Sidestepping the Media with a Text

Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Read a review of his book in "It's Not a Revolution if Nobody Loses" by Emily Gould, from the September/October 2008 issue.

There are several interesting things about the Obama campaign's decision to text-message his VP announcement directly to his supporters. It makes the choice more exciting. It reinforces a direct connection with his most passionate followers. It creates an enormous list of mobile-phone numbers that the campaign will doubtless use in its get-out-the-vote efforts in November. The most interesting effect, though, is the way it cuts out mainstream news outlets.

Broadcast news has two conflicting imperatives--get the news out fast, and provide interpretive context. For most of the last century, these two things weren't in serious conflict, since radio and TV were the only ways to spread information quickly and at large scale. In that environment, the classic format for a breaking news story went like this: "Obama has announced that Batman is his VP. Now we turn to our political analyst, the Joker, to discuss what this all means ..." Because the broadcast outlets were required for the simple act of distribution, they were able to link that to the complex act of exposition.

What the Obama campaign has realized is that broadcast is no longer required for news distribution. An individual organization, with the goodwill of its users, can now run a communications operation that reaches national scale. The pitch to recipients of the text messages is access to unfiltered news the minute it happens, but the reality is that there are now going to be more filters--millions more--for this bit of news.

As a proportion of all Democrats, the obsessive ones who have signed up for Obama's text messages is tiny, but text messaging is only the first-order distribution strategy. Seconds after the VP message goes out, Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and the blogosphere are going to light up with excited rebroadcasts. This superdistribution will be instant and massive, and it has a chance of being the first way a majority of Democrats under 30 learn the name of the candidate.

By harnessing social networks to distribute the news, the Obama campaign ensures that many people will be getting it from a trusted contact who is also an Obama supporter. As a filter for the news, this is close to the Platonic ideal for any campaign communication. Even when some of his supporters dislike the choice, as they inevitably will, they will only be able to broadcast their discontent to hundreds or thousands of others, not millions, and those negative messages will be in an environment with many more positive ones.

Distribution over social networks will also undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to provide context with their content. Because there are going to be millions of outlets for the news instead of hundreds, it will probably invert the usual order of news analysis, with professional news organizations asking what Obama supporters are thinking about the choice, rather than telling them what to think.

This is the best chance the campaign has to shape the conventional wisdom to its advantage. In terms of content, the announcement may yet be a damp squib, with an uncontroversial and unsurprising choice eliciting basically the same reaction everywhere. But as an exercise in piggybacking on social networks as national media outlets, this is a watershed moment.

The Last Car You Would Ever Buy--Literally

Would you buy a car that costs 10 times as much as a hybrid gasoline-electric, like the Prius? What if I told you it had half the range of the hybrid? What if I told you most cities didn't have a single hydrogen fueling station? Not interested yet? This should be the deal closer: what if I told you it wouldn't have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than the hybrid?

Other than the traditional media, which is as distracted by shiny new objects as my 16-month-old daughter, nobody should get terribly excited when a car company rolls out its wildly impractical next-generation hydrogen car. Too many miracles are required for it to be a marketplace winner.

Take Honda's new FCX Clarity. As the New York Times reported, "the cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce," although Honda's president Takeo Fukui "said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase."

But why would production volumes increase for a car that delivers no real value to the consumer and has no significant societal benefit to motivate government support? Answer: They wouldn't, so prices may never drop below $100,000.

And who, exactly, is going to buy a car that can't easily find fuel? On the other hand, who is going to build tens of thousands of fueling stations--price tag $2 million apiece or more--until the cars are wildly successful? That is the so-called chicken-and-egg problem, which is especially acute for hydrogen. After all, why should oil companies spend tens of billions of dollars building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which at best will take away business from their tremendously profitable gasoline sales, and at worst will be a complete business loss, assuming, as now seems likely, that hydrogen cars never catch on?

And yet the media can't get enough of these hi-tech Edsels. The New York Times, of all places, writes,

Fuel cells have an advantage over electric cars, whose batteries take hours to recharge and use electricity, which, in the case of the United States, China and many other countries, is often produced by coal-burning power plants.

Is the Times unaware that electricity is pretty much available everywhere, whereas hydrogen is essentially available nowhere? Is the Times unaware that the per-mile fuel cost of an electric car is probably one-quarter that of a hydrogen fuel-cell car? Is the Times unaware that electric-car manufacturers are working on "exchangeable batteries," which would make a battery swap about as fast as it takes to refuel a car with hydrogen?

Most egregious: where, exactly, does the Times think hydrogen comes from? Santa Claus? More than 95 percent of U.S. hydrogen is made from natural gas, so running a car on hydrogen doesn't reduce net carbon dioxide emissions compared with a hybrid like the Prius running on gasoline. Okay, you say, can't hydrogen be made from carbon-free sources of power, like wind energy or nuclear? Sure, but so can electricity for electric cars. And this gets to the heart of why hydrogen cars would be the last car you would ever want to buy: they are wildly inefficient compared with electric cars.

Electric cars--and plug-in hybrid cars--have an enormous advantage over hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in utilizing low-carbon electricity. That is because of the inherent inefficiency of the entire hydrogen fueling process, from generating the hydrogen with that electricity to transporting this diffuse gas long distances, getting the hydrogen in the car, and then running it through a fuel cell--all for the purpose of converting the hydrogen back into electricity to drive the same exact electric motor you'll find in an electric car.

The total power-plant-to-wheels efficiency with which a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle is likely to utilize low-carbon electricity is 20 to 25 percent--and the process requires purchasing several expensive pieces of hardware, including the electrolyzer and delivery infrastructure. The total efficiency of simply charging an onboard battery with the original low-carbon electricity, and then discharging the battery to run the electric motor in an electric car or plug-in, however, is 75 to 80 percent. That is, an electric car will travel three to four times farther on a kilowatt-hour of renewable or nuclear power than a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle will.

No wonder the Wall Street Journal reported this in March:

Top executives from General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. Tuesday expressed doubts about the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near term and suggested their companies are now betting that electric cars will prove to be a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a large scale.

So why do a few car companies persist in rolling out generation after generation of overhyped Hindenburgs? Maybe it's because they keep getting so much free positive publicity.

The Times story includes not a single critic of hydrogen cars and reads like a Honda press release. The Times opens the story by saying that the FCX "may have just moved the world one step closer to a future free of petroleum." Not quite.

The story does end with some illumination: "For now, the first batch of customers seem drawn by the car's novelty as much as anything else." The same might be said of the media.

If you build it, the media will come, but don't hold your breath waiting for mass-market hydrogen-car buyers. In two years, GM and Toyota have promised to deliver plug-in hybrids. That will be a real step closer to a future free of petroleum.

Joseph Romm is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. In the mid-1990s, he helped oversee the Energy Department's clean-energy programs. He is the author of the book The Hype about Hydrogen.

Divorced from Reality

It was with some trepidation that I submitted my essay in this month's issue of Tech Review. Whether it was the perceived ruthlessness of my former masters at NBC/GE or simply the shame of being seen as a disgruntled former employee ranting in print, I presumed there would be a response. I was dragged away from Christmas carols at the piano in New England by a call from the Philadelphia Inquirer on December 23. The essay was picked up by blogs all through the holidays, and then shortly after the new year, the people at The O'Reilly Factor were among the first to call. In the weeks since the posting, I have received hundreds of e-mails and observed at least as many references in blogs and links, besides the coverage in Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and the Daily Kos.

In Hollywood there was much interest in my description of NBC head Jeff Zucker as a toy action figure from The Simpsons or The Sopranos, while O'Reilly was most interested in allegations of GE dealings with Iran and the bin Laden family. In general the coverage ignored the central point about how networks confuse technology with gadgets and miss the important transformations taking place in media of all kinds. Mostly I was left with the impression that there is enormous pent-up anxiety over the state of network television in the U.S. I received numerous e-mails from former subjects of Dateline segments relating personal stories of being crammed into some preconceived emotional narrative by NBC or Dateline. Journalists hired as consultants by NBC told me of having their own story pitches dismissed or ignored. I was creepily worried that perverted targets of To Catch a Predator would contact me and declare me their hero for going after Dateline. Instead, it was people directly concerned about child exploitation who were happiest that I had taken on Dateline. To them the Predator concept was a stunt that didn't aid in addressing child exploitation on the Web.

There were numerous people who contacted me from within the networks who assured me that their experience was even worse than what I had described. To these stalwart but more than a little disgruntled TV news producers and journalists, my essay seemed to read as a secret diary smuggled from inside the gulag.

I received many requests to go on the air and talk about the essay but in the end refused them all, including the one from The O'Reilly Factor. The Fox producer explained that the show wanted to focus on GE inserting itself into editorial decisions at NBC and also suggested that Bill O'Reilly personally has an interest in keeping a watchful eye on the competition at MSNBC. "You mean Olbermann?" I asked the producer, referring to how Keith Olbermann, whose show competes with O'Reilly, has made much sport of calling the Fox anchor "the worst human being on earth," a very NBC/GE-esque experiment in branding. "Well partly," he said. "The way MSNBC has acted makes the whole profession look bad." I agreed but perhaps for a different reason.

Corporate media such as NBC/GE seek a single truth: the reality of Audience (or: the supremacy of ratings). If lefty performances such as those delivered by Keith Olbermann deliver eyeballs, fine (Don Imus's offenses were fine on MSNBC until they offended sponsors). If faux-conservative screaming about politics from pundits like Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough demonstrate traction, they can dutifully remain part of the revenue engine of GE. Even the bizarre corporate rituals of GE have been mined by NBC for the successful comedy 30 Rock. Any thought that journalism might embody the values of factual truth, a moral right, or civic accountability is merely arcane unless such virtues can also prove themselves by delivering revenue.

In the end, O'Reilly put on a story without me. Fox News did quote extensively from Tech Review and had a picture of me. Headlining on Fox News amounted to something of a milestone for Tech Review and I was proud to have been a part of history. The story O'Reilly ran was about GE, the bin Ladens, and Iran. They also noted NBC's official response to my essay. A spokesman had said that I was so out of touch with reality that there was no reason for them to respond.

But hearing O'Reilly quote NBC about my departure from reality made me proud. As painful as it was to have been axed after nine years of service at NBC, I felt quite happy and a bit relieved to have left this network "reality." For that I owe NBC a debt of gratitude, but I suspect the network brass is too busy figuring out such urgent matters as how to make the Golden Globe Awards a "news event" despite the writer's strike, or picking which bimbos will open suitcases on Deal or No Deal, to accept my thanks.

NBC's reality is a little too real for me. I think I'll just stay detached for now.

Read the Original Essay: You Don't Understand Our Audience: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC. »

Read the Reuters's article: Former "Dateline" Reporter Blasts NBC.

Wrap Not, Waste Not

Credit: Nicolas Raymond

Each year, reams and reams of wrapping paper are wasted as gift givers tend to overestimate the amount of gift wrap required to festoon their packages. To cut down on all this holiday paper waste, a British mathematician at the University of Leicester has devised a formula for how to most efficiently wrap a present of any shape and size.

In a university press release, the equation's originator, postgraduate student Warwick Dumas, says,

"We have tested different methods of wrapping and our investigations showed that ... cutting the right size of paper will allow consumers to wrap presents in the least amount of time and achieve a classy result."

The formula, which can be applied to any box-shaped item, goes like this:

Area = 2(ab+ac+bc+c²)

"To explain in the most simplistic terms, the minimal area of paper needed to wrap a box-shaped gift is twice the sum of the height times the width, the width times the depth and the height times the depth, plus twice the square of the depth," says Dumas.

In multiple tests, Dumas found that wrapping cubic-shaped objects diagonally used up more paper than wrapping along the edges--except when the object has a square base. Then, the best method is to wrap diagonally, so that the flaps only just meet.

The same equation for box-shaped items may be used to wrap cylindrical gifts whose radius is greater than 87 percent of their height (for example, a squat tin of cookies). Taller cylinders (e.g., tubes of socks) may be best wrapped via a rolling method.

Dumas has teamed up with Bluewater, a major shopping center based in the United Kingdom, to help shoppers reduce their "gift-wrapping footprint." Bluewater plans to hold workshops throughout the holiday season to teach shoppers the ecofriendly wrapping equation.

Of course, minimizing the extra scratch paper you'll need in order to make your gift-wrapping calculations is another problem entirely.

Yahoo Settles Lawsuit

Yahoo announced today that it has settled a lawsuit brought in a California federal court on behalf of two Chinese Yahoo users, Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. The lawsuit alleged that Yahoo turned over electronic records on Shi and Wang to the Beijing State Security Bureau. That information, the plaintiffs argued, directly led to their arrest, conviction, and subsequent torture while each served a 10-year sentence. Yahoo, the lawsuit alleged, was responsible for their treatment.

Yahoo never denied that it did, in fact, hand over user information on Shi and Wang to Chinese authorities. But the company argued that it was forced to in order to comply with Chinese law. And, Yahoo lawyers said, it was unclear what role, if any, the information that the company provided played in the arrest and conviction of Shi and Wang.

News of the settlement comes a week after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan faced harsh questions about the company's business practices in China during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. During that hearing, committee chairman Tom Lantos asked Yang to turn around and personally apologize to Shi's mother, who was seated directly behind the Yahoo executives in the hearing room. Lantos chided Yang and Callahan for doing nothing to help the families of those imprisoned. When Yang said he would personally like to do more, Lantos quipped, "Well, you certainly couldn't do less."

New Jersey Republican and senior House Foreign Affairs Committee member Chris Smith went further. He challenged Yahoo to settle the lawsuit as quickly as possible. After the hearings concluded, Yang reportedly approached the family members of the detainees, asked to speak with them privately, and started the process that culminated today with the announcement that a deal had been reached.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed and are to remain confidential. But the plaintiffs and their families are pleased, according to Morton Sklar. He's the executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, the Washington-based group that brought the suit on behalf of Shi and Wang. "Everyone's first priority is getting the prisoners released. What everybody realized was that if this case continued, that would take four or five more years."

Sklar says that he and his clients feel assured that Yahoo will do everything it can to ensure that Shi and Wang get out sooner than that. "What the settlement and Congressional hearings emphasize," Sklar says, "is that U.S. corporations have to recognize that they must do more, that their responsibility extends beyond the obvious of abiding local laws in the countries they operate in, but also abiding by U.S. laws and international human-rights standards."

Human-rights groups were cautiously optimistic about the settlement. Most welcomed the idea that the families of Shi and Wang will receive some relief and comfort, however cold, from Yahoo. "But we certainly don't want to see companies viewing this settlement as an easy way out," cautioned Amy O'Meara, who heads Amnesty International USA's Business and Human Rights Program. "We don't want them saying we can just settle these kinds of lawsuits, put these problems behind them, and not really deal with the complex problems of censorship seriously."

In a statement released today, Congressman and senior committee member Chris Smith commended Yahoo for settling the lawsuit. But he cautioned that "convening a Congressional hearing every time a U.S. company helps put a human-rights activist in jail should not be their only means of securing justice." He then touted legislation that he is sponsoring, the Global Online Freedom Act. The measure, Smith noted, would "make certain that U.S. companies are not compelled to comply with local Secret Police or any other unlawful policies when operating in foreign markets."

Democrat Tom Lantos, the committee chairman, was less forgiving:

"It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing and coughed up some concrete assistance for the family of a journalist whom Yahoo had helped send to jail. What a disgrace. When I asked Yahoo officials 21 months ago whether the company had reached out to the family to offer help, I was appalled to learn the answer. It was infuriating last week to hear that the company still had not reached out. In my view, today's settlement is long overdue."

The First Annual Body Computing Conference

"Imagine a world," said cardiologist Leslie Saxon, "where you turn on your computer and, along with surfing the Web and turning on YouTube, you can check your or your family members' health stats."

Saxon was opening the first annual Body Computing Conference, at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, on October 26. She offered a definition of body computing: implanted wireless devices that transmit real-time data about the body to doctors, patients, and relatives.

The prospect of such devices interests some of the biggest health-care companies in the country. Panelists included the CEOs of Boston Scientific and GE Healthcare, and high-level executives from Medtronic, St. Jude, Texas Instruments, and Johnson & Johnson.

The conference hall was packed with scientists, engineers, physicians, and venture capitalists.

The heart is a big target of body computing. Several of the panelists, including Jim Tobin of Boston Scientific, discussed implantable heart defibrillators (more technically called implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, or ICDs) that store a continuous record of heart activity that can be analyzed by a cardiologist. (See "Defibrillation's Alternative.")

Other kinds of devices were discussed as well. Garry Neil of Johnson & Johnson talked about miniature, pill-shaped cameras called PillCams that can take thousands of photographs of the inside of the intestine and transmit them to a waist-worn receiver for later downloading. (See "Swallowable Sensors.")

Chris O'Connell of Medtronic discussed devices for diabetics that measure blood-sugar levels hundreds of times a day, revealing trends that may be missed by traditional finger-stick methods. And startup companies, such as MedApps of Scottsdale, AZ, are aiming to perfect systems that wirelessly monitor blood-sugar levels and send the data to physicians via the patients' cell phones. (See "Your Daily Digital Doctor.")

One panel was moderated by Andrew Thompson, the CEO of Proteus Biomedical, a startup based in Redwood City, CA. Since he was the moderator, he didn't talk about his company, but a magazine article distributed at the conference ("Proteus Biomedical: Using Computers to Manage Chronic Diseases," In Vivo, March 2007) describes its goal of creating a "smart pharmaceuticals" system in which computer chips embedded in prescription drug pills send data identifying when they were swallowed.

Then, in the Proteus system, a computer chip attached to the body--either by a patch or by implantation under the skin--monitors the patient's vital stats, such as temperature and blood pressure. The aim is to correlate the pill taking with the patient's physiological responses, thereby refining the patient's drug regimen for maximum effectiveness.

Several panelists noted that such technologies raise new challenges as well as new possibilities. Neal Eigler, the manager of Savacor, a maker of implanted heart monitors, noted that doctors can be overloaded by masses of real-time information but can also practice medicine better if their patients have tools they can use to manage their own condition. Omar Ishrak of GE Healthcare pointed out that doctors and patients need to have the right data, not simply lots of data, and figuring out what the right data are is a substantial challenge.

Privacy was briefly mentioned as a potential issue during one of the question-and-answer discussions. How it's an issue wasn't explored, but one can imagine scenarios. Would an elderly parent want her children to have access to her vital statistics around the clock? Would it be a good idea for spouses to be able to monitor each other's heart rates and blood-glucose levels? Could such technology be used to monitor the consumption of recreational drugs or force compliance with taking psychoactive drugs?

Not all body computing is implanted. Michael Tchao, the manager of Nike Techlab, discussed a collaboration between Nike and Apple that had yielded the Nike + iPod system for runners. It consists, Tchao explained, of a sensor built into a Nike shoe that wirelessly sends data to a receiver plugged into an iPod. So equipped, the iPod can give the runner statistics on time, distance, and calories burned, both visually and by voice. (See "Beyond the Pedometer.")

"Running is a social sport," Tchao reminded the audience, and he demonstrated a system in which runners could upload their running statistics into iTunes to compare them with those of other runners. People could join "virtual marathons" by running at the same time that real marathons occurred, regardless of their location; this had just been done, on October 21, at the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco benefiting the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Notably, sensory implants were not discussed. Cochlear implants--implanted devices that enable the deaf to hear by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve--were not on the agenda. Nor were retinal implants, an equivalent technology for enabling the blind to see, nor spinal cord stimulators for pain control. Spinal cord stimulators block pain with programmable electrodes implanted in the spinal cord.

The martini-bar reception at the end was something of a relief, since it required no body computing at all. It was, however, sponsored by BlackBerry.

Michael Chorost covers implanted technologies for Technology Review. His book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, came out in 2005.