Higher Power - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/higher-power.htm Latest news and articles about Higher Power en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:28:51 GMT Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:28:51 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {COMPUTERS > ROBOTICS} - Robots Walking in a Wiggly World http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/robotics/robots-walking-in-a-wiggly-world-20080866729.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/robotics/robots-walking-in-a-wiggly-world-20080866729.htm Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:15:01 GMT Traditional robotics applications such as CNC and welding have relied on the idea that robots should be extremely rigid, with very precise mechanics and encoders. This leads to robots that are very bad at interacting with the real world. Animals, which are very good at interacting with the real world, are full of wiggly, springy, imprecise actuators. A new paper (PDF format) from the CMU Robotics Institute looks at the benefits of adopting this principle in robot leg design. Using compliant, spring-like mechanisms, the robot can recycle energy and exert higher mechanical power when walking or running. The researchers examine a range of compliance using a variable stiffness leg, called the Electric Cable Differential (ECD) Leg. Robots.Net Robots Walking in a Wiggly World {new window}   Robots.Net - Traditional robotics applications such as CNC and welding have relied on the idea that robots should be extremely rigid, with very precise mechanics and encoders. This leads to robots that are very bad at interacting with the real world. Animals, which are very good at interacting with the real world, are full of wiggly, springy, imprecise actuators. A new paper (PDF format) from the CMU Robotics Institute looks at the benefits of adopting this principle in robot leg design. Using compliant, spring-like mechanisms, the robot can recycle energy and exert higher mechanical power when walking or running. The researchers examine a range of compliance using a variable stiffness leg, called the Electric Cable Differential (ECD) Leg.
Published: August 26, 2008, 11:15 pm - Indexed: August 27, 2008, 4:51 pm - Page Size: 5KB
Category: Computers > Robotics

]]> Computers > Robotics {BREAKING NEWS > BUSINESS AND ECONOMY} - US industrial output edges higher http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/business-and-economy/us-industrial-output-edges-higher-20080822613.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/business-and-economy/us-industrial-output-edges-higher-20080822613.htm Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:26:42 GMT The output of US factories, mines and power plants rose by 0.2% in July, driven by a rise in car production. News.Bbc.Co.Uk US industrial output edges higher {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - The output of US factories, mines and power plants rose by 0.2% in July, driven by a rise in car production.
BBC NEWS | Business | US industrial output edges higher {...}
Published: August 15, 2008, 4:26 pm - Indexed: August 16, 2008, 11:31 am - Page Size: 51KB
Category: News > Breaking News > Business and Economy

]]> News > Breaking News > Business and Economy {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Gallery: Measuring the History of Electricity http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gallery-measuring-the-history-of-electricity-20080829512.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gallery-measuring-the-history-of-electricity-20080829512.htm Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:00:00 GMT : Photo: mtowber/flickrThe invention of the electric meter made it possible to bill customers for electricity, creating the incentive to build out the nation's first network for moving electrons. The Grid, the system of dumb, buzzing wires that allows power to move across the country, is so important, it topped the National Academy of Engineering's top 20 triumphs of the 20th century. This gallery tours the history -- and future -- of making you pay for juice. Some time within the next few years, you're likely to get a new type of so-called "smart meter" that will mark the first real upgrade to electrical billing since your grandparents were born. Until the 1870s, electrical power wasn't used for much aside from telegraphs and telephones. But after the Edison's improvement of the incandescent light bulb, power was suddenly much more useful. The problem was, the few metering systems that tinkerers had built up until that time didn't actually work. So Edison resorted to a low-tech method: He charged for electricity on a per-lamp basis. In modern business model terms, Edison was giving away the blades to sell the razor. He would not have received venture capital for that idea. : Photo: Great Beyond/Flickr Throughout the 1880s, various inventors thought hard about the problem of how to measure the flow of electrons through time. Edison himself tried a two-electrode chemical system in which your charge was determined by how much zinc moved from one electrode to another. Workers actually had to weigh the electrodes to determine the price you paid. Elihu Thomson developed a walking-beam meter that functioned quite like toy dunking birds (left). The heating and cooling of alcohol inside a pair of bottles caused a periodic liquid exchange that caused the bottles to rock back and forth. And that mechanical motion is what the meter measured. It was an excellent hack, but it couldn't scale. : Image: Library of Congress By 1888, a major, long-lasting dispute within the power industry was on the verge of getting settled. Edison had been promoting the use of direct-current power, despite the difficulty that the technology encountered transmitting electricity over long distances and changing the voltage. Both problems limited the uses of electricity. George Westinghouse, meanwhile, purchased a patent for a transformer that could increase the voltage of alternating-current power. With a working transformer, his company, Westinghouse Electric, was able to send power over long distances, allowing for larger, centralized power-generating stations. These stations could power factories as well as your great-grandfather's school reading lamp. But they needed to bill for it. And that's where Westinghouse employee Oliver Shallenberger came in. His design (left) paved the way for Westinghouse to purchase a patent from Nikola Tesla for an improved AC system. The modern electrical grid was about to take root. : Photo: Library of Congress With early success fueling investment in the electrical sector, a variety of new technologies began to converge to create the standard model for electrical generation and distribution in the United States. Through the 1890s, various iterations of the induction watt-hour meter were becoming standard technology. These meters measure the number of rotations that a metal disk makes in response to magnetic flux within the meter. The amount of power is proportional to the speed of the disk's revolution, so the meter can accurately measure a range of energy usage levels. In most places, this is still how your company knows how much power your home or business is drawing. Meanwhile, transmission-line technologists were steadily upping the voltage of the power lines running from ever-large power plants, like this one, to increasingly large cities filled with more and more electricity users. The higher the voltage, the better the quality of transmission over distance. By the 1920s, the percentage of two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and three-quarters of factories used electricity to power their motors. : Image: Edison Electric Institute During the Great Depression, the government began to regulate private utilities and push for getting electricity to rural areas far from urban centers through agencies like the Rural Electrification Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority. The Edison Electric Institute Bulletin had a special issue in 1942 on "entering the seventh decade of electric power." By this time, almost all Americans had access to cheap and reliable electric power, but many could remember a time when they didn't. The horsepower available to factory workers had increased from about 3 in 1914 to 6.5 in 1942, with most of the increase coming from purchased electrical power. As one professor chillingly put it, engineering advances had made 6 billion "manpower" available to the country, "equivalent to 50 slaves for each man, woman, and child." : Photo: Library of CongressWith most of the metering and transmission infrastructure in place, all electrical companies had to do was make as much power as cheaply as possible. And that's all they did. Innovation in transmission and metering largely stopped. This 1940s meter technician would probably understand most meters in use today. Most capital investment went to building power plants that could exploit the nation's ready source of cheap energy: coal. In 1949, only 84 million tons of coal wer used for electrical power production. By 1970, coal consumption by the power industry had nearly quadrupled to 320 million tons per year. Last year, American utilities burned about 1.05 billion tons of coal to make electricity. : Photo: Slightlynorth/flickrThe golden age of cheap power came to an end some time in the last decade. Coal, which made electricity cheap and abundant, also happens to generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. It's widely expected that the next president will sign a law that will tax carbon dioxide emissions, as is already the case in many places around the world. The specter of energy regulation and rising natural gas, coal and petroleum prices has raised interest in new emission-free technologies like wind turbines and solar power. But the adoption of these technologies isn't as simple as it sounds. Both wind and solar -- which are abundant and clean -- will require substantial changes to the nation's transmission and billing systems. Wind and solar, unlike coal, do not produce power at the same rate at all times. If they are adopted at scale, the grid infrastructure and the meters like this one will have to be much more flexible than what we built 100 years ago. Power generation has been centralized since the very early days of the industry, but now, wind and solar open the possibility to generate power right on or near your home. But to make economic sense, we need meters and grid tie-ins that can easily accomplish this type of "reverse billing". : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comSo, we find ourselves in a new era of electric meter innovation. A host of companies is trying to find just the right mix of features that will satisfy utilities and provide consumers with more flexibility in how they make, buy and use power. Like everything else in the internet age, electricity-billing systems are about to make the transition from a centralized, one-way mode of operation to two-way systems that are connected to the internet. In addition to the back-end differences, the next generation of meters has received a facelift that will let consumers see their energy usage in near real-time. Of course, people have been talking about "smart meters" for years. But after years of delayed rollouts, utilities finally appear ready to scale them up. This electronic meter from Tendril is slated for a massive rollout with five major utilities that the company says will reach 2 million homes. Wired.Com Gallery: Measuring the History of Electricity {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - : Photo: mtowber/flickrThe invention of the electric meter made it possible to bill customers for electricity, creating the incentive to build out the nation's first network for moving electrons. The Grid, the system of dumb, buzzing wires that allows power to move across the country, is so important, it topped the National Academy of Engineering's top 20 triumphs of the 20th century. This gallery tours the history -- and future -- of making you pay for juice. Some time within the next few years, you're likely to get a new type of so-called "smart meter" that will mark the first real upgrade to electrical billing since your grandparents were born. Until the 1870s, electrical power wasn't used for much aside from telegraphs and telephones. But after the Edison's improvement of the incandescent light bulb, power was suddenly much more useful. The problem was, the few metering systems that tinkerers had built up until that time didn't actually work. So Edison resorted to a low-tech method: He charged for electricity on a per-lamp basis. In modern business model terms, Edison was giving away the blades to sell the razor. He would not have received venture capital for that idea. : Photo: Great Beyond/Flickr Throughout the 1880s, various inventors thought hard about the problem of how to measure the flow of electrons through time. Edison himself tried a two-electrode chemical system in which your charge was determined by how much zinc moved from one electrode to another. Workers actually had to weigh the electrodes to determine the price you paid. Elihu Thomson developed a walking-beam meter that functioned quite like toy dunking birds (left). The heating and cooling of alcohol inside a pair of bottles caused a periodic liquid exchange that caused the bottles to rock back and forth. And that mechanical motion is what the meter measured. It was an excellent hack, but it couldn't scale. : Image: Library of Congress By 1888, a major, long-lasting dispute within the power industry was on the verge of getting settled. Edison had been promoting the use of direct-current power, despite the difficulty that the technology encountered transmitting electricity over long distances and changing the voltage. Both problems limited the uses of electricity. George Westinghouse, meanwhile, purchased a patent for a transformer that could increase the voltage of alternating-current power. With a working transformer, his company, Westinghouse Electric, was able to send power over long distances, allowing for larger, centralized power-generating stations. These stations could power factories as well as your great-grandfather's school reading lamp. But they needed to bill for it. And that's where Westinghouse employee Oliver Shallenberger came in. His design (left) paved the way for Westinghouse to purchase a patent from Nikola Tesla for an improved AC system. The modern electrical grid was about to take root. : Photo: Library of Congress With early success fueling investment in the electrical sector, a variety of new technologies began to converge to create the standard model for electrical generation and distribution in the United States. Through the 1890s, various iterations of the induction watt-hour meter were becoming standard technology. These meters measure the number of rotations that a metal disk makes in response to magnetic flux within the meter. The amount of power is proportional to the speed of the disk's revolution, so the meter can accurately measure a range of energy usage levels. In most places, this is still how your company knows how much power your home or business is drawing. Meanwhile, transmission-line technologists were steadily upping the voltage of the power lines running from ever-large power plants, like this one, to increasingly large cities filled with more and more electricity users. The higher the voltage, the better the quality of transmission over distance. By the 1920s, the percentage of two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and three-quarters of factories used electricity to power their motors. : Image: Edison Electric Institute During the Great Depression, the government began to regulate private utilities and push for getting electricity to rural areas far from urban centers through agencies like the Rural Electrification Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority. The Edison Electric Institute Bulletin had a special issue in 1942 on "entering the seventh decade of electric power." By this time, almost all Americans had access to cheap and reliable electric power, but many could remember a time when they didn't. The horsepower available to factory workers had increased from about 3 in 1914 to 6.5 in 1942, with most of the increase coming from purchased electrical power. As one professor chillingly put it, engineering advances had made 6 billion "manpower" available to the country, "equivalent to 50 slaves for each man, woman, and child." : Photo: Library of CongressWith most of the metering and transmission infrastructure in place, all electrical companies had to do was make as much power as cheaply as possible. And that's all they did. Innovation in transmission and metering largely stopped. This 1940s meter technician would probably understand most meters in use today. Most capital investment went to building power plants that could exploit the nation's ready source of cheap energy: coal. In 1949, only 84 million tons of coal wer used for electrical power production. By 1970, coal consumption by the power industry had nearly quadrupled to 320 million tons per year. Last year, American utilities burned about 1.05 billion tons of coal to make electricity. : Photo: Slightlynorth/flickrThe golden age of cheap power came to an end some time in the last decade. Coal, which made electricity cheap and abundant, also happens to generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. It's widely expected that the next president will sign a law that will tax carbon dioxide emissions, as is already the case in many places around the world. The specter of energy regulation and rising natural gas, coal and petroleum prices has raised interest in new emission-free technologies like wind turbines and solar power. But the adoption of these technologies isn't as simple as it sounds. Both wind and solar -- which are abundant and clean -- will require substantial changes to the nation's transmission and billing systems. Wind and solar, unlike coal, do not produce power at the same rate at all times. If they are adopted at scale, the grid infrastructure and the meters like this one will have to be much more flexible than what we built 100 years ago. Power generation has been centralized since the very early days of the industry, but now, wind and solar open the possibility to generate power right on or near your home. But to make economic sense, we need meters and grid tie-ins that can easily accomplish this type of "reverse billing". : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comSo, we find ourselves in a new era of electric meter innovation. A host of companies is trying to find just the right mix of features that will satisfy utilities and provide consumers with more flexibility in how they make, buy and use power. Like everything else in the internet age, electricity-billing systems are about to make the transition from a centralized, one-way mode of operation to two-way systems that are connected to the internet. In addition to the back-end differences, the next generation of meters has received a facelift that will let consumers see their energy usage in near real-time. Of course, people have been talking about "smart meters" for years. But after years of delayed rollouts, utilities finally appear ready to scale them up. This electronic meter from Tendril is slated for a massive rollout with five major utilities that the company says will reach 2 million homes.
See the latest multimedia and applications including videos, animations, podcasts, photos, and slideshows on Wired.com {...}
Published: August 14, 2008, 2:00 am - Indexed: August 15, 2008, 3:13 pm - Page Size: 35KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/fitting-network-tv-for-a-toe-tag-20080836112.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/fitting-network-tv-for-a-toe-tag-20080836112.htm Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio Can Jeff Zucker Reinvent Broadcast TV? Best Buy Starts Selling the iPhone What a Former Hockey GM Can Tell the Music Industry Subscribe to Portfolio magazine For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up. "People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us." Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4?a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames?and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks. When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable?counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime?now receives 55 percent of the total viewership. It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore?and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.) Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn?t what it used to be either.) It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-?80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week. Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK?you can change the plot!) It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable?about 65 million?hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year. So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn. 1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal. The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy?two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers." When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't?so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks. "Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows?NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators?and the classy ones: TNT?s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they?re morons." 2. Know your brand. "There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don?t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows?Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck?tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents. It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television?its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'?to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show." Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering?wrestling?in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible. Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words. In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox?with the exception of American Idol?is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America?s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect. 3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience. Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast." Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago?as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year?Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first. The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently. 4. Content counts. Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth. Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip?about American Idol. Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.) 5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it. Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment). It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right." But investing in shows?and thus in audience building?is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers. 6. Don't break faith with your audience. Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there?s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. 7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em. Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has. Take a closer look at that pie: Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind. Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom?s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel. Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV). So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches?including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven?t escaped the compound. 8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend. The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be. Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in. But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income?and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with. The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week. So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction?toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel. What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning? Wired.Com Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio Can Jeff Zucker Reinvent Broadcast TV? Best Buy Starts Selling the iPhone What a Former Hockey GM Can Tell the Music Industry Subscribe to Portfolio magazine For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up. "People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us." Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4?a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames?and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks. When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable?counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime?now receives 55 percent of the total viewership. It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore?and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.) Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn?t what it used to be either.) It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-?80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week. Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK?you can change the plot!) It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable?about 65 million?hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year. So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn. 1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal. The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy?two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers." When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't?so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks. "Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows?NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators?and the classy ones: TNT?s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they?re morons." 2. Know your brand. "There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don?t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows?Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck?tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents. It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television?its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'?to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show." Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering?wrestling?in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible. Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words. In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox?with the exception of American Idol?is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America?s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect. 3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience. Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast." Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago?as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year?Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first. The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently. 4. Content counts. Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth. Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip?about American Idol. Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.) 5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it. Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment). It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right." But investing in shows?and thus in audience building?is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers. 6. Don't break faith with your audience. Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there?s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. 7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em. Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has. Take a closer look at that pie: Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind. Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom?s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel. Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV). So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches?including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven?t escaped the compound. 8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend. The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be. Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in. But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income?and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with. The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week. So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction?toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel. What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning?
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: August 13, 2008, 4:00 pm - Indexed: August 14, 2008, 9:18 pm - Page Size: 63KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {NORTH AMERICA > REAL ESTATE} - Full Service Exec Suites in Morgan Hill (morgan hill) $300 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/full-service-exec-suites-in-morgan-hill-morgan-hill-20080898116.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/full-service-exec-suites-in-morgan-hill-morgan-hill-20080898116.htm Sun, 10 Aug 2008 05:57:56 GMT Four offices available for immediate move in. Offices range from 120-140 square feet each. An additional office suite of 1400 sf is available - please call for price. Full service lease includes electric, gas, air-conditioning/heating, DSL, trash, water, and maintenance. Each office is set for plug and play access or for your own network. There are separate men/women restrooms, kitchen, refrigerator, microwave. You can also bring in your own phone lines. Our unit is located just behind recently renovated Cosmo Dental. The property is well-maintained, and a multi-tenant complex close to downtown Morgan Hill, the post office, and the 101 freeway. Various separate suites are between 100 and 140 square feet. There is a conference room to share with seating for eight. Interior units have glass walls and skylights for natural light, two to three power outlets and DSL/phone access. There is plenty of parking, with three spots reserved for clients in the front of the building. Great opportunity for the small business owner! Offered at $2.50/sq. ft. full service. Some office suites are larger than 120 sf and would rent slightly higher. For more information please respond now. Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Full Service Exec Suites in Morgan Hill (morgan hill) $300 {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - Four offices available for immediate move in. Offices range from 120-140 square feet each. An additional office suite of 1400 sf is available - please call for price. Full service lease includes electric, gas, air-conditioning/heating, DSL, trash, water, and maintenance. Each office is set for plug and play access or for your own network. There are separate men/women restrooms, kitchen, refrigerator, microwave. You can also bring in your own phone lines. Our unit is located just behind recently renovated Cosmo Dental. The property is well-maintained, and a multi-tenant complex close to downtown Morgan Hill, the post office, and the 101 freeway. Various separate suites are between 100 and 140 square feet. There is a conference room to share with seating for eight. Interior units have glass walls and skylights for natural light, two to three power outlets and DSL/phone access. There is plenty of parking, with three spots reserved for clients in the front of the building. Great opportunity for the small business owner! Offered at $2.50/sq. ft. full service. Some office suites are larger than 120 sf and would rent slightly higher. For more information please respond now.
Full Service Exec Suites in Morgan Hill {...}
Published: August 10, 2008, 5:57 am - Indexed: August 10, 2008, 1:38 pm - Page Size: 5KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate {NORTH AMERICA > EMPLOYMENT} - REVERSE MORTGAGE CO. seeks ROCK STAR LOAN OFFICERS!!!!! http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/employment/reverse-mortgage-co-seeks-rock-star-loan-officers-20080880710.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/employment/reverse-mortgage-co-seeks-rock-star-loan-officers-20080880710.htm Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:10:14 GMT This is your opportunity to become a member of the Bay Area’s fastest growing financial services company. We are a company that lives and dies by our core values and we are looking for like minded individuals who want to become a part of our elite team. Our Core Values are as follows: 1)DO WORK! - We value individuals who love their jobs and work their hardest to make our firm stand out above all of our competition -We work hard, make best use of our time, and maximize the effects of all of our action -We value great work ethic in all of our team members -We do not confuse effort with results, we are a results driven organization 2)LIVE ZEN -We believe in the inevitable outcomes of both good and bad kharma -We only want team members with extremely positive attitudes -We make lemonade from lemons -The glass is always half full -We strive to create positive connections w/all clients, team members and business partners in our organization -We promote positive energy through our work, family, and communities who we impact through our business -We believe in team work and the power of cohesive positive energy -Through our belief in kharma we are always able to protect our firm 3)BREAK THE BOX -We strive to find a better, easier way to do our work -We attract people who are not confined by their job title, job description, or daily responsibilities to make us a better organization -We are creative thinkers who are not afraid to take risks in coming up with a better way for conducting our business -We utilize technology for simple, easier, more cost effective outcomes -If it is not broken, don’t fix it, use it and make it better -We strive to stay ahead of the curve though creative strategic thinking. 4)WOW EVERYONE -We strive to create the best experience possible for our clients, team members, vendors and business partners. -We are a team that is always raising the bar in terms of customer service and client experience with our firm. -We go above and beyond the call of duty to our clients and team members -We recognize that multiple team members contribute to the job at hand and though respect and extraordinary effort, we are able to perform at higher and higher levels. -We strive to have people brag about their experience with our firm -Our end goal is to create a world class team who provides world class customer service You might be saying to yourself……these guys have high expectations and our answer is “YES WE DO!” We are a financial services company that NECK HIGH in the Reverse Mortgage LEADS and we are looking to make a splash in this quickly growing industry. OUR GOALS ARE SIMPLE: 1)BE THE LARGEST REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE BAY AREA by NOV 2008 2)BE THE LARGEST REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN CA by MARCH 2009 3)BE A TOP 10 REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE USA by JAN 2010 YOU ARE: We are looking for the following: -Top producing loan officers with a minimum of 1.5 years experience. -Must have 1099/w-2's and proven track record of top production (Will make exceptions for a bad 2007 if 2006, and previous years show strong production) You will NOT be: -COLD CALLING -BUYING YOUR OWN LEADS -EXPECTED TO BUILD A REFFERAL NETWORK You will be: -PROVIDED TONS OF HOT LEADS -GIVEN TOP NOTCH SUPPORT and TRAINING -MAKING GREAT $$$$ AGAIN (top producer close 10+ deals per month) Job Requirements: College Degree Preferred but not required Must have a car (100% of our client appointments are face to face) Candidate must have a strong work ethic Must be willing to commit to a full time position Quick learner with high retention ability Economic/Business background +++ Strong drive to learn the reverse mortgage loan product Ability to maintain a positive attitude and a level head Real Estate license will eventually be required We are looking for the BEST of the Best Loan Officers to come into our company and turn their Mortgage Careers around. If this is you, email us your resume and coverletter (please explain how your core values fit with ours), with a breakdown of your mortgage achievements and if we like what we see, we will give you a ring and show you how Winners Are Reacting to a Down Market Place. Note: Resumes submitted without coverletter addressing CORE VALUES will be discarded. We are serious about our corevalues. Sfbay.Craigslist.Org REVERSE MORTGAGE CO. seeks ROCK STAR LOAN OFFICERS!!!!! {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - This is your opportunity to become a member of the Bay Area’s fastest growing financial services company. We are a company that lives and dies by our core values and we are looking for like minded individuals who want to become a part of our elite team. Our Core Values are as follows: 1)DO WORK! - We value individuals who love their jobs and work their hardest to make our firm stand out above all of our competition -We work hard, make best use of our time, and maximize the effects of all of our action -We value great work ethic in all of our team members -We do not confuse effort with results, we are a results driven organization 2)LIVE ZEN -We believe in the inevitable outcomes of both good and bad kharma -We only want team members with extremely positive attitudes -We make lemonade from lemons -The glass is always half full -We strive to create positive connections w/all clients, team members and business partners in our organization -We promote positive energy through our work, family, and communities who we impact through our business -We believe in team work and the power of cohesive positive energy -Through our belief in kharma we are always able to protect our firm 3)BREAK THE BOX -We strive to find a better, easier way to do our work -We attract people who are not confined by their job title, job description, or daily responsibilities to make us a better organization -We are creative thinkers who are not afraid to take risks in coming up with a better way for conducting our business -We utilize technology for simple, easier, more cost effective outcomes -If it is not broken, don’t fix it, use it and make it better -We strive to stay ahead of the curve though creative strategic thinking. 4)WOW EVERYONE -We strive to create the best experience possible for our clients, team members, vendors and business partners. -We are a team that is always raising the bar in terms of customer service and client experience with our firm. -We go above and beyond the call of duty to our clients and team members -We recognize that multiple team members contribute to the job at hand and though respect and extraordinary effort, we are able to perform at higher and higher levels. -We strive to have people brag about their experience with our firm -Our end goal is to create a world class team who provides world class customer service You might be saying to yourself……these guys have high expectations and our answer is “YES WE DO!” We are a financial services company that NECK HIGH in the Reverse Mortgage LEADS and we are looking to make a splash in this quickly growing industry. OUR GOALS ARE SIMPLE: 1)BE THE LARGEST REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE BAY AREA by NOV 2008 2)BE THE LARGEST REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN CA by MARCH 2009 3)BE A TOP 10 REVERSE MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE USA by JAN 2010 YOU ARE: We are looking for the following: -Top producing loan officers with a minimum of 1.5 years experience. -Must have 1099/w-2's and proven track record of top production (Will make exceptions for a bad 2007 if 2006, and previous years show strong production) You will NOT be: -COLD CALLING -BUYING YOUR OWN LEADS -EXPECTED TO BUILD A REFFERAL NETWORK You will be: -PROVIDED TONS OF HOT LEADS -GIVEN TOP NOTCH SUPPORT and TRAINING -MAKING GREAT $$$$ AGAIN (top producer close 10+ deals per month) Job Requirements: College Degree Preferred but not required Must have a car (100% of our client appointments are face to face) Candidate must have a strong work ethic Must be willing to commit to a full time position Quick learner with high retention ability Economic/Business background +++ Strong drive to learn the reverse mortgage loan product Ability to maintain a positive attitude and a level head Real Estate license will eventually be required We are looking for the BEST of the Best Loan Officers to come into our company and turn their Mortgage Careers around. If this is you, email us your resume and coverletter (please explain how your core values fit with ours), with a breakdown of your mortgage achievements and if we like what we see, we will give you a ring and show you how Winners Are Reacting to a Down Market Place. Note: Resumes submitted without coverletter addressing CORE VALUES will be discarded. We are serious about our corevalues.
Published: August 10, 2008, 2:10 am - Indexed: August 10, 2008, 10:59 pm - Page Size: 0KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Employment

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Employment {NORTH AMERICA > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Security Matters: Memo to Next President -- How to Get Cybersecurity Right http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/society-and-culture/politics/news-and-media/security-matters-memo-to-next-president-how-to-get-2008082114.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/society-and-culture/politics/news-and-media/security-matters-memo-to-next-president-how-to-get-2008082114.htm Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:45:00 GMT Obama has a cybersecurity plan. It's basically what you would expect: Appoint a national cybersecurity adviser, invest in math and science education, establish standards for critical infrastructure, spend money on enforcement, establish national standards for securing personal data and data-breach disclosure, and work with industry and academia to develop a bunch of needed technologies. I could comment on the plan, but with security, the devil is always in the details -- and, of course, at this point there are few details. But since he brought up the topic -- McCain supposedly is "working on the issues" as well -- I have three pieces of policy advice for the next president, whoever he is. They're too detailed for campaign speeches or even position papers, but they're essential for improving information security in our society. Actually, they apply to national security in general. And they're things only government can do. One, use your immense buying power to improve the security of commercial products and services. One property of technological products is that most of the cost is in the development of the product rather than the production. Think software: The first copy costs millions, but the second copy is free. You have to secure your own government networks, military and civilian. You have to buy computers for all your government employees. Consolidate those contracts, and start putting explicit security requirements into the RFPs. You have the buying power to get your vendors to make serious security improvements in the products and services they sell to the government, and then we all benefit because they'll include those improvements in the same products and services they sell to the rest of us. We're all safer if information technology is more secure, even though the bad guys can use it, too. Two, legislate results and not methodologies. There are a lot of areas in security where you need to pass laws, where the security externalities are such that the market fails to provide adequate security. For example, software companies who sell insecure products are exploiting an externality just as much as chemical plants that dump waste into the river. But a bad law is worse than no law. A law requiring companies to secure personal data is good; a law specifying what technologies they should use to do so is not. Mandating software liabilities for software failures is good; detailing how is not. Legislate for the results you want and implement the appropriate penalties; let the market figure out how -- that's what markets are good at. Three, broadly invest in research. Basic research is risky; it doesn't always pay off. That's why companies have stopped funding it. Bell Labs is gone because nobody could afford it after the AT&T breakup, but the root cause was a desire for higher efficiency and short-term profitability -- not unreasonable in an unregulated business. Government research can be used to balance that by funding long-term research. Spread those research dollars wide. Lately, most research money has been redirected through Darpa to near-term military-related projects; that's not good. Keep the earmark-happy Congress from dictating (.pdf) how the money is spent. Let the NSF, NIH and other funding agencies decide how to spend the money and don't try to micromanage. Give the national laboratories lots of freedom, too. Yes, some research will sound silly to a layman. But you can't predict what will be useful for what, and if funding is really peer-reviewed, the average results will be much better. Compared with corporate tax breaks and other subsidies, this is chump change. If our research capability is to remain vibrant, we need more science and math students with decent elementary and high school preparation. The declining interest is partly from the perception that scientists don't get rich like lawyers and dentists and stockbrokers, but also because science isn't valued in a country full of creationists. One way the president can help is by trusting scientific advisers and not overruling them for political reasons. Oh, and get rid of those post-9/11 restrictions on student visas that are causing (.pdf) so many top students to do their graduate work in Canada, Europe and Asia instead of in the United States. Those restrictions will hurt us (.pdf) immensely in the long run. Those are the three big ones; the rest is in the details. And it's the details that matter. There are lots of serious issues that you're going to have to tackle: data privacy, data sharing, data mining, government eavesdropping, government databases, use of Social Security numbers as identifiers, and so on. It's not enough to get the broad policy goals right. You can have good intentions and enact a good law, and have the whole thing completely gutted by two sentences sneaked in during rulemaking by some lobbyist. Security is both subtle and complex, and -- unfortunately -- it doesn't readily lend itself to normal legislative processes. You're used to finding consensus, but security by consensus rarely works. On the internet, security standards are much worse when they're developed by a consensus body, and much better when someone just does them. This doesn't always work -- a lot of crap security has come from companies that have "just done it" -- but nothing but mediocre standards come from consensus bodies. The point is that you won't get good security without pissing someone off: The information-broker industry, the voting-machine industry, the telcos. The normal legislative process makes it hard to get security right, which is why I don't have much optimism about what you can get done. And if you're going to appoint a cybersecurity czar, you have to give him actual budgetary authority -- otherwise he won't be able to get anything done, either. --- Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. Wired.Com Security Matters: Memo to Next President -- How to Get Cybersecurity Right {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - Obama has a cybersecurity plan. It's basically what you would expect: Appoint a national cybersecurity adviser, invest in math and science education, establish standards for critical infrastructure, spend money on enforcement, establish national standards for securing personal data and data-breach disclosure, and work with industry and academia to develop a bunch of needed technologies. I could comment on the plan, but with security, the devil is always in the details -- and, of course, at this point there are few details. But since he brought up the topic -- McCain supposedly is "working on the issues" as well -- I have three pieces of policy advice for the next president, whoever he is. They're too detailed for campaign speeches or even position papers, but they're essential for improving information security in our society. Actually, they apply to national security in general. And they're things only government can do. One, use your immense buying power to improve the security of commercial products and services. One property of technological products is that most of the cost is in the development of the product rather than the production. Think software: The first copy costs millions, but the second copy is free. You have to secure your own government networks, military and civilian. You have to buy computers for all your government employees. Consolidate those contracts, and start putting explicit security requirements into the RFPs. You have the buying power to get your vendors to make serious security improvements in the products and services they sell to the government, and then we all benefit because they'll include those improvements in the same products and services they sell to the rest of us. We're all safer if information technology is more secure, even though the bad guys can use it, too. Two, legislate results and not methodologies. There are a lot of areas in security where you need to pass laws, where the security externalities are such that the market fails to provide adequate security. For example, software companies who sell insecure products are exploiting an externality just as much as chemical plants that dump waste into the river. But a bad law is worse than no law. A law requiring companies to secure personal data is good; a law specifying what technologies they should use to do so is not. Mandating software liabilities for software failures is good; detailing how is not. Legislate for the results you want and implement the appropriate penalties; let the market figure out how -- that's what markets are good at. Three, broadly invest in research. Basic research is risky; it doesn't always pay off. That's why companies have stopped funding it. Bell Labs is gone because nobody could afford it after the AT&T breakup, but the root cause was a desire for higher efficiency and short-term profitability -- not unreasonable in an unregulated business. Government research can be used to balance that by funding long-term research. Spread those research dollars wide. Lately, most research money has been redirected through Darpa to near-term military-related projects; that's not good. Keep the earmark-happy Congress from dictating (.pdf) how the money is spent. Let the NSF, NIH and other funding agencies decide how to spend the money and don't try to micromanage. Give the national laboratories lots of freedom, too. Yes, some research will sound silly to a layman. But you can't predict what will be useful for what, and if funding is really peer-reviewed, the average results will be much better. Compared with corporate tax breaks and other subsidies, this is chump change. If our research capability is to remain vibrant, we need more science and math students with decent elementary and high school preparation. The declining interest is partly from the perception that scientists don't get rich like lawyers and dentists and stockbrokers, but also because science isn't valued in a country full of creationists. One way the president can help is by trusting scientific advisers and not overruling them for political reasons. Oh, and get rid of those post-9/11 restrictions on student visas that are causing (.pdf) so many top students to do their graduate work in Canada, Europe and Asia instead of in the United States. Those restrictions will hurt us (.pdf) immensely in the long run. Those are the three big ones; the rest is in the details. And it's the details that matter. There are lots of serious issues that you're going to have to tackle: data privacy, data sharing, data mining, government eavesdropping, government databases, use of Social Security numbers as identifiers, and so on. It's not enough to get the broad policy goals right. You can have good intentions and enact a good law, and have the whole thing completely gutted by two sentences sneaked in during rulemaking by some lobbyist. Security is both subtle and complex, and -- unfortunately -- it doesn't readily lend itself to normal legislative processes. You're used to finding consensus, but security by consensus rarely works. On the internet, security standards are much worse when they're developed by a consensus body, and much better when someone just does them. This doesn't always work -- a lot of crap security has come from companies that have "just done it" -- but nothing but mediocre standards come from consensus bodies. The point is that you won't get good security without pissing someone off: The information-broker industry, the voting-machine industry, the telcos. The normal legislative process makes it hard to get security right, which is why I don't have much optimism about what you can get done. And if you're going to appoint a cybersecurity czar, you have to give him actual budgetary authority -- otherwise he won't be able to get anything done, either. --- Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Barack Obama has a plan to improve the nation's cyber security, and rival John McCain is said to have one in the works. Here's some concrete security advice for the next president. {...}
Published: August 7, 2008, 4:45 pm - Indexed: August 10, 2008, 1:05 pm - Page Size: 50KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > Society and Culture > Politics > News and Media

]]> Regional > North America > United States > Society and Culture > Politics > News and Media {LIBRARIES > WEBLOGS} - Charter Schools: Are They Needed? Looking at Both Sides of the Debate http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/charter-schools-are-they-needed-looking-at-both-2008086293.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/charter-schools-are-they-needed-looking-at-both-2008086293.htm Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:16:22 GMT Charter Schools: Are They Needed? Looking at Both Sides of the Debateby Michael Lorenzen(This is another rescued paper I put up at a now vanished website years ago. I think some web surfers may find it of interest.)Most reform concepts work by making changes within schools. However, a newer reform idea works by creating entirely new schools. The charter school movement seeks to improve public school by creating new, rival, and competing public schools. The hope is that competition for students will force public schools to improve. However, many do not believe the free market will actually bring this about and may actually harm public schools. Despite the relative newness of the charter concept, the ideas behind it are not new and an examination of education literature can shed a lot of light on the concept. Description of charter schools The pro-charter school group, the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA), defines on their web page that, "Charter Schools are public schools-free and open to all. They are started by interested parents, educators, and business and community leaders. Each school is created with its own unique curricula and is licensed by a school district, community college or, most often, a state university." The mostly anti-charter National Education Association, (NEA) furthers the definition by writing on their web site, "These school are deregulated, autonomous and independent of the rules and regulations that govern traditional schools. The theory that underlies the charters is that such freeing of some public schools will hasten educational innovation, improve student achievement, create greater parental involvement, and promote improvement of public education in general. And the theory follows that if there's no educational improvement, the school will be held accountable and the school's charter won't be renewed." A description of the charter school concept can be constructed including both of the above descriptions and using other sources. Charter schools are public schools that are free from some, but not all, of the regulations that govern most public schools. Any person or group may start their own public school if they can get a charter from an approving educational institution, which is normally a state university. These schools, which are free from many regulations and teachers unions, can attempt to innovate curriculum and learning in ways that traditional public schools can not or will not try. In districts with charter schools, parents can choose to send their children to either the local public school system or to a charter school. Whichever school the parents chooses, that school gets all of the state funding for that student. It is hoped that making schools compete for students will make them better. If a school system loses a significant number of students and money to charter schools then it is likely going to try to compete with the charter schools by being more responsive to parents and more willing to try reforms that the school previously opposed. Those local school districts that refuse to innovate and improve to keep pace with charter schools will lose money and students. Those charter schools that do not deliver quality instruction will not keep their students and run the risk of going out of business or losing their charter.Praise and criticism for charter schools The greatest benefit of charter schools according to its proponents is that all public schools will get better if there is competition. The free market will drive quality instruction and innovation and those schools, which do not respond to market forces, will either get progressively weaker or be closed entirely. The pro-charter Charter Friends National Network writes on its web site, "The purpose of charter schools is not just to create schools. The evaluation (of charter schools) should ask whether districts do in fact act to improve their own programs in response to the appearance of charter laws and charters schools. Most evaluations so far have not looked for these second-order effects. To evaluate the 'ripple effect' requires looking simply at what districts do." Using this argument, if a school district improves after a charter is opened, the charter school idea has worked even if the local school district outperforms the charter school. Both the school district and the charter are needed to create the free market that drove the improvement in the school district. The United States is a capitalistic society and the free market drives most of what occurs in the economy. The Federal government promotes the free market as it tends to produce jobs and keep prices low. Although different sectors of the market may not always work as well as they should in the free market; the American free market system has created the strongest economy in the world. The only area that the government has historically interfered with the free market is to prevent or destroy monopolies. The free market can create monopolies but monopolies destroy the free market when they emerge. This reasoning is transferred to public schools with the charter school idea. The public school system as it previously stood was a monopoly. Except for paying for private schooling, the local public school was the only option a parent had for educating their child. Charter schools create competition. And if the free market works for education as it does in the economy, the public schools as a whole will become a better product. Opponents of charter schools have several counters to this reasoning. Much of it can be found at the NEA web site. Although the free market does a good job as a whole for the economy, there are losers in this system. As such, there will be losers in an educational free market. Do we want children to suffer if they are among the losers? Further, how can you make a school better if you take money away from it? Opponents argue that many of the problems with public schools to begin with are from a lack of funding. Taking money from a school will only make it worse. Another argument for charter schools is fairness. A form of school choice exists for those have the money. It does not for everyone else. Wrote Nathan (74), "We have a deeply inequitable public school system in which the wealthy already have school choice: middle and upper income families can always move to exclusive suburbs, where the price of admission to 'public' schools is the ability to buy a home and pay real estate taxes. Low and moderate income families do not have this ability. Thus those who defend the current public education system are in fact defending a massive, informal school choice system based on wealth and residence which is arguably the most inequitable system imaginable. As one innercity activist recently said to a charter school critic: 'How dare you insist we send our children to school you will do anything to avoid for your children?' Charter schools offer a much fairer approach to school choice." Since the traditional public school model relied so heavily on where a student lived, this tended to give the poor the worst public schools. However, an inordinate number of racial minority students live in poor neighborhoods. The traditional public school model then places a higher percentage of minorities in poor schools. This results in a racist system that perpetuates racial privilege. It is not surprising then that many members of these racial groups are supporters of charter schools. They provide parents with a choice of schools. This choice can create better schools for their children, which may help to break the poverty cycle. It is interesting to note that civil rights leader Rosa Parks applied to start a charter school in Detroit based on this reasoning. Another argument for charter schools is that they empower parents. Charter schools not only give parents the option of creating or attending schools more to their liking, but it also gives them the opportunity to bargain with teachers and administrators in school districts. One area that can be explored is cultural preference. Racial minorities may desire a school that promotes their culture. Religious parents may desire to send their children to schools that promote their moral values. Wrote Smith (56), "Many families with children in the public schools must contend with pressures of assimilation toward mainstream norms as they attempt to transmit their cultural or religious values. To escape these pressures, or to be ensured a certain quality of education, some families choose private education. But only those who can afford private school tuition can use this option. Thus, families whose values are not represented in the mainstream culture and families with low to middle incomes are at a disadvantage in the present structure of public education." Charter schools give choice to those who previously lacked it. It also assures a higher level of bargaining for a parent if they keep a child in the local school district. The Board of Education will think twice about approving teacher supported curriculum that is opposed by a vocal group of parents. Unpopular curriculum such as sex education and values clarification is less likely to be approved in a district if parents can and will pull their children from the school district. Critics of charter schools point to this as a bad thing. They prefer to allow these curricular decisions to be made by educational professionals. However, most parents believe that the ultimate arbiter of their children's education is themselves and not the state. And as such, this ability to have cultural preferences addressed seriously is popular with parents. Another criticism of charter schools is that for-profit companies operate many of them. The NEA web site calls them "fly-by-night" companies in derision. A recent article in Educational Leadership wrote about these for-profit schools in Michigan. Wrote Dykgraaf and Lewis (51), "Our conclusions proved troubling. First, cutting expenses is indeed part of the for-profit strategy, which results in consequences for transportation, special education, and the socioeconomic mix of students. Second, we concluded the public is not aware of how drastic for-profit management is in Michigan, for no easily accessible source of information is available on the activity of these management groups. Finally, de facto ownership of these schools rests more with the management companies and not the public." The NEA's, Dykgraaf, and Lewis's criticism of for-profit charter schools is very understandable. It touches on a fundamentally moral issue. Is it ok to run schools for money? Many would find this objectionable. Cost cutting in areas such as special education is also problematic. Finally, the fact that for-profit schools are truly owned by the corporation and not the state raises many concerns. Another criticism of charter schools is that they attract students with concerned parents. By their nature, parents have to take an active interest in their children's education to enroll in charter schools. Children who have parents actively involved in their education do better overall than students who do not. Hence, charter schools are going to attract the students who tend to do better in school. The local school system will be left with fewer children who have active parents. This will make it hard to compare the charter with the local school district. If the charter is getting better performing students, it should be doing better on comparable tests. A counter to this argument is that the parents who are concerned about education have a right to send their children to schools that are populated with students of other concerned parents. This is a better learning environment for the students. Another result of charter schools that this author has not seen considered yet is the concept of property values. Real estate values in areas with poor school systems tend to be low. This is often attributed to the quality of the local public school system. What happens when charter schools are present in a district? If parents can avoid the local public school system by sending a child to a charter school, does this make them more willing to live in the district? If this is the case, property values should rise in these districts. If this proves true, residents of a district will show even more support to charter schools. Although a few more years will need to pass before this kind of research can be done, it does like an interesting research idea.Analysis of the charter school issue Not surprisingly, the debate over charter has been informed by the development of education and educational reform in America. As such, looking at the writings of educational researchers and practitioners can help in understanding the charter school issue. Charter schools have not developed in a vacuum. Looking at the wider issues in education is very important. The belief that charter schools help further the goals of democracy and fairness is important. The notion of democratic equality is very important in the United States. The belief that schooling should serve all regardless of social background and give all an equal chance at an education that will lead to a potentially high social class is widespread. In brief, this belief envisions that all inhabitants of the United States (citizen and alien alike) will receive the same education. Those who are worthy, regardless of the backgrounds of the parents, will succeed and achieve great things and those that are less worthy will through their own efforts select their own less than spectacular destinies. This is a powerful idea that is held by those dedicated to the egalitarian ideal of The Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, by those who are in the working class who believe that providence has delivered what they deserve, and by those who are well off who believe the educational system has justified their own status. Several scholars have taken note of democratic equality. Cohen and Neufield (73) wrote, In addition to citizenship training and equal treatment, the goal of democratic equality has taken a third form, and that is the pursuit of equal access." Labaree (47) wrote, "Equal access has come to mean that every American should have an equal opportunity to acquire an education at any educational level." These same scholars convincingly trace the development of this vision of equality in America from the development of public elementary schools, the rise of public high schools, and finally the realization of nearly universal access to higher education. However, the traditional public school system has not delivered on the democratic equality promise. Not all schools are equal. Some are much worse than others are. Poor students in these schools have no choice but to attend them. This results in them not having a fair chance at succeeding. Charter schools give many the belief that democratic equality is still attainable.Paradoxically, this low public opinion of the local public school system developed because schools tried to deliver on this promise. However, universal school attendance created problems. Can a school be open to all and be excellent? The answer appears to be no too many. By attempting to serve everyone equally, the school serves no on excellently. Access for all creates a problem. Vast numbers of diverse students with various backgrounds have different educational needs. Further, many students do not desire to be in school. This creates a need to make school attractive to these students. This can result in a water downed curriculum that most students can succeed in. Further, as Willis showed in his book on working class students in England, even the students can deliberately choose not to be educated. Part of the desire for charter schools is the perceived lack of serious education in public schools. Wrote Sedlak at al (preface, x), "There appears to have developed an implicit 'bargain' between students in virtually all of our high schools, which results in a de-emphasis on academic learning and student disengagement from learning. The bargain is negotiated, albeit tacitly, between two parties, both of which have resources, but unequal power. This bargain determines the level of academic learning that takes place in the classroom. Although content and acquisition of knowledge ultimately suffer, the bargain struck in most classrooms furthers its primary goal of making the relationships between educators and students more comfortable and less troublesome." This idea creates a dual consideration for charter schools and the community. Charter schools can indeed create an alternative to public schools where bargains water down learning. Many want this bargain eliminated. The public does not want students taking easy classes and they want students being challenged academically. They want the students to be challenged and the teachers to push high standards. The hope is that charter schools will do this. However, what promise do we have that the charter schools will not make their own bargains with students? What assurance is there that the current bargaining system will simply not be reproduced in the charter schools? This should make charter school advocates take pause and consider what can occur in the charter schools. The desire of many to want charter schools is not surprising. People have a strong ownership and desire to participate in the education process. Wrote Cusick (1992), "Individual freedom runs all the way through the system. Parents may or may not support the school board; superintendents may support or oppose the state department; state department staff may alter the intent of federal policy makers. People make and exercise personal decisions, enter and take part on their own terms, and regards those as their rights. Students mix their classes, cultures, and friendships with school requirements; teachers adjust their curriculums to their predilections, create their student relations, and support and oppose principals as they choose. Reformers decide schools need accountability, or principals decide their teachers have too much or too little power. Teachers decide students need more freedom. Each member of the system is free to make his or her own decision and set out on a course of action." The charter school movement is the ultimate manifestation of Cusick's view of the education process. Charter schools allow unparalleled opportunities for input. Any teacher, administrator, parent, businessperson, or politician can literally start their own public school. The degree to which this can be used to influence the education process is enormous. The amount of educational freedom created is unprecedented. Charter schools are popular now and it is certain they will continue to expand in the near future. It will be interesting to see how well they perform in comparison to public school districts and if these districts change for the better in attempting to compete for students. Regardless, the conditions that created charter schools will remain and this reform is just one way to address them.Works CitedCharter Friends National Network. http://web.archive.org/web/20070405174929/http://www.charterfriends.org/. Cohen, David K. and Barbara Neufield (1981). "The failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education." Daedalus 110 (Summer): 69-89. Cusick, Philip (1992). The Educational System: Its Nature and Logic. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990. Dykgraaf, Christy Lancaster and Shirley Kane Lewis (1998). "For-Profit Charter Schools: What the Public Needs to Know." Educational Leadership 56(2): 51-53. Labaree, David (1997). "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals." American Educational Research Journal 34 (Spring): 39-81. Michigan Association of Public School Academies. http://web.archive.org/web/20070405174929/http://www.charterschools.org/. Nathan, Joe (1998). "Charters and Choice." American Prospect (issue 41): 74-77. National Education Association. http://www.nea.org/issues/charter/ . Sedlak, Michael et al. (1986). Selling Students Short: Classroom Reform in the American High School. New York: Teachers College Press. Smith, Stacy (1998). "The Democratizing Potential of Charter Schools." Educational Leadership 56(2) : 55-58. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Information-literacy.Net Charter Schools: Are They Needed? Looking at Both Sides of the Debate {new window}   Www.Information-literacy.Net - Charter Schools: Are They Needed? Looking at Both Sides of the Debateby Michael Lorenzen(This is another rescued paper I put up at a now vanished website years ago. I think some web surfers may find it of interest.)Most reform concepts work by making changes within schools. However, a newer reform idea works by creating entirely new schools. The charter school movement seeks to improve public school by creating new, rival, and competing public schools. The hope is that competition for students will force public schools to improve. However, many do not believe the free market will actually bring this about and may actually harm public schools. Despite the relative newness of the charter concept, the ideas behind it are not new and an examination of education literature can shed a lot of light on the concept. Description of charter schools The pro-charter school group, the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA), defines on their web page that, "Charter Schools are public schools-free and open to all. They are started by interested parents, educators, and business and community leaders. Each school is created with its own unique curricula and is licensed by a school district, community college or, most often, a state university." The mostly anti-charter National Education Association, (NEA) furthers the definition by writing on their web site, "These school are deregulated, autonomous and independent of the rules and regulations that govern traditional schools. The theory that underlies the charters is that such freeing of some public schools will hasten educational innovation, improve student achievement, create greater parental involvement, and promote improvement of public education in general. And the theory follows that if there's no educational improvement, the school will be held accountable and the school's charter won't be renewed." A description of the charter school concept can be constructed including both of the above descriptions and using other sources. Charter schools are public schools that are free from some, but not all, of the regulations that govern most public schools. Any person or group may start their own public school if they can get a charter from an approving educational institution, which is normally a state university. These schools, which are free from many regulations and teachers unions, can attempt to innovate curriculum and learning in ways that traditional public schools can not or will not try. In districts with charter schools, parents can choose to send their children to either the local public school system or to a charter school. Whichever school the parents chooses, that school gets all of the state funding for that student. It is hoped that making schools compete for students will make them better. If a school system loses a significant number of students and money to charter schools then it is likely going to try to compete with the charter schools by being more responsive to parents and more willing to try reforms that the school previously opposed. Those local school districts that refuse to innovate and improve to keep pace with charter schools will lose money and students. Those charter schools that do not deliver quality instruction will not keep their students and run the risk of going out of business or losing their charter.Praise and criticism for charter schools The greatest benefit of charter schools according to its proponents is that all public schools will get better if there is competition. The free market will drive quality instruction and innovation and those schools, which do not respond to market forces, will either get progressively weaker or be closed entirely. The pro-charter Charter Friends National Network writes on its web site, "The purpose of charter schools is not just to create schools. The evaluation (of charter schools) should ask whether districts do in fact act to improve their own programs in response to the appearance of charter laws and charters schools. Most evaluations so far have not looked for these second-order effects. To evaluate the 'ripple effect' requires looking simply at what districts do." Using this argument, if a school district improves after a charter is opened, the charter school idea has worked even if the local school district outperforms the charter school. Both the school district and the charter are needed to create the free market that drove the improvement in the school district. The United States is a capitalistic society and the free market drives most of what occurs in the economy. The Federal government promotes the free market as it tends to produce jobs and keep prices low. Although different sectors of the market may not always work as well as they should in the free market; the American fr