by Bill Hayes
In Lookout Safeguards Smartphones, but Do Consumers Care?, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on Lookout, the maker of security apps for smart phones.
Lookout’s apps are free, but premium features such as the ability to remotely lock and erase stolen phones cost $2.99 a month. Hering says less than 10 percent of users pay, but that’s “a big number.” Lookout’s threat-detection features are almost entirely automated. Algorithms monitor data about phone usage across its network of apps. When computers spot an anomaly they alert an engineer, who adds the threatening app or website to a blacklist. The software automatically blocks traffic from those sources. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Russia’s Great Red Hope, Newsweek asks whether chess champion Gary Kasparov, who Putin defeated in the presidential election, has any hope of changing Russia into a democracy.
“You have no idea how exhausting it is,” Kasparov admits.
So I ask him again why he doesn’t just leave the country — now that his daughter is growing up in New York and even his name recognition has moved abroad.
“Oh, I am still recognized here,” he responds. “But it does feel different abroad. I feel it as soon as I leave the country. There is no danger. And I feel a change in the level of respect. I am received by high-placed officials, including heads of state. Whereas here even the lowest-level bureaucrat shuts his door in my face.”
“The easiest thing to do would be to step aside, especially since the process of change has already been set in motion and I can’t influence it all that much, objectively speaking. But I think I should do what I can to make a difference. And also, I don’t mean to be pompous, but I want to see the dawn of freedom.” [more]
by Bill Hayes
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley, writes a New York Times Book Review essay, titled When a Dictionary Could Outrage, on the reception of the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
At 2,700 pages and almost 14 pounds, Webster’s Third was a literally weighty work, the product of over 700 editor-years of effort, the publisher boasted. But it was widely denounced for what critics viewed as a lax admissions policy: it opened its columns to parvenus like “litterbug” and “wise up,” declined to condemn “ain’t,” and illustrated its definitions with quotations from down-market sources like Ethel Merman and Betty Grable. That was reason enough for The Times to charge that Merriam had “surrendered to the permissive school” and that the dictionary’s “say as you go” approach would surely accelerate the deterioration already apparent in the language. In The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote that the editors had “made a sop of the solid structure of English,” and in an Atlantic article called “Sabotage in Springfield,” Wilson Follett called the Third a “fighting document” that was “out to destroy . . . every obstinate vestige of linguistic punctilio, every surviving influence that makes for the upholding of standards.” (The dereliction that most appalled Follett was the Third’s refusal to reject “that darling of the advanced libertarians,” the use of “like” as a conjunction.)
The uproar spilled over beyond the culture pages. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Behind Europe’s Workday Club Craze, Bloomberg Businessweek looks at midday clubbing in Europe, which may be coming to a city near you.
“Lunch Beat” events … have surged in popularity across Sweden. In the past few months, this daytime, hour-long nightclub has spread to a dozen cities in the rest of Europe, including Vienna, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Manchester. The originators of Lunch Beat encourage those who hear about it online to launch their own franchises, and there are plans to export it to Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.
Setting up a Lunch Beat franchise in a new city is simple, according to Lunch Beat’s Stockholm organizer, Daniel Odelstad. All producers need to do is find a large space that’s unused in the middle of the day, set up a sound system, invite people, charge a nominal fee to cover costs …. [more]
by David De La Torre
In The not-for-profit sector, The Economist reports on the losses suffered by owners of bank stocks.
Between 2007 and the end of last year shareholders in banks globally have lost almost 10% of their investment each year, according to the Boston Consulting Group…. Behind this international average lie some truly horrible losses. Investors who stuck it out in Dutch banks saw the value of their holdings fall by almost 28% a year. Holders of French, German and Swiss banks suffered average annual losses of close to 20%. Those in American and British banks lost 14% and 16% a year respectively. “The little secret to doing well…has been ‘just don’t hold banks’,” says Jacob de Tusch-Lec, a fund manager at Artemis.
A fall in the price of an asset is usually a good signal to consider buying it. But those investors who thought that they had timed the bottom of the market have been proved wrong again and again. [more]
by Shruti Modi
More on this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners: The Associated Press won for its reporting on the NYPD’s intelligence operations. In Document shows NYPD eyed Shiites based on religion, the AP discovered that the NYPD targeted Shiites as a way of finding signs of Iranian terrorists.
The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”
The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Hotels Are Hiring as Americans Hit the Road, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on the upswing in business at hotels.
Hotels are hiring. That simple statement is giving hope to many long-unemployed or underemployed Americans who see hotel jobs as a pathway back to full-time work — low-paying, long-hours work, but a job nonetheless.
Hotels and motels are getting busier as Americans feel a little more secure economically and are taking vacations. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In The Family Hour: An Oral History of the Sopranos for Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner gets an inside look at what the cast and crew have to say about the famous television show.
During the six seasons it was on the air, The Sopranos knocked over Emmys like so many bowling pins (112 nominations and 21 wins), and — as many testify here — changed the game. It was nominated for outstanding drama series throughout its entire run, and in 2004 it won, a first for cable television. It raised the bar not just for cable and network TV but for the movies as well. Allen Coulter, one of the show’s directors, was given his first feature film, Hollywoodland — based on Hollywood Kryptonite, a book I co-authored with Nancy Schoenberger — as a result of his work on The Sopranos. Other Sopranos alumni graduated to award-winning cable shows: executive producer Matthew Weiner created Mad Men, executive producer Terence Winter brought Boardwalk Empire into being (starring Steve Buscemi, who played Tony’s hapless, jailbird cousin Tony Blundetto on The Sopranos), Tim Van Patten directed episodes ofBoardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, the writing team of Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess created Blue Bloods, and writer Todd A. Kessler was one of the creators of Damages.
In the five long years since the screen went black and The Sopranos went off the air, on June 10, 2007, there has grown up a kind of omertà around the show: few have been willing to talk about the experience, wanting to move on with their careers and their lives. But through the endless good graces of David Chase, who dreamed up The Sopranos from an idea he had about “a mobster in therapy,” we were able to speak with many of the show’s actors, producers, directors, and writers. What follows, then, is what it felt like to be part of this extraordinary cultural phenomenon. Perhaps Brad Grey, one of the show’s producers, said it best: “I’ll never have that much fun in television again.” [more]
May 18th, 2012 in
Arts |
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by David De La Torre
In Pay to stay at home, The Economist looks at Germany’s new child-care policy.
CRITICS call it a “hearth bonus” or “keep-your-kids-out-of-school money”. The government prefers Betreuungsgeld (“child-care benefit”). Few of its ideas are as contentious as a planned €150 ($199) monthly payment to parents who do not put their children into crèches. Angela Merkel, the Christian Democrat chancellor, defends this as “an essential part of our policy of freedom of choice.” But it seems to contradict much of what she stands for. [more]
by Bill Hayes
The New York Times’ Room for Debate lets various knowledgeable contributors discuss news events and other timely issues. One recent debate covered: Easing the Pain of Student Loans.
Nearly every student is taking out loans to go to college, and as prices soar, many are borrowing beyond their means. More than $1 trillion in student loans are outstanding. The average debt per borrower is $23,300. Meanwhile, many have no prospect of a well-paying job to help them pay off their debt.
What can be done to control the level of debt and protect young people from taking on an onerous financial burden? [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Food Groups for The New Yorker, Ben McGrath describes New York’s reading exams for children and how a few oddly worded questions have sparked a debate over the ambiguity of the reading passages in question.
An edited version of Pinkwater’s passage, we now know, was included in a test of comprehension in this year’s New York State reading exam, and students were asked if the animals in the story had eaten the pineapple in the end because they were (a) hungry, (b) excited, (c) annoyed, or (d) amused — by the fact that they had duped themselves into considering the possibility that a foodstuff could outrun a mammal, let alone self-locomote at all. [more]
May 18th, 2012 in
Education |
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by Bill Hayes
In Open-Source Software’s Sugar Daddy, Bloomberg Businessweek profiles Mark Shuttleworth, a billionaire whose company (Canonical) is trying to get more people to run open-source software.
Founded in 2004, Canonical makes Ubuntu, an operating system based on open-source Linux software. Shuttleworth’s lofty goal for Ubuntu is “to profoundly change the economics of software” and displace Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s OS X with a free product. Fundamental software, such as operating systems, should be “like oxygen, and then you pay for those services on top of it that you engage with,” he says. Canonical follows this model, giving away its wares and making money by charging for technical support, custom engineering work, online storage, and file syncing.
Ubuntu has, in fairly short time, become the favored operating system of geekdom. Many software developers have it on their laptops, and tech companies run it on their data center servers. Google (GOOG) is the highest-profile customer …. [more]
by David De La Torre
In The great realtor rip-off, The Economist examines why realtors still sell most houses in the United States.
Economists are baffled. The internet has squelched inefficient middlemen in other industries, from insurance brokers to travel agents. Why not American realtors? Although scores of discount brokers and for-sale-by-owner websites have sprouted up, traditional full-service realtors have somehow maintained their market share of 80% without reducing fees. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Apple, the Other Cult in Hollywood, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Apple does not pay for product placement in movies and TV shows, but its brand often appears.
Apple products … sometimes take a lead role as an object of devotion, as in a famous 2010 episode of Modern Family. Airing just two days before the first iPad hit stores, the episode centered around dad Phil Dunphy’s quest for the new device. The plotline was unusual in part because Modern Family executive producer Steve Levitan has on multiple occasions nixed eight-figure product placement deals that don’t feel true to the plot, according to a branding expert who asked not to be named…. [more]
by Damon Huss
As Facebook’s IPO opens on NASDAQ, the “elephant in the room” could be that the high valuations of social media indicate a bubble, not unlike the “dot com bubble” of the 1990s, which led so many investors to lose so much. Eric Randall at The Atlantic Wire asks “Can Spotify really be worth $4 billion?”
Spotify, unlike the billion dollar Instagram, at least already has a hefty revenue stream. Nevertheless, it’s currently losing money as it invests in its business. As we recalled after news of Pinterest’s valuation this morning, bubbles happen, according to The New York Times, when “mania causes the price of an asset to soar far above its intrinsic worth.” [more]
For a free classroom lesson, see “Tulipmania and Economic Bubbles” from Bill of Rights in Action (scroll down to the Spring 2011 issue).
