "Rotten Effort" editorial on May 8th:

So why was someone in a sales position leaning so hard on AWC about a supposed licensing compliance concern?

When I phoned Lawless to find out, she referred me to Microsoft's PR machine. The responses I got through that channel stressed that Microsoft's aim is to help customers navigate the complexities of software licensing and that one of the roles of engagement managers is to assist in that effort by informing customers of a potential licensing risk. I was told to attribute the responses to Lawless.

And then, in the May 15th story, it gets even worse!

According to Robert Deshaies, a Microsoft vice president for the software asset management program, the goal truly is to help customers get the most out of their Microsoft software licenses. And he insists that four out of five customers are happy with the results.

But here's what happens if you're a big Microsoft customer: Your customer history and purchase cycles are reviewed on a monthly basis by an engagement manager like Lawless. (That's right — your Microsoft purchasing history is handed off to the consulting side for making sales pitches.)

Then the engagement manager makes the initial pitch — that's the "preliminary review indicates your company may not be licensed properly" letter Frantz got. Deshaies says most customers take up the opportunity at that point.

And if, like Frantz, the customer says no? Then the pressure is ratcheted up with a higher-level effort to make the sale, Deshaies says.

If there's still no sale, if the engagement manager still believes there's a problem with the customer's licenses, the final decision is whether or not to pursue it, Deshaies says — presumably by kicking the issue over to the software sales side.

Incidentally, engagement managers like Lawless are working from a "designed process." Frantz wasn't facing some loose cannon. Lawless was following the script.

"This isn't about license compliance," Deshaies says. Yes, it is. It shouldn't be, but it is. Right now, Microsoft's software asset management consulting services are pitched from the start as being about license compliance. And if the customer keeps saying no, the last stop is a threat to sic the license police on the customer.

I mean, wow.  This takes arrogance to a new level.  Don't the PR people at Microsoft see what's wrong with this?  Doesn't anybody over there? 

(Thanks to Instapundit for pointing me in the direction of this story, by way of Evan Coyne Maloney.)

The Secret to Making Money from Blogs

You can't make money blogging, or at least you can't make much. At least not now. Well, actually nobody knows. I don't have any ads on this site, the main reason being nobody has ever asked me to put their ad on this site. Maybe advertisers are missing a huge opportunity!

But I think I've figured out the secret to making money from blogs. Get someone to pay you to monitor them.

That's the conclusion I draw from Deborah Brown's op-ed (subscription required) in the current PR Week. Deborah Brown is senior director at Peppercom, a much-awarded small firm with offices in New York, San Francisco and London. She's got a common-sense approach to what she calls "digital media" that reminded me of the John Prine lyric, "It don't make much sense, this common sense don't make no sense no more."

For example, she says:

It’s also critical to understand that your company cannot state the same key messages via digital media that are allowed in other marketing initiatives such as advertising. With digital, the customer is in complete control. You need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control.

This is true, but it is fast becoming a cliche. Realizing you have little or no control is good Zen discipline, but pretty soon the clients are going to start asking their PR people for something more than a list of "what-not-to-do's." From my perch, I think we're at the point where an old economic idea, "Creative Destruction," needs to be applied to these new realities. From Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, written in 1942:

(T)he contents of the laborer's budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

"Industrial mutation" — there's a term I'd like to see the PR blogs use more often! The fact is, in a breathtakingly short period of time, mass communications has undergone a profound mutation, to which the PR industry and current practices might not successfully adapt.

In PR Week, Brown quotes Christopher Barger, "Blogger-in-Chief" at IBM, saying the customers "want relationship building" and not "traditional messages." From this article and dozens more like it all over the PR blogosphere and trade media, you get the idea that some PR industry leaders see "relationship building" as just another tactic in the PR professional's arsenal.

I don't think so. Training in the PR industry is notoriously poor, but from what I remember, it's mostly about dealing with the news media, elements of good writing, client relations and "managing for profitability." There aren't many PR agency GMs who could instruct staff to go forth and help clients "build relationships" via "digital media" and have any confidence in how their employees would translate those words into action. Chaos would ensue. It might be funny like "The Office" is funny. But a client shouldn't pay for people to do something they aren't qualified to do.

I don't mean to knock Deborah Brown. Her article is good as far as it goes. She has a clear view of the mutation process, and how control is slipping away. The rather tentative tone of her article is probably appropriate. Nobody really knows what to do, and she doesn't pretend to either.

However, she did make one suggestion that made me laugh.

Monitor…monitor….monitor…know what’s being said about your company, but know when it makes sense to react.

Digital monitoring: It's a tactic PR people can certainly do. It's just like media monitoring, except more billable hours, since, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report,

As of last December, 35 percent of Americans had posted to a blog, created a Web page, shared online photos, or otherwise generated content. That proportion is more than double the 16 percent that had posted any content to the Web in January 2002, when Pew first researched the topic.

Can you imagine how many of those posts mention a brand-name company, one that might have PR people in-house or under contract? Monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor…

Lonely At The Top

You've seen all those Apple TV ads where the poor, hapless, Bill Gates'-tubby-nephew PC gets ragged on by a cool, Jimmy-Fallonesque Mac. All the cliche problems about PCs form the basis of these ads — the need for frequent reboots, the viruses, the poor interconnectivity. Very cute. You'd never know that PCs outsell Macs by something like 10-to-1. Apple's got the rep.

But Apple better wipe that smug smile off its face. In the market where they dominate, portable MP3 players, the company's getting quite a PC-like reputation. From a consumer column in the Guardian:

Apple iPod owners love their sleek machines. That's when they work. When they don't, they enter a twilight world where they discover their prized music player is considered by its manufacturer as nothing more than a throwaway item.

It doesn't matter that iPod lovers can spend up to £300 on their gizmo. Apple operates on the basis that the iPod life expectancy is a year, and that's it.

Complain that your £200 or £300 could have bought a fridge or TV that would be expected to last five years or more, and a customer services assistant will explain that a one-year warranty is just that, and no more.

Last month Guardian Money explained how the Sale of Goods Act sets out a series of basic customer rights. These are fleshed out by guidelines from the Department of Trade & Industry. The key in all discussions with retailers, which are the first port of call, is that goods should last up to six years, depending on their cost and expected durability.

In the article we told how a reader took a broken ClickwheeI 40Gb iPod back to the Birmingham Apple Centre. Staff said the cost of repair would exceed the value of the £300 model and refused a free replacement. Arguments that iPods are designed to be portable and take a reasonable amount of wear and tear fell on deaf ears.

Which? – formerly the Consumers Association – says consumers should argue strongly with retailers. While the DTI guidelines do not define how long specific products should last, a survey by Which? of manufacturers into how long they believe electrical appliances should last (not including Apple) found that all reckoned five years or more.

Apple has sold more than 2m iPods in the UK and it would be unfair to expect all of them to work without any problems. But judging from the postbag at Guardian Money, while it's easy to fall in love with the design and ease of use of iPods, they can at times be highly temperamental.

The 40Gb Clickwheel, now discontinued, appears to have suffered more than its fair share of problems. Apple says not. Its response, however, captures the dilemma faced by customers offered an extended warranty. Either the product is robust and the rare failure can be absorbed by the seller, or there is a widespread reliability problem which the manufacturer should deal with.

Apple, like most other manufacturers, refuses to accept responsibility for repairs even when machines break down within weeks of expiry of the one-year warranty.

You get the worst of both worlds: A balky product, and an arrogant attitude toward customers.

For all I know, the iPod's many competitors have the same problems. But I never read about them.

Googling the Hill

Older readers who grew up like me on the east coast might remember a New York sports columnist named Jimmy Cannon. Before offering pithy opinions about boxers and ballplayers, he'd warn you he was about to say something out of turn. He'd write, "Nobody asked me, but…"

Well, nobody asked me, and nobody will ask me, but… hasn't this story been written before?

Of the billions of searches conducted by Google Inc., potentially its most important is playing out in offices above an Asian fusion restaurant here: the quest for influence in the nation's capital.

The Silicon Valley company's dominance of Internet search is built on its mastery of advanced mathematical algorithms. But like other fast-growing tech titans before it, Google is finding Washington's political calculus harder to solve.

Since opening its Washington office last summer, Google's attempts to establish its presence has moved at dial-up speed — resulting in a slow and sometimes balky connection with lawmakers that has irritated both Democrats and Republicans.

"I think they've been a little bit too innocent in how the game is played," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused Washington think tank.

Google's efforts to rally support for rules guaranteeing open Internet access — an abstract issue known as Net neutrality — has been called largely ineffective by key Democratic supporters. Heavily lopsided political contributions to Democrats from Google employees have annoyed the GOP majority. And in what veteran lobbyists called a high-profile tactical mistake, a Google executive called before a House panel this year tried to engage subcommittee members critical of the firm in a debate.

I remember stories just like it about Microsoft, Intel, America Online, and every other high-tech supernova — admonitions to start spending more on high-powered lobbyists. It's the only time the press portrays lobbyists as anything but enemies of the people, and campaign contributions as anything but barely-legal bribery.

And what's this? "(K)ey Democratic supporters" objecting to "heavily lopside political contributions to Democrats?"

Two possible explanations.

1. The news media, or at least this reporter (Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times), wants Google's position on "net neutrality" to prevail, and worries that Google is about to lose the arms race. The net neutrality campaign is all about making sure content providers like Google and Yahoo! don't have to pay a toll to the high-speed carriers like AT&T or Comcast to reach customers.
2. Like a good boxing reporter who wants a story he can hype, this reporter wants to build Google up so he can knock them down later.

I don't pretend to have any pertinent advice for Google, except for this: Don't expect praise if you follow the Times' advice. Expect the opposite. Lobbyists and reporters are natural enemies, because they compete to be the gatekeepers of public policy. 

Hey, Google: Maybe, in the long run, the times are right for a quirky, not-business-as-usual approach to our esteemed representatives. It seems oddly off-key at this moment when outrage at K Street has reached a climax that a major company would be criticized for not buying into the lobbying game.

Just guessing here: When a high-tech winner starts hiring packs of DC lobbyists, the rise in their stock price begins to level off, or go down. If that's true, of course, I can't prove cause-and-effect. These might be two distinct symptoms of a company like Google reaching a sadder but wiser stage of maturity.

“When Two Black Holes Collide, Space Shivers Like Jello.”

It's all over the news: NASA has simulated what happens when two black holes collide. This is a case, however, where the visual doesn't convey the magnitude of the achievement. Words do. From CNet (via ZDNet):

When two black holes collide, space shivers like Jell-O. With the help of a supercomputer to simulate this event, NASA seeks to prove Albert Einstein's theories and unveil universe's secrets.

The NASA supercomputer Columbia just performed its largest astrophysical calculation ever; a 3D simulation of two black holes merging. "This merger is a cataclysmic event, second only to the Big Bang in the amount of energy it produces," Joan Centrella, chief of the NASA Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory in Greenbelt, Md., said Tuesday in a press teleconference.

NASA called the successful simulation a breakthrough in the observation of black holes, as well as the understanding of the entire universe. In fact, NASA claims that it might even provide the ultimate proof for Einstein's theory of general relativity.

And from ScienceBlog,

Previous simulations had been plagued by computer crashes. The necessary equations, based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, were far too complex. But scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have found a method to translate Einstein's math in a way that computers can understand.

"These mergers are by far the most powerful events occurring in the universe, with each one generating more energy than all of the stars in the universe combined. Now we have realistic simulations to guide gravitational wave detectors coming online," said Joan Centrella, head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory at Goddard.

The simulations were performed on the Columbia supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif. This work appears in the March 26 issue of Physical Review Letters and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review D. The lead author is John Baker of Goddard.

Similar to ripples on a pond, gravitational waves are ripples in space and time, a four-dimensional concept that Einstein called spacetime. They haven't yet been directly detected.

Gravitational waves hardly interact with matter and thus can penetrate the dust and gas that blocks our view of black holes and other objects. They offer a new window to explore the universe and provide a precise test for Einstein's theory of general relativity. The National Science Foundation's ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, a joint NASA – European Space Agency project, hope to detect these subtle waves, which would alter the shape of a human from head to toe by far less than the width of an atom.

Black hole mergers produce copious gravitational waves, sometimes for years, as the black holes approach each other and collide. Black holes are regions where gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. They alter spacetime. Therein lies the difficulty in creating black hole models: space and time shift, density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill. Such variables cause computer simulations to crash.

If he were alive today, I suppose Einstein would be unsurprised by this. He would also note that he didn't use a computer to figure it out.

iDon’t Get It

The digital smackdown between France and Apple over a pending French law that would require the iTunes Music store to allow music downloads onto devices other than iPods is another reminder of a digital-age phenemenon that I don’t get.

What is the value proposition that causes iPod and iTunes to be the dominant portable music format?

If you buy an iPod, you can only get music from one place: iTunes. On iTunes, you can only listen to fragments of songs. If you want to hear the whole thing, you have to buy it, for 99 cents. At that point you own the song, just as if you’d bought a CD of one song for 99 cents. Which is great, if you’re sure you want to keep playing that song the rest of your life. You can burn it onto a CD. But you can’t put the song onto any other portable device–only an iPod.

There’s another alternative. You can become a subscriber to another online music store, such as Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music or Napster. You pay them a monthy fee. There are usually two pricing tiers — neither of them more than the price of a typical CD. The lower price allows you to stream almost anything they have, i.e. listen to the whole song as often as you want on your computer, or to burn it and keep it like iMusic does, for an additional fee of about 79-89 cents.

For the slightly higher price, you can also “subscribe” to tracks, which means you can store them on your computer to play even when you’re offline, and you can download them onto your portable device. Eventually, your “rights” to that song will expire if you don’t reconnect your device with the subscription service. And you can’t burn it onto a CD, unless you pay that extra fee.

Myriad portable devices can take downloads off these competing music services, from dozens of manufacturers. Microsoft has finagled its way into this picture with the “Plays for Sure” logo, which is actually helpful. When I got a Creative Zen for my birthday, I was able to give my Rio to my son, knowing that I could put subscription music onto his and mine from the same service.

That’s a very different world from the restrictive one that Apple has built.

Go back to the lower-tier price. If you have a laptop and can pick up wi-fi, the ability to stream music means you can set up a playlist of, say, 200 songs (any number really), plug the earphones into your computer and just listen while you work. I’ve done this many times. Sometimes I’m in the mood for Handel. Sometimes I’m in the mood for the Rolling Stones. Rhapsody lets its listeners create playlists, and sometimes I listen to one of those. One weird day, I even created a Bee Gees playlist. Not too bad, actually!

You can’t do that on iTunes, unless you’re happy with 200 30-second fragments.

I am not endorsing weird French laws. Mon Dieu, non. If Apple wants iTunes to only play on iPods, that’s their right.

But thanks to subscriptions and streaming, I’ve been able to discover, or re-discover, vast libraries of music I would’ve never paid to try. Not just the Bee Gees, but a long list of current rock bands, old jazz masters, and favorites who just had more music out there than I could have kept up with before.

Take Johnny Cash. Most everyone knows the great version of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” that Cash recorded with producer Rick Rubin a few years before he died. But Cash completed four CDs with Rubin, and more songs that didn’t fit into those CDs were released later. A great version of the Beatles’ “In My Life,” the country chestnut “Streets of Laredo,” and literally dozens of others. Who has the money to buy all of that? But now I’ve heard a lot of it. Recent box set surveys of Duke Ellington and the Band are now, almost in their entireties, on my MP3 player.

Another example: I bypassed CDs by the New Pornographers many times, just because I didn’t like their name (still don’t.) But checking them out on Rhapsody has turned me into a huge fan of their expertly crafted pop-rock (imagine the Mamas and the Papas, backed by Led Zeppelin, singing songs by Brian Wilson). Listening to the New Pornographers turned me on to one of the band’s singers, Neko Case, who has grown from a Patsy Cline-like alt-country cowgirl into a brilliant, uncategorizable singer-songwriter. If you want to listen to her new album, “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” you could test-drive it on Rhapsody before deciding if you want to buy it. Or, if you’re a subscriber, you could put it on your MP3 player — as long as it’s not an iPod.

That’s what confuses me. iPod gives you fewer choices, but it’s far and away the standard, outselling everything else. When Donald Fagen released his new single “H Gang,” the press release said it was available for purchase on iTunes. And it was. But it was also available for streaming, downloading or purchase on Rhapsody and presumably other services, but that fact was not mentioned in the news releases. Is it supposed to be a secret?

This might be a PR problem. The benefits of subscription services have not been reduced to a soundbite. Napster, Yahoo! and Rhapsody are all competitors against each other as well as Apple. Apple is selling hardware as well as its online service, so its incentive to market heavily is greater.

To me, it’s a hiccup in the market, one I hope is corrected, because the subscription model opens doors for people to get exposed to new music in ways iTunes’ does not. And with the demise of commercial radio as a proselytizer of music, I would hate to see the subscription alternative fail.