Context & Continuity

Where's George Gilder when you really need him?

About a million years ago, I was helping a Hewlett-Packard bring its line of consumer PCs to market, the Pavilion line.  I was a small part of a large team and we did some very good work.  I learned something very important from HP during that experience:  technology innovation usually appears first in consumer products and then ends up in enterprise products.  There are countless examples of this.

I saw two articles today that have nothing and everything to do with each other.  First, here's a story from the NY Times about internet usage at meetings and conventions:  

As recently as a few years ago, a type of connection called a T1 line was the norm for most hotels. With speeds of 1.5 megabits a second, it was robust enough for e-mail and Web browsing. (By comparison, an average at-home cable modem offers three to five megabits a second.)

The advent of cheap, user-friendly — but bandwidth-heavy — streaming video technology changed the status quo drastically. Demand at hotels and convention centers has spiked, as businesses add videoconferencing to their meetings and guests download media. Adding to the logjam, hotel managers are moving toward Web-based tools for managing back-of-the-house departments, using more bandwidth, too.

Most business hotels now have added more T1s or a T3 (also referred to as a DS3), which accommodates 28 T1s of traffic. Other hotels are installing fiber optics, which also offer large bandwidth capacity. Many of these new systems are what technology specialists term burstable, meaning they have a typical six or eight megabit-a-second rate of transmission but are capable of sustaining many times that amount of traffic if necessary.

Then, there's this article from the Wall Street Journal: 

Among the issues are what speed Congress should define as broadband and whether government money should be funneled only to areas that have no broadband access, or if it should also subsidize upgrades to existing networks.

Policies under serious consideration are corporate tax credits to build new wireless or landline infrastructure, government-backed broadband "bonds" and grants to companies or local governments, legislative aides and lobbyists close to the process say. There also is strong agreement that low-income consumers need to be encouraged to sign up for broadband -- for example, through vouchers to purchase computers or discounts on monthly service.

Folks, this is an issue  we've been discussing since the fourth issue of Wired magazine, September 1993.  The United States will have a bandwidth crises Real Soon Now.  It was this year that notebook computer sales surpassed desktops.  What percentage of those notebooks have wireless connnections built in?  And how many cellphones have WiFi connections built into them?  And Cisco is making stereo equipment now?  (I'll leave it to you to size that a mistake that is, but please consult some of 3Com's former employees before placing your bet in the deadpool.)

What amazes me is that, in all the time, no one found a business model that would light up the hundreds of miles of dark fiber that weaves across the country and make a buck at the same time.  As of this writing, my employer pays $40 / month for me to have broadband into my home so I can work for them 24 x 7. (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.)  That's a ton of money when you start to think that I'm not the only one doing this.   And then there are all those people who pay for it out of their own pocket.  And how many people in the new economy will be working out of Peet's, slurping up their broadband and lattes?  Here's one to think about:  What's going to happen when we actually receive our Skype handset? 

A tsunami of bandwidth hungry people are about to crash onto our shore.  Someone has got to figure out how to monetize them without resorting to goverment subsidies.  If I can't understand bailing out GM, I'm way not ready to subsidize Qwest.  No hard feelings, okay?  I'm just saying.

This seems like a really bad idea.

In today's NYTimes, I read a story about NBC, ABC and CBS have pull most of their news operations out of Iraq.  Here's a quote from the story:

Joseph Angotti, a former vice president of NBC News, said he could not recall any other time when all three major broadcast networks lacked correspondents in an active war zone that involved United States forces.

Wow.  The United States has 130,000 soldiers in Iraq (Which means how many more "contractors"?) and the three networks can't find the story there.  Yes, I do understand that the three network news organizations do not have the same responsibilities, influence, scope, budget, power, whatyouwill as they used to have.  (I have been paying attention during the past twenty years, I assure you.)  Nevertheless, it strike me as 1. fascinating and 2. disappointing that our war in Iraq can't sustain the interest of these news organizations. 

Here's another quote from the story: 

In the early months of the war, television images out of Iraq were abundant. “But clearly, viewers’ appetite for stories from Iraq waned when it turned from all-out battle into something equally important but more difficult to describe and cover,” Ms. Arraf said. She recalled hearing one of her TV editors say, “I don’t want to see the same old pictures of soldiers kicking down doors.”

“You can imagine how much more tedious it would be to watch soldiers running meetings on irrigation,” she said.

So, I was a journalist for about sixty seconds, but I understanding a few things about journalism and one of these is the idea of competitiveness.  A competitive journalist would allow himself to be spoonfed the minutes from the irrigation meeting and you, dear reader, don't believe that the irrigation meeting is the best story in Iraq today either.

Here's the real danger:  Imagine what a public relations organization can do to shape the news when reporters aren't around to actively cover the story.  Reporters sources narrow down to those who can afford to stay in touch with the reporter, since the reporter can't stay in touch with the sources.  The military then has a tremendous advantage over the "man in the street" in Baghdad. The military can paper news organizations with photographs, statements, updates, responses.  I assure you, the people in the military responsible for managing the media in Iraq haven't had such a triumph since they came up with the idea of embedding reporters during the initial invasion. 

Here's the link to the story.

Stoppard in Conversation with the Hartford Courant.

Another posting in the vein of All Things Stoppard.

Stoppard has an affection for the newspaper profession, having left school in England at 17 to be a journeyman journalist in Bristol in 1954. "I loved it," he says. "Being a junior reporter on a morning newspaper in a city of a quarter of a million is pretty glamorous compared with being in boarding school. People I went to school with all disappeared into offices."

When asked if his news writing shaped his playwriting, he says, "I may be the last person to know that answer because I'm not that self-aware. But just the daily practice and necessity of making decent sentences and finding the right word for something, that in itself must have been helpful.

...

"But more than that, I think the arts come from somewhere else. A meaningless phrase, I know. But. I don't think the arts are something you teach and learn. But. I'm missing the point I'm trying to make — which is that there is something about creativity that escapes the physical world, even escapes mathematical law. Artists aren't subject to that. It's hard to explain."

But that doesn't stop Stoppard from trying.

"When you're working well, and this may be true for all kinds of disciplines, you take leave of yourself in some sense in order to make that [thing happen]. I think one benefits from the subconscious in a very important way when you do creative work. What I'm aware of is that I don't know how I do what I do. I really don't know how it's done."

[more]

What you should have read in the NYTimes today.

Frank Rich:  Who Wants to Kick A Millionaire?

Congress can’t get the answers either. Its oversight panel declared in a first report this month that the Treasury is doling out billions “without seeking to monitor the use of funds provided to specific financial institutions.” The Treasury prefers instead to look at “general metrics” indicating the program’s overall effect on the economy. Well, we know what the “general metrics” tell us already: the effect so far is nil. Perhaps if we were let in on the specifics, we’d start to understand why.

Between Obama and the Press

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I met Gibbs for lunch at a cafe near his home in Alexandria. He is 37 but has an ageless face — at once boyish and well worn — that could put him anywhere from 25 to 50. Gibbs gained considerable weight during the campaign that he is trying to shed, and he has a habit — maybe unconscious — of running his hands up and down his paunch while he speaks. (“The chronicle of his weight is a story unto itself,” Obama told me.)

Gibbs scrolled back a few days on his BlackBerry to show me a helpful reminder that the current White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, sent him. “Remember to unlist your phone number,” it said. “Your wife will thank you.” (His wife, Mary Catherine, had already thought of that.)

Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.

The Buzzwords of 2008

Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!”

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network

When you ask someone for help, request specific advice or information rather than leads for jobs, and both of you will feel more comfortable. It is risky for people to give someone they’ve just met a job lead or an introduction because it can put their reputations on the line, Ms. Baber said.

Particle Man

In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.

Rabbi David Lieber, Scholar and University President, Dies at 83

A renowned biblical scholar, Rabbi Lieber had for more than 20 years contemplated the compilation of a volume of commentary on the Torah that would provide a modern interpretation for Conservative Jews. Finally, in 2002, with essays by 41 prominent rabbis and scholars, “Etz Hayim” (Hebrew for “Tree of Life”) was issued by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million members of the movement in North America.

Until the 1,560-page “Etz Hayim” was introduced, the commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth in the 1930s, was the basis for Conservative Torah interpretation. Rabbi Hertz’s work countenanced no doubt that the Torah was the literal word of God. And that is the immutable view of Orthodox Jews, many of whom raised objections to “Etz Hayim.”

There was even discomfort among Conservative Jews, including Rabbi Susan Grossman, an “Etz Hayim” co-editor. After the book was released, Rabbi Grossman told The New York Times that the “basic historicity” of the Torah “is valid and verifiable.”

You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book

Sometimes things get lost in books. The novelist Diana Abu-Jaber recalled putting a favorite photograph of a friend’s greyhound inside her copy of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf” — and then promptly leaving the book on a plane. (“I hope it comforts someone who’s afraid of flying,” she wrote in an e-mail message.) Similarly, the musician Dan Zanes once used a book to store a prized possession given him by his mother — a rare photograph of J. D. Salinger, taken by Mrs. Zanes’s mentor, the German photographer Lotte Jacobi. “I’m sure it’s safe, but I have no idea where it’s safe,” Zanes said. “Not in any book that I currently own, that’s for sure.”

Need a Ride? Check Your iPhone

“You put the iPhone on the dashboard, and it records the entire trip and sends the route to our network,” he said. The system stores the route, adding it to its menu of paths and pick-up points and offering them automatically to interested riders.

A Generation With More Than Hand-Eye Coordination

“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” he writes. “They care strongly about justice and the problems faced by their society and are typically engaged in some kind of civic activity at school, at work or in their communities.”

Welcome, Michael Arrington. Really.

That snapping sound you heard late this morning came from the direction of the TechCrunch blog, the flagship of Michael Arrington's media empire and platform for his pontifications.  It was a loud, sharp crack and I recognized it instantly.  Nothing quite sounds like the splintering of plastic veneer as the ego beneath it inflates beyond bounds. 

Missed it?  Here it is. 

Or you can let me summarize it for you:  Michael Arrington is tired, durn tired of being pushed around by public relations people.  This isn't the first time he's fired off a screed in the direction of the practioners in my profession but it is the first time I've taken the time to note it here.  I'm doing so because I think other might benefit from the lesson. 

It can't come as a surprise to anyone that the rise of "citizen journalism" has endgendered a new generation of para-professionals new to the rules of engagement, such as they are, that exist between journalist and publicist.  So, dear reader, if you want to practice journalism and come across a public relations person, be forewarned and please note the following: 

• Publicists work for those who are paying them.
• Trust is earned, or not.
• You are but one element in a much bigger picture.

And if one of my colleagues, out of desperation or sheer stupidity, decides to double-cross you on an embargo or an exclusive or, heaven forfend, warps facts to make a case, I offer you my apologies in advance.  And while I have you on the line, `may I offer you some advice?  If you're out for dinner with someone you're trying to impress and you drip a little consommé onto your lap, and your jacket will cover the spot, do not, under any circumstances, stand up and announce in a loud voice -- that everyone can hear -- that you have a stain on the front of your pants.  Okay? 

This is a story waiting to be written...

From today's NYTimes obituaries:

George S. Morrison, 89, Admiral in Tonkin Gulf and Singer’s Father, Is Dead George S. Morrison, who commanded the fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to an escalation of the Vietnam War and whose son Jim was the lead singer of the Doors died Nov. 17 in Coronado, Calif. He was 89 and lived in Coronado.

Wall Street Journal: Lessons From The Great Books Generation.

These were not just any books, but "Great Books of the Western World," marketed by Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors included Aristotle, Aquinas, Milton, Locke, Hume and Mill along with some especially dense texts such as Apollonius' "On Conic Sections." The celebrities who bought the special Founders' Edition at $500 per leather-bound set included David Ben-Gurion, Frank Capra, Marshall Field, Conrad Hilton, Henry Luce and Walter Lippmann.

The rest of the article.

Dear Mr. Crovitz: 

In 1975, I was a sophomore at Northside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas and intensely aware that I was well beyond the pale of intellectual America and, probably, the civilized world.  Then, I found "that low door in the wall" through which I gained admittance into that world I yearned for.  In my sophomore year, I took an advanced placement English class based on The Great Books. 

That year, we followed a program leading us through those Great Books and the course resolved with each of us using the Syntopicon to study a single great idea through history.  In my case, the idea was truth.  And I'm writing to tell you this about the experience:

Standing in front of a set of Great Books, even in the foothills of the Ozarks, I could see the breadth and depth of What Is Important.  It brought all the best and greatest ideas, literally, into my grasp and suddenly, I knew it might be possible to learn something that could get me somewhere.  The Great Books defined what it was to be learned and illuminated a path leading towards that destination.  Taking that course gave me the confidence that "I can do this." 

Due to an early romance with Journalism, I attended the University of Missouri and promptly enrolled in its two-year Humanities program, a study of Western Thought.  And following my years in Missouri, I confidently enrolled at Radcliffe to learn how books are published.  And I held my own in a small class of enormous intellects gathered up to be shepherded into Book Publishing and become its stewards.

Today, I just read too much and try my best to pass along my enthusiasm.  Alas, it is a challenge.  My daughter doesn't "get" Romeo and Juliet even when I screen the Bas Luhrmann vision.  And when I review the table of contents of her English reader, I admire the work done to make it up-to-date, but sigh about what's been left behind.

Last week, I read that Milton's Paradise Lost has been translated into English prose to make it easier for people to read.  Oh dear.  This month, Book Publishers are deciding to stop buying manuscripts.  Oh dear.  And one of my colleagues from Radcliffe sent me a DVD of the movie Fahrenheit 451 for my birthday this year.  --And the sly joke wasn't lost on me at all.

Best regards,
Brian D. Johnson
California.

Lost in Translation.

As I've been following the adventures of my sophomore-year (high school) daughter studying Shakespeare, I've been given again to think about the language, its meaning and accessibility.

In the study of Torah, we learn -- very quickly -- that any translation out of Hebrew is reading an entirely different text -- all but stripped of the meaning except for the grossest elements of plot and character.  Adding even vowels and cantillation mutes the original. 

Having read Proust and Cervantes in translation, I am convinced that I haven't read these masters at all.  In school, I read Chaucer in Middle English and, apart from feeling quite smug about that, I can now bore people at cocktail parties by reciting the first forty lines in a sonorous and  ponderous voice.  But I do feel that reading it in the 'original' gave me a much better understanding of the work.  (Ask me about The Faerie Queene and I'm likely to give you a different answer.) 

Then comes along this bit of news recently posted on a New York Times blog:  Paradise Lost has just been published into translation. 

From the article: 

Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost” into rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story — to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.

Danielson borrows the word “inimitable” from John Wesley, who in 1763 was already articulating the justification for a prose translation of the poem. Wesley reports that in the competition for the title of world’s greatest poem, “the preference has generally been given by impartial judges to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” but, he laments, “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Harold Bloom made the same observation. Ordinary readers, he said, now “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost’ with full appreciation.”

I am vain, but I'm not so stupid as to disagree with Harold Bloom, but you must forgive me a moment to mourn the passage of another great work into the mists.