History > 2011 > USA > Internet (III)

The Joy of Quiet

December 29, 2011
The New York Times
By PICO IYER

LAST year, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting, “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”!), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.



The author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head,” which comes out next week.

    The Joy of Quiet, NYT, 29.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html

Online Merchants Home in on Imbibing Consumers

December 27, 2011
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

After enjoying a few drinks, some people go dancing. Others order food. And for some, it’s time to shop online.

“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany Whitten, of Dayton, Ohio, whose most recent tipsy purchase made on her smartphone — a phone cover — arrived from Amazon much to her surprise. “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”

Shopping under the influence has long benefited high-end specialty retailers — witness the wine-and-cheese parties that are a staple of galleries and boutiques. Now the popularity of Internet sales has opened alcohol-induced purchases to the masses, including people like Ms. Whitten, who works in shipping and receiving and spent just $5 on the cat-shaped phone cover.

Chris Tansey, an accountant in Australia, went shopping online after drinking late one night (to be precise, it was well into the morning). By the end of the session, he had bought a $10,000 motorcycle tour of New Zealand.

“The hang-ups of spending your hard-earned cash are so far removed from your life when you’ve had a bottle of wine,” Mr. Tansey said in an e-mail. The New Zealand trip was terrific, he said. But a pair of $3 sunglasses on eBay “turned out to be horrible fakes, with $17 of postage that I obviously didn’t see with beer goggles.”

Online retailers, of course, can never be sure whether customers are inebriated when they tap the “checkout” icon. One comparison-shopping site, Kelkoo, said almost half the people it surveyed in Britain, where it is based, had shopped online after drinking.

But while reliable data is hard to come by, retailers say they have their suspicions based on anecdotal evidence and traffic patterns on their Web sites — and some are adjusting their promotions accordingly.

“Post-bar, inhibitions can be impacted, and that can cause shopping, and hopefully healthy impulse buying,” said Andy Page, the president of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer that is adding more sales starting at 9 p.m. to respond to high traffic then — perhaps some of it by shoppers under the influence.

On eBay, the busiest time of day is from 6:30 to 10:30 in each time zone. Asked if drinking might be a factor, Steve Yankovich, vice president for mobile for eBay, said, “Absolutely.” He added: “I mean, if you think about what most people do when they get home from work in the evening, it’s decompression time. The consumer’s in a good mood.”

Nighttime shopping is growing over all. ChannelAdvisor, which runs e-commerce for hundreds of sites, says its order volumes peak about 8 p.m., and that shoppers are placing orders later and later: in 2011, the number of orders placed from 9 to midnight increased compared with previous years.

A recent array of nighttime offers sent to a shopper’s e-mail inbox included: from 6 to 9 p.m., a limited-quantity sale on fashions at Neiman Marcus; at 7:38 p.m., a promotion for three-day stays at Loews hotels; at 8:44 p.m., a promotion by Gilt for macaroons and faux-fur blankets; and at 2:23 a.m., an offer by Saks for a $2,000 gift card with purchase.

At QVC, the television shopping channel, traffic and viewers rise around noon, then quiet down until after 7 p.m. Then items like cosmetics and accessories sell briskly. “Call them girl treats — they seem to attract a really strong following once you get past dinnertime,” said Doug Rose, senior vice president for multichannel programming and marketing for the company. “You can probably come to your own conclusion as to what’s motivating her.”

Still, the nighttime spike requires delicacy among retailers: for reasons of propriety, they do not want to be seen as encouraging drunken shopping, and many people who inadvertently buy products in that state would most likely return them at high rates. On the other hand, a happy customer can lead to higher sales.

“In a shopping context, alcohol would lift people’s moods and make them feel more relaxed,” said Nancy Puccinelli, an associate fellow at the Oxford’s Saïd Business School who studies consumer behavior. “If we see a product and we feel good, we will evaluate the product more positively.”

Alcohol-fueled purchases, however, could lead to problems, she said. Even with online retailers storing credit card information and offering one-click checkout, alcohol reduces working memory, which means “at the time of purchase, you wouldn’t have the cognitive ability to think through. If you think about a sweater: is this the right size, is it the right color,” she said.

Kristin A. Kassaw, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Baylor, said online shopping while drunk could have serious financial consequences.

“When you’re loading things you can’t feel or touch into this fake cart, you don’t have a sense of, ‘I’m buying all this stuff, I’m buying too much.’ It takes you away from the actual spending-money experience,” she said.

In actual stores, despite the longer hours around the holidays, intoxicated shoppers seem to be rare — but when they do appear, they can be quite disruptive.

On Thanksgiving night around 11 p.m., a shopper at a Walmart in Florence, Ala., was stumbling in the aisles and grabbing onto items; police officers shot him with a stun gun and charged him with public intoxication. At a Best Buy in Lufkin, Tex., a drunken man disappeared into a bathroom around 4 a.m. on Black Friday and tried to flush a cable down the toilet, apparently to avoid being caught shoplifting.

And in Scarborough, Me., early on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a man was arrested as he drove out of a Cabela’s parking lot, where he had ostensibly been drinking all night as he waited for the store to open.

Amanda Schuster, a wine-and-spirits writer and consultant in Brooklyn, says she never shops in actual stores after drinking, but she finds it hard to resist the Web. “It feels productive in a way — like I didn’t just come home drunk and pass out, I went home and did something,” she said.

That something tends to be buying used CDs at Amazon. When an unexpected package shows up, “I try to backtrack a little bit, and I look in to my purchasing history, and I’m like, oh, yeah,” she said.

Regrets? She has a few.

“When did I get ‘Heart’s Greatest Hits’?” she said.

    Online Merchants Home in on Imbibing Consumers, NYT, 27.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/business/
    online-retailers-home-in-on-a-new-demographic-the-drunken-consumer.html

Logging In With a Touch or a Phrase

(Anything but a Password)

December 23, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Passwords are a pain to remember. What if a quick wiggle of five fingers on a screen could log you in instead? Or speaking a simple phrase?

Neither idea is far-fetched. Computer scientists in Brooklyn are training their iPads to recognize their owners by the touch of their fingers as they make a caressing gesture. Banks are already using software that recognizes your voice, supplementing the standard PIN.

And after years of predicting its demise, security researchers are renewing their efforts to supplement and perhaps one day obliterate the old-fashioned password.

“If you ask me what is the biggest nuisance today, I would say it’s the 40 different passwords I have to create and change,” said Nasir Memon, a computer science professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn who is leading the iPad project.

Many people would agree. The password has become a monkey on our digital backs — an essential key to our many devices and accounts, but increasingly a source of exasperation and insecurity.

The research arm of the Defense Department is looking for ways to use cues like a person’s typing quirks to continuously verify identity — in case, say, a soldier’s laptop ends up in enemy hands on the battlefield. In a more ordinary example, Google recently began nudging users to consider a two-step log-in system, combining a password with a code sent to their phones. Google’s latest Android software can unlock a phone when it recognizes the owner’s face or — not so safe — when it is tricked by someone holding up a photograph of the owner’s face.

Still, despite these recent advances, it may be premature to announce the end of passwords, as Bill Gates famously did in 2004, when he said “the password is dead.”

“The spectacularly incorrect assumption ‘passwords are dead’ has been harmful, discouraging research on how to improve the lot of close to two billion people who use them,” Cormac Herley, a researcher at Microsoft, the company that Mr. Gates founded, wrote in a recent paper. Mr. Herley suggested instead that developers try “to better support the use of passwords” — for example, by helping people protect their wireless connections from eavesdroppers. “Passwords,” Mr. Herley continued, “have proved themselves a worthy opponent: all those who have attempted to replace them have failed.”

The touch-screen approach of Professor Memon in Brooklyn works because, as it happens, each person makes the same gesture uniquely. Their fingers are different, they move at different speeds, they have what he calls a different “flair.” He wants logging in to be easy; besides, he said, some people find biometric measures like an iris scan to be “creepy.”

In his research, the most popular gestures turned out to be the ones that feel most intuitive. One was to turn the image of a combination lock 90 degrees in one direction. Another was to sign one’s name on the screen. In principle, the gesture can be used to unlock a device, or an app on the device that safely holds a variety of passwords.

Despite their resilience, passwords are weak, notably because their users have limited memories and a weakness for blurting out secrets. Most people need dozens of them, and they tend to pick ones that are so complex they need to be written down, or so simple they can be easily guessed. Recently, criminals have become adept at stealing passwords by sneaking malicious software onto computers or tricking users into typing them into an illegitimate site.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have sought to address the frustration with passwords by allowing their usernames and passwords to open the door to millions of Web sites, a convenience that brings obvious risks. A thief with access to a master username and password can have access to a host of accounts.

Rachna Dhamija, a California computer scientist turned entrepreneur, sought to combat those weaknesses by breaking up the password. The user first logs in to the service that Ms. Dhamija built, UsableLogin, and signs in with her own partial password. Behind the scenes, the service verifies that the user is on an authorized device, and pulls the third piece from the cloud, generating a unique password for any Web site that the user wants to log in to — Facebook, for instance. In other words, one piece of the password rests with the user, another is stored in her device, and a third piece is kept online.

“You take a secret and you spread it across,” said Ms. Dhamija, whose service was recently acquired by Webroot Software, based in Broomfield, Colo. “You’re spreading the risk. The password is not stored in its whole form anywhere.”

But even if a user has been authorized at the start of a session, what if someone else gains access to her computer an hour later? Darpa, the Defense Department’s technology research arm, has invited security researchers to develop ways to verify a user every instant, based on the way the individual uses the machine — “for example, how the user handles the mouse and how the user crafts written language in an e-mail or document,” it explains on its Web site.

Each of these techniques is driven by the notion that a password alone is an insufficient means to verify online identity. Think of them as a fortification: a password-plus.

Many companies use a smart card or a security “dongle” — a small piece of hardware that plugs into the computer and functions as a key — as that second step of verification to allow access to internal networks. Today, biometrics — an individual’s unique physical traits — are emerging as an alternative.

At least a half-dozen banks in the United States ask their customers to verify who they are by reciting a two-second phrase to a computer over the phone, in addition to punching in their PINs. It could be as simple as “at my bank,” and a million customers could recite the very same phrase and still sound unique, according to Nuance Communications, a company based in Burlington, Mass., that makes the technology.

As mobile phones become bodily appendages for people worldwide, they too are emerging as instruments to verify identity. Google introduced its two-step process earlier this year. It sends a six-digit code to an application on a Google user’s cellphone to be entered, along with a password, when signing onto a Google account on a computer or tablet. The code can also be sent as a text message for those who don’t have smartphones, or it can be conveyed through a phone call.

The extra step is not mandatory, and the company will not say how widely it has been adopted. But as vulnerable as passwords are to theft and compromise, Google says, it is increasingly important for a user’s identity to be verified through another channel — a cellphone, in this case.

“I think we’ll start to see people using their mobile devices as their pervasive identifiers,” said Brendon Wilson, a security researcher at Symantec. “The password will no longer be the final arbiter that you are you. You will see layers on top.”

    Logging In With a Touch or a Phrase (Anything but a Password), NYT, 23.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/technology/logging-in-with-a-touch-or-a-phrase-anything-but-a-password.html

Last Witness for Military Takes Stand in Leak Case

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By GINGER THOMPSON

FORT MEADE, Md. — The government’s arguments in the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning came to a dramatic conclusion Tuesday when the computer hacker who turned him in to the authorities took the stand to explain his role in the investigation, revealing at one point that he was simultaneously trading computer messages with Private Manning while sharing information from those chats with the authorities.

The hacker, Adrian Lamo, said in a military courtroom here that he began exchanging instant messages and e-mails with Private Manning in early May last year, and decided to go to the authorities right away because the soldier made claims of “acts so egregious it required that response.”

Private Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, stands accused in the most significant leak of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers. Since Friday, the military has been conducting a hearing to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to court-martial him on charges of funneling tens of thousands of diplomatic cables and intelligence reports to WikiLeaks, which shared them with several news organizations, including The New York Times, and ignited international outrage.

The hearing, which is expected to last through the end of the week, has given much of the world its first look at Private Manning, 24, who, even in his uniform and dark-rimmed glasses, barely looks old enough to drink. Mr. Lamo’s appearance stirred some of the most emotional exchanges in these proceedings, with defense lawyers attacking him for betraying a troubled soldier who had gone to him for moral support.

David Coombs, a defense lawyer, asked Mr. Lamo about chats in which he told Private Manning that the contents of their communication would remain private. Mr. Lamo told Private Manning that he should consider him as a “minister or a journalist,” adding that their chats would be treated as “a confession or an interview, never to be published.”

Less than a month later, however, Mr. Lamo had shared the chats with both the authorities and the news media.

Mr. Coombs attempted to press the matter for several minutes, with Mr. Lamo evading his questions. Finally, Mr. Coombs asked, “Do you believe Mr. Manning was coming to you for moral support?”

Mr. Lamo was unapologetic, saying, “I think he wanted to brag about what he had done.”

Throughout the hearing, Mr. Manning’s lawyers have attempted to portray their client as a deeply troubled young man, struggling with gender identity issues during a time when the military was governed by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly.

The lawyers have argued that commanders were well aware of the soldier’s turbulent emotional state when they cleared him to handle some of the military’s most sensitive files, and that the military’s controls over those files were lax, at best.

“The government has told you a lot about how things happened,” an exasperated Mr. Coombs said during Tuesday’s proceedings. “We are trying to tell you why things happened. That’s just as important.”

Testimony by one of Private Manning’s former supervisors seemed to support the defense argument. Jihrleah Showman, who also worked as an intelligence analyst, said she had warned commanders on several occasions that Private Manning was in severe emotional distress and should not be allowed to handle classified material.

Ms. Showman said she told commanders that she believed Private Manning suffered “elevated levels of paranoia,” and that he reported feeling as if he were constantly being watched.

She said the soldier’s outbursts were so “uncontrolled” that she believed he posed a threat to himself and to others. And she said she urged her commanders not to deploy him to Iraq.

She described three occasions that she said exemplified Private Manning’s erratic behavior, including one when he was “screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands” at an officer. In a second incident with a different officer, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning flipped over a table and lunged at him. And in the third incident, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning punched her in the face.

She said the attack was “unprovoked.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2011

A caption on a photograph in an earlier version of this article misidentified the position in which Pfc. Bradley Manning was standing. Mr. Manning was at the left in the photograph, not the right.

    Last Witness for Military Takes Stand in Leak Case, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/us/governments-last-witness-takes-stand-at-bradley-manning-hearing.html

Saudi Prince Invests $300 Million in Twitter

December 19, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says he and his investment company are investing a combined $300 million into the microblogging site Twitter.

Alwaleed said Monday the joint investment with his Kingdom Holding Company represents an interest in investing "in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact."

Twitter allows users to send short messages of up to 140 characters. It has been instrumental in connecting protesters and relaying on-the-ground developments during this year's Arab Spring uprisings.

Alwaleed's KHC is a major shareholder in Citigroup and holds stakes in other large stakes in other western giants, including Apple and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

    Saudi Prince Invests $300 Million in Twitter, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/12/19/business/AP-ML-Saudi-Alwaleed-Twitter.html

Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM

Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.

“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”

As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.

But the company is running into a roadblock in this country. Some people, even on the younger end of the age spectrum, just refuse to participate, including people who have given it a try.

One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated.

“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”

To be sure, the Facebook-free life has its disadvantages in an era when people announce all kinds of major life milestones on the Web. Ms. Elser has missed engagements and pictures of new-born babies. But none of that hurt as much as the gap she said her Facebook account had created between her and her closest friends. So she shut it down.

Many of the holdouts mention concerns about privacy. Those who study social networking say this issue boils down to trust. Amanda Lenhart, who directs research on teenagers, children and families at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that people who use Facebook tend to have “a general sense of trust in others and trust in institutions.” She added: “Some people make the decision not to use it because they are afraid of what might happen.”

Ms. Lenhart noted that about 16 percent of Americans don’t have cellphones. “There will always be holdouts,” she said.

Facebook executives say they don’t expect everyone in the country to sign up. Instead they are working on ways to keep current users on the site longer, which gives the company more chances to show them ads. And the company’s biggest growth is now in places like Asia and Latin America, where there might actually be people who have not yet heard of Facebook.

“Our goal is to offer people a meaningful, fun and free way to connect with their friends, and we hope that’s appealing to a broad audience,” said Jonathan Thaw, a Facebook spokesman.

But the figures on growth in this country are stark. The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said this slowdown was not a make-or-break issue ahead of the company’s public offering, which could come in the spring. What does matter, he said, is Facebook’s ability to keep its millions of current users entertained and coming back.

“They’re likely more worried about the novelty factor wearing off,” Mr. Valdes said. “That’s a continual problem that they’re solving, and there are no permanent solutions.”

Erika Gable, 29, who lives in Brooklyn and does public relations for restaurants, never understood the appeal of Facebook in the first place. She says the daily chatter that flows through the site — updates about bad hair days and pictures from dinner — is virtual clutter she doesn’t need in her life.

“If I want to see my fifth cousin’s second baby, I’ll call them,” she said with a laugh.

Ms. Gable is not a Luddite. She has an iPhone and sometimes uses Twitter. But when it comes to creating a profile on the world’s biggest social network, her tolerance reaches its limits.

“I remember having MySpace for a bit and always feeling so weird about seeing other people’s stuff all the time,” she said. “I’m not into it.”

Will Brennan, a 26-year-old Brooklyn resident, said he had “heard too many horror stories” about the privacy pitfalls of Facebook. But he said friends are not always sympathetic to his anti-social-media stance.

“I get asked to sign up at least twice a month,” said Mr. Brennan. “I get harangued for ruining their plans by not being on Facebook.”

And whether there is haranguing involved or not, the rebels say their no-Facebook status tends to be a hot topic of conversation — much as a decision not to own a television might have been in an earlier media era.

“People always raise an eyebrow,” said Chris Munns, 29, who works as a systems administrator in New York. “But my life has gone on just fine without it. I’m not a shut-in. I have friends and quite an enjoyable life in Manhattan, so I can’t say it makes me feel like I’m missing out on life at all.”

But the peer pressure is only going to increase. Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, said society was adopting new behaviors and expectations in response to the near-ubiquity of Facebook and other social networks.

“People may start to ask the question that, if you aren’t on social channels, why not? Are you hiding something?” she said. “The norms are shifting.”

This kind of thinking cuts both ways for the Facebook holdouts. Mr. Munns said his dating life had benefited from his lack of an online dossier: “They haven’t had a chance to dig up your entire life on Facebook before you meet.”

But Ms. Gable said such background checks were the one thing she needed Facebook for.

“If I have a crush on a guy, I’ll make my friends look him up for me,” Ms. Gable said. “But that’s as far as it goes.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 13, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of Americans who do not have cellphones, as estimated by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It is 16 percent, not 5 percent.

    Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-tell-about-it.html

Facebook IPO sparks dreams of riches, adventure

Thu, Dec 8 2011
Reuters
By Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Traveling to space or embarking on an expedition to excavate lost Mayan ruins are normally the stuff of adventure novels.

But for employees of Facebook, these and other lavish dreams are moving closer to reality as the world's No. 1 online social network prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering that could create at least a thousand millionaires.

The most anticipated stock market debut of 2012 is expected to value Facebook at as much as $100 billion, which would top just about any of Silicon Valley's most celebrated coming-out parties, from Netscape to Google Inc.

While weak financial markets could postpone or downsize any IPO, even the most conservative market-watchers say Facebook seems destined to set a new benchmark in a region famous for minting fortunes, with even the rank-and-file employees reaping millions of dollars.

Facebook employees past and present are already hatching plans on how to spend their anticipated new wealth, even as securities regulations typically prevent employee stock options from being cashed in until after a six-month lock-up period.

"There's been discussions of sort of bucket list ideas that people are putting together of things they always wanted to do and now we'll be able to do it," said one former employee who had joined Facebook in 2005, shortly after it was founded.

He is looking into booking a trip to space that would cost $200,000 or more with Virgin Galactic or one of the other companies working on future space tourism. That's chump change when he expects his shares in Facebook to be worth some $50 million.

"If that IPO bell happens, then I will definitely put money down," said the person, who declined to be identified because he did not want to draw attention to his financial status, given the antiglitz ethos of many people in Silicon Valley. "It's been a childhood dream," he said of space travel.

Others are thinking less science fiction and more "Indiana Jones." A group of current and former Facebook workers has begun laying the groundwork for an expedition to Mexico that sounds more suited to characters from the Steven Spielberg film "Raiders of the Lost Ark" than to the computer geeks famously portrayed in the movie about Facebook, "The Social Network."

Initially, the group wanted to organize its own jungle expedition to excavate a relatively untouched site of Mayan ruins, according to people familiar with the matter who also did not want to court notoriety by being identified in this story. After some debate earlier this year, they are now looking at partnering with an existing archeological program.

BIG PACKAGES

Founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, Facebook has grown into the world's biggest social network with over 800 million members and revenue of $1.6 billion in the first half of 2011.

Information about its ownership structure or employee compensation packages is hard to come by, since the still-private company discloses very little. Facebook declined to comment for this story.

It is clear that Facebook's earliest employees, who were given ownership stakes, and early venture capital investors -- such as Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel -- will see the biggest paydays. Zuckerberg, 27, is estimated to own a little over a fifth of the company, according to "The Facebook Effect" author David Kirkpatrick.

But the wealth will trickle down to engineers, salespeople and other staffers who later joined the company, since most employees receive salary plus some kind of equity-based compensation, such as restricted stock units or stock options.

Facebook's headcount has swelled from 700 employees in late 2008 to more than 3,000 today. Given its generous use of equity-based compensation in past years, people familiar with Facebook say that even by conservative estimates there are likely to be well over a thousand people looking at million-dollar-plus paydays after the company goes public.

"There will be thousands of millionaires," said a former in-house recruiter at Facebook, who did not want to be identified because of confidentiality agreements.

Lou Kerner, the head of private trading at Liquidnet, estimates that Facebook now has roughly 2.5 billion shares outstanding, which would translate to a per-share price of $40 at a $100 billion valuation.

Engineers are the most richly rewarded among the rank and file. The former Facebook recruiter said as recently as 2009, the company gave an engineer with 15 years experience options to buy about 65,000 shares at around $6 per share.

After a 5-for-1 stock split in October 2010, the engineer would now have the right to buy around 325,000 shares. Assuming a $40 share price, that would yield a profit of more than $12 million.

According to another former Facebook employee, it was not unusual for the company to offer some executive-level hires up to 100,000 restricted shares as recently as three years ago.

The company has since cut back on equity compensation for new hires. Managers hired one year ago received 2,000 to 30,000 restricted shares depending on the job function, according to another recruiter who had also worked for Facebook.

The company has also been stingier in handing out equity to noncore employees -- so there may not be as many of the dazzling rags-to-riches stories that were commonplace at the time of the Google IPO, when in-house chefs and at least one masseuse struck gold with options.

Facebook has its share of chefs -- including head chef Josef Desimone who was lured away from Google -- and other support staff, but it's not clear how many of them were awarded share options.

These days, "Google and Facebook are notorious for hiring contract employees they don't have to give equity to," said the second former Facebook recruiter.

HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS

Facebook's IPO has been long anticipated, but veterans of other startups that have gone public say the period after could be fraught with new challenges.

Some employees could grow jealous over colleagues with more stock, while others might look down on peers who are too quick to sell, questioning their loyalty to the company.

And there is always the risk that talented staff would leave with their newfound wealth to make their own mark in the technology world by becoming entrepreneurs or investing in other promising startups.

Some Facebook employees have already left the company to do that, selling their shares ahead of the IPO on private exchanges such as those run by SecondMarket or SharesPost.

One such person is engineer Karel Baloun, who joined the social network in 2005 and left just over a year later to start his own online network for commodities-futures traders, funded by a tidy package of stock options. It failed and Baloun laments that he could have made a lot more money if he had stayed at Facebook.

But he is philosophical, saying that the equity windfall gave him the cushion to do new things.

"It's really wonderful being able to choose your work based on the meaning of it, not the size of your salary," said Baloun, now chief technology officer at mobile-commerce company Leap Commerce. "I have two kids, and I couldn't do it if I didn't have some savings from this IPO."

Baloun said he has sold about half his Facebook shares and is holding on to the rest until after the IPO. "I will buy a house," he said.

WEALTH MANAGERS SALIVATE

For many of Facebook's staffers, the IPO will provide the means to pay off school loans and buy a house or new car. Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area have typically been lofty, but many homeowners and real-estate agents are eagerly anticipating a surge of new buyers flush with money from the IPOs of Facebook and other Web companies.

"Watch for Facebook proceeds to buy Palo Alto real estate," said David Cowan, a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners who backed social network LinkedIn Corp, among other companies.

Wealth managers and investment advisers are also looking to win new clients from the Facebook crowd.

"A lot of them are going to be multimillionaires at 30 and live to be 100. That means creating a 70-year plan, which is unheard of," said John Valentine of Valentine Capital Asset Management in San Ramon, California, noting that his average client plan spans about 35 years.

Valentine, whose firm manages about $600 million in assets, said he plans to break into the Facebook client base through connections with venture capital firms, and he has meetings set the next two weeks to leverage those relationships. "It's the hot ticket in Silicon Valley," he said of Facebook.

David Arizini, managing director of Constellation Wealth Advisors, has several current and former Facebook employees as clients and hopes they refer more of their friends.

But he knows that it will take time and work to win them over for his firm, a New York and Menlo Park-based wealth manager with about $4.5 billion in assets under management.

"They are very skeptical of the financial services industry largely because of what has transpired over the last three years," he said. "So the bulk of clients interviewed five to 10 advisers before they made their choice."

The imminent flood of Facebook dollars is sure to provide a welcome boost to local businesses in Silicon Valley, from high-end car dealerships to wine merchants.

Buff Giurlani, founder of car and wine storage service AutoVino in Menlo Park, is looking forward to an acceleration in already-brisk trade. "If a Facebook guy buys a house and wants to remodel it, maybe the contractor will buy another car," he said. "Maybe the realtor will put a car in. There's a trickle-down effect."

For Facebook's younger staffers, who favor jeans and T-shirts over designer suits, the shopping sprees will almost certainly involve computers and electronics.

"Start packing pepper spray for your next trip to the Apple store," said Bessemer Venture's Cowan.

(Reporting by Sarah McBride and Alexei Oreskovic,

additional reporting by Ashley Lau and Jilian Mincer,

editing by Tiffany Wu and Matthew Lewis)

    Facebook IPO sparks dreams of riches, adventure, R, 8.12.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/08/us-facebook-millionaires-idUSTRE7B72NK20111208

N.Y.C. Police Maligned Paradegoers on Facebook

December 5, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

They called people “animals” and “savages.” One comment said, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.”

Hearing New York police officers speak publicly but candidly about one another and the people they police is rare indeed, especially with their names attached. But for a few days in September, a raw and rude conversation among officers was on Facebook for the world to see — until it vanished for unknown reasons.

It offered a fly-on-the-wall view of officers displaying roiling emotions often hidden from the public, a copy of the posting obtained by The New York Times shows. Some of the remarks appeared to have broken Police Department rules barring officers from “discourteous or disrespectful remarks” about race or ethnicity.

The subject was officers’ loathing of being assigned to the West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn, an annual multiday event that unfolds over the Labor Day weekend and that has been marred by episodes of violence, including deaths of paradegoers. Those who posted comments appeared to follow Facebook’s policy requiring the use of real names, and some identified themselves as officers.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said he learned of the Facebook group from a reporter and would refer the issue to the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

The comments in the online group, which grew over a few days to some 1,200 members, were at times so offensive in referring to West Indian and African-American neighborhoods that some participants warned others to beware how their words might be taken in a public setting open to Internal Affairs “rats.”

But some of the people who posted comments seemed emboldened by Facebook’s freewheeling atmosphere. “Let them kill each other,” wrote one of the Facebook members who posted comments under a name that matched that of a police officer.

“Filth,” wrote a commenter who identified himself as Nick Virgilio, another participant whose name matched that of a police officer. “It’s not racist if it’s true,” yet another wrote.

The officers were at times spurred on by civilian supporters and other city workers, including members of the Fire Department, an analysis indicated.

It is impossible to say with certainty whether those quoted are the people they claim to be. But a comparison by The Times of the names of some of the more than 150 people who posted comments on the page with city employee listings showed that more than 60 percent matched the names of police officers, and Mr. Browne did not deny that they were officers. Of course, some people do circumvent Facebook’s rule on identification.

It was impossible to determine the racial breakdown of the officers who were posting comments, but at least one of the participants said that most of them seemed not to be minorities.

Efforts were made to contact some of those who participated through the Police Department, through the prosecutor in a court case that revealed the existence of the group, through Facebook messages and through other methods. One, Nick Virgilio, said he was a member of the department but responded, “I don’t wish to comment.”

The comments in the group included anger at police and city officials and expressions of anxiety about policing what has often been a dangerous event. “Why is everyone calling this a parade,” one said. “It’s a scheduled riot.” Another said: “We were widely outnumbered. It was an eerie feeling knowing we could be overrun at any moment.”

“Welcome to the Liberal NYC Gale,” said another, “where if the cops sneeze too loud they get investigated for excessive force but the ‘civilians’ can run around like savages and there are no repercussions.”

“They can keep the forced overtime,” said one writer, adding that the safety of officers comes “before the animals.”

Wrote another: “Bloodbath!!! The worst detail to work.”

“I say have the parade one more year,” wrote a commenter who identified himself as Dan Rodney, “and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” Reached on Monday, Mr. Rodney confirmed that he was a police officer and that he had used Facebook, though rarely, but denied making the comment. “That wasn’t me,” he said before suggesting that someone else might have been responsible. “I leave my phone around sometimes. Other than that I have no comment.”

The page — though visible to any Facebook user before it vanished into the digital ether — appears to have drawn no public notice until an obscure criminal case in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn last month, the gun possession trial of an out-of-work Brooklyn food-service worker named Tyrone Johnson. His defense lawyers put many of the controversial remarks before the jury. But when that too seemed to draw little notice outside the courthouse, the lawyers, Benjamin Moore and Paul Lieberman of Brooklyn Defender Services, provided a digital copy of the Facebook conversation to The Times, saying it raised broad questions about police attitudes.

While preparing for the trial, Mr. Moore checked to see if the officer who had arrested his client, Sgt. Dustin Edwards, was on Facebook. He was. Mr. Moore noticed that Sergeant Edwards’s profile showed he belonged to a Facebook group formed, it said, for “N.Y.P.D. officers who are threatened by superiors and forced to be victims themselves by the violence of the West Indian Day massacre.”

The group’s title, “No More West Indian Day Detail,” attracted Mr. Moore’s attention because Sergeant Edwards had arrested Mr. Johnson in the predawn hours of the celebrations before the parade in 2010.

Mr. Moore said that when he clicked on the link — the page was apparently public — and began reading a conversation that ran 70 printed pages, he was struck by what seemed to be its reckless explicitness. “I found it astounding,” he said. He made a digital copy. When he looked two days later, all trace of the group was gone.

At the trial, the defense lawyers argued that the gun Sergeant Edwards said he found near their client had not belonged to Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson is black and lived in the parade area. The defense suggested that Sergeant Edwards might have planted the gun.

Sergeant Edwards testified he had never posted a comment on the group that protested the West Indian Day detail. He said his involvement had amounted to nothing more than clicking on the name of the group that included “a lot of the people in another police group that I’m in.”

Still, through Mr. Moore’s questions, Justice Bruce M. Balter’s courtroom got an earful of what Mr. Moore described as the bias-riddled police commentary.

Did Sergeant Edwards agree with the posting that described the parade as “ethnic cleansing”? What about the one that said the parade should be “moved to the zoo”? What about the sarcastic one that called working the parade detail useful “ghetto training”?

“I’m not aware of the post, no,” the sergeant testified. He agreed the comments were offensive.

A prosecutor, Lindsay Zuflacht, argued that with no posts from Sergeant Edwards, there was “nothing to indicate that he feels at all the same.” The sergeant did testify, however, that he agreed with the statement that police officers were forced each year to become victims of the violence of the West Indian Day parade.

On Monday, Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, said the office would investigate any matters stemming from the trial referred to it by the Police Department.

At the trial, the prosecutor read the jurors one of the cautionary postings that was on Facebook. “Please keep it focused,” the post said. “This is not a racist rant. This is about us, the cops.”

On Nov. 21, the jury acquitted Mr. Johnson.

 

Jack Styczynski contributed research.

    N.Y.C. Police Maligned Paradegoers on Facebook, NYT, 5.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/nyregion/on-facebook-nypd-officers-malign-west-indian-paradegoers.html

Online Learning, Personalized

December 4, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.

He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.

Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.

Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum — a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition.

This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan’s experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

As schools try to sort out confusing claims about the benefits of using technology in the classroom, and companies ponder the profits from big education contracts, Khan Academy may seem like just another product vying for attention.

But what makes Mr. Khan’s venture stand out is that the lessons and software tools are entirely free — available to anyone with access to a reasonably fast Internet connection.

“The core of our mission is to give material to people who need it,” Mr. Khan said. “You could ask, ‘Why should it be free?’ But why shouldn’t it be free?”

For now, Mr. Khan’s small team is subsidized by more than $16.5 million from technology donors, including Bill Gates, Google, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the O’Sullivan Foundation. He intends to raise an endowment. And this summer, starting in the Bay Area, where he is based, he plans to hold an educational summer camp.

It is too early to know whether the Khan Academy software makes a real difference in learning. A limited study with students in Oakland, Calif., this year found that children who had fallen behind in math caught up equally well if they used the software or were tutored in small groups. The research firm SRI International is working on an evaluation of the software in the classroom.

Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help children puzzle through a concept than drill it into their heads.

“Instead of showing our students a better lecture, let’s get them doing something better than lecture,” Frank Noschese, a high school physics teacher in Cross River, N.Y., wrote on his blog in June.

But in education circles, Mr. Khan’s efforts have captured imaginations and spawned imitators. Two Stanford professors have drawn on his model to offer a free online artificial intelligence class. Thirty-four thousand people are now taking the course, and many more have signed up. Stanford Medical School, which allows its students to take lectures online if they want, summoned Mr. Khan to help its faculty spice up their presentations.

And a New York-based luxury real estate company credited Mr. Khan with inspiring its profit-making venture: the Floating University, a set of online courses taught by academic superstars, repackaged and sold to Ivy League colleges and eventually to anyone who wants to pay for them.

“What Khan represents is a model that’s tapped into the desire that everyone has to personalize the learning experience and get it cheap and quick,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the Education Department.

Mr. Shelton predicted that there would be “a bunch of knockoffs” that would take the Khan approach and try to expand on it. “This is going to spread like wildfire,” he said.

Mr. Khan grew up in a suburb of New Orleans, where his mother, who is from Bangladesh, raised him on her own by cobbling together a series of jobs and businesses. He went to public schools, where, as he recalls, a few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top universities.

Math became his passion. He pored over textbooks and joined the math club. He came to see math as storytelling. “Math is a language for thinking,” he said, “as opposed to voodoo magical incantations where you have no idea where they’re coming from.”

The YouTube lectures got their start six years ago when Mr. Khan needed a way to help a cousin catch up on high school math. They are startlingly simple. Each one covers a single topic, like long division or the debt crisis, usually in a bite-size 10-minute segment. The viewer hears Mr. Khan talking, in his typically chatty, older brother sort of way. But his face is never seen, just his scribbles on the screen. More recently he has included two outside specialists to give lectures on art history topics like the Rosetta Stone and Caravaggio.

Today, the Khan Academy site offers 2,700 instructional videos and a constellation of practice exercises. Master one concept, move on to the next. Earn rewards for a streak of correct answers. For teachers, there is an analytics dashboard that shows both an aggregate picture of how the class is doing and a detailed map of each student’s math comprehension. In other words, a peephole.

Diane Tavenner, chief of the Summit chain of four charter schools, said that at first she was ambivalent about using Mr. Khan’s software. It would require buying laptops for every student and investing in more Internet capacity. And she found the Khan Academy model of instructor and blackboard — albeit a digital one — to be a bit too traditional.

In the past, math class at the Summit schools was always hands-on: the class worked on a problem, usually in small groups, sometimes for days at a time. But getting an entire class of ninth graders to master the fundamentals of math was never easy. Without those, the higher-level conceptual exercises were impossible.

That is where the machine came in handy. The Khan software offered students a new, engaging way to learn the basics.

Ms. Tavenner says she believes that computers cannot replace teachers. But the computer, she recognizes, can do some things a teacher cannot. It can offer personal feedback to a whole room of students as they work. And it can give the teacher additional class time to do more creative and customized teaching.

“Combining Khan with that kind of teaching will produce the best kind of math,” she argued. “Teachers are more effective because they have a window into the student’s mind.”

Ms. Tavenner’s students here inhabit a world that seems distant from the dazzle and wealth of adjacent Silicon Valley. Nearly half come from families where English is a second language. Forty percent qualify for free lunches. So pervasive is gang violence in the area that school uniforms have been mandated as a safeguard against the display of gang colors. Not all students have a computer at home, or parents who can help with homework.

Math class at Summit on one afternoon this fall began like many around the country. Mr. Roe was at the whiteboard at the head of the room, explaining order of operations — the math concept that dictates the sequence in which calculations should be performed in a long equation. Handouts were passed out, and there was a series of questions and answers.

In the second hour, the students were huddled over laptops, each working on a different set of exercises. Nicole Bermudez, 14, was on geometry. She had trouble with math in middle school. Her teacher, she said, had no time to help her, and her mother did not have the patience. “She would just yell at me. She would say, ‘You can’t get it? This is simple math.’ ”

The Khan Academy software, she pointed out, offers hints and instructional videos to nudge her ahead. It waits until she has mastered one concept before she can move on to the next. She can ask Mr. Roe when she is really stuck.

In the back of the class, two girls wearing headphones watched one of Mr. Khan’s videos. Moses Rodriguez plodded slowly through some exercises, his attention occasionally wandering until Mr. Roe came around and prodded him. The classroom was quiet, apart from the occasional eruptions of victory.

“Is your brain hurting yet?” one girl asked her neighbor.

Matt Richtel contributed reporting.

    Online Learning, Personalized, NYT, 4.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/technology/khan-academy-blends-its-youtube-approach-with-classrooms.html

Oregon Tests iPads as Aid to Disabled Voters

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Could the iPad someday supplant the voting machine?

Oregon last week became the first state in the country to use iPads to allow people with disabilities to vote, and it intends to use them again for another election in January. Several other states are expected to follow suit with iPads or other tablets, possibly as early as for next year’s presidential election.

In a special primary election in five counties in Oregon, 89 people with disabilities marked their ballots on an iPad. They did not actually cast their votes online — Internet voting is an idea whose time has not yet come, several elections officials said.

Rather, these voters used iPads, brought to their homes or nursing homes by election workers, to call up their ballots, mark them on-screen and print them out on a portable wireless printer. The voters or assistants then either mailed in the printed ballots or dropped them off at election stations.

One woman, who has impaired vision, was able to enlarge the print on her ballot so that she could see the names of candidates. A man with arthritis who could not hold a pen was able to touch the screen with his finger and mark his ballot.

“The goal was to make voting accessible and convenient for voters with disabilities, and the iPad does exactly that,” said Kate Brown, Oregon’s secretary of state.

For the Jan. 31 election, she said, voters with disabilities will have even more iPad options: those who cannot use their hands, for example, can use a tube to activate software that lets them call up the ballot and mark it. They will be able to attach their own joysticks or paddles. The iPad can also translate the ballot for those who do not speak English, and read it out to the blind.

Ms. Brown said that the state tried out several different tablets and devices at a conference this year and found that people with disabilities preferred the iPad.

Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People With Disabilities, commended Oregon’s experiment. “Is the iPad perfect?” he said. “No. But it is an important step forward.” One challenge is that the visually impaired cannot read the printouts of their ballots to verify them.

Election workers found the iPad and wireless printers more convenient than the computer stations that they had previously dragged to homebound voters.

Ms. Brown said that if the experiment went as well in January — when voters in five counties will choose a replacement for Representative David Wu, a Democrat who resigned after a sex scandal — she expected to expand the program statewide.

Other states are interested, too. “It’s definitely a direction we’re moving in,” said Shane Hamlin, co-director of elections for Washington State, although he said it was too early to say whether tablet voting might be available to all voters or just those with disabilities.

But he said that in the long run, voting by iPad or a similar device could save money, considering the costs of maintaining, storing and updating regular voting machines.

Lori J. Steele, chief executive officer of Everyone Counts, the California company that developed the software used by Oregon, said she expected that a half-dozen states would be using iPads or similar tablets for people with disabilities in next year’s presidential election.

“Oregon is the model for what states could and will be doing in the next few years,” she said. “I can see the transformation as old equipment becomes obsolete.”

    Oregon Tests iPads as Aid to Disabled Voters, NYT, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/oregon-tries-out-voting-by-ipad-for-disabled.html

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22; Co-Founded Social Network

November 15, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a co-founder of the start-up social network Diaspora*, which has been described as the “anti-Facebook” for its emphasis on personal privacy and decentralized data collection, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 22.

The San Francisco police, in confirming his death, did not give the cause. Friends and associates of Mr. Zhitomirskiy said there were indications of suicide.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy was a student at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2010 when he and three fellow undergraduates conceived the idea for a Web-based community that would give users, rather than the Web site itself, control of the information they shared.

Instead of creating a central database like Facebook’s, where information about hundreds of millions of members is stored and mined for advertising and marketing purposes, their idea was to develop freely shared software that would allow every member of the network to “own” his or her personal information.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy, an impish self-styled radical, unicyclist and competitive ballroom dancer, was a member of the nascent liberation technology movement, which views the conglomeration of personal information by large corporate and government bodies as a threat to civil liberties and human rights.

He and his partners were inspired to start their project after attending a lecture in February 2010 by Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law School professor and an advocate of liberation technology, about the threat to privacy and social justice in Internet commerce.

Professor Moglen, who became acquainted with the Diaspora* founders, said Mr. Zhitomirskiy was the most idealistic of the group.

“He was an immensely talented and intent young mathematician,” Mr. Moglen said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had a choice between graduate school and this project, and he chose to do the project because he wanted to do something with his time that would make freedom.”

Ilya Alekseevich Zhitomirskiy was born on Oct. 12, 1989, in Moscow to Alexei and Inna Zhitomirskiy. His father and his grandfather Garri Zhitomirskiy are mathematicians. After the family moved to the United States in 2000, Mr. Zhitomirskiy attended public schools in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, where his father found work teaching and later in business.

In addition to his parents and grandfather, Mr. Zhitomirskiy is survived by his grandmother Galina Fillippuk Zhitomirskiy, and a sister, Maria.

He attended college at Tulane University, the University of Maryland and N.Y.U. He was a semester shy of graduation when he and three friends at N.Y.U. — Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi and Raphael Sofaer — floated their idea for what they called a “personally controlled, do-it-all, open-source social network” on an Internet fund-raising platform called Kickstarter.

The concept for Diaspora* (the asterisk represents a seed from a dandelion seed head) struck a chord. Though they had originally intended to raise a modest sum, the partners received a flood of contributions, eventually totaling $200,000, from about 6,000 donors.

They moved to San Francisco, starting a prototype of the site (diasporafoundation.org) in the summer of 2010. The site was scheduled to become fully operational in the next few weeks.

In a September 2010 interview in New York magazine, Mr. Zhitomirskiy said the open platform model for Diaspora* would not make him and his partners rich.

“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” he said. “Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”

    Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22; Co-Founded Social Network, NYT, 15.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html

Quietly, Google Gets Its View of the Park

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

As gold leaves drifted to the ground in Central Park on Monday, a strange-looking vehicle joined the park’s stream of pedicabs, bicycles, baby carriages and skateboards. It was straight out of Roald Dahl’s imagination, at once sinister and innocent — an ungainly contraption cooked up by, say, Good Humor and the K.G.B.

It was, in fact, Google’s Trike, a panoramic camera system with nine lenses mounted on an oversize tricycle. The company, which already offers 360-degree street-level views of New York City and other cities, has turned its attention to parks, as well as other locations inaccessible by car. The Trike has been wheeling through hard-to-reach places across the globe, mapping them and then offering online Street View tours on Google Maps that let the would-be parkgoer mouse-click along a path.

Two weeks ago, the High Line was added to Google’s digital archive, along with Clearview Park Golf Course in Queens, Dyker Beach Park in Brooklyn and Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. They joined parks in 21 other countries, from Kensington Gardens in London to Koganei Park in Tokyo.

Central Park had its star turn on Monday, when a team of cyclists began the job of maneuvering the Trike along 58 miles of paths. The leaves were in full splendor as the camera lenses captured vistas in all directions, snapping meadows and playgrounds, monuments and ball fields, as well as the occasional squirrel.

The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park for the city, last year introduced a smartphone app dedicated to the city’s 843-acre flagship. The app already relies on Google Maps, and the conservancy says the app will automatically incorporate the new photographs as it helps people plan the quickest route from one attraction to another. By seducing them with online images, conservancy officials also hope to nudge visitors to explore the less crowded northern half of the park.

“We have 38 million visitors a year, and we’re always looking for ways to enhance their experience,” said Douglas Blonsky, the conservancy’s president. “The north end has some of the most beautiful sections of the park, like the Cascades, the North Woods and Harlem Meer.”

A publicist for Google who accompanied the Trike in Central Park would not say when the photographic simulation would go online, but it took several months for the company to add the High Line, which was photographed in the spring.

Indeed, the Trike was treated with utmost secrecy. The publicist would not allow the trio of pedalers to speak to reporters about their experience. (One Trike pilot, who was drenched with sweat, managed to say, “The hills are getting to me.”) Nor would she say how many days it would take them to document the park, how long their shifts lasted or how the cameras worked.

Dena Libner, a spokeswoman for the conservancy, said Google had indicated that it would take two to three days to complete the photography.

The Trike is part of a larger fleet used by Google Maps to collect images, which includes cars, snowmobiles and an even smaller vehicle, called a Street View Trolley, that can navigate inside museums.

The High Line, the mile-long park converted from an elevated rail bed, has garnered international attention. So perhaps it is no surprise that the Street View feature on Google Maps would satisfy a certain curiosity. “It doesn’t replace the experience, but it helps people understand what it’s like up there,” said Robert Hammond, a co-founder of Friends of the High Line.

But even frequent visitors to Central Park said they might just click their way to a favorite spot from the comfort of an armchair once in a while. “I have a funny back, and I sometimes can’t do the long distances,” said Cathy O’Connor, a 64-year-old administrator who is partial to the northwest section. “It would be nice to just see it on my computer.”

    Quietly, Google Gets Its View of the Park, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nyregion/google-takes-central-parks-picture-for-online-strolling.html

F.T.C. Said to Be Near Facebook Privacy Deal

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are nearing a settlement over deceptive practices related to several Facebook features, including its privacy settings, according to two people briefed on the settlement.

Under the agreement, Facebook would agree to privacy audits for 20 years, one of the people said. It would also prohibit Facebook from making public a piece of information that a user had originally shared privately on the site without express permission, the person said. The individuals spoke on condition of anonymity because the F.T.C. commissioners have not yet approved the settlement.

But Facebook would not be required to ask users if they would like to participate in all sharing features on the site, including tools that it builds in the future.

A Facebook spokesman, Andrew Noyes, and an F.T.C. spokeswoman, Claudia Farrell, declined to comment. The settlement is part of the F.T.C.’s effort to protect consumer privacy online.

In March, Google and the F.T.C. agreed to 20 years of privacy audits and other measures after an investigation into deceptive privacy practices related to Buzz, its ill-fated social networking tool. It was the first time the F.T.C. had charged a company with such violations and imposed such regulations. Last year, after an F.T.C. investigation into two security breaches, Twitter agreed to establish a privacy program.

For Facebook, which has said it has voluntarily made its privacy settings simpler in the last 18 months, the settlement is occurring as it tries to smooth the path toward an initial public offering.

“This is part of the balancing act Facebook has to do,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “It also needs to settle the privacy complaints in the United States and Europe before its I.P.O.”

But Mr. Chester expressed doubts that the settlement would appease critics of Facebook’s data-collection practices.

“The real test of the F.T.C.’s Facebook deal will be whether a user actually has control over their own information, or will this be a tiny digital bump on the road that does nothing to derail Mark Zuckerberg’s voracious appetite to swallow up our data,” he said.

Users, privacy specialists and politicians have attacked Facebook for automatically signing people up for new features on the site, instead of asking them first.

For a year and a half, the F.T.C. has pushed Facebook to offer granular privacy controls so people can choose to share or make private specific information they post on the site, according to a person involved in the talks.

Facebook has since added tools, like one for sharing with small groups of Facebook friends.

The settlement addresses several complaints that the F.T.C. has received from organizations like the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

It focuses on privacy changes that Facebook made in December 2009. Although the company said at the time that the changes would simplify settings users found confusing, they exposed information that could previously be made private, including profile photos, gender, friend lists and current city. Facebook also removed the ability to opt out of some features.

After a public outcry, Facebook in May 2010 limited the amount of information users were required to make public, and restored the ability to opt out of certain tools.

The settlement also addresses other Facebook features that the F.T.C. said were deceptive, including a program for giving applications from outside programmers the Facebook seal of approval that ended in December 2009, one of the people said.

Several people briefed on the settlement, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, said it was unclear how long it would take to complete the deal.

 

Nick Bilton contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Steve Lohr from New York.

    F.T.C. Said to Be Near Facebook Privacy Deal, NYT, 10.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/technology/facebook-is-said-to-be-near-ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html

Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, must reveal information about three of its account holders who are under investigation for their possible links to the WikiLeaks whistle-blower site.

The case has become a flash point for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant last year. Instead, on the basis of a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, the government demanded that Twitter provide the Internet protocol addresses of three of its users, among other things. An Internet protocol address identifies and gives the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet.

The three people came to the Justice Department’s attention because it believed they were associated with WikiLeaks.

Twitter informed the three people — Jacob Appelbaum, an American computer security expert, along with Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s Parliament — of the government’s demand for information earlier this year.

The petitioners argued in federal court that their Internet protocol addresses should be considered private information and that the demand for information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks. They also argued that the order suppressed their right to free speech.

The court disagreed. Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., wrote in his opinion that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

The judge said that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over the Internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account, they relinquished an expectation of privacy.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

The court also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department’s explanation for why it sought the account information.

Neither the Justice Department nor Twitter company officials responded to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.

The petitioners themselves spoke up on Twitter. “I would do it again,” Ms. Jonsdottir posted.

“Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days,” Mr. Appelbaum wrote on Twitter.

Lawyers for one of the petitioners said they were still reviewing the judge’s order and could not yet say what the next steps were.

    Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case, NYT, 10.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/technology/twitter-ordered-to-yield-data-in-wikileaks-case.html

7 Charged In Web Scam Using Ads

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JENNA WORTHAM

It was a subtle swap: a cheesy advertisement for a vacation timeshare atop the home page of ESPN.com, in a spot that might have been claimed by a well-known brand like Dr Pepper.

Those who saw swapped advertisements, federal prosecutors say, might never have known that their computer had been drawn into a complex Internet advertising scam that they say generated $14 million for its creators.

Over the last four years, a group of men in Eastern Europe quietly hijacked millions of computers worldwide and diverted unsuspecting users to online advertisements from which they could profit, federal law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.

Six men, all in their 20s and early 30s, are under arrest in Estonia for what the United States attorney’s office in New York called “a massive and sophisticated Internet fraud scheme.” A Russian suspect in the case remains at large.

The malicious software infected four million computers, including 500,000 in the United States, the prosecutors said. The software was so subtle that most people using an infected computer were probably unaware of it.

It was a two-pronged scheme, prosecutors said. One component involved redirecting clicks on search results to sites that were controlled by the defendants. A search for “I.R.S.,” for instance, would lead a user to the Web site of the tax preparer H&R Block. The sites to which users were directed would pay the swindlers a referral fee, prosecutors said. The more traffic they could redirect, the more fees they collected.

The other way the group made money, according to the indictment, was to swap legitimate online advertisements on certain Web sites with others that would generate payments for the defendants. Prosecutors said that Web sites for ESPN and The Wall Street Journal were affected — but only when viewed on the infected computers.

“On a mass scale, this gave new meaning to the term false advertising,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference in Manhattan.

The security firm Trend Micro, which was among several private companies that helped federal officials with the investigation, called it the “biggest cybercriminal takedown in history.” The group running the scheme had 100 command-and-control servers worldwide, the company said, one of which was in a data center run in New York.

The scheme came to light after 100 computers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were found to have been infected. The malicious software spread through infected Web sites.

The most serious aspect of the scheme was that it attacked part of the scaffolding of the Internet: the domain name system, or D.N.S., which links the numerical addresses of Web sites with more user-friendly addresses like irs.gov.

“When people start attacking infrastructure, it creates the potential for a rogue version of the Internet,” said David Dagon, a computer security expert at the Georgia Tech College of Computing who helped federal authorities in the investigation.

Unlike more traditional malware that ferrets out valuable personal information, the group’s program was not designed to steal data, so it was not easily detected, private security consultants said. It manipulated the infrastructure of the Web to do what it does every day in great volumes: display advertising.

All six of the Estonian defendants were in the custody of Estonian police. Four of them also face charges in that country. One of them, Vladimir Tsastsin, 31, has been previously convicted of money laundering in Estonia, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is identified with a company called Rove Digital, which investigators say ran the operation’s infrastructure.

According to the indictment, the malware also staved off antivirus software updates, which meant that an infected computer could not detect that it was infected. This also made the machine vulnerable to other security bugs.

The malware affected both Windows and Mac operating systems. On its Web site, the F.B.I. outlines how to detect this particular program and how to get rid of it.

Mr. Bharara described the scheme as “cyber infestation of the first order” that reflected the global nature of Internet fraud.

    7 Charged In Web Scam Using Ads, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/technology/us-indicts-7-in-online-ad-fraud-scheme.html

Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography

Spurs Debate Over Severity

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

Does downloading child pornography from the Internet deserve the same criminal punishment as first-degree murder?

A circuit court judge in Florida clearly thinks so: On Thursday, he sentenced Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old stockroom worker whose home computer was found to contain hundreds of pornographic images of children, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But the severity of the justice meted out to Mr. Vilca, who had no previous criminal record, has led some criminal justice experts to question whether increasingly harsh penalties delivered in cases involving the viewing of pornography really fit the crime. Had Mr. Vilca actually molested a child, they note, he might well have received a lighter sentence.

“To me, a failure to distinguish between people who look at these dirty pictures and people who commit contact offenses lacks the nuance and proportionality I think our law demands,” said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, who highlighted Mr. Vilca’s case on his blog, Sentencing and Law Policy.

Sexual offenses involving children enrage most Americans, and lawmakers have not hesitated to impose lengthy prison terms for offenders. In Florida, possession of child pornography is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Mr. Vilca was charged with 454 counts of possession, each count representing one image found on the computer.

Steve Maresca, the assistant state attorney in the case, said that in his view, Mr. Vilca “received a sentence pursuant to the sentencing guidelines.”

“Too many people just look at this as a victimless crime, and that’s not true,” he said. “These children are victimized, and when the images are shown over and over again, they’re victimized over and over again.”

But Lee Hollander, Mr. Vilca’s lawyer, called the sentence ridiculous.

“Daniel had nothing to do with the original victimization of these people; there is no evidence that he’s ever touched anybody improperly, adult or minor; and life in prison for looking at images, even child images, is beyond comprehension,” he said.

Mr. Hollander said Mr. Vilca had consistently said he did not know the images were on his computer. He refused a plea bargain of 20 years in prison, after which the state attorney increased the charges. The sentence will be appealed, Mr. Hollander said.

Troy K. Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri’s Western District, noted that most people assume that someone who looks at child pornography is also a child molester or will become a child molester, a view often mirrored by judges.

But a growing body of scientific research shows that this is not the case, he said. Many passive viewers of child pornography never molest children, and not all child molesters have a penchant for pornography.

“I’m not suggesting that someone who looks at child pornography should just walk,” he said. “But we ought to punish people for what they do, not for our fear.”

State and federal laws, which generally increase penalties based on the number of pornographic images, reflect the idea that acquiring child pornography requires extensive time and effort and thus is a measure of a defendant’s involvement and interest. But with the rise of the Internet, it is possible to download hundreds of images in a matter of minutes, making the size of a stash a less than reliable indicator, Mr. Stabenow and other criminal justice experts said. It is now a rare case that does not involve the possession of hundreds, or even thousands, of images.

As a result, many federal judges have issued sentences lower than those called for by federal guidelines, which add months for multiple images and other aggravating factors. And even when such sentencing enhancements are enforced, the sentences — which can sometimes be 18 or 20 years — are often well below what Mr. Vilca received. The federal guidelines, for example, recommend a minimum of 57 to 71 months in prison for possession of 600 or more images of very young children.

Paul Cassell, a former federal judge who is now a law professor at the University of Utah, said there was no question that “consumers of child pornography drive the market for the production of child pornography, and without people to consume this stuff there wouldn’t be nearly as many children being sexually abused.”

Mr. Cassell is involved in efforts to get restitution for victims of child pornography, and has filed a petition in one case with the Supreme Court. But he said that while he was not familiar with Mr. Vilca’s case and did not know what other facts might be involved, “in the abstract, a life sentence for the crime of solely possessing child pornography would seem to be excessive.”

“A life sentence is what we give first-degree murderers,” he said, “and possession of child pornography is not the equivalent of first-degree murder.”

    Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography Spurs Debate Over Severity, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/us/life-sentence-for-possession-of-child-pornography-spurs-debate.html

Silicon Valley Wows Educators, and Woos Them

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — Three times over the last two years, school officials from Little Falls, Minn., have escaped the winter cold for two-day trips to Silicon Valley. Their destination: the headquarters of Apple.

In visits the officials described as inspirational, they checked out the company’s latest gadgets, discussed the instructional value of computers with high-level Apple executives and engineers, and dined with them and other educators at trendy restaurants. Apple paid for meals and their stay at a nearby inn.

The visits paid off for Apple too — to the tune of $1.2 million in sales. In September, Little Falls handed out iPads to 1,700 of its 2,500 students at a celebration in the school gym. And a few days earlier, 200 teachers got a pep talk via video chat from an Apple executive whom the school superintendent had come to know during his company visits.

“Both my visits there have been extraordinary,” said Curt Tryggestad, superintendent of the Little Falls Community Schools, who visited Cupertino in 2010 and earlier this year. “I was truly amazed to sit in a room with Apple vice presidents, people who were second in command to Steve Jobs.”

The demand for technology in classrooms has given rise to a slick and fast-growing sales force. Makers of computers and other gear vigorously court educators as they vie for billions of dollars in school financing. Sometimes inviting criticism of their zealous marketing, they pitch via e-mail, make cold calls, arrange luncheons and hold community meetings.

But Apple in particular woos the education market with a state-of-the art sales operation that educators say is unique, and that, public-interest watchdogs say, raises some concerns. Along with more traditional methods, Apple invites educators from around the country to “executive briefings,” which participants describe as equal parts conversation, seminar and backstage pass.

Such events might seem unremarkable in the business world, where closing a deal can involve thinly veiled junkets, golf outings and lavish dinners. But the courtship of public school officials entrusted with tax dollars is a more sensitive matter. Some critics say the trips could cast doubt on the impartiality of the officials’ buying decisions, which shape the way millions of students learn.

Mike Dean, a spokesman for Common Cause of Minnesota, a nonpartisan group that promotes open government, was critical of the Apple visits, calling them “influence peddling.” He said he believed that a Minnesota law prohibiting government officials from accepting “anything of value” from contractors would apply to the hotel stay and dinners. And he said Apple was offering an experience that made potential buyers feel like insiders.

“There is a geek culture that very much worships Apple, and they’re feeding into that to get more contracts.”

Apple declined to discuss the executive briefings. Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for the company, said education was “in its DNA.” As to the public employees who participate in the trips, Ms. Kerris said: “We advise them to follow their local regulations.”

Broadly, efforts by technology vendors to get close to educators are becoming more sophisticated, said John Richards, an adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where he teaches about education and technology.

“What the textbook sellers had perfected for years has moved into the high-tech world,” said Mr. Richards, who also works as a consultant for technology companies in the education market.

The sales pitches come as questions persist about how effective high-tech products can be at improving student achievement. The companies say their products engage students and prepare them for a digital future, while some academics say technology is not fulfilling its promise.

Even Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, turned skeptical about technology’s ability to improve education. In a new biography of Mr. Jobs, the book’s author, Walter Isaacson, describes a conversation earlier this year between the ailing Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, in which the two men “agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools — far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law.”

The comments echo similar ones Mr. Jobs made in 1996, between his two stints at Apple. In an interview with Wired magazine, Mr. Jobs said that “what’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” even though he had himself “spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet.” Mr. Jobs blamed teachers’ unions for the decline in education.

Still, Mr. Jobs seemed to hold out hope that devices like the iPad could change things by replacing printed textbooks. Mr. Isaacson writes that the textbook market was the next big business Mr. Jobs hoped to disrupt with technology.

The executive briefings on Apple’s campus have been going on for more than a decade, but have received little attention, partly because participants sign nondisclosure agreements that are meant to protect the company’s technical and business secrets.

Matt Mello, director of technology for the Holly Area Schools in Oakland County, Mich., went on a two-day trip to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in April 2010, and his description of it is similar to those of other participants.

Mr. Mello chronicled his visit using the Moleskine notebook Apple gave him. On the first day, he said, there was a light breakfast at the hotel, a ride to Apple’s campus and a briefing around a U-shaped conference table that began with company executives asking the educators about their needs. The latest Apple laptops and other products were scattered around the room. They had lunch in the gourmet cafeteria, where Mr. Mello sampled a bit of everything, and visited the company store.

“I joked that I felt like we were on hallowed ground,” Mr. Mello said of the campus. “There’s this mystique.”

Still, Mr. Mello said he was not sure what would come of a trip that had developed a few months earlier, when the regional sales representative for Apple “snuck a MacBook under my nose and got me to try it.” Soon, he said, the district was conducting a test with 30 Apple laptops and considering whether to upgrade hundreds of Windows-based computers or switch to Apple.

Mr. Mello said the sales representative told him: “If you guys are serious, we could get you an invitation to an executive briefing in Cupertino.”

The representative traveled to Cupertino for the meeting but hung in the background. The sales team wore ties, and the engineers and executives dressed casually. Sales pitches took a back seat to conversations and presentations about how students use computers. One video showed a 10-year-old boy talking about creating podcasts with a MacBook.

The group met with a local participant in Apple’s “distinguished educator” program, Ted Lai, who talked about podcasting in schools. Then, in a room called the Jim Henson Studio, they learned to create podcasts using iMovie software. Soon, Mr. Mello was convinced.

“We went there with our eyes open but hesitant. What could be so compelling as to get us to move off our base? And they did it,” Mr. Mello said. What swayed him, he said, were the presentations but also the company’s bright new monitors: “We were looking at each other thinking, ‘Wow. I can’t believe these are available at this price point.’ ”

Since then the district has switched to Apple, giving 350 laptops to teachers in 2010 and, this fall, 450 iPads and computers to high school students. The price: $637,000.

Mr. Mello was joined on the trip by two principals, two assistant superintendents and a teacher. Apple paid for meals and a stay at the Inn at Saratoga, near the Apple campus, where rates run $189 for a single room that looks onto a tranquil creek. Airfare was not included. And the group did not let Apple pick up the drink tab at the hotel, Mr. Mello said, noting: “As a school district, we’re conscious of that sort of thing.”

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a nonprofit watchdog group, said he did not believe the educators were violating state law. But he said the ethical issue seemed to be a gray area for public officials. “It’s acceptable business ethics,” he said. “It’s not good public ethics.”

For his part, Mr. Mello said he did not think the Apple perks had influenced him. But he said he believed that Apple, by inviting his district, which is relatively wealthy, was seeking to influence other Michigan schools. In fact, he said he was told as much by a senior sales executive during dinner at a Silicon Valley Latin American restaurant.

The executive even offered to throw in about $20,000 of wireless equipment, but the district declined because it already had other plans, Mr. Mello said.

Mr. Robinson and other watchdogs said state ethics rules were not uniform and varied widely. For instance, school officials in Nebraska, several of whom have visited Apple this year, are prohibited from accepting meals and hotels only if they agree to buy products in exchange, an overt quid pro quo that no one is suggesting is taking place.

In all, about 30 states have laws restricting gifts to state officials, laws that might invite scrutiny of Apple’s generosity, said Karen Hobert Flynn, vice president of state operations for Common Cause.

In Microsoft’s case, the company covers airfare, hotels and meals for participants in its events for teachers. It also invites administrators and school technology staff to regional meetings that aim to help them solve technical issues. Because those meetings include people who can be involved in purchasing computers and other gear, Microsoft does not pay for travel or hotels.

And in the case of both the teacher meetings and the technical briefings, Microsoft requires that attendees bring a letter certifying that if they accept meals or any other perks, they will not be violating local, state or federal ethics laws, according to Kevin Hartley, associate general counsel at the company.

There is sensitivity about these issues on the educators’ side as well. In September, a group of state officials and educators in Idaho canceled a trip to Microsoft because they worried it might appear as if the trip had unfairly influenced any eventual purchase of Microsoft products.

Mr. Tryggestad from Little Falls said that Apple did not push him to take anything that would violate state law, and that he did not think he or anyone in the district had done so.

When he went on his first visit to Apple in 2010, Mr. Tryggestad was joined by about a dozen other Minnesota superintendents. On his second visit this February, the group spent an afternoon at Stanford University talking to students and faculty who were experimenting with educational uses of technology.

In March, the district technology director visited Apple in a group that included his counterparts from schools in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. Less than a month later, the Little Falls school board approved the big iPad purchase.

At the time the district was curious to see how students’ test scores would be affected by the use of the new devices, but the test results from one school’s pilot project last year would not be available for months. And the district decided not to wait, Mr. Tryggestad said, given the enthusiasm for the device among students and teachers.

Mr. Tryggestad said he believed Apple invited him to its campus (and also to larger education meetings in Dallas and Chicago) because he had some influence. He sits on the board of the Minnesota Rural Education Association, a lobbying group, and is on a state advisory committee for online learning.

“Maybe they looked at me as being a conduit,” he said.

 

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.

    Silicon Valley Wows Educators, and Woos Them, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educators-with-trips-to-silicon-valley.html

College Radio Heads: Off the Dial

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By KYLE SPENCER

INSIDE a broadcast booth, at the radio station of the State University of New York Fredonia, Jud Heussler was presiding over his hourlong comedy show “The Morning Inferno.”

In a barreling voice, he announced that he would soon be throwing a few things up on the show’s Facebook page: a photo of a drunken moose he had uncovered online; a YouTube clip used for his segment “The Yoga Minute,” in which he and his co-host hyperventilate giddily along to the words of an earnest yoga instructor; and a video clip of the comedian Donald Glover, who was to perform on campus that night.

“Call, text, Facebook, whatever you want,” Mr. Heussler shouted to his listeners as he logged onto Facebook to check out who was posting on the show’s wall. Meanwhile, he sipped apple juice and fiddled with knobs on the audio board, plotting one of the day’s big activities: the videotaping of a campus groundbreaking. Who would shoot it? Someone who knew how to operate the station’s beloved Flip camera — flipping, as it’s called.

If none of this sounds like classic college radio, it’s not. Fredonia, a campus of 5,700 about an hour southwest of Buffalo, has two stations. And WDVL, the more popular, is so far removed from traditional radio it can’t even be found on the FM dial. Instead, that station streams on the Internet, which means tousled-haired disc jockeys in faded band T’s are constantly encouraging listeners to check out a rolling supply of podcasts, YouTube clips, photos and campus news on the station’s Web site.

Mr. Heussler, a senior majoring in audio-radio production, is general manager of both stations. He pointed boastfully at a printout of the station’s latest stats. “You could argue that WDVL has a bigger impact beyond the campus than we do on it,” he said. The station has about 350 online listeners a day; 40 percent of them live almost 300 miles away in the New York City area, while a mere 4 percent are on or near campus. Other log-in clusters? Los Angeles and the Czech Republic. “People listen from everywhere,” he said.

Fredonia’s radio station, with its tattered band posters and fading stickers, rickety desks and swivel chairs, and the occasional forlorn turntable or microphone jack, is plush by college standards. There is a mustard-colored couch from the 1960s in the lounge and an oversize banner of the call letters in red and black draped over an office divide. And nostalgically, a large closet houses thousands of dusty vinyls and CDs.

Most of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System’s 700 college members now stream on the Internet along with, or instead of, their broadcasting efforts. The Web’s freedom from Federal Communications Commission regulations is not the point. At stations like Fredonia’s, the goal is to transform themselves into the multimedia platforms they believe students with unprecedented tech appetites actually want, and it is changing the ethos, content and vibe of collegiate stations.

“No one brings a radio to their dorm today,” says Sean Owczarek, a recent Yale graduate who helped remake WYBCX, the university’s online-only station, during his time as general manager there.

Instead, students arrive on campus armed with smartphones, iPods and tablets on which they can listen to music services like Pandora, an Internet station that uses an algorithm to determine what songs to play. And now that Facebook has teamed with peer-to-peer applications like Spotify, users can share music right there on the site. ITunes carries some 225 college stations.

In this crowd, luring listeners, and keeping them entertained, is a matter of survival.

A dispiriting number of college administrators, unclear on the need for radio stations at all, are selling their coveted space on the AM-FM dial. In the last two years 14 stations have been sold or have pending sales, according to College Broadcasters Inc., an industry association.

Despite vociferous protest, Vanderbilt University in June sold the broadcast license to its indie station WRVU, a Nashville institution that promoted its music as the kind “you can’t hear anywhere else.” The sale price: $3.35 million. Brown’s BSR lost its FM spot this summer, too. And after multiple attempts to scuttle the deal, Rice University recently sold its license for KTRU, which played everything from Philip Glass to shoegaze, a British rock subgenre characterized by noisy guitars and motionless musicians on stage. All three stations are now streaming online. (WRVU and KTRU can also be found on HD Radio, for hybrid digital, which requires special receivers.)

To improve morale, Rob Quicke, a communications professor and general manager of the station at William Paterson University, in Wayne, N.J., organized a College Radio Day on Oct. 11. It was a call to unity in which 365 stations showcased their best work and played a segment by Professor Quicke on the value of college radio.

Station managers, sounding more business than boho, increasingly meet to strategize ways to stay relevant. “One of the big things we do is monthly conference calls with our board of directors where we brainstorm the future of our station,” says David DyTang, a policy analysis and management major and general manager of Cornell’s rock station, WVBR. “How do we reach out to students? How do we access them through modern media?” In one way, the students are creating an app to access the station’s Web site from a smartphone.

Three years ago, Fordham started up the Alternate Side as an edgier, visually stimulating option to its FM-based station, WFUV. The Alternate Side streams 24/7 on the Internet, a few hours a day on the FM dial, and on HD Radio. Student technicians videotape and edit live jam sessions that are e-mailed to listeners in a weekly newsletter and posted on the station’s page. “We call ourselves a radio station,” says John O. Platt,WFUV’s communications director. “But we’re really a multimedia content provider.”

Students at Yale’s WYBCX refer to their station as a “global entity.”

In response to lost listenership in 2007, students voluntarily transformed their free-format AM station into an Internet-only outfit with a highbrow mix of pop-electronica and contemporary classical. While WYBCX is like many stations in that it offers live college sports, its disc jockeys would never be satisfied streaming for just a dorm buddy. “All our shows are designed for audiences beyond Yale,” says the general manager, Carl Chen, a junior sociology major who is as comfortable discussing an 11-member hip-hop collective from Los Angeles as the “media model” the station ought to be pursuing to compete for listeners. The plan is to develop niche followings with eclectic interview shows like “The Art World Demystified,” “A Glimpse of Islam” and “fsck,” on the tech world.

Once upon a time, it was a hyper-local focus that constituted the beauty of the often unpolished, old-school college radio show. Disc jockeys shouted out to roommates cramming at 3 a.m. for calculus II exams, played cranky ballads to ex-boyfriends, and introduced new, underground bands. For those who recall stations as carefree places where a kid who was into music could play some tunes, even ones no one was likely to enjoy, this global-minded, strategic maneuvering is unsettling.

“College radio has traditionally been rooted in a community, a place and a time,” says Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit group that has been involved in the fight to preserve college radio. “It’s live and it’s local. There is a tremendous romance to that. Without it, college radio stations risk losing their uniqueness.”

DePaul University’s Internet-only station garners listeners from as far away as Tokyo, and when a marketing class was asked to evaluate what the station could do to improve, there was overwhelming consensus: focus more on what’s happening here, on the Chicago campus.

“We were trying to be a global radio station,” says Scott Vyverman, faculty manager for the station. “And we were missing that connection at home.”

To rectify this, the station began broadcasting campus sports and beefed up its local news coverage.

Even at free-format stations like Drexel University’s WKDU, which streams online but still maintains a strong local presence on the FM dial, students are being forced to confront issues concerning the station’s distinctiveness. In free-format programming, D.J.’s are invited to produce a show on just about any topic or musical genre they please. It’s the kind of station that has captured the romantic imagination, but in fact many now utilize formal playlists, some of them automated.

WKDU has long positioned itself as West Philadelphia’s answer to corporate music. Playing Top 40 tunes is not allowed. Jake Cooley, a junior and the station manager, chuckles when he recalls the time, a few years back, when a D.J. propped a vacuum cleaner up to his microphone and let it roar to mimic the noisy dissonance of a black metal drone band. It was part musical experience, part D.J. bravado. Would Mr. Cooley sanction such a performance today? “Probably not,” he says almost apologetically. “It’s a fine line.”

Larry L. Epstein, faculty adviser to WKDU, has watched the transition up close. “These college stations are still social environments,” says Mr. Epstein, who is also an executive board member of Cornell’s WVBR. But students tend to be more deliberate about their time at them and more demanding of one another. While some of this has to do with the changing work ethos on American campuses, he says, it also has to do with the pressure stations are under. “Their programming has to be relevant to their core audience,” he says. “The days of college stations that only appeal to the students who work there has come to an end.”

Mr. Epstein is direct. “I tell them: You don’t want to end up another Vanderbilt.”

It wasn’t always like this. As mainstream radio in the 1980s and 1990s became more focused on profits, and hence more risk averse, college radio became one of the rare broadcast venues where new sounds could be introduced, according to Susan Smulyan, author of “Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting.” “College radio became a hideout,” she says.

And it relished the role. In the 1980s college radio catapulted the post-punk pop of R.E.M. into the mainstream, and is credited with discovering and promoting the 1990s grunge bands Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. In the early 2000s, it was college radio that helped ignite a garage band revival with the White Stripes. Even Coldplay was lifted up through the ranks of college radio.

David Hargis, a former student disc jockey at Princeton’s WPRB, says the power of these stations has been diluted because music blogs like Pitchfork and social networking sites, which he calls “word of mouth on steroids,” are offering those same opportunities to discover new music. “There are too many other ways to get what college radio gives you,” says Mr. Hargis, who was a paid program coordinator for KUSF, the University of San Francisco’s student station, which now is found only streaming on the Internet.

Mr. Vyverman, the faculty manager at Radio DePaul, says college radio can etch out a new role, but online so young listeners can do what they have grown accustomed to doing: participating. “College students don’t want: You listen to what we tell you,” he says. “They want two-way communication. They want to feel that their voice is being heard.”

A VISITOR recently drop­ped by and heard a lively conversation in the Fredonia station’s lounge on what live radio stations can offer students that automated Internet radio stations can’t.

Izzy Jay, a senior and program director for Fredonia’s FM-dial station, paced back and forth, nibbling on chips and offering her thoughts on how much a disc jockey really adds to a listener’s experience. “I listen to radio to hear new music,” she argued. “I don’t need the disc jockey to draw me in.”

But Rob Neves, program director for the campus’s Internet station, leaned against an office divider in a cobalt-blue “I Love Radio” T-shirt and politely but vehemently disagreed.

“Music is what brings people to the radio,” he retorted. “Personalities are what keep them coming back.”

Mr. Neves said later, “It’s an ongoing debate between certain people — what drives people to come and why iPods and Pandora are different.”

WDVL station heads are confident they can put up a valiant fight against robotic technologies — not by becoming riskier because they’re F.C.C. free, but by producing shows that promote real-time connections. “Lover Call,” a late-night talk show, encourages listeners to instant-message their romantic woes, as one lovelorn listener did repeatedly last year. “Week after week, we got updates,” Mr. Heussler said, describing a suspense-packed virtual soap opera.

Last year, “Bonjour Cupcake” featured soupy guitar bands that sang about foiled love affairs. Meanwhile, listeners swapped cupcake recipes in a live chat room. “Yup, that’s basically what they did.” Mr. Heussler said, affecting a tone that suggested even he was puzzled by that show’s success.

Mr. Heussler believes another way to foster these connections is to help listeners find information on artists they want to learn more about. To illustrate this, he told the story of how two years ago, WDVL conducted a phone interview with an indie electro-pop band from Colorado called 3OH!3. The podcast included a recording of “Don’t Trust Me,” the band’s catchy, tongue-in-cheek tune about the perils of hooking up. When that song shot to No. 1 on the music charts, fans from around the world, seeking news about the band, found the Fredonia site.

To old radio heads, what Mr. Heussler was describing wasn’t really introducing someone to something new. You find what you’re looking for; you don’t find what you’re not looking for. But he is not the type to get bogged down in what used to be.

When asked which station was WDVL’s biggest competitor, Mr. Heussler, taking a rare break in the foam-padded interview room, shrugged. “Who are we competing with? We’re competing with past generations.”
 

Kyle Spencer is a freelance writer based in New York City.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 5, 2011

A picture caption on Page 22 this weekend with an article about college radio on the Internet misidentifies a Fordham student shown videotaping a band for the university’s station, WFUV. She is Erica Talbott, not Clair Donovan.

    College Radio Heads: Off the Dial, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/college-radio-heads-off-the-dial.html

WikiLeaks Founder

Can Be Extradited to Sweden in Sex Abuse Case

November 2, 2011
The New York Times
By RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — A London court ruled on Wednesday that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, can be extradited to Sweden for questioning over allegations of sexual abuse there last year.

The decision was the latest chapter in a months-long legal battle that has seen Mr. Assange under house arrest and WikiLeaks temporarily shuttered. In their ruling, two British appeals judges said a European Arrest Warrant seeking Mr. Assange’s extradition could not “be said to be disproportionate” since it related to “serious sexual offenses,” which Mr. Assange has denied.

A British judge had previously ruled that Mr. Assange should return to Sweden to face allegations of sexual molestation, unlawful coercion and rape made by two WikiLeaks volunteers in Stockholm in August 2010. Wednesday’s ruling came after an appeal by Mr. Assange, who has engaged a series of high-profile lawyers to fight the extradition warrant.

His lawyers said the ruling gave Mr. Assange 14 days to decide whether to seek to appeal to Britain’s highest court and that his decision would be the subject of a further court hearing.

WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of classified United States military documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and classified State Department diplomatic cables dominated the front pages of newspapers across the world, including The New York Times, last year. Mr. Assange placed himself at the forefront of those releases, he told reporters, as a means of seeking publicity for documents he hoped would reshape the very nature of government.

But since Mr. Assange was briefly jailed last December, before being released on bail and placed under house arrest at the country mansion of a wealthy friend in eastern England, WikiLeaks has foundered. He told a press conference in London last month that it would cease its publishing activities because it lacked money following a blockade on donations to WikiLeaks by credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and the payments services Western Union and PayPal.

In the midst of Mr. Assange’s legal battles, the organization was severely weakened by a spate of defections from its core of specialist computer-programmer volunteers, insiders have said. Many, tired of what they described as Mr. Assange’s eccentricity and imperiousness, have formed their own document leaking sites.

As his legal battles spanned half a dozen court appearances, across three courthouses, Mr. Assange has given dozens of interviews with the rolling country estate as a backdrop. He has condemned Sweden’s strict sexual crimes laws, calling the country “the Saudi Arabia of feminism” and compared himself to the civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.

He has told friends that he refused to return to Stockholm to face questioning because he fears that the country is run by a small cabal of interconnected people who are aligned against him. He believes he is on trial, he has said, for an alleged affront to all Swedish women, and that court proceedings will thus be tainted.

The two women accusers said that consensual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual. Mr. Assange appeared for an initial interview with police in Sweden in 2010, but fled to London before further questioning could be completed, a court here was subsequently told. Swedish prosecutors decided to issue an Interpol red notice and a European Arrest Warrant to compel him to return.

Protesters, and celebrity supporters like the socialites Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger, and the journalist John Pilger, have often conflated the case with a battle for free speech. Mr. Assange himself has hinted darkly that government forces might be behind the allegations of sexual wrongdoing as a means of silencing him.

    WikiLeaks Founder Can Be Extradited to Sweden in Sex Abuse Case, NYT, 2.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/world/europe/wikileaks-founder-faces-extradition-hearing-in-london.html