Roger Ebert in Conference on World Affairs

Lots of heavy hitters in Boulder this week. In fact, I just heard Roger Ebert and director Ramin Bahrani dissect the small-budget indy film Chop Shop at the University of Colorado. Bahrani’s film, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and was then released widely, is set in NYC and follows two poor orphans through their exploits of prostitution, theft and life. The film was shot in only 30 days. The movie looked really cool, although I only saw at best 10 minutes of it over the course of 2 hours. They literally hit play, watched 5 seconds of film, paused, analyzed, tirelessly fielded questions (hollered out from a crowd of a couple hundred in Mackey Auditorium) hit play again, and repeated the cycle for 2 hours.

It’s really cool to get inside a filmmaker’s (and movie critic’s) head. He explained why he used sharp light contrast, how it took hours set lighting for an outdoor night scene, how he created tension through holding the camera on certain expressions for  lengthened moments, why he threw a flip-flop into a puddle during a torrential downpour (to symbolize the loss of innocence by showing childhood nostalgia of the beach and playing float away.)

Bahrani talked about how directors set up scenes to guide a viewer, but how they cheat geography in the process.

He talked about the power of dramatic irony – when the audience knows something a character doesn’t.

He said drama is when anticipation meets uncertainty.

Roger Ebert, who lost his voice and speaks with a computerized voice that has many accents (he mimicked Sir Lawrence for awhile!)

Anyway, I enjoyed hearing the filmmaker and big-time critic interact with the crowd – many attendees seemed to be movie buffs and caught onto more visual metaphors than I! How lucky we are in Boulder to have so much culture in our lap this week!

March, up north

I wasn’t sure if Alaska was a good place to go for spring break, seeing as I live in Boulder, which has its own bona fide winters. But lo and behold, I had the best powder day of the season (although I say that after every powder day) and even an awesome time trolling around Fairbanks, which was registering 20 below just a couple weeks ago.

An ice sculpture of a 10-foot tall raven fishing at Ice Alaska in Fairbanks in March, 2009.

My first jaunt to the last frontier was this past summer (pre-Palin). A few key differences I picked up on between AK summers and winters:

• in the peak of summer the sun hovers along the horizon for a couple hours but it never gets dark. in the winter night actually falls – although it was light until about 9 each night, way later than Boulder
• days got shorter as the summer went on. in March, every day is about 7 minutes longer than yesterday
• SNOW – it dumped two feet while I was skiing in Girdwood (near Anchorage) over two days
• coastal snow is about 10 times heavier than Colorado powder. let’s just say i got put in my place (aka my face) on tele skis and switched to fat downhill skis
• the inlets around Anchorage (like Ptarmigan Arm) appear as beautiful ocean in the summer, but frozen mud flats in the winter
• volcanoes erupt more in winter. this may not be geologically true, but Mt. Redoubt blew several times while I was there. fortunately, my plane and ski days were spared from the ash
• locals drink more in the winter (or at least start earlier in the day since many have seasonal jobs)
• a sweet ice park with 15-foot-tall ice sculptures fares better in March than June. Ice Alaska was an outdoor exhibit in Fairbanks of probably 40 some ice carvings by artists from all over the world, including interactive SLIDES!
• legend has it the mood is far better in the summer, although spirits run very high in march too because spring is around the corner
• the snow in Fairbanks is pristine white, unlike Colorado, because it never melts, gets slushy and mixes with dirt. every flake that fell since october is still part of the snowpack, whereas snow melts in boulder in two days – tops
• no bugs in march!
• didn’t see any bears
• gas was $2.30 instead of $4.30
• Alaskans (at least the ones I know) were more embarrassed about Palin after the presidential bruhaha than when she was just an unknown governor

What remains the same from summer to winter?

• Alaska is still refreshingly empty – no crowds, no hassle (except for Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage)
• smoky bars
• lots of moose sitings
• lots of soccer (although indoor, thank goodness)
• way more dudes than ladies
• everyone driving massive trucks (coincides with above)
• super fun and packed with novel experiences!!

The End of the Printing Press Era

On every journalist’s mind is the question: ‘where the hell is this ship headed?’ To figure that out, it helps to dissect the recent changes. First, you have to tease apart journalism from the print industry. One is transforming; one is perishing. While they’ve been one and the same for a long time, the Internet has destroyed the marriage of the two. Now anyone can publish, and printing presses just aren’t economical anymore

Why Newspapers Won’t Make it

In Clay Shirky’s blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, he says we are conflating “saving newspapers” with “saving journalism.” Saving newspapers is futile. Today’s focus is – wrongly – on saving news institutions, when it should really be about saving journalism.

When the news industry realized how the Internet would transform its product, it came up with “walled gardens” – news sources you had to pay to view – and micropayments to support its traditional model.

Those strategies failed. I actually thought these ideas (listed below) might hold water. Shirky theorizes they failed because they were trying to triage the old model instead of imaging a new one:

• “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.)

• “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.)
• “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.)
• “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Since technology has spawned new, free publishing platforms, journalism (and its embodied cost of printing) is having a hard time competing. Just like during the printing press revolution in the 1500s, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in place,” as Shirky says. Right now there’s no replacement for newspapers, which is why the public and vested stakeholders are in a tizzy. As with any revolution, you can only see the turning points in rear-view. Only incremental changes – like the closures of the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post Intelligencer, and the firing of environmental and investigative desks – are visible in real time.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to make print journalism relevant again once it fades. How do you make readers pay for content and advertisers for exposure when both are available for free (or less) online?  Plus, newspapers are using money from their old revenue bases – print – to fund their new fancy interfaces – which aren’t profitable yet. They are actually undermining their own product. It’s a mess. Journalists need a new structure must emerge to optimize digital data. It will doubtfully be premised on ad revenue and subscriptions.

Survival of Journalism

Do we even need journalists anymore?  It’s fairly unanimous that newspapers benefit society in in ways that open-source blogs can’t. But “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model, as Shirky points out

The good news, as reinforced by Steven Johnson in this post, is that plenty of smart businesses and non-profits are scheming ways to produce and market solid information. Through a news portfolio made up of different pieces, the public should eventually be able to get the same good news package.

A new portfolio could also trim redundancies. Newspapers will move online and provide the reliable, gatekeeping function of their journalism brands. Leave technology and politics to bloggers. Leave movie, book, travel and restaurant reviews to engaging online voices and forums. These niche formats will be better able to cover our radius of interest because of online journalism’s long tail. As Jeff Jarvis states: “do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

However, I’m not as optimistic as Johnson for the immediate future. He envisions more content, analysis and precision. He says newspapers will be an authoritative guide to an overwhelmed public, linking to good content when they’re not writing it. I foresee a serious problem with quality control.

How to Solve the Energy AND Job Crises

Well, we’ve got some brains mulling it over at least. A committee of industry, government and university experts formed by the National Academies of Science in 2005 to discuss how policymakers can strengthen American quality of life through science and technology. They published it in  the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm.

Of course, multinational companies will nest in the most hospitable environment -  one with cheap labor, innovation talent, favorable tax policies and laws, quality universities, lots of federal funding, a healthy domestic market and national economy.

Although the U.S. has long been a leader in innovation, it sounds like we’re on the verge of being passed by China and the EU. While we have great resources, high cost of labor deters investment.

The Committee decides the two key challenges are creating high-caliber American jobs and making strides toward clean, renewable energy. I thought their recommendations were great, and practical, especially these:

• To jumpstart education, create 4-year, $20,000 scholarships for science and math teachers in exchange for five years at public schools; create specialty high schools for math and science whizzes

• To catalyze R&D, increase federal funding by 10 percent for the next 7 years; provide special grants to early-career researchers to “sow the seeds”; allocate $$ specifically for high-risk research as we’ve developed a risk-averse environment

• To foster higher education, offer more scholarships to undergrads in earth and physical sciences and engineering; tax credits to employers who send practicing scientists back to school; and a skill-based preferential immigration option (although touching the immigration issue is risqué)

• To protect intellectual property while defending an open research system, reform the patent system: do administrative reviews after patents are granted like Europe and Japan; assure researchers they won’t get in trouble for using patent inventions; change laws that act as barriers to innovation, as in the pharmaceutical area. Beefing up the R&D tax credit would also help private investment.

I think these approaches are direct, realistic, and would have a massive net effect.  As the Committee writes, we can’t get complacent or we’ll lose an advantage in technology innovation that we’re unlikely to recover:

• “Some will argue this is a problem for market forces to resolve – but that is exactly the concern. Market                forces are already at work moving jobs to countries with less costly, often better educated, highly motivated workforces and friendlier tax policies.”

Breaking the Dry Spell

I’m finally skiing Vail tomorrow, after sitting out for three weeks! Why would someone who purchased a $550 epic pass (unlimited Vail days) skip three weekends worth of winter turns, you ask? Because it hasn’t snowed all March – the snowiest month in Colorado.

Yesterday seven inches fell from the heavens and tomorrow I’ll see what’s left of it. If it’s better than Ski Roundtop in Lewisberry, Penn. I’ll be happy. I’m picturing a packed surface caked with a thin film of powder and crud. But it should be 37 and a bluebird, which is reason enough to go.

I’ll happily return to Boulder Sunday for a forecasted 70-degree mid-March day. Not many locales where you ride snowy peaks the first half of the weekend and sunbath the second.Rather than lounge, however, I’ll be playing a 90-minute soccer match Sunday on my new rec team. I’m bracing myself for the soreness that will seize me.

Thanks to Morgan for this ravishing photo taken of me outside the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I hadn’t brushed my hair because I wasn’t planning on modeling for the Holga shoot! Thank goodness for the forgiving light of the waning afternoon sun. Note: Holga is a toy camera, hence the funny effects.

Does “progress” in science and technology always improve quality of life?

As U.S. society has greatly benefited from advances in biomedicine, agriculture, telecommunications technology, and other scientific advancement, we’ve started to think of “improved technology” as interchangeable with “improved standard of living.” Often times, it is. Yet it depends largely on how you define progress.

David Sarewitz, in his book Frontiers of Illusion, reminded me there is more to progress than simply economic growth (the main measure we use in America.) It also includes justice, liberty, intellectual fulfillment, equal access to resources, and more. Many of these values are left unfulfilled by technological advancement. For instance, we’ve come up with great drugs to fight H.I.V. but they are unaffordable to many; lots of cancer patients don’t have access to the cutting-edge treatment that’s been discovered.

Sometimes a focus on progress even undermines societal welfare. Sarewitz gave the example of Japan’s rush to catch up the U.S. in network technology. The nation was behind in this category because they value  face-to-face communication over texting, IM’ing and online social networking. But since profit motives fuel the world’s economies, and often governments, it comes at the expense of culture. Sarewitz refers to the externalities in a system where the desire for profit and preferences take center stage.

“Individuals may rationally deide to seek the most advanced medical technologies because they are sick, to buy gas-guzzling cars when fuel prices are low, to log onto the information superhighway because everyone else is doing it. Millions of individuals making such choices- solving individual problems – may lead not only to economic growth but to an increasingly expensive and decreasingly equitable medical system, to increased emissions of ggs and decreased energy independence, to a decline in face-to-face communication that undermines social comity.” (127

Then he makes another good point about human nature – our desire to fulfill our potential and improve the human condition has turned into an insatiable appetite for material goods. Technology exaggerates this human tendency, allowing us to “express ourselves” with ridiculous cars and toys and vacations.

“The societal implications of scientific and technological progress are further complicated by the never-ending quest of human beings to satisfy their desire for material goods, wealth, and status. If people weren’t constantly eager to trade in last year’s model for this year’s; if they weren’t demanding the most advanced medical treatments, the fastest computers, the smallest videocams; if they weren’t seeking to increase their incomes and expand their businesses; if they did not, on the whole, perceive a strong positive correlation between standard of living and quality of life, then economic growth would not occur. Science and technology are thus faced with an economic task that is inherently Sisyphean; to nourish the human need to consume.”

What we have is never good enough, so we will create technology to produce and consume more in an endless cycle (until we run out of resources). At least that’s what I interpreted, and observe!

Commercialization of the biotech industry

Apparently, the model for sparking innovation in biotechnology in the U.S. could use some work. According to some heavy-hitters, our system of financial incentives and partnerships are leading us astray and not making for more efficient science.

Part of it seems based on a love triangle between universities (which complete most basic research), biotech companies and private pharmaceuticals. When the government passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, universities were allowed to patent federally-funded research. This led to stronger partnerships with private companies, which spawned technology-transfer offices at most research universities. These offices were designed to license the inventions or discoveries of researchers to the private world to be developed and marketed. Fast forward to, by 2000, industry was funding 62% of biomedicine academic research (Morss and Hook, the Outlook for Meteorological Research in a Commercializing World.)

Next come the inevitable conflicts of interest: choked flow of information between universities (so far as scientists not commenting at conferences); secrecy among companies; withholding of results from publication at universities; disincentives for scientists to pursue certain subjects because they have to work around patents; and profit incentives (a.k.a. greed) blur the organized skepticism of the scientific community.

Overall, according to Morss and Hook, this redirects research toward the most profitable type of work, not the most beneficial. And their haunting prediction is that as universities become more intertwined with corporations, university researchers may cease to be the independent source of expert knowledge that society depends on. Then who do we have?

news songs i like

…new to me, at least. Yes, I love these tunes, but not enough to pirate them. Still, the whole 99 cents per song rates are killing me so I just listen to Pandora and hope for the best.

Heard the World – O.A.R.

Best I Ever Had – Vertical Horizon

Car Crash – Matt Nathanson

Friend of the Devil – Counting Crows

Any tips on good bands or songs? Please post. Some of my favorite groups are Chili Peppers, the Killers, Modest Mouse, Weezer, Jack Johnson, Coldplay, Rolling Stones, U2, Bruce Springsteen…I know, I’m so original! I like indy music too, just don’t intercept much of it these days..

Loves of my Life

Lately, life in Boulder has been pretty sweet. Today was 74 with a light breeze. Yesterday was 73 with a cerulean blue sky. Here are some of the pleasures that have made Boulder so lovable lately (in no particular order):

• Picture-perfect weather and lots of skydivers to stare at
• My only homework this weekend was taking pictures of a college lacrosse game
• Saw hundreds of prairie dogs while biking around Wonderland Lake (cute little suckers)
• Got a new stylin’ shirt at Target for $7
• Had my first kickball game of the spring season. We won 9-2 and I got a triple!!
• Bonded with a horse last weekend at Boulder Valley Ranch
• Have a jar of Nutella in my cabinet
• Am going to Alaska in 2.5 weeks!
• Bought ticket to Costa Rica for $250 and will be on the turquoise Pacific this  August
• The Bachelor has been entertaining lately
• I’m writing a story about Ultimate Frisbee for Boulder Magazine

There are many more reasons to be jolly. Not that I’m not jealous of my parents, who are flying to Lima, Peru tomorrow to begin their 10 day tour of the Amazon! But hey, there are worse places to be than Boulder.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

One hundred years ago there were more electric cars on the road than gas cars. They’re quiet, smooth and can be charged at home. Gas cars were yucky, required cranking and produce exhaust.

Why did the gas car win over the electric car? Automatic starters, cheaper oil and mass production gave the edge to the gasoline car. By 1920 the internal combustion engine had won the race for control of the roads and modern automobile age was on its way. Why should we be haunted by the ghost of the electric car?

Because it seems it was murdered.

This documentary goes on a quest through recent history to figure out who, and how.

First, the shortcomings of gas-powered cars. S-M-O-G. Every gallon of gas we burn adds 19 pounds of CO2 to the air. By 1990s, people were getting lung lesions and respiratory diseases in places like southern California.

GM came out with an electric car – two seater, slick styling. California Air Resources Board saw this as a chance to solve another problem. It passed the Zero-Emission vehicle mandate in 1990. This required automakers to sell some cars that produced no exhaust. 2% of their fleets had to be zero-emissions by 1998; 5% by 2003

EV-1 became the first modern electric car by major US car company in nearly a century. It’s a Saturn!

People loved them! “They’re cool. They’re fast. They’re sexy.” Not too pricey – payments between $250 and $500 a month.

Mel Gibson liked his. The console was nice; the lighting was beautiful; it was quiet; it was so fast it looked like it would outrun its own shadow. You just charge the battery at home and it got about 70-80 miles per charge. That’s all Tom Hanks needed to drive in the course of a day, and the average person drives less than 30 miles per day.

“It was the new thing that was going to change the way everybody travels.” Momentum building; waiting lists growing…

CUT TO…the conspiracy

GM decides to sabotage its own product in order to battle the California mandate. GM decides that consumers are actually cautious about the electric car and broadcasts their uncertainty – are they strong and big and dependable? How do I charge the battery?

California pressured to drop mandate by a group that went around to city council groups urging leaders not to waste tax dollars putting in EV charge stations. Turns out the groups are consumer organizations funded by the oil industry.

Oil companies bought editorials in magazines saying EVs aren’t as environmentally-friendly as they seemed. Oil even made the argument of environmental justice – it’s not fair that only rich people can afford electric cars.

Meanwhile car companies argued that mandate was too strict. California compromised with automakers and signed a memorandum that automakers would build EVs in correspondence with demand. Otherwise they didn’t have to build any.

GM says it spent over $1 billion to drive the market. Were they really trying to make it commercially viable?

No matter how many people joined the waiting list (4,000) it wasn’t enough to constitute “demand.” GM fought regulation while making it nearly impossible to buy a car. Mel Gibson had to send in resume and fill out an application just to lease a car. They didn’t mass market EVs. Instead, GM closed its EV plant and laid off force despite customers and waiting lists by 2001.

Ralph Nader was part of the good fight to defend EVs.

Automakers joined forces and sued California Air Resources Board. The Bush administration decided to join the lawsuit (lobbyists?!?!??!) Bush proposed $1.2 billion in R&D to develop clean hydrogen-powered vehicles. Nevermind that we already had a clean technology on the market and hydrogen was a looong shot.

Car companies pour energy into campaign for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and use this in their case against the California mandate. Even Schwarzennager is driving a hydrogen Hummer!?!?

California has to vote on whether to kill the electric car mandate or not…

Board members have mixed optimism about hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Is it bait and switch? What if fuel cells don’t work?

At the deliberation, automakers had unlimited time to plead their case and build up the hydrogen technology. Electric guys had 3 minutes.

California killed its electric car mandate on April 24, 2003. Sad commentary on the way our system works. We go from 10 percent of a fleet being electric to nothing.

GM made drivers give all the leased cars back. No buyers allowed! People had no choice but to turn them in or get sued for car theft.

EV drivers became organized, held protests to save electric cars.

Summer 2004, only a single EV1 left in southern California. Driver says “I’ve never seen a company be so cannibalistic about its own product before. It’s such an odd experience.”

Why did they want the electric cars back? Trucked out of state to GM’s off-limits grounds in Arizona.

Helicopter flies over and sees 50 EV1s flattened and stacked onto semi flatbeds….WHY ON EARTH crush them? Especially when PR baron promised to recycle or donate them to universities or museums.

Electric Fords, Toyotas and Rangers were being demolished across the country too. Pulling fresh, new EVs off the lot to be shredded into millions of pieces.

Drivers organized the EV club to watch 70 remaining EVs at GM lot in Berkley 24 hours a day. The club offered GM $1.9 million check to buy the last 78 cars. Instead, GM loaded ‘em up, police arrested the protesters blocking the gate and the last EV1s were taken away and destroyed.

Who to blame?

Auto makers: Why were they so determined to take them off the road even as they churned them out? Car companies fostered huge resentment toward the mandate and didn’t want to be told what type of car to make. They didn’t see a profit in the short-term from cars like the Prius (ha! look at the Prius today). EV has no internal combustion engine, which represents large part of the dealers’ income through replacement and repairs. Not to mention oil filters. To service an EV, just bring it in every 5,000 with an EV and add air, rotate tires and add wiper fluid.

Consumers who didn’t trust limited range of vehicle: They were worried that batteries wouldn’t last long enough (they lasted 60 miles) and that they would be stranded without a place to recharge. Sidenote: the average person drives 29 miles per day.

Oil companies: Why did they lobby so hard to build public opposition to the EV in California? Was it a threat to their transportation-fuel monopoly? Yet the petroleum industry contends it was inadequate technology that killed the electric car.

Federal government: It sued California to stop the electric car! Bush joined case against California mandate. Reagan didn’t support fuel economy in 1980s, stopped regulation for fuel economy. Oil prices plunged. The Clinton administration bargained with the auto industry to develop hybrid-electric vehicles in return for not pursuing fuel economy standards. Spent billions of tax dollars on hybrid research and yet no car companies released any hybrids during Clinton’s terms. When Bush was elected auto makers walked away from hybrids. So Toyota and Honda developed hybrids because
they didn’t want to be beaten by the U.S.

And then just some extra factoids that fired me up:

Combined profits of Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco and Conoco-Phillips in 2003 – $33 billion. 2004 – $47 billion

Andrew Card, former President and CEO of American Automobile and Manufacturers’ Association, is chief of staff when Bush Admin joined case against California mandate.

Our average car on the road is less efficient than it was 20 years ago because it’s impossible to get fuel economy standards through Congress

Average miles driven per day: 29, so EV would be more than enough to get most people around even on just 60 miles per charge

Oil imports were 8.8 million barrels per day in 1977. Carter pledged we would never be that high again after oil embargo. In 2005 U.S. imported 13.5 million barrels per day.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could supply U.S. with slightly more than one year’s worth of oil. Raising fuel economy standards to 40 mpg would save same amount of fuel within 15 years.

Fuel cell car powered by hydrogen made with electricity uses 3 – 4 times as much energy than a car powered by batteries. “Hydrogen is the wave of the future,” Bush declares!

5 Miracles for hydrogen car – current fuel cell car costs $1 million; not enough room for hydrogen fuel; hydrogen fuel is expensive; we have no fueling infrastructure; hope that competitors in marketplace don’t improve (like the hybrid)