Botnet Storm
No, this is not some solar system far, far away. Closer than you think, this is is a visualization of a botnet storm. For all you know this malicious virus, or one of its siblings, is controlling your computer – spamming thousands of innocent internet users on your behalf – at this moment. Feeling paranoid already? Yes, next nature can be harsh sometimes.
Check out the first trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The first trailer for the new Transformers movie is out. Michael Bay takes it to the extreme by implying that there were Transformers alive and kicking during the famous Apollo 11 moonwalk. Enjoy!
[via Apple]
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems has been the cause of some uncertainty and concern for the open source projects and initiatives that Sun were previously responsible for. Oracle are not known for being particularly welcoming or supportive of FOSS — and with the relatively high profile OpenSolaris project being cancelled soon after the acquisition, much of that concern appears justified.
Attention has therefore turned to OpenOffice.org, the premier open source office suite and a very big, and important, product and project in the FOSS world. Of course, it's very unlikely Oracle would cancel something like OOo outright, but many still remain concerned about the future direction Oracle might take the project.
Enter The Document Foundation.
There have been forks of OpenOffice.org before. Perhaps you might remember the NeoOffice project, which developed the first version of OOo's code that ran semi-natively on Mac OS X (or at least, without requiring X11).
This new Foundation, and its OOo fork LibreOffice, however, arise directly because of the concerns about Oracle and its future management and direction of the OOo project. The other difference is that this fork has a huge amount of support from the existing OOo community, who appear to no longer be happy to continue their work under Oracle's direction. The press release makes things fairly clear:
The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.
In essence, the community is jumping ship from what is currently ‘OpenOffice.org’, and moving over to this forked product.
Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand “LibreOffice” has been chosen for the software going forward.
Oracle have a couple of choices:
- Retain the OOo brand, probably lose most, if not all, the existing community around OOo, and develop the suite on their own. They’ll be able to incorporate changes made under the LibreOffice brand under the terms of the licence, but won't have direct control over those new contributions.
- ‘Donate’ the brand to the new Foundation and the product will continue to be called OpenOffice.org, and give up their influence and control over the project as they have now.
Regardless of what happens, the future of OpenOffice.org (not the name itself, but the provision of a Free office suite with that code) is likely to be pretty stable after this gets sorted out, with or without Oracle’s cooperation. What we call it might change, but there are enough people behind the new Foundation and its commitment to the suite’s neutrality, that it should be fine.
There will be those, however, who will see this instability in the project as a reason not to use it, or to discourage its adoption — perhaps even attempt to discredit any adoption of FOSS entirely. That's an unfortunate consequence of this situation.
Users of the suite, and those considering deploying it, however, should rest assured that there will be a future for the suite (whatever its name) for a long time to come. It’s just too important and useful to get ‘gobbled up’ in this mess.
Yesterday, the Durian Open Movie Project premiered Sintel, a short animation film produced independently by the Blender Foundation and licensed under a Creative Commons licence.
What makes this film (and previous Blender films, Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream) special, is that they are designed, produced and rendered completely with free and open source software. All of the ‘source’ files of the movie — including all of the artwork — will also be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, giving anyone who might be interested the ability to study the files and see how the film was put together.
The film is an epic and emotional fantasy adventure, that manages to fit into 15 minutes, where we follow the hero Sintel on a quest. As well as being a technical achievement — with beautiful CG animation, especially if you are able to watch it in its full 2K quality — the film has very high production values and, I think, a compelling storyline. You would be forgiven for thinking this came straight out of Hollywood.
The project is funded partially through sponsors and the Netherlands Film Fund, but also from those who order the 4-disc DVD set, which will include the full movie (as an HD movie file in various formats as well as DVD video) and all of the source files, with tutorials, as well as behind-the-scenes content.
It is an impressive showcase, once again, of what can be achieved with a completely FOSS workflow, focused around Blender. In fact, proving that Blender and open source tools can be used to produce something of this calibre.
You can watch the full 15-minute movie by downloading it in various formats, buying the DVD set, or watching it on YouTube.
Public release date: 9-Dec-2010
Contact: Steven Beck
Beck.5@osu.edu
614-292-6849
Ohio State University
Computer-based program may help relieve some ADHD symptoms in children
COLUMBUS, Ohio – An intensive, five-week working memory training program shows promise in relieving some of the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, a new study suggests.
Researchers found significant changes for students who completed the program in areas such as attention, ADHD symptoms, planning and organization, initiating tasks, and working memory.
"This program really seemed to make a difference for many of the children with ADHD," said Steven Beck, co-author of the study an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
"It is not going to replace medication, but it could be a useful complementary therapy."
Beck conducted the study with Christine Hanson and Synthia Puffenberger, graduate students in psychology at Ohio State. Their findings are published in the November/December 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.
The researchers tested software developed by a Swedish company called Cogmed, in conjunction with the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm.
The software is designed to improve one of the major deficiencies found in people with ADHD – working memory.
Working memory is the ability to hold onto information long enough to achieve a goal. For example, you have to remember a phone number long enough for you to dial it. Students have to remember the passage of a book they just read, in order to understand what they're currently reading.
"Working memory is critical in everyday life, and certainly for academic success, but it is one of the things that is very difficult for children with ADHD," Hanson said.
The study involved 52 students, aged 7 to 17, who attended a private school in Columbus that serves children with learning disabilities, many of whom also have an ADHD diagnoses. All the children used the software in their homes, under the supervision of their parents and the researchers.
The software includes a set of 25 exercises that students had to complete within 5 to 6 weeks. Each session is 30 to 40 minutes long. The exercises are in a computer-game format and are designed to help students improve their working memory. For example, in one exercise a robot will speak numbers in a certain order, and the student has to click on the numbers the robot spoke, on the computer screen, in the opposite order.
"At first the kids love it, because it is like a game," Puffenberger said. "But the software has an algorithm built in that makes the exercises harder as the students get better. So the children are always challenged."
Half the students participated at the beginning of the study. The other half were wait-listed, and completed the software program after the others were finished.
Parents and teachers of the participating students completed measures of the children's ADHD symptoms and working memory before the intervention, one month after treatment, and four months after treatment.
Results showed that parents generally rated their children as improving on inattention, overall number of ADHD symptoms, working memory, planning and organization and in initiating tasks. These changes were evident both immediately after treatment and four months later.
On individual measures, between one-fourth and one-third of the children showed clinically significant progress – in other words, enough progress to be easily visible to their parents.
The teacher ratings, while pointed in the direction of improvement, were not strong enough to be statistically significant in this study. That's not surprising, Beck said, because very few treatment studies ever find significance among teacher measures.
"Teachers only see the kids for a few hours a day and they are dealing with a lot of other children at the same time. It would be difficult for them to see changes," Beck said.
Beck said this is the first published study they know of testing this software in the United States. One of the strengths of the study is that it used a very typical sample of children with ADHD – other studies in Sweden had excluded children who were on medication.
"Most kids with ADHD are on some kind of medication, so it helps to know how this intervention works in these cases," he said.
In this sample, 60 percent of the students were on medication. The results showed the program was equally effective regardless of whether they were on medication or not.
"Medication for ADHD does not help directly with working memory, and the training program does, so it can be useful," Beck said.
"One of the encouraging findings is that parents reported even ADHD symptoms improved after the program, and that isn't the focus. This program is focused on improving working memory."
Beck said they can't say for sure how the program works to help kids with ADHD. But it seems that children are learning how to focus and how to use their working memory on everyday tasks, and they are able to use that knowledge at school and home.
One possible criticism of the study could be that it relies on parental reports, and the parents may be biased.
"That's true, but it is also the parents who are observing the kids day in and day out, and they are the ones who would be most likely to observe any changes that occur," Beck said.
The researchers plan on extending the work by using more objective measures of children's progress after using the program.
###Two other co-authors of the study were William Benninger, an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State, and Kristen Benninger, a medical student at the University of Toledo
Beck, Hanson and Puffenberger have no financial interest in the company that makes the software. William Benninger does have an interest, but was not involved in the collection of the data.
Contact: Steven Beck, (614) 292-6849; Beck.5@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
Public release date: 9-Dec-2010
Contact: Vanessa McMains
vmcmain1@jhmi.edu
410-502-9410
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
On...off...on...off... The circuitry of insulin-releasing cells
Johns Hopkins researchers uncover potential inroad to diabetes treatment
A myriad of inputs can indicate a body's health bombard pancreatic beta cells continuously, and these cells must consider all signals and "decide" when and how much insulin to release to maintain balance in blood sugar, for example. Reporting in Nature Chemical Biology last month, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have teased out how these cells interpret incoming signals and find that three proteins relay signals similar to an electrical circuit.
"Pancreatic beta cells are influenced by hormonal, metabolic and electrical signals and something must be integrating all of these inputs to determine how to generate the cell's output," says Jin Zhang, Ph.D., an associate professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at Johns Hopkins. "We have discovered a tunable circuit that may control the behavior of the cell."
According to Zhang, typically PKA (protein kinase A) acts as a switch and turns on and does what it needs to do until it's done and turns off. The team initially noticed that PKA was switching on and off while observing fluorescently tagged live cells under a microscope. "It was so interesting and uncharacteristic we had to study it further," says Zhang.
So the team started by again recording video of live cells over the course of an hour. They took advantage of so-called biosensors that they engineered, which are protein tags that glow one color when turned off and another color when turned on. By inserting a PKA biosensor into these cells, they were able to see when PKA was turned off and on. They found that PKA does turn on and off in regular intervals—about three cycles every 10 minutes.
"We already knew that calcium levels in these cells oscillate and this controls the release of insulin," says Zhang. "So we were curious to see how the PKA oscillation we observed was linked to calcium."
Using a dye that changes color when calcium levels are high, the team again observed live cells and found that PKA oscillations and calcium oscillations were in register with each other—every time PKA turned on, calcium peaked a short while later, and PKA would turn off almost immediately, overlapping with a decrease in calcium. "This too was surprising because turning off PKA in other types of cells normally is slow, on the order of tens of minutes, but in these cells it was fast, on the order of just a few minutes," says Zhang.
The team then turned to colleagues in biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering to build a mathematical model of this circuit to better study and predict how these oscillating signals are used in a cell. Culling everything that is known about PKA, calcium and another chemical in the cell that affects PKA activity, Levchenko's team came up with a model where all three components are closely linked by cross-talk so that the oscillatory behavior of each was determined by the activity of the other two. "Human engineers have figured out a long time ago that oscillating signals can carry more information than the steady ones, and it was fascinating to see that cells might have arrived at the same solution, too," says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins.
The model predicted that blocking PKA activity would stop calcium levels from oscillating as well; so the team treated cells with a chemical that blocks PKA and found that indeed, calcium levels stopped changing. The model also predicted that increasing PKA activity would change the frequency of calcium oscillations; again, adding a different chemical that increases PKA activity in turn increased calcium oscillation frequency. "The mathematical model enabled us to do more informed experiments and uncover even more about the activity of these molecules in the cell," says Zhang.
So what does this all mean? According to Zhang and Levchenko, they may have come up with an explanation for a long-standing mystery in the field. Low PKA oscillation frequency tunes PKA to act locally, in the immediate region where it is anchored in the cell. And high PKA oscillation frequency tunes PKA to work more globally throughout the cell, to generate a different response.
The discovery of PKA's oscillating activity and its involvement in this protein circuit in pancreatic beta cells is intriguing to Zhang, who hopes that this finding can lead to repairing deficient cells in treating diabetes. "This type of circuit-like control also may be more widespread among different kinds of cells," says Zhang. "We're eager to see what our new biosensors can teach us."
###This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Authors on the paper are Qiang Ni, Ambhighainath Ganesan, Nwe-Nwe Aye-Han, Xinxin Gao, Michael Allen, Andre Levchenko and Jin Zhang, all of Johns Hopkins.
On the Web:
Nature Chemical Biology: http://www.nature.com/nchembio/index.html
Jin Zhang: http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/JinZhang.php
Andre Levchenko: http://www.bme.jhu.edu/people/primary.php?id=391
Public release date: 10-Dec-2010
Contact: Keri Chiodo
kchiodo@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science
Twin study helps scientists link relationship among ADHD, reading, math
Children with ADHD can sometimes have more difficulties on math and reading tests compared to their peers. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, used identical and fraternal twins to look at the genetic and environmental influences underlying ADHD behaviors, reading, and math skills in children in an attempt to better understand the relationship among them.
Sara Hart, of the Florida State University, and her colleagues used twins enrolled in a long-term study of reading and math. Hart says by focusing on twins specifically, psychological scientists are able to tease out the difference between nature and nurture.
To do this, scientists compare identical twins, who have nearly the same DNA, with fraternal twins, who generally only share about half of their DNA. If identical twins are generally more alike on a trait—say, their eye color or reading ability—and fraternal twins are much less alike on the same trait, you can presume the trait is inherited. On the other hand, if pairs of identical twins are alike on a trait to the same extent that pairs of fraternal twins are alike on that trait—like how outgoing they are—you know the trait is probably influenced by their environment. Most traits fall somewhere in between, and twin studies can show that, too.
In this case, Hart and her colleagues were interested in how twins matched up on symptoms of ADHD, reading achievement, and math achievement. At about age 10, every pair of twins was tested on their reading and math ability. Their mothers also filled out surveys on any problems the children have with attention or hyperactivity.
The researchers found that ADHD behaviors, reading achievement, and math achievement were all influenced by the same genetic influences; this doesn't prove anything about what causes what, but some psychological scientists think that all three might be linked through the working memory system.
Although common genetic influences is a typical result from twin studies, the exciting aspect of this work was that that ADHD behaviors, reading achievement, and math achievement are also associated by common environmental influences.
Although it is not known what the actual environmental influences are, Hart and her colleagues suggest that it could be related to aspects of the classroom and homework environment. If researchers can figure out what these environmental influences really are, they may be able to help children with ADHD do better in school.
###For more information about this study, please contact Sara Hart at shart@fcrr.org.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Exploring How Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Are Related to Reading and Mathematics Performance: General Genes, General Environments" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Keri Chiodo at 202-293-9300 or kchiodo@psychologicalscience.org.
We’ll start with four essential posts on the Wikileaks matter.
First is Iran and the Bomb, by Hedrik Hertzberg, It’s this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. Here’s the pull quote:
Perhaps the two biggest secrets that the WikiLeaks leaks leaked are that the private face of American foreign policy looks pretty much like its public face and that the officials who carry it out do a pretty good job.
Second is Clay Shirky‘s Wikileaks and the Long Haul. His bottom lines (or, paragraphs):
The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”
Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.
Third is Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech, in the New York Times. It’s about secretive hackers attacking MasterCard, Visa and Paypal, and doing so in what we might call a “social” way. Sez the Times, “To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them.” The pull-grafs:
Some internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public. Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University, said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.”
Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.”
She added, “Your free speech rights are only as strong as the weakest intermediary.”
Fourth is Dave Winer‘s Are we starting a full-out war on the Internet? His post pivots from Wikileaks to a larger issue: the Net itself:
I watch my friends root for the attackers and think this is the way wars always begin. The “fighting the good fight” spirit. Let’s go over there and show them who we are. Let’s make a symbolic statement. By the time the war is underway, we won’t remember any of that. We will wonder how we could have been so naive to think that war was something wonderful or glorious. People don’t necessarily think of wars being fought on the net and over the net, but new technology comes to war all the time, and one side often doesn’t understand…
…the Internet no longer has to fight for a right to exist. The people want it. But what kind of Internet we get, and what kind of government we get, those two things are now very deeply intertwined, and absolutely not decided. And how our financial system functions, that’s going to be what the war is fought over, if we can’t avoid having a war — which we should, if we can.
Let’s go back to Clay’s characterization of the Web as a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech. This is true, and in a way that goes far deeper than the current popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other “social” sites and services. It goes to the Domain Name System, or DNS.
You don’t own domain names. You rent them. You do this through a domain name registrar. Most of these are commercial entities. These sit in a domain name space that is hierarchical in nature and structure. This is why it is possible for governments and well-placed companies to cut off Wikileaks from every Web location other than wikileaks.ch, in Switzerland, which is characteristically neutral on the matter. It’s also why, even with COICA (the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act) still in its larval stage, Homeland Security can kill off websites for alleged copyright infringement without showing probable cause, issuing a warrant, or anything else so traditionally procedural. (Here’s one example.)
The Web and the DNS are also organized on the client-server model. In addition to putting site owners at the mercy of greater powers in the hierarchy, this puts users — you and me — at the mercy of the site owners. Think about this every time you don’t read the terms of an “agreement” you submit to. The pro formalities of these conform to the submissive/dominant relationship between clients and servers. These agreements, known as contracts of adhesion, nail down the submissive party while leaving the dominant party free to change the terms. Such is the law of the Web’s jungle: a system in which site owners control the rules of engagement, and provide the means as well. This is why you have to carry around a janitor’s keyring of separate logins and passwords for every different site and service with which you do business. The shortcuts provided by Twitter and Facebook are handy, but can also mask high degrees of exposure — especially in the Facebook case. (See I Shared What? for schooling on this.) Think about why “privacy policy” appears in nearly a billion sites, with the quotes, and in three and a quarter billion sites without the quotes.
So, why don’t you have your own policy? Why can’t you be as trustworthy on the Web as you are walking into any store off the street? The reason is that you have no status on the Web itself beyond the minima implied by the term “user.” Whatever status you experience is what’s granted by site owners. You are the client. Your position is submissive. The dominant party is in charge, and there are a billion-plus of those.
I don’t propose fixing either DNS or the client-server model. I do propose, however, that we work on new models that don’t put us in submissive roles. For one example, see “How is your idea new?” under our Knight News Challenge entry. (And, if you like it, give it a good rating.) There are others as well. David Siegel wrote a whole book on one. Kynetx has another. (They’re complementary.) I could go on (and I invite others to do exactly that).
The Wikileaks mess was made on the Web, and less so the Net. These things are different. More to the point, we are netizens and not just webizens. The war for the Net is a separate one, and it is being faught in many places. From some of those places, little if any news escapes. (For example, did you know that your city in Texas you can’t do what Chatanooga’s doing in Tennessee?) Others places, such as Washington, are beyond fubar.
I’ll have more to say about that war in another post soon. Meanwhile, it might help to read an oldie but (very) goodie: Retired Texas Judge Steve Russell’s reaction to the late Communications Decency Act.
Right snip this time.
Lately, thanks to the inexcusably inept firing of Juan Williams by NPR brass, and the acceptance of a $1.8 million grant from George Soros, NPR has tarred its credentials as a genuinely fair and balanced news organization. Which it mostly still is, by the way, no matter how much the right tries to trash it. (And mostly succeeds, since trying to stay in the middle has itself become a lefty thing to do.)
Columnists all over the place are calling for the feds “pull the plug on funding for Natonal Public Radio”. (That’s from No subsidy for NPR, by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. An aside: NPR’s name is now just NPR. Just like BP is no longer British Petroleum.) In fact NPR gets no money from the feds directly. What NPR does is produce programs that it wholesales to stations, which retail to listeners and sponsors. According to NPR’s finances page, about 10% of that sponsorship comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Another 6% comes from “federal, state and local government”.
Jeff points to a NY Times piece, Move to Cut NPR Funding is Defeated in the House, which says “Republicans in the House tried to advance the defunding measure as part of their ‘YouCut‘ initiative, which allows the public to vote on which spending cuts the G.O.P. should pursue.’ The You Cut page doesn’t mention public radio. It does have this:
Terminate Broadcasting Facility Grant Programs that Have Completed their Mission.
Potential Savings of $25 million in the first year, $250 million over ten years.
In his most recent budget, President Obama proposed terminating the Public Broadcasting Grants at the Department of Agriculture and Public Telecommunications Facilities Grants at the Department of Commerce. The President’s Budget justified terminating these programs, noting that: “Since 2004, the USDA Public Broadcasting Grants program has provided grants to support rural public television stations’ conversion to digital broadcasting. Digital conversion efforts mandated by the Federal Communications Commission are now largely complete, and there is no further need for this program.” and “Since 2000, most PTFP awards have supported public television stations’ conversion to digital broadcasting. The digital television transition was completed in 2009, and there is no further need for DOC’s program.”
CPB isn’t in there. And they’re right: the digital conversion is done. So maybe one of ya’ll can help us find exactly what the congressional Republicans are proposing here.
Here’s a back-and-forth between Anna Christopher of NPR and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Says Anna,
NPR receives less than 2% of its funding from competitive grants sought by NPR from federally funded organizations (such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts).
Replies Michael,
I appreciate the smug, condescending tone of this letter, but I’m unconvinced. As one former CPB official I spoke to explained, “they love to claim they’re insulated, but they’re very much dependent on the public tit.” The other 98 percent of NPR’s funding comes from a mix of donations, corporate support, and dues from member stations. The fees and dues paid by member stations comprise more than half of NPR’s budget. Where does that money come from? In large part, from the federal government.
Take the local NPR affiliate in Washington, WAMU 88.5. That station paid NPR in excess of $1.5 million in dues, the station’s largest single expense outside of fundraising and personnel. The station also took in $840,000 in public funding and grants from the CPB. The station spent nearly $4 million on “fund-raising and membership development,” with a return of just $6 million. Fundraising is expensive — public money isn’t.
I looked at the .pdf at that link and don’t see the same numbers, but it’s clear enough that NPR affiliates pay a lot for NPR programming, and a non-trivial hunk of that money comes from CPB. According to this CPB document, its regular approriation for fiscal year 2010 is $420 million, and it’s looking for $430 million in 2011, $445 million for 2012 and $604 million for 2013. Bad timing.
Still, here’s the really interesting thing that almost nobody is talking about. Public radio kicks ass in the ratings. It’s quite popular. In fact, I would bet that it’s far more popular, overall, than right wing talk radio.
In Raleigh-Durham, WUNC is #2, with an 8.2 share. That’s up from 7.5 in the prior survey. Radio people can tell ya, that number is huge.
In San Francisco, KQED is #4 with a 5.2 share.
In New York, WNYC-FM is down in the teens with a 2.2 share, but nobody has more than a 6.5. Add WNYC-AM’s .8 share and classical sister WQXR’s 1.8 share, and you get a 4.8, which is #3 overall.
Here is Boston, WBUR has a 3.3 share. WGBH has a 1.1. Its classical sister station, WCRB (which now avoids using call letters) has a 2.7. Together those are 6.1, or #3 overall.
In Washington, WAMU gets a 4.8, , and stands at #5. Classical WETA has a 4.4, for #6. Add in Pacifica’s jazz station, WPFW, with .8, and you get 10, which would be #1 if they were counted together.
There are places where public radio, relatively speaking, sucks wind. Los Angeles is one. The public stations there are good but small. (The Pacifica station is technically the biggest in the country, but its appeal is very narrow.) Dallas is another. But on the whole, NPR stations do very well.
But do they do well enough to stand on their own? I think so. In fact, I think they should. That’s one reason we created ListenLog, which I visited at length here last July. ListenLog is an app that currently works with the Public Radio Player from PRX. The idea is to show you what you listen to, and how much you value it. Armed with informative self-knowledge, you should be more inclined to pay than just to cruise for free.
We’re entering an era when more and more of our choices are both a la carte and our own. Meaning we’re more responsible, on the whole. And so are our suppliers. There will be more connections between those two facts, and we’ll be in a position to make those connections — as active customers, and not just as passive consumers.
So, if you want public radio to do a better job, to be more accountable to its listeners and not just to the government (even if indirectly), pony up. Make it yours. And let’s keep building better tools to help with that.
[Later...] Here’s a bonus link from Bob Garfield’s AdAge column. (He’s also a host of NPR’s On the Media.) And a quote:
The only quality journalism available, at least in this country, is from a few dozen newspapers and magazines, NPR, some alt weeklies, a few websites Slate.com, for instance) and a few magazine/website hybrids such as Atlantic. On TV, there is “The News Hour” and “Frontline” on PBS and that is it. Cable “news” is a wasteland (watch for a while and let me know when you see a reporter, you know, reporting). Network news, having taught cable how to cut costs and whore itself to ratings, isn’t much better. Local TV news is live remotes from crime scenes and “Is Your Microwave Killing Your Hamster?”
Good stuff. Read the whole thing.
The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.
Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.
For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
What do you call a 12 inch by 12 inch by 16 inch box that can print 3D objects of your design, continuously for hours at a time, for just over a thousand dollars? That's the new MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, the latest and greatest in automated home 3D object printing. MakerBot has just begun sending the first shipment out its doors.MakerBot says the Thing-O-Matic prints higher-quality items than its other 3D printers but the real differentiator here is the automation: give this thing enough plastic to chew on and it will print the same or different objects one after the other after the other, clearing itself out each time before beginning anew. Can the Thing-O-Matic self-replicate - be used to make more Thing-O-Matics? That line was crossed by the old school MakerBot last June, so perhaps it's just a matter of time.
SalonHave the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.
In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.
In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.
Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.
The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.
This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.
What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.
This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.
In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.
Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.
Even here, the rich have options other than hiring American citizens. Wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives agree on one thing: the need for more unskilled immigration to the U.S. This is hardly surprising, as the rich are far more dependent on immigrant servants than middle-class and working-class Americans are.
The late Patricia Buckley, the socialite wife of the late William F. Buckley Jr., once told me, "One simply can't live in Manhattan without at least three servants -- a cook and at least two maids." She had a British cook and Spanish-speaking maids. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"
The point is that, just as much of America's elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported. Small wonder that proposals for "guest worker" programs are so popular in the U.S. establishment. Foreign "guest workers" laboring on American soil like H1Bs and H2Bs -- those with non-immigrant visas allowing technical or non-agriculture seasonal workers to be employed in the U.S. -- are latter-day coolies who do not have the right to vote.
If much of America's investor class no longer needs Americans either as workers or consumers, elite Americans might still depend on ordinary Americans to protect them, by serving in the military or police forces. Increasingly, however, America's professional army is being supplemented by contractors -- that is, mercenaries. And the elite press periodically publishes proposals to sell citizenship to foreigners who serve as soldiers in an American Foreign Legion. It is probably only a matter of time before some earnest pundit proposes to replace American police officers with foreign guest-worker mercenaries as well.
Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.
If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.
To be sure, wealthy humanitarians might take pity on their economically obsolescent fellow citizens. But they no longer have any personal economic incentive to do so. Besides, philanthropists may be inclined to devote most of their charity to the desperate and destitute of other countries rather than to their fellow Americans.
If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run.
Where would a few hundred million ex-Americans go? The answer is obvious: to the emerging markets where the work and investment are found. That will show all those American union members who complain that their jobs have been outsourced to China. Let them move to China themselves and compete, instead of complaining!
Needless to say, the Chinese and Indians might resist the idea of an influx of vast numbers of downwardly mobile North American workers. But like American capitalists, Chinese and Indian capitalists might learn that ethnic diversity impedes unionization, while the mass immigration of North Americans to East and South Asia would keep wages in those regions competitively low for another few decades at least.
Once emptied of superfluous citizens, the U.S. could become a kind of giant Aspen for the small population of the super-rich and their non-voting immigrant retainers. Many environmentalists might approve of the depopulation of North America, because sprawling suburbs would soon be reclaimed by the wilderness. And deficit hawks would be pleased as well. The middle-class masses dependent on Social Security and Medicare would have departed the country, leaving only the self-sufficient rich and foreign guest workers without any benefits, other than the charity of their employers.
Of course there are alternative options, which would not require the departure of most Americans from America for new lives on distant shores. One would be a new social contract, in which the American people, through representatives whom they actually control, would ordain that American corporations are chartered to create jobs in the U.S. for American workers, and if that does not interest their shareholders and managers then they can do without legal privileges granted by the sovereign people, like limited liability.
The American people also could put a stop to any thought of an American Foreign Legion and declare, through their representatives, that a nation of citizen-workers will be protected by citizen-soldiers, whether professionals or, in emergencies, conscripts. The American people, in other words, could insist that the United States will be a democratic republican nation-state, not a post-national rentier oligarchy.
But restoring democratic nationalism in the U.S. would inconvenience America's affluent minority. So instead of making trouble, maybe most Americans should just find a new continent to call home.
-->Back in 2004, the French space agency CNES launched a small satellite called DEMETER into polar orbit some 700 km above the Earth's surface.
DEMETER's is an unusual mission. Its job is to monitor low frequency radio waves generated by earthquakes.
Today, a group of geoscientists release the data associated with the M 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti in January. They say that DEMETER saw a clear increase in ultralow frequency radio waves being emitted from the Earth's the crust in that region in the build up to the quake.
The anecdotal evidence of electromagnetic effects associated with earthquakes is legion. Various accounts link earthquakes with mysterious light and heating effects. Then there is the widespread evidence that certain animals can sense impending quakea, possibly because of a sensitivity to low frequency electric fields.
But good data is hard to come by. Geoscientists have been measuring the currents that flow through Earth beneath our feet for over 100 years. These so-called telluric currents are thought to be generated by friction and piezoelectric effects within rock. And the flow of electrons they cause has been linked to various atmospheric phenomena such as thunderstorms.
But the role these currents play in earthquake physics is unknown. It makes sense that any currents generated by friction and piezoelectric effects should be dramatically influenced by the relative movement of different parts of the crust.
But these effects occur over vast distances and at frequencies that are hard to measure and difficult to separate from background noise. Which is why DEMETER was launched , (DEMETER stands for Detection of Electro-Magnetic Emissions Transmitted from Earthquake Regions).
Now Michael Athanasiou at the Technical University of Serres in Greece and a few buddies say that DEMETER spotted good of evidence of a change in ultralow frequency radio waves in the ionosphere above Haiti in the run up to the quake. "The results reveal a significant increase of the energy of ULF waves, up to 360%, for a period of one month before the main earthquake compared with the energy of the background," they say. That's a dramatic increase. These emissions dropped gradually in the month after the quake.
The implications are interesting. Athanasiou and co say: "The results of this paper clearly indicate that ULF electromagnetic waves can be very useful in revealing possible precursor seismic phenomena."
That's carefully worded and for good reason. Any talk of earthquake prediction needs to be qualified with a good deal of hedging. It may well be that the crust generates more low frequency waves in the build up to an earthquake but there may be other mechanisms that produce a similar signal but are not linked to quakes.
These effects would have to be teased apart before a forecast of any use could be made.
Then there is the problem of the timescale over which these emissions are produced. The increase in pressure that causes earthquakes occurs over geological timescales. It's not yet clear how this process changes the emission of low frequency em waves.
That means the predictions from this kind of data may be never be any better than the ones geophysicists already make, ie giving the percentage likelihood of a big 'un in the next 50 years, for example. That helps with things like building standards (in developed countries that can afford to implement them) but it is not much use in preventing the kind of catastrophe that hit Haiti in January.
Clearly, there's work ahead on a multitude of fronts. Geophysicists need bigger and better data sets of low frequency em wave emissions over longer timescales. They need a better theoretical understanding of the processes that generate telluric waves. And they need some way to test new ideas when they emerge.
And DEMETER is certainly a significant step along the way.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1012.1533: Enhanced ULF Radiation Observed By DEMETER Two Months Around the Strong 2010 Haiti Earthquake
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-->When it comes to planet formation, the conventional thinking has been with us for over 40 years. It goes like this: bits of rock and dust clump together to form rocky planets which then attract the gases that form their atmospheres. The gas giants form when these rocky cores grow to at least ten times the size of Earth and so can attract huge gaseous envelopes.
There are numerous problems with this model, not least of which is explaining how metre-sized lumps of rock end up sticking together after smashing into each other at random. Then there is the problem of planetary rotation. If the planets form from the random aggregation of rock and dust, why do almost all of them rotate in the same direction? Surely, their rotations should be randomly distributed.
But in the last few months various astrophysicists have begun discussing another idea that solves these problems. Today, Sergei Nayakshin at the University of Leicester in the UK gives a neat account of this new thinking.
The new approach turns the conventional model on its head. Planet formation begins at distances in excess of 50 AU from the mother star, when random variations in the density of the protoplanetary gas cloud begin to attract more gas and so grow under the force of gravity.
Inside these loose clumps, called giant planet embryos, any rocky material aggregates at the centre forming a rocky core. These cores all rotate in the same direction as the original gas cloud because they from by the gravitational collapse of the cloud rather than by random collisions.
As the cores are forming, the embryonic planets interact with the mother star's gas cloud causing them to spiral inwards. Astronomers have long known that huge gaseous atmospheres are unstable at distances closer than a critical radius because of various factors, such as tidal forces and irradiation from the Sun. So when the embryonic planets get closer than this critical radius, they loose their gas envelopes leaving behind terrestrial rocky planets like ours.
Incidentally, at the critical radius, the inspiralling planets discard not only gas but any solids still mixed up in their outer atmospheres. This radius corresponds to the asteroid belt in our system. This new thinking explains for the first time how the belt formed and why it separates the gas giants from the terrestrial planets.
The gas giants like Jupiter are planetary embryos that simply hadn't made it this far towards the Sun when the orbital dynamics settled into the relatively stable system we have now.
One impressive feature of this model is that it naturally accounts for the structure of the Solar System, with the distant gas giants separated from the inner rocky planets by an asteroid belt. No other model does this so elegantly. It is this elegance that has focused so much attention on it so quickly.
What's curious about this new thinking is that none of the mechanisms it relies on are new ideas. But in the past, each has been suggested and then discarded.
For example, the idea that terrestrial planets are gas giants that have lost their gas envelopes was first put forward over 30 years ago. Astronomers abandoned it after various calculations showed that gas giants couldn't form close to a star where we find rocky planets today.
And the idea that planets can migrate great distances in a planetary system has also been around for years.
What's new is the re-ordering of these processes so that the gas giants form first and then migrate, losing their atmospheres as they get closer to the mother star. All of a sudden, it looks obvious.
There's still work to be done, of course. Nayakshin points out that the new model doesn't yet account for structures such as the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud not can it explain the composition of comets.
But there's a sense of excitement about this idea that is giving it considerable momentum in the community. You can be sure that astronomers will be poring over the details as I write. Expect to hear more about it in the coming months.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1012.1780: A New View On Planet Formation
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Why IT Jobs Are Never Coming Back
Stephanie OverbyDecember 9, 2010 (CIO)
The combination of more automation, increased offshoring, and better global IT infrastructure has taken its toll on the U.S. IT profession, resulting in a net loss of 1.5 million corporate IT jobs over the last decade, according to recent research from IT consultancy and benchmarking provider The Hackett Group.
The barely bright side for the American IT worker is that the total number of annual job losses will diminish slightly in the coming years, down from a high of 311,000 last year to around 115,000 a year through 2014, according to Hackett which based its research on internal IT benchmarking data and publicly available labor numbers. The really bad news? It's unlikely that IT will contribute to new job creation in the foreseeable future. "To succeed over the next five years, companies need to understand how to reposition existing talent; jettison or rationalize current jobs that have no place in the leveraged organization; and source, develop and retain still others to fill the need for new skills, both offshore and in retained onshore staff," reads the Hackett report, which itself was written in part by offshore researchers according to co-author and Hackett Chief Research Officer Michel Jannsen.
CIO.com talked to Jannsen and Hackett Global Business Services Practice Leader Honorio Padron about their predictions.
CIO.com: Your study looks at the decline in IT job growth based on private and public data from corporate IT departments at billion-dollar-plus companies, but ignores the jobs eliminated by IT service providers. How much greater would the figures be if the likes of IBM or HP were included?
Janssen: It would be huge. If you look at HP or IBM, India is their either second or third largest geography [in terms of hiring]. They have mammoth offshore organizations.
CIO.com: If IT is unlikely to contribute to U.S. job creation in the foreseeable future, what does that mean for America's standing in the IT universe?
Padron: Everyone wants to be like IBM, which started the strategy of having the right resource in the right place at the right time. Companies are becoming truly global. At the same time, IT is becoming more utilitarian and more standardized. And broadband is making all of this easier to do. When you put all of those things together, there's inertia in terms of creating jobs in the U.S. The jobs that you used to think of hiring in large numbers-help desk, network management, data center operations, disaster recover, programming-all of those are going to migrate or have already migrated to places other than the U.S. There's no need to be local today. You can work on anyone's problems from anywhere.
Jannsen: The whole bottom layer [of IT] has largely been removed from North America and Europe. A lot of the entry level roles are in India or China.
CIO.com: How will companies fill the mid- and upper-level IT roles at the top of the pyramid if that supporting base of feeder roles is vanishing?
Jannsen: Companies are still struggling with that, and it's going to become a bigger and bigger problem. It requires a change in thinking about how they build talent and where they will find the future leaders. Some will develop special training programs for the handful of folks they need. Others will take the easier route and hire ready-made leaders from the big consulting firms.
CIO.com: You're assuming the big IT service providers will continue to develop such talent in the U.S.
Jannsen: When I worked at EDS, we had big corporate training facilities-whole apartment complexes just full of people. Now those are in Hyderabad or Bangalore. They no longer have that kind of scaling availability here in the U.S.-the bulk may be in low-cost geographies-but they still have tens of thousands in the U.S.
CIO.com: You predict that IT job loss will level off at around 115,000 jobs a year, at least until 2014. What happens after that?
Jannsen: In the corporate world, it's going to be a grizzly picture here. [Net IT job loss] could continue until 10, 15 years from now.
Padron: Even longer. You know, the Chinese are now outsourcing to South Africa because it's cheaper. [U.S. IT job loss] is going to go on for a long time. It could be 50 years.
Jannsen: Companies have to understand the global marketplace. What we have is an asymmetrical talent war. In Asia or India the question is, 'How do I hire 500 people?' In the U.S. it will be, 'How do I hire 5, 10, or 50?' In the U.S., they will be hiring professionals with very specialized industry skills, the ability to manage in the global context, or experience in new technologies.
CIO.com: What happens to those hundreds of thousands of American IT professionals skilled in, say, programming or data center operations?
Padron: I was on a flight to Miami, and I met a 30-year-old QA auditor who had moved to Shanghai from Boise, Idaho. This isn't a high-level management job&mdsah;those jobs are going to some folks in Europe and North America. He was a mid-level manager. This is really becoming a global war for talent.
CIO.com: On the quasi-bright side, you say a weak dollar could mean transformational work will be done onshore. Is limited labor arbitrage really the only reason transformational projects would stay close to home? Are offshore IT organizations capable of handling major corporate change?
Jannsen: Labor arbitrage is still really compelling when you're trying to make your budget for next year. It's a challenge when people go back into growth mode to hire someone for $75,000 [a year] when they can get someone for $25,000. The weak dollar does play a role; it decreases the spread. If there's a violent retraction [in the dollar] for multiple years, we could see an end to this conversation.
Today, I'm hiring people with MBAs for $5,000 per year. They're tier two MBAs, so that would be about $55,000 in the U.S. And I do have to move them to $8,000 or $10,000 in two years. There isn't as much of a delta on the management side. For people with 5 or 10 years of experience, there's not a five to ten-fold difference in price points.
CIO.com: But what about management overhead and other hidden costs that can erode those labor savings-have those diminished?
Jannsen: It's gotten a lot easier to manage in terms of basic fundamentals. There are two parts to that-problems on the U.S. side [of the offshore engagement] and problems on the Indian side. They are both more mature. But if someone tells you they're having problems with their team in India, it usually means the problems actually exist on the U.S. side. The ability to work on a global basis is more challenging for U.S. [IT organizations]. I have a lot of my research written in India today. They used to only provide charts or data.
Padron: It's becoming a moot point, because you are going to have to manage a global workforce anyway.
CIO.com: You write that captive offshore centers are the dominant model for the globalization of IT support. In recent years, a number of large companies sold their offshore IT centers. Is that trend reversing?
Jannsen: A few years ago, a number of offshore players and some domestic providers were looking to expand their global footprint and the easiest way to do that was to buy someone's [captive] operations. Proctor & Gamble's [sale of its captive centers] was a big one. But there's not a lot of selling going on right now because there aren't a lot of new entrants that need footprints.
Padron: Global shared services centers have accelerated beyond IT to other functional areas. According to our research, 65 percent of companies are leveraging the P&G model and putting it all together-IT, finance, HR, procurement-as a global business services center. Captives are still growing and companies that know how to do business offshore prefer it because they get to keep all the labor arbitrage benefits.
CIO.com: Who oversees these global service centers-the CIO?
Padron: Some are under the CFO because they started in finance, but they're migrating away from that. Sometimes, the CIO is in charge, particularly in companies with a business-oriented CIO like Merck or P&G or Dow.
CIO.Com: Offshoring isn't the only culprit in the loss of U.S. IT jobs; automation has also played a role. Which is having a bigger effect on employment prospect s for American IT professionals today?
Padron: Automation is still the preferred labor arbitrage strategy. Many companies have implemented great, new infrastructure and are saying how do we go to one instance of ERP, for example? How do we automate the next stage of work?
Jannsen: Automation has been the primary driver (of U.S. IT job loss). Looking forward, offshoring will have the biggest impact.
CIO.com: At what stage is U.S. corporate IT in coming to terms with the new global-and asymmetrical-war for talent you describe.
Padron: The first thing that went offshore was the help desk and the data center. The next thing was programming. That's lagged a bit because companies still have a lot of legacy code-spaghetti code, some non-standard thing unique to that company-and it doesn't make sense to send that somewhere else. But as the next wave of standardization happens in the next few years, those unique requirements are going to go away.
Jannsen: One other constraint is the scale issue. Companies that are $5 to $10 billion [in revenue] are ahead of other companies. Globalization is just part of doing business. But if you're a midsize company in the Midwest. it takes a lot longer. They need to go that extra mile to compete globally. The only other option is automation.
Padron: A lot of what's inhibiting companies that should be doing this is cultural. There's a lack of management team understanding of how to do business in a global setting. They're just doing things the way they've always done it.
CIO.com: What IT roles will remain stateside for now?
Padron: You have to separate the back office side from the customer facing capabilities. You'll see folks who can better integrate supply chains and do design and architecture. Customer and relationship management, those higher level strategic jobs will be retained.
We're not saying innovation in IT in the U.S. is dead by any stretch. A lot of innovation will continue to come from the U.S., but the masses of jobs will be elsewhere. We'll still see U.S. innovation in cloud computing create wonderful capabilities, but if it requires masses of programmers, they will be elsewhere.
Jannsen: Innovation will continue. It's an important part of who we are in the U.S. That combination of capital flow and entrepreneurialism is unique to America.
CIO.com: But aren't countries like India maturing in terms of IT innovation capabilities as well?
Jannsen: That's the scary part. They will get there. It's one thing to get cost savings from less strategic parts [of the corporate IT portfolio]. But at some point, Infosys is going to be just as innovative as IBM.
Padron: And some of the IBM innovation is not done in the U.S. anymore. The economic world is ahead of the geopolitical world.
CIO.com: Is corporate IT-and U.S. IT job loss-a bellwether for other corporate service functions like finance or HR?
Jannsen: Finance is catching up in a big, big way. IT was leading the pack. In three to five years, there will be just as many finance jobs lost as IT jobs. HR will take a little longer because it is a business-to-consumer function while finance and IT are business-to-business.
Read more about outsourcing in CIO's Outsourcing Drilldown.
It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.
Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:
These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits.
The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase “responsible-seeming”). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.
Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.
So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.
I remember encountering this same mentality a few years ago, when it was more laughable than dangerous. I didn’t like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly even bombed Sudan on a “wag the dog” basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all irrelevant. Didn’t I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K millennium crisis—remember that?—in order to seize power for life and become the Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu of our day? These people were not interested in the president’s actual transgressions. They were looking to populate their fantasy world with new and more lurid characters.
There is an old Republican saying that “a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have.” This statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook. But it is negated, not amplified, if it comes festooned with racism and superstition. In the recent past, government-sponsored policies of social engineering have led to surprising success in reducing the welfare rolls and the crime figures. This came partly from the adoption by many Democrats of policies that had once been called Republican. But not a word about that from Beck and his followers, because it isn’t exciting and doesn’t present any opportunity for rabble-rousing. Far sexier to say that health care—actually another product of bipartisanship—is a step toward Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ten percent unemployment, on the other hand, is rather a disgrace to a midterm Democratic administration. But does anybody believe that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and GM had been permitted to go bankrupt? Why not avoid the question altogether and mutter about a secret plan to proclaim a socialist (or Nazi, or Jew-controlled: take your pick) dictatorship?
Again, there is a real debate about the pace and rhythm of global warming, and about the degree to which it has been caused (or can be slowed) by human activity. But at the first Tea Party rally I attended, at the Washington Monument earlier this year, the crowd—bristling with placards about the Second Amendment’s being the correction—was treated to an arm-waving speech by a caricature English peer named Lord Monckton, who led them in the edifying call-and-response: “All together. Global warming is?” “Bullshit.” “Obama cannot hear you. Global warming is?” “bullshit.” “That’s bettah.” I don’t remember ever seeing grown-ups behave less seriously, at least in an election season.
Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …
As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine! It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
