Technology360

#Opera browser provides huge improvement on high-latency #WildBlue ISP!

Loudoun Co., where I live in northern Virginia, has or had the highest median income of any of the 3,000+ U.S. counties. But that doesn’t give my wife and I access to terrestrial broadband, and neither of the WISPs that operate in the county reach here. We live on a farm in a remote corner of the county where the only broadband is via satellite. Email, web browsing, audio streaming and YouTube, yes; Hulu and Netflix, no.

We had HughesNet, which got dumped due to unreasonable data limits and lengthy outages, and are now using WildBlue, which sucks less. We do lose service in thunderstorms and other moderate-to-heavy rains, and wet snow is a problem (keep a broom handy). WildBlue has about the same data limits but averages them over a month so automatic software and system upgrades don’t, as punishment, knock your speed back to sub-dialup rates for 24 hours. When connected, speeds are just under a T1 rate, so that’s not awful, but latency is. Connecting with DNS is a big problem, and makes the whole web experience frustrating. One gets tired of hitting refresh and often the sites just give up before you connect. It’s particularly bad with Google sites and Twitter. WildBlue has a so-called “optimizer” which does speed up things somewhat with Firefox, but doesn’t seem to help with IE or Chrome.

I used earlier versions of Opera when I lived in Idaho and used a WISP, and remembered it was faster than IE and Firefox, but I got out of the habit during the three years I lived in the urban DC area where I had a cable ISP. So last night, I downloaded Opera 11.6 and the improvements just blew me away. So far, DNS access has worked on the first try each time and page loading is swift. The only downside so far is that me.com doesn’t work with Opera.

If this keeps up, I’m going to have to find something else to complain about. --Dennis

Martin Busch, public broadcasting pioneer, died today | #pubmedia

 

My good friend and professional mentor, Martin Busch – died today in Kansas.  He began his broadcasting  career at KUSD-AM in Vermillion, S.D., and was executive director of South Dakota Public Broadcasting from 1960 to 1984.  Along with his engineering colleague, Jim Prusha, he built a statewide network of public television stations and began a statewide public radio network as well before his retirement – which itself was a statement of principle with a former governor.

Martin and his friend, the late Jack McBride, from whom he took inspiration, were among the pioneers of regional broadcasting – efficient operating models for rural states that now increasingly look like efficient models for the rest of public broadcasting.

I saw Martin last in October when South Dakota Public Broadcasting dedicated its television studio to him.  In spite of suffering from one of the insults of old age (I think he was 89 87 in March), he gave a nice speech and, as always, looked debonair.  Here is the citation for this event on the SDPB web site:

On Friday, October 1, 2010, during the USD Dakota Days celebration, SDPB dedicated our TV Studio in honor of Martin Busch. Martin was the Executive Director of SDPB from 1960-1984, and hosted "The Bookshop" on SDPB Radio from 1960-2002. Speakers included Julie Andersen, Executive Director of SDPB; James Abbott, President of the University of South Dakota; Ted Muenster, former member of the ETV Board; Dr. Tom Kilian, an early supporter of SDPTV; Stephan Busch, Martin's son; and Martin Busch. View the ceremony here: MARTIN BUSCH STUDIO DEDICATION

RIP, friend.

Update 18 April 2011:  Rapid City Journal article on Martin.  Thanks to Ron Hull and Burnie Clark for updated picture and news article link.  South Dakota Public Broadcasting's "Dakota Midday" 4/18/2011 program on Martin.

--Dennis

Open note to @jeffjarvis on travel and health

With apologies for this public exhortation from a near stranger (we met only once), but this morning, 59,289 of us had this note from you in our Twitter feeds, so perhaps that gives me license:

An 11-day, 4-city trip 3 weeks after cancer surgery was not the wisest thing I’ve ever done.

To agree:  Your BuzzMachine posts, tweets and media appearances are too important, even when we disagree with you (as I have on occasion; e.g., Assange), to encourage you to undergo major travel now.  In 2007 lost my intrepid, cancer patient wife a couple of weeks after a birthday cruise during which she contracted the beginnings of pneumonia and thereafter declined to slow down to give her compromised immune system a chance to fight it.  Don’t let a “once-in-a-lifetime trip” become truly a once-in-a-lifetime trip.  --Dennis

Tablet apps likely to revolutionize professional books – and us

NB:  This starts out as a long story about publishing medical books, but I intend it as a way to illustrate the pace and degree of change in the media for the blog’s usual readers at the end.  --DH

This spring I married a physician who has written or edited a fairly large number of medical books.  Her background is both in clinical practice and research, she has an appointment as full professor at an area medical school, and she has way, way more letters behind her name than do I.  Her most successful book is a sort of how-to manual for procedures in her area of specialty, the most recent edition of which came out in 2007.

So a few weeks ago, we were discussing a call she received from her publisher asking her if she wanted to do a 5th edition of the book.  The last edition had a companion DVD that contained videos illustrating seven of the 53 procedures in the book.  The videos are good, including some basic animations, but require a physician to go to a computer, find software that will play the odd format (with some trial and error, one of which crashed my PC, I discovered that RealPlayer could handle it), and hope that the procedure you need to do is one of the 13% in described in the book (the book does have helpful drawings and photos).  You shouldn’t have to call the IT department before trying to bone up on intubations.

As a new iPad owner, I’d been very impressed with how tablet apps are creating a whole new category of book – or is it a whole new category of video – or is it some new medium we haven’t yet named?  I’d heard great things about two such apps, so I  downloaded them and they blew me away.  One is Alice for the iPad by Atomic Antelope, a presentation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  The other is Theodore Gray’s, The Elements: A Visual Exploration by Element Collection, Inc., a mesmerizing way (I kid you not) to visualize and learn about the periodic table of elements. 

I showed these to my wife and her co-editor, and they got it instantly.  In The Elements, not only do you get text and video but computations are also included in the app.  The ability of a “book” to include text, audio, video, animation, and computation totally blows away the traditional atom-based professional book (imagine being able to enter patient parameters and instantly determine medication dosage).  And the tablet format frees you from having to retreat to your office (perhaps at a different location), boot up a DVD through problematic software, and find the right video in multiple indexes.  You can do all this in  the hallway or even the OR if you want.

That led the three of us to have a conference call with the publisher, a leading company for this type of book.  To give them the benefit of the doubt, they hadn’t viewed the same iPad apps that we had, and perhaps we weren’t the most articulate advocates, but it was clear that they were in the business of making books of paper and perhaps they could add some additional procedures to the DVD that’s bound into the book.  If there was recognition that the whole conception of a professional book has changed, it wasn’t evident on the call.

Enough of the book publishing story.  I don’t want to be too hard on them because those of us in other traditional forms of media are too often not much better at re-envisioning our products.  But we must do that and, indeed, there is very good creative work being done toward that end.  Let’s do more.  --Dennis

Shy (and retiring) - #pubmedia

Yesterday, NPR announced that I’ll be retiring at the end of this year, 41 years after reporting for work at KUSD in the small university town of Vermillion, South Dakota.  It’s pretty scary how fast four decades go.  In 1969, vacuum tube devices were still plentiful, AM was king in radio, cable TV was mainly a central off-air antenna for remote communities, PBS and NPR weren’t created until the following year, and Al Gore hadn’t yet invented the internet.

Actually, there were already signs of change in each of those areas.  For example, in that year, the first internet-like physical network was built using federal funds and 50 kbps(!) circuits between four universities in California and Utah.  FM was gaining ground on AM thanks to rock’s ascendance and a then-popular but now-dead format called “beautiful music.”  The nascent cable industry was fighting restrictive FCC programming policies that were finally lifted in 1972 and changed everything. 

The point is that things are always changing and success goes to those who respond to this and penalizes those who are in denial.  The latter number is, unfortunately, almost always a much bigger than the former.

I’ve had many of influencers over my career, but I’ll single out only two.  My first post-college boss, Martin Busch, was one of public broadcasting’s pioneers who, as he once put it, “raised me from a whelp.”  He was himself influenced by Jack McBride, and together they provided ubiquitous services to the rural states of South Dak0ta and Nebraska, respectively.  So I’ve always viewed state and regional networks as the most efficient way to serve rural populations, and I’ve built a couple of them myself.  Secondly, I’ve been strongly influenced by Clayton Christensen’s arguments about disruption.  The Harvard professor wasn’t the first one to bring up this notion (that may have been the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who I read in college), but he was certainly the most articulate.  Reading his Innovator’s Dilemma was the proverbial whack on the side of the head and has influenced my interest in trying to ascertain the trend vectors in our industry going forward.

I’m not ready to say with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”  For one thing, I have a bit over six months left here at NPR and want to keep intellectually involved after retirement, primarily through this blog.  More importantly, unlike his escaping dolphins, I’m not retiring because we’re about to be demolished to make room for the media equivalent of an intergalactic expressway. 

Or maybe I’m in denial.  Hold it, what are those orange flags staked out in the field?  ;-)

I’ll keep up this blog as long as it has readers and look forward to being able to write without fear of appearing to speak for some organization.  --Dennis

Twitter feed added

Just added the widget for Twitter, so my five most recent tweets are in the lower left.  --Dennis

Thanks, public radio colleagues

Today, Vivian Schiller took over as the new president & CEO of National Public Radio, to the welcome of us all at NPR, and I've moved to a new stint as executive VP.  Three months as interim president & CEO and seven months before that as interim CEO have been a ten-month graduate school in management, so now new acronyms like EBITDA, LIBOR and UPMIFA trip off my tongue with ease.  ;-)  Vivian will be a terrific leader for NPR and for public radio in general.  I know there a bunch of public broadcasters who read this neglected blog and I'd like to thank you for your support and encouragement since early March.  The economy didn't exactly go the way I'd hoped when I came here, but NPR is a strong organization and public radio is extremely well-positioned to weather the rocky times in which we now find ourselves.

I'm hoping now to be able to devote a little more time to posting here.  Cheers!  --Dennis

NYTimes.com's Vivian Schiller to be new Pres/CEO @ NPR

Yesterday, NPR announced that Vivian Schiller, current SVP/GM at NYTimes.com, will become its new President and CEO effective January 5th.  She brings some great qualifications with her, not the least of which to readers of this blog is her history of bringing content out from behind DRM at the Times.  In previous professional lives, Vivian also has experience with long form media at CNN and Discovery.  I'm very happy to extend to her my enthusiastic support.

Links: paidContent.org for Rafat Ali's take on the story and Staci Kramer's interview with Vivian.

I will continue as NPR's Interim Prez/CEO until then, and the board has asked me to follow that with a stint as Executive Vice President.  Thanks to the many well-wishers who've written or called since yesterday.  It's been a true privilege to serve in this role.  There is no "NPR exception" from the current deep recession, but I'm confident we will be unwaivering in our commitment to both excellent journalism and breaking new ground in emerging platforms.

Updated 13 November, 2008:
Hear NPR's Madeline Brand and David Folkenflik discussing the hire on Morning Edition.  Link:  NPR. 

--Dennis

'My Cancer' Blogger Leroy Sievers Dies

It's taken me a while to note the death of Leroy Sievers in my blog because even though it perfectly illustrates how powerful the combination of broadcasting (NPR in this case) and social media (blogging in this case) can be, this one had a personal dimension for me.  My wife, Sandra, died nearly a year ago after a 2½-year bout (since diagnosis) with esophageal cancer.  Leroy's NPR appearances and his blog were, for both of us, important fuel for the fight she waged from the moment her cancer was first diagnosed in early 2005.  Leroy was a journalist and so was Sandra early in her career (became a professor of it later), and she also wrote eloquently about it, though in her case it was in private emails to a large group of friends and family members.  Maeve McGoran and Laurie Singer have posted to Leroy's blog since his death and many among his large circle of readers wonder if this is going to survive him.  Or perhaps, since it was such a personal statement, it needs to be let go.  I don't have an answer, only hope for the much too large a club that is touched by cancer.  --Dennis

West Virginia: state #50!

This afternoon, I finally made it to beautiful West Virginia, having driven to Harpers Ferry for dinner (about 65 miles from where I live in Washington, DC).  Great drive along the Shenandoah River.  It was the last of the United States that I'd not visited.  --Dennis