Federal regulators are about to open up more of the wireless spectrum for Wi-Fi use – but commentators disagree about who will benefit most. Google and other big companies? Consumers? Rural areas? Cities? Read a useful round-up here.
Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology
Quick Review: The Dumbest Generation
English professor Mark Bauerlein takes on the younger generations in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. I will summarize three of the main arguments from this 2008 book and offer some of my own thoughts.
1. To his credit, Bauerlein draws upon a lot of data. This primarily comes from large surveys conducted in the last ten years. It appears that a lot of the data comes to similar conclusions, increasing its validity.
2. One main argument: the new learning style of the younger generation, built around the Internet and browsing text rather than reading books, hasn’t led to improved educational or societal outcomes. While many people have praised these new skills or suggested that they are leading to a new kind of world, Bauerlein says it hasn’t improved much of anything.
3. Another main argument: having all of these options for information, primarily through the Internet but including social media and television, has not opened worlds for younger generations. Instead, younger people tend to use this information for more prosaic ends, like following pop culture or the latest doings of their friends. Just because all of this information is out there, it doesn’t mean they know what to do with it or how to use it.
4. A third argument: the older generation has failed the younger generations by not extolling the virtues of tradition and knowledge. Instead, the older generations have given in and let the younger generations dictate what they should learn and how they should be taught. Older members of society have run with anecdotal positive stories about the Internet (often based on elite, Ivy League or similar students) without considering the broad trends. With little involvement by adults, the younger generations have little interest in civic engagement or the world of big ideas. This books appears to be aimed at the older generations – of course, as Bauerlein points out, the odds of many younger people reading any book, are limited.
5. In what I think is a smart move, Bauerlein suggests early on that this is not just another jeremiad from an older adult against the younger members of society. The data he marshals in his support helps his case though the third main argument (point 4 above) seems a little less certain and more of an opinion. Another point in his claims that this is not a jeremiad: he places a lot of blame for the situation on the older generations that have let the younger generations do what they want.
6. I would have liked to have read more about how Bauerlein thinks these new changes in society, such as the Internet and technology, could be harnessed for better ends. Or is there something inherently bad about these tools – is the medium the message?
7. I am still processing these arguments on a personal level. On one hand, I have some similar questions to Bauerlein’s regarding my generation and technology. At the same time, I am a frequent user of these technologies. I think I am going to need some more time to figure it out.
Overall, this is a thought-provoking read with implications for the future of America.
The world of oil changes: severe driving, oil analysis, and stickers
I’ve read many times that newer cars don’t need oil changes every 3,000 miles. But in an article from the New York Times regarding oil changes and the optimal miles between changes, I learned some additional oil change information including what might be considered severe usage, companies that analyze oil, and how oil change businesses might change their stickers.
-Drivers with severe usage need to change their oil more frequently, roughly around 5,000 miles. And what is considered severe? The kind of driving that many people do: short trips under 10 miles.
The different types of driving are usually known as severe and mild (which is also sometimes called normal), Mr. Sutherland said, which seems counter-intuitive since most of us probably don’t think we drive in severe conditions. But we do.
The reason, he said, is that if you take a trip of less than 10 miles or so, the engine and the oil are not completely warmed up. And if the oil is still cool, he said, it cannot absorb the contaminants that come from internal combustion as efficiently.
-There are companies that analyze car oil for consumers and tell them what is in the oil and then what might be wrong with their car:
[Y]ou can send your engine oil out to be analyzed. Blackstone Laboratories in Fort Wayne, Ind., one of the best-known places for engine oil analysis, will send you a free kit.
You send back an oil sample and for $25, they’ll tell you all sorts of things about your car.
“We would compare what your oil looks like compared to the average Mazda5 of that year,” said Kristen Huff, a vice president at Blackstone. If there is a lot more lead in my oil than in a typical Mazda5, for example, it means I have a bearing problem, she said.
Her lab runs about 150 samples a day and a fair percentage of those are consumers looking to find out how often they need to change their oil, Ms. Huff said.
-Based on these changes in cars, companies like JiffyLube will soon begin using new stickers that leave the mileage between oil change decisions to consumers:
But Jiffy Lube, the largest quick oil change company in North America, is now under pressure to change its automatic 3,000-mile recommendation.
For about a year, the company has run a pilot program with some franchises across the country suggesting that instead of a blanket recommendation, mechanics tell customers what the manufacturer recommends under mild or severe driving conditions.
“By this time next year, every Jiffy Lube will do it,” said Rick Altizer, president of Jiffy Lube International. And the little sticker on your windshield will no longer simply state when the next oil change should occur, but, “I choose to change my oil” at a specific mileage.
“It’s so it’s not some arbitrary technician saying this,” Mr. Altizer said, but the consumer’s decision.
I wonder how many consumers would feel better/more secure if the sticker did say when they should get an oil change. That way, they wouldn’t have to make a decision about a machine they may not feel comfortable around.
Users spend more time on Facebook than Google’s sites
According to figures from August, web users in the United States now spend more time per day on Facebook than Google’s sites (which includes YouTube). This can’t be good news for Google – but it shows the power of Facebook:
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9% of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6%, people spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.
U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo Inc. sites, or 9.1% of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing. In July, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first time, according to comScore.
Facebook appears to be growing more and more popular. Google can’t figure out a way to introduce social connectivity throughout their sites – whatever happened to Google Wave?
An interesting social experiment: restrict social media access at a college for a week
Social media is ever-present on college campuses. It appears that some institutions are thinking about ways to encourage thinking about using social media – by restricting it:
Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook.
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.
“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”
Ah, equating life with no social media with the age of dinosaurs – this is quite funny (though probably accurate).
When I first saw this headline, I thought this school might be doing this to help students to use the time they might spend on social media in other ways. To discover the world outside of Facebook. Alas, the school has other aims:
Mr. Darr said his hope is that people…would take the week to reflect on outside-the-box ways to use social media—such as for entrepreneurship or political advocacy.
So the goal in restricting social media use is to help people think about social media use? And I was hoping for a social experiment where students might discover other virtuous things to do with their time…
What matters in a hybrid: financial value or something else?
A recent study compared hybrid models to their traditional counterpart models and found that the hybrids are not a very good value:
Everyone knows hybrids get better fuel economy and emit less CO2 than their conventional counterparts, but they also cost more because of the added technology. And that makes them a lousy value because you won’t recoup that added cost in fuel savings.
So say the car gurus at CarGurus.com, who repeat a common argument against hybrids but back it up with some stats. They examined the purchase price and operating costs of 45 popular hybrid models and discovered the average gas-electric automobiles costs 25 percent more to own and operate than its gasoline-only sibling.
This may help explain why hybrids still are only a small part of the market – just under 3% according to this study.
But for those who currently drive hybrids, is financial value the primary reason? While this seems to be key to the larger market, I would guess there are a lot of current hybrid drivers who drive them for other reasons like being (or perhaps appearing) green. If more people truly wanted to be green or were worried about pollution from cars as opposed to saving money, then they would probably purchase more hybrids.
Quick Review: The Facebook Effect
Facebook, which went online in early 2004, is now old enough to be the subject of retrospectives. There is a new movie about the company, The Social Network, coming out this fall. There is also a recent book, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick. I recently finished this book and have a few thoughts about the story of Facebook:
1. The idealism of Facebook comes throughout the story. Even from its early days, the founder Mark Zuckerberg was more interested connecting people than in just making money. This has driven many of the decisions made by the company and created friction between Zuckerberg and his coworkers as some wanted a greater emphasis on profits. At the end of the book, Kirkpatrick elicits some interesting thoughts from Zuckerberg regarding the differences between Google and Facebook. Zuckerberg describes Google as a passive company that tries to categorize the information that is already out there. In contrast, Facebook is a company that helps people express themselves and divulge information.
2. The growth in terms of number of users is remarkable. Kirkpatrick mentions several times seven or eight countries where 30% or more of the residents are on Facebook (not just 30% of Internet users).
3. The potential for profits comes from Facebook’s unique user database. With users voluntarily uploading information about themselves, advertisers can then target messages to particular groups. While most advertising is aimed at vague categories or misses its mark altogether, Facebook offers the opportunity to really reach certain segments.
4. While Facebook might have a unique mission, the story of its early history sounds similar to other tech companies. The founder has an idea that builds upon his previous work, he finds others to help him out, some of the key people drop out of college to focus on the company, and for years the company operates more like a frat house than a legitimate business.
5. Kirkpatrick recognizes that Facebook has had its issues and he points out when he disagrees with the company. However, several times he suggests that users ability to protest Facebook’s actions (like when privacy settings have been changed) is only made possible because of Facebook’s genius.
6. The main founders were from Harvard. There is little discussion in the book about how the advantages the founders had (generally wealthy families, exemplary educations, the connections one can make at a place like Harvard) could help make Facebook possible compared to starting a company like this elsewhere.
7. The big question that comes after reading about Facebook: how exactly does this or will this change the world? Does it improve the world? Kirkpatrick seems to buy into the big ideas of Zuckerberg: the book opens with the story of how a single man in Columbia was able to kick-off a nation-wide protest against the existing government through Facebook.
I am more skeptical. While this online world does seem to represent something new (people voluntarily giving up their privacy and forming communities), I don’t think it has yet translated into much real-world action. Does being open online (even though openness really is more often sculpting an idealizing image of oneself) necessarily lead to being more open in the real world? Perhaps greater results will be seen when younger generations who are always used to having Facebook around grow up.
In summary, this is an intriguing look at how Facebook has developed and about the ideals that motivate its founder.
Shaving a precious 2-5 seconds off your Internet searches
Google announced yesterday a new feature of their search engine: Google Instant, which will unveil search results even as you are typing in your search terms. The goal? To shave off a few seconds from the typical search process:
Google says the average web search currently takes about 25 seconds: nine second to type it, less than one second for Google to return a result and 15 seconds to pick the best result.
They say Google Instant will shave two to five seconds off of that time.
Perhaps two to five seconds could make a big difference and the feature will become standard practice. The value of time over the Internet has certainly changed over the years, particularly comparing page loads these days to what was common in the mid 1990s. I’m not sure a couple of seconds will matter to most users – but perhaps I am wrong. We do seem to be impatient when a page even takes just a few extra seconds to load…it’s like we have wiped from our memories the experiences of loading pages on 56k modems.
Picking the 10 coolest American small towns…by Internet poll?
BudgetTravel.com has highlighted “the coolest small towns in America.” This looked interesting so I clicked on a link to check out the story – and then found that the 10 places were selected by Internet poll. While these may be interesting communities, this does not seem to be a scientific way to go about compiling this list. On the other hand, it may drive more traffic to BudgetTravel as smaller communities and their residents and fans travel to the website to nominate and then vote on the communities.
Also, what qualifies to be nominated as a “cool small town” is interesting:
First, your town must have a population under 10,000—we’re talking small towns, not big cities. It’s also got to be on the upswing, a place that’s beginning to draw attention—and new residents—because of the quality of life, arts and restaurant scene, or proximity to nature. And cool doesn’t mean quaint. We want towns with an edge, so think avant-garde galleries, not country stores.
I wonder how they weed out the “uncool” small towns…
The quest to tweak search results to lead readers to news stories
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post provides a behind-the-scenes look at how newspapers attempt to position themselves in search engines in order to draw more readers. While these are news organizations with often serious intentions, they have to compete with other popular web topics. Here is what Kurtz suggests this looks like:
If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers. So carried to a hypothetical extreme, an ideal headline would be, “Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent.”…
On a recent Wednesday morning, some Post editors were frustrated that the primary election results weren’t garnering many hits — despite the fact that John McCain had just won his party’s nomination and Lisa Murkowski was on the verge of losing hers. What was hot, the traffic directors said, was Elin Nordegren telling People that her life had been “hell” since her husband’s sex scandal, a photo of an alligator in the Chicago River, and a video posted on Gawker of a British woman throwing a feral cat into a dumpster…
Zaleski says such trend research is used mainly to tweak headlines and search terms. But, she adds, “what we’re realizing is that we can’t live in a vacuum, where we decide what people want to read.”
The quest for online eyeballs is one that all online sites are competing in and those who are interested in providing or discussing more serious topics do not seem to be winning the day.
h/t Instapundit
