tv

A mummified body in front of a TV

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From Reuters’ “Mummified body found in front of blaring TV” (17 February 2007):

Police called to a Long Island man’s house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.

The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said on Saturday his body was discovered on Thursday when they were called to the house over a burst water pipe.

…

Officials could not explain why the electricity had not been turned off, considering Ricardo had not been heard from since December 2005.

HDTV’s widely adopted by American households

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From Alex Mindlin’s “Room to Grow as Homes Add HD TVs” (The New York Times: 21 November 2010):

High-definition televisions have entered American homes with startling speed; 56 percent of households now have at least some HD channels and an HD set, according to Nielsen. Among consumer technologies, that speed of adoption is rivaled only by the VCR.

But the average television viewer is still unlikely to watch television in high definition. One reason is that people watch some standard channels on their HD sets. But a more important reason for the low HD viewing rate is that most homes have several televisions, of which the HD set is only one.

…

“What we’re seeing,” [Pat McDonough, a senior television analyst at Nielsen] said, “is that people want a second high-definition set pretty quickly, once they get used to watching it.”

Indeed, in households with a single HD set, family members diverge from normal American viewing patterns; rather than migrating to their rooms at night to watch TV on separate sets, they cluster in the living room around the HD set.

Don DeLillo on how film has changed our society completely

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From Adam Begley’s interview of Don DeLillo in “The Art of Fiction No. 135” (The Paris Review: Fall 1993, No. 128):

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. In my work, film and television are often linked with disaster. Because this is one of the energies that charges the culture. TV has a sort of panting lust for bad news and calamity as long as it is visual. We’ve reached the point where things exist so they can be filmed and played and replayed.

David Foster Wallace on serious vs. commercial art

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From David Wiley’s interview of David Foster Wallace, “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview” (The Minnesota Daily: 27 February 1997):

But Plato and John Stuart Mill both take books to talk about different types of pleasure. In my own personal life, I like really arty stuff a lot of the time. But there’s also times I watch an enormous amount of TV, and I’ve read probably 70 percent of Stephen King’s books. And I’ve read them basically because for a little while I want to forget that my name is David Wallace, you know, and that I have limitations, and that I’m sad that my girlfriend yelled at me. I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world. And one of the dangers is if we get conditioned to confront less and less and experience more and more pleasure, the commercial stuff’s gonna win out.

The future of news as shown by the 2008 election

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From Steven Berlin Johnson’s “Old Growth Media And The Future Of News” (StevenBerlinJohnson.com: 14 March 2009):

The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls. Every night I would dutifully tune into Crossfire to hear what the punditocracy had to say about the day’s events. I read Newsweek and Time and the New Republic, and scoured the New Yorker for its occasional political pieces. When the debates aired, I’d watch religiously and stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.

That was hardly a desert, to be sure. But compare it to the information channels that were available to me following the 2008 election. Everything I relied on in 1992 was still around of course – except for the late, lamented Crossfire – but it was now part of a vast new forest of news, data, opinion, satire – and perhaps most importantly, direct experience. Sites like Talking Points Memo and Politico did extensive direct reporting. Daily Kos provided in-depth surveys and field reports on state races that the Times would never have had the ink to cover. Individual bloggers like Andrew Sullivan responded to each twist in the news cycle; HuffPo culled the most provocative opinion pieces from the rest of the blogosphere. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did meta-analysis of polling that blew away anything William Schneider dreamed of doing on CNN in 1992. When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis. (Yochai Benchler talks about this phenomenon of academics engaging with the news cycle in a smart response here.) I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch. All this was filtered and remixed through the extraordinary political satire of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.

What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it. Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet. A few serious newspaper might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that’s about the most we could have hoped for.

There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.

The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. … But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a “citizen reporter” named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen’s Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.

David Foster Wallace on TV, loneliness, & death

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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):

One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

Why everyone wants a computer: socializing

business, history, social software, tech in changing society / By /

From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009):

The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.

This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that’s what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.

The future of TV is the Internet

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From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009):

About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word “convergence” we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call “TV shows,” but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.

…

Whether [TV networks] like it or not, big changes are coming, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. On the Internet, you don’t have to send everyone the same signal, and you don’t have to send it to them from a local source. People will watch what they want when they want it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I’m guessing not. Which means local TV is probably dead. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology.

What passwords do people use? phpBB examples

language & literature, security / By /

From Robert Graham’s “PHPBB Password Analysis” (Dark Reading: 6 February 2009):

A popular Website, phpbb.com, was recently hacked. The hacker published approximately 20,000 user passwords from the site. …

This incident is similar to one two years ago when MySpace was hacked, revealing about 30,000 passwords. …

The striking different between the two incidents is that the phpbb passwords are simpler. MySpace requires that passwords “must be between 6 and 10 characters, and contain at least 1 number or punctuation character.” Most people satisfied this requirement by simply appending “1” to the ends of their passwords. The phpbb site has no such restrictions — the passwords are shorter and rarely contain anything more than a dictionary word.

It’s hard to judge exactly how many passwords are dictionary words. … I ran the phpbb passwords through various dictionary files and come up with a 65% match (for a simple English dictionary) and 94% (for “hacker” dictionaries). …

16% of passwords matched a person’s first name. This includes people choosing their own first names or those of their spouses or children. The most popular first names were Joshua, Thomas, Michael, and Charlie. But I wonder if there is something else going on. Joshua, for example, was also the password to the computer in “Wargames” …

14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like “1234,” “qwerty,” or “asdf.” There are a lot of different patterns people choose, like “1qaz2wsx” or “1q2w3e.” I spent a while googling “159357,” trying to figure out how to categorize it, then realized it was a pattern on the numeric keypad. …

4% are variations of the word “password,” such as “passw0rd,” “password1,” or “passwd.” I googled “drowssap,” trying to figure out how to categorize it, until I realized it was “password” spelled backward.

5% of passwords are pop-culture references from TV, movies, and music. These tend to be youth culture (“hannah,” “pokemon,” “tigger”) and geeky (“klingon,” “starwars,” “matrix,” “legolas,” “ironman”). … Some notable pop-culture references are chosen not because they are popular, but because they sound like passwords, such as “ou812” (’80s Van Halen album), “blink182” (’90s pop), “rush2112” (’80s album), and “8675309” (’80s pop song).

4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby. The name “samsung” is a popular password, I think because it’s the brand name on the monitor that people are looking at … Similarly, there are a lot of names of home computers like “dell,” “packard,” “apple,” “pavilion,” “presario,” “compaq,” and so on. …

3% of passwords are “emo” words. Swear words, especially the F-word, are common, but so are various forms of love and hate (like “iloveyou” or “ihateyou”).

3% are “don’t care” words. … A lot of password choices reflect this attitude, either implicitly with “abc123” or “blahblah,” or explicitly with “whatever,” “whocares,” or “nothing.”

1.3% are passwords people saw in movies/TV. This is a small category, consisting only of “letmein,” “trustno1,” “joshua,” and “monkey,” but it accounts for a large percentage of passwords.

1% are sports related. …

Here is the top 20 passwords from the phpbb dataset. You’ll find nothing surprising here; all of them are on this Top 500 list.

3.03% “123456”
2.13% “password”
1.45% “phpbb”
0.91% “qwerty”
0.82% “12345”
0.59% “12345678”
0.58% “letmein”
0.53% “1234”
0.50% “test”
0.43% “123”
0.36% “trustno1”
0.33% “dragon”
0.31% “abc123”
0.31% “123456789”
0.31% “111111”
0.30% “hello”
0.30% “monkey”
0.28% “master”
0.22% “killer”
0.22% “123123”

Notice that whereas “myspace1” was one of the most popular passwords in the MySpace dataset, “phpbb” is one of the most popular passwords in the phpbb dataset.

…

The password length distribution is as follows:

1 character 0.34%
2 characters 0.54%
3 characters 2.92%
4 characters 12.29%
5 characters 13.29%
6 characters 35.16%
7 characters 14.60%
8 characters 15.50%
9 characters 3.81%
10 characters 1.14%
11 characters 0.22%

Note that phpbb has no requirements for password lengths …

The color of the TV you watch determines the color of your dreams

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From Richard Alleyne’s “Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams” (The Telegraph: 17 October 2008):

New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome – even now.

…

Research from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white but the tide turned in the sixties, and later results suggested that up to 83 per cent of dreams contain some colour.

Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects’ dreams.

One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content

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From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):

The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of the word. See supra notes 119-121 and accompanying text (describing this taboo effect). The PTC has even created a pull-down, web-based form that allows people to file an instant complaint with the FCC about specific broadcasts, apparently without regard to whether you actually saw the program or not. See, e.g., FCC Indecency Complaint Form, https://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/sweeps/main.asp (last visited Feb. 10, 2006) (allowing instant complaints to be filed against episodes of NCIS, Family Guy, and/or The Vibe Awards). This squeaky wheel of a special interest group literally dominates FCC complaints. Consider this data. In 2003, the PTC was responsible for filing 99.86% of all indecency complaints. In 2004, the figure was up to 99.9%.

How technologies have changed politics, & how Obama uses tech

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From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):

Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as he reached for the presidency, was perhaps even more important to his election and public image. Jackson’s exploits in the War of 1812 became well known thanks in large measure to the distribution network that the postal service had created, and his 1828 campaign—among the first to distribute biographical pamphlets by mail—reinforced his heroic image. As president, he turned the office of postmaster into a patronage position, expanded the postal network further—the historian Richard John has pointed out that by the middle of Jackson’s first term, there were 2,000 more postal workers in America than soldiers in the Army—and used it to keep his populist base rallied behind him.

Abraham Lincoln became a national celebrity, according to the historian Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, when transcripts of those debates were reprinted nationwide in newspapers, which were just then reaching critical mass in distribution beyond the few Eastern cities where they had previously flourished. Newspapers enabled Lincoln, an odd-looking man with a reed-thin voice, to become a viable national candidate …

Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio to make his case for a dramatic redefinition of government itself, quickly mastering the informal tone best suited to the medium. In his fireside chats, Roosevelt reached directly into American living rooms at pivotal moments of his presidency. His talks—which by turns soothed, educated, and pressed for change—held the New Deal together.

And of course John F. Kennedy famously rode into the White House thanks in part to the first televised presidential debate in U.S. history, in which his keen sense of the medium’s visual impact, plus a little makeup, enabled him to fashion the look of a winner (especially when compared with a pale and haggard Richard Nixon). Kennedy used TV primarily to create and maintain his public image, not as a governing tool, but he understood its strengths and limitations before his peers did …

[Obama’s] speeches play well on YouTube, which allows for more than the five-second sound bites that have characterized the television era. And he recognizes the importance of transparency and consistency at a time when access to everything a politician has ever said is at the fingertips of every voter. But as Joshua Green notes in the preceding pages, Obama has truly set himself apart by his campaign’s use of the Internet to organize support. No other candidate in this or any other election has ever built a support network like Obama’s. The campaign’s 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors have provided him with an enormous financial and organizational advantage in the Democratic primary.

…

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

There is some precedent for Obama’s vision. The British government has already used the Web to try to increase interaction with its citizenry, to limited effect. In November 2006, it established a Web site for citizens seeking redress from their government, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/. More than 29,000 petitions have since been submitted, and about 9.5 percent of Britons have signed at least one of them. The petitions range from the class-conscious (“Order a independent report to identify reasons that the living conditions of working class people are poor in relation to higher classes”) to the parochial (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to re-open sunderland ice rink”).

2 New TV Interviews, Both on Cell Phones

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I was interviewed twice in the last couple of months by two local TV news channels, both times on the same subject: the cool stuff that even ordinary cell phones can do nowadays. Google features prominently, as does Flickr, Wireless Amber Alerts, and Cellfire. Best of all, the later one has Libby, my dog, in it, which is a nice added bonus.

KMOV’s Cell Phone Secrets (23 May 2007)

Video available at http://www.granneman.com/presentations/interviews/kmov23may2007.htm

KSDK’s How To Get The Most Out Of Your Cell Phone (6 July 2007)

Video available at http://www.granneman.com/presentations/interviews/ksdk6july2007.htm

What can we learn from Scooby-Doo?

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From Chris Suellentrop’s “Scooby-Doo: Hey, dog! How do you do the voodoo that you do so well?” (Slate: 26 March 2004):

The Washington Post‘s Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the “Scooby worldview” when the first live-action movie came out: “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.”

AT&T’s security tv station

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From Stephen Lawson & Robert McMillan’s AT&T plans CNN-syle security channel (InfoWorld: 23 June 2005):

Security experts at AT&T are about to take a page from CNN’s playbook. Within the next year they will begin delivering a video streaming service that will carry Internet security news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to the executive in charge of AT&T Labs.

The service, which currently goes by the code name Internet Security News Network, (ISN) is under development at AT&T Labs, but it will be offered as an additional service to the company’s customers within the next nine to 12 months, according to Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T’s Global Networking Technology Services and AT&T Labs

ISN will look very much like Time Warner’s Cable News Network, except that it will be broadcast exclusively over the Internet, Eslambolchi said. “It’s like CNN,” he said. “When a new attack is spotted, we’ll be able to offer constant updates, monitoring, and advice.”

TV signals passing through the Stone Age air

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From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):

The gift-dropping missions had ended in 1996. There was still no television set on North Sentinel; it remained, like Prospero’s island, a place where the air shimmered with invisible signals, with unseen Hindi soap operas and Thai music that drifted, unheard, across the Andaman Sea.

Clarabell the Clown’s final – and only – words

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From The New York Times‘ “Lew Anderson, 84, Clarabell the Clown and a Bandleader, Dies“:

Lew Anderson, whose considerable success as a musician, arranger and bandleader paled before the celebrity he achieved as Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody’s sidekick on one of television’s first children’s shows, died on Sunday in Hawthorne, N.Y. …

“Well, his feet are big, his tummy’s stout, but we could never do without,” Buffalo Bob Smith and the Kids of the Peanut Gallery sang in appreciation of his character, in a baggy, striped costume, who communicated by honking a horn for yes and no, Harpo Marx style.

Other times, Clarabell the Clown made his feelings known by spraying Buffalo Bob with seltzer, or playing a trick on him that everybody but Bob figured out immediately.

Before there was Big Bird, Barney or SpongeBob, there was Howdy Doody and his friends in Doodyville. Baby boomers grew up with “The Howdy Doody Show,” which began in December 1947 at a time when only 20,000 homes in the country had television sets. It was the first network weekday children’s show, the first to last more than 1,000 episodes and NBC’s first regularly scheduled show to be broadcast in color.

When it ended on Sept. 24, 1960, after 2,243 episodes, it was Clarabell who had the show’s last words. Since until then he had only honked, they were also his first words.

The camera moved in for a close-up of Mr. Anderson, who had a visible tear in his eye. A drum roll grew louder and then died. With quivering lips, Clarabell whispered, “Goodbye, kids.” …

In the late 1940’s, he joined the Honey Dreamers, a singing group that appeared on radio and early television shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The group appeared on a musical variety television show Mr. Smith produced for NBC.

When the Clarabell part opened up on Mr. Smith’s other show, “Howdy Doody,” Mr. Smith and the other producers asked Mr. Anderson if he could juggle. “No.” Dance? “No.” Magic tricks? “No.” What can you do? “Nothing.”

“Perfect, you start tomorrow,” Mr. Smith said.

More distribution channels = more viewers

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From “NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time“:

NBC’s “The Office” delivered a 5.1-its highest ratings ever-last Thursday among adults 18 to 49, a bump the network credits in large part to the show’s popularity as an iPod download. …

Such a connection between podcast success and broadcast ratings success is particularly significant because the NBC data is among the first available evidence of what network executives have been gambling on when striking their new media deals-that the new video platforms are additive because they provide more entry points into a show for consumers. …

NBC is confident that the iPod exposure contributed to the rise. …

The iTunes offering is bringing new audiences to the show that would not otherwise have watched, said Frederick Huntsberry, president of NBCU Television Distribution. “Consumers have choices, and we are not reaching all consumers with one technology,” he said.

ITunes is one way to bring fresh eyeballs to the network, he said, in particular the younger demo that uses video iPods. …

Yet ABC has also seen a ratings increase for its iTunes shows. To date since their debut on iTunes in October, both “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” are up versus the same period last year. …

That growth and the knowledge that iTunes distribution possibly grew and certainly did not cannibalize ratings gave the ABC Disney Television Group the confidence to add another round of iTunes programs last week …

Now that is one good insult

commonplace book, on writing, true stories / By /

From Yahoo! News (March 2004):

Andy Rooney certainly knows how to stir the passion in his viewers. The ’60 Minutes’ curmudgeon said Sunday he got 30,000 pieces of mail and e-mail in response to his Feb. 22 commentary, in which he called ‘The Passion of the Christ’ filmmaker Mel Gibson a ‘wacko.’

It’s the biggest viewer response ever to a segment on the CBS newsmagazine, which has been on the air since 1968, a spokesman said. …

He read some of the mail on the air, including one letter that called him an ‘asinine, bottom-dwelling, numb-skulled, low-life, slimy, sickening, gutless, spineless, ignorant, pot-licking, cowardly pathetic little weasel.’