Category: News

At TED2013, Rose George talks about a major global health problem—the 2.5 billion people who live without toilets. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

A single gram of poop contains 50 diseases, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasites, 100 worm eggs and 10 million viruses, by journalist Rose George’s tally. For people who have flushing toilets, this is something that they rarely have to think about. But for the 2.5 billion people in the world who have no toilet at all, feces is to blame for a devastating toll of disease.

Consider these other numbers. Four thousand children die every day from diarrhea, a common symptom from exposure to many of those fecal microbes. That’s more than die from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and measles combined. Each year, $260 billion is lost because of lack of sanitation. Despite this, just 10 to 25 percent of related budgets focus on sanitation, compared to 75 to 90 percent for clean water. Rose George: Let's talk crap. Seriously.Clean water is no help when it is continuously contaminated by poor sanitation.

In today’s talk, given at TED2013, George describes how she “plunged into the world of sanitation, toilets, and poop,” an odoriferous adventure that she chronicled in her 2009 book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. If you’re hankering for even more dirty talk, we spoke with George about people’s reactions to her project, the surprisingly wide-ranging impact of sanitation and the future of poop.

In your talk, you start off with a story about your own bathroom experience — the first time you thought, “Wait, where is this stuff going?” What happened after that? How does a reporter start researching poop?

Well, there’s a long story and a short story. I’ll give you the short one. The first thing I did when I decided that I was going to dive into the world of poop was look at who was doing stuff in that world. The first I came across was the World Toilet Organization. So one of the first things I did was to go to their annual show in Moscow. I ended up in a Russian winter near the Kremlin, and the WTO had its exhibit on one floor and, on the floor below, was a fur coat exhibition. There were more people in the fur coat exhibition.

It’s quite a select gathering of people. It’s certainly changed over the past six years, but at that point, it was really quite a small field. That’s where I started making my acquaintances and getting to know who was who and who was doing what. A few people I met in that couple of days ended up being written up in the book — like Joe Madiath in Orissa, and Jack Sim. This guy Scott Chapman, who I met in the café, looked really bored. We started having this conversation, and he said, “Why should I be interested in toilets?” I started telling him what I had learned by that point — that 2.6 billion people don’t have a toilet — and he looked really surprised. He became a really enormous toilet evangelist. So that was really quite fun to watch.

That is where I started, and then I went to a couple of other WTO events. I just ended up sort of wandering around the world with people who I found were doing interesting things.

What was it like pitching the topic of poop to editors and your agent? What was their reaction? Did they get it initially, or did it take some convincing?

I have two main publishers. My first was the British publisher Portobello. It was bit of a weird process because I went to them with another idea for a book, about Darfur. For various reasons nobody wanted it, and the publisher there, we were sitting in his little office and he said, “Rose, I don’t want that book but I do want you.” I can’t remember the exact list [I pitched him] but toilets was about number three. His face was not that impressed. And he said, “Um yeah, well, what do you mean?” So I started on my 2.6 billion, and Sulabh International, and untouchables in India who have to clean toilets with their bare hands in this day and age. And I do remember that he actually got up out of his chair with excitement, and from then on was fully behind it.

Then on the back of that book deal was a four-part series for Slate on the world of sewage. I went down to the sewers in London and looked at a campaigning group in London called RATS, Rowers Against Thames Sewage, and I went to Sewage School and hung out with kids learning to make sewage soup and how to clean sewage. And it was great — really good fun. Subsequently, I ended up getting a publishing contract with Metropolitan Books, and they were absolutely behind it from the beginning. There was never any question — which is weird. There is certainly a perception that Americans are more prudish about this kind of stuff, but that absolutely has not been the case. Americans have been much more enthusiastic about this book all the way through, and I’ve done far more American radio interviews, far more American publicity, and I still get emails from Americans and Canadians. So that’s been quite a revelation for me.

Why do you think this topic is so taboo in general? Obviously there are various reactions depending on where you are, but why in general do you think this is something we don’t talk about enough?

I actually don’t think it’s true that it is taboo — I just think there’s no avenue for discussion about it. It’s been my experience that people are very happy to talk about it. When I was doing the research, which was a two-year process, honestly only about two or three people changed the subject. And I was asked all the time what I was working on, and I’d always say ‘toilets’ or ‘public health’ or ‘sanitation.’ Invariably, people would pause just to take that in. Then they would go, “Oh, well I’ve got a great toilet story!” The thing is, we do or think about this stuff every day. Every parent with a toddler has to think about it when they change a nappy or diaper. Everyone who has to find a decent toilet in a shopping mall has to think about it. Everybody has to think about it because they spend a lot of time in the toilet.

I think there are two areas where poop still is taboo. I think it’s been taboo in advertising on TV. The toilet industry and the toilet paper industry have felt unable to be frank about their product, but I think that is changing quite a lot. In the last few years, there have been lots of plain-speaking toilet paper ads that I’ve seen in the US and in the UK as well. But the more important place where I do think it is very taboo still is in the corridors of power, and in the people who fund sanitation as a development issue. Certainly when I started, it was considered for some reason unspeakable. Politicians don’t think it is a vote-getter because they don’t hear people demanding toilets — whereas they do demand clean water. The other thing is that it sort of gets kicked around between various ministries. Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development — it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor — it’s all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility. There’s no Minister of Sanitation. There doesn’t necessarily need to be one, but the responsibility for it in a political environment gets shared around and doesn’t really get the attention it deserves.

I think that’s changed now because sanitation has become a human right, so governments are going to be obliged to take it seriously. I think that’s a wonderful change. I think the taboo is breaking all over the place, so it is quite exciting.

You mentioned all the different areas that poop and sanitation actually touch. In your talk, you also mention education and economics. At what point in your research did you realize that your topic had such wide impact? Was it a gradual process, or was it something you had a hunch about early on?

It was definitely a learning process. I mean, everybody is an expert on poop, really, but I started out not knowing how to make the connection. Because none of it is rocket science. If you have a girl who doesn’t have a toilet at school, she is not going to want to go to school when she’s got her period. It’s pretty straightforward. But I just didn’t make the connection. Only along the way, it was talking to people like Joe Madiath or the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, the UN advocacy agency that deals with sanitation — people who were in the field. The other thing was there wasn’t much connection between people working in sanitation. There’s all sorts of divisions in development — in water, and health, and education and sanitation — so you kind of have to learn from all sorts of people.

But the economics, that was actually specifically a guy called Guy Hutton who’s been really, really excellent at putting together the economic argument. And again it makes sense. If people can’t work, obviously there’s going to be an economic impact. But I would have never linked that to the toilet.

When you started your research, did you have a hunch that toilets would have such a serious impact on human health?

I had no idea that people — that children — were dying of diarrhea at the rate that they do. That was a real shock – in fact, I still find that shocking. It’s completely shameful because it is so preventable.

Another thing I found really striking were the unexpected health aspects. For example, malnutrition: Children who are malnourished, you can find them in a well-fed family. Relatively recently, people have figured out, it sometimes is because they have diarrhea. So no matter how many high-protein foods the child is given, it goes straight through them. There’s now been research that links sanitation to stunted growth. That’s pretty new to me. And vaccinations. When my book came out, someone wrote to me who is a vaccinator. And he wrote, “You know, people just don’t realize that sometimes because these kids are malnourished and because they have diarrhea, we have to give them six or ten times the amount of vaccine to take it in. People don’t know the connection.” They don’t link sanitation to all these things. I find that really fascinating.

On a lighter note, what was the silliest thing you learned about toilets or poop? Were there any crazy gold-plated toilets, or crazy advanced Japanese toilets?

Oh yeah. I used to work at Colors magazine as a writer and researcher, before I started writing the book, and someone had a bit of an obsession with toilets. We used to regularly feature the latest gold-plated toilet, usually from somewhere in Asia. And then there is of course a senator in South Korea who built a toilet-shaped museum, or a toilet-roll-shaped museum, I think. There’s all kinds of stuff. And I think it is important to have the funny humor stuff, because that is what disarms people and makes it easier to talk about.

People like Sulabh International, a fantastic Indian NGO that has built toilets all over India, they know that, so they set up the International Museum of Toilets, which is in a compound near the international airport in Delhi. And it’s great. It’s just one room, but it’s got replicas of toilets and it’s pretty humorous. They have a copy of a French commode in the shape of books.

Wacky is fine — I knew I had to have some humor in it. Sulabh really helped, and Japan helped as well. But I always was careful and determined not to write a book of toilet humor. Other people have done that, and that’s fine, but it is a serious subject. It was quite tricky doing that balancing act.

Yeah. I’ve been to Japan and I was amazed about the toilets and the technology they have.

Once you use a Japanese toilet, you’re spoiled.

Are there any sanitation initiatives that you think are doing a particularly good job acknowledging this poop problem and trying to address it? I’m thinking in particular of the Gates Foundation’s Toilet Challenge.

Over the last two or three years it’s been really exciting because a lot has changed. I think the Gates Foundation should absolutely be applauded, because I think they’ve been really instrumental in that. As soon as Bill and Melinda Gates started talking about toilets — and they openly use the word ‘toilet’ — that gave the subject huge legitimacy that it didn’t have before. I think that’s broken the ice for NGOs that were maybe a little shy about talking about toilets. They disguised it as water-related illnesses, or as ‘people need water.’ And they do. But what’s the dirtiness in the water? It’s usually poop. I think that’s been an opening of the floodgates a little bit.

And there’s all sort of exciting stuff going on. Sanitation hackathons, people working on apps. Matt Damon doing his famous press conferences. All that is really, really great. And it’s new. It makes me hopeful actually that maybe something has changed.

Speaking of the Toilet Challenge, do you have a favorite amongst the winners?

No I don’t, actually, and I’m sort of careful not to. When people ask me, “What’s the best toilet? What’s the best solution?” I’ve always said the solution is flexibility. The solution is understanding that we need all sorts of solutions. So I think they’re all great. This is a bit of a cop-out, but my favorite is the actual job description that they put out, which is that it has to be low-cost and it has to be sustainable. To me, that is brilliant. I don’t mind beyond that. The more ideas, the better. It’s pretty obvious if you travel in the developing and the developed world, it’s not one-solution-fits-all. Some countries have more water than others — some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away and some can’t.

So I think the best thing that reinventing the toilet did is not provide actual innovations in toilets — which is true, it does need innovating — but make us examine the system itself, which has been unquestioned for so long and is high-energy and high-cost. Even in the US and the UK, our sewers are crumbling. It’s a pretty unsustainable system. I think that’s what they’ve done that is really valuable. 

One last question: What do you find most hopeful about the future of poop?

That we’re talking about it. For heaven’s sake, I’ve just done a TED Talk on it. Six years ago, I never would have thought that was possible. I think things have changed so rapidly in the past few years, and I am really hopeful, actually, even though the statistics are still so woeful. Even though it’s the most off-track in the Millennium Development Goals, I think there is a legitimacy around it now. There are ads on American TV for, I can’t remember which toilet paper, but they were saying toilet paper doesn’t clean you — it’s like having a shower with a dry towel. And I think, “Oh, I said that!” But it’s great to see it on TV. I remember four or five years ago, Toto put an ad in Times Square showing bare bottoms, and they had to be taken down. So I really think there’s hope that this is going to be a more talkable subject. And maybe when people get an invitation from an NGO or a charity, maybe they’ll give money for a toilet and not just a clean water supply.

If you installed Facebook Home on your phone and you have a security-enabled lockscreen with a pin code or pattern, you may have noticed that your Facebook account is visible when you turn on your phone’s display. This means that anyone who picks up your phone will have access to your Facebook account and is free to do what they want. When they try to open any other app, they will be prompted to enter the code or swipe the pattern to fully unlock your phone, which really isn’t the intent of security-enabled lockscreens.

When using a security-enabled lockscreen, it should mean that your phone is 100% locked, not 90% locked. The good news is that it’s an easy fix. All you need to do is go into the settings for Facebook Home and uncheck “See Home When Screen Turns On”. Now when you (or anyone else) turn on your phone, your security-enabled lockscreen will be the first thing that you (of they) will see. Making Home show up first by default was a bad move by Facebook, but thankfully they made it easy to correct. Hit the break for a quick video showing you how it’s done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: How to securely lock your phone while using Facebook Home as your launcher

Fact: When it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one. How could this be?, you ask. Digital marketing provides targeted reach and measurable impact. Innovative digital marketing approaches in social media, CRM, and other areas dominate the discussion. Nevertheless, analog spending still rules, as confirmed by Gartner’s 2013 digital marketing spending report. Shouldn’t CMOs and all marketers be shocked by this? Sure, an ample pile of dollars can be attributed to big spending on a few analog media channels, like Super Bowl ads, for example. But I would suggest that there is something more fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability.

The Digital Disconnect

First, there’s a digital disconnect in the executive ranks, a leadership vacuum created by a mismatch between expertise and authority. Like so many other revolutions, digital marketing has taken hold from the bottom up. Here, we find digital natives steeped in digital culture and practice — twenty- and thirty-somethings who came of age on the social web. Squint your eyes and you see tomorrow’s CMOs. But today’s CMO is different: the corporate attire may be gone, but the assimilation to the new digital culture is incomplete.

You can see a strong precedent for this in the open source software movement, which didn’t go mainstream until its early adopters progressed through the ranks. Yesterday’s Linux hackers are now the chief architects and CIOs of the largest enterprises. Unsurprisingly, open source has become a key part of most enterprise IT architectures. But open source only crossed the chasm once its champions came of age. Many CMOs see their digital future, but struggle to make the case across the executive ranks, where resistance is born of unfamiliarity, fear, or misperceptions about what digital marketing means for the brand. “But we’re a traditional company” is no longer a credible line of defense, though, unbelievably, it is still a more common one than you’d think.

Perhaps digital marketing won’t go native until the natives occupy the executive suite. But I’m betting it will only accelerate because, unlike the open source movement which was initially about cost, digital marketing is plainly driven by revenue. Digital experiences and engagement draw consumers closer to a brand and more efficiently drive conversions and transactions, both online and off.

The Consequence of Measurement

Second, digital marketing is illuminating in ways both powerful and problematic. Analog practices leave room for ambiguity. The numbers matter, but can’t always be counted with precision. ROI is often ambiguous and anecdotal, which can relieve the CMO of true accountability. To be fair, many CMOs do want greater visibility. They’re tired of the murkiness clouding the space between investment and impact.

Others, however, long for the bygone days when the big idea was sufficient. The CMO could tap dance through the average board meeting, as long as revenue tracked up and to the right. Like Mad Men‘s Don Draper, the CMO became the master of the soft-shoe performance.

But with digital techniques, everything is measurable. Feedback loops tighten, segmentation becomes microtargeting, and optimizations can happen on the fly or even in real time. The relationship between investment and impact becomes correlated and causal — and the CMO becomes accountable down to the dime and moment by moment. Light dawns on the marketing spend! This transparency is powerful when quarters are turning into dollars for the business — but potentially perilous when the opposite is the case.

The Digital CMO

Now, a few CMOs may feel unfairly implicated here. Apologies! Of course, there are indeed strong examples of digital converts who have completed this assimilation successfully and built world-class digital marketing organizations that reimagine brand engagement, and even reinvent business models.

What do these “digital CMOs” do differently? They experiment aggressively. They hire smart digital natives — and empower them. They partner with great agencies. They have the humility to admit what they don’t know, the courage to toss out the old playbook, and the confidence to allow digital metrics to illuminate the results.

Some hire a chief technologist. Sometimes it’s a peer to the CMO, perhaps a chief digital officer, which Gartner predicts will be present in 25% of enterprises by 2015. Sometimes it’s a chief marketing technologist reporting to the CMO, which Gartner already finds in 70% of marketing organizations today. In both cases, this role is the designated left brain to the CMO’s right.

Digital CMOs also think beyond digital marketing. They look for opportunities to create digital experiences and revenue streams enabled by the nexus of forces, which is Gartner’s description of the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and rich information. The collision of these factors unlocks opportunities to reach and engage with consumers across the physical and virtual worlds, drawing them closer with targeted, contextually relevant experiences and offers. Further, it can allow brands to redefine how value is created and delivered — the way Apple has with music, Amazon has with IT infrastructure, and Netflix has with movies.

Last year, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO’s technology budget will exceed the CIO’s. Why? Because more often than not, it’s the CMO who is expected to drive this digital transformation, which is deeply dependent on technology. Is the average CMO ready to step up to this challenge?

Some CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution by filling the gap between expertise and authority. In other words, they have the self-awareness and the confidence to take bold action even when the context has shifted beyond their sphere of influence and scope of expertise. That is leadership. Others are afraid of the digital disruption — or exhausted by what it will take to convert digital resistors in the executive suite.

But as we’ve witnessed through the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and the resulting creation and destruction of business models, markets and careers — disruptions can be swift and unrelenting, and it is much better to be a disruptor than one of those being disrupted.

Baggy pants are tacky, but making the questionable fashion statement illegal seems to be taking it a bit too far. One town in Louisiana apparently doesn’t see the problem as it has made baggy pants illegal.

The town of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana recently voted 8-1 in favor of outlawing baggy pants. The ordinance says that “appearing in public view while exposing one’s skin or undergarments below the waist is contrary to safety, health, peace and good order of the parish and the general welfare.”

Those found in violation of the new baggy pants law will be hit with increasingly more expensive fines for each offense. The first offense will cost $50, the second will cost $100, and every other offense after that will cost $100 and 16 hours of community service.

Those who argued for the law went to great lengths to point out that they aren’t making this a race issue. They said that baggy pants are simply crass, and an undesirable part of prison culture that made its way into mainstream fashion.

Those who opposed the law said that they agreed that baggy pants were tacky, but argued that legislating fashion is a slippery slope that leads to legislating morality. They said it was an example of government overreach and shouldn’t be allowed.

Despite arguments against it, it’s expected that the Parish president will sign the anti-baggy pants ordinance into law. The ordinance will surely promote decency among the young men and women of Terrebonne Parish because baggy pants are obviously the greatest threat to decency since rock and roll and mini-skirts.

[WWLTV via HuffPost]

The GED, or General Educational Development tests, were created in 1942 to measure the academic skills of U.S. soldiers who had left high school to join the military. Though the test has undergone revisions, the American Council on Education has maintained the tests as a way for those who did not graduate high school to gain an equivalent certification. Now, it seems that the move to modernize the test has resulted in higher costs, leading some states to abandon the GED.

According to an Associated Press report, 40 states are now looking into alternatives for the GED. This comes as the GED Testing Service, which runs the tests, has announced a new version of the GED set to launch in 2014. The new version of the test will be available only on computer and will cost $120 – double the cost of the current test. The new GED will also reportedly have tougher math and reading standards.

States, such as New York and New Hampshire, have already announced they will be switching to a new high school equivalency test, and others, such as Tennessee, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Indiana, and Missouri are exploring other solutions to the rising test price. Competing equivalency tests are now making bids and educating states on their tests, some of which have paper versions and offer much lower prices.

SiriusXM announced the launch of a new personalization feature called MySXM, which enables users to personalize over 50 its channels by creating up to over 100 variations of each.

Channels that take advantage of the MySXM feature let users adjust sliders to impact library depth, familiarity, music style, tempo, region, and over attributes. Eventually, more channels will get the feature.

SiriusXM President and Chief Content Officer, Scott Greenstein, says, “MySXM is a personalization feature built to enhance our already well-loved curated commercial-free music and comedy channels and make an already amazing listening experience even more personal. Our experts set the stage giving you the tools to make the channel your own. You decide how involved you want to get and where you want to take your channel.”

The idea is that you will hear more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t.

MySXM is a free feature for subscribers, and is included on the iOS and Android apps.

The rise of social media means companies are collecting more and more of our personal data every time we go online. The government has been slow to respond — or even understand — the issue, leading some people to adopt technology tools as a way to protect their privacy.

Disconnect.me is one example. Launched in 2010 by a former Google engineer, the company provides “Facebook Disconnect” and other tools to stop the “Like” button and other widgets from siphoning data about your web browsing habits. On Monday, Disconnect launched a major update that not only provides a better picture of which companies want to track you, but also improves web speed.

Disconnect 2: what it is, how it works

In 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created a popular extension for the Chromse browser that stopped Facebook tracking. Soon after, feeling conflicted about working for a major data collector, he left Google to work on privacy issues full-time. He formed the company Disconnect along with consumer rights’ attorney Casey Oppenheim and another Googler.

The team’s first move was to replicate the features of Facebook Disconnect and use them to shut out other data-collecting platforms like Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Kennish made these companies his target because their widgets appear on many of the most popular websites on the internet: sites that offer information about health or news or weather. These widgets, which invite a reader to “like” or “share,” also act as backdoor portals that disclose what you’re viewing to advertising and analytic companies. For instance, the social media companies help ad firms learn when when you visit sites like “6 Things I wish I knew about Cancer.”

Now, the company has unveiled Disconnect 2, which Kennish describes as the tool he wanted to build all along. In a phone interview, he and Oppenheim explained that the new version is meant to embody three goals: privacy, speed and “don’t break the internet.” The company says this last goal means that Disconnect’s filtering tools won’t interrupt or interfere with a user’s ordinary browsing experience — even as it screens out more than 2,000 of the biggest data-collecting sites.

Disconnect 2, which you can install on your Chrome or Safari browser, also has a new look that provides much more information at a glance than the previous version. The icon sits in the top right of the browser; here’s what you see when you click on it:

The three letters at the top, which represent Facebook, Google and Twitter, are displayed separately because their tracking tools are found on so many websites. The user can also see the number of other tracking sites broken down by category. The drop-down arrows provide specific information about those other tracking sites. Meanwhile, hovering over the bars at the bottom shows how much faster the page loads without all the tracking tools (in this case, 28 percent) as well as how much less data is being consumed:

Finally, users can also pull up an image of just which companies trying to track them on a given webpage. If you click “Visualize page,” this is what you see:

The above image shows that BuzzFeed is one of the dozens of sites, including advertisers, data firms and analytics companies, that request information when I visit the Huffington Post (I don’t mean to single out either BuzzFeed or HuffPo — a similar graphic appears if you visit Reuters, ESPN, Weather.com or nearly any other well-known site — including GigaOM).

What Disconnect 2 means for users, publishers and advertisers

The new version of Disconnect should be a hit with privacy-craving internet users, who will welcome the opportunity to throw up a bigger shield between their social media identities and companies that want their data. The faster, less-cluttered browsing experience is also appealing. Publishers and advertisers, however, will not be giving Kennish and crew a high-five anytime soon.

That’s because, in addition to cutting off tracking sites, Disconnect 2 also strips out many of the ads that appear on a website (I visited Drudge Report, for instance, and the prime top-of-the-page ad had vanished). This is hardly good news for publishers navigating an already challenging ad economy. Advertisers too will be unimpressed since the data Disconnect is unplugging is the lifeblood of popular “retargeting” campaigns.

On the other hand, publishers and advertisers can take comfort in the fact that only a relative handful of users are sophisticated enough to understand the tracking issue in the first place — let alone download a special browser extension to stop it. According to the company, there are one million active users a week for the original Disconnect. While advertisers may fear a future surge in the tool’s popularity, that number alone will not have them quaking in their boots.

Disconnect 2: no match for the movement to mobile

While Disconnect 2 has the potential to throw a wrench into the advertising operations of Facebook and Google, it’s also unlikely to check the larger erosion of privacy taking place all around us. The reason for this is not because Disconnect 2 is an esoteric product. The problem is instead that its arrival coincides with a major shift in how we explore the internet.

Today, the most serious threat to our privacy is not the screen on our desk but the one in our pocket. Our smartphones are not just little computers — they are also GPS tracking devices that record our every movement and many our thoughts. Consumers happily enable this process with toys that blare their location like Foursquare and Facebook. And the trend is only accelerating (see Om’s trenchant thoughts in ”Why Facebook Home bothers me“).

In the face of this voluntary surrender of our location and habits, does Disconnect’s attempt to staunch the tide of desktop data even matter? It can certainly help, of course. At a time when Facebook is collecting not just our online habits but our offline ones too (the company is now partnering with retailers like drug stores), any tool that will deprive them of data will be a comfort to privacy advocates. Overall, though, Disconnect is unlikely to be a game changer.

Kennish appears to recognize this. In our phone interview, he said the company is at work on tools to limit the spread of data from mobile devices. He also stresses that one of Disconnect’s primary goals is education and awareness. By distributing a tool that helps average people understand how their data is collected, the company can help build a critical mass aware of what is happening and what is at stake.

Finally, here’s a video in which the company explains Disconnect 2 in its own words:

Correction: This story was amended at 3pm on Monday to state that the original version of Disconnect has 1 million active users, not 1 million downloads.

(Image by  Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock)

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The storage of data (and lots of it) is a continued business demand. The storage industry is evolving to keep pace.

The data center environment continues to evolve. Current market and business demands have changed to revolve around cloud computing, more devices, and a focus on the end-user computing experience. Large or small – infrastructure is what has been keeping organizations operational. Within the data center, numerous technologies all work together to help bring powerful technologies to other sites, branches and the end-user. A major part of this environment has always been the storage component.

Over the past few years, the storage controller has advanced far beyond a device which only handles storage needs. With more cloud and IT consumerization – managing data, space and future storage requirements has become a greater challenge. So, as other technologies evolved; storage did as well. With modern storage appliances, organizations are able to do so much more than ever before. In all effects – storage has helped revolutionize how we work with and control data. Remember, resources are still expensive. So, why not deploy intelligent technologies which not only optimize, but can scale directly as well.

• Logical storage segmentation/multi-tenancy. As organizations grow – many will develop regional departments or branch offices. In some cases, administrators would have to deploy a new storage controller to numerous locations; even if they needed just a bit of non-replicated storage. Now, modern controllers can be logically split to facilitate the delivery of “virtual storage” slices to various departments. Unlike simple storage provisioning – the branch administrator would receive a graphical user interface (GUI) and a “virtual controller.” To them, it looks like they have their own physical unit. In reality, there is a main storage cluster which has multi-tenancy enable. The primary admin can see all of these slices, but the branch administrators will only see the slice that they are provided. Those private instances can be controller, configured, and deployed all without impacting the main unit.
• Storage thin provisioning. Storage utilization and provisioning has always been a challenge for organizations. With virtualization and many more workloads being placed onto a shared storage environment, organizations needed a way to better control data. With that came the technology around thin provisioning. Thin Provisioning utilizes the on-demand allocation of blocks of data versus the traditional method of allocating all the blocks at the very beginning. In using this type of storage-optimized solution administrators are able to eliminate almost all whitespace within the array. Not only does this help with avoiding the poor utilization rates, sometimes as low as 10 percent- 15 percent, thin provisioning can also optimize storage capacity utilization efficiency.  Effectively, organizations can acquire less storage capacity up front and then defer storage capacity upgrades in line with actual business usage. From an administrative perspective, this can reduce data center operating costs, like power usage and floor space, which is normally associated with keeping large amounts of unused disks spinning and operational.
• Connecting to the cloud. No core data center function can escape the demands of the cloud. This includes storage technologies. With more systems connecting into the cloud, storage technologies have adapted around virtualization, cloud computing, and even big data. There really isn’t any one major, cloud-related, storage advancement. Rather, numerous new features and technologies have surfaced which directly optimize, secure and manage cloud-based workloads. For example, solid-state and flash storage arrays have been growing in number when it comes to high IOPS workloads. Technologies like VDI require additional resources to allow hundreds and even thousands of desktops to operate optimally. Another example is geo-fencing data and storage. In creating regulatory compliant storage environments, organizations can now fully control where their data goes and where the borders are required. Not only does this help with file sharing, it helps companies control how their data lives in a public or private cloud scenario.
• Controlling big data. It really didn’t take too long for storage vendors to jump on the “big data” bandwagon. The big picture here is that data and the utilization of data will continue to grow. Storage vendors like EMC and NetApp took proactive approaches in partnering and deploying intelligent systems capable of supporting big data initiatives. For example, Open Solution from Netapp delivers a ready-to-deploy, enterprise-class infrastructure for Hadoop so businesses can control and gain insights from their data.  Furthermore, in partnering with server makers – storage vendors are now able to deploy validated reference architectures which provide reliable Hadoop clusters, seamless integration of Hadoop with existing infrastructure, and analysis on any kind of structured or unstructured data. From EMC’s perspective, their powerful Isilon scale-ready platform for Hadoop combines EMC’s Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) and EMC Greenplum HD. In working with these types of technologies, organizations are able to utilize a powerful data analytics engine on a flexible, efficient data storage platform.

With so many vendors pushing hard to advance the storage market, the above list can truly become much longer. Market trends clearly indicate growth in the consumer market as well as within the business organization. This means more end-points, many more users and a lot more data. Furthermore, high resource workloads demand smarter storage solutions which work to prevent bottlenecks.

In creating your data center, always plan around core components which are driving technological advancement. This means deploying scalable servers, solid networking components, and an intelligent storage system which can control growing data demands. As the market continues to push forward, administrators will need to work with storage solutions which meet business requirements both now and in the future.

For more on storage news and trends, bookmark our Storage Channel.

YouTube is celebrating the 57th anniversary of the VCR with a fun new clickable inside the YouTube player.

It’s called “tape mode,” and it turns the video you’re watching into an old, crappy-looking VHS video.

You’ll notice a little VHS icon on the bottom of the player, right next to the settings and cc icons. This tape mode is only appearing on select videos, so you may have to search around to find one. Or, you could watch this latest Facebook Home ad in tape mode.

“Not too long ago, the video tape was the media of choice for living rooms around the world. In celebration of the 57th birthday of the first commercial video cassette recorder, check out a fun VHS mode for the YouTube player to relive the magic feel of vintage video tapes. On select videos, you’ll find a VHS button in the bottom right of the player–just click to turn back the clock and enjoy the static and fuzzy motion of the VHS era,” says YouTube.

And any time you pause or skip ahead in the video, you’ll see this familiar sight:

Cute, YouTube. Hopefully, tape mode not only expands to more videos, but also sticks around for a while. It’s a nice hit of nostalgia on a Monday afternoon. Now, excuse me while I go find my sweet Land Before Time VHS collection.

To ensure that the Brad Paisley/LL Cool J song “Accidental Racist” remains a topic of conversation for at least another day or two, SNL offered a spoof of the song on Saturday night’s Vince Vaughn-hosted episode.

Vaughn didn’t appear in the sketch, however, which came as part of “Weekend Update”. Kenan Thompson played LL Cool J, and Jason Sudeikis played Paisley. Most of the sketch is simply their attempt at defending the song, which has drawn a great amount of controversy and ridicule, but they did, of course, offer some new lyrics.

For example, Thompson’s Cool J offers, “If you think NCIS is good, I’ll forget the Aryan Brotherhood.”

In case you haven’t heard the actual song, one of the real lyrics is: “If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains.”

Anyone who’s been an IT administrator for a decade or more will tell you of the good old days when there was far too little information about the underlying IT configuration of a given enterprise. Now, the problem is too much information — which can be just as useless unless put into the right context. That’s the issue that ManageEngine said it’s addressing with a new Enterprise Search function for its IT360 IT management software.

“There are too many IT consoles, too many vendors — one for network management, one for help desk, one for application performance,” said Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine’s parent company Zoho. Pity the poor admins who have to piece all that information together to figure out what’s going on, or worse, what went wrong.

The search function promises these woebegone admins a “Google-like interface” that lets them search on a device name, for example, and get back every instance in which that name crops up.

“If you search on the term ‘Windows’ it will surface all instances of Windows — in SolarWinds, in ManageEngine, in Numara (now part of BMC ), then you click on a hyperlink and it will take you right into that native context,” he said.

If you search on a given server type, it will bring back every instance of that server along with all the applications that touch it or have referenced it. “You can see the nodes, the inventoried assets, any notes in the help desk file or in your CMDB (configuration management database),” Sabhlok said.

The search is part of ManageEngine’s overall  IT360 on-premises management product but will work across all relational database backends he said. And the beauty is it will work on competitive management products like the aforementioned SolarWinds. “SolarWinds is siloed. So are we, but we know customers need one way to find and view this stuff,”

The company may end up breaking Enterprise Search out as a standalone package, over time, he added.

Comcast customers, get ready for yet another TV transition: The cable provider has started to alert its customers in some markets that it is about to encrypt their basic cable signals, forcing them to order a digital adapter if they want to continue to receive basic programming through the service. Comcast is making adapters available for free in select markets, and the company even has a model that works with third-party set-top boxes — but some users could still be left in the dark.

Consumers who already use a Comcast-provided set-top box on all of their TV sets don’t have to worry, their service will continue to work as before. But if you have a TV in your den that’s hooked up to your cable outlet without a set-top box, then you’re going to have to get an adapter to keep it working.

Comcast is contacting consumers ahead of the transition, offering them up to two digital TV adapters for free for two years. These adapters are small boxes that come with their own remote control and are connected to a TV set with a coaxial (antenna) cable. Remember the converter boxes that consumers had to buy to receive over-the-air digital TV on old TV sets? It kind of works like that, except the sole purpose of this device is to descramble Comcast’s cable signals.

Comcast confirmed the move towards encrypted basic cable when contacted by GigaOM, and a spokesperson sent us the following statement via email:

“We are beginning to proactively notify customers in select markets that we will begin to encrypt limited basic channels as now permitted by last year’s FCC B1 Encryption Order. While the vast majority of our customers won’t be impacted because they already have digital equipment connected to their TVs, we understand this will be a change for a small number of customers and will be making it as convenient as possible for them to get the digital equipment they may need to continue watching limited basic channels.”

The company is also making a help page available online that goes into some of the details of the offering.

Cable companies have long lobbied for the right to encrypt basic cable channels, arguing that this will prevent cable theft and simplify remote management of their equipment. They succeeded last year when the FCC ruled that they could start to encrypt basic cable, as long as they provide consumers with some help during the transition.

The company also struck a separate agreement with Boxee to provide owners of the Boxee Cloud DVR with access to its encrypted basic feeds — and the new Boxee device also happens to be the first one that’s compatible with a new DLNA-based adapter that streams TV signals via an Ethernet connection.

However, Comcast’s adapters won’t work with Boxee’s old live TV dongle, which the company introduced a little over a year ago to bring live TV to the original Boxee Box. Also left in the dark are customers who use any other kind of digital TV adapter for their PC that are based on coaxial inputs, like the Elgato EyeTV. The last resort for many of these consumers may just be to invest in an antenna.

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A Swedish startup is introducing a new approach to making next-gen thin film solar panels, using techniques from optical disc manufacturing. However, the solar manufacturing sector is facing a brutal year in 2013 and as solar manufacturers continue to suffer losses, it could be a difficult time to launch a new production technique.

Midsummer, based in Jarfalla, Sweden, has developed equipment and processes to make thin film solar panels, using the material copper indium gallium (di)selenide, or CIGS. If the term CIGS rings a bell, that’s because the ashes of CIGS firms have burned brightly — and burned their investors’ cash – in recent years.

Silicon Valley’s MiaSolé, which had originally impressed investors with its high conversion efficiencies, was sold at a bargain-basement price to Chinese renewable energy firm Hanergy earlier this year. Reports are that the firm was snapped up for 10 percent of the price tag the board was after. There was also Solyndra, Nanosolar, Heliovolt, and others that have struggled.

But beyond just CIGS, the entire solar panel market is laboring under the weight of oversupply, and manufacturers have production capacities for about twice as many solar panels than the market needs. Even the big manufacturers are struggling and one of the biggest, China’s Suntech, has been unable to pay bondholders, with the subsidiary responsible for much of its manufacturing slipping into insolvency.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’ll be difficult to sell new equipment to prospective manufacturers. But that hasn’t stopped Sweden’s Midsummer. It believes its new approach to CIGS deposition offers major advantages.

Optical disk approach to solar panels

Midsummer’s approach is to produce individual CIGS thin film cells on a stainless steel substrate. The cells are “punched out” of the stainless roll before deposition. “We wanted to produce many small thin film solar cells and then later on put them together in a module,” says CEO Sven Lindström.

This approach draws on optical disc manufacturing techniques, treating each individual CIGS cells in much the same was a CD or DVD would be created. It certainly marks a departure from current thin film semiconductor deposition, which tends to be employed in a continuous process, either onto a glass substrate or a roll of stainless steel. The closest relative to the Midsummer process in PV would be MiaSolé, which uses a stainless steel substrate cut into cells. But even MiaSolé uses a continuous deposition process with the cells being sorted into efficiencies batches afterwards.

What’s the advantages of the CIGS semiconductor deposition onto individual cells? Lindström believes that it allows R&D improvements to be made more quickly and incrementally, one cell at a time. The company is aiming to produce 200 to 400 cells per hour on its equipment, and says it can change the process parameters a little for each individual cell. Midsummer employs its 2D bar coding system for the substrate, so individual cells can be logged on a database and efficiencies assessed.

Midsummer claims that other advantages include that its cells can be employed in a flexible module, which is a market segment that has been largely left open after Global Solar and Uni-Solar ceased production. The difference between Midsummer’s approach and those companies’ technologies is that Midsummer’s cells are significantly more efficient. Midsummer can produce modules with an efficiency of 14 to 15 percent, while Global Solar and Unisolar were producing modules for closer to 8 to 10 percent.

In addition, Lindstöm says the weight per square meter of Midsummer’s modules is below three kilograms per square meter, which is more lightweight than competitors. Flexible modules have been touted as a solution for commercial rooftop panels or membrane roofing, where weight load is an issue. Light weight, flexible panels could also open up other more unusual markets, like on the roofs of trains.

In terms of costs, the Midsummer claims its flexible module can be made for $1.10/W and with glass for $0.70. It has a roadmap for $0.50/W by the end of 2014, which is slightly ahead of competitors. It also believes that such costs can be achieved at a relatively small scale, tens of megawatts instead of hundreds or gigawatts.

It should be noted that while Midsummer has a line up and running in its labs in Sweden, but that the efficiency and cost results have not yet been tested in scale production. And with very few solar panel manufacturers looking to add capacity, there’s a chance that won’t happen soon.

“Nobody is buying”

While all of these advantages and this new approach appears promising, it could be incredibly hard to find buyers willing to invest in new solar panel equipment. “Nobody is adding new capacity,” at least for the next 12 to 18 months, says Finlay Colville, VP at NPD Solarbuzz. “This makes it a really big problem for anybody who is introducing a new tool,” particularly turnkey thin film lines.

But that doesn’t mean all is lost for Midsummer. It reports that an unnamed Chinese customer has one of the Midsummer lines currently installed for testing. The solar market’s geographical shift away from traditional European markets and to new ones in the Middle East and East Asia may also provide opportunities.

A GTM Research report released recently predicted that the Middle East and Africa will provide 1 GW of demand for solar panels in 2013, an increase of over 600 percent on 2012. The strong performance of thin film panels and CIGS’ in hotter temperatures could also give that technology an advantage. GTM Research’s Shyam Mehta thinks that if some of the CIGS cells that have reached 19 percent efficiency in a lab setting, could be applied to commercial production, there could be good prospects for the technology.

Even with a PV manufacturing market under considerable stress, innovation is still required to drive efficiencies up and costs down and Midsummer may allow for iterative improvements, cell by cell, for the first time in thin film. CEO Lindstöm reports that the company is well funded at present, but for its approach to make an impression it will have to start selling equipment sooner rather than later.

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In the past, channels delivered messages to audiences. You either owned the pipe or paid to use someone else’s. You controlled the message all the way through that pipe.

In a digital and social age, pipes are less important. People are the channel. You don’t own or rent them. You can’t control them. You can only serve and support them.

This new world is disorienting because pipes and people work very differently as channels. Pipes flow out; people flow in. Content is pushed out through pipes, but pulled in through people.

This reversal is shifting the balance of power. Individuals have access to information, tools, and resources once reserved for institutions. Externally, this means a shift in the relationship between customers and brands. Internally, this means breaking down the silos that once divided functions and departments. What used to be a hierarchy with the company at the top is now a network with the customer at the center.

For marketers, this of course changes everything. As part of an awards program that one of us (Cara) created and the other (Mark) helped judge, we had the opportunity to see how hundreds of top marketers in Silicon Valley are engaging customers and growing revenue in this new era. The two most important principles that emerged are that customers make the best brand advocates, and entire organizations make for the best marketing teams.

• Externally, empower your customers to be brand advocates. Laura Messerschmidt, Vice President of Marketing at Outright (a GoDaddy company), discovered through extensive customer research a new tax law that would significantly affect millions of customers and prospects. Instead of creating a campaign, Laura created a movement. She developed compelling content to educate customers, prospects, advocates, and influencers on the new law. She organized a roadshow meeting with local small business groups in ten cities. She reached out to 5,000 top customer advocates and invited them to share the content on social networks. The results? Monthly sign up rates went up over 225% in just two months and the cost to acquire customers decreased by over 40%.

• Internally, treat your entire organization as your marketing team. Chris Borr, former Vice President of Marketing at McKesson, was responsible for launching a major new campaign for one of McKesson’s divisions. On the belief that everyone in the division would need to support the campaign to make it successful, he spent as much energy cultivating internal ownership as external engagement. Focusing on the division’s 7,500 employees, from the night shift workers to the executives, he looked at every customer touchpoint and ensured everyone understood their new role as it pertained to the brand. The results? $600 million in new business the first year the program launched.

Some key skills and strategies accelerate the shift from pipes to people:

1) Don’t talk, listen. Brent Remai, CMO at FireEye, was hired into a small, venture- funded company with several years of moderate results. His first task was to spend significant time with dozens of customers to understand their problems and the language they use to talk about the issues. He used this information to formulate a marketing strategy that spoke to the customers in a language they understood. He then tested his strategy repeatedly with customers until it truly resonated. The result? In 2012, they were ranked as the 4th fastest-growing tech company by Technology Fast 500.

2) Don’t push products, solve problems. Laura Fay, Vice President Integrated Campaigns and Strategy at Cisco, has helped the global marketing organization rethink the way it approaches marketing. For years, the company had been focused on product launches to create splash, buzz, and engagement. Instead, she implemented an integrated planning process that started with the top customer issue and then created an integrated solution that crossed business divisions. The results? The integrated campaign resulted in Cisco’s share of voice for Cloud computing going from No. 5 to No. 1.

3) Don’t stop at 1-to-1, think many-to-many. Antonio Lucio, Chief Brand Officer at Visa, created a customer engagement strategy for the 2012 Olympics. Instead of pushing out messages, the company used social media to connect fans with each other and with the athletes they were cheering for. In exchange, fans got exclusive behind-the-scenes stories. The results? The most successful campaign in the company’s 26 year history of Olympic sponsorship, resulting in significant brand equity lifts, 13% claimed product usage and 470 million earned impressions in 26 markets.

Ironically, the shift from pipes to people is made possible by intensive use of technology and data — not only to automate but to analyze, personalize, and socialize. Technology brings speed and scale to what previously was impractical or unaffordable. Many of the most innovative marketers cited how social media monitoring enables them to listen and respond on a global scale. In addition, customer and employee communities enable them to identify real problems in real-time. Finally, relationship and content management tools enable them to make connections and capture user-generated content achieving both reach and relevance.

Counterbalancing this use of technology and data is a shared mindset that emphasizes reciprocity in the relationship between a brand and its customers. Top marketers know that they can’t put one over on the customer, nor can they control the message or their customer’s behavior. It takes humility, appreciation, and an orientation towards openness and inclusion.

So what’s the recipe for results in marketing today? Choose people over pipes, and mix one part technology with an equal part humanity.

Space Mountain is one of the most well-known attractions in the world, and is almost certainly the most famous in-the-dark roller coaster ever built. However, fans of the attraction will not be able to ride the Disneyland California version of the coaster in the near future as Space Mountain has been shut down over safety concerns.

On Friday, April 12, Disneyland was issued safety citations by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health. The description of the citations states that a contractor was injured while performing maintenance on the exterior of Space Mountain. While investigating the incident, the department found that Disneyland had not corrected “known fall hazards” on the outside of the Space Mountain building after a Fall Protection Assessment Report in 2006.

Though the safety concerns for Space Mountain do not relate to the ride itself or did not endager theme park attendees, other rides at Disneyland have also been shut down. According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Soarin’ Over California were both shut down over the weekend, though the Matterhorn Bobsleds reopened on Sunday. A spokesperson for Disneyland told the Times that the closures were voluntary and that the park is “reviewing certain protocols.” An estimate for when Soarin’ and Space Mountain might re-open has not been announced.

Final Book Now Available

As mandated by the Global Change Research Act (GCRA), the U.S. Global Change Research Program is currently producing a “National Climate Assessment” (NCA). The NCA is a report to inform the President, the Congress, and the American people about the current state of scientific knowledge regarding climate change effects on U.S. regions and key sectors, now and in the coming decades. This document contains an evaluation of the draft NCA report, presented through consensus responses to the Panel’s Task Statement questions, and through a large collection of individual Panel member comments and suggestions for specific chapters, statements, figures, etc. While focusing primarily on practical suggestions for immediately improving the current draft, the Panel also raises some broader considerations about fundamental approaches used in certain parts of the NCA report, and about the scope of USGCRP research that underlies the NCA findings. Some suggestions can be viewed as longer-term advice for future versions of NCA work.

This NCA has been a significantly more ambitious effort than previous assessments, in terms of the scope of topics addressed and the breadth of public engagement processes involved. Some of the important new areas include the use of “traceable accounts,” the articulation of needs for future research and a vision for an ongoing assessment process, the outreach efforts to help various stakeholders define their climate-related information needs, and the initial (though incomplete) effort to assess the current state of climate change response activities around the nation. Given the current state of the science and the scope of resources available, we believe the NCA did a reasonable job of fulfilling its charge overall. Although more needs to be done to fully meet the nation’s needs for information and guidance, such needs cannot be met without an expanded research effort on the part of the USGCRP and future assessments.

The Panel suggests that the NCA report would be improved by addressing the numerous specific problems and concerns and the more cross-cutting issues raised in the consensus answers to the Task Statement questions—which include, for instance, the need to:

1. provide a clear overarching framework for the report that helps readers understand climate change as part of a complex system with interacting physical, biological, and human social/economic dimensions, and offers practical guidance on using iterative risk management strategies to make decisions in the face of large uncertainties;
2. clearly acknowledge how climate change affects and is affected by other types of major global environmental changes and other societal developments;
3. offer an explicit discussion about the uncertainties associated with the regional model projections presented in the NCA draft;
4. take full advantage of the e-book format planned for this document through strategic use of hyperlinks among different parts of the report and other innovative approaches that help guide the experience of the NCA’s diverse audiences.

As the nation continues to engage with the threats, opportunities, and surprises of climate change in its many manifestations, the 2013 NCA should prove to be a valuable resource, as a summary of the state of knowledge about climate change and its implications for the American people.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Earth Sciences | Behavioral and Social Sciences | Environment and Environmental Studies

Here’s the latest news on Monticello from Watchdog Minnesota Bureau…

Threatened with a bond-holder lawsuit, the city of Monticello has quietly made a deal to buy time in negotiations with the trustee for  owners of $26 million in revenue bonds for the financially struggling FiberNet broadband network. …

A so-called “tolling agreement” approved by the City Council in March effectively extends the statute of limitations on legal claims bondholders can file against the city while ramping up the pressure to reach a resolution with the temporary agreement, set to expire June 1, 2013.

The article gives a little background…

The development follows the city’s decision to halt debt service payments in 2012, due to an annual operating loss of more than $400,000 and flat subscription rates. For the first few years of operation, FiberNet Monticello dipped primarily into about $4.5 million in profits from the municipal liquor store to make bond payments.

Going forward, however, the city wants to repay bondholders out of profits from the broadband triple-play network, as stipulated in the bond filing. While that arrangement would protect taxpayers from further subsidizing FiberNet, it’s not clear when bondholders would get a return on their investment with the system continuing to operate in the red.

Negotiations continue…

Meantime, behind-the-scenes negotiations continue between the city and representatives for Wells Fargo, the trustee. The confidential nature of the process leaves both bond holders and taxpayers largely out of the loop, including two recent closed-door City Council sessions on the threat of legal action against the city.

And service continues…

“I can assure you, the agreements and negotiations with Wells Fargo and the bondholders, have had NO impact on the operations of Fibernet, nor its customers, suppliers and other stakeholders,” Pultusker said. “I believe City Council’s release of over $200k of funds for Fibernet, is proof of this state of affairs.”