Republished with permission from TelecomTV One . Martyn Warwick is board director, Telecom TV

Biased? FCC calls location-based tracking a “boon to the economy” even as it sets up forum to debate the issue

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is to hold a day-long “public education forum” to “study the risks and benefits” of location-based services and the tracking of smartphone users. Yes, a whole day. We are not worthy – obviously.

Yes, there’s to be a full eight hours of waffle (minus coffee breaks and lunch of course) with half the day given over to Apple, Google and their ilk during which time they can bring their expensive heavy guns to bear and tell the world how great location tracking is and how misguided are those who oppose it.

“Consumer advocates” have also been invited to the June 28 event but critics say the day is likely to be hi-jacked by vested interests favouring tracking technologies and will be little more than a platform from which wireless carriers and technology companies will trumpet the benefits of location tracking whilst deriding the arguments of those who oppose such intrusions into personal liberty.

The FCC has finally be forced to do something – minimal though it may be – because of growing consumer concern and unrest following the revelation last month that iPhones routinely collect and transmit location data – even when a user turns off the tracking software. This secretly and illicitly collected data, Apple acknowledges, is then held for up to a year. It also transpires that Google’s Android-based mobile handsets also do something remarkably similar.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which is exhibiting rather more concern for the privacy rights of smartphones users than is the FCC, is also involved in the forum and has said that not only does it intent to write a report on location-bsed tracking and services but will also press the FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, to regulate on the issue – something which the FCC should be doing off its own bat in any case.

In a what might best be described as a reluctant and biased statement, the FCC says, “Over the last few years, location-based services have become an important part of the mobile market and a boon to the economy.” Says who – apart from Apple and Google that is?

The statement continues, “Commercial location-based services include applications that help consumers find the lowest-priced product nearby or the nearest restaurant… But recent reports have raised concerns about the location-based information that is gathered when consumers use mobile devices.”

The June event will be the third time Apple has been called to give testimony on the issue and, who knows, maybe this time will prove to be lucky for exploited iPhone users. I would’t bet on it though. After all there’s a ton of money to be made from selling location data to advertisers and consumer privacy comes way, way down the list after a consideration like that.

Topics to be (briefly) aired at the forum include: “How location-based services work, their benefits and risks and information parents should know about location tracking of children using mobile devices.”

Elsewhere, an anonymous FCC apparatchik says, “While the use of location data has spurred innovation, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan recognizes that consumer apprehension about privacy can also act as a barrier to the adoption and utilization of broadband and mobile devices”.

This has got “whitewash” written all over it.

Reprinted with permission from online community newspaper MinnPost, Minnesota, USA

Fifth and last article in a five-part science/travel series

The entrance to the Palazzo Bo, or Ox Palace (photo: Jake Otto)

Padova, Italy — I have been posting from Italy all week, where I have been talking with leading European science journalists about science debates. Most of the world’s great challenges now revolve around science policy issues, yet we are paralyzed on many of them because of politics. Science debates bring policymakers together with science and the public, highlighting key issues and helping to break logjams.

The Palazzo Bo coats of arms (photo: Jake Otto)

The ceiling of the entry to the Palazzo Bo looking out toward the courtyard (photo: Jake Otto)

This aspect is lost on many modern scientists, who seek to disavow association with science’s political dimensions, and, as a result have ceded some measure of public definition of reality back to ideologues.

Galileo simply spoke about his observations through a better telescope that could show the planets more clearly. Shadows on Jupiter, he told students, confirm what Copernicus had already postulated: the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. You can look for yourself, he told church officials. But they refused to look through his telescope.

Inherently political

Like many scientists, Galileo underestimated politics, and didn’t realize that the simple statement of an observable fact is a political act. It either affirms or denies the current power structure.

Consider this quote from Galileo’s 1633 indictment by the Roman Catholic Church, at the time the seat of world power:

1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

Therefore…, invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo…have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture.

Why did the church go to such great lengths to discredit this solitary man? For the same reason we fight political battles today over issues like climate change, and right-wing US senators seek to discredit scientists like Michael Mann, whose similarly iconic “hockey stick graph” charts the rise in average global temperatures.

Science sides with observation and measurement, not vested interests. Failing to acknowledge science’s inherently political nature leaves both science and America vulnerable to attack by anti-science thinking from both the right and left—thinking which has come to dominate American politics in the early 21st century—and leads to political rigidity and paralysis.

Modern-day call to defend science

Science has proved to be more powerful and beneficial to humans than anything previously developed. It has built up knowledge that has doubled our life spans, multiplied the productivity of our farms by more than 35 times, freed untold millions from manual farm labor and a life that was, in the words of 15th century writer Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” a “war of every man against every man.” It has given us tremendous insights into our place in the cosmos, into the inner workings of our own bodies, and into our capacity as human beings to exercise our highest aspirations of love, hope, creativity, curiosity, compassion, humility, courage and charity.

This good has come from the scientific process of questioning assumptions about the universe, dreaming up experiments that test those questions and, based on observations, incrementally building knowledge about nature that is independent of beliefs. A scientifically testable claim can be shown to be either probably true, or to be false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a pope, a congressman, or a common citizen. Because of this, science is anti-authoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power.

I came to Italy to talk about science and politics, but as I leave Padova, I am struck by how each generation from Galileo’s to my own must defend science, democracy and freedom of thought, as a moral imperative.

In that regard, we could learn from the courage of those early Italians.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and CEO of sciencedebate.org. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie “House of Sand and Fog” and won the Alfred P Sloan Foundation’s award for best science screenplay for “Hubble.” He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film “Dreams of a Dying Heart.” He lives in Minnesota, USA.

By Shawn Lawrence Otto

Reprinted with permission from online community newspaper MinnPost, Minnesota, USA

Fourth in a five-part science/travel series

Reprinted with permission from online community newspaper MinnPost, Minnesota, USA

Third in a five-part science/travel series

Torino, Italy and Geneva, Switzerland — The thing about Italy is that it teaches you to go with the flow. Those who cannot are naturally selected out of the population by early heart attacks, emigration or some other process of elimination. Italians who are left are the only ones who can survive their own system. You always hear them saying things like “No problem” and No worries”. Today is an example of why that Zen-Italian attitude is important.

The Porto Nuovo train station is a grand dame located near the center of Torino. We walk there from our hotel, about 20 blocks through winding streets with flagstone sidewalks. We arrive at the station in plenty of time and look up to see that our train to Milan — where we were to make our connection to Venice — has been cancelled. There is a strike in Milan and the train station there is closed.

We wait in line for the customer service window, where the attendant says my prepaid ticket is worthless. I need to go to a ticket window and get a refund. But this being Friday, the busiest travel day in Italy, they are all closed. The only alternative is to use self-service machines to purchase another ticket going through Bologna. Then, when I get to Venice, I can go to a ticket window and ask for a refund.

I go to the ticket machine lines, and when I get to the front there are not enough tickets left on the train for our party. I book the next available train, which will take us through two other cities and get us in about 8:40 [20:40] in the evening. Not ideal, but hey, it’s Italy. I go ahead and make the reservation, which, being rush hour, is more than double the price.

But then, just to be sure, I check again. This time the same parameters yield a one-stop route that costs only one and a half times as much. Back to customer service. I have time. Eventually I get the second set of tickets marked cancelled. I will have to get a refund on those later as well. At the machines I buy the third set at the lower price and more advantageous route.

So here I sit, next to a man who has never heard of deodorant, waiting for six hours to pass and writing the post I promised about the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) near Geneva.

No worries.

Cern

Cern, the smaller circle, and the LHC (larger circle) that runs underground in France and Switzerland (photo: D Bertolla / Cern)

Dominique Bertola is the bouncing, gregarious head of visitor information at Cern, and he is a natural born teacher. He has the rare ability among scientists to take the complicated and make it simple and interesting.

This talent is often looked down upon in the scientific community in a sort of naive snobbery. Astronomer Carl Sagan, perhaps the greatest science communicator ever, had a show called “Cosmos” that was seen by an estimated 600 million people around the world. But Sagan was rejected by his peers for admission to the National Academy of Sciences. This division is part of what I am trying to overcome as I globe trot promoting science debates.

Dominique brims with enthusiasm as he shows me the massive equipment.

The Large Hadron Collider is Cern’s new machine for trying to make some discoveries about the underlying nature of the universe. It is located in a donut-shaped tunnel 100 meters or roughly 35 stories below ground. The donut is huge — a whopping 27 kilometers (16.8 miles) in circumference, running under Switzerland and France. It’s filled not with cream, but with vacuum tubes, superconducting busbars, and electromagnets that make up the core of the particle accelerator.

Racing at the proton track

The way the collider works is kind of like a big slot car race track, except instead of slot cars, the physicists use packets of protons that they shoot into a pair of tubes, each about three inches in diameter. The tubes have the air sucked out of them, to a much higher vacuum than on the surface of the moon. They run side by side around the big 27 km circle, and the beams of proton packets race in opposite directions in each tube, until physicists guide them into collisions in the center of four huge detectors — each about 40 meters long by 30 meters high and about 10,000 metric tons (22 million pounds).

The detectors measure the speed and trajectory and energy of the particles produced by the smash-ups.

As you have probably figured out, there’s a bit of a problem. Protons, like any particle, like to fly in a straight line. If you tie a rock to the end of a string, spin it around your head and let it go, it won’t keep going in a circle. It will fly off in a straight line.

To get the protons to fly in a circle, particle physicists at the collider use a very strong magnetic field. They create it with wafers of electromagnetic metal plates stacked one next to the other like radiator fins along the entire length of the tubes. This magnetic field needs to be really strong because the protons are circling the 27km donut at almost the speed of light – so fast that they make about 11,000 revolutions per second.

Cooling down to powering up

To get the magnetic field strong enough to keep them in the perfect center of the tube takes incredible power — Cern uses about the same amount of power as the entire city of Geneva, over 100 megawatts.

The problem is that getting that much power down there creates a lot of heat and resistance in the electric wires. The engineers working at Cern figured out a novel solution. They use a combination of metals that, when cooled to near absolute zero, become superconductors. And all electrical resistance suddenly disappears. The 10,000 amps of electricity that once required cables the size of a linebacker’s thigh can now flow over a busbar the size of a butter knife blade with no power loss or heat.

This “cryogenic” cooling is achieved by circulating liquid helium through pipes that run along next to the electromagnetic plates. Like liquid nitrogen that your doctor uses to freeze a wart, liquid helium is just a few degrees above absolute zero, or minus 271 degrees Celsius (about 456 degrees below zero farenheit).

The I-35W bridge problem

Cooling the collider introduces another problem, though, and this is what led to the famous failure a few days after the collider’s start-up.

Things contract when they get cold. You see this on bridges — for example, the I-35W bridge that collapsed on us in Minnesota: bridges have joints that slide to allow for movement as their metal structures expand and contract with temperature changes. The same goes for the metal that makes up the collider — but at this incredible scale the effect is enormous. As the collider’s 27 km circumference is cooled, it shrinks by a whopping 80 meters (262 feet).

To allow for this movement without breakage, the collider’s engineers built in about 1,800 flex joints every 15 meters or so — tight enough to retain the near perfect vacuum in the pipes but flexible enough to absorb the shrinkage.

At these joints the multiple superconducting busbars are bolted to one another. But one of those thousands of joints was bad. Heat built up and began to melt the busbar. This caused the liquid helium to heat up as well. It turned back to gas, the superconducting effect was lost, all the magnets in several sections suddenly had electrical resistance, they heated up too, the helium blew and the collider crashed.

High-speed smashups

It’s easy to see in retrospect how this happened. Each system is relatively simple in its parts. But taken all together the collider is the most complex instrument ever built. When something blows it can set off a chain reaction.

After a year of studying the problem, rebuilding, and installing new safeguards, the collider has run continuously. The packets of protons are accelerated by the magnets in opposing directions.

Then the physicists steer the two beams into a head-on collision and whammo!

The protons explode into their constituent subatomic particles, some known, and some unknown.

That is what physicists want to study. They are like two-year-olds smashing matchbox cars into each other at higher and higher speeds to see what parts fly off – but here the knowledge gained can change the world. Discoveries from particle physics have led, for example, to the information age.

But can they get the Italian trains to run on time? Wait — no worries.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and chief executive officer of sciencedebate.org. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie “House of Sand and Fog” and won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s award for best science screenplay for “Hubble.” He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film “Dreams of a Dying Heart.” He lives in Minnesota.

Reprinted with permission from MinnPost, a Minnesota USA online community newspaper.

Second in a five-part science/travel series.

Tiny villages nestle into each valley in the Italian Alps, under their local castle and church (photo: Jake Otto)

Geneva, Switzerland — In Italy they like to eat late. Most people don’t even head out to the restaurants until about 9. And in Torino there are many of them, mostly spilling out onto the sidewalks. In the old town center, an area of winding streets and tall brick and stone buildings, it’s sometimes hard to tell what is restaurant and what is street – tables are placed out onto the pavement and cars wind between them. They seem to all merge into an outdoor party full of a pleasing mix of wood smoke from the grills, fresh and delicious seafood, Fiat exhaust and wine.

Which explains why this morning came especially early. We had to be at the old Fiat plant, now a huge shopping, hotel, and conference complex, at 6:45 a.m. to catch a bus to Cern — the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The Fiat plant is about a two mile walk from the hotel. It was still that sort of liquid cool before what you could just tell was going to be a hot summer morning.

We ducked into a patisseria along the way and grabbed a cappuccino and some pastries — and let me tell you, you have not lived until you’ve had a china cup full of Italian cappuccino and a still-warm pastry at 6:15 in the morning. You can’t get anything to go here — in fact Torino is the capital of the global Slow Food movement — a pastiche of aligned ideas and practices from extremely fresh, high quality local foods to a certain attitude about life that rejects fast, cheap and unmindful. But the service is quick nevertheless. This morning, we were in, out and happy in less than five minutes. Add that we got to drink and eat on china near the open door, not out of a paper cup and a wax bag, and you have to love it.

Crossing the Alps to Cern

The Cern trip is one of the last activities at ESOF — the Euroscience Open Forum. I am here to talk about U.S. science policy and politics, and how we organized Science Debate 2008 between Barack Obama and John McCain.  Several European countries have since copied the initiative, hoping to elevate science in the national dialog and in the minds of elected officials.  At least in the case of Barack Obama, it worked.

We’re taking a coach bus over and through the Italian, French and Swiss Alps to Geneva, Switzerland. Cern is famous to moviegoers as the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the most complex scientific instrument on the planet. In the movie “Angels and Demons” it was the source of the anti-matter the bad guys stole to try to end the world. In reality, you encounter antimatter all the time, but in subatomic particles that are almost immediately destroyed as they contact matter.

In fact, physics formulas suggest there should be roughly the same amount of matter as antimatter in the universe. The extreme rarity of antimatter today is a puzzle that scientists are trying to understand.

Another way you may have heard recently of the Large Hadron Collider was in media speculation and even lawsuits over worries that a small black hole created in theory by one experiment could grow and swallow the planet. (You can read Cern’s reassurances regarding that worry here.) This proves a point that I was invited to Europe to make: that when science is presented in ways that are relevant to people’s lives, i.e. through politics and ethics, they are deeply interested.

From brick barns to ubiquitous tobacco

On the road north into the Alps we see some of the interesting differences between Europe and the United States. The corn is tall here, just like at home, but the barns and silos are mostly brick, sometimes even combined with houses on the second floor, which draw heat from the animals below.

Another difference is how quickly the cities fall off into the countryside and farm fields. Europe grew up before the car, making cities much more compact. What we think of as typical suburban sprawl is nonexistent. Also, public transportation is common, fast and cheap — and the daily walk to and from the train station means most Europeans are svelte by America’s Shrek-like standards.

Of course, Italy is famous for its food — and I don’t mean the tomato paste stuff of cliché. Italy is surrounded on three sides by water and both seafood and meat as in carne are plentiful, fresh, delicious and cheap.

Add walking to the amazing food and you have a pretty healthy situation — which Europeans immediately compensate for by smoking like diesel engines. Tobbaccarias are everywhere and are also where you send the children to get other everyday necessities, like bus tickets.

Tobacco vending machines also are ubiquitous — but to use them you have to insert your universal health insurance card, something Americans would likely bristle at, after they got done bristling at the idea of having a universal health insurance card.

Spiky mountains, tunnels, Cern

The bus climbs up into the Italian Alps, which are unlike anything in North America with the possible exception of Estes Park. Steep, spiky mountains like the Matterhorn are the norm. They stream with long waterfalls and the valleys rush with gray rivers. Tiny villages nestle into each valley under their local castle and church, and vineyards climb up mountain terraces behind. The buildings are most often roofed with large diamond-shaped slabs of raw gray slate that look like they’ve been in service for five hundred years, and probably have.

We climb higher and pass through the 11,611 meter-long (7.2 miles long) Mont Blanc tunnel. Coming out the other side, we are in France. The vista expands outward and upward. Gone are the vineyards and the slate-roofed houses. Here are wider valleys, and the broad-roofed Alpine chalets you have seen in photos. And here the mountains expand upward, too, another several hundred meters, into broad white icecaps that shine brilliantly in the mid-morning sun.

These continue down through steep Alpine valleys and tunnel after tunnel through into the Swiss Alps and gradually fall off into the wide farm fields surrounding the South of Geneva.

Cern itself is not a new facility. Originally built in 1954, it was the first cooperative venture of its kind. Particle physicists working at Cern have produced many wonders over the years, including inventing the World Wide Web to help them share data at light speed with satellite research centers and universities across five continents.

What is new at Cern is the Large Hadron Collider. It accelerates protons to almost the speed of light, in circular beams, making about 11,000 revolutions per second as they race through a tunnel 100 meters (328 feet) under Switzerland and France, 27 kilometers (16.8 miles) in circumference.

Tomorrow, I’ll take you deep into the heart of the Large Hadron Collider and tell you what angels and demons I found there.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and CEO of ScienceDebate2008.com. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie “House of Sand and Fog” and won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s award for best science screenplay for “Hubble.” He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film “Dreams of a Dying Heart.” He lives in Minnesota.

Reprinted with permission from MinnPost, a Minnesota USA online community newsaper, first in a 5-part travel/science series

A gondolier awaits a fare on the island of Burano (photo: Jake Otto)

Torino, Italy — I am posting from the Euroscience Open Forum in Torino, Italy. Torino is a beautiful older city of about 1 million nestled along the Po River in northern Italy at the foot of the Alps. It was, for a brief spell in the late 1800s, the capital of Italy. It is full of grand palaces and manors hundreds of years old, but the building getting the most use this week is the huge old Fiat plant, now known as the Lingotto Conference Center, the venue for ESOF.

The reason I’m here is to talk about U.S. Science policy and world politics. I got here the other day, sans luggage, and had to go straight from the airport into a press conference, then out to dinner with my hosts, a bunch of science journalists from around Europe. After some amazing food and wine under the stars by violin and scooter engine, I chose to walk the four miles back to the hotel.

As I did, I stumbled upon an outdoor exhibition of “green porn” in the old town square. Apparently this was part of the Science in the City program and had been billed as a movie about animals mating but turned out to be a bunch of old scientists on a stage talking about sexual and asexual reproduction. This may be the worst example of a scientist’s idea of how to sex up science to make it interesting to lay people.

Still there were about two hundred people sitting in chairs in the square, but I think it was a bit of a bait and switch. I can’t possibly guess what these Italians thought of when they heard “green porn” but for me it definitely wasn’t old scientists.

Science poised to transform lives
The larger issue of elevating science in the public dialog is a big part of why I’m here. In fact, I gave a presentation about it at Euroscience, headlining a panel on science debates. There have been several science debates in various European countries now, generally in the context of parliamentary or national elections, all patterned on a science debate I helped organize in 2008 between Barack Obama and John McCain. The other panelists in the latest session included Hajo Neubert, president of the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations, as well as science debate organizers from Germany, Italy and the UK.

Shawn Lawrence Otto

The idea behind ScienceDebate is simple. Most of the world’s major political issues revolve around science policy, from energy and climate change to ocean health, biodiversity loss, global economic competitiveness, and dozens of others. At the same time, the number of scientists around the world is expanding rapidly, all connected by the internet. This is causing an explosion of new knowledge that will utterly transform our lives over the coming few decades. Topics that are barely on the public radar now, like genomics, nanotechnology, and geoengineering have the potential to become the political lightening rods of tomorrow.

By Martyn Warwick, editor in chief, Telecom TV

Republished with permission from Telecom TV

The New York Times, aka the “Gray Lady” of 8th Avenue, one of a select few US “newspapers of record” has promoted itself to the top spot on the pedestal of press pedantry by prohibiting journalists from referring to to Twitter messages as “tweets”. Martyn Warwick reports.

I have been in America for the past couple of weeks so there’ll be a few quirky US-centric stories from me over the next few days. And I celebrate my return to Blighty’s shores by beginning with this one.

One of the great strengths of the English language is its mutability: many new words are coined and come into common usage every year both in speech and in print and eventually some of them even make it to that ultimate arbiter of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, there are those who refuse easily to accept such changes and The Times of London newspaper has a long tradition of defending the use of archaic English terminology long after the rest of the population routinely uses new (and therefore suspect) new words.

However, on this occasion the Thunderer has been outdone by its transAtlantic cousin. The New York Times employs Mr. Phillip Corbett as its “Standards Editor” and that gentleman has circulated a message to writing staff (this time apparently via the strange new medium of the electronic dissemination of written communications over the invisible ether rather than on parchment) informing them that Twitter messages may not be referred to as “tweets” – even though that is what everyone else on Earth calls them.

It seems it’s that “common” bit that so exercises Mr. Corbett. He writes “outside of ornithological contexts, ‘tweet’ has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.”

He goes on, “Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And ‘tweet’ -  as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three.

Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.”

I say! Great Scott! What is the world coming to? Thinking-up and using new words like that without permission or the sanction of committee? It’ll have to stop. Standards, you know, standards.

However, there is some good news for hacks paid by the word. Corbett will permit the use of “deft” alternatives such as ” a Twitter message” or “a message posted on Twitter”. What’s that rattling noise? Why, it’s Mr. Pitman getting up to V3 in his grave. “Rotate”.

But, please note, it’s not that the standard’s editor has his head completely in the sand. Mr. Corbett does accept that “new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.”

He adds, “It doesn’t help that the word [tweet] itself seems so inherently silly” but does accept that “Someday, ‘tweet’ may be as common as ‘e-mail.” Gotta love that hyphenated “e-mail”, so that we all understand its shorthand for electronic mail – lest we forget. Perish the thought.

It’s good to see that even in this time of unprecedented crisis for newspapers and as the industry struggles to remain relevant in the age of instant electronic communications, that someone will keep the flag flying even as the ship goes down.

The New York Times has been in continual publication since 1851. Peter Mark Roget, who compiled his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases rather earlier, in 1805, defines the good old word “twit” variously as “travesty”, “farce”, “ridicule” and “hold in derision”. If the cap fits…… or, perhaps, in the special case of the New York Times, it it should be if the snood, capuchon, glengarry, topee, toque, peruke, beaver, cowl or wimple fits. I’ll leave it to you to make your own deft – or daft – choice.

E-asy to vote

Voting has never been easier. I always thought it was cool to wake up on the Sunday morning of voting day, and go on down to the voting place, which in my case was the local gymnasium. When I moved across the border to France, things changed. As one of the many Swiss abroad, I could only vote by mail.

Now there’s another option.  For the first time, the Swiss abroad who are registered to vote in Geneva may vote by internet. There is really nothing to it. Once you go to the secure server, you’re asked to key in the 16 digit voting card number (the voting card is the one you usually put your date of birth on and sign), then you vote, you confirm, and it’s done. It really is that simple. This is a demonstration of how it works, in English.

In addition to all the Swiss abroad, residents of 11 communes (Anières, Bernex, Chêne-Bourg, Collonge-Bellerive, Cologny, Grand-Saconnex, Onex, Perly-Certoux, Plan les Ouates, Thônex and Vandoeuvres) can vote electronically. The vote is limited to 20 percent of the electorate because there are two federal issues on the ballot, which need to be approved by both a majority of the popular vote and by a majority of the cantons.

The federal council limits the vote to 20 percent of the canton’s electorate by means of the 1978 law on political rights, as amended for electronic voting.

Recently, I went to buy a mobile phone, and came out of the store with a computer, printer and MP-3 player.  Now, those of you that know me can confirm I’m usually a level-headed guy who doesn’t throw money out the window. So what happened ?

I recently became interested by the new Apple iPhone 3GS, because it contains a number of functions that I can see myself use on a daily basis; I was especially interested by the recently included video camera, which means I can now use it for a new project I’m working on. After lurking in the shadows for a while, I decided to go to the Apple Store to check it out. And there, it happened. Not only did I buy an iPhone, but I also sprung for a brand new Macbook Pro and a printer !

I decided to analyse what happened, and here’s what came out: Apple provides you with a brand experience that is more guaranteed to make you buy than the average carpet salesman in a Moroccan soukh …

Making Eye Contact

From the moment you enter an Apple Store, the world seems to be in harmony. I mean, aside from all the fresh-looking, uniformly dressed 20-somethings who seem to “hang out” there rather than work and the beautifully designed store, it all just … looks the biz.

Everything, from in-store displays over counters to on-the-wall projections says “Welcome to our world”. But it says so in a very subtle and enticing way: there is no hard-sell in sight, staff seem relaxed yet helpful and there is plenty of opportunity to “interact with the product”. In fact, at first, interacting with the product seems to be what it’s all about …

The first encounter

Inevitably, at some point you’re looking for some help (unless you just came in to check your e-mail, which is what plenty of teenagers seem to do). Staff members are easy to spot, very helpful and – most importantly – there always seems to be someone around to help you in a reasonable amount of time. Again, there is no hard sell: staff is confident about the product, and many are avid users themselves – with more than one telling me they made the switch from PC themselves.

What I found is that they’ll tell you the truth, and let you make up your own mind about whether or not you want to buy. In fact, just to show you how much they value your business, they’ll set up a personalized shopping experience – and that’s where it all comes together.

Getting Up Close & Personal

Let’s be honest here: where else but Apple (and possibly Tiffany’s) would you make an appointment to shop ? Well, I was curious to try it, so I did. According to Apple, ”Personal Shopping offers you free, uninterrupted time with a knowledgeable Specialist (note the “caps S”) who can give you a personal demonstration of any Apple product, offer advice, and answer any questions you might have.”

Sounds expensive (and from Apple’s perspective, it probably is) but the point is this: for an hour, Apple gets what is commonly known as “a captive audience”. In marketing terms, that is priceless. One by one, the “Specialist” answered all my questions, gradually taking away all my objections.

The Business End

Personal shopping over, I was free to go – I mean, no strings attached. Come and see us if you like, and if not, that’s fine too. So I did – for a day or so.

Next day, I went back and came out with more bags than a New York socialite shopping on 5th Avenue. And know what ? Unlike that bag you bought that was really not what you wanted, or the overpriced car you got talked into, I am slowly discovering the benefits of the Mac – no buyer’s remorse, no regrets. Simply put: the product delivers on its promise.

Post-play

From the Apple employee spending 15 minutes in a queue to my mobile phone company on his personal iPhone to the guy taking another 15 minutes making sure I was fully set for my rebates (what, you didn’t think I was that impulsive did you ?), they all made sure I was 100 % set before leaving the store.

Did I mention I just got an e-mail asking me to review my in-store experience ?

The Apple Experience

The point is this: Apple does an amazing job at marketing their product in an integrated and fully reinforced way. They are experts at meticulously designing an experience that is sure to maximize the chances of you buying their products.

• 100 % On Brand - everything, from the people to the place to the product, at Apple is on-brand;
• Everything Seems To Revolve Around YOU - the entire shopping experience is designed to make you feel like you (the customer) truly are king;
• Five-Senses Experience - shopping at Apple is a five-senses experience, involving plenty of opportunities for touching, hearing, seeing, feeling and – perhaps in the future – smelling ?
• They walk their talk - the quality feel of the products, employee attitude and even the packaging all serve to reinforce an overall impression of luxurious cool and style;
• It doesn’t stop there - for a small fee, you can continue to enjoy the Apple experience: from one-to-one training sessions over specialized clinics to their MobileMe-platform, Apple strives to build an ongoing customer relationship.

Regardless of how you feel about Apple and their products, from a marketer’s perspective, they are extremely good at what they (need to) do: make myth and sell product.

Poster for the Madrid Book Fair?

Peter Gaechter lives in France, near Geneva

By Peter Gaechter

The other day I received an email with an attachment.  The subject line said it was the poster of the Madrid Book Fair and it shows a woman being embraced by a wall of words. The poster comes with a poem ascribed to Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner.

Don’t ask me to take something at face value, especially when it comes attached to a mail. I decided to test the new, improved Google search engine that the company announced on 12 May at their searchology symposium to determine what was what about the poster and the poem. I was looking for a translation and the origins of the poster.

Try switching to Spanish and see what happens

On the Google page, I switched my preferences to Spanish, typed in “Pablo Neruda afiche”, the Spanish for poster, and hit return. In the blue results bar at the top left, you now have a “Show options” panel. If you click on that, the page reorganizes and you get further options: you can have results organized by time (past 24 hours, past week, past year), which is useful if you’re looking for news stories, by relevance or by date. Among the options for standard results, is one, “images from page”.

Since I was looking for an image, I tried this and restricted the time frame to the past week, hoping that my attachment would be returned. I got 61 results that linked Neruda with poster in some way, and the actual images of posters were returned as well. None of them were the poster I was looking for, however.

So I tried another of the new options, one Google is quite pleased about. It’s the aptly named wonder wheel. Once you click on that, the results are pushed to the right side of the screen and in the centre is a blue circle with the search criterion in the middle of it.

To put it through its paces, I typed in Swat, as in the conflict region in Pakistan. The blue circle is surrounded by related terms, each connected by a line. This is Google’s attempt at relational search management, I guess you’d call it. The search engine doesn’t know what I want with “Swat”, and until I type in “Swat, Pakistan” it assumes I’m interested in the game. Once it sees that my interest is in Pakistan, the related options it offers me are military operations, curfew and Rehman Malik (the interior minister).

Google is trying to read its customers “intent”

Google says that it is attempting to understand its customers better, and to understand their intent. “The real goal is that we have many users and we have to solve their problems. What is user intent, what do they need and get it to them,” says Udi Manber, vice president of engineering at Google.

The results on the right side of the page reflect my choice of options on the wonder wheel. The great thing for someone who easily gets sidetracked by following links willy-nilly is that the wonder wheel keeps track of your original blue circle so that you can hop right back to it. Neat feature.

Not Neruda!

Back to my search. I repeated the exercise to find a translation of the poem on the poster. It turns out that the poem is not by Neruda. It’s by a young man who lives in the Basque country in Spain.  But he’s probably not too distressed to have a poem of his confused with one by Neruda. It hasn’t been translated yet.

It also turns out that the poster isn’t from the Madrid Book Fair, either. I sent them an email and asked.

Background: ZDNet Blog