Saturday, June 25, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
The latest in Radio Technology
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue.html
A Library of Listening, Made by You
By DAVID POGUE
Want to know the real problem with the digital age? There’s not enough to listen to.
I mean, what is there, other than your iPod music, your phone, AM/FM radio, satellite radio, podcasts, Internet radio stations, Pandora, Rhapsody, Napster, Slacker, Live365 and maybe one or two hundred other sources?
I kid, of course. The thing is, though, they’re all compromises. The free ones don’t let you choose exactly what you want to hear or when; the ones that do cost money.
But that’s about to change. One phrase should tell you all you need to know about the latest development: free TiVo for radio.
That’s the promise of DAR.fm, a Web site that lists every single radio show on every one of 1,800 AM and FM stations across the country. (It stands for Digital Audio Recorder.)
You can search, sort, slice and dice those listings any way you want: by genre, by radio station, by search phrase. It’s all here: NPR, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. Music shows. Talk shows. Religion, sports, technology. Politics by the pound.
You don’t know or care when your show will actually be aired, or on what station. You only know that you’ve requested it. Shortly thereafter, an e-mail message lets you know that your freshly baked show is ready for listening.
You get every episode, automatically. And why not? It’s not your hard drive they’re filling up. You get two gigabytes of free storage, enough for about 100 hours of recorded shows. If you fill in the application page at MP3Tunes.com, you get a free upgrade to 10 gigabytes. That’s 500 hours of radio, which is almost enough to cover your next layover at O’Hare.
And here’s the best part: you can listen absolutely anywhere. For starters, you can listen right there on the DAR.fm Web page. The page that lists your recordings wasn’t designed by, you know, Monet, but it gets the job done. You can pause, rewind and fast-forward through your recordings, and there are 30-second skip forward/skip backward buttons.
Actually, maybe this part is even better: Many radio stations transmit the names of the songs and bands they’re playing. DAR.fm captures that information and detects song breaks. In other words, if you record a day or so of a music station, you’ve suddenly got a tidy list of songs, identified (and sortable) by title or band. You can listen to individual songs, skip the turkeys and otherwise enjoy your totally free song collection. It’s crazy cool, like a hybrid of iTunes and satellite radio.
You can also listen to your recordings on an app phone, using a free app for that purpose. (The app for iPhone is called Airband; for Android, it’s MP3Tunes; for Windows Phone 7, Locker Player; for WebOS, MP3tunes.) Can you imagine having the last few weeks’ worth of every worthwhile radio show, right on your phone? Sure, subscribing to podcasts achieves a similar goal — but not every show is available as a podcast. And this way, you never have to sync your phone with your computer.
For best results, listen when your phone is in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Otherwise, streaming music will rip through your monthly data allowance like the winner of a hot-dog-eating contest.
Or use the trick described at dar.fm/faq.php. It tells you how to download your recordings, so you can listen to them later without an Internet connection. (Yes, you can even download individual songs that you captured. The record-company lawyers must love that part.)
Even more intriguingly, you can listen to your recordings on an actual, physical radio. You know, one of those tabletop things with speakers and knobs. These days, they come with wireless Internet connections — which is all DAR.fm needs to know.
The Wi-Fi radios from Grace Digital ($80 to $200) list DAR.fm right on the main menu. Selecting that source instantly presents your list of recorded radio shows.
But Grace radios aren’t your only option. The person who created DAR.fm also runs a company called MP3Tunes.com. It’s an online storage locker for your music files, so that you can play them from any computer or phone, anywhere you go.
(If this sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon introduced a nearly identical service last month, called Amazon Cloud Player. Google just opened a “cloud music locker” service, too. Needless to say, the headlines about this “new” kind of music service drives the MP3Tunes guy crazy; his site has been in operation for four years.)
Whenever you record a show at DAR.fm, it shows up automatically in your MP3Tunes.com music locker. And the contents of that locker are viewable, and playable, on 30 different Wi-Fi radio models from various manufacturers, and even the Roku set-top TV box.
The Logitech Squeezebox is one of them, and it’s representative of how you would get to your recorded radio shows. You set up by installing an MP3Tunes app and putting it on your main menu. Thereafter, you choose MP3Tunes; then, in the next menu, Playlists. Inside, you’ll find all your recorded shows. So — another couple of steps.
(The Squeezebox can also accommodate a battery, sold separately, so “All Things Considered” can follow you around the house as you do your springtime chores.)
So here’s the bottom line: DAR.fm is a joy to use, it’s simple enough to be idiotproof, and the sound quality is very good. And it’s absolutely free.
Where’s the catch?
First, it won’t always be free. The company intends to incorporate ads at some point — not audio ads, but text ads that appear in your app or the screen of your radio.
Second, you have to wonder about the legality of all this. The company says that it’s in the clear. It points to a 2008 case involving Cablevision, the cable company, which offered its subscribers a service that could record your favorite TV shows by remote control — like a TiVo, except that the recording machines were at Cablevision and not at your house. The judge ruled that this plan was O.K. because Cablevision wasn’t actually making copies of copyrighted material; it was creating separate recording for each customer who requested it.
That’s what DAR says it’s doing. If 8,000 people all record a certain episode of “Fresh Air,” then, by golly, it makes 8,000 copies of that audio file at its headquarters. Seems wasteful, but hey — that’s what the judge wants.
Third, there are a few minor features that might be nice to add. The main one is that you have to program your recordings on the Web — you can’t do it from your physical Wi-Fi radio. Similarly, if you’re listening to a live show on your Wi-Fi radio, there’s no Record button.
But those complaints sound like an application for the Nitpickers Society. DAR.fm is fantastic, useful, easy to use and free. It’s real TiVo for radio. It lets you time shift, of course, but also presents the entire universe of radio broadcasting in one tidy menu. No longer must you gripe about the creeping commercialism that shut down, say, your town’s NPR affiliate or ’70s reggae station. Suddenly there are 1,800 radio stations in your town — and they program their shows according to your schedule, not theirs.
You’ve complained about having nothing to listen to for the very last time.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 27, 2011
Because of an editing error, the State of the Art column on Thursday, about DAR.fm, a Web site that allows users to record any American radio show, garbled a sentence in some editions. The sentence, about a drawback to the service, should have said, “And of course, you have to program your recordings on the Web — you can’t do that from your physical Wi-Fi radio” — not “The main one is that you can’t do that from your physical Wi-Fi radio.”
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Moving Forward in E-Readers
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/technology/personaltech/09pogue.html
Moving Forward in E-Readers
By DAVID POGUE
We think we’re so modern. We think we’re hot stuff, with our touch-screen tablets, video cellphones and Internet movie downloads. But mark my words: we’re in the Paleozoic era of consumer technology.
Our grandchildren will listen to our technology tales — spotty cellphone coverage, 24-hour movie viewing windows, three-hour battery life — and burst out laughing the minute they’re out of earshot.
Take e-book readers, like the Kindle and its rivals. “Come on, Grandma. You really couldn’t read Kindle books on a Nook, or vice versa? What a dumb system!” “Tell us again why you couldn’t read Harry Potter books on e-readers?” “Grandpa, what do you mean ‘monochrome’?”
This week, though, e-book readers just took their first slimy steps out of the primordial soup.
Both Barnes & Noble and Kobo, its far less advertised rival, introduced nearly identical readers that are clearly intended to embarrass the industry leader, the Amazon Kindle.
They’re called the All-New Nook ($140) and the Kobo Touch Edition ($130).
Yes, Barnes & Noble actually calls it, and capitalizes it, “All-New NOOK.” Not only is that cloying and annoying, like you’re doing their advertising for them (see also: the exclamation point on Yahoo!), but it’s going to look really silly when it’s no longer new. What are they going to call the next models? The Even Newer NOOK? The All-New All-New NOOK? The Newest NOOK Imaginable?
These two readers have the same latest-generation, six-inch E Ink screen as the latest Kindle: supercrisp black type against very light gray. But they’re smaller, because they do away with the Kindle’s thumb keyboard. Instead, they have the infrared-sensor E Ink touch screens that debuted on much more expensive Sony e-readers.
Good call. How often do you use the keyboard anyway? Maybe about 0.01 percent of the time — when you’re typing a book’s name while shopping, or when annotating something you’re reading. The rest of the time, the keyboard just makes the Kindle bigger. And on an e-book reader, size is, so to speak, huge; after all, you’ll be holding it for hours.
In weight, the Kobo is the winner. Among its competitors — the Kindle, and the touch-screen Nook and Sony Reader — it’s the lightest. It weighs seven ounces, which makes it only slightly less likely to blow away on the beach than an actual paperback book.
The Kobo is also the least expensive brand-name model, apart from the Kindle with Special Offers ($114), which displays ads on its screen saver and in the bottom inch of the home screen.
The All-New Nook is only slightly heavier, but it’s thicker and 0.3 inch wider, which, in blazer-pocket terms, may as well be a football field. That porkiness serves a good purpose: the battery goes for two months on a charge (Wi-Fi turned off). That’s twice the life of its rivals, and almost good enough to avoid being laughed at by grandchildren.
When you hold an e-reader, most of what you’re touching is the back. Both the Kobo and the Nook have slightly rubberized hard-plastic backs. The Nook’s back panel contains a shallow oval indentation, sort of a finger well. Its soft rim provides a secure, supremely comfortable grip for your fingers.
The Kobo’s back is sculptured in a quilted pattern, like a queen-size mattress for hamsters.
Each has built-in memory for 1,000 books, plus a memory-card slot.
Barnes & Noble’s engineers have somehow managed to eliminate most of those flashes that occur every time you turn a page on an e-reader using E Ink. On the All-New Nook, you get that flash only once every six page turns. The rest of the time, each page briskly cross-fades into the next.
True, that once-every-six flash is more distracting than ever. But for the previous five pages, you’ve had a completely immersive, seamless reading experience. It’s fantastic.
The Nook’s advantages over the Kobo also include excellent control over the typeface (six fonts), font size, line spacing and even page margins. The Kobo offers only two fonts and no spacing or margin controls. It’s also slower than the Nook; sometimes you tap twice, wondering if your first tap even registered.
On both readers, you turn the page by swiping across the screen, or by just tapping the right edge. (The Nook also has physical page-turn buttons.) Hold your finger down on a word for its dictionary definition. And you move down a list by swiping up the screen, just as on a touch-screen phone.
But these are not, ahem, iPads. The screen image doesn’t actually scroll when you swipe up a list; you wait a second, and then the new list image appears all at once. Similarly, these aren’t multitouch screens. You can’t pinch or spread two fingers on the screen to shrink or reduce the type size.
Both companies make much of their social features. The Nook Friends feature lets your buddies on Twitter and Facebook see what you’re reading and lets you “lend” them books you’ve bought. (I use quotes because the feature is so lame: you can lend a given book only once in its life, for two weeks — and only books whose publishers allow the procedure.) The Kobo lets you broadcast your reading progress to Twitter or Facebook, awards you points and badges for reading, and so on.
You can read either company’s books on a Mac, Windows PC, Android phone or tablet, iPhone or iPad; technically, you don’t need to buy an e-reader machine at all. The Kobo also has reader apps for BlackBerrys, Palm Pre phones and PlayBook tablets.
Each company’s system remembers the page where you stopped when you switch gadgets (when you move from your phone to your PC, for example).
These readers both connect to their bookstores over Wi-Fi. Their e-bookstores carry pretty much the same books at the same prices.
Barnes & Noble has come light years since its first, slow, buggy e-reader (do they call it the All-Old NOOK?). The All-New model, for this nanosecond in marketing time, offers the best combination of size, shape, battery life and features on the market; it’s a superb reading machine. But remember that buying an e-reader means locking yourself into that company’s bookstore. Idiotic, incompatible copy-protection schemes mean that you can’t read a Kindle book on a Nook, or a Nook book on a Kobo, or a Sony book on an iPad.
So carefully consider which corporation you want to marry. For example, Barnes & Noble’s color Nook may not be All-New, but it has a color touch screen, a rudimentary Web browser and an e-mail program. Amazon is about due for a new Kindle, too — it’s been 10 months since its last new model; fans hope for a color touch-screen Kindle combining all Amazon’s offerings, including books, music and video.
All of this is clear evidence that the clunky primitiveness of the Paleozoic e-book era is finally drawing to a close. At this rate, before you know it, e-book readers will arrive solidly in the Jurassic period.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 8, 2011
An earlier version of this column incorrectly reported that the new Nook and Kobo readers were the first to have infrared-sensor E-ink touch screens.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 8, 2011
An earlier version of this column omitted mention of Barnes & Noble's e-book app for Android tablets.
When Food Kills
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12kristof.html
When Food Kills
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.
Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.
Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.
Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.
Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system — I say this as an Oregon farmboy who once raised sheep, cattle and hogs — is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.
The Food and Drug Administration reported recently that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock, not humans. And 90 percent of the livestock antibiotics are administered in their food or water, typically to healthy animals to keep them from getting sick when they are confined in squalid and crowded conditions.
The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.
This cavalier use of low-level antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The upshot is that ailments can become pretty much untreatable.
The Infectious Diseases Society of America, a professional organization of doctors, cites the case of Josh Nahum, a 27-year-old skydiving instructor in Colorado. He developed a fever from bacteria that would not respond to medication. The infection spread and caused tremendous pressure in his skull.
Some of his brain was pushed into his spinal column, paralyzing him. He became a quadriplegic depending on a ventilator to breathe. Then, a couple of weeks later, he died.
There’s no reason to link Nahum’s case specifically to agricultural overuse, for antibiotic resistance has multiple causes that are difficult to unravel. Doctors overprescribe them. Patients misuse them. But looking at numbers, by far the biggest element of overuse is agriculture.
We would never think of trying to keep our children healthy by adding antibiotics to school water fountains, because we know this would breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It’s unconscionable that Big Ag does something similar for livestock.
Louise Slaughter, the only microbiologist in the United States House of Representatives, has been fighting a lonely battle to curb this practice — but industrial agricultural interests have always blocked her legislation.
“These statistics tell the tale of an industry that is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” Slaughter said. “As they feed antibiotics to animals to keep them healthy, they are making our families sicker by spreading these deadly strains of bacteria.”
Vegetarians may think that they’re immune, but they’re not. E. coli originates in animals but can spill into water used to irrigate vegetables, contaminating them. The European E. coli outbreak apparently arose from bean sprouts grown on an organic farm in Germany.
One of the most common antibiotic-resistant pathogens is MRSA, which now kills more Americans annually than AIDS and adds hugely to America’s medical costs. MRSA has many variants, and one of the more benign forms now is widespread in hog barns and among people who deal with hogs. An article this year in a journal called Applied and Environmental Microbiology reported that MRSA was found in 70 percent of hogs on one farm.
Another scholarly journal reported that MRSA was found in 45 percent of employees working at hog farms. And the Centers for Disease Control reported this April that this strain of bacteria has now been found in a worker at a day care center in Iowa.
Other countries are moving to ban the feeding of antibiotics to livestock. But in the United States, the agribusiness lobby still has a hold on Congress.
The European outbreak should shake people up. “It points to the whole broken system,” notes Robert Martin of the Pew Environment Group.
We need more comprehensive inspections in the food system, more testing for additional strains of E. coli, and more public education (always wash your hands after touching raw meat, and don’t use the same cutting board for meat and vegetables). A great place to start reforms would be by banning the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.
Hidden Costs of Your 401(k)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/your-money/401ks-and-similar-plans/11money.html
Revealing Hidden Costs of Your 401(k)
By RON LIEBER
Your 401(k), 403(b) or other similar plan isn’t free. In fact, it’s probably pretty expensive, costing you tens of thousands of dollars in lost retirement money over the course of your career.
But just try to figure out how those costs break down. Several weeks ago, I talked about the biggest cost, the underlying expenses of the mutual funds in your plan. You can keep those low by begging your employer for more low-cost index funds, which have the added benefit of outperforming most actively managed funds over the long haul.
But there are also various administrative fees that come with a workplace retirement plan, and you usually pay for those, too. It is the rare employer, however, that breaks out those costs for you.
Instead, the costs are embedded in the expenses of many of the mutual funds you pick. In a practice known as revenue sharing, fund companies refund some of the expenses to the service provider running your plan to pay for its administrative costs.
This all seems very tidy at first glance, since neither the employer nor the employee has to write a check each year to pay for running the retirement plan. But the system tends to disproportionately punish both big savers and people investing in actively managed mutual funds, since people with higher balances and higher expense ratios on their investments end up subsidizing their fellow workers.
At long last, the Labor Department, which oversees 401(k) plans, is forcing everyone involved to confront the hard numbers. Starting next year, it is making investment companies itemize all of the various expenses employers are paying and make the underlying mutual fund costs distinct from administrative ones.
Workers, meanwhile, will get account statements that make their mutual fund fees clearer and will at least learn that revenue sharing is going on.
The Labor Department claims to have no strong feelings on the appropriateness of revenue sharing. “I’m not sure we have any opinion on this,” said Phyllis C. Borzi, the assistant secretary of labor who oversees the department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration. “We surely don’t have one right now. Whether over the long term we might have one is not clear.”
But it is pretty clear that the department hopes the new disclosure rules will lead to some good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, particularly among smaller employers that often have no idea that any of this is going on behind the scenes.
“It’s so cloudy, so you can get away with a lot,” said Chad Parks, president and chief executive of the Online 401(k), which helps small companies start plans and charges employees and employers flat fees for the privilege. “It’s got to be one of the last industries where you’re paying for a service but you don’t actually have any idea how much you’re paying for it.”
•
So how did the system evolve into something so opaque that it required government intervention?
When 401(k) plans first emerged in the 1980s, employers, also known as plan sponsors in the world of workplace retirement plans, generally paid the administrative costs. They often put employee contributions in the hands of outside money managers, possibly those who were already running the company’s pension plan.
Then two things changed, according to Ted Benna, who created the first 401(k) plan. First, human resources departments came under pressure to cut costs. “That was the main motivation,” he said. Second, employees started agitating for investments that they could actually look up in the newspaper every day.
The solution was to put 401(k) money in mutual funds, and the fund companies were happy to help. Many of them charged employers nothing — and put participants into the fund companies’ own mutual funds, using the profits from the funds to cover the costs of setting up and running new 401(k) plans. When employees eventually demanded a broader choice of fund families, other fund companies realized that the quickest way to get onto an employer’s 401(k) menu was to refund some money from the investment fees they already charged each fund’s investors to help the employer pay for its plan.
It all seems pretty logical, until you stop to examine the winners and losers. “There’s a bit of a Robin Hood discussion around whether a plan should charge the rich to pay for the poor,” said Steve Utkus, a principal at Vanguard, which does not pay employers and their retirement plan administrators any revenue sharing but accepts it from other fund companies when it serves as a record keeper for a company’s retirement plan.
Think about it this way: If, say, 20 basis points (each basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point) of a retirement plan participant’s fund expenses go toward administrative costs each year, someone with a $100,000 balance contributes $200, 10 times as much as the $20 paid by someone with an identical allocation but only a $10,000 balance. That would presumably raise some eyebrows, especially if employees knew that a large plan might need only $25 or $50 a person annually to pay those administrative costs.
A 401(k) plan provider’s representatives might just shrug their shoulders at this. After all, that’s how mutual funds outside of 401(k) plans work, too; expenses are mutualized by definition.
“Many plan sponsors view that as fair and equitable, and it encourages younger people to get in,” said Ralph Derbyshire, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Fidelity. The same thing is true for lower-paid workers, too. After all, nobody wants to discourage workers from participating, and using a flat annual fee might scare off employees with low or no balances, given that the fee might eat up 5 or 10 percent of their contributions in the first year.
Mr. Parks, of the Online 401(k) has trouble with the Robin Hood approach, though. “If you make $150,000 and I make $30,000 and we want to buy the same Toyota FJ Cruiser, should you have to pay more?” he said
Then there’s the cross-subsidy issue. Let’s say an employer sets up a retirement plan that has some expensive actively managed funds that engage in revenue sharing and some cheaper Vanguard index funds or other investments that don’t. The people in the active funds will be paying the administrative costs for the retirement plans of those who are only in the Vanguard funds. In fact, the plan literally can’t pay for itself unless a bunch of people pile into the active funds.
That has the potential to make investors in actively managed funds losers on two counts: They are likely to earn less money over time because of the long-term underperformance of actively managed funds and they’re also paying the expenses of the people three cubicles over who have made different investment choices.
“Plan sponsors are becoming increasingly sensitive that this is difficult to explain to participants, and it might drive behavior that is unintended,” said Lori Lucas, who is the defined-contribution practice leader at Callan Associates, a consulting firm.
So why not get rid of revenue sharing, and levy a separate fee to cover each account’s costs? “I think a lot of it remains a participant P.R. issue,” Ms. Lucas said. “If there was no revenue sharing, they’d have to state an explicit dollar amount for fees. It would look like the fees had increased, and now participants think they are paying more.”
In fact, many of them wouldn’t be paying more at all. Moreover, such a transformation would probably persuade employers to abandon some of their high-cost actively managed funds and include more index funds and exchange-traded funds in their plans. That could lead to better returns over the long haul, which would benefit everyone.
So let’s hope that the improved transparency literally rubs employers’ noses in what they are choosing to make their workers pay. While larger employers may already have a pretty good sense of how all this works, the smaller companies may simply not know that there is a better way to run a retirement plan because the chief financial officer has 50 other things to keep track of.
That said, the consciousness-raising starts with all of us — we who do not pick the investments that end up on our retirement plan menu but must pay the bill anyway. We still have a lot to learn, and it’s hard to understate the importance of all of this given that it is the most important component of many financial plans.
“I don’t think people understand any of this stuff,” said Ms. Borzi of the Labor Department. “Which is why we undertook this project in the first place.”
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