techno

Interview with Philip Seib

2012-01-17T17:43:00.003+01:00

Philip Seib is professor of journalism and public diplomacy and professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. He is authot of many books, including The Al Jazeera Effect: how the new global media are reshaping world politics (2008); on next february we will have in bookshops his new book called Al Jazeera English: Global news in a changing world.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born on 1949. Arlington, Virginia, USA.

2) When did you become interested about journalism and public diplomacy?

Long-time interest in how journalism affected policy and politics. Focused on public diplomacy beginning in 2007, when I came to the University of Southern California, which is home of the Center on Public Diplomacy.

3) Al Jazeera was born on 1996, how long time did you need to understand the importance of Al Jazeera for the muslim world?

After the 2000 intifada and the 2001 attacks on the United States, it became clear how important Al Jazeera was to Arab audiences.

4) Al Jazeera english was born on 2006, (beside experts like you) do you think it has been having a real impact towards english speaking audiences?

Through its coverage of events in the Arab world during 2011, Al Jazeera English proved that it is an important journalistic source for English-speaking audiences around the world.

5) On february your new book about Al Jazeera english will be out: what's the main idea behind that book? What's the difference between this new book and the book you wrote on 2008 (the Al Jazeera effect) about Al Jazeera?

The Al Jazeera Effect was about the general importance of satellite television and online news in changing the politics of the Middle East and the rest of the world. Al Jazeera English is more tightly focused on this one channel, and how it brings news of the Global South to the Global North.

6) I watched Al Jazeera english during the egyptian uprising (25th january-11th february 2011) and i thought that the non-stop live coverage of Tahrir Square and the reports were all pro-uprising and were encouraging the "revolution". Do you think that encouraging (even against a dictatorship) an uprising with biased reports is fair journalism?

Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera English feature what might be called "activist journalism". Some purists would disapprove, but others would commend AJ/AJE's role in serving a broad public.

7) How important was Al Jazeera in encouraging the Arab spring?

Extremely. For instance, AlJazeera brought news of events in Tunisia to Egyptians in ways that Egypt's government-run media would never have allowed.

Interview with Daniel Walsh

2011-11-21T15:14:00.004+01:00

Daniel C. Walsh is an assistant professor at Appalachian State University in the Department of Communication. He wrote the book "An air war with Cuba: The United States radio campaign against Castro" (publisher Mcfarland) and he accepted to be interviewed.

1) Where and when were you born?

I was born in Greenville, North Carolina, USA December 2, 1969.

2) What is your first memory of listening to a radio?

I guess my first memory of listening to a radio is riding around in my mother's station wagon. I also remember as a child playing radio station where I would pretend to be a radio announcer and introduce records on a turntable. When I got older I put a walkie talkie up to the stereo speaker and then would go to another room with the other one to make it seem like a real radio.

3) When did u become interested about US propaganda towards Cuba?

I became interested in U.S. propaganda for Cuba when I was in graduate school at Marshall University. I needed a research topic for one of my classes and thought it would be interesting to examine Radio Marti. I thought it was interesting that the United States spent a lot of money on a Radio Free Europe type station for Cuba yet Fidel Castro was still in power. I created a proposal for evaluating the effectiveness of Radio Marti but never actually did the study. A few years later, the Elian Gonzalez custody battle forced people to think about relations with Cuba again. I thought the topic should be studied and wished I could have actually completed the study I proposed. When I was getting my Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina a few years after that, I began thinking about picking up where I left off. The United States and Cuba were still adversaries and Radio Marti was still on the air so I thought it was a legitimate topic.

4) In Cuba there is a dictatorship, how difficult is it to get fair reports about audience studies in Cuba?

Research of Cuban audiences is extremely difficult. One of the primary ways in which the United States obtains information about radio listeners in Cuba is by interviewing immigrants to the United States. The validity of these results is questionable. A Cuban who decides to leave the island and come to the United States may not be a typical Cuban. That person has demonstrated positive feelings toward the United States. One would assume they might be more likely to have positive feelings about Radio Marti as well.

There is a television version of Radio Marti called TV Marti. Practically no one has seen it because the Cuban government has jammed the signal. Radio Marti gets through because a radio signal is more difficult to jam. Officials at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana have conducted their own research in Cuba regarding TV Marti and found that most people on the island cannot see it.

A few years ago the U.S. did a telephone survey of people in Cuba and asked them if they listened to Radio Marti. Most people said they did not. A lot of these people thought that the phone calls were from Cuban officials testing their loyalty to the revolution. A people of the interviewees asked that someone from the government stop by to repair some things. It was obvious that they thought the interviewer was a Cuban official.

5) You are building an archive of international broadcasts, which are the main radio stations in your archive?

The archive of international radio broadcasts was supposed to include Voice of America, Radio Marti, the BBC, Radio Vatican, and as many other radio operations as possible. When I tried to analyze Radio Marti for my dissertation I found that I could not obtain recordings of the station. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act makes it illegal for the federal government to release recordings of radio broadcasts of Radio Marti, VOA, Radio Free Europe or other operations to U.S. citizens. This stipulation was included in the 1948 to prevent the federal government from being in a position to disseminate propaganda to the domestic population the way the Nazis did prior to WWII. The restriction was still in place more than 40 years later.

The law makes no sense in that it only prohibits U.S. officials from releasing recordings or transcripts of programs to U.S. citizens. It does not prevent a U.S. citizen from having these materials. U.S. officials are allowed to disseminate these materials to people outside the United States. The broadcasts encourage listeners to request the materials. What this means is that a U.S. citizen who wanted a recording of a Radio Marti broadcast could have someone in Canada request the information and then mail it back to the person in the U.S. This is legal. That's what I did. to get recordings of Radio Marti. The interesting thing about it was I got the idea from people at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the people that originally originally told me that they couldn't release the materials.

This made no sense to me. I also realized that it made it extremely difficult to research these stations. There is almost no transparency and no way for the public to hold the stations accountable. I thought it was ironic that we fund the broadcasts but cannot listen to them. I thought it would be easier for people like me who wanted to analyze international radio broadcasts if there was an archive of recordings. Vanderbilt University has an archive of television news programs dating to 1968. I was trying to do the same thing for international radio.

The archive is currently on hold. In December of 2010, I contacted some amateur radio groups about recording programs and contributing to the archive. One person said my proposal was a scam and accused me of trying to manipulate people into bypassing copyright restrictions. Most international broadcasts are in the public domain. This person also told me that he or she would be turning my name over to the FBI, CIA, FTC and other authorities. I don't think what I am trying to do is illegal. I contacted officials in Washington who didn't really give me a definitive answer. They said that some of the material is copyrighted because it comes from people contracted to produce content. They didn't say much more than that. I have suspended the operation for now (no recordings were ever collected). I am hoping that some people will express interest and offer to help. No one has so far.

6) Do you think that propaganda radio stations are still useful ?

I do not believe that radio broadcasts are effective propaganda tools in that they cannot "force" a population to overthrow a government. There are examples of how radio broadcasting can be used to create a false sense of reality but that is only if the person is willing to believe. Radio propaganda cannot cause a person to do or believe something the person does not want to do or believe. I think Cuba is the perfect illustration of this. The United States has bombarded the island with propaganda for more than 50 years and the people there have not taken up arms against their government. They don't want to.

I believe that there is still a need for informational (not propaganda) international radio broadcasting. In the early years of Radio Marti, the station covered stories on AIDS and the Chernobyl disaster. Neither had not been covered by Cuban media. The Internet and social media have diminished the role of radio broadcasting in developed parts of the world but not in some of the underdeveloped areas, which tend to need the information more than anyone. Cuba has Internet access but it is limited and often monitored by the government. I think radio also overcomes literacy barriers, which is still a problem for many regions. Until the Internet can be perfected and eliminate the reading requirement, there will be a need for international radio.

Interview with Gunnar Garfors

2011-11-02T23:13:00.004+01:00

for the pic, thanks to Berit Roald, Scanpix

Gunnar Garfors is CEO of Norwegian Mobile TV Corporation (NMTV), he blogs here.

1) When and where were you born?

In Hammerfest, Norway (“the world’s northernmost city”) in May 29, 1975.

2) What is your first memory of radio?

The first thing I remember from the radio was the news about the Alexander Kielland oil rig that capsized in the North Sea on March 27, 1980, killing 123 people. My mom was pretty much in shock, something that made a big impression on a four year old. I remember the scary atmosphere and both the news reader and the reporters being very much effected of what they were reporting. I really started appreciating radio when I was a little older. My parents gave me a FM/SW/MW/LW radio that I used a lot and that taught me to love the power of radio and the great pictures it created. I listened to sports, quiz shows and youth programs from NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) and to SW broadcasts from BBC and Radio Ulster in particular. The latter were playing great music and had a funny DJ at the time I was supposed to be sleeping.

3) What is your opinion about digital radio? Do you think it could work in any country?

Digital radio is a major part of the radio future. It opens up for more radio channels, easier navigation, better coverage and a lot of additional services that work together with the internet and open up for exciting opportunities when it comes to functionality and revenues. It can undoubtedly work in any country. We see that the de facto standard for digital radio, DMB/DAB/DAB+ is being adopted in over 40 countries. The standard is advanced, widespread, mature, already here and it secures equal digital opportunities for everyone.

4) Some experts like Grant Goddard (i interviewed him last year ) are skeptical about the transition to digital radio; what do you think about their views?

I do not consider Grant Goddard an expert in this field. He certainly knows radio from the content side, maybe he should concentrate on that. He portrays himself as a skeptic in order to get PR which he needs for his consultancy business. The best way he can get PR is to distance himself from broadcasters, listeners and advertisers. By doing that he gets to be the guy the media calls to get “the other view.” But what will he do when radio has gone digital, as is about to happen in Norway (FM switch off in 2017), Great Britain (announcement of switch over expected in 2013), Denmark (Minister of Culture wants to switch off FM) and other countries? I think he may be better off staying an expert on content and formatting, even though it will get him less airtime. His views are anyhow extremely conservative, at best. He is doing his best to prevent the transition radio needs, to go digital as the last media out there. Why does he not want to give everyone equal opportunities when it comes to radio? I want more choice, more money to better programs, better reception and easier usage. It is even much greener too. The transition for TV went smoothly, now providing better choice and quality to the vast majority of people. Many people will have to get new radios or to have them adapted, but this is also the case for all other receivers. People do for instance change much more expensive devices such as mobile phones and computers every 1-3 years. Why are radios different in this respect?

5) You are in favour of switching off FM; what should we do on 87,5-108 MHz?

Power companies are looking at these frequencies as a way of transferring data about electricity usage. Other machine to machine communications could also use these frequencies. Frequencies will in any case always be attractive. Offer them to businesses, and there will undoubtedly be good ideas.

6) What do you think of DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale)? Is there a future for digital radio below 30 Mhz?

DRM is great as a complement to DMB/DAB/DAB+ if you are looking to cover vast areas with few people with one or two radio stations. The DRM consortium should push for receivers that combine DMB/DAB/DAB+ and DRM. That way, they will be able to ride on the wave of the digital radio movement we are currently seeing. For DRM to stand on its own will be very difficult as I don’t think it in an isolated manner can compete from technical, financial or functional points of view.

Interview with Jason Manolopoulos

2011-10-26T02:01:00.005+02:00

Jason Manolopoulos is a greek expert of economy, he wrote the book "Greece's odious debt" about the economic situation in Greece. He studied economics in UK (short bio) and he runs an alternative investment fund.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born in 1975 in Athens, Greece.

2) In your opinion, what went wrong in Greece?

Let us recap on how we got here in the first place. The PIGS were lent massive amounts of money by institutions during the era of Greenspan, when there was ample liquidity and low interest rates.There was pressure for free flow of capital under deregulation and free markets mantra. This capital was too great for the countries to productively absorb. (Look at how some of the National Lottery winners typically spend their windfalls – poorly). Politicians misled electorates and other institutions; either by lying on statistics, breaking the Stability & Growth Pact rules, overplaying the eurozone’s inevitability, or pursuing unsustainable fiscal policies.Investors and lenders did not conduct proper due diligence on whether these debts could be paid back. Hence there were numerous events that preceded some hedge funds taking opposing bets. Institutional investors did similar things, selling bonds and going on a buyer’s strike, for the same fundamental reasons – poor credit metrics.

3) When did you start writing the book "Greece's odious debt" ?

April 2009

4) What do you think it will be the solution for Greece and/or Eurozone? / 5) Do you think there will be a future for the Euro?

The questions we should initially focus on are: Should a low value-add production economy be lumped with a high value-add or upper-end economy? Does sufficient labour mobility exist in euroland? Do all countries have flexible product and services markets? The answer to these is no. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t start from here. Exiting the euro would be catastrophic, but staying in means many years of austerity and high unemployment, and difficult conditions in which to make essential economic and political reforms, because the exchange rate is so high relative to the productive economy. Either way, Greece has lost a huge amount of national sovereignty, because we cannot bear these huge debts without default and/or surrendering autonomy to investors or other rescuers who will be in a strong negotiating position.

Too much emphasis has been put on the currency aspect per se. A currency in itself, is no silver bullet. The UK had the British pound in the dismal 1970s and still does today, yet the country is a very different place, post Margret Thatcher’s sweeping reform. Turkey was a basket case over run by corruption in the 1990s and early 2000s, having to resort to IMF bailouts. Today post reform and its cleansing process, its economy is growing strongly and has become a strong regional player. It still has its national currency, as it did previously. Sweden and Zimbabwe have independent currencies un-pegged national currencies, with clearly widely differing economic results.

Interview with David Hendy

2011-02-14T16:45:00.004+01:00

David Hendy is a media historian with a broad interest in the social and cultural impact of broadcasting and cinema over the past two centuries; he's a reader in media and communication in University of Westminster.

He wrote the books Radio and the Global Age (2000) and Life on Air: a History of Radio Four (2007).

I had the chance of interview him.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born in 1962 in the small city of Wells in the west of England - and spent most of my childhood in the region.

2) What is your first memory of radio?

I suppose I remember being a small child, maybe about 2 or 3 years old, playing in the kitchen while my mother did the housework. While she loaded the washing-machine or prepared the evening meal, the radio would be on. It was mostly speech radio, so I'm guessing it was the BBC's old 'Home Service', which included news and plays and discussion programmes, plus a little music every now-and-then. And I can remember sitting next to the radio set one day in particular, to hear my father, who was being interviewed for some reason or another. But it wasn't until I was about ten or eleven that radio's peculiar magic took hold of me. I’d just rescued an old Bakelite radio set from my parents’ attic and installed it next to my bed. I listened mostly at bed-time, when the lights were off. My ear would be pressed hard against the cloth-covered loudspeaker, so the volume could be down low and I could evade discovery. In the darkness, I was transfixed by a small, round, blood-red bulb fixed to the dial. It pulsated into glowing life, decayed into invisibility, then into life again, as I turned slowly through the frequencies to try to catch the faint chatter of distant voices. Out of the electromagnetic swell of white noise, I heard programmes from Paris, Hilversum, Rome. But the ones that gripped me the most were from the other side of the Iron Curtain: Radio Tirana, Radio Moscow… Radio Peking. I can’t remember what they said. It didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was that as they spoke, I felt connected by a gossamer thread with someone 5,000 thousand miles away. As a teenager, then as a student, I briefly lost this connection with radio - I was, I suppose, too busy with other things. But perhaps subconsciously, something of this earlier experience remained, to be re-awakened later, in my late-20s.

3) How much time did you need to write the books Radio in the Global Age and Life on Air?

There are two very different answers to this. In the sense of actually sitting down and writing, Radio in the Global Age took about 1 year. But I started writing it only after several years of working at the BBC and several more years teaching about - and subconsciously thinking a lot about - how radio worked and what it's importance was. So in another sense, Radio in the Global Age was several years in the making. For Life on Air, again, I was drawing, in one sense, from many years of working in radio, listening to radio, talking to radio practitioners, and thinking about the subject. But in practical terms, I spent about a year planning and scheming and doing initial research, then about two years researching in the archives full-time, and finally another two years writing - so about five years altogether, though with some teaching and other work during this period.

4) What is your opinion about digital radio?

I feel ambivalent about digital radio. There's no doubt that digital phenomena such as podcasts and the ability to 'listen-again' to radio has improved my life in many ways. I no longer fear missing my favourite programme on, say BBC Radio 3 or BBC Radio 4: I simply subscribe to it as a podcast and then listen to it when driving the 50 miles or so between home and work. Sound quality's improved, too - and that makes a real difference when listening to music or drama. On the other hand, there are features of the digital revolution that have made little difference to me. Choice is supposed to have multiplied exponentially - but that, I think is more illusory than real, because so many of those who run radio stations are too unimaginative about the medium's possibilities and therefore end up producing programmes that all sound very much alike. Of course, Internet radio makes it theoretically possible to listen to any station or any genre of output from anywhere around the world. And, occasionally, I have taken advantage of this facility, tuning in to, say, a college radio station in the US. But, more often than not, I have experienced no real feeling of 'connection' to such stations. Finding them satisfies an idle curiosity, much as finding radio from beyond the Iron Curtain did when I was a child. But at some crucial psychic level, radio maintains a distinctive 'national' or local bond with its listeners. Perhaps it's because, in Britain, we have the BBC, which is a phenomenal resource that we take too much for granted, yet which has infiltrated British life to an extraordinary degree. Whatever the reason, I miss the BBC terribly when I am abroad. In 2010 spent a lengthy period working in the United States. But despite it being the land if infinite choice, I struggled to find any station - commercial or public service - which gave me pleasure in the way that BBC Radio 3 or 4 have done for years, and will continue, I hope, to give me pleasure for the rest of my life. And, one of the reasons these stations give pleasure, is that in a profound way they are a 'gift' - given to me without any expectation of me having to respond. There is value in passivity. It creates the space to absorb and to think. And there is danger, sometimes, in a forced 'interactivity that removes the opportunity for reflective space. To use the old radio metaphor, we sometimes need to stop 'transmitting' in order to enjoy simply 'receiving'.

5) Are you working on another book?

I'm currently working on two books. Almost finished is a small book called 'Public Service Broadcasting' for publication in 2012. It tries to explore what public service broadcasting is in terms of its role in civic life. My second book, much bigger in scale, is 'Media and the Making of the Modern Mind', which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2014. It explores the ways in which four 'new' media - radio, cinema, television and the internet - have each in turn changed the ways we think and have understood the world over the past 120 years. Some of the ideas in the book were explored, more briefly, in a five-part radio series I presented for the BBC in 2010, called 'Rewiring the Mind'.

Interview with James Cridland

2011-01-26T01:17:00.006+01:00

James Cridland

James Cridland is an english radio expert and a conference speaker, he's managing director of Media UK and he blogs at James Cridland's blog.

I had the chance to interview him.

1) When and where you born?

I was born in London in 1971: the year that the mandatory radio licence was abolished in the UK. It was another two years before commercial radio started broadcasting.

2) How and when did you discover your interest in the radio?

I saved up vouchers from a box of breakfast cereal, and sent off for a free radio. It arrived (in the shape of a box of breakfast cereal itself). I used it for a few hours on the first day I got it, and was very disappointed as I went to sleep: I thought it had ran out. "How does the latest news get in there?" I wondered. "How will it get the latest music? I'll have to buy a new one." The bug had bitten me: and from then on, I was determined to work in the industry.

3) When you were growing up, which radio stations were you listening to?

Radio 4, like my parents - it's a serious news and speech radio station and I felt very grown-up listening to it. Then I listened to a small local private radio station, Signal Radio, when it first launched: and I was hooked on the idea that this station was coming from just down the road.

4) What is your opinion about the transition towards digital radio (DAB,DAB+,DRM, etc)? Do you think that FM-band should be switched off by law (like the british government suggests)?

It's helpful that the government has indicated that simulcasting between FM and DAB should cease. However, in my opinion, the only people who should decide whether analogue radio should be switched off, I believe, are the radio broadcasters. It is not the government's place to commit mass-murder on an ailing commercial radio industry by forcing them to switch off their FM frequencies.

My post in the blog has more on this.

I believe that the future of radio is a multi-platform future: one that includes FM, DAB, and the internet. I also believe that broadcasters should take far more of an interest in the receivers, since it is in their interest to ensure that these are "platform-blind". The listener should not care whether their favourite radio station is on FM, DAB, DRM or the internet: they should just be able to listen. It's silly, in this era of content, to expect listeners to know whether their favourite radio station is on FM or DAB: it should just appear, by name, on their radio.

Apple, Sky, Canal +, Freeview, and many other broadcasters and content providers are working hard to ensure a standard, simple user interface to access their content. It appears odd that radio broadcasters are not doing so.

5) How do you imagine the future of radio?

The future of radio is a multi-platform future.

We have to have broadcast radio to reach hundreds of thousands of people at the same time: the internet can't do that.
We have to have more than one broadcast standard to offer the choice people expect.
We have to use the internet to deliver on-demand content and personalisation; and niche, out-of-area content.
And we have to have all this in one, easy-to-use, device that we'd like to call a "radio".

The future of radio isn't on-demand over live; internet over FM; personalisation over a linear stream - it's all of these things. That'll help keep radio fresh and exciting.

Interview with Marshall T. Poe

2011-01-09T23:32:00.004+01:00

Marshall Poe (1961) is associate professor of history at University of Iowa. Last year (2010) he wrote the book "A history of communications. Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet" (the book is "not yet published" in Cambridge University Press site but it's available in Amazon)

I had the chance to interview him.

1) When did you start using the Internet?

That would be about 1992. I remember because I'd just come back from a year in the Soviet Union.

2) We've seen the crisis of music industry, the crisis of rent of home video (and other similar examples) and do you really think that Internet changes nothing?

Since the 19th century, we in the West have had a deep bias for new technology, and particularly media technology. We think it's going to save us, to fix us, to make a brighter future for us. We fill it with our hopes, and therefore exaggerate its potential. If you read what pundits of the 1950s wrote about, say, television, and compare it to what pundits of the present say about the Internet, you get an eerie sense of deja vu. Television was supposed to "change everything" and the Internet is supposed to do the same. But the former didn't, and the latter won't either. The history of modern media--mass newspapers, radio, TV, and now the Internet--is strikingly continuous. Each provided (and continues to provide) news, entertainment, and commerce, and each is funded primarily by advertising or the state. That later media are "better" than earlier media is some technical sense is important, but not important enough to "change everything." Like its modern predecessors, the Internet will change some things and not others, and the system in which it is entrenched--modern liberal capitalism--will remain unaltered.

My sense is that many people don't know this and some don't want to believe it. If I were to write an essay called "The Internet Changes Everything," few people would pay any attention to it and those who did would probably agree. But if I were to write an essay called "The Internet Changes Nothing" (which I did), it would get a lot of attention, most of it negative (which it did). Why the radical difference in responses? The reason is not empirical: "the Internet changes everything" is just as false as "the Internet changes nothing." No modern medium changes everything or nothing. Rather, the split has to do with ignorance and investment. Again, many people don't know that the history of modern media is continuous (they believe the hype) and many others are committed to the idea of discontinuity (they create the hype).

So, in direct answer to your question, no, I don't believe the internet changes nothing. When I called my essay "The Internet Changes Nothing" I was trying to make a point about about our tendency to exaggerate the impact of modern media technologies in general and the Internet in particular. What I believe is that like mass circulation newspapers, commercial radio, and broadcast TV, the Internet will change some things and not others.

3) Don't you think that Internet may probably need longer time to change social structures of the society?

I'm reminded of that famous quip attributed to Mao. A reporter asked the Great Helmsman what he though of the French Revolution. "It's too soon to tell," he responded. The history of media shows that it sometimes takes centuries for the implications of new forms of communication to work themselves out and reach a kind of equilibrium with the other institutions and values in a society. This was the case with writing and print. But I'm not sure that it will be the case with the Internet. Writing and print were quite different than the media that came before them, so they were disruptive (though they took a long time to disrupt). That's not really true of the Internet. It looks and acts a lot like a TV. What do you use a TV for? Mostly for news and entertainment. What do corporations use TV for? Mostly to sell you stuff. What do you use the Internet for? Mostly for news and entertainment, though you can also look things up and chat with friends. What do corporations use the Internet for? Mostly to sell you stuff, though they also use it to store and communicate data. Nothing really set the stage for the reception of writing and (mass) print; TV set the stage the Internet, at least in the Free World.

4) You think that Internet won't change everything but don't you think that Obama wouldn't be president if Internet had not been existed now?

No. The reason Obama was elected has much more to do with the two-party system than the Internet. Nothing about the Internet favors Republicans or Democrats. Internet or no, a Republican or Democrat is going to occupy the White House. This time it was a Democrat; next time (some next time) it will be a Republican. The Internet won't change that, at least anytime soon.

5) What do you think about sociologists like Manuel Castells who built an entire theory around network society (a kind of Internet-society)?

I don't really like the the phrase "network society." It's redundant. All human groups ("societies") of whatever size, shape or purpose are made of networks, that is, non-random (structured) links between people. What's interesting to me is that different media technologies enable people to create different kinds (sizes, shapes, purposes) of networks. Speech makes speech networks, writing makes writing networks, print makes print networks, audiovisual media (TV and the like) make A/V networks, and the Internet makes Internet networks. Once writing was invented, none of these media-enabled networks was "pure," that is, existed in isolation from other media (and here I mean in place with writing). The first writing network was really a speech + writing network; the first print network was a speech + writing + print network; and so on. Today we in the developed world live in a speech + writing + print + A/V + Internet network. This being so, it doesn't seem sensible to speak of "Internet society," for there is no such thing. There is an Internet network, structured by the capacities of the Internet medium. But it's embedded in other, earlier media. Because it's embedded, it's hard to study the internet network in isolation. It's not impossible, though, and sociologist like Castells are doing their best.

Interview with René Wolf

2010-12-28T01:40:00.005+01:00

René Wolf teaches Modern European History at Royal Holloway University of London and runs the academic podcasting service backdoorbroadcasting.net; in May 2010 Palgrave Macmillan published his book "The Undivided Sky. The Holocaust on East and West German Radio in the 1960s"

I had the chance to interview him.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born in 1958 in Kobe, Japan of German parents. My parents moved out there in 1950 to work for a German multinational. I lived in Tokyo up to 1970, when we returned to Germany. I left Germany in 1976 with no formal qualifications and came to London.

2) What had you been doing, before working in the university?

I had a variety of jobs, from window cleaner, dishwasher, picture-framer, waiter, barman, actor, theatre director until in 1982 I became involved in running a Jazz club in London, which I did for the next 10 years. Due to ill health I had to stop my night-time life and started to study, first A-levels, then a History degree, then a Masters, and finally a PhD, which I completed in 2006.

3) How and when did you discover your interest in the radio?

When I was about 8 years old my father gave me a transistor radio - a little Sony one. I kept it under my pillow and listened to it at night - to pop music of the time (1960s) with DJs like Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasem on the American Forces Network (AFN) and a variety of Japanese stations. Later I aquired a shortwave radio and listened to broadcasts from all over the world - I must have been 10 or 12 at the time. This continued - I still listen to some shortwave today - although it's easier today with internet radio.

The book (which was my PhD thesis) came out of that interest, and initially I wanted to just write about the radio's ability to transcend space (esp the Berlin Wall), but what I found in the archives really dictated the content - the Auschwitz Trials and Germany's past.

4) Do you think that the radio was important in building a "new identity" in West and East Germany after the World War II?

Radio was certainly very instrumental in establishing a new German identity. The most important phase for this, I think, were the early years immediately after the war, when radio was in the hands of the Allies. Initially it was the Soviet radio which had the 'friendly' approach, wheras the Western Allies were more interested in using the medium for de-nazification and broadcasts from the Nuremberg Trials. This soon changed and the ideological battle-lines were drawn. But it is important to note that East German radio was not just Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s the GDR radio output was very impressive, which was not always the case with all the regional broadcasters in the West. But the focus of my study lies more with some of the (mostly left-leaning) radio journalists of the West, who were extremely important in forging a new German identity.

5)What was the treatment for Germany during the Copenaghen Plan of 1948?

The 1948 Copenhagen Radio Frequency Plan allocated two AM wavelengths to Germany as radio, and expecially medium wave, was considered a powerful media tool in the eyes of the Allies. In reality this was far more complex and the shortage of AM stations did not make the slightest bit of difference. Most stations were available either on the LW or SW bands and many people still had old crystal sets. The old 'Volksempfänger' were all tri-band (LW, MW, SW) and in the same year as the Copenhagen Plan, 1948, Telefunken AG was already producing radio sets with VHF (FM) as standard. The switchover the more localised FM transmission happened throughout the 1950s, in East and West, although the GDR did not (along with many other nations) adhere the the Copenhagen Plan. Frequency allocations, along with 'Jamming' are two of the great myths of post-war radio history, hyped up in the frenzy of the Cold War. In reality radio broadcasts were diverse and lively, and above all, everywhere.

6) What happened to the East German Radio right after the re-unification?

East German Radio was already quite diverse and localised at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two main stations, DDR1 and DDR2, as well as the station aimed at West Germany, Stimme der DDR, the station for Berlin, Berliner Runfunk and the Youth Radio Station DT64 were all integrated into more localised radio stations in the five new Bundesländer. These very much followed the Western model of main broadcast studios in the state capital, and smaller ones in the regions. At present, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is covered by the (Hamburg-based) NDR, Thüringen, Sachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt are integrated into the MDR, and Berlin and Brandenburg are covered by the BBR. There are a few exeptions to the complete integration of East German radio into the West German media, most notably 'Deutschlandradio' which is really the continuation of the old 'Deutschlandsender' and can trace its history back to 1926. This international broadcaster has a very high quality output and rivals, if not surpasses, Germany's other international radio broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.

What of course is so interesting now is that all these are available on the internet, digital, live and not live, which of course makes a mockery of the 1975 Geneva Frequency Plan.

7) How did GDR radio describe the events of 1989?

On the whole the East German media reported what was going on, as 'Peristroika' had also somewhat taken hold in the GDR. There was an uneasy undertone, and a lot of confusion in the reporting on 9 November 1989. The radio output managed to create a clearer analysis by the evening of that day, but the the day was really a 'television event', from that fateful utterance about new East-West travel regulations by Günter Schabowski a press conference to the opening of the check-points and the mass of East Germans flooding into the West.

Much more interesting is the archive material of the reporting on the Leipzig demonstrations, which started about a year earlier. There you have initially a very hard-line coming from the SED, and then factual reporting of 'disturbances' more like reporting about rowdy football fans.

The German Radio Archive (DRA) in Berlin-Babelsberg is a goldmine of material, most of it not digitized yet, and I fear that lots of the very old magnetic tape will not survive.

Interview with Grant Goddard

2010-12-05T14:50:00.006+01:00

Grant Goddard is one of the best expert of radio and he runs a very interesting blog about radio and its evolution in UK and abroad.

I asked him an interview.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born in the 1950’s in Surrey, just west of London.

2) What is your first memory of listening to the radio?

In the 1960s, I remember 'Big L' (Radio London) booming out from the car
radio. The music was exciting, the DJs were entertaining - it was a great
introduction to radio. I also remember listening to Radio Luxembourg in the
evenings, playing songs that other stations did not. Then there was the
excitement of BBC Radio 1 launching in 1967 to fill the gap after Big L had
closed down. It was a time of great changes in radio, which made the
experience inspiring for young people.

3) When did you start listening to the radio and why did you like it?

I listened to radio for the music. I had always loved pop music and radio
provided the opportunity to hear all sorts of new artists, new songs and new
styles of music. We had a tape recorder that we used to record our favourite
songs from the radio so that we could listen to them whenever we wanted.
Radio provided my music education, for which I am eternally grateful.

4) When did you start working for a radio?

My first involvement in radio was in the early 1970s, when I worked for AM weekend pirate radio stations in London, including Radio Concord, London Weekend Radio, Skyport Radio and Swinging Radio England. I initially answered the listener phone line and then presented programmes, on my own and also with my friend Jerry.

5) In your book "DAB digital radio -licensed to fail" you seem very
skeptic about the success of digital radio in UK; do you think there's
no hope for digital radio in the foreseeable future?

I believe that digital radio has a great future. The problem in the UK is
specifically about the DAB platform and the way it has been implemented. The
technological developments that have enabled radio to be distributed all
around the world, and to a dazzling range of connected devices, are
absolutely incredible for the radio medium. Unfortunately, DAB had been
marketed in the UK as a means for existing radio broadcasters to maintain
their control over the radio market. Increasingly, consumers have been
disinterested in DAB radio, as demonstrated by declining sales of DAB
receiver hardware in the UK. The outcome is that DAB will not succeed as a
replacement for existing FM/AM broadcast radio. But digital radio as a whole
has a positive future.

6) What is your opinion about DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale)? and DRM+?

It seems that DRM will be useful for longer range radio broadcasts, though we are in a period when shortwave is being used less and less by international broadcasters. Those places that are most reliant on shortwave (Africa, Latin America, etc) are likely to have the slowest take-up of new, relatively expensive hardware technologies such as DRM. As a result, it is hard to see DRM as anything more than a supplemental technology to analogue reception. Just because a technology is inherently better does not guarantee its take-up (viz Betamax and digital compact cassettes).

7) As a paradox, could we say that in Italy digital radio has more chances for success than in the UK because Italy has basically skipped DAB and it's going straight to DAB+?

The biggest challenge for implementing DAB is the economics of radio, rather than whether the codec is DAB or DAB+. There are at least three economic issues. Firstly, consumers update their radio hardware infrequently, requiring simulcasting on analogue and DAB for at least 10, maybe 20, years, which at least doubles a station’s transmission costs for a long period. Secondly, advertisers use radio because it is a ‘mass’ medium, so they have no interest in using DAB until it reaches millions of people, which results in no revenues from the DAB platform for the first 10, maybe 20, years. Thirdly, consumers already have a large choice (compared to TV) of analogue stations on AM/FM, so it is hard to find ‘new’ radio content that will motivate them sufficiently in large numbers to buy new DAB radios. These economic issues make it unlikely that DAB+ will have any more success than DAB.

8) Are you sure that there is future for "radio on radio spectrum" or
is it just a waste of time because internet-radio will rule above any
other alternative systems?

I think that broadcast radio (FM/AM) still has a future because reception is
so robust, as a result of 50+ years of investment in the extensive
transmission systems. I can stand in the middle of nowhere and still pick up
broadcast radio. Internet radio cannot match that level of universality at
present. Eventually, the IP platform may be able to compete head-on with the
broadcast platform, but we are not at that stage yet. For the next few
years, internet-delivered radio is a very useful supplemental platform to
broadcast radio that offers the consumer a much wider choice of content and
the ability to timeshift programmes. It is important to remember that, when
local or national emergencies happen, it is broadcast radio that citizens
turn to for information, because electrical power cuts bring IP networks
(and even television) to a standstill. A single transmitter on long wave can
cover almost the whole UK - that is a difficult distribution system to beat!

9) Since your youth, you've beeing seeing huge change of radio-set (a topic that it's rarely discussed), from analog radio-set to digital display (including RDS) of today sets. What's your opinion about it? Is there any evolution that you'd like to see in the near future?

At the end of the day, it is content that drives people to listen to the radio. All the technology does is make it possible to deliver that content to them. Some of the most popular radio stations have had less than perfect reception experiences – Radio Luxembourg on AM, Laser 558 on AM, Atlantic 252 on long wave, and all the FM pirate stations – but consumers will sacrifice quality for content any day. This is why people are happy to listen to low-fi mp3’s on their mobile phones. I think this phenomenon will remain. The biggest difference between then and now is the huge choice of stations offered by IP. When I grew up, there were never more than a handful of radio stations to choose from. Now, there are thousands. The challenge now is to enable consumers to find something of interest to them and to help them navigate their way around the global menu of radio available to them. We need a Google for radio that will deliver search results to a listener, however arcane their request for a radio station to match their tastes.

Interview with Hayo about financial crisis of Eurozone

2010-11-23T01:37:00.003+01:00

Bernd Hayo is a german Professor of Macroeconomics at Marburg Center for Institutional Economics.; he wrote several papers about ECB and Eurozone.

I asked him a short interview about the ongoing financial crisis of Eurozone.

1) According to you, after the greek situation and the irish situation, what went wrong in the European Union?

I think that it was wrong to give up the 'no bailout'-clause based on the reason that it is necessary for the survival of the euro area. From my perspective, there exists no necessary linkage between the sovereign debt crisis and the survival of the euro. Look at the situation in the US: California is bankrupt but nobody thinks that it should leave the US dollar currency union. If the EU had let Greece become bankrupt, creditors would have lost money. Nothing wrong with that. Costs of increasing Greek government debt would have risen-again nothing wrong with that. It would have made it clear to Greece that it ought to address its problem of tax evasion and corruption-this is a good thing. Now it is the EU which is seemingly responsible for the hardship awaiting Greek citizens in the future. In my view, there is one argument that would help explain why the EU was so keen on saving Greece: the continuing instability of the European banking system. But then Germany and the other relatively more solvent governments should have intervened directly in the financial markets again, as now we face two situations of moral hazard: private banks know that they will be bailed out and governments know that they will be bailed out too. This does not bode too well for the future.

2) What do you think about the decision of 3rd may 2010 when ECB decided to suspend its minimum threshold for Greek debt "until further notice"? Don't you think it's a big change in monetary policy and independence of ECB?

In practice, it is not such a big thing as Greece is small and the ECB sterilised the intervention (i.e. kept the monetary base constant). It is a violation of fundamental principles, though, and one can only wonder what is going to happen if more countries start encountering similar sovereign debt problems than Greece. If the ECB started buying government bonds from lots of countries than its mandate of keeping price stability could be in peril. This could really endanger the integrity of the European currency union.

3) What do you think about the hypothesis of expulsion or withdrawal of acountry from EMU? Do you think it could be possible, as extrema ratio, to save EMU?

First, I do not think that European monetary union is endangered by one country's sovereign debt problem in the same way as California's bankruptcy does not endanger the US dollar area. Second, there is no legal basis for a country's expulsion from EMU. A country could consider moving out on its own accord (of course, other EMU members could in principle exert strong political pressure), as I would find it unlikely that the political will of a free country would be disregarded by the other EMU members. However, the costs would be high indeed: loss of credibility, loss of deep capital markets, loss of trade, loss of ECB as lender of last resort, etc.

Bandwidth crunch: myth or real threat? 3

2010-11-16T14:30:00.006+01:00

Another post about the so-called "bandwidth crunch": an interview with MIX, the internet exchange point of Milan.

1) a ABI research in august 2007 (quoted by many sites afterwards) said: “The increasing bandwidth demands on cable operators will soon reach crisis stage, yet this is a ‘dirty little industry secret’ that no one talks about.”
What does MIX think about it? Is a "bandwidth crunch" a real threat?

Well, this is not a question having a simple answer beeing strictly related to the complexity of the Network and also the the ABI research statement would have to be read in a more articulated way.
Let's have a look at the macro Internet infrastructure: it can be roughly modeled into two main parts; from one side we have the access networks (the network components facing the end user, such as the DSL access networks, the wireless access stage for mobile users, the wi-fi areas); at the other side we have the long-haul transport networks and the network to network interconnections infrastructures where the IXPs like MIX play a major role.These two environments may belong to different operators or large operators may provide them both, according to their size and coverage.

Despite MIX and other IXPs experience a stable and strong traffic growth year after year , we do not foresee any significant bandwidth crunch problem here. Fiber transmission technology is progressing at a pace where long haul connections can accommodate even the most optimistic growth, where high speed Ethernet environments like IXP - even if 100 Gbps will be delayed till 2011 - will not significantly suffer from it while the traffic we expect will still grow significantly.

If exists a possible threat it could be at the edge of operators' networks, on the access part. End users are eager for high bandwidth while nobody is willing to pay more for it.
In large and industrialized country FTTH access infrastructure is the most reasonable solution. ISP and network providers may rely on this shared infrastructure focusing on services provided to end users.
This requires availability by network operators to long term investments and - maybe more difficult ! - a long term vision.

2) Worst case scenario: a terrorist wants to hit the MIX: if he succeded, what would happen to connection in Italy?

Internet does not stop to work. It would happen that part of Internet traffic going from one provider to another could flow slower beeing force to be routed through alternative connections not always enough sized. End-user could experience slowing down in accessing web sites but just if they are located outside their providers network. This is due to the fact that any ISP connected to MIX has at least one other connection to the Big Internet independent by MIX switches and MIX DC (paradigma of "Internet diversity").

3) What's the percentage of growth that MIX can handle (in the near future) ?

MIX adopts technologies and equipment able to manage big growth of traffic: at today we are configured for beeing able to manage more than three times current traffic exchanged on our infrastructures.

4) Does MIX think that the present infrastructure (generally, in the world) is suitable for IP-TV?

In the world there are huge differences between countries in terms of access infrastructure and is very difficult to answer to this question without keeping in mind the overall situations.
Countries where the copper lines are relatively short (few km from the homes to the public switch) can provide good IPTV services on DSL lines. Other countries must switch to FTTH or wireless LTE network to offer good IPTV service experience to end users. In general HDTV over IP is possible only through fiber access and this is why the present infrastructure in general is not really ready for that, at least not anywhere.

(Thanks to Valeria Rossi of MIX for the interview)

Bandwidth crunch: myth or real threat? 2

2010-07-01T14:40:00.002+02:00

Another post about the so-called "bandwidth crunch": an interview with NaMex, the internet exchange point of Rome.

1) a ABI research in august 2007 (quoted by many sites afterwards) said: “The increasing bandwidth demands on cable operators will soon reach crisis stage, yet this is a ‘dirty little industry secret’ that no one talks about.” Similar thing was said in february 2010 by RIM co-CEO. What does Namex think about it? Is a "bandwidth crunch" a real threat?

The growing demand for interactive and multimedia services in recent years has led content providers to an increase in the demand for bandwidth to Internet service providers. The current transmission technologies shift a large flow of data on the backbone of the operators, always keeping up with the increasing demand of the bandwidth from content providers. Today, however, Internet traffic has moved from the core of its infrastructure, represented by international transit providers (Tier-1). Part of the traffic is exchanged directly between content providers and customer networks.

So, if the core doesn’t have bandwidth problems, for example in Italy the growth of traffic shows up some problems about the users access lines where the “broadband technology” is not very radicalized: too few investments by Access Providers due to poor use by the population of multimedia services and so-called Web 2.0 applications.

2) Worst case scenario: a terrorist wants to hit the Namex: if he succeded, what would happen to connection in Rome?

The original design of the Internet was aimed at avoiding that a failure in one of its nodes could impact the overall functioning of the network, later in time people started to think about site availability, apparently forgetting the original design principle of the network itself. From a theoretical point of view, a failure of NaMeX should not affect the overall Internet traffic, neither locally, nor at a broader level. In practice, as experienced in past outages, we can expect some minor difficulties for ISPs not fully exploiting redundancy of physical links and logical forwarding paths.

3) What's the percentage of growth that Namex can handle (in the near future) ?

As the current utilization of our switching infrastructure is way below its nominal capacity, we could manage twice or three times the current peak traffic as well, without any need for upgrades.

4) Does Namex think that the present infrastructure (generally, in the world) is suitable for IP-TV?

In the Italian scenario, especially in suburban areas, edge access network is still unsuitable for these kinds of applications. Nonetheless, there is not a generalized answer for the entire world: while Japanese have 1Gbps fiber connections to their home, we can expect many european countries experiencing the same “digital-divide” issue as Italy.

5) Namex is a non-profit internet exchange; in USA some Internet exchanges are profit organizations and are listed on Nasdaq: what do you think the advantages and disadventages of being non-profit are?

NaMeX was established as a non-profit consortium whose goal was to provide a set of useful services to its members, that is: members gathered together to setup an infrastructure that was considered useful to all of them. In this sense, there is no reason to think NaMeX as a profit organization, as its guiding principles are mutualituy and neutrality. Being non-profit also ensures that revenues are wholly invested in infrastructural upgrades and organizational improvement.

(Thanks to Flavio Luciani of Namex for accepting the interview)

Bandwidth crunch: myth or real threat? 1

2010-06-29T03:21:00.004+02:00

Is bandwidth crunch (or bandwidth crisis) a real treath or just a myth?

Let's have a look backward.

10 december 1998: CNN says "Study sees bandwidth crunch in 1999"

March 2002: The expression "bandwidth crunch" starts to get in common language, step by step, because it's included (as a name of a subchapter) in the sixth edition of the ITU’s World Telecommunication Development Report.

14 august 2007: ABI research says "Cable bandwidth crisis approaching" and this article led to a huge wave of other articles talking about scary bandwidth crunch. Many articles quoted this part of the article:

Vice president and research director Stan Schatt: “The increasing bandwidth demands on cable operators will soon reach crisis stage, yet this is a ‘dirty little industry secret’ that no one talks about.”

But they didn't quote another part saying:

Some of the solutions noted in the study — such as rate shaping and expanding spectrum beyond 750 MHz — have already been undertaken by some cable operators (particularly in the United States). However, a number of other solutions will come into play during the 2007-2012 forecast period, including spectrum upgrades coupled with node-splitting, switched digital video, PON overlay, MPEG-4 compression, and home gateway bandwidth management solutions.

16 february 2010: Economic Times (english language indian newspaper) wrote: "Blackberry maker RIM warns of bandwisth crisis" and, again, another huge wave of articles in the web talking about bandwidth crisis. The most quoted words were:

Lazaridis [co-CEO of RIM] said: "If we don't start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States."

This article (27 dec 2007) of Techdirt (US technology blog) has an interesting point of view:

the "threat" of a bandwidth crunch is pretty much a myth. We're not running out of bandwidth, and the ongoing upgrades to the network should be able to handle whatever growth comes along. There's no reason to panic... yet, that's not the message that the telcos want you to hear. After all, it's in their interest to work up fears of internet capacity problems so that politicians will pass legislation providing them with subsidies or other unnecessary benefits.

11 years and 2 months after the CNN article, we haven't had any bandwidth crunchc, we've had bandwidth expansion.

The best thing is to ask the Internet Exchange Points and i started asking the AMS-IX (Amesterdam Internet Exchange)

1) a ABI research in august 2007 (quoted by many sites afterwards) said: “The increasing bandwidth demands on cable operators will soon reach crisis stage, yet this is a ‘dirty little industry secret’ that no one talks about.”
Similar thing was said in february 2010 by RIM co-CEO.
What does AMS-IX think about it? Is a "bandwidth crunch" a real threat?

Whether a bandwidth crunch is to be considered a real threat probably depends on what part of the world you are talking about. The Netherlands and most of Western Europe, home base of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, do not cope with serious capacity problems.

2) Worst case scenario: a terrorist wants to hit the AMS-IX: if he succeded, what would happen to connection in Netherlands?

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is a so-called distributed exchange and is currently present in 7 separate co-locations throughout Amsterdam. Our office is situated in the centre of Amsterdam separate from these locations. All our co-locations are professional datacenters equipped with high security standards and extensive backup facilities for power and cooling. There is no "one" AMS-IX location. Recent studies have shown that most of our members are connected to more than one Internet Exchange, have several private interconnects and buy transit from different providers. In the most unlikely event that someone would succeed to disrupt our service by targeting all of our seven locations at once, the Internet traffic will be rerouted over other exchanges, private interconnects and or carriers.

3) What's the percentage of growth that AMS-IX can handle (in the near future) ?

AMS-IX has always been a frontrunner concerning traffic load capacity and creating enough capacity for future traffic growth. Right now our theoretical capacity exceeds the actual traffic that flows over our Exchange by several times. Our current traffic load is just under a terabit while our platform is able to handle 4 x 1.2 terabit and is equipped with the possibility to scale up and be able to handle 8 x 1.2 terabit.

4) Does AMS-IX think that the present infrastructure (generally, in the world) is suitable for IP-TV?

It is hard for us say anything about subject, certainly worldwide. AMS-IX does not look into applications. We work with IP traffic in general and for that we see no serious capacity problems in the Netherlands or for Western Europe.

5) Is AMS-IX profit or non profit organization?

AMS-IX is a not for profit organization. We have an association and a company. The association owns the company, which operates on a not-for-profit basis. AMS-IX pricing is simple and straightforward. It's just a simple portfee, no additional membership fees or install charges. Prices are defined on cost-basis including planned investments for platform extensions and upgrades to secure business continuity.

(Thanks to Anna Kocks of AMS-IX for accepting the interview)

Interview with Gary Frost about history of FM

2010-05-18T00:20:00.006+02:00

Gary Lewis Frost was born in Idaho (USA) and studied to be an engineer at California State University--Fullerton; later, he received a Ph.D. in history at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill.
The Johns Hopkins University Press published his book called "Early FM Radio: Incremental technology in Twentieth-Century America". I won't pretend i read his book (i haven't but i'm willing to) but i asked him few questions about it.

1) How would you describe the main point of the book "Early FM Radio: Incremental technology in Twentieth-Century America" ?

A: Most readers, I hope, will credit the book principally for correcting errors in the traditional history of FM radio's origins. For more than half a century, historians have claimed that practical broadcast FM technology sprang from the mind of one man, Edwin Howard Armstrong, during his solitary quest to conquer static noise. They have also claimed that by the time Armstrong patented his system in 1933, only he had not abandoned frequency modulation as unworkable. Early FM Radio debunks these and several other false claims.

2) If the commonly accepted history of FM radio is wrong, why did this account last for more than 50 years?

A: For one thing, any serious historian who desired to take a fresh look at early FM really had to understand how radio technology works. I'm not the first person to possess the technical knowledge required to write a book about FM radio's origins, but historians like me have probably comprised a very small group, perhaps a handful of individuals. Second, the most important archive of primary sources, the collection of Armstrong's papers (stored at Columbia University, New York), has been especially difficult to research. It's several hundred boxes of sketchily-indexed papers and microfilm, and only recently have Columbia's archivists had the funding to begin cataloging the collection adequately.

Finally, ever since 1956, the year Lawrence Lessing introduced the traditional history of FM in his engaging biography of Edwin Howard Armstrong, those who might have aspired to overturn that history have encountered a psychological obstacle. Lessing played on his readers' sympathies by describing Armstrong as a man of singular genius and moral integrity, who after inventing FM radio in 1933 courageously fought the heartless mega-corporation (i.e., RCA) that attempted to suppress his creation. Later, RCA tried to rob him of credit for inventing FM, and he spent a fortune defending his patents. Lessing also implied that Armstrong's suicide during the patent trials amounted to an act of martyrdom in defense of individualism, anti-corporatism, and technological progress. If my own experience is representative, it can be emotionally difficult even to think about questioning this story.

3) When was your interest for radio born? and How?

A: Although I listened to shortwave radio when I was a boy, and later worked as an electronic engineer, my interest in the history of radio surfaced only after I entered the humanities. I was seeking a historical topic for my master's thesis, and my graduate school advisor suggested early radio. I ended up writing about Reginald Fessenden, the Canadian who first transmitted the human voice using something like amplitude modulation in 1900. When it came time to choose a topic for my doctoral dissertation, I was open to almost anything, but I committed to FM radio quickly. Only a few hours of research revealed that although without exception every book that examined FM radio's history derived from Lessing's Armstrong biography, that book failed to provide citations, and contained several serious contradictions and omissions. Originally, I set out only to resolve those contradictions, and to fill in gaps about the actual technology. I never imagined that I'd eventually publish a book arguing that Lessing was wrong about so many things.

4) In developed countries they are trying to start digital modulations (mostly Ibiquity in US and DAB/DAB+ in Europe) but the listeners don't seem to be happy about it; what's your opinion about the transition towards digital radio?

I'm not familiar with the specific problems of Ibiquity and DAB/DAB+ that you mention, so I'll venture to guess why some listeners might express dissatisfaction with digital audio in general. The history of FM radio suggests both technical and nontechnical reasons. Perhaps somewhere along the signal path--from studio microphone to the listener's speakers--shortcuts have been taken that degrade audio fidelity. A wobbly sampling frequency or some other distorting factor created by an inferior analog-to-digital converter for example, will cause distortions on playback. So will the misuse of digital audio technology. Lowering the sampling frequency narrows the audio bandwidth. An excessively “lossy” method of conversion discards too much data to preserve fidelity. Again, I'm making these guesses solely on what the history of FM teaches us. In 1940 RCA proposed that the Federal Communication Commission establish an FM broadcast service with a maximum allowed frequency swing of 100 Khz. We should be thankful that the commission rejected that proposal and adopted a standard of 150 Khz instead. Otherwise, FM radio today would not sound as good as it does.

I want to add that by broadening our perspective beyond just the hardware, we'll almost always find non-technical factors that influence technical choices. Audio engineers and listeners typically have limited budgets, which motivate them to use cheaper (and thus too often inferior) apparatus. And then there's the sometimes bewildering factor of listener psychology. During my research I discovered many people in the 1940s and 1950s who expressed a preference for AM radio over FM. Their explanations resemble those of many people today who object to digital audio on principle: FM, they protested, sounded sterile and cold, and even “ghastly in its realism.” I don't know if this kind of thinking accounts for much listener dissatisfaction with Ibiquity and DAB/DAB+ today, but I've heard many people who have nothing but entirely subjective reasons to back their assertions that analog audio always sounds better than digital sound.

2 Interviews about presidential debates

2010-03-30T23:26:00.006+02:00

Sheila Blackford is library specialist for Miller Center of Public Affairs.
I asked her few questions.

1) How many people watch the presidential speeches in Miller site?

The Presidential Speech Archive at the Miller Center of Public Affairs gets almost 10 percent of the Center’s total web traffic. In raw numbers that means that the detail pages for the speeches plus the main page were viewed more than 81,500 times in the last month (from February 21 to March 24, 2010).

2) For Miller institute, is it very hard to get in possess with old video of former presidents?

To obtain a copy of the presidential speeches, the Miller Center partners with the National Archives presidential libraries (for example, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum--http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/ or the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library-- http://www.reaganlibrary.com/). These libraries exist for presidents from Herbert Hoover forward. From John F. Kennedy forward, it is relatively easy to obtain video copies of the speeches from these libraries. However, it is much more complicated to obtain videos for earlier presidents (Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover) because the footage is not in the public domain but is protected by copyright and owned by television news networks.

3) Who owns the copyright of speeches of former presidents?

We post the videos on our site under the assumption that they are in the public domain. However, we recommend that anyone wishing to use or copy the video speeches, contact the relevant presidential library to get a definitive statement about the copyright before proceeding because we are not the official custodians of the records and cannot make a definitive statement about the copyright status.

4) Do you think that the presidential debates are decisive or, most of the times, is it a just a show for the media industry?

There have been moments in presidential election history where the presidential debates have made a difference in the election. Most famously are the Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960, which historians argue helped tip the balance toward Kennedy. However, generally they are not a decisive event but help people learn more about the candidates and their positions, and reaffirm for the voters the candidate that they already preferred.

Alan Schroeder is an associate professor at Northeastern University (Boston) and he wrote a book called Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV (Columbia University Press, 2000)
I asked him few questions.

1) Do you think that the presidential debates are decisive or, most of the times, is it a just a show for the media industry?

In some cases they have been very influential, such as 1960 with Kennedy and Nixon and also 1980 with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Decisive is probably too strong a word, because it's impossible to separate debates from all the other factors that influence voting decisions.

2) This year, for first time in history, there will be a general election debate in UK (with 3 candidates). What do you think about foreign "adaptations" of US presidential debates? Do you think it will work among 3 speakers or will lose "duel-like" style?

More than 70 countries around the world have held live televised debates among candidates for president or prime minister. Last year both Iran and Afghanistan joined the list of countries that have experimented with TV debates. Debates have proven to be very popular in all parts of the world. Voters like them because they are both entertaining and educational. The element of being live and unscripted also heightens public and media interest.

Three debaters on the stage does change the dynamic, though it's impossible to predict how the format will work in the UK prime minister debates. In the US we had one round of three-way debates in 1992 that included the first President Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. Perot more or less won the first debate, Clinton won the second, and Bush performed well in the third. So who knows?

3) On 1968 Nixon ran again for White House, on 1972 he sought a second term and both times refused to challenge in presidential debates (i would say he could do that because there was not an established tradition of having presidential debates). I think that today a candidate for the White House can not refuse a debate (like Nixon did on 1968 and 1972). Since when, can't a candidate say "No, i won't go in a presidential debate" without seeming weak?

At this point in the US it would be just about impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid a debate. The tradition in this country is too well established. In other countries, candidates still manage to refuse -- just this year in the Ukraine, to name one example. In the US it would take an extreme national emergency for an incumbent president to get out of debating.

4) Who had the idea of a televised (and radio broadcast too) presidential debate in 1960?

Many people were involved in the beginning, but essentially the Kennedy-Nixon debates were a creation of the three major television networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC.

5) Using Internet, do you think it's possible to make innovations to presidential debates?

Yes, we see this already. The YouTube format, with citizens submitting questions on video, has been used successfully in both the US and New Zealand. Interactive online debates are now common as well. Nonetheless, debates remain primarily a television exercise that plays out secondarily on the internet.

6) Who owns the copyright of presidential debates? Broadcasters or speakers?

In America the debates are produced by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, which I assume holds the copyright. I'm not an expert on the legal aspect of this, but it seems to me that video clips from all the debates are available to anyone who wants to use them. So the material may exist in the public domain, or perhaps there's some kind of common creative license that applies -- I'm just not sure.

7) We know that presidential candidates prepare for the debates: How can they prepare? Which advice would you give to a candidate?

Candidates prepare for debates in a variety of ways. In US presidential debates it is typical for the candidates to undergo full-scale rehearsals involving mock opponents, using the exact format of the actual debate. Candidates also do extensive reading about the issues and about their opponents' positions in order to prepare for debates. Typically the practice sessions are videotaped and critiqued by the candidates' advisors.

As for advice, I would remind candidates that debates are a different form of political performance than other campaign appearances such as press conferences, speeches, and interviews. Candidates need to have a thorough understanding of the format and also of their specific objectives for each debate. Finally, I would say that in spite of the pressure, candidates should try to enjoy the debate, because voters want to see a leader who is self-confident and in command of the situation.

Nobel to Internet? and an interview with Jodi Dean

2010-03-27T22:55:00.008+01:00

1933 Nobel Peace Prize

Some months ago, italian version of Wired started campaigning saying "Nobel Peace Prize should go to Internet". Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize but Internet (=an item, not a person) might win the Nobel Peace Prize!! Why not give the Nobel Peace Prize to telephone cables or the air (that carries radiowaves)? (I would give the Nobel Peace Prize to BBC World Service for providing reliable information to people - living under dictatorships and not - for decades; but this is a different topic).

Jodi Dean (1962) is an american professor, she teaches political theory. I asked her about the idea of giving Internet the Nobel Peace Prize and other things. (Jodi Dean blogs here)

1) Italian version of Wired started lobbying for "Nobel Peace Prize should go to Internet" (http://www.internetforpeace.it/manifesto.cfm). What do you think about it? Do you think it's technological fetishism?

Of course it is techno fetishism, a ludicrous extension of the cult of the amateur and the fantasy that because crowd sourcing works for some things it works for everything; there is a middle ground between the false, romantic idea of the single genius and everyone

2) You wrote "In the US today there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and official politics". Do you think that the election of Obama (probably impossible without Internet) changed this view? Can't it be seen like the come back of democracy?

No. Obama didn't need the internet to win (or, the internet wasn't the difference that made a difference although it is now an additional media field on which the game must be played). There were only 2 candidates; one was the least popular president ever in the midst of an economic debacle. Also, Obama raised more money--the candidate who raises the most wins. The shocking thing is that Obama didn't win by a larger margin. 'Come back of democracy'? I don't even know what that means--George W. Bush won his second term; the hideous Republicans in Congress were elected. All sorts of right-wing nut jobs are out there organizing, protesting, participating. The problem is not at all that democracy went away. The problem is that the left hasn't been able to use the democratic process to advance. Corporations love democracy--they give millions and millions to campaigns, candidates; they pay fortunes to lobbyists. Democracy is great for capitalism--just not for people.

3) Do you think that the economic crisis of 2008 (or better 2008-ongoing) is an event that makes to rethink theories of economic globalization?

If by 'rethink' you mean that fans of globalized neoliberalism can no longer deny the destructive force of capitalism, then I guess so. But how is this being done? The IMF is pressuring European countries to lower their debts--this means
cutting social services, which remains in keeping with neoliberalism. In the US, the big banks are once again saying screw you to the US government and giving massive bonuses; there has been no significant effort to bring them under control--derivatives (what Warren Buffet called financial weapons of mass destruction) remain unregulated. So, the real question is who is rethinking and what are the re-thoughts?

4) What is your point of view about theories like Manuel Castells'one, when an author seems so enthusiastic about internet, to talk about a network society?

Castells remains massively significant as the provider of one of the first comprehensive maps/over views/ of the shape of networked society. Is everything he said still correct? no. Did he leave stuff out? sure.
One way I look at it--Castells did the first map of the global; Hardt and Negri did the political equivalent of a Mercator projection. Using this as some kind of space of flows basis, I think Albert Laszlo-Barabasi is indispensable--
his account of the emergence of powerlaws and hubs in complex networks characterized by growth and preferential attachment make is absolutely clear why the division between multitude/empire can in no way be understood ontologically but only politically; network ontologies are characterized by extremes of inequality

Interview with Pure

2010-03-19T14:47:00.002+01:00

PURE: "the idea of analogue radio in a digital world is a nonsense."

PURE (former name was PURE DIGITAL) is a british manufacturer that makes digital tuners. Colin Crawford (PURE's director of marketing) answered some questions.

1) When was Pure founded? and by whom?

PURE was founded in 2002 and is a division of Imagination Technologies, founded in 1986.

2) Beside the "propaganda" of engineers and lobbysts, what's your view of digital radio? Do you think it will be able to replace FM (in near future) or will it be always work-in-progress situation?

We believe strongly that the idea of analogue radio in a digital world is a nonsense. For radio to remain relevant, it must go digital and visionary markets such as the UK, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France and Australia are making that happen already.

3) Pure doesn't sell products with DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale). Why?

Because there is no consumer demand.

4) Might DRM+ change this choice?

We remain to be convinced but we will keep monitoring any opportunities in this area.

5) Do you think that a unique european standard (like DVB-T for television) will help strongly the manufacturers?

The DAB family of standards is already a unique European standard and the standardisation of profiles by WorldDMB, EBU and DIGITALEUROPE brought the digital radio market together for the first time and has already revitalised the industry for manufacturers.

6) Are you sure that there is future for "radio on radio spectrum" or is it just a waste of time because internet-radio will rule above any other alternative systems?

PURE is a strong believer in hybrid radio systems that combine broadcast radio content with internet connectivity. This provides a perfect solution whereby mainstream listening happens efficiently by broadcast and niche content and interactivity can be delivered over the internet. The idea that the internet could cope with the hundred of millions of hours of radio listening is preposterous.

7) Which radio station do you listen to, during your spare time?

I am a profligate radio listener spending nearly all my time on broadcast radio with a good mix of BBC and national UK commercial stations.

--

On march 2010 PURE announced that it will launch, for the first time, their products in Italy in summer 2010

Interview with Revo - part 2 of 2

2010-03-11T13:04:00.003+01:00

After the first part of the interview
(interview with Revo - part 1 of 2; 4 march 2010)
we have the second part.

6) What does Revo think about DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale)?

For a while, it seemed like the next big thing. But as time has gone on, i think it has little chance of success.

7) Do you think we will ever see Revo tuner with DRM?

If there is demand, or a good chance of success ... we'll produce radios.

8) The transition towards digital radio is very difficult, even in UK: from your point of view, what are the mistakes made?

All parties need to work together. Government, broadcasters (public and commercial), the infrastructure guys ... everyone. If they don't, it fails.

9) There is much debate in UK about possible future switch off of FM band. What do you think about it? If u had the chance to write the rules of future spectrum for UK radio, which rules would you make?

In order to aid and accelerate the uptake of DAB (or DAB+ as it may eventually be) in the UK, an FM switch off date is essential, even if only to focus the minds of all the parties concerned. As for the rules of future spectrum use ... I'm a humble radio manufacturer, i'll leave that to other more qualified people.

10) Are you sure that there is future for "radio on radio spectrum" or is it just a waste of time because internet-radio will win above any other alternative systems?

I'm certain, i have no doubts. As a business, we actually sell more internet radios than DAB digital radios, but i am convinced that a radio spectrum based service is necessary, and that it will be the dominant platform. Internet radio devices have their places, but they will not prevail.

---

P.S. Mike Hughes submitted a petition asking the Prime Minister (of UK) to "Halt the proposed Analog Radio Switch-off" (Deadline to sign up: 19 December 2009; Signatures: 4,582)

The proposed analog radio switch off disadvantages everyone. It forces you to scrap all your existing radios - and buy DAB sets instead. Car radios, kitchen radios, bedside radios, stereo tuners, all become scrap. And the liberated bandwidth is used for extra services no-one wants - witness the DAB station failures - polluted with advertising, and never again the chance to hear a foreign station by accident. This is not a future I want.

3 March 2010 - The Government's response: "No, we won't halt it"

The Digital Britain White Paper set out the Government’s vision for a radio industry in a digital world and the mechanisms needed to deliver it. To date over 10 million digital radio receivers have been sold and around 20% of all radio listening is via a digital platform. Listeners are clearly being attracted by digital-only services, including the BBC’s digital-only stations. We believe there is already significant momentum towards digital radio take-up and the decision for Government is not whether digital radio will replace analogue, but to ensure that any transition to digital is delivered in a coordinated way which best reflects the needs and expectations of listeners. However, we have been clear that this process will be market-led and will only consider setting a date for digital radio switchover once 50% or more of all radio listening is to digital.

The Government recognises that we must ensure the environmental impact of any significant analogue radio disposal is minimised through a responsible disposal and recycling strategy. Any waste electrical equipment produced as a result of Digital Radio Upgrade will be disposed of subject to the requirements of the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. The Government is working with manufacturers to consider the implementation of a ‘set-top box’ solution for analogue radio which would allow existing analogue radios sets to receive DAB.

We acknowledge that some parts of the UK currently have access to overseas analogue radio services. Digital radio, via the internet, will in fact increase the opportunity for listeners to access overseas radio stations not just from neighbouring countries, but from around the world.

Discovering startups 2: Hyperwords

2010-03-10T00:15:00.004+01:00

Hyperwords is a plug-in that lets people right-click for interactive searches. The company's advisory board include geniuses like Douglas Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson.

I asked Frode Hegland (founding director of Hyperwords company) few questions.

1) When was Hyperwords created? and by whom?

By me, Frode Hegland. In the early 2000's.

2) How many people work at Hyperwords?

Two full time, two part time and two development teams, one full time team in Russia and one part time in Germany.

3) I see a Techcrunch article about you in 2005 and i see that you were in Le Web 2009: why didn't you go to Le Web earlier?

We realized quite quickly that people were not interested in the idea of concept, but only in a very smooth and effective user experience so we've been working hard to improve the system since then more than promoting it.

4) In your site you say: "The Hyperword project is based on the work of Doug Engelbart", what does he think about it?

Doug is very happy with the progress of Hyperwords as a step in the evolution of what he calls "symbol manipulation".

5) What is the business model for Hyperwords?

Client installs (Firefox, Chrome and soon Windows, so yes, it will work in Internet Explorer) are affiliate driven (AdSense & Amazon primarily). Server is licensed.

6) Who and how much financed Hyperwords?

Personal finance.

Interview with Revo - part 1 of 2

2010-03-04T19:44:00.006+01:00

Revo is a new radio manufacturer based in Scotland; in Revo official site they describe themselves saying "Revo Technologies Ltd is a privately owned designer and manufacturer of award-winning digital radio products for the DAB, DAB+, HD and internet radio platforms".

David Baxter is the CEO and agreed about an interview about digital radio (DAB, DRM), switch off of FM and similar topics.

1) When was Revo created and by whom?

I founded Revo Technologies Ltd in the summer of 2006.

2) How many people work at Revo?

Revo has a staff of 12 people based in Lanark, Scotland.

3) How many radio did you sell in a year?

We are a relatevely small (but growing) manufacturer, in 2009 we sold just over 50,000 radios.

4) I see that you don't have a distributor for USA: why? Do you have any plan to make radio for USA for the future?

Generally speaking, the USA is a difficult market for a small European brand to penetrate. It's geographically large, and the selling "culture" is more different than you would imagine. There have also been other barriers such as the economic situation in the USA over the last 18 months. This made U.S. retailers nervous about trying new things. Also, there hasn't been as much of an appetite for digital radio/internet radio in the USA as you would expect. We have only very recently appointed a small independent distributor to handle Revo in the USA. We believe that this is the best approach for the moment.

5) Some people blame the manufacturers for the failure of digital radio: what do you think about it?

I think that it's difficult to blame the manufacturers. In markets where a transmitter infrastructure has been put in place, and unique programming exists, digital radio has been a success. Without these things, there is little that a manufacturer can do.

(to be continued)

UPDATE: 11 march 2010 - second part of interview

Discovering startups 1: Stribe

2010-03-02T19:45:00.004+01:00

Stribe is a social network for any site, provided as Software as a Service.

Founders Kamel Zeroual, Gael Delalleau and Demba Diallo created the company in March 2008 and released the service in September 2009 during TechCrunch50.

Stribe allows blogs, casual gaming or even an e-commerce sites to create their own social network in theirs sites. It deeply engages the visitors and allows social interactions after an easy 5-minute plug & play installation, which can be fully customized and freely branded.

Stribe won the first place at Le Web 2009 (december, Paris).

Interview with Stribe

1) How many people work in Stribe?

We are 8 engineers working in Stribe

2) When do you plan to reach break-even?

It’s up to the viral effect of our service. We still working in designing the best business model to reach the break even as fast as we can.

3) right now, how many people use Stribe?

We’ve send more than thousand invitation to website and there is around 15000 users registered beta testing our product.

4) what's the business model of Stribe?

It’s Freemium business model: there is a free version for small websites/blogs and we provide premium features.

5) Stribe was and techcrunch50 2009 in september and at Le web 2009 in december (i know u won at le web): would you describe the differences between the 2 events?

TC50 is dedicated about startup launching. It’s the core event and everyone come for that and expect to discover the next “Google or Facebook”.

LeWeb is a conference about a topic with many web gurus and next to this event there is an European competition startup. People, media, bloggers and journalist are very careful about this because it’s a competition and all the web ecosystem are in Paris to meet them up.

Kamel Zeroual at Techcrunch 50, 15th september 2009:

Number of failed banks from 2000 to 2009 in USA

2010-02-04T19:28:00.005+01:00

The chart shows the number of failed banks from 2000 till 2009 in USA (source: FDIC)

We must not think that the financial crisis is over: in the first month of 2010, 15 banks have failed!!! The year 2010 may not reach the number of 139 failed banks (like 2009), but 15 banks in one month is a bad beginning...

Ownership and control of Google

2010-01-25T01:47:00.002+01:00

In the last days i read this:

NYT: Google Founders to sell, but are not losing control

Paid Content: Google's Brin and Page to sell off shares; give up majority voting power over five years

Techcrunch: Google Co-Founders plan to sell up to 10 million shares over next five years

BBC: Google co-founders to sell shares

Everything started because there was a SEC filing (=communiqué from SEC) saying:

On November 30, 2009, Larry Page and Sergey Brin each adopted stock trading plans in accordance with guidelines specified under Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 and Google’s policies regarding stock transactions. In the future, they will begin selling a portion of their Google stock pursuant to these stock trading plans.

It means: onNovember 30, 2009 Larry Page and Sergey Brin told SEC that they are going to sell some shares of Google

Larry and Sergey currently hold approximately 57.7 million shares of Class B common stock, which represents approximately 18% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 59% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock. Under the terms of these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, and as a part of a five year diversification plan, Larry and Sergey each intend to sell approximately 5 million shares. If Larry and Sergey complete all the planned sales under these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, they would continue to collectively own approximately 47.7 million shares, which would represent approximately 15% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 48% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock (assuming no other sales and conversions of Google capital stock occur).

To understand that, we need to understand the corporate governance of Google. At January 31, 2009, there were 240,289,354 shares of the Class A common stock outstanding and 75,004,353 shares of the Class B common stock outstanding. Class B shares are special shares: each one has 10 voting rights; Class A common stock has been listed on The Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “GOOG” since August 19, 2004 and ; Class B common stock is neither listed nor traded.

If we read that: (annual report 2008; page 30)

Our board of directors may issue, without stockholder approval, shares of undesignated preferred stock. The ability to issue undesignated preferred stock makes it possible for our board of directors to issue preferred stock with voting or other rights or preferences that could impede the success of any attempt to acquire us.

We can be sure that, with Brin and Page holding 48% of voting rights (Eric Schimdt another 10%), nobody can take away the control of Google

35 best innovators of 2009

2009-12-20T15:04:00.003+01:00

After mentioning best innovators of 2008 and 2007, it's the turn of best innovators of 2009.

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

Theese are the winners of 2009

2009 Innovator of the Year: Kevin Fu
2009 Humanitarian of the Year: José Gómez-Márquez

Andrea Armani (31 - University of Southern California)
Sensitive optical sensors detect single molecules

Michael Backes (31 - Saarland University)
Proving that Internet security protocols can really be trusted

Jeffrey Bigham (28 - University of Rochester)
Free service to help blind people navigate the Web

James Carey (32 - SiOnyx)
Using “black silicon” to build inexpensive, super-sensitive light detectors

Jorge Conde (32 - Knome)
Offering consumers whole-genome sequencing--and software to interpret it

Ranjan Dash (32 - Y-Carbon)
Nanoporous carbon could help power hybrid cars

Adam Dunkels (31 - Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
Minimal wireless-networking protocols allow almost any device to communicate over the Internet

Nathan Eagle (32 - Santa Fe Institute)
Mining mobile-phone data for the public good

Cody Friesen (31 - Fluidic Energy)
Making cheaper, higher-energy batteries to store renewable energy

Kevin Fu (33 - University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Defeating would-be hackers of radio frequency chips in objects from credit cards to pacemakers

José Gómez-Márquez (32 - Innovations in International Health, MIT)
Practical medical devices for use in poor countries

Jeffrey Heer (30 - Stanford University)
Easy-to-use tools allow people to present data in creative and interesting ways

Andrew Houck (30 - Princeton University)
Preserving information for practical quantum computing

Kurt Zenz House (31 - C12 Energy)
Capturing carbon dioxide through cement production

Shahram Izadi (33 - Microsoft Research U.K.)
An intuitive 3-D interface helps people manage layers of data

Ali Javey (29 - University of California, Berkeley)
“Painting” nanowires into electronic circuits

Michelle Khine (32 - University of California, Irvine)
A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips

Anat Levin (31 - Weizmann Institute of Science)
New cameras and algorithms capture the potential of digital images

Erez Lieberman-Aiden (29 - Harvard University/MIT)
Quantitative tools offer new insights into evolution

Andrew Lynn (32 - Orthomimetics)
Repairing joints by stimulating regrowth in bone and cartilage

Ellis Meng (34 - University of Southern California)
Micropumps deliver drugs that prevent blindness

Pranav Mistry (28 - MIT)
A simple, wearable device enhances the real world with digital information

Aydogan Ozcan (30 - UCLA)
Inexpensive chips and sophisticated software could make microscope lenses obsolete

Shwetak Patel (27 - University of Washington)
Simple sensors to detect residents’ activities

Andrew Perlman (34 - GreatPoint Energy)
Slashing carbon emissions by converting coal into natural gas

Ashoke Ravi (32 - Intel)
Using software to send diverse radio signals

Vera Sazonova (30 - Nat’l Research Council Canada)
World’s smallest resonator could lead to tiny mechanical devices

Elena Shevchenko (32 - Argonne National Laboratory)
Assembling nanocrystals to create made-to-order materials

Vik Singh (24 - Yahoo)
Opening up search secrets to spur innovation

Dawn Song (34 - University of California, Berkeley)
Defeating malware through automated software analysis

Jaime Teevan (32 - Microsoft Research)
Using personal information to improve search results

C. Shad Thaxton (33 - Northwestern University)
Nanoparticles could treat cardiovascular disease by mimicking “good cholesterol”

Andrea Thomaz (33 - Georgia Institute of Technology)
Robots that learn new skills the way people do

Adrien Treuille (30 - Carnegie Mellon University)
Complex physics simulations that can run on everyday PCs

Cyrus Wadia (34 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Identifying materials that could be unexpectedly useful in solar cells

Dark future for Telecom Italia (at least in Italy)

2009-12-10T01:12:00.007+01:00

number (in millions) of fixed-line network connections in Italy 1997-2008 and isdn only

number of fixed-line network connections (including ISDN) in Italy of Telecom Italia, from 25.698 millions of 1997, the peak in 2001 (27.353 millions) and down to 20.031 millions (2008). On March 2010 they will release the report for 2009 but on 30th june 2009 the number was 19.170 millions. I may predict a number of 18.6 for 31st december 2009. The rise of 1997-2001 is because of big success of ISDN; in 2006 they stopped giving numbers about ISDN but the peak was on 2003 (6.027 millions).
Today a consumer customer has to pay a monthly fee of 16.08 Euro (vat included) to Telecom Italia; 192.96 Euro for one year

Zeitgest of the year 2009

2009-12-03T01:13:00.003+01:00

After Google Zeitgeist of 2007, and 2008 it's time to write about the Zeitgeist of they year 2009.

Zeitgeist is a german word and it could be translated as "spirit of the age" or "spirit of the times", it is best known in relation to Hegel's view of philosophy of history.

"Except where noted, all of these search terms are most popular for 2009—ranked in order of the queries with the largest volume of searches this year. In some cases, we list the "fastest rising" queries, which means we found the most popular searches conducted in 2009 and then ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2008. Conversely, "fastest falling" queries were very popular in 2008 but flattened in popularity in 2009."

Fastest Rising (Global)

michael jackson
facebook
tuenti
twitter
sanalika
new moon
lady gaga
windows 7
dantri.com.vn
torpedo gratis

1 New moon should be the sequel to 2008's Twilight
2 dantri.com.vn is a vietnamese newspaper
3 torpedo gratis is a portuguese language site where you can send free sms

For first time, we have the top 10 fastest falling

Fastest Falling (Global)

beijing 2008
euro 2008
heath ledger
barack obama
amy winehouse
kraloyun
dailymotion
bebo
wii
emule

Somebody in Techcrunch Europe asks "Why does Turkish startup Sanalika feature on Google Zeitgest 2009?" and explains us:

Sanalika is a virtual world where you can play multiplayer games and join realtime events. It was launched on November 2008 and has already reached over 3 million users.

But how did Sanalika make Google’s Zeitgeist 2009?

Sanalika isn’t yet available in english so that isn’t the reason why it’s become a popular search term. Instead, it’s the way Google is used within the Turkish online community.

Most Turkish Internet users search for the domain or keyword of a website on Google then click on the first search result to go to the actual site. So, when a web service has millions of users it’s inevitably searched for on Google over a million times a day.

Techcrunch writes:
Google Publishes Zeitgeist 2009 – Michael Jackson Crowned King Again

Interview with a european commissioner - part 2

2009-11-19T23:37:00.002+01:00

second part of an interview with (a member of staff of) european commissioner about "Information society and media"

2- The main difference between digital tv and digital radio is that digital tv (in Europe) has one standard (DVB-T), while digital radio has a lot of standards (DAB, DAB+, DRM, DRM+,IBOC,etc). Do you think that this is the reason behind the failure of the success of digital radio in Europe? Or should we blame the broadcasters?

Given that cable, satellite and terrestrial transmission all require different modulation schemes, there are actually different standards for digital TV, even if the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Group has made conversion between them very easy. Within the DVB-T standard, technological progress means that a more modern compression standard - MPEG4-AVC - is now being used alongside the older MPEG2 system. A new and more efficient standard called DVB-T2 is also entering the market in order to facilitate HDTV transmissions in scarce terrestrial spectrum. It is a myth therefore that there is a single standard for digital television. We have a family of co-existing standards, which evolve in the light of technological possibilities and market needs. The situation is not so different in digital radio.

So far, digital radio has been launched successfully in a number of EU Member States.

Radio is an important part of the cultural landscape in Europe and can be delivered over a huge variety of different platforms. Besides dedicated digital terrestrial transmission for which different standards exist, radio services are also transmitted over the internet, over digital terrestrial and mobile TV platforms, via cable and satellite and over analogue terrestrial FM and AM networks.

The most common digital terrestrial radio standard in the EU is Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). The United Kingdom is by far the most advanced country in the EU in terms of penetration with digital radio using this standard. By mid 2008, 6.8 million digital radios had been sold in the United Kingdom (and 1 million in Denmark).. DAB has also been implemented in Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.

Freeing up spectrum for new wireless applications and innovative broadcast services drives EU policy on terrestrial TV switchover. The current DAB standard for digital radio transmission does not provide a significant increase in the efficient use of spectrum over (analogue) FM radio. That is why so far there has been no spectrum efficiency argument for switching off analogue terrestrial radio.

Now, established market players and new entrants have a second generation of digital terrestrial radio broadcast standards available which use spectrum more efficiently. These standards facilitate innovation and interoperability. At the same time co-ordination around common solutions has become more complex.

France will introduce a second generation standard for digital radio, Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB). Launch is planned for December 2009 in Paris, Nice and Marseille. In the Netherlands there are also plans to launch DMB radio, in combination with DMB mobile TV services before the end of the year in The Hague.

Malta has launched DAB+ services in 2008.

16 Member States have not yet introduced digital terrestrial DAB-based radio. All Member States still heavily rely on analogue FM and AM radio since receivers are cheap and almost omnipresent.

The WorldDMB industry group has developed receiver specifications which would integrate the first generation digital radio standard DAB and the second generation standards DAB+ and DMB in one receiver, thanks to the availability of more powerful integrated circuits (chips). These receivers facilitate the upgrade from DAB to DAB+ and DMB in a Member State and would allow the reception of digital radio services in foreign countries if one of the three standards is used.

This demonstrates the ability of the market to come up with solutions where different broadcast standards are used. Consumers and broadcasters are served best if the selection of radio transmission techniques is left to market forces, industry co-operation and well co-ordinated national policy initiatives in which all players are carefully consulted.

The Commission will continue to monitor technological and market developments closely and to discuss digital radio issues with Member States and industry.

3 - Do you think that Europe should help the transition to digital radio with public funds or leave it to the interaction among broadcasters, manufacturers and listeners?

Because of the subsidiarity principle, this question would have to be answered at Member State level. For digital TV switchover, there have been no subsidies at EU level.

Jean Houghton
Assistant to Martin Selmayr

Interview with a european commissioner - part 1

2009-11-17T21:35:00.004+01:00

I tried to interview (through e-mail) Viviane Reding (european commissioner about Information society and media). Probably it's too late to get an interview (the first Barroso commission was supposed to serve from 22nd november 2004 till 31st october 2009; but the second Barroso commission isn't ready yet!), anyway i sent an e-mail and somebody of the staff answered me, then i sent 3 questions and another person answered (2 questions out of 3).

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that european commission is far from common people, this interview may be the answer

1-The (first) Barroso commission is ending the job now: do you think that, for the point of view of pushing for an information society, all the best was done or that could you do more?

Of course there is always more to do and that is why every Commissioner should use the end of his or her 5 years term to outline a future-vision for the area in which (s)he has been working – because even though we have been talking about the completion of Europe's 'single market' since 1992, we are not there yet. I am thinking here for example of a Single Digital Market which makes access to rich content online easy for Europe's 500 million consumers while at the same time remunerating creators.

Nevertheless, we should also look back at our achievements and I think that the Barroso Commission has clearly delivered on the 'Europe of results' and on putting the citizen into the heart of the single market project. My portfolio for example, Information Society and Media, might sound rather technical but what I regard as my personal achievement is that I have succeeded in creating a connection to the people; giving technology a human face and putting technology at the service of Europe's citizens.

For example thanks to the EU rules on roaming people are no longer punished on their phone bill when crossing a border and due to the lower roaming prices (a 70% reduction for roaming calls and another 60% reduction for roaming SMS) people actually use their mobiles abroad more than before!

Another example is Europeana, Europe's digital library, which we opened last year. It is available in 21 languages and offers today access to 4.6 million digitised objects, including books, paintings, movies etc. An internet platform offering everyone around the world access to Europe's rich cultural heritage – a symbiosis of technology and culture which I find truly fascinating.

Last but not least let's not forget the huge social potential of ICTs that I have always been trying to promote next to the economic potential: internet access for all is vital in order to create an all-inclusive information society in which everyone has access to knowledge. ICTs can help us achieving a sustainable, low-carbon economy or to treat (elderly) people from home saving them the daily trip to the doctor.

The European Commission has been the driving motor behind projects putting ICTs at the use of our society and I regard this as an achievement for the building of an information society for and in Europe.

Best DJs of 2009!!

2009-11-06T16:11:00.003+01:00

Armin Van Buren, world's n.1 DJ (pic from Flickr)

I talked about it one year ago, two years ago and I can't miss it this year!
DJ magazine wrote the TOP 100 DJ of 2009, the first two positions haven't changed:

1 Armin Van Buuren - (Netherlands) Third year in a row as world number one!

2 Tiësto - (Netherlands)

3 David Guetta - (France)

4 Above & Beyond (England)

5 Paul Van Dyk - (Germany)

6 Deadmau5 - (Canada)

7 Ferry Corsten - (Netherlands)

8 Markus Schulz - (Germany)

9 Gareth Emery - (England)

10 Sander van Doorn - (Netherlands)

11 ATB - (Germany)

12 Infected Mushroom - (Israel)

13 Sasha - (Wales)

14 Axwell - (Sweden)

15 Andy Moor - (England)

16 Bobina - (Russia)

17 John Digweed - (England)

18 Carl Cox - (England)

19 Cosmic Gate - (Germany)

20 Steve Angello - (Greece-Sweden)

---
To know the whole TOP 100, click here

Monetary policy of Bundesbank 1975-1998

2009-10-28T00:43:00.006+01:00

German banknotes

Around one year ago a paper was released, its name was

Opting out of the great inflation: german monetary policy after the break down of Bretton Woods

and it was written by:

Andreas Beyer (ECB)

Vitor Gaspar (Banco de Portugal, special adviser)

Christina Gerberding (Deutsche Bundesbank)

Otmar Issing (Centre for financial studies)

Abstract:

During the turbulent 1970s and 1980s the Bundesbank established an outstanding reputation in the world of central banking. Germany achieved a high degree of domestic stability and provided safe haven for investors in times of turmoil in the international financial system. Eventually the Bundesbank provided the role model for the European Central Bank. Hence, we examine an episode of lasting importance in European monetary history. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how the Bundesbank monetary policy strategy contributed to this success. We analyze the strategy as it was conceived, communicated and refined by the Bundesbank itself. We propose a theoretical framework where monetary targeting is interpreted, first and foremost, as a commitment device. In our setting, a monetary target helps anchoring inflation and inflation expectations. We derive an interest rate rule and show empirically that it approximates the way the Bundesbank conducted monetary policy over the period 1975-1998. We compare the Bundesbank's monetary policy rule with those of the FED and of the Bank of England. We find that the Bundesbank's policy reaction function was characterized by strong persistence of policy rates as well as a strong response to deviations of inflation from target and to the activity growth gap. In contrast, the response to the level of the output gap was not significant. In our empirical analysis we use real-time data, as available to policy-makers at the time.

Some excerpts:

"In the period 1960-1998, German inflation measured in accordance with the Consumer Price Index, was, on average 3.1 per cent per year [...] the lowest and most stable, as recorded internationally."

"The Mark, initially (1873) created as a currency based on gold had ended its existence in the hyperinflation of 1923 which destroyed Germany's civil society. The successor of the Mark, the Reichsmark, created in 1924 ended its short life with the currency reform of 1948. People had again lost most of their wealth invested in nominal assets.No wonder that a strong aversion against inflation and a desire for monetary stability became deeply entrenched in the mind of the German people!"

It would be interesting to know more about the dispute over currency union with East Germany. The paper doesn't talk about it; according to Wikipedia, the dispute between Helmut Kohl (then chancellor of West Germany) and Karl Otto Pöhl (president of Deutsche Bundesbank) led to the resignation of Pöhl. I assume it was a blow against the famous independence of Bundesbank "of instructions from the Federal Government".

Digital radio development in Ireland

2009-10-07T15:02:00.004+02:00

coverage of DAB in Ireland today (Dublin, Cork and Limerick)

About 2 weeks ago (25th september 2009), the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (but since 1st october "The duties and responsibilities of the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland have transferred to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland") published the report:

Digital Radio for Ireland: Competing Options, Public Expectations

Most of the report deals about the question "DAB or DAB+?". A very good choice is calling a chapter "What radio listeners say".

The authors are:
Helen Shaw - CEO Athena Media
Brian O'Neill - Head of School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology
Agata Olbrycht - Research Assistant Athena Media

Digital radio in Ireland:
-chapter one - survey findings
-chapter two - strategic interviews
-chapter three - online digital radio
-chapter four - what radio listeners say
-chapter five - conclusions and recommendations

UN, Stiglitz and Blanchard about the economic crisis

2009-08-20T01:51:00.005+02:00

Joseph Stiglitz

UN conference on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development
24-26 june 2009

From official site of UN:
"The United Nations is convening a three-day summit of world leaders from 24 to 26 June 2009 at its New York Headquarters to assess the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. The aim is to identify emergency and long-term responses to mitigate the impact of the crisis, especially on vulnerable populations, and initiate a needed dialogue on the transformation of the international financial architecture, taking into account the needs and concerns of all Member States."

In Italy the media coverage about this conference was close to zero but it's interesting to point out few things.

The Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and informally known as the Stiglitz Commission, was convened by the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, "to review the workings of the global financial system, including major bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF, and to suggest steps to be taken by Member States to secure a more sustainable and just global economic order".It presented its recommendations on March 20, 2009 and a preliminary draft of its full report on May 21, 2009. The draft is available here.

On August 18 2009, Olivier Blanchard (Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF’s Research Department) wrote an article for IMF's F&D magazine:

Sustaining a global recovery

Blanchard on April 2009 wrote a paper called The crisis: basic mechanisms, and appropriate policies

Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Prize in economic sciences) is the chairman of the UN commission of experts and he wrote his view in an article on The Nation:

A global recovery for a global recession
---
These are the contents of the draft of that commission of experts:

chapter 1: introduction
the crisis: its origins, impacts, and the need for a global response
the institutional response to the crisis
policy responses to the crisis
a global crisis needs a global response
some basic principles
impact on developing countries

chapter 2: macro-issues and perspectives
the sources of the crisis
international responses: fiscal policy
monetary policy and restructuring financial markets
bail-outs
the role of central banks
risks and policy trade-offs
multiple and new objectives
impacts on developing countries
developing countries need additional funding
concluding remarks

chapter 3: reforming global regulation to enhance global economic stability
failure of the prevailing regulatory philosophy
the purpose of financial regulation
financial policy and regulatory policy
regulation and innovation
regulatory capture
boundaries of financial regulation
micro-prudential regulation
ring-fencing
some common principles of macro- and micro- prudential regulation
securitization
transparency
macro-prudential regulation
countercyclical regulations
capital market liberalization
capital account management for development
capital market interventions during crises
financial market liberalization
further issues in micro-regulation
lending and public banking to promote development
regulating other players
credit rating agencies (CRAs)
sovereign wealth funds
regulatory institutions
capture and voice
regulation and political processes
incentive structures
personnel
regulatory structure
global regulation
comprehensiveness
international banking centres and international tax cooperation
international cooperation on taxation
beyond financial regulation

chapter 4: international institutions
the challenges ahead - the need for new global economic governance
a global economic coordination council could lead the way forward
policy coherence for development also has to be improved on the national level
policies and instruments
the Bretton Woods institutions must support national capital account management
other international financial bodies
international lending and ODA
additional funding for developing countries is needed
aid effectiveness
expansion of resources by IFIs
the IMF needs an immediate expansion of its resources
review developing countries' debt sustainability in light of the financial crisis
establish a new credit facility
trade and investment
commodities trade and compensatory financing
appendix: the Doha round and development

chapter 5: international financial innovations
the global reserve system
sovereign debt default and restructuring
innovative risk management instruments
innovative sources of financing

Walter Cronkite 1916-2009

2009-07-21T15:31:00.003+02:00

Walter Cronkite, legend of american broadcast journalism, died on 17th July 2009; he was 92.

NYT: Walter Cronkite, 92, dies; trusted voice of tv news

USA today: Iconic journalist Walter Cronkite dies at 92

Los Angeles Times: Cronkite - that's the way he was

NASA: Cronkite remembered for coverage of Apollo launches

MBC (The Museum of Broadcast Communications): legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite has died at 92.

CBS: television pioneer, CBS legend, passes away in New York at 92

The Times: Walter Cronkite: CBS news anchor

Telegraph: Walter Cronkite, who died on July 17 aged 92, was the avuncular anchorman on CBS Evening News for 19 years and often referred to as "the most trusted man in America"

Guardian: US salutes Walter Cronkite, giant of TV journalism's golden age

Barack Obama: "he never lost the integrity he gained growing up in the heartland"

Don't forget to have a look at Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication

Tiscali, the dream is over

2009-05-11T00:01:00.003+02:00

Tiscali group on 2001

Tiscali has sold Tiscali UK to Carphone Warehouse Group for 255.5 million of GBP. After years of sales, the dream of a italian-based european provider is over.

Renato Soru created Tiscali on January 1998.

October 1999: IPO (Tiscali enters the stock market during the dot-com bubble). People pay 46 euro for 1 share of Tiscali.
May 2009: (after the stock split 10:1 of april 2000) the same investor would have 10 shares of the value of 0.416 euro each, never a dividend.

Tiscali, son of the dot-com bubble, victim of bad management.

Chief executive officer
1998-2004 Renato Soru
2004-2005 Ruud Huisman
2005-2008 Tommaso Pompei
2008-incumbent Mario Rosso

as roma for sale - no future for Sensi group

2009-05-06T02:20:00.005+02:00

If you look at financial statements of Compagnia Italpetroli (owned by 51% by Sensi sisters and by 49% by Unicredit bank), it's difficult to understand how the group can keep going.

ebitda is getting worse (14.431 million of euro on 31-12-2006; 4.365 million of euro on 31-12-2007)

ebit is getting worse (-1.718 million of euro on 31-12-2006; -8.497 million of euro on 31-12-2006)

debt is huge and is growing (381.208 million of euro on 31-12-2006; 396.715 million of euro on 31-12-2007)

The only solution (to try to survive) will be the sale of as roma, it's only a matter of time.

Pulitzer Prize winners 2009 - journalism

2009-04-23T15:14:00.004+02:00

April 20, 2009 - Columbia University announces 93rd annual Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, letters, drama and music.

Here you can read the winners for journalism:

-Public service
Awarded to the Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon, for the exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip amid lax enforcement of regulations, leading to changes in policy and improved safety conditions.

-Breaking news reporting
Awarded to the New York Times Staff for its swift and sweeping coverage of a sex scandal that resulted in the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, breaking the story on its Web site and then developing it with authoritative, rapid-fire reports.

-Investigative reporting
Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been coopted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

-Explanatory reporting
Awarded to Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times for their fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States.

-Local reporting
Two Prizes of $10,000 each:
Awarded to the Detroit Free Press Staff, and notably Jim Schaefer and M. L. Elrick, for their uncovering of a pattern of lies by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick that included denial of a sexual relationship with his female chief of staff, prompting an investigation of perjury that eventually led to jail terms for the two officials
and
Awarded to Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, Arizona for their adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff's focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety.

-National reporting
Awarded to the St. Petersburg Times for "PolitiFact", its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.

-International reporting
Awarded to The New York Times Staff for its masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America's deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reporting frequently done under perilous conditions.

-Feature writing
Awarded to Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times for her moving, richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.

-Commentary
Awarded to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post for his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.

-Criticism
Awarded to Holland Cotter of The New York Times for his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.

-Editorial writing
Awarded to Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glen Falls, N.Y., for his relentless, down-to-earth editorials on the perils of local government secrecy, effectively admonishing citizens to uphold their right to know.

-Editorial cartooning
Awarded to Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune for his agile use of a classic style to produce wide ranging cartoons that engage readers with power, clarity and humour.

-Breaking news photography
Awarded to Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald for his provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.

-Feature photography
Awarded to Damon Winter of The New York Times for his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barck Obama's presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg and the future of Facebook

2009-03-16T17:15:00.004+01:00

26th October 2005, Zuckerberg explains how you can monetize users "pretty easily"; today he would have said different things...

Mark Zuckerberg was 19 years old when he created Facebook, with Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It was February 4th 2004 and nobody could imagine that after 5 years Facebook has almost 200 million active users worldwide.

Zuckerberg & friends moved to Silicon Valley during the summer of 2004 (the world is NOT flat, Mr. Thomas Friedman!) and they looked for investors.

October 2008: Zuckerberg says: "What every great internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today."

3 years can mean October 2011! Does Zuckerberg think he has such a long time?

The future of Facebook doesn't depend only on Zuckerberg but it depends on its investors too:

- Microsoft put $240 million

- Li Ka-shing put $120 million

- TriplePoint Capital put $100 million

and others (full list here)

According to Techcrunch (article of October 2008):

"The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone"
[...]

"With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll."
[...]

"It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money."

Time is running out for Zuckerberg, it's going to be "Facebook must make money or sell Facebook"

It would be nice to have an etiquette for Facebook, how long do we have to wait for?

The Economist asked "Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120" and "women tend to have somewhat more than men"[...] "Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten."

1st phase Feb 2004-Aug 2005 Facebook only for US university

2nd phase Sep 2005-25 Sep 2006 Facebook only for US university and high schools

3rd phase 26 Sep 2006-today Facebook is open for everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address

What would Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) think about Facebook? He could think it's the Panopticon of the XXI century with important diffences:

- in Panopticon there are prisoners and observers; prisoners don't choose to lose privacy.

- in Facebook people do choose to lose part of privacy

- in Facebook everybody can be an observer

Techcrunch: commercial radio is dead

2009-03-11T15:49:00.005+01:00

March 11th 2009. In a few minutes a new FM radio is starting in New York - 92.3 NOW FM - but Nicholas Deleon (Techcrunch) 2 days ago wrote:

Commercial radio is dead: Why CBS Radio's K-Rock format switch in New York won't make a bit of difference in fight against technological irrelevance

There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they’re certainly not sticking around through the commercials to listen to new music on a radio station. No, sir, that’s what the Internet is for, and that’s why your business has no future. [...]

how do people discover new music in the year 2009?

[...] They’re not listening to the radio, sitting through commercials, waiting for the marble-mouthed DJ to say, “Hey, here’s [Cool New Band].” Yes, we know. We heard about [Cool New Band] two weeks ago via Twitter/Facebook/MySpace Music/whatever. Thanks for trying to remain relevant, though!

Now, I still think radio, as a medium, isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people listen to talk radio, whether it’s of the comedy variety à la Opie and Anthony, of the political variety à la Hannity or Rush, or of the sports variety. (My God does sports radio delve into minutia!) Radio is great for news, too: nothing wrong with listening to the headlines while you’re stuck in traffic on the BQE. But this idea that CBS Radio, and others, cling to, that commercial music radio has a future, that people still seek out commercial radio to listen to new music, is laughably outdated.

Click here for the full article and all the comments

Mediaweek:
Remember the Top 40 radio wars of the 60s? Well, they're back. CBS Radio announced Monday (March 9), it plans to ditch K-Rock on WXRK-FM in New York for Top 40, challenging Clear Channel Radio's Z100 (WHTZ-FM). Called "92.3 NOW FM," the Top 40 station will launch Wednesday, March 11 at 5 p.m. playing the hits that appeal to an 18-34 year-old listener.

Click here for the full article and all the comments

Globalization of football (soccer) communication

2009-03-05T01:28:00.005+01:00

David Beckham invited on closing ceremony of olympic games, Beijing; August 24, 2008

Let's see the official sites of football (soccer) team of Serie A: how many languages are official sites available in?

milan 6 languages: italian, english, spanish, portuguese, chinese, japanese

inter 4 languages: italian, english, spanish, chinese

juventus 3 languages: italian, english, chinese

chievo, napoli, palermo 2 languages: italian, english

atalanta, bologna, cagliari, catania, fiorentina, genoa, lazio, lecce, reggina, roma, sampdoria, siena, torino, udinese 1 language: italian

other important teams in Europe:

barcelona 7 languages: catalan, spanish, english, japanese, chinese, korean, arabic
bayern munich 5 languages: german, english, japanese, chinese, spanish
manchester utd 4 languages: english, chinese, japanese, korean
chelsea 4 languages: english, american version (?), korean, chinese, russian
real madrid 3 languages: spanish, english, japanese
psv eindhoven 3 languages: dutch, english, spanish
manchester city 2 languages: english, chinese
ajax 2 languages: dutch, english
porto 2 languages: portuguese, english
olympique de marseille 2 languages: french, english
borussia dortmund 2 languages: german, english
zenit st petersburg 2 languages: russian, english
red star belgrade 2 languages: serbian, english
liverpool 1 language: english
benfica 1 language: portuguese

obviously somebody doesn't understand the globalization of audience in football (soccer) ...

Radio's impact on public spending (USA, 1930's)

2009-02-25T03:25:00.004+01:00

FDR (1882-1945) after giving one of his famous fireside chats

David Stromberg is a professor at Stockholm University and he wrote a paper called

Radio's impact on public spending

(quarterly journal of economics 119-1, 2004 but the paper appears in early version on 1999)

Abstract:

If informed voters receive favorable policies, then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not. These ideas are developed in a voting model. The model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major New Deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio. The main empirical finding is that U.S. counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds. More funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but, controlling for these and other variables, the effects of radio are large and highly significant.

1 introduction

2 the FERA program and the expansion of radio

3 model

4 specification and data

5 results

6 conclusion and discussion

"governors allocated more relief funds to areas where a larger share of the population had radios" (page 23)

Invention of telephone and national heritage

2009-02-11T16:03:00.006+01:00

Sirio187: Telecom Italia telephone with caller ID and SMS - 2000

Who invented the telephone?

Yet we can't be sure at 100%. The problem is that an invention isn't only an artefact but often it is seen as a part of national heritage (similar thing about the invention of radio, i already wrote about it).

From Wikipedia:

the history of the invention of the telephone is a confusing collection of claims and counterclaims, made no less confusing by the many lawsuits which attempted to resolve the patent claims of several individuals

In the USA Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) for very long time was credited with inventing the telephone: patent 174,465 (see the 6-page patent here), including the claim on transmitting vocal sounds, was issued to Bell on 7 March 1876 by the U.S. Patent Office.
But things are much more complicated.

On 11th June 2002 the US House of Representatives passed the second version of bill number H.RES.269 EH

Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic; (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

HRES 269 EH

H. Res. 269

In the House of Representatives, U.S.,

June 11, 2002.

Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic;

Whereas, upon immigrating to New York, Meucci continued to work with ceaseless vigor on a project he had begun in Havana, Cuba, an invention he later called the `teletrofono', involving electronic communications;

Whereas Meucci set up a rudimentary communications link in his Staten Island home that connected the basement with the first floor, and later, when his wife began to suffer from crippling arthritis, he created a permanent link between his lab and his wife's second floor bedroom;

Whereas, having exhausted most of his life's savings in pursuing his work, Meucci was unable to commercialize his invention, though he demonstrated his invention in 1860 and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper;

Whereas Meucci never learned English well enough to navigate the complex American business community;

Whereas Meucci was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay his way through the patent application process, and thus had to settle for a caveat, a one year renewable notice of an impending patent, which was first filed on December 28, 1871;

Whereas Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate laboratory reportedly lost his working models, and Meucci, who at this point was living on public assistance, was unable to renew the caveat after 1874;

Whereas in March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci's materials had been stored, was granted a patent and was thereafter credited with inventing the telephone;

Whereas on January 13, 1887, the Government of the United States moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation, a case that the Supreme Court found viable and remanded for trial;

Whereas Meucci died in October 1889, the Bell patent expired in January 1893, and the case was discontinued as moot without ever reaching the underlying issue of the true inventor of the telephone entitled to the patent; and

Whereas if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved

, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.

After over a century Antonio Meucci (1808-1889) is credited with the invention of telephone ... but Alexander Graham Bell is a hero in Canada (he spent years in Canada and he died on 2 August 1922, at his private estate, Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, at age 75) and after 10 days we have news from canadian Parliament:

Friday, June 21, 2002

Oral question period

Canadian Heritage

Mr. Bob Speller (Haldimand—Norfolk—Brant, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Canadian Heritage.

The minister must be aware now of the silly goings on in the United States capital where the U.S. house of representatives passed a motion claiming that somebody other than Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

I am wondering if the minister will take the time to inform the U.S. congress that indeed yes, Virginia, Alexander Graham Bell did invent the telephone.

Hon. Sheila Copps (Minister of Canadian Heritage, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, this is one planted question that will bear fruit.

The member for Haldimand--Norfolk--Brant has raised a very important point. It has also been raised by my colleague from Brantford and by members on all sides of the House.

I am very pleased to report that right after question period I hope we will be able to table a unanimous resolution of all members of the House recognizing the fact that the real inventor of the telephone was indeed Alexander Graham Bell.

and later the same day:

Routine Proceedings

Alexander Graham Bell

Hon. Sheila Copps (Minister of Canadian Heritage, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the House for unanimous consent on the following motion, which has been discussed with all parties, regarding Alexander Graham Bell. I move:

This House affirms that Alexander Graham Bell of Brantford, Ontario and Baddeck, Nova Scotia is the inventor of the telephone.

The Speaker: Does the hon. Minister of Canadian Heritage have the unanimous consent of the House to propose this motion?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

The Speaker: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

(Motion agreed to)

Hon. Sheila Copps: Mr. Speaker, might I suggest that we forward a copy of this to the congress in the United States so they get their facts straight?

--
Not a word about Antonio Meucci, not a single evidence about the invention. Is the important thing to discover the truth about history or to save the national heritage?

There is even a second controversy about a race to the patent office between Elisha Gray (1835-1901) and Alexander Graham Bell (again!): I don't know who should be credited but I do know that Bell is a legend and Gray is completely unknown by the masses...

Using radio to fight corruption

2009-02-06T02:10:00.002+01:00

Nathalie Francken - Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) - LICOS Center for Transition Economics -, Bart Minten - Cornell University - Food and Nutrition Policy Program; Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) - Department of Agro-Engineering and Economics - and Johan F.M. Swinnen - Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) - LICOS Center for Transition Economics - in 2005 wrote a paper called

Listen to the Radio! Media and Corruption: Evidence from Madagascar

abstract: This paper investigates the role of the media in reducing corruption. We analyze data on personal capture of public education expenditures by local officials in Madagascar. We find that corruption can be successfully constrained through a combination of media programs and monitoring. More transparent funding mechanisms and access to mass media reduce capture. However, the impact of the media is conditional on the characteristics of the population. With high illiteracy in poor regions, the effectiveness of newspaper and poster campaigns is limited, and radio programs are more important to reduce capture.

The analysis is based on data collected in a budget tracking survey in 2002-2003.

1 Introduction

2 The policy framework

3 Monitoring and the media

4 Measuring capture and its determinants

5 Theory and hypotheses

6 Empirical model

7 Results

8 Conclusion

Digital radio and catch-22

2009-01-07T16:58:00.006+01:00

If you want to know a simple reason (there are many reasons, actually) why digital radio hasn't succeded yet, watch this video.

It's an old video but after 1:20 you can listen to Glyn Jones (i think he was BBC managing editor of digital radio from 1995 to 1999 and today is operations director at DigitalOne):

the manufacturers hesitated because no broadcasters are committed, no one
has said "right, we are gonna start transimitting this" and the broadcasters
hesitated because the manufacturers won't say "right, we'll have sets
available in the shops by this day"

It's a catch-22.

From Wikipedia: Catch-22 is a term coined by Joseph Heller in his novel Catch-22, describing a false dilemma in a rule, regulation, procedure or situation, where no real choice exists. In probability theory, it refers to a situation in which multiple probabilistic events exist, and the desirable outcome results from the confluence of these events, but there is zero probability of this happening, as they are mutually exclusive.

We can say that, in a transition from analogue to digital radio, deregulation can't work or, at least in this case, hasn't worked at all. We need the government (after talking to everybody: authority, broadcasters, manufacturers, listeners, etc..) to set a timeline (assuming that staying forever in analogue radio isn't really an option). We'd better read the Final Report (26 pag. 121 KB) by Digital Radio Working Group published on 19 December 2008. The report doesn't really talk about DAB+ but talks about switching off analogue radio: FM started in UK on 1955 and it could almost end between 2017 and 2022 (according to the report only small scale commercial and community radio will allowed to be in FM after digital migration). What will happen to 87.50 - 108.00 MHz frequencies after the switch off?? Low power FM radio (keep dreaming!) ??
The DRM standard is mentioned only once and not about UK ("DRM has been trialled in Switzerland, Russia and China")

Some reactions:

Guardian (John Plunkett)
Digital Radio Working Group reports on DAB, but ducks DAB+
(technology blog, Guardian)
BBC welcomes DRWG's report
Grant Goddard radio blog
UK free tv blog
Frontier Silicon
Daily Telegraph

Radio is an important part of the national discourse and perhaps an even more important voice in local democracy
(Final report of DRWG, page 11)

Hedge Funds and the Financial Market

2008-12-20T17:18:00.004+01:00

George Soros (from Flickr)

The Committee on Oversight and Government reform held a hearing titled, “Hedge Funds and the Financial Market” on Thursday, November 13, 2008.

Here you can read some interesting excerpts:

Testimony of Professor David Ruder (Professor of Law Emeritus, Northwestern University School of Law, Former Chairman, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 1987-1989)

The definition of hedge fund is unclear. The SEC has acknowledged that the term has no "precise legal or universally accepted definition". The President's Working Group on the Financial Markets has called a hedge fund "any pooled investment vehicle that is privately organized, administered by professional managers, and not widely available to the public".

[...]

Hedge fund managers do not want their investment strategies to become known.

[...]

Although hedge funds have been active participants in the financial markets during the past years, they do not seem to have played a major role in the events precipitating the crisis. [...], the market participants central to the credit crisis were loan originators, investment banks, rating agencies, and sellers of credit default swaps.

Testimony of Professor Andrew Lo (Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management)

If hedge funds are forced to reveal their strategies, the most intellectually innovative ones will simply cease to exist or move to other less intrusive regulatory jurisdictions.

Testimony of Houman Shadab (Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University)

First, hedge funds did not cause the financial crisis and are in fact helping to mitigate its damage and save taxpayers money. [...]

Second, hedge funds' short-selling activities have helped draw attention to the poor management and investment decisions of financial companies in recent years. [...]

Finally, existing laws and regulations should be strictly enforced against hedge funds and their managers, but changing how hedge funds are regulated could actually undermine the interests of investors and increase economic instability.

Testimony of Philip Falcone (senior managing director and co-founder of Harbinger
Capital Partners Funds)

Our investment philosophy is very simple; we study, often for months, the fundamentals of companies to identify those that are undervalued or overvalued, and we act decisively when opportunities present themselves. We are not momentum traders, nor are we day traders; we are investors. It is not magic. My analists perform thorough due diligence, rather than relying on ratings agencies or other research reports -- like many of the reports that improperly valued securitized mortgage products over the past few years.

Testimony of Kenneth Griffin (founder and CEO of Citadel Investment Group)

I am proud that in the 18 years since I founded Citadel, it has grown into a financial institution of great strenght and capability, with a team of over 1,400 talented individuals. Citadel manages approximately $ 15 billion of investment capital for a broad array of institutional investors, endowments, high-net-worth individuals and Citadel's employees.

Testimony of James Simons (chairman and CEO of Renaissance Technologies LLC)

Renaissance's investment approach is driven by my background in mathematics. Before I ever entered the business world, I was a mathematician. I have a PhD from Berkeley, won the 1975 Veblen Prize of the American Mathematics Society (given every four years for work in geometry and topology), and taught mathematics at the MIT and Harvard before becoming the chairman of the Mathematics Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Along the way, I spent four years as a code cracker for the National Security Agency. Renaissance, an SEC-registered Investment Adviser since 1998, manages what are termed quantitative funds - funds whose trading is determined by mathematical formulas designed to predict market behavior. Individual trades are generated by computers, based on work continually developed by our researchers. Naturally, human beings carefully monitor the trade execution process, making sure that all parts of the system are behaving properly. We operate in only highly liquid, publicly listed securities, such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities, and do this on exchanges throughout the world. This means, for example, that we do not trade in credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations, neither of which satisfies the above criteria. In the stock trading of our Medallion Fund, we hold balanced portfolios in each country, i.e., portfolios very close to being equally long and short. Our trading models tend to buy stocks that are recently out of favor and sell those recently in favor.

Testimony of John Paulson (president and founder of Paulson & Co. Inc)

Paulson & Co. Inc is an investment advisory firm that was founded in 1994 and has been registered with the SEC since 2004. We currently manage assets of approximately $ 36 billion using event-driven strategies. We are based in New York and also have offices in London and Hong Kong. We have approximately seventy employees. Prior to founding the firm, I was a Managing Director in Mergers & Acquisitions at Bear Stearns. I am a summa cum laude graduate from New York University and graduated with high distinction, as a Baker Scholar, from Harvard Business School in 1980. Our investors include pension funds, endowments, banks, insurance companies, family offices and high-net-worth individuals in the U.S. and around the world. All of the investment funds we manage are open only to "qualified purchasers", which are highly sophisticated investors with $5 million in investable assets if they are individuals, and $25 million in investable assets if they are institutions. Our investors look to us to protect their capital, and to show positive returns in both good and bad markets. We do this by going long securities that we think will rise in value and going short securities that we think will decline in value. By constructing a diverse portfolio of both long and short positions, we have been able to operate profitably in 14 out of the last 15 years, including this year and the 2000-2002 periods when the NASDAQ index lost 78% of its value. [...] We share profits with our investors on an 80/20 basis where 80% of the profits go to the investors and 20% remains with us. We only earn performance allocations if our investors are profitable. All of our funds have a "high water mark", which means that if we lose money for our investors, we have to earn it back before we share in future profits. Some of our funds also have a "claw back" provision, requiring us to return profits earned in prior periods if we lose money in subsequent periods. In addition, we invest our own money alongside that of our clients, so we share investment losses along with gains.

We are a private company and have no public shareholders. We receive no taxpayer subsidies. All of our investors invest with us on a voluntary basis. We also use very little leverage. Over the past five years, for over half the time our base portfolios were not funded with any borrowed money, and our maximum borrowing as a percentage of equity capital over this period was 33%.

In February 2004, we voluntarily registered with the SEC as an investment advisor.

Testimony of George Soros

The crisis was generated by the financial system itself. This fact - that the defect was inherent in the system - contradicts the prevailing theory, which holds that financial markets tend toward equilibrium and that deviations from the equilibrium either occur in a random manner or are caused by some sudden external event to which markets have difficulty adjusting. The severity and amplitude of the crisis provides convincing evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with this prevailing theory and with the approach to market regulation that has gone with it.

Zeitgeist of the year 2008

2008-12-12T00:03:00.006+01:00

Sarah Heath Palin: she lost election but she won the Google Zeigeist

One year ago, i wrote about Google Zeitgeist of 2007. Now it's time to write about the Zeitgeist of they year 2008.

Zeitgeist is a german word and it could be translated as "spirit of the age" or "spirit of the times", it is best known in relation to Hegel's view of philosophy of history.

From Google Zeitgeist site:
As the year comes to a close, it's time to look at the big events, memorable moments and emerging trends that captivated us in 2008. As it happens, studying the aggregation of the billions of search queries that people type into the Google search box gives us a glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times. We've compiled some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and hope you enjoy looking back as much as we do.

Actually, in US Zeitgeist they are more specific:
"Fastest rising" means we looked at the most popular searches conducted for 11 months of 2008 (we compile this list by early December) and ranked them based on how much their frequency increased compared to 2007.

Fastest Rising (Global)

sarah palin
beijing 2008
facebook login
tuenti
heath ledger
obama
nasza klasa
wer kennt wen
euro 2008
jonas brothers

1 Tuenti is a Madrid-based, invite only private social networking website (launched on May 2006) that has been referred to as the "Spanish Facebook". The name Tuenti, pronounced in Spanish, sounds like Twenty in English. Tuenti is targeted at the Spanish audience. The site is currently accessible only to those who have been invited
2 nasza-klasa.pl (Our Class) is a large social networking platform for people in Poland, a social networking site bringing together a school's students and alumni; launched on november 2006, today has 11 million registered people
3 wer kennt wen is a german social networking website created on 2006, today has 4.9 million of users
4 Jonas Brothers are an american boy band active since 2005

---

Google.com - Fastest Rising (U.S.)

obama
facebook
att
iphone
youtube
fox news
palin
beijing 2008
david cook
surf the channel

5 att should be AT&T: the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, DSL Internet access and wireless service in the United States with 71.4 million wireless customers and more than 150 million total customers
6 David Cook (1982) is an American singer-songwriter. On May 21, 2008, he won the seventh season of the reality television show American Idol
7 SurfTheChannel is website for TV fans

---

Fastest Rising UK

iplayer
facebook
iphone
youtube
yahoo mail
large hadron collider
obama
friv
jogos
wiki

The battle of (mobile)phones goes on

2008-12-01T14:48:00.008+01:00

pic from Flickr - iPhone

Last year i was writing about phone business: iPhone and Android, let's see what happened in the last 12 months.
On 14th November 2007, i wrote about Android Developer Challenge: a contest for the most innovative application for Android, 10 million US dollars distributed between two phases of the competition.

First phase - 12th May 2008 - The top 50 applications are announced, click here to know 46 of them (4 teams decided "to continue their efforts in secret"); each team received a $25,000 award to fund further development
Second phase - 25th September 2008 - 10 teams received a $275,000 award each and 10 teams received a $100,000 award each. Click here to know all the projects

The winner of $275,000 award are:
cab4me
cab4me enables you to easily call a cab to any location worldwide
CompareEverywhere
Compare prices, read reviews, and connect with local stores
Ecorio
Ecorio automatically tracks your mobile carbon footprint, suggests transit and carpooling alternatives and lets you stay carbon neutral by offsetting your trips easily
GoCart
Scan a product's barcode with your phone's camera and view all the best prices online and at nearby, local stores
Life360
Life360 uses a multi-channel messaging system and neighborhood-centric social network to keep you up-to-date and in contact with your family and local community
Locale
Locale is an advanced settings manager that automatically changes your phone's settings based on conditions, such as location
PicSay
Easy to use image editor that enables you to quickly personalize your pictures and share them with friends or photo sites
Softrace
With Softrace people around the world meet online to compete against each other in different physical activities
TuneWiki
TuneWiki Social Media Player, is an advanced player, featuring synchronized lyrics for audio or video, translation, music maps and a social network
Wertago
Find the hottest parties in town and connect with friends and others all night long

Since 21 Oct 2008, Android is available as open source, the source is approximentely 2.1GB in size

The first phone in the market running Android is the T-Mobile G1, released on 22nd October 2008, it came preinstalled with Android 1.0

pic from Wikipedia - T-Mobile G1 (made by HTC)

And what happened to the iPhone?
iPhone has been a big success but iPhone 3G has been a HUGE success:

picture from Wikipedia
Q1 Oct-Dec; Q2 Jan-Mar; Q3 Apr-Jun; Q4 Jul-Sep

iPhone was realeased on 29th June 2007, iPhone3G was released on 11th July 2008. Apple sold more iPhones in 92 days (July-Sep 2008) than in the previous 12 months!! 6.89 million of iPhones in July-Sep 2008 and 6.124 million from 29th June 2007 to 30th June 2008.
Apple might win the battle of business but isn't winning the battle for climate leadership.

From the site of Greenpeace:

The Guide to Greener Electronics is our way of getting the electronics industry to take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of its products. We want it to face up to the problem of e-waste and take on the challenge of tackling climate change.

First launched in August 2006, the Guide ranks the leaders of the mobile phone, computer, TV and games console markets according to their policies and practices on toxic chemicals, recycling and energy. Since June 2008, the Guide has ranked companies on five climate and energy criteria. In this current edition we're focussing on climate leadership - not only because the global climate needs it but because electronics firms have a big role to play in the low-carbon economy of the future.

Nokia is the best one: ranking 6.9/10
Apple ranking 4.3/10

Complete results of 2008 US presidential election

2008-11-22T17:17:00.006+01:00

pic from Wikipedia - popular vote by county

pic from Wikipedia - red denotes states/districts won by McCain/Palin, blue by Obama/Biden. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state

Election results

Barack Obama 67,981,686 votes--------52.77%--------365 electoral votes
John McCain 59,082,002 votes--------45.86%--------173 electoral votes
Ralph Nader 720,227 votes-------------0.56%----------------------------

Barack Obama/Joe Biden (democratic party) won in 28 states + DC + NE2
(California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachussets, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska2, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin)

John McCain/Sarah Heath Palin (republican party) won in 22 states
(Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississipi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska1, Nebraska3, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming)

Barack Obama is going to be the first president (since John Fitzgerald Kennedy) who has been neither a governor nor a vice president. If John McCain had won, it would have been the same (but McCain spent 4 years as a member of House of Representatives and 22 years as a member of Senate)

The night of 4th November 2008, Obama gave his acceptance speech:

McCain gave his concession speech (click here)

It's impossible not to talk about another famous speech:
28th August 1963 - Martin Luther King's speech (I have a dream) in Washington during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

MLK: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

If MLK had been alive today, what would he has said? Is his dream real today??

Best DJs of 2008!!

2008-11-20T15:45:00.004+01:00

record needle on technics 1210 (pic from Flickr)

I talked about it one year ago and I can't miss it this year!
DJ magazine wrote the TOP 100 DJ of 2008, the first two positions haven't changed:

1 Armin Van Buuren - (Netherlands)

2 Tiësto - (Netherlands)

3 Paul Van Dyk - (Germany)

4 Above & Beyond - (England)

5 David Guetta - (France)

6 Ferry Corsten - (Netherlands)

7 Sasha - (Wales)

8 Markus Schulz - (Germany)

9 John Digweed - (England)

10 Infected Mushroom - (Israel)

11 Deadmau5 - (Canada)

12 Carl Cox - (England)

13 Sander van Doorn - (Netherlands)

14 Paul Oakenfold - (England)

15 Richie Hawtin - (England)

16 Hernan Cattaneo - (Argentina)

17 James Zabiela - (England)

18 Andy Moor - (England)

19 Eddie Halliwell - (England)

20 Axwell - (Sweden)
--
To know the whole TOP 100, click here

Investment banks and financial crisis 2007-2008

2008-11-14T00:07:00.006+01:00

Leverage ratios of investment banks (from Wikipedia)

US Gross Federal Debt, unadjusted for inflation (from Wikipedia)

If we want to try to understand the global financial crisis going on now, we need to try to understand the role of investment banks in USA.
There is an interesting paper about investment banks, the paper was written and it's called
The Demise of Investment-Banking Partnerships: Theory and Evidence
written in 2004 by Alan D. Morrison (University of Oxford-Said Business School; University of Oxford-Merton College) and William J. Wilhelm Jr (University of Oxford-Said Business School; University of Virginia-School of Law)

Abstract:
Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999) the last of the bulge bracket banks to float. In this paper, we ask why the Investment Banks chose to float after 1970, and why they did so in waves. In our model, partnerships have a role in fostering the formation of human capital. We examine in this context the effect of technological innovations which serve to replace or to undermine the role of the human capitalist and hence we provide a technological theory of the partnership's going-public decision. We support our theory with a new dataset of investment bank partnership statistics.

This is a very important issue: before 1970, the New York Stock Exchange (the famous Wall Street) prohibited investment banks from going public (in USA "going public" means starting an IPO in order to enter the stock exchange).

We can read from the official site of NYSE:

Public Can Own Member Firms
March 26 1970
Public ownership of member firms is approved for the first time

And, maybe, it was the beginning of the end...

James Surowiecki wrote (29 September 2008; The New Yorker):

[...] All, then, seemed good. But, for Wall Street firms, going public was a deal with the devil, because it meant exposing themselves to what was, in effect, a minute-by-minute referendum, in the form of the stock price, on the health of their operations. This was fine as long as things were going well—the higher the stock price, the richer everyone got—but, once things started to go bad, that market referendum started to look like a vote of no confidence. And that made the problems that the companies were already facing much, much worse. [...]

and

[...] All companies, of course, worry about how their stock is doing. But for most the stock price is a product of performance, rather than a cause of it. If Procter & Gamble’s stock plummeted tomorrow, people would still keep buying Tide. By contrast, if an investment bank’s share price tumbles, it not only wrecks people’s confidence but also can lead to credit-rating downgrades, which provoke a further decline in the stock price, and so on. The downward spiral can be stunningly fast and near-impossible to escape. [...]

After 1970, investment banks could enter the stock exchange, and theese are the dates when they decided to do so (NYSE):

1971 Merrill Lynch
1985 Bear Stearns
1986 Morgan Stanley
1994 Lehman Brothers
1999 Goldman Sachs

What happened to the 5 investment banks that we can see from the first image?

Merrill Lynch: acquired by Bank of America
Bear Stearns: acquired by JPMorgan Chase (with the help of the Fed)
Morgan Stanley: changed its status from investment bank to bank holding
company
Lehman Brothers: bankruptcy
Goldman Sachs: changed its status from investment bank to bank holding
company

On 23rd September 2008 we heard:

The FBI is investigating Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc and insurer American International Group Inc and their senior executives for potential mortgage fraud, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Well, who is going to investigate the role of the Sec about the subprime crisis??

35 innovators

2008-11-03T23:23:00.005+01:00

Last year I already talked about this (35 beautiful minds) and I'm glad to write about it again.

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review (magazine of Massachussets Institute of Technology) have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research they find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

Theese are the winners of 2008.

2008 Innovator of the Year: JB Straubel
2008 Humanitarian of the Year: Aimèe Rose

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (33 years old - Microsoft Live Labs)
Building immersive 3-D environments

Theodore Betley (31 - Harvard University)
Re-creating photosynthesis

Martin Burke (32 - University of Illinois)
Molecular diversity

Dries Buytaert (29 - Drupal)
Simple, flexible Web publishing

Cristopher Chang (33 - University of California, Berkeley)
Probing chemical reactions in the body

Michelle Chang (31 - University of California, Berkeley)
Designing microbes to make fuels and drugs

Jenova Chen (26 - Thatgamecompany)
Gaming with the flow

Tanzeem Choudhury (33 - Dartmouth College)
Inferring social networks automatically

Peter L. Corsell (30 - GridPoint)
Making the electric grid smart

Jack Dorsey (31 - Twitter)
Personal updates made simple

Stefanus Du Toit (25 - RapidMind)
Programming for parallel processors

Nicholas Fang (33 - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Superlenses for watching cells

Ric Fulop (33 - A123 Systems)
Energizing rechargeable batteries

Julia Greer (32 - California Institute of Technology)
Revealing how materials behave at the nanoscale

Hossam Haick (33 - Technion-Israel Institute of Technology)
Sniffing out cancer

Seth Hallem (28 - Coverity)
Deconstructing software to find bugs

Donhee Ham (34 - Harvard University)
Portable nuclear magnetic resonance

Konrad Hochedlinger (32 - Harvard Medical School)
Turning adult cells into stem cells

Xian-Sheng Hua (34 - Microsoft Research Asia)
Enhancing video search

Sundar Iyer (31 - Cisco Systems)
Making memory at Internet speed

Jeffrey Karp (32 - Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology)
Gecko-inspired surgical tape

Farinaz Koushanfar (32 - Rice University)
Locking microchips to prevent piracy

Johnny Lee (28 - Microsoft)
Streamlining human-computer interactions

Meredith Ringel Morris (29 - Microsoft Research)
Searching websites jointly

Andrew Ng (32 - Stanford University)
Building household robots

Kostya Novoselov (34 - University of Manchester)
Two-dimensional transistors

Milica Radisic (32 - University of Toronto)
Patching damaged hearts

Aimèe Rose (34 - ICx Technologies)
Ultrasensitive detectors to sniff out explosives

Bilal Shafi (34 - University of Pennsylvania)
Preventing congestive heart failure

Adam Smith (23 - Xobni)
Making sense of e-mail madness

JB Straubel (32 - Tesla Motors)
Engineering electric sports cars

Joo Chuan Tong (31 - The Singapore Agency for Science, Technology, and Research's Institute for Infocomm Research)
My vision: Personalized vaccines

Eric Wilhelm (31 - Instructables)
Putting DIY projects online

Robert Wood (31 - Harvard University)
Building robotic flies

Ronggui Yang (34 - University of Colorado, Boulder)
Efficient electricity from waste heat

First birthday of the blog

2008-10-09T01:05:00.004+02:00

This blog is one year old! The first post was sent exactly one year ago (rather silly post!) and now you can read other 215 posts (but i have to admit that most of the posts of the first 2 months were copy & paste). I can't complain about the visits (22,614 visits so far; the first country is USA, then Italy and UK). Beside the numbers, i hope that somebody finds interesting stuff here, feel free to comment. Keep tuned, more to come!

Top 2008 brands

2008-09-22T01:35:00.005+02:00

1901 Coca Cola calendar

Interbrand announces the 2008 best global brands, they listed the top 100. Here you can see the top 10 (i added the year):

Brand - year - 2008 brand value $ mil - country of origin

1 Coca-Cola - 1886 - 66,667 - USA

2 IBM - 1924 - 59,031 - USA

3 Microsoft - 1976 - 59,007 - USA

4 GE (General Electric) - 1878 - 53,086 - USA

5 Nokia - 1865 - 35,942 - Finland

6 Toyota - 1937 - 34,050 - Japan

7 Intel- 1969 - 31,261 - USA

8 Mc Donald's - 1940 - 31,049 - USA

9 Disney - 1923 - 29,251 - USA

10 Google - 1998 - 25,590 - USA

the first british is
27 HSBC - 1865 - 13,143 - UK
the first italian is (actually today Gucci is owned by french PPR)
45 Gucci - 1921 - 8,254 - Italy

year means the year when the name was adopted

in the press release we can read:

Coca-Cola (No.1) remains the best global brand for the eighth year in a row. Yet, a notable shift in this year’s rankings was made by IBM, which took over the No. 2 position from Microsoft (No. 3). Google also moved into the top 10 brands, at No. 10, after ranking at No. 20 in 2007.

It's possible to download the full report (pdf file, 85 pages)

The brand Google: in 10 years from nothing to number 10!! It would be interesting to know how much money the corporations spent for advertising. How much money has Coca-Cola been spending since its foundation?

Telecom Italia in trouble

2008-09-07T19:33:00.004+02:00

ownership of Telecom Italia on August 2008

value of Telecom Italia stocks from january 1998 to 5th september 2008

Telecom Italia entered in Milan stock exchange on 27th October 1997, when the government (Prodi was PM) decided the privatisation. The highest

value was on 13th March 2000, during dot-com bubble. The last trade on 5th september 2008 was made at 1.037 Euro per stock, the lowest value since 12th January 1998 (1.009 Euro). Somebody thinks the Telefonica isn't unhappy about this: they'll be able to buy Telecom Italia at a cheap price... Anyway, something is going to happen soon...

Dab and Dab+ test in Rome

2008-09-07T02:28:00.005+02:00

Now it's possible to hear DAB test of Rai (in 2008!!) in Rome.
In channel 9D they are testing DAB+ (DAB with new codec) as well.

Channel 6A 181,93 MHz

ClubDab - RaiWay

Radiouno 160 kbps stereo
Radiodue 160 kbps stereo
Radiotre 160 kbps stereo
Rai Fd4 96 kbps stereo
Rai Fd5 96 kbps stereo
Isoradio 96 kbps mono
Grpr 48 kbps mono
Radio Radicale 64 kbps stereo
Radio Maria 64 kbps mono

It's also possible to hear:

Channel 9D 208,06 MHz

Eurodab

Radio Radio 128 kbps stereo
Radio Radio +
Rtl 102,5 128 kbps stereo
Rtl 102,5 +
Radio Vaticana +
Radio Padania +
Rtl Italian Style
Rtl Clas +

Secret tool of iPhone

2008-08-27T14:45:00.005+02:00

On 6th August, the site iPhone Atlas wrote:

iphone can phone home and kill apps?

Apple has apparently included a blacklisting mechanism in iPhone OS 2.x via
which the device can phone home, check for unauthorized applications, and
disable them. The OS includes a URL that points to a page containing a list
of unauthorized applications, specifically:

https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps

Jonathan Zdziarski said:
"This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what
applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been
blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable
applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so
chooses to shut them down. "I discovered this doing a forensic examination
of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep
inside CoreLocation."

That post was like opening Pandora's box: all conspiracy theorists were
happy, they had found a trendy scapegoat. The next day Zdziarski wrote in his
own blog:

So I post one little comment to a geek blog site about an "unauthorized
apps" list downloaded by the iPhone, and every wanna-be-watergate journalist
in the northern hemisphere emails me with conspiracy theories.

It's worth reading the whole page because he explains how it is possible to disable this infamous
functionality entirely.

On 11th August Steve Jobs (chairman and CEO of Apple) gave an interview to WSJ saying:

Apple raised hackles in computer-privacy and security circles when an independent engineer discovered code inside the iPhone that suggested iPhones routinely check an Apple Web site that could, in theory trigger the removal of the undesirable software from the devices.

Mr. Jobs confirmed such a capability exists, but argued that Apple needs it
in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program -- one that stole users'
personal data, for example -- to be distributed to iPhones through the App
Store. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be
irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he says.

Hopefully, mr Jobs, we would never like to buy something that has secret
levers! How many other levers are built in iphone? Hopefully, are you going
to tell us or do we have to wait for the next geek?

Decline of payphones in Italy

2008-07-30T01:37:00.002+02:00

Telecom Italia payphone in Vatican State, 2008

In Italy payphones are less and less used by people: in the last 10 years mobile phones have been a huge success.

How many millions of minutes were spent in payphones?

The answer is in the reports of italian authority.
It would be interesting (but they didn't write it) to know how many sms are sent from those payphones.

2005

800 millions of minutes (1)

2006

600 (2)

2007

300 (2)

If you go to worldpayphones you can see photographic pictures of payphones of all the world

1 report 2007 pag.50
2 report 2008 pag.48

Controversial survey about muslim students in UK

2008-07-28T03:07:00.006+02:00

In UK the "Centre for Social Cohesion" interviewed 632 muslim students and 831 non-muslim students.

Is it fair having 632 muslim people interview and the newspapers writing "Killing for religion is justified, say third of muslim students" ? The same article says "The YouGov poll was conducted for the Right-wing think tank, the Centre for Social Cohesion" but you need to reach the end of the article (how many times do we stop earlier?) to read "YouGov polled 600 Muslim students and 800 non-Muslim students at universities with a high number of Muslims."

You can read the full report:
Islam on campus - a survey of UK students opinion (126 pages, pdf file)
or read an executive summary here (3 pages, pdf file)

The Times:

A third of muslim students back killings; Abul Taher

Telegraph:

Killing for religion is justified, say third of muslim students; Patrick Sawer

Guardian:
Radical Islam gains ground in campuses; Jamie Doward

--

FOSIS is the umbrella organization of student groups in colleges and universities throughout the UK and Ireland, representing over 90,000 Muslim students

FOSIS condemns the report:

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) in the UK and Eire today condemned the publication of a report published by the Centre for Social Cohesion entitled "Islam on Campus".

Faisal Hanjra, President for FOSIS, said today, "This is yet another damning attack on the Muslim community by elements within the academic arena whose only purpose seems to be the undermining of sincere efforts by mainstream Muslim organisations to tackle the threat of terror which wider society faces. The report is methodologically weak, it is unrepresentative and above all serves only to undermine the positive work carried out by Islamic Societies across the country. Unfortunately, the views espoused by the CSC in tackling extremism involves the creation of an "Islam" outside the Muslims, which, to begin with is a sure way to failure, and far from empowering the Muslims, perpetuates a patronising tone of "we know better than you do"."

He further added, "FOSIS has been a recognised cog in delivering consistent, mainstream opinions and by maligning it, CSC has shown itself to be an unreliable and marred think tank. Muslim students have had a tough time since the dreadful attacks on 7/7, they have faced numerous challenges with courage and perseverance, it is evident that those challenges have yet to go away and what is equally evident is the resilience of Muslim students to face those challenges. The message though to those who seek to cause this mischief is clear, we will not be deterred, our work will continue and the results of our efforts are clear for all to see.

Communication breakdown during semi-final Euro 2008

2008-06-26T18:02:00.004+02:00

Yesterday, during the second half of the semi-final Germany - Turkey (european football/soccer tournament called Euro 2008), the live feed from the host broadcaster went down at the Vienna's International Broadcast Centre (IBC) and most viewers missed about 15-18 minutes of the match.

What happened?

It's interesting to read the official statement from UEFA:

26-06-2008 communiqué aux médias n 095

Statement on the television interruption during UEFA 2008 semi-final, Germany Turkey

At a press conference held this morning in Vienna, UEFA Media Technologies SA CEO, Alexandre Fourtoy, explained the problems encountered yesterday at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC), precipitated by a violent electrical storm that triggered a power outage and a loss of image for a number of minutes during the second half of the first UEFA EURO 2008 semi-final in Basel.

"The IBC of Vienna is using the power grid of the city of Vienna, and the provider of our power solution here has also installed, on top of it, a protection system which is designed to detect cuts of power and to switch automatically to a back-up power on site, which is provided by generators. Yesterday we have been affected during the storm in Vienna by three micro-cuts of less than 1 millisecond, but this millisecond is enough to cause our Master Control Room to re-boot and that takes several minutes, and this is why the signal was off air. The protection system has been defective in detecting the cuts, to switch to the back-up power.

You should know that we have selected the best providers to build-up our IBC and the power system - the providers which have built up the IBC and the power system for the World Cup 2006 - and this power has been fully tested according to industry procedure before the event and it was working perfectly well up until yesterday.

What is important to know is for tonight (the second Semi-Final Russia - Spain in Vienna) and for the Final, we have switched the power of the IBC to the fully independent generator power which has also a back up on its own, because what we want to do is to avoid any external factor affecting the power and therefore the transmission of the signal.

The issue of yesterday was purely linked to electricity, nothing to do with transmission, nothing to do with our partners Telekom Austria and Swisscom, and what i'd like to add as well is that we are, of course, extremely sorry for everyone watching television yesterday for the minutes they have missed. We have however been re-feeding the missing material to all broadcasters afterwards."

It's also interesting to read Reuters:

UEFA's director of communications William Gaillard told a news conference: "This is not normal summer weather for central Europe. It was exceptional and there is no forecast of a repeat."

Pictures were lost for two separate six-minute spells and UEFA then decided to manually take the system down, causing another six-minute break, to switch to the back-up power supply.

Swiss TV was able to show continuous pictures as there was a separate fibre-optic feed from the Basel Stadium. Other broadcasters including Germany's ZDF, used the Swiss pictures with their own commentators, slightly off the pace, tagged on.

Were broadcasters (such as german ZDF) allowed to use pictures from Swiss tv?

From Times:

There is also uncertainty whether it was a breach of contract when broadcasters took pictures from Swiss television, which was reported to be unaffected, as a result of the loss.

"I don't know exactly the terms of the contracts, I don't think there is an obligation to take the signal from Vienna because broadcasters have several capacities to manage a signal," Alexandre Fourtoy, chief executive officer of Uefa Media Technologies, said.

One thing is having an obligation to take the signal from a place, another thing is not having an obligation and using other tv's effort without any compensation.

Much rumour about nothing

2008-06-10T02:17:00.005+02:00

above: the last 12 months of AS Roma stocks

UPDATE about globalization of football (soccer) ownership post

On 1st May i wrote:

"There are several rumours that George Soros (hungarian-born US speculator and philanthropist) is going to buy Roma ; Steven Horowitz of Inner Circle Sports has been recently seen in Rome more than once, therefore someone does want to buy the club. Some newspapers wrote Soros offered about 210 million Euro for 67% of shares, which is 2,37 Euro per shares, more than double the current price. Will it be enough for the family that now owns the club?"

I was wrong because on 3rd June MF-Dow Jones (one news agency for italian stock exchange) wrote that Michael Vachon [director of communications at Soros Fund Management (SFM). Mr. Vachon serves as spokesperson for the Fund and for Mr. Soros personally] told them that Soros isn't interested about buying that team.

It might be usefull to ask some questions:

1) Was it true that George Soros (before June) wanted to buy As Roma?

If not, who started the rumour? If it was true, what went wrong?

2) Why don't the current owners (Sensi family) explain what happened in the past months?

3) The current owners need to pay back (reports talk about 370 mil of euro) some banks. Do they know how to do that without selling the team?

Grid: innovation or marketing?

2008-05-20T14:51:00.003+02:00

In the overdose of information that we experience everyday, in April i found the following news:

Coming soon: superfast internet called "Grid"

Most of the articles about Grid are based on one article (April 6, 2008) of british Times. In the article you can read the words of David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project: "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine". It's a kind of sentence that can mean everything and nothing at the same time, it sounds like an advertising of a new product. Have scientists become expert of marketing?

Not huge difference of information since another article of Guardian (July 3 2003)
Welcome to the grid: unlimited PC power at your fingertips

another article full of hype:
The Internet's over ... here comes the Grid
Daily Mirror, 7 April 2008

What is the Grid?

A very fast speed network is obviously a positive invention but what is the
content of this network? What could be the benefit for "common" people? They
didn't tell us, but they (Ian Bird, project leader for Cern's high-speed
computing project) said "It will lead to what's known as cloud computing,
where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere".
And the privacy? Who can guarantee that corporations won't search through my
private information that i could store online?

I'm not saying that the Grid is useless, probably it could be very useless,
but could anyone explain the usefulness to normal people instead of using
trendy slogans?
Is it possible to see the day when some journalists ask simple questions, instead
of just repeating/translating what they saw on the net?

In another site, at last we can read some specific information:

The EGEE Grid consists of 41,000 CPU available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to about 5 PB disk (5 million Gigabytes) + tape MSS of storage, and maintains 100,000 concurrent jobs. Having such resources available changes the way scientific research takes place. The end use depends on the users' needs: large storage capacity, the bandwidth that the infrastructure provides, or the sheer computing power available.

You can see the blog of David Britton (don't expect much because he
started blogging 1 month ago)

Al Gore tours for launching italian Current TV

2008-05-14T01:16:00.010+02:00

from the left: Carelli (director of italian Sky news), Al Gore, translator and Marc Goldman (US Current)

Few days ago (8th May 2008) Al Gore (do i have to write he was vice president of USA from 1993 to 2000 and he won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?) was in Rome to talk about the new tv channel: italian version of Current Tv. Bloggers met Al Gore in a theatre and asked him 15 questions about the new channel (but i think that italian director Tommaso Tessarolo will have much autonomy for italian Current); i took some pictures and i listened to the "dialogue".

The italian blogosphere is full of comments about blogger's reaction to Al Gore, if you know italian language you can read the opinion of
(my friend) Antonio Pavolini
Michele Colitti
Valeria Gentile
Kay Rush
Mario Tedeschini Lalli
Vittorio Zambardino
Francesca "LaFra" Casadei
David Orban
Telemac0

I'm not going into a deep debate about the philisophy of brand-new Current Tv Italy (is the name correct?) but i have an easy complaint: not everybody (from 18 to 34 years old) can afford an annual contract with Sky Italia; less viewers, less impact on society.

The risk is that we'll have a smarter version of YouTube, as somebody already has said.

I don't know what kind of clip (or pod, like Gore said) we'll be able to see in Italy but from the blog of Foreign Policy i saw that the american version of Current has shown very interesting clips such as:
- Lost in democracy (18 minutes)

Christof Putzel travels to Bhutan to find out how young people are dealing with democracy, westernization, and other challenges to their unique national culture
- City on steroids (almost 28 minutes)
American filmmaker Adam Yamaguchi tours the little-known megacity of Chongqing, China. Growing at a rate of nearly 200,000 people per year, Chongqing is the one of the fastest growing cities on the planet and an emblem of China's rapid urbanization. The clearly overwhelmed Yamaguchi takes viewers on a quick tour of this modern boomtown from brand new yuppie apartments to factory floors
- A civil war ends? (6 minutes and half)
Short documentary on the conflict in Uganda that includes an interview with a former top Lord's Resistance Army commander who says he has no regrets about his actions

The first 2 videoclips are Current Vanguard, which means are special video not sent by "normal" users; users are only allowed to send video from 2 to 8 minutes. If italian Current will show this kind of video (which i can NOT see from the website!), i would say: two thumbs up! Anyway, doesn anyone know what's the social impact of 3 years of Current TV in USA??

Globalization of football (soccer) ownership

2008-05-01T02:20:00.005+02:00

This season we've seen 4 teams in Champions League: 3 english teams (Man utd, Chelsea and Liverpool) and 1 spanish (Barcelona); and we now we can be sure we'll see 2 english teams (Man utd and Chelsea) for the final, scheduled on May 21st 2008, Moscow.

Who are the owners of theese teams?

Barcelona is owned by its members, they are more than 150 thousands and every four years they have the right to vote in the club’s presidential elections.

Let's see what happened in english football in the recent years:

1997 egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed bought Fulham FC

2003 russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea FC

2005 US businessman Malcolm Glazer bought all of the shares and delist Man Utd from
London Stock Exchange

2006 US entrepreneur Randy Lerner bought Aston Villa FC

2006 irish Niall Quinn bought Sunderland AFC

2006 icelandic billionaire Björgólfur Guðmundsson bought West Ham United

2007 US businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks bought Liverpool FC

2007 thai businessman and politician Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City

All the most important teams (except Arsenal) today are owned by foreigners, probably there's a connection between the foreign investors and the first final with two english clubs.

There are several rumours that George Soros (hungarian-born US speculator and philanthropist) is going to buy Roma ; Steven Horowitz of Inner Circle Sports has been recently seen in Rome more than once, therefore someone does want to buy the club. Some newspapers wrote Soros offered about 210 million Euro for 67% of shares, which is 2,37 Euro per shares, more than double the current price. Will it be enough for the family that now owns the club?

If you don't have any idea why people like football (or soccer, if you are from USA), you can have a look at this research:

Parity and Predictability of Competitions - 2006
(you can view and download the 6-page pdf file)
3 US researchers (Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez) studied the results of nearly all regular season competitions in 4 major American professional sports leagues (Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, National Basketball Association and National Football League) and English Premier League; they analized more than 300,000 games in over a century.
It is hard to say whether to rely on this study (they admitted "home and away games are not incorporated into our model, but game location does affect the outcome of games") or not; anyway at the end they wrote "soccer and baseball are the most competitive sports while basketball and [US] football are the least"

Italy 2006 and 2008

2008-04-17T19:59:00.012+02:00

Italy 2008

Italy 2006

red belongs to the regions where the centreleft coalition won for the senate, blue belongs to the regions where the centreright coalition won for the senate

the maps are taken from Wikipedia, here and here

the numbers inside of the regions: the number of senators that got elected from the winning coalition (in the specific region)

you can read the results of italian general elections here: 2006 and 2008

Pulitzer Prize winners 2008 - journalism

2008-04-09T00:03:00.004+02:00

(Adrees Latif's photo)

April 7, 2008 - Columbia University announces 92nd annual Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, letters, drama and music.

Here you can read the winners for journalism:

-Public service

Awarded to The Washington Post for the work of Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille in exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.

-Breaking news reporting

Awarded to The Washington Post Staff for its exceptional, multi-faceted coverage of the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, telling the developing story in print and online.

-Investigative reporting

Two Prizes of $10,000 each:
Awarded to Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker of The New York Times for their stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other everyday products imported from China, leading to crackdowns by American and Chinese officials
and
Awarded to the Chicago Tribune Staff for its exposure of faulty governmental regulation of toys, car seats and cribs, resulting in the extensive recall of hazardous products and congressional action to tighten supervision.

-explanatory reporting

Awarded to Amy Harmon of The New York Times for her striking examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing, using human stories to sharpen her reports.

-local reporting

Awarded to David Umhoefer of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for his stories on the skirting of tax laws to pad pensions of county employees, prompting change and possible prosecution of key figures.

-national reporting

Awarded to Jo Becker and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post for their lucid exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful yet sometimes disguised influence on national policy.

-international reporting

Awarded to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post for his heavily reported series on private security contractors in Iraq that operate outside most of the laws governing American forces.

-feature writing

Awarded to Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post for his chronicling of a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters.

-commentary

Awarded to Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post for his insightful columns that explore the nation's complex economic ills with masterful clarity.

-criticism

Awarded to Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting.

-editorial writing

no award

-editorial cartooning

Awarded to Michael Ramirez of Investor's Business Daily for his provocative cartoons that rely on originality, humor and detailed artistry.

-breaking news photography

Awarded to Adrees Latif of Reuters for his dramatic photograph of a Japanese videographer, sprawled on the pavement, fatally wounded during a street demonstration in Myanmar.

-feature photography

Awarded to Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for her intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness.