Networking

On NPR’s Morning Edition today was an item about a cable television channel called OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. It seems that Oprah doesn’t have her usual golden touch on this one: the channel is almost a year old, and it hasn’t established much of a presence and following (yet?). I haven’t watched it, so I haven’t anything to say about its content. But, while OWN is a cute acronym and all that, I want to talk a bit about what a TV network is, and why this isn’t one. For younger readers, this will be a bit of history; for others, perhaps a trip through time and memories.

When I was small (and Christmas trees were tall)^[1], television programs were broadcast over the airwaves, as FM radio signals. They had their own frequency bands, and the spectrum was divided into twelve channels: 2 through 6 on one frequency band, and 7 through 13 on another — for historical reasons, there was no channel 1. The allocations were made such that each channel had enough bandwidth to carry the audio and video at the desired quality, with enough extra at the edges to minimize interference between adjacent channels. And the television set had a dial to select the channel — a large-ish, round, twelve-position switch that adjusted the tuner to receive the desired one of the twelve channels.

A service area with a moderate population might have had only one or two active channels broadcasting within its range, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Larger areas, such as New York City, would have four or five, or even as many as six. The programs were all in black and white (actually many shades of grey), just like the old movies, though modern movies had long been in colour, of course.

Content was expensive to produce. Local stations would produce their own programming, but the budgets were necessarily low. So television took the network idea from radio: a network was a content provider that would distribute programming to its affiliates. The network would sign up stations, one per area, to take its content (including much of its advertising), and during certain times of the day those affiliate stations would air the network’s content. That way, everyone could get I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Car 54, Where Are You?, and they knew when their favourite shows would be on.

And they knew what channels to find them on. Everyone in the New York City area knew that channel 2 was CBS, channel 4 was NBC, and channel 7 was ABC, and those were the three networks that existed at the time. The station affiliations and channels were different in different cities, but if you moved to Miami, you’d learn that CBS was on channel 4 instead of channel 2, and you could still find Ed Sullivan without trouble.

Each TV station still aired non-network programming — local news, locally produced shows (such as children’s shows, where local kids were in the audience and sometimes on stage), and so on. Also, they didn’t operate 24 hours a day. They would sign on in the morning and sign off at night, and would sometimes have off periods during the day. During the off times, if you tuned to the channel you would see either a test pattern (a fixed image broadcast by the station) or snow (random, changing black and white dots, the result of the television’s attempt to interpret the background noise as a signal; TV sets nowadays detect the lack of signal and show a solid blue or black screen).

Those twelve channels, 2 through 13, were in the VHF bands. In the 1950s, stations started broadcasting on 70 new channels, 14 through 83, in the new UHF band... only, they had a serious problem: most television sets couldn’t receive their signals. And there was little incentive for people in large markets to worry about this: they already had all the television they could want in New York City, for example, on the VHF channels. The UHF channels were mostly inhabited by local-only, non-network stations, which generally failed. But in 1961, a new law required that by 1965, all new televisions have UHF tuners. Most accomplished this by adding a second tuning dial; the first had thirteen positions — channels 2 through 13, and UHF — and the second would tune 14 through 83 in seventy very tiny clicks.

The new channels opened the path for new networks, such as expanded educational and public TV networks (in the 1970s), and Fox and spanish-language networks (in the 1980s). But there was still the concept of local stations that were affiliated with content-distribution networks.

People got used to the term network, and with the idea that a network is big, with broader, better content... while a station or channel is a small, local thing, with little content of interest. With the cable television boom came hundreds of channels with direct content — no local stations, no affiliates. Some of them are called channels, but some are called networks, though they really aren’t. The Oprah Winfrey Network certainly isn’t the only one. The Food Network is another example, and there are others.

The distinction mostly doesn’t matter, and it’s really only of historical interest. But the NPR item makes one significant point in this regard:

Gerbrandt says cable is such a different animal than broadcast. For starters, people can’t find OWN.

Indeed: with the real networks, we all knew where the broadcast stations were on the dial. Now, with cable, those same affiliate stations have their old places, with low channel numbers. If you want CBS, NBC, and ABC, look in those low numbers — they’re still 2, 4, and 7 in the New York City area. But where’s the Food Network? The Discovery Channel? Sy-Fy? OWN? You have to learn where they are, which means that you have to want them in the first place. And with hundreds of channels available, it’s not so likely that we’ll stumble across them as we go from channel to channel.

It’s tough to develop a following.

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^[1] Extra points if you know the reference.

Netflix abuses its customers

In December, I complained about Netflix streaming: not enough of what I want to watch is available for streaming. But some is, and getting one DVD at a time in addition to the streaming makes up for the lack, at least somewhat. In the end, then, we decided to keep the $10 Netflix subscription.

But Netflix has just announced that it’s increasing the cost of that plan by 60%. That’s a lot!

They’re actually doing it by separating the streaming and DVD plans, and charging $8 for each. Here’s what they say about it in their email message:

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month

Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $7.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.

These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

The good part, I suppose, is that people who do only want one of the services can save $2 a month (let’s skip the penny here or there). But the assholes nice people at Netflix are doing a massive 60% rate hike for those who want the same package they’ve been using.

And one thing that’s particularly irritating about this is that if Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, or Verizon wanted a 60% rise in rates, they’d have to get permission for it from regulatory agencies, and they wouldn’t be allowed to dump it all on us at once. Netflix has no such restriction, and can do what it wants... it’s up to us to say No! by not buying their service.

And so I’m really undecided about what to do. On the one hand, I’ve gotten used to the streaming, despite its limitations, and it’s nice to have stuff available and to watch things on the laptop when I’m travelling (in the U.S.). It’s tempting to just drop the DVD service and continue with $8/month for the streaming.

On the other hand, I very much want to give Netflix a clear message that they can go fuck themselves, and hope they lose 80% of their customers and go out of business.

Watson’s third day

I hadn’t planned to make three posts, one per day, about Watson on Jeopardy!, but there ya go. The third day — the second game of the two-game tournament — was perhaps even more interesting than the first two.

Watson seemed to have a lot more trouble with the questions this time, sometimes making runs of correct answers, but at other times having confidence levels well below the buzz-in threshold. Also, at many of those times its first answer was not the correct one, and sometimes its second and even its third were not either. Some of the problems seemed to be in the categories, but some just seemed to deal with particular clues, regardless of category.

Watson also did not have domination of the buzzer this time, even when it had enough confidence to buzz in. I don’t know whether they changed anything — I suspect not, since they didn’t say so. It’s likely that Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter simply were more practiced at anticipating and timing their button-presses by then (remember that the three days’ worth of shows were all recorded at the same time, a month ago).

Those factors combined to make Watson not the run-away winner going into the Final Jeopardy! round that it was in the first game. In yesterday's final round (category: 19th-century novelists), all three contestants (and your reporter, at home) came up with the right answer, and Watson pulled far ahead with an aggressive bet that Mr Rutter didn’t have the funds to match. Mr Jennings, meanwhile, chose to be conservative: assuming he would lose to Watson (the first game’s results made that certain), he made his bet of only $1000 to ensure that he would come in second even if he got the answer wrong.

The result, then, was Watson winning the two-game match handily, and earning $1 million for two charities. Other charities will get half of Mr Jennings’s and Mr Rutter’s winnings (whether that’s before or after taxes, I don’t know; I also don’t know whether taxes will reduce Watson’s million-dollar contribution).

One other thing: in a New Scientist article yesterday, talking about the second day and the first Final Jeopardy! round, Jim Giles makes a sloppy mistake (but see update below):

Watson’s one notable error came right at the end, when it was asked to name the city that features two airports with names relating to World War II. Jennings and Rutter bet almost all their money on Chicago, which was the correct answer. Watson went for Toronto.

Even so, the error showed another side to Watson’s intelligence: knowing that it was unsure about the answer, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Of course, Watson’s wager had nothing to do with how sure it was about the answer: it had to place the bet before the clue was revealed. Its wager had something to do with the category, but likely was far more heavily controlled by its analysis of the game position and winning strategy. In determining its bets, it runs through all the bets it and its opponents might make, and decides on a value that optimizes its own position. And its strategy in the second game was different from that in the first

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Update: The New Scientist article was updated shortly after it was published. It now says this:

Even so, the error did not hurt Watson too much. Knowing that it was far ahead of Jennings and Rutter, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Watson’s second day

Commenting on yesterday’s entry, The Ridger notes this:

I find looking at the second-choice answers quite fascinating. "Porcupine" for what stiffens a hedgehog’s bristles, for instance. There is no way that would be a human’s second choice (after keratin). Watson is clearly getting to the answers by a different route than we do.

That’s one way to look at it, and clearly it’s true that Watson goes about determining answers very differently from the way humans do — Watson can’t reason, and it’s all about very sophisticated statistical associations.

Consider that both humans (in addition to this one, at home) got the Final Jeopardy question with no problem, in seconds... but Watson had no idea (and, unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the top-three analysis that we saw in the first two rounds). My guess is that the question (the answer) was worded in a manner that made it very difficult for the computer to pick out the important bits. It also didn’t understand the category, choosing Toronto in the category U.S. Cities, which I find odd (that doesn’t seem a hard category for Watson to suss).

But another way to look at it is that a human wouldn’t have any second choice for some of these questions, but Watson always does (as well as a third), by definition (well, or by programming). In the case of the hedgehog question that The Ridger mentions, keratin had 99% confidence, porcupine had 36%, and fur had 8%. To call fur a real third choice is kind of silly, as it was so distant that it only showed up because something had to be third.

But even the second choice was well below the buzz-in threshold. That it was as high as it was, at 36% confidence, does, indeed, show Watson’s different thought process — there’s a high correlation between hedgehog and porcupine, along with the other words in the clue. Nevertheless, Watson’s analysis correctly pushed that well down in the answer bin as it pulled out the correct answer at nearly 100% confidence.

In fact, I think most adult humans do run the word porcupine through their heads in the process of solving this one. It’s just that they rule it out so quickly that it doesn’t even register as a possibility. That sort of reasoning is beyond what Watson can do. In that sense it’s behaving like a child, who might just leave porcupine as a candidate answer, lacking the knowledge and experience to toss it.

No one will be mistaking a computer for a human any time soon, though Watson probably is the closest we’ve come to something that could pass the Turing test. However good it can do at Jeopardy! — and from the perspective of points, it’s doing fabulously (and note how skilled it was at pulling all three Daily Doubles) — it would quickly fall on its avatar-face if we actually tried to converse with it.

Watson’s first day

Interesting.

Watson did very well on its first day. In order to have time to explain things and introduce the concept of Watson, they set it up so that only two games are played over the three days. The first day was for the first round, and the second day (this evening) will have Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy.

It wasn’t surprising that there were a few glitches, where Watson didn’t fully get the question — for instance, answering leg, rather than missing a leg, in describing the anatomical oddity of an Olympic winner. And, as we knew might happen, Watson repeated an incorrect answer from Ken Jennings, because the computer has no way to know what the other contestants have said.

What I found interesting, though, is that Watson does have a very strong advantage with the buzzer. Despite the attempts to smooth that out by setting up a mechanical system whereby Watson sends a signal to cause a button to be physically pushed, and despite whatever the humans can do through anticipation, it’s clear that people just can’t match the computer’s reactions. Almost every time Watson was highly confident of its answer — a green bar (see below) — it won the buzz. Surely, on things like the names of people in Beatles songs, Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter were as confident of the answer as Watson was, and had the answers ready well before Alex finished reading. Yet Watson won the buzz on every one of those.

It was fun to have a little of Watson’s thought process shown: at the bottom of the screen, we saw Watson’s top three answer possibilities, along with its confidence for each, shown as a percentage bar that was coloured red, yellow, or green, depending upon the percentage. That was interesting whether or not Watson chose to buzz in. On a Harry Potter question for which the answer was the villain, Voldemort, Watson’s first answer was Harry Potter — it didn’t understand that the question was looking for the bad guy, even though the whole category related to bad guys. But its confidence in the answer was low (red, and well below the buzz threshold), it didn’t buzz in, and Mr Rutter gave the correct answer (which had been Watson’s second choice).

Of course, they didn’t use any audio or video clues, according to the agreement — Watson can neither hear nor see — but they didn’t seem to pull any punches on the categories or types of questions. It feels like a normal Jeopardy! game.

Oh, and by the way: the TiVo has it marked as copy-protected, so I can’t put it on a DVD. Damn. I don’t know whether regular Jeopardy! games are that way or not; I’ve never recorded one before.

Jeopardy! tomorrow

Monday through Wednesday are the days when the Jeopardy! games will air that pit IBM Research’s Watson computer against former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

My TiVo is set to record them, and it’s also recorded last week’s NOVA program, Smartest Machine on Earth (which you can watch on the PBS site). I’m eager to see how the games, recorded last month, came out.

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Update, 15 Feb, answer to Nathaniel’s question in the comments: Ken Jennings says this, on his blog:

On Twitter, Watson (okay, his human handlers) have said that video will be posted on Watson’s website on Thursday, for those unable to watch one or more of the games live. You know: non-Americans, the gainfully employed, the Tivo-less, those with significant others expecting a romantic night out tonight instead of a quiz show, etc.

Not so big a bang

Friends and acquaintances periodically tell me that, as someone in the science and technology field, I would love The Big Bang Theory, and I should check it out. And now the New York Times has published an article about the show.

The thing is, I have checked it out, and it’s not for me. The article notes that “many of the people who grouse [...] about the show have not seen very much of it,” and that some incorrectly think that it puts forth the stereotype of the “dumb blonde”. That’s not my problem with it; I just don’t find it funny.

I do have a bit of a problem with the other side of the stereotype: that it presents all the scientists as social misfits. Some are, yes, but certainly not all, and I’d say that it’s really a minority. People may get that perception because what such people do with their working lives is beyond the understanding of most others, but they do have lives outside of work. Most of the scientists I know are interesting people, with families and friends, with hobbies and interests, who enjoy art, culture, food, conversation, beer, and sports. They are not socially inept. (And, in fact, I suggest that someone unable to hold a conversation that doesn’t involve football is as much a “misfit” as one who can only talk about lab experiments.)

But, really, that’s a minor point: it’s meant to be silly, and I don’t take it seriously enough to be worried about that. It’s just, as I say, that I haven’t found the show funny, the few times I’ve taken it for a spin

What I really found interesting, though, was the final point in the article:

[Creator/producer/writer Chuck] Lorre said that the whole “challenge and joy” of a series like this is character development. “Maybe at the end of the day this will inspire some kids to go into physics,” he added, “just like ‘Cheers’ inspired countless young people to go into bars.”

It’s a scary thought that “Cheers inspired countless young people to go into bars,” though I suppose it’s true. That never occurred to me; I wonder whether Seinfeld prompted folks to be complete dufuses, and whether Green Acres moved people out of the cities and onto farms. What, I wonder, did Gomer Pyle do for Marine Corps recruitment?

Anyway, I can’t imagine that Mr Lorre really thinks that portrayal of scientists will encourage viewers to follow the characters into scientific fields. But maybe I’ll give the show another try.

Follow-up on TV content

In a recent post, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV.

For now, not everything is available through these services, and the limitations on available content might deter some potential users. On the other hand, for people who’re specifically looking in this direction because they don’t want the overblown content circus, getting what’s available online might be just the thing. And you don’t just have to watch it on your computer: there are setups to put it — in 1080p HD — on your television set.

To make this work, we’re really depending upon network neutrality. Because one is receiving television content over the Internet, using the same service provider that would like to provide television content through their own dedicated service at additional cost, it seems clear that the service provider has an incentive to make the experience less than ideal. If service providers are permitted to block, slow down, or otherwise interfere with this kind of Internet usage, they can steer customers away from it, and back to the provider’s television service.

When I was on the Internet Architecture Board, I began setting up a technical plenary session about net neutrality for the Stockholm IETF meeting. IAB member Marcelo Bagnulo took it over when I left the IAB, and he moderated the session. You can see the result as a transcript (search for “4. Network Neutrality”), with the slides here and here (PDFs).

TV: content vs service

As 2009 came to a close, Time Warner Cable narrowly averted the removal of Fox channels (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) from its channel lineup, and Cablevision failed to do the same for Scripps Networks’ Food Network and HGTV channels. The issue, of course, is money: the content providers want to raise the fees for their channels, and the service providers want to avoid passing on yet another round of higher fees to their subscribers. (See also here, and here.)

These sorts of disputes amount to a form of extortion, where the consumer winds up as the victim. We could say that it’s a free market, and we should let free-market economics decide the matter, but that would be ignoring the monopoly situations that exist here. Whether you like Fox News or not, it’s clear that it’s a unique service, and that lovers of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and their ilk can find that programming from no other source. The Fox channels also carry popular programs such as The Simpsons and American Idol. Similarly, if one wants to watch Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Emeril, one finds them on The Food Network... or not.

The content providers know that, and use the power they get from the popularity of their programming to make demands of the service providers, knowing they have them over a barrel, but the service providers are not innocent either. There’s little choice of service providers even in large markets, and no choice at all in the smaller markets. Where I live, I choose between Cablevision and Verizon... or I can switch to satellite, which is not an appealing option.

The result is that the service providers can charge pretty much what they want to, and can set up their packages as they please... and we, the consumers, are stuck with what they offer, or nothing.

And what they offer is designed to have us pay dearly for what we don’t want, in order to get what we do. A few years ago, the New York Yankees demanded that Cablevision carry their YES channels on the basic cable service, ostensibly “making them available to all subscribers,” rather than having only subscribers who wanted those channels pay the extra fee. The Yankees won, and the result was that all subscribers had to pay $2 more per month, whether we wanted the YES channels or not (I do not).

The same is true with many of the other price hikes that go on: ESPN, Fox, the Scripps channels... increased rates on these force rates up for all subscribers, because we don’t have the option to choose to take one, but not the others. And that is dictated by the service providers (and by the contracts that they agree to for the content). The content providers feel they have to hike up their charges to make up for lost advertising revenue, which has been on the wane for a while.

I can’t tell you how many channels I get on my Cablevision system now — the number has gone up from “a bunch”, to “a boatload”, to “more than one can imagine”, over time. But I can tell you how many I ever watch: sixteen. There are eight I use regularly, and eight more occasionally. And that’s it. I am paying for Fox, for sports (at least a dozen sports channels, and maybe more), for children’s programming, for old sitcoms, for music videos, and for the credulous garbage aired by “Discovery” and its sisters, all without wanting to.

And it’s no small amount. When I first got cable TV, I paid $30 a month for it, and even that seemed like a lot when I compared it to getting free TV over the airwaves, paid for by advertising. I’m now paying over $80 a month, when you add everything up — the basic fee, the rental on the cable box, the rental on the remote control for the cable box, the taxes and extra charges, and so on — and the next price hike comes at the whim of Scripps (or Fox, or ESPN, or the New York Yankees).

Scripps, of course, for its part, says that they’re not being paid what their content is worth, and they have to take a stand and demand proper compensation for it. It’s hard to argue with that, particularly since the subscribers (the customers, us) can’t weigh in, at least not in a meaningful way. Not with our wallets.

Here’s where regulation needs to step in... but not to force accommodation one way or another, as the courts did with the YES situation. The service providers should be required to offer channel selections à la carte. Subscribers should be able to pay for exactly the channels we want, and not to pay for those we don’t want. The service providers may certainly offer discounted packages for channel groupings, as they do today. But unlike today, customers should have a choice, channel by channel.

And then if Scripps wants to make Cablevision customers pay a few dollars per month more, we will have the option of saying “No,” by simply dropping those channels from our subscriptions, no longer forced to keep them in order to be able to watch PBS and CNN.

There are dire warnings going around that setting up channel selection that way will kill all the small channels, aimed a specific markets — that channels such as BET and Lifetime will disappear because not enough households will pay for them, when they have to pay directly. I don’t agree with that assessment, and neither does Consumers Union, which has been pushing for this for years.

À la carte pricing won’t happen unless we demand it, loudly, both to our service providers and to our regulators. So let’s go!

Visitors

As I said yesterday, when I was a child I would watch anything to do with science fiction. I don’t now, but, well, I still lean in that direction. I watch very little major-network television, and don’t really want to get hooked on a new series, but if it’s science fiction, I’m more likely to give it a try.

In that vein, I tuned in last night to the pilot of a new series on ABC, called “V”. The V stands for “visitors”, and the show opens, after a few minutes of introducing major characters, with the arrival of spaceships hovering over major world cities. After some initial panic, the apparent leader of the Vs, who is in the spaceship that’s over New York City^[1], projects her image worldwide and reassures everyone that it’s a peaceful visit. They’re thrilled to find intelligent life, they want to share with us while they refuel and do some maintenance, and then they’ll be on their way.

As a pilot episode needs to do, this one set up main characters, the story’s premise, some conflicts, and a couple of plot threads that will continue as the series progresses. I actually quite liked it, both for the story and for the way it was presented. The spaceships arrive with terrible rumbling and shaking, which gets people in something of a panic. But for our first visual glimpse, director Yves Simoneau, the Canadian who also directed the pilot of The 4400, gives us images reflected in the glass of the buildings, before showing us the ships directly. The effect works well.

I also liked that once the Vs have started having meetings with Earth’s world leaders, they set up tours of their spaceships for the people of Earth. “Yes,” I said when I saw that, “Isn’t that just what friendly visitors would do, if they could?” I thought back to when I would give tours of the computer center to grade-school students, when no one their age had ever seen a computer face to face before.

So I’m going to continue watching the series, at least for now, and we’ll see whether it lasts, and whether it continues to be interesting. It’s often disappointing when a new series like this either loses its edge after a few episodes or, perhaps worse, stays sharp but gets cancelled anyway.^[2]

Here’s one thing the pilot episode made me think about:

When the spaceship is hovering over New York City, just before Anna’s soothing image is projected, something on the ship opens up. Most people who are watching it at that point start running away in panic. And I wondered what I would do. If there were an alien spaceship sitting there in front of me — not some fuzzy-blob “UFO” that’s most likely a reflection or some such, but a real, incontrovertible space ship, as in V or The Day the Earth Stood Still — would I be interested enough to check it out, or would I keep away, afraid of what might come out and what its intentions might be?

I have to think I’d stay and check it out, and I’d be eager, when it started to open, to see what was inside. I’d imagine that beings who figured out how to get here from some impossibly distant world would not have come here to kill us. I would want to be among the first to say hello.
 

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^[1] It always seems to work that way: if alien ships appear all over the world, the flagship is always at New York or Washington. A little U.S.-centric, are we?

^[2] The short-lived Journeyman was a recent one in the second category. I liked it, and was enjoying discovering things as the protagonist did, when it was cancelled right in the middle of it all. The series only lasted 13 episodes (and you can see all of them on Hulu).

Pseudoscience on television

“It is regrettable,” says a fellow skeptic in a private conversation, “that more popular, network talk shows — especially those marketed towards women, which also bugs the crap out of me — tend to publicize pseudoscience.” In fact, it’s more than that they publicize it, but that they actively emphasize it. They focus on it. And the implication, inferred from the consistent pairing of the theme (pseudoscience) and the target audience (women), is that women tend to be credulous.

Women sit home and watch daytime television. All My Children. Montel, Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, The View. Oprah. With nothing better to do between swabbing Mop-n-Glo on the kitchen floor and swabbing dribble off the baby’s chin, women just stare at the TV, dewy-eyed and heart-warmed by stories of how they might be swept off their feet by a Libra who will use crystals to remove toxins from their bodies and set up the best feng shui for their living rooms.

OK, so maybe it’s just that I don’t know women who sit home watching daytime television, but the women I know are not credulous dew-eyes who get sucked in by Oprah and her ilk. On the other hand, it’s very clear that these TV shows are marketed primarily to women. So what’s going on here?

Is it just that daytime TV, in general, is marketed to women because women have traditionally been the ones who’ve been home to watch it? And these fluffy programs go on during the day because they certainly aren’t decent fodder for Prime Time (not enough explosions, which appear to sell car ads). Then, the appearance that we’re shoving superstition and pseudoscience at women is just a matter of collateral damage?

But, then, why do these shows exist in the first place? The TV networks must think that women are suckers for this garbage, or they wouldn’t have put it on to start with. Or maybe they think we’re all suckers for it, but it doesn’t sell enough car ads, so our prime-time exposure to it is limited to D-list outlets like Syfy and the ironically named Discovery Channel and History Channel (do click those links for shining examples).

Oh, and Larry King (tonight’s [schedule change] Friday night’s show will feature Suzanne Somers using her extensive medical training to talk about cancer treatment). How’d he wind up in prime time?
 

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Update, 24 Oct: I updated the Larry King link to point to the transcript of the Suzanne Somers show.

The Twighlight Zone turns 50

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... the Twilight Zone.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the airing of the very first episode of The Twilight Zone. That episode, “Where Is Everybody?”, was one of the show’s best, an excellent beginning to an excellent series.

In commemoration of the day, here’s a list of my other favourite episodes, just for fun:

• “Time Enough at Last” (season 1, episode 8)
• “And When the Sky Was Opened” (season 1, episode 11)
• “What You Need” (season 1, episode 12)
• “The Hitch-Hiker” (season 1, episode 16)
• “People Are Alike All Over” (season 1, episode 25)
• “A Stop at Willoughby” (season 1, episode 30)
• “Eye of the Beholder” (season 2, episode 6)
• “A Most Unusual Camera” (season 2, episode 10)
• “A Penny for Your Thoughts” (season 2, episode 16)
• “Twenty Two” (season 2, episode 17)
• “Long Distance Call” (season 2, episode 22)
• “The Silence” (season 2, episode 25)
• “Two” (season 3, episode 1)
• “The Shelter” (season 3, episode 3)
• “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (season 3, episode 14)
• “The Hunt” (season 3, episode 19)
• “To Serve Man” (season 3, episode 24)
• “Living Doll” (season 5, episode 6)
• “Ring-A-Ding Girl” (season 5, episode 13)
• “The Encounter” (season 5, episode 31)
• “The Bewitchin’ Pool” (season 5, episode 36)

[Note that they experimented, in the fourth season, with hour-long episodes. I think it didn’t work, and none of the fourth-season shows are among the best, as I see them.]

Computers in movies and television

In 2007, I had a series in these pages about technology in Star Trek. I remembered that series the other day, when I read an article in New Scientist about the science in Battlestar Galactica.[1]

The New Scientist article focuses on human physiology and psychology, and on gravity and g-forces. It doesn’t look at power, speed, computers, astronomical issues, or any of a number of other things that would have been fun to see covered. Oh, well.

But it made me think to come back to the idea of how technology is portrayed — in particular, how computers had been and are depicted in movies and television.

Star Trek, of course, and other futuristic stories, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, at the time the movie was made,[2] was still set more than 30 years in the future), sported talking computers that showed varying degrees of intelligence. The Enterprise’s computer mostly responded to spoken commands and queries, but other computers in the Star Trek universe were semi-sentient to the point of being able to be confused or tricked, an angle that was central to the plot of more than one episode. And 2001’s HAL-9000, well... we all know what happened there, whether or not we understood what was happening.

But cinematic views of contemporary computers have always been somewhat odd, usually aimed at being obvious or flashy. In the old days, they always consisted of banks and banks of tape drives and flashing lights, long after real computers had few or none of those. As personal computers came around and more people had more realistic images of computers — boxes on their desks, rather than mysterious roomfuls of equipment — the tape-drives-and-lights depiction had to change.

Now, computers look like what we’re used to seeing, but what they can do seems just about unlimited. The stuff that’s comical now has to do with those limitless capabilities and the silly user interfaces.

Computers on television can search for anything, find anything, display anything. They can zoom in on the minutest details, rotate images in three dimensions to show any perspective, and go through millions or billions of data records or documents in no time at all. They understand commands or queries in human language, just as the Star Trek computer did, except we have to type the instructions, not speak them.

The interesting thing about that last bit is that it’s actually backward from what the real technology can do: we’re much better at having a computer turn the spoken language into the right words than we are at having the computer understand what those words and sentences mean. My former colleagues at IBM’s Watson Research Center have long had the ViaVoice products working quite well, but they’ve only recently begun a “grand challenge” project to get a computer to understand human-language questions well enough to play Jeopardy! competitively.

We often see police investigators zooming in on low-quality surveillance videos and “enhancing” a cropped portion in order to identify a face, read a sign or a car’s license plate, or the like. A certain amount of computer-enhancement can, indeed, be done, and technology for image processing is getting better all the time. That said, for the most part what they’re doing is ridiculous. Image data can only be extrapolated to a point, and the reality is that information that isn’t there can’t be created out of nothing. A low-resolution image can’t magically become high-resolution with the aid of a computer, and if you zoom in on a 30-pixel-square portion of a grainy, one-megapixel security-camera image, you will never, with any computer, get a clear image of the suspect’s face.

The same goes for the 3-D rotation: such manipulation is possible, and it’s done all the time when the 3-D data are available. But a two-dimensional source does not have that information, and, beyond approximation and guesswork, such an image can’t be rotated to show a side view.

When was the last time you did a search on your computer and wound up with a large blinking, beeping box in the middle of the screen, saying, “NO MATCH FOUND”? A pop-up box with an “OK” button on it, maybe, but we just don’t have them blink and beep repeatedly.

The other thing we don’t have them do is display the thing to be searched for — often a face or a fingerprint — on the left side of the screen, while rapidly flashing all the unmatched images we’re searching through on the right side. That may look cool on TV (which is why they do it), but in reality it would slow the search down so much that it’d be entirely useless. No one would ever design a real search program that did that.

Finally, in the movies people always seem able to go up to any computer, start any program, and use it expertly. They can even do this with special-purpose computers, not just ones that run Windows or Unix or MacOS. To address the most ridiculous case that comes to my mind: it would simply not be possible to connect your laptop to a space-alien’s computer and upload a computer virus that would take out the computer system and defeat the aliens.

Suspension of disbelief has its limits.
 

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[1] The recent, well-received series, of course, with Edward James Olmos, not the horrible, short-lived one from the late ’70s, with Lorne Greene.

[2] And, for the record, the book came from the movie’s screenplay, not the other way around.

Africa on television

Those of you who get the HBO TV channel and are looking for a real winner of a television series should not miss The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It’s based on the stories of Alexander McCall Smith, about a woman in Botswana who sets up a business as a private detective. There are mysteries solved — some with happy outcomes, and some not — but the show is really about the characters, more than about the cases.

It’s wonderful to see a mainstream television series set in a little-known African country — Botswana, once a British protectorate called Bechuanaland, is nestled among the higher-profile South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia — and starring many African actors. The scenery is gorgeous, and it’s great in high definition. And we see something of African life beyond the “nature” shows.

The two principals are African-American actresses. The detective, Precious Ramotswe, is played by Jill Scott, who proves that it’s not necessary to be Twiggy to be beautiful. (And I see that she just had a new baby a week ago!) Her assistant, Grace Makutsi, is theatre and film actress Anika Noni Rose. Many of the others, though, are African, including South African Desmond Dube from Hotel Rwanda.

And the costumes are as gorgeous as the scenery. I love the colours and patterns, and wouldn’t mind a few shirts from the same fabric as Ms Scott’s dresses.

But another thing I find engaging about the show is the tiny glimpse we get of the local language. Almost everything is in English, of course, but we’re teased by a few phrases in Setswana. Setswana, spoken in Botswana and parts of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, is a Sotho language, a subgroup of Bantu. What we hear most is the standard greeting, “Dumela, mma,” meaning “Hello, ma’am,” using the word for “mother” as a general feminine term of respect. (And, of course, the corresponding, “Dumela, rra,” for “sir”.) We also hear, “Ee, mma,” (pronounced “eh”) for “Yes, ma’am,” along with “nnyaa” for “no”. Other words and phrases haven’t so far been repeated enough for me to’ve picked them up.

[Update: See the comments for some language links.]

In the episode titled “The Boy with an African Heart”, we hear a conversation in the Xhosa language, carried on through a translator. The Xhosa “click” sounds are fascinating. I always wonder, when I consider various languages, how we settle on the particular set of sounds we use in our languages, and how those sounds vary from language to language.

Watch this show, if you can! The first seven episodes have aired so far, but episodes 5 thru 7 are still scheduled for repeat airings. I will certainly buy the DVD set when it comes out — I’ll want to see these more than once or twice.

TV, or not TV: that is the digital

You all know, of course, that broadcast TV is scheduled to switch from analogue to digital on the 17th of February. You all know, of course, that the switch only affects the old style broadcast system, the one that goes through the air and is picked up by an antenna. You know that, right? If you have cable, satellite, FIOS, or any other system like that, you do not have to worry about this. In fact, you don’t even need to worry about it if you use an antenna, but you have a new TV that already has a digital tuner.

Your service provider might be doing some digital conversions of its own — mine has been switching selected channels to digital for a while now — but that’s purely its own decision, independent of the well publicized broadcast switch, and it’s responsible for informing you and making sure you have what you need.

But how many people still use antennas? Doesn’t everyone have cable (or some other piped-in system) by now? It’s easy for someone who lives where I do to ask that question: I can get nothing over the air but snow and hiss without some serious structure on my roof, and so it’s pretty obvious that everyone around here would get their TV service through a service provider. But in New York City, and in other cities, the situation is different.

First, the cities are closer to the broadcasters, and set-top antennas usually suffice to pull in the standard local stations. Users won’t get Bravo and E!, and one wonders how they can survive thus, but that’s how it is. Second, the cities are home to more poor people than the suburbs are, and, well, if one doesn’t have to pay $30 to $50 a month to watch Grey’s Anatomy, one can use that money for, oh, say, food.

The government even set up a plan to help people with the conversion: it offered coupons to defray $40 of the cost of a converter box. Unfortunately, it screwed that up. It defined bizarre rules about how to get and use the coupons. It didn’t anticipate that people would not understand who needed the converters, so, because many people who didn’t need the coupons got them, they ran out. And it made no allowance for the concept that people would not be able to figure out what to do — what to buy, how to install it, and so on.

The result of all this is that the government’s determined that the 17th of February will bring disaster. Grey’s Anatomy, along with All My Children and Wheel of Fortune, will be unwatchable by the myriad Americans who will not have the right setup.

The government is right about this.

They have decided that the answer is to delay the conversion by four months, to give them time to get yet more publicity out and more coupons printed and sent (and funded), and to give consumers time to buy their converter boxes and get them installed. The Senate has passed the delay, and the House is working on it.

The government is wrong about this.

I have sympathy for people who, despite more than three years of planning and publicity, still don’t know what’s happening. I have sympathy for people who don’t understand what they need to do. I have sympathy for people who have bought their converters but have no idea how to install them. And I realize that even when they’re installed, we won’t be sure they’re all working right until the cutover happens and we find out how many TVs don’t work, though they have converters on them.

But I also know, from many years of experience with these sorts of things, that changing the cutover date will make little difference. The problems will be there whenever the conversion happens. And the 17 February date has been set and publicized for so long that any change will cause a great deal of confusion on top of that.

Let me repeat that key point: we’ll have about as many problems on 12 June as we will on 17 February. That’s because no change like this goes smoothly. Any such change makes a lot of things break. We will never be “prepared” for the change.

The best we can do is be prepared for the aftermath.

Rather than worrying about delaying the conversion — and the inevitable avalanche of difficulties — we should be setting up infrastructure for accepting reports of problems and sending out help for fixing them. We want to create jobs? By all means: let’s hire an army of technicians who can go out to people’s houses and install converter boxes, or fix failed installations.

Then let’s do the cutover, deal with the problems, and move on to the next issue.
 

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Update, 10 PM: This video should answer the question Thomas brought up in the comments. [Hat tip to Educated Guesswork for the link.]
 

Update, 4 Feb: The delay has been passed in both houses of Congress, and the president plans to sign it. Let the confusion come.

Carrie Bradshaw might get you pregnant

Or maybe it’s Samantha Jones; we can’t be sure.

Researchers have recently published a study that shows that teens who watch TV shows with sexual content are more likely to become involved in a pregnancy. The Washington Post seems to do a good job of summarizing the study; unfortunately, the full article at the American Academy of Pediatrics is behind a pay-wall.

From the AAP:

EXPOSURE TO SEXUAL CONTENT ON TELEVISION LINKED TO TEEN PREGNANCY

For the first time, a new study links teen exposure to sexual content on television with pregnancy. In “Does Watching Sex on Television Predict Teen Pregnancy? Findings from a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,” researchers used data from a national survey of teens, ages 12 to 17, to assess whether exposure to television sexual content predicted subsequent pregnancy (girls), or responsibility for pregnancy (boys) over a three-year period. Teens exposed to high levels of televised sexual content (in the 90th percentile) were twice as likely to experience a pregnancy during the three-year period, compared to teens with lower levels of exposure (10th percentile). Limiting teen exposure to sex in the media and balancing portrayals of sex with information about possible negative consequences might reduce the risk of teen pregnancy, according to the study authors.

Here’s what the WaPo reports:

Chandra and her colleagues surveyed more than 2,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 three times by telephone from 2001 to 2004 to gather information about a variety of behavioral and demographic factors, including television viewing habits. Based on a detailed analysis of the sexual content of 23 shows in the 2000-2001 TV season, the researchers calculated how often the teens saw characters kissing, touching, having sex, and discussing past or future sexual activity.

Among the 718 youths who reported being sexually active during the study, the likelihood of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant increased steadily with the amount of sexual content they watched on TV, the researchers found. About 25 percent of those who watched the most were involved in a pregnancy, compared with about 12 percent of those who watched the least. The researchers took into account other factors such as having only one parent, wanting to have a baby and engaging in other risky behaviors.

Fifty-eight girls reported getting pregnant and 33 boys reported being responsible for getting a girl pregnant during the study period. The increased risk emerged regardless of whether teens watched only one or two shows that were explicit or surfed many shows that had occasional sexual content, Chandra said.

If you’ve read some of my other complaints about survey-based studies, you’ll know what my complaint about this one is: they have shown correlation, but not causality.

It’s entirely likely that teens who are inclined to be sexually active are also inclined to want to watch TV shows that talk about or depict sex. Inversely, teens who would prefer not to have sex are likely to be more put off by titillating TV.

It’s not just me, of course:

Several experts questioned whether the study had established a causal relationship.

“It may be the kids who have an interest in sex watch shows with sexual content,” said Laura Lindberg of the Guttmacher Institute. “I’m concerned this makes it seem like if we just shut off the TV we’d dramatically reduce the teen pregnancy rate.”

And that is exactly the problem with these sorts of studies. It’s not that they have no value; they certainly do. It’s that they lead to silly conclusions and unwise decisions — often to unwise public policy. These sorts of studies should be used as ticklers for further study. They uncover correlations that can be further explored, but they do not uncover “truths”.

And then there’s this odd recommendation, which makes me wonder about the genesis and funding sources of this study:

Programmers should also include more-realistic portrayals of the risks of sex, such as sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, the researchers said.

Hm. Do we really think we want more TV shows depicting pregnant teenagers and teens with STDs? Somehow, I think not. And imagine how silly something like Sex and the City would have been if the 30-something ladies kept warning Samantha that she was going to get the clap if she didn’t take precautions.

One could do a better-controlled study like this, but it’d be hard: it would mean controlling what the kids watched on TV (and perhaps making them watch things they don’t want to), so it’s not clear how well it would work out, really. But they’d be volunteering.

Here’s (roughly) what I’d do:

1. Get a bunch of volunteers and have them fill out questionnaires. Do not, of course, tell them what you’re researching.
2. Based on the questionnaire, divide them into several groups of similar composition — each group has the same balance of religious kids, kids with a single parent, kids raised by wolves, and so on.
3. Assign a slate of TV watching to each group. You must watch the programs in your group’s list to the best of your schedule/ability. You must avoid other TV as much as you can.
4. Interview them periodically, and adjust the TV schedule, keeping the sexual content approximately constant.

It’d be tough to keep that up for three years, but that might give you some valid conclusions about causality. It might give you a better idea of whether it’s watching TV programs that relates to behaviour... or the inclination to watch that does.

Posh Nosh

When the British cop shows are shown on public television here in the States, they usually end somewhat early (they’re shown with no advertising breaks), and a bit of filler is needed to bring things up to the next hour and the next show. One of our local public TV stations has taken to inserting episodes of Posh Nosh to accomplish that.

Posh Nosh is a short bit of satire — each episode is only ten minutes — that pokes fun at gourmet-cooking shows. Richard Grant and Arabella Weir portray “Simon and Minty Marchmont” (names that ought to be right out of Saki or P.G. Wodehouse), as they do an over-the-top spoof of a cooking show, mixing a bit of spousal bickering into the crème anglaise. The show ran briefly in 2003.

I especially like the way Minty, who recites the “recipes” as she puts them together, uses inappropriate verbs and adjectives along the way. Here’s a transcript of one that I saw the other day, “Birthday Parties”, just excerpting the recipe for a chocolate-almond-chestnut torte (exactly what you’d serve at a child’s birthday party, hm?):

Waltz 50 grams of organic unsalted organic butter around a highly sprung cake tin. Make sure you cover every inch — Simon’s very strict with me when I’m butter waltzing. And then, line the bottom with baking parchment. 500 grams of fresh French chestnuts. We did our chestnut run to Provence last week. Hot-bubble your chestnuts in goat’s milk ’til queasy — ten minutes or so — then, disappoint. Save the milk for your cat. Into your mixer go the disappointed chestnuts, and some whole, blanched almonds from Spain. Vulgarize the nuts and chocolate.

Put 120 grams of organic unsalted organic butter plus 250 grams of organic caster sugar into your other mixer, and disorientate until they’re the colour of sunrise over the Duke of Dorset’s villa in Tuscany, where I met Sir Elton John. Swish chocolate and nut melange. Pirouette a quarter of the adopted egg whites into the chocolate mix. D’you see how excited it is? Well, the eggs will relax it. Nurture the remainder. Now, that’s the perfect cake mix: serene, but not comatose.

Time to lower it into the cake tin. Forewarn your Aga to 150, and furnace for about 46 minutes.

Good cop, bad cop

I often watch some of the British TV cop shows, the ones with Inspector Lynley, or Inspector Morse, or Inspector Tennison. The ones where the detectives root around and solve a murder, which word they pronounce so British-ly. And there’s something I think I’ve noted before, but maybe I’m just thinking about it now because of the recent Supreme Court Decision declaring the District of Columbia’s handgun restrictions unconstitutional, and thereby making our cities more deadly with a stroke of “Justice” Scalia’s pen.

You see, I’ve watched American detective shows too, such as NYPD Blue and the Law and Order series, and there’s something very different between the US and UK versions. In the US shows, as the detectives sift their way through the facts and the evidence and the leads and the suspicions, they do it in a very physically aggressive, in-your-face kind of way. They’re rough with the suspects and the interrogations. They smack people around, they threaten them, they shout a lot. They go places with guns drawn, and you never know when some skel will take a shot at them. There’s the threat of a bullet around every corner.

The British detectives, in contrast, work more subtly. They’re generally rather polite, if insistent (the American version might be Columbo, or the guys in Dragnet, decades ago), and they crack the case through dogged determination and by getting into the minds of the suspects and puzzling out the inconsistencies. They don’t even carry guns — in the British police force, only special units are armed — and there’s rarely concern that they’ll walk through a door and take a bullet, or even a club to the head. They’ll speak sternly during interviews, but they don’t often shout, and I can’t recall them applying fists to the situation.

It doesn’t matter, for this discussion, whether either of these depict police work accurately. What’s interesting is what it shows about how our two cultures look at police work, what image we have of how they operate. The American culture is steeped in aggression, violence, and guns. We have the Old West image of the lawman with his six-shooter, and a cop without a sidearm is a completely foreign image to us. And, obviously, the creeps they’re dealing with are no good, so if we can slap some sense into them or get them to “cooperate” by banging their heads into the wall, where’s the problem in that?

The Brits, on the other hand, would find it odd to see their Detective Inspectors running around with guns or using their suspects as punching bags. In fact, there was a plot thread in one season of Inspector Lynley, where a threat to push a suspect off a balcony nearly cost DI Lynley his job. That’d be a normal day for Andy Sipowicz.

It’s fiction, yes. But our fiction says a lot about our reality. In the 1950s, Joe Friday never drew his gun. 40 years later, we didn’t even notice the guns because we were so used to them.

We’ve come a long way.

The Jewish Americans

You know, some people really will find reasons to get hot under the tallis about nearly anything. PBS is airing a documentary series called “The Jewish Americans”, and the “City Room” blog at the New York Times has started a Q&A series with the director, David Grubin. Sounds nice, right?

Of course right. So what are some of the first questions? Well, Karen asks this:

Why is the series called The Jewish Americans, of all things? What a turn-off. I, for one, am an American Jew not a Jewish American. What were you thinking?

...and Jack asks this:

Tony Kushner is a far inferior author to David Mamet and is far more of a “fringy” representative of Jewish Americans. Why was he chosen and given such a prominent role?

Jesus Chri... er... Holy Moses, give me a break, folks.

Mr Grubin’s answer to the second is the rather obvious one: he asked them both, and guess who said yes. And he supports the choice of Mr Kushner (who wrote the play “Angels in America”, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize). Personally, I, too, prefer David Mamet’s plays. But hey: I would never presume to second-guess Mr Grubin on this point: it’s his film; he gets to make these choices.

But on the name, well, really. “What a turn-off”? Karen really seems to want to find something to complain about. Some people probably think that “Jewish American” makes it sound like you’re Jewish first, and an American second. And some people probably hear it exactly the opposite way. So give the kvetching a rest: the documentary is about Jews, and the documentary is about Americans. In whatever order you want to put them in.

David Grubin actually took Karen’s complaint seriously, and gave it a serious answer. But in the end, he says, “The series, like Judaism itself, raises questions. It’s not about answers.”

In any case, it’s interesting. It’s well made. Watch it. Nu?