Observations Along the Road

Roadkill Along the Information Superhighway

The Digital Disenfranchised

Written By: cahwyguy - Thu Apr 25, 2013 @ 12:32 pm PDT
Posted in news-chum, rant , , , , , , | No Comments »

userpic=verizonA number of articles I’ve read in the last week have highlighted an increasing digital divide in our society. This subject and these articles have been running around my head all week, so while I eat lunch I’d like to share them with you and get your thoughts.

What triggered the subject was Harry Shearer’s Le Show. Its host station, KCRW 89.9 FM in Santa Monica, abruptly yanked the show off the airwaves and moved it to be Internet-only. KCRW believes that growth is going to be on the Internet side, and those that listen to the show will find it there. Now a number of broadcasters have done this in the past — think Adam Corolla or Tom Leykis –but arguably the audiences for those shows is very different than the NPR/Public Radio audience. I think Shearer captured my concern very well:

People are sawing the legs out from under the idea of radio as we speak. Television, when it came to prominence, was supposed to kill radio outright, and it didn’t. The question is: Will online audio kill radio broadcasting? I listen to about 80 percent of my audio content online, and I look at a lot of my video content online, so I’m not a Luddite in any sense of the word. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in radio broadcasting.

A lot of people driving in their cars don’t have the facility or haven’t mastered yet getting online audio into their car’s audio system. A lot of poorer people don’t have the wherewithal for broadband everywhere that they might want to hear something, and older people don’t want to mess with that stuff. Radio better be around, because in any kind of emergency, my experience has been the first thing that goes down is the electric grid, and the second thing that goes down is the telephone grid. And if you don’t have a portable battery-powered radio, you are seriously out of luck. People who are trying to dismantle this system are way in front of themselves, and may not be doing the public a service.

I, too, have seen a growing number of articles predicting the demise of terrestrial radio. NetFlix is predicting the death of the TV channel. The problem is that the movement to Internet  based approaches for TV and Radio are not available to all — due to either the financial or intellectual cost of the new technology. Do we have the right to disenfranchise these people?

But the problem is not just radio. Look at music in general. iTunes is turning 10, and there are numerous articles on the changes iTunes has brought. One article notes the following:

The iTunes store dominated by downloads “is on its last gasp,” says Bob Lefsetz, a former music industry lawyer and blogger at the Lefsetz Letter. “YouTube is where most young people listen to music now.” (More than 1 billion people visit the site each month.)

“When iTunes turns 15 years old, we won’t be talking about downloads, because Apple won’t be selling them,” he says.

Here’s another quote from the same article:

Ten years ago, Apple’s most popular iPod was the largest-capacity model with 80 gigabytes of storage. Now the top seller is the 32 GB iPod Touch starting at $299. The entry-level iPhone comes with 16 GB of storage.

“If downloads were still important, we’d all need more storage,” Lefsetz says. “Apple knows which direction this is going.”

Yet again we are creating a community of digital disenfranchised.  Not everyone wants to stream media — they may not know how to do it; they may not be in a location that permits it; they may not have the signal to do it; they may not be able to afford the cost of doing it. Yet the assumption seems to be that it is something the public wants. What this is really doing is hurting the public: no longer can you own a personal copy of your music you can listen to at any time in any place. You become tethered to the (for profit) streaming service, who can dictate if you can listen to your music and where and when. Is this the right direction for society?

We all know technology is everywhere, and in increasing cases, it is not serving to help but to hurt. What used to be broadcast is now exclusively on the web, eliminating as a potential audience those lacking the financial or technological wherewithal to find it. Others are starting to embrace a return to old media.   We need to make sure that in our rush to embrace the latest and greatest technology, we don’t cut off those not quite as nimble.

Disclaimer: Even though I know how to listen to podcasts, I still like the radio sometimes. I like to physically own my music (in fact, I’m looking to buy some LP storage crates and a media center), even as I have over 31,000 songs on my iPod (160GB). Further, I do not have a smartphone. I feel cut-off everytime I see a QR scan-this discount code.

Music: Destry Rides Again (1959 Original Broadway Cast): “Overture” [recorded from LP to MP3 using Roxio Easy Media Creator, loaded into iTunes, currently playing on my iPod]

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Impacts of Technology: Movies, Radio, Lectures, and Powerstrips

Written By: cahwyguy - Fri Feb 15, 2013 @ 11:22 am PDT
Posted in news-chum, security , , , , | 2 Comments »

userpic=frebergEarlier this week, I wrote about the negative impacts of the Internet on society. Today’s news chum deals with a similar subject: the impacts of the Internet and technologies on industry and academia:

 

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Friday Miscellany: Entertainment News, History News, and udder stuff.

Written By: cahwyguy - Fri Jun 08, 2012 @ 11:30 am PDT
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It’s Friday at lunchtime, and you know what that means — time to clear out the bookmarked links…

P.S.: Two good net comics today. College-bound and college-attending folks (such as my daughter) should appreciate today’s XKCD on college laundry  (I remember those days). Secondly, those into art and art history would appreciate today’s Dork Tower.

Music: Nunsensations (Off-Broadway Cast): Sin City Sue

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Living on Planet Money

Written By: cahwyguy - Tue Aug 09, 2011 @ 8:25 pm PDT
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OK, I admit it. I’ve become addicted to Planet Money on NPR, and it has started to teach me about economics.

I was thinking about this while reading the news over dinner. For example, could we make it so that what the government invested in were purely public goods? You know, like lighthouses. In particular, I’m thinking about using the government to invest in things that provide public services and public benefits: highways, transit, science, research. Things that bring long term benefits to the country but don’t make sense for private enterprise. Further, let’s get the government out of those areas where private enterprise is doing just fine. All those tax benefits for private companies: why is the government supporting them? If we’re going to give money to industries, let it be industries that will ultimately improve the economic growth of this country in the long term. In other words: let’s invest in education, science, and energy research. Look at the economic engine that DARPA’s investment in the Internet proved to be?

I was also thinking about health insurance. Planet Money has had some good pieces on this, pointing out that one of our biggest problems today is employer-funded health insurance. It came about in the 1940s when employers could not raise wages, so they competed by adding perks. But employer-funded health insurance makes us not realize the cost of our health services. They like to use the thought experiment of employer-provided food insurance. You could go to approved grocers and buy all the food you want for a $40 co-pay. Would you make good economic decisions? Would you buy the expensive imported beer or the Budweiser? But by now, this form of health insurance is so tied up in our benefits package, it is suicide to propose getting rid of it. Still, I was trying to think what the alternative might be? Giving larger salaries and letting employee’s pick their plans and pay 100% of the cost? Would people pick the insurance companies that got the best deals on costs and negotiated the rates the best?

Planet Money has gotten me thinking about the interconnectedness of our economic actions. It has also made me realize that most of our elected officials don’t understand economics. I mentioned this last night: if you’re having financial trouble at home, you don’t just cut expenses: you work to bring in more income, and you make sure that everyone in the family is equally sacrificing and giving their fair share. We’re not doing that. We’re like the family with the spare bedroom and the rich uncle loafing on the couch, who we feed and cloth but doesn’t contribute to the house. We need to make the rich uncle contribute if he’s going to live in the house, and we need to rent out Wyoming.

In past economic downturns, there have been two traditional solutions. A good war and war spending. That won’t work here: we can’t afford the deficit war spending. The only other solution has been a government funding stimulus — not in the forms of checks to families, which are never large enough, or tax cuts to families, which work to pennies in the scheme of things, but in the forms of government programs that create jobs. We can’t do deficit spending to create these, so we need to cut our spending that is not creating jobs (again, some of those subsidies to profitable companies come to mind, as well as programs we can privatize), and start spending on research and education that enables people to work, and to work innovating the next idea that will make this country great.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I strongly recommend people listen to the Planet Money Podcast.

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Things That Are Disappearing

Written By: cahwyguy - Thu Jun 10, 2010 @ 11:59 am PDT
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Today’s news chum brings news of three items that are soon-to-be gone:

  • If you’ve ever driven by the corner of Sherman Way and Tampa in Reseda, you’ve seen Lorenzen Mortuary across the street from the Jewish Home. According to the Daily News, they are going to have to relocate. The mortuary at 19300 Sherman Way was founded in 1952 by Virginia and Donald Lorenzen (who later served on the Los Angeles City Council). Virginia died in January at age 92; in early 2009, the Los Angeles County Office of the Public Guardian, serving as her trustee and conservator, received court approval to sell her real estate holdings to pay for her care and expenses. They were sold to Robert Hirsch, chairman of the board of the Jewish Home, who then donated the land. The Home plans to build Senior Housing, and so the mortuary has to move.

  • You might just have driven by that corner in a Chevy. If you didn’t, someone else did. However, if GM has its way, you won’t be able to say that: GM wants people to stop using the term “Chevy” and go back to the full name, “Chevrolet”. Some dealers even have a “Chevy Jar”, just like a curse jar. I’ve seen responses to this that say they don’t think an American car should have a French name. This is something I think GM will have trouble with—it’s like Anheiser-Busch trying to get folks not to call their swill “Bud”. (hmmm, interesting parallel there: Quality automobile are to Chevys as quality beer is to Bud). In other car news, Cadillac has redesigned their logo again.
  • And while in that car, you might have been listening to the radio. Thirty years ago, you might have been turned to KMET listening to Dr. Demento (I know I did in high school). Soon, you won’t be able to do that, at least on the radio. Dr. D is leaving the airwaves after 40 years. He’ll still be streaming a 1 hour show on the Internet. In many ways, though, the nature of novelty records has drastically changed. Nowaday, who makes audio recordings—they are all You-Tube videos.

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Writing About Not Writing About Something

Written By: cahwyguy - Sun Jan 03, 2010 @ 3:56 pm PDT
Posted in security, Transferred-From-LJ , , | Comments Off

It’s a quiet Sunday — the calm before I return to work tomorrow. I’ve been trying to think about what to write about.

I thought about writing about “Wait, Wait – The NPR News quiz”, which has been the subject of an interesting article on CNN and even provided a news quiz about 2009 to the LA Times. But I couldn’t connect that to anything.

I thought about writing about theatre, always a good subject, triggered by a post by Charles McNulty, the LA Times Theatre Critic, about why “Nine” didn’t work on the big screen. It’s an interesting analysis, and exposes well the difference between stage and screen. But again, nothing good to tie it to.

I thought about writing about computer security, triggered by an article in the NY Times about how Cybersecurity is the hot job. The problem, of course, is they are looking for people that know how to stop attackers, not people who know how to engineer less complex and more secure systems.

But in the end, none of these stories made we want to devote a full entry to them. So I decided not to write about them. I hope I succeeded.

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News Chum: Dr. Demento Returns, Incandescent Light Bulbs, Vanity License Plates

Written By: cahwyguy - Mon Jul 06, 2009 @ 11:39 am PDT
Posted in news-chum, Transferred-From-LJ , , , | Comments Off

Well, the feeding frenzy resulting from Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin has calmed down a bit, and a few interesting pieces of lunchtime news chum have surfaced:

  • From the “Pico and Sepulveda” Department: Gary Lycan (who has an excellent radio column in the OC Register) is reporting that Dr. Demento is returning to the airwaves as part of a July 10 tribute to KMET — The Mighty Met — on KSWD 100.3 FM (there was also a July 4 tribute on KLOS 95.5). The good Dr. will be on at 7pm “playing all the songs that became famous on my show at KMET like ‘Fish Heads’, ‘Another One Rides the Bus’, and ‘Pico and Sepulveda.” No word yet whether he’ll be followed by “Flo and Eddie”.

    The Mighty Met was a radio staple during my high school and early college days. Although I wasn’t into the music they played at the time, I did listen regularly to Dr. Demento and I still remember Flo and Eddie to this day (explanation: right after Dr. D was the Flo and Eddie By The Fireside show). When they became “The Wave” and went to lukewarm jazz, Los Angeles lost one of its best music stations.

    (An interesting side note in the article: Merrill Shindler, restaurant critic, is returning to KABC with a new “Feed Your Face” program, 4-7 p.m. Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays.)

  • From the “A Bright Idea Department: The NY Times has an interesting article on a new breed of incandescent light bulbs — bulbs that have been engineered to be significantly more energy efficient and to meet new efficiency requirements. This is good news for those of us with dimmer switches (CFLs don’t work well with dimmers), as well as those sensitive to the CFL “flicker”.
  • From the “Blue Plate Special” Department: The SF Chronicle has an interesting article about the Golden Gate Special Interest Plates, and how they might not be getting enough subscribers to be made. In general, sales of vanity plates dropped about 20% in 2008 from the year before. But vanity plates are still popular, with the “Kids” plate and the “Whale Tale” plate taking the 1st and 2nd sales position. I have a kids plate, in order to get the ♥ symbol, permitting me to say ♥CAHWYS. Alas, the UCLA plate is the least popular.

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Signs of the Times

Written By: cahwyguy - Wed Apr 29, 2009 @ 1:11 pm PDT
Posted in news-chum, Transferred-From-LJ , , , | Comments Off

A late lunch today–I’ve been busy. A few quickies (no pun intended) that, in my opinion, reflect the times very well:

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