Category Archives: Technology

Proving the innocent innocent, and the guilty guilty

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Joe McCulloch called me this morning to give us a heads-up on something. The House agreed on Thursday to recall a bill from committee that would allow people who are convicted of murder, rape and a handful of other violent crimes to have DNA testing done if they can convince a judge it would likely prove them innocent. The bill has passed the Senate, so there’s a chance it could become law this year, if the House approves it this coming week. Here’s the editorial we wrote about it earlier this month:

Post-conviction DNA testing
protects all of us

WHEN THE WRONG person is convicted of a crime, the only clear winner is the actual criminal – although police and prosecutors might appear to be winners, since they were able to score a conviction. The person wrongly convicted certainly doesn’t win, and in fact we do incomprehensibly grave harm to that person. Neither do the rest of us, who are less safe because the real criminal remains free to harm others.
    We don’t have reason to believe that a large number of people are wrongly convicted in South Carolina, but we do know that our laws are not adequate to right the wrong when it does occur. A bill passed last month by the Senate (S.429) would correct part of the problem, by adding our state to the 44 others that allow people convicted of murder, rape and a handful of other violent crimes to have DNA testing done if they can convince a judge it would likely prove them innocent.
    Under current law, there’s no mechanism for such testing; in most cases, judges can’t order DNA testing – or do anything about it if such testing is somehow done and demonstrates the convict’s innocence – unless the solicitor agrees to the request.
    That wouldn’t be a problem in an ideal world, because the job of prosecutors is to do justice, and so they would be just as anxious as anyone to make sure the wrong person isn’t in prison. The reality is different. Prosecutors are human and dislike admitting their mistakes; and besides, they grow cynical from hearing the inevitable claims of innocence from criminals who really aren’t innocent, so with rare exceptions, they fight tooth and nail against those claims.
    One of the main criticisms of laws to facilitate claims of innocence is that they would be abused by prisoners who, with all the time in the world on their hands, will pursue any avenue of appeal that’s opened to them. That’s always a risk, but the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Gerald Malloy, projects that no more than five to 10 requests would be made each year. That’s in part because the bill is a double-edged sword for prisoners who really are guilty: If the DNA testing confirms their guilt, they are subject to contempt of court, revocation of good-time credits and denial of parole requests. Perhaps more importantly, it requires that any new DNA samples be run through state and federal databases, to see whether the prisoner can be tied to unsolved crimes.
    Senators tried to address concerns about the cost by putting an annual limit of $150,000 on the amount of money the state would spend to provide DNA testing for prisoners who can’t afford it themselves. But that doesn’t address the larger potential cost, in increased demand on our already overburdened and underfunded courts. That cost is not a sufficient reason to reject the legislation – but it is reason to give the courts the resources they need to do their job. Another way to hold down the cost might be to eliminate the appeals procedure, and make the judge’s decision on whether to order testing final.
    There is certainly room for debate over precisely how such a program should operate – and we hope that the House will engage that debate before lawmakers adjourn for the year. But we have not heard any convincing arguments why our state should continue to bar the courthouse door to inmates with reasonable claims that a simple test can prove their innocence.

A way to prove the innocent innocent, and the guilty guilty. It’s hard to see why this wouldn’t pass in a heartbeat.

Desperately seeking video tech help

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Today, I forgot to bring my camera to work. Normally, I remember all my school supplies (mainly because I keep them in the briefcase out of which I live), but this morning I left my Canon PowerShot A95 on the kitchen table.

Since I had two interviews this morning — with Vince Ford, who’s seeking Kay Patterson’s Senate seat, and Rep. Joe Neal, defending House District 70 — I had to stoop to a desperate measure: I used the Sony Model DCR-SR40 camcorder that the nice folks at thestate.com gave me awhile back.

This is a pretty cool video camera, with a built-in 30-gig hard drive. It shoots pretty nice video, with MUCH higher resolution than my little Canon, which is actually intended to shoot still pictures.

There’s just one little drawback — its format is (as near as I can tell) MPEG-4, and I do not have any software that can edit MPEG-4 video. Nor can I convert these files into a format that I CAN use. That means the only way I can share video with you is if I keep it really, really short and load it onto the blog unedited, as in the clip you see above, which as short as it is, almost crashed our VMIX thingie when I loaded it.

That’s not terribly helpful when I want to share video with you from interviews that last 30 or 45 minutes or more.

This, I suspect, is the reason why the nice folks gave me this camera — they couldn’t figure out what to do with the files, either.

Anyway, I’ve wasted absurd amounts of time searching the Web for help with this problem, looking for codecs and such. Apparently, I am the first person in the history of the world to have this problem, because I’m not running into any helpful support out there.

I even got desperate enough to e-mail Sony for help, and did so, after getting through all the barriers manufacturers erect to letting you ask a direct question. Here’s the only answer I’ve received so far:

Thank you for contacting Sony.

This message confirms that your e-mail has been received and your request is currently under review. Thank you for your patience as we strive to provide you with the best service and support possible.

Your Sony Online Support Team

… which leads me to suspect that Sony has fallen into the hands of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. Next, I’m going to ask them if they can provide me with a drink that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

But while I’m waiting for my tea, I thought I’d check to see if Y’ALL have any suggestions for me. Helpful ones, I mean…

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

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Since, I’m on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn’t post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it’s always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here’s a PDF of the original page, and here’s the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let’s do something about it.
    And while we’re at it, let’s win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
    It’ll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
    In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I’ve written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
    This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going with "Energy" for now.
    Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git ‘er done. So let’s change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
    I’ve made a start on the plan (and mind, I’m not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we’ll refine it as we go along:
— * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It’s possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won’t fit in a Prius. Let’s play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
— * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you’ll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won’t. Or if you do, we’ll go to $5.
— * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we’re going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That’s one thing we’ll spend that new tax money on.
— * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
— * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
— * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can’t (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can’t), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
— * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up — it ain’t happening.
— * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
— * If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
— * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
    You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that’s what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
    Then, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
    How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my — I mean, our– Web Headquarters:  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Why do people compress files — or use PDFs?

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Here’s a pet peeve. I needed to share with a colleague a handful of Word files that had been sent to me. Unfortunately, they had been e-mailed to me as a compressed folder attachment, and my colleague didn’t have the unzip software.

So I had to unzip the things, save them to a folder, and then e-mail them to her.

My question is, why do people do that — create unnecessary barriers that just make work on both ends? The total size of all these files was less than a 72 dpi photo, so there was no need whatsoever. The e-mail went out in the blink of an eye.

I can only conclude that such items are generated by people who don’t know much about computers, or whose knowledge is 10 years out of date.

And another thing — why are so many things on the Web in PDF format, which takes my browser SO much longer than HTML, and can’t be searched as easily, and all sorts of other mean, nasty, ugly things? I can understand when it’s an image of a document that only exists in hard copy form — say, a 30-year-old newspaper page. But most documents these days start out in electronic form. Why not keep things simple, and keep the interaction smooth?

The usual culprits in this instance are academics.

Somebody’s Big, Stupid Second Cousin

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There was an intriguing piece today in the WSJ applying the principles of The Wisdom of Crowds to predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The logic of it was persuasive when it invoked Wikipedia, which I find to be far more useful and reliable than detractors claim (when people say it’s inaccurate, I want to know, Compared to what source of such breadth and depth?)

It was less persuasive in the preceding sentence, when it said,

This collective intelligence also accounts for why Google results,
determined by an algorithm reflecting the popularity of Web results
matching a search, are so relevant….

Today, wearing my vice president hat, I heard a presentation on new vistas of user-specific smart online advertising that the presenter described more than once in “Big Brother” terms — not as a bad thing, but in terms of Big Brother’s storied effectiveness and, I suppose, intrusiveness into private thinking patterns.

But you know what? So far, I’ve been hugely unimpressed by the effectiveness of software that is supposed to get to know me well enough that it can predict what I want. Take Netflix, for instance. I have freely given Netflix more than its share of info on my preferences. I have, for instance — and I’m embarrassed to admit this — rated 1,872 movies on the one-through-five-star system. Yes, that’s one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two. Any time Netflix has said I need to “rate more movies” — and it seems to have an insatiable appetite in this regard — I have taken a few moments (in the evenings, of course) to oblige.

I have done this in a vain attempt to give Netflix enough info to at least make a wild guess as to what sort of movies I like. It still doesn’t seem any deeper or more intuitive than what a clerk at an ’80s-style video store might have guessed after less than a dozen rentals. Or so it seems to me.

For instance, Netflix is convinced I’ve got a fierce hankering to watch “Classics” — you know, movies with Clark Gable or Myrna Loy or whatever. Apparently, this is based on the fact that I’ve given high ratings to, for instance, “It Happened One Night” and “The Thin Man.” But of course I give those high ratings! Any literate movie fan would! That doesn’t mean I want to see them again, or that I want to see lesser films with the same actors in them! I don’t have a black-and-white jones here, people. I just acknowledge quality, and I think my judgments along those lines are fairly conventional, really. What I need you to do is extrapolate what I might like among films I haven’t seen or heard about…

Whatever. Anyway, this sort of software hasn’t figured me out, even when I’ve wanted it to. It’s more like somebody’s stupid second cousin than Big Brother.

Aunt Joy’s Cakes

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Here’s another excellent example of the places you can go when you combine an attention deficit problem with the magic of hypertext links.

I was reading the comments on this post, and decided to answer some points Peter brought up. In particular, I took issue with this assertion:

From the problems at Corrections, Health and Human Services, Commerce
and others, the blame ALWAYS stays at the agency and never seems to
rise to the governor….

In part, I said:

As for Corrections, please tell me what problems you think there are
that stem from the administrative side. The problem with Corrections is
deep, profound, fundamental, and lies with the Legislature. It is this:
That our lawmakers embrace locking people up when it is unnecessary,
and refuse to fund Corrections sufficiently to imprison that many
people effectively and safely, much less do anything in the way of
rehabilitation.

It’s an enormous waste of money to lock up nonviolent offenders,
people who pose no physical threat to the citizenry. In their own
perverse way, lawmakers agree with this equation. So they lock them up
anyway (because of some atavistic urge they have to do so), and just
don’t appropriate the money. The results are predictable.

Or were you suggesting there is something wrong with what Ozmint and
Sanford have done with the situation handed them? Personally, I don’t
see any failings on their parts that pose even a measurable fraction of
the systemic problem our laws create. (Ozmint’s greatest sin is
refusing to criticize the underlying situation more forcefully and on
the record, although he has recently begun to crawl out of that shell.) Here’s a column I wrote about that problem , back in 2005. Things have not changed since then…

There’s more, but I won’t bore you further, but will move on to the fun, ADD stuff.

Looking for links to support my assertions without having to go into even greater detail (yes, my comment was, unfortunately, much, much longer than that — as was Peter’s let me hasten to add), I ran across this old post.

I found myself rather frustrated in reading the comments on that one, because … well, for the usual reason that I get frustrated. I had simply noted that something Jon Ozmint had said was like something the Captain had said in "Cool Hand Luke." I thought that was cool in and of itself. For me the connection is the thing. It releases dopamine in my brain or whatever.

But to some of my correspondents, to whom everything has to be this big black-vs.-white argument, preferably of the ideological variety, my pointing that out was some kind of huge, bleeding-heart whine for the poor criminals or something. Such people ascribe to me an affinity for relevance that I don’t possess.

So, to prove to them that it WAS like what the Captain said (yes, we’re talking Strother Martin here), I went looking for the appropriate clip, and here it is. Now this next part is not my fault, because the YouTube page suggested it under "Related videos." It’s the scene in which the girl whom Dragline dubs "Lucille" washes the car. I had to go ahead and look at it for research purposes.

And then I got to wondering about the um, actress who portrayed "Lucille" with such compelling force. Turns out her name was "Joy Harmon," and she also portrayed a 30-foot-tall woman in "Village of the Giants," which is not to be confused with the 50-foot-woman Maureen Dowd recently referred to.

Now here’s the icing, as it were. Turns out that Wikipedia refers to Joy Patricia Harmon as "a baker and former American actress." It also says she wore a bikini in the famous "Cool Hand Luke" scene, which we know she did NOT do, but then everybody says Wikipedia gets things wrong. (Come on, safety pin — Pop!)

A baker?, you’re thinking. Exactly. So I had to read a little further, and I discovered that after she retired from washing cars and being abnormally tall, Ms. Harmon started a business in beautiful downtown Burbank, and it’s called "Aunt Joy’s Cakes." Really. She started the business because "The demand for her delicious treats became too great for her to do alone in her kitchen." (You hush now; Dragline doesn’t want you talking that way about his Lucille.)

So now you know. And now you see how pointless it is to argue against government restructuring.

And I get this pooge WHY exactly?

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Most people get a lot of e-mail that they delete immediately, and I am surely no exception. In fact, I get so much that I have several accounts, as a way of sorting and triaging — a published one for the world (which I get to as soon as I can, and race through as quickly as possible, which involves a LOT of instantaneous deletion), an internal one for gotta-know-this-to-get-the-paper-out-today-type business, a couple of private ones (one of them for e-bills, which I do my best to ignore) and so forth.

But sometimes I pause with my finger over the "delete" key, just long enough to think "Why did I get this?" Some of the messages in this category are cool. For instance, I’ve somehow gotten on a lot of e-mail lists for commercial artists and photographers, which I forward to my daughter who’s majoring in graphic arts. Still don’t know why I get them, though.

Then there’s the stuff that’s kind of work-related, but I still don’t know how I got on the list. For instance, this one today (from a source I get messages from daily):

***MEDIA ADVISORY***
RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to Speak at Fayette County Republican Party Reagan Day Dinner

WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Robert M. “Mike” Duncan will deliver the keynote address to the Fayette County Republican Party Reagan Day Dinner.  The dinner will be held on April 26 at 6:00 p.m. in the Griffin Gate Marriott’s Paddock Tent to benefit the Republican Party of Fayette County.  Details are available on the party’s website: www.fayettegop.com.

WHO:                RNC Chairman Mike Duncan
WHAT:              2008 Fayette County Republican Party Reagan Day Dinner
WHEN:              Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:00 p.m. EDT

And all the way down, I’m thinking, Fayette County where? What state is this even in? Only at the very end to I get my answer:

WHERE:            Griffin Gate Marriott
                         Paddock Tent
                         1800 Newtown Pike
                         Lexington, KY 40511

Admittedly this comes from the Republican NATIONAL Committee, so I can see why I’m on their list. But what kind of doofus sends out a release nationally that doesn’t tell editors in the 49 other states that there is no way that they will EVER be interested in this. I mean, you know, I’m assuming that the purpose is that you would want editors to pay SOME attention to your releases at some point in the future, right? If not, why send out the damn’ things?

Yeah, I know, y’all don’t care about this. And even for me, it’s just one of a hundred or so petty irritations that I’ll endure today in my never-ending quest to inform and entertain thousands of Kansans. I mean, South Carolinians.

‘I thought I told you kids to keep your toys out of the parking lot…’

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So I’m rolling along through a parking lot today, and I think I see a space, but when I get to it, a portion of it — a small portion, but enough to constitute an obstruction — is occupied by this little yellow thing.

Being the founder of the Energy Party, you’d think I would be charmed by such an itty-bitty vehicle. But then I read that the "smart" car doesn’t get in-town mileage as good as that of the much-bigger Prius (at least, that’s what Wikipedia said; still looking for a better source on that). Therefore I don’t think the party should endorse something that would be this appallingly unsafe on American roads (on account of the ridiculous monstrosities that predominate there), given the small tradeoff in fuel efficiency.

Thoughts from the floor?

Why can’t we be smart like our sister?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THINK OF South Carolina as a restless schoolboy. He doesn’t test well, but he’s got loads of potential; everybody says so. He’s a well-meaning kid, but has an attention-deficit problem. There he sits, as far to the back of the class as he can get away with. As the teacher drones on about science and stuff, he wonders whether he can get away with spending his lunch money on candy again. Then, just as he’s turned to calculating the number of days left until school is out and he can go to the beach (he’s very good at this sort of math), his reverie is rudely interrupted.
    The teacher stands over him, her eyes just boring into him over the glasses on the end of her nose. She speaks directly to him, demanding to know, “Why can’t you be smart like your sister?”
    The poor kid hears that a lot.
    My own rather feckless, aimless mind (I was born here, you know) has been running along these lines all week, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how well our smart sister has applied herself. Not my sister, personally, but South Carolina’s. Her name is Queensland, and she’s our sister state in Australia.
    Her former premier, Peter Beattie, spoke at my Rotary meeting Monday, although I didn’t realize it at the time because I slipped out of the meeting early (I’m telling you, I am that boy). Mr. Beattie is the one who suggested the whole “sister-state” economic development relationship when he was in office back in the ’90s. He got the idea after a visit here in 1996. He had come to study how our state had taken advantage of the Atlanta Olympics, serving as a training site and hosting the women’s marathon trials. He hoped his state could do the same with the Sydney games.
    As things turned out, though, our “sister” would go on to do some things we should emulate. As premier, he pushed a strategy that would lead to Australia’s “Sunshine State” getting a new alias: “The Smart State.”
    During a week when the S.C. Senate Finance Committee was reacting to tough fiscal times by cutting back on the endowed chairs program and letting K-12 funding slide backward, I kept getting my nose rubbed in the smartness of our sister despite my best efforts to miss the point. On Wednesday, someone sent me a copy of remarks Mr. Beattie — who has been lecturing at USC’s Walker
Institute of International & Area Studies recently — had prepared for a speech this coming Tuesday to the Global Business Forum in Columbia. I skimmed over what he had written…

    Twenty years ago, Queensland was a traditional rocks-and-crops economy where education was not regarded as a priority. But with increasing globalisation, my government knew this was not enough to compete with the new emerging markets of China and India…. We publicly said innovate or stagnate were our choices.
    As a result we developed a strategy called Smart State. This involved a major overhaul of our education and training systems… the cutting edge of developments in biotechnology, energy, information and communications…
    The result has been… Queensland’s lowest unemployment rate in three decades… budget surpluses and a AAA credit rating. Our economic growth has outperformed the nation’s growth for 10 consecutive years and was done on the back of competitive state taxes. Our focus has been long-term and education reform was central.
    Since 1998, the Queensland Government has invested almost $3 billion to boost innovation and R&D infrastructure…

    … but I didn’t have time to read it all just then. Being that unfocused boy, I did find time to write a pointless post on my blog about how “For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me….” That night, I was attending a lecture by Salman Rushdie, who had been brought here by Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist and USC professor, who as it happens grew up in Queensland.
    So guess who I ran into at the reception that night for Mr. Rushdie? Yep — Peter Beattie. (The coincidences were starting to get as weird and mystical as something out of a novel by, well, Salman Rushdie.)
    Cooperating with the inevitable, I introduced myself, and he told me eagerly about the exciting high-tech opportunities he saw here in South Carolina, what with the endowed chairs and Innovista, and our state’s advantages in the fields of hydrogen power, clean coal technology and biotech.
    Biotech, by the way, has been a big one for Queensland, employing 3,200 people, generating $4 billion a year in revenues, and leading to such concrete advances as Ian Fraser’s new human papillomavirus vaccine, which is now protecting 13 million women worldwide from cervical cancer — just so you know it’s not all pie in the sky.
    When I asked him about some of the less-than-visionary (in my view, not his) decisions being made by S.C. political leaders as we spoke, he insisted that was not his place: “I’m a guest here,” he said in that wonderful Down Under accent. “Queensland is like South Carolina. Manners are important.”
    He spoke instead about the opportunities we had in common, and about the fact that places such as Queensland and South Carolina “have to innovate or be left behind.”
    South Carolina, so used to lagging behind the other kids, truly does possess the potential to be a “smart state” like our sister. But too many easily distracted boys over at the State House keep staring out the classroom window…

Countdown to a million

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Check out the cool new counter that Kelly Davis of thestate.com set up for me — it’s in the upper right-hand corner of this page, at about 2 o’clock from here.

I still haven’t decided how to mark this blog’s millionth page view. But in the meantime, y’all can watch the countdown along with me.

And no, I didn’t expect chills to run up and down your spine, or anything. I just wanted to share.

On Saturdays, you’ll find us on the Web

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SINCE YOU’RE reading this, we can assume you found us in our new location. Actually, Page D2 is sort of an old location for the Sunday editorial page. We were here for many years before jumping to the A section a little more than a year ago.
    Being back on D2 feels like home to me; I hope it will make our pages more convenient each week for you as well.
    But my purpose today is not to talk about a change already made, but one coming up. And this one is going to feel a lot less familiar to all of us.
    Starting six days from now, we will no longer publish opinion and commentary pages on Saturdays in The State. Instead, we’ll unveil a new Web page featuring content of the sort that we would have published in the paper, only more of it. The new page will be called “Saturday Opinion Extra.”
    Why are we doing this? Two reasons, which I’ll keep as simple as possible:

  1. We have to cut costs.
  2. There are things we can do online we can’t do in the paper.

    Now, about the cost-cutting:
    You may have read that newspapers don’t make as much money as they used to. We still make money, just not as much as the stock market demands. And when you’re a publicly traded company, you have no options: Making less money is something shareholders don’t stand for.
    So you do two things: You work like crazy to bring in more revenue, which is not my department. And you cut costs, which does involve the editorial staff.
    When we lost one writing position three years ago, we eliminated staff-written copy from our Monday pages. Now, faced with further reductions, we’re eliminating editorials from another day, plus eliminating two pages of newsprint a week.
    But just as we replaced the staff copy with a lot more letters to the editor (one of the most popular features in the paper) on Mondays, you’ll get more content on Saturdays online than we could possibly put in the paper. For instance:

  • We get far more syndicated and local guest columns than we can fit on our op-ed pages during the week. On our new Saturday Web page, we’ll be able to give you several op-ed pages worth of columns from the likes of David Broder, Kathleen Parker, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Cal Thomas, Paul Krugman and Charles Krauthammer.
  • Add to that at least one column from a local writer, just as you would normally have received on Saturdays. But the particular columns we put online might be something you’d never have gotten in the paper. We often get more than one column in a month from such newsmakers as Gov. Mark Sanford (Columbia Mayor Bob Coble has submitted three this past month). But since space in the paper is at such a premium, we try to limit each writer to no more than one a month. We also turn down most columns that other newspapers have published. So we turn down some interesting, relevant columns — but finite space in the paper demands tough choices. Online space is virtually unlimited, so you’ll get additional chances to read what newsmakers, and others, are thinking.
  • You will see at least as many letters to the editor online as you would have received in the paper, with the added bonus that some of them will be letters held out for no reason other than that they were too long for our page, and didn’t lend themselves to trimming.
  • We regularly shoot video during editorial board interviews with newsmakers. I’ve been using some of it on my blog the last couple of years, but sporadically; the Saturday Opinion Extra page gives us a place to showcase some of the most interesting footage from the past week.
  • You’ll find links to such things as a new, improved page devoted to Robert Ariail’s recent cartoons, featuring such DVD-style bonus features as unpublished sketches, archives, and video of Robert talking about what he does. (There will also be links to recent posts on my blog, of course.)

    That’s the content we’ll be starting with, and I hope you will suggest more.
    This is a big and scary step for us in the editorial department. We have always published editorial and op-ed pages daily, and departing from that feels a little like stepping off something firm and secure into thin air.
    But like skydiving, it’s also pretty exciting. Ever since the 1980s — since before there was a Worldwide Web — I’ve been interested in the potential of an electronic opinion forum, with immediacy and interactivity you can’t get on paper. That’s why I started the blog; this takes us another step.
    Sure, we’ve let  our paper content flow onto the Web for years, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do there in the opinion realm. The editorial board needs to turn some attention to better serving the 800,000 unique visitors who come to thestate.com each month.
    Please check out this new feature on Saturday, and let us know what you think of it. Even more than a published page, this new venture will always be a living work in progress, and I’m counting on our readers to help us shape it.

Until the new Saturday Opinion Extra page appears, please come to my blog to share your thoughts:  thestate.com/bradsblog/. Or send us a letter at [email protected].

Name that tune — please!

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Someone sent me a copy of that video about how fast the world is changing, and about how China has more economic growth in its little fingernail than we’re likely to have in a billion years and stuff. I’m not sure whether this was an update of the video or what (I know there are several versions of it floating out there); there was no accompanying information.

Anyway, while it was very interesting once again, it left me with a maddening question: What is that background music?

It’s from a movie, a movie I’ve seen. I’m even willing to go so far as to say I might have liked the movie. But I can’t place it.

For some reason, the music suggests something about the Scottish highlands. I picture characters running about on the heath in kilts — maybe something out of a remake of "Kidnapped" — with a wide, moving shot taken from a low-flying helicopter.

But I’m almost sure that image has nothing to do with this music. Maybe I’m thinking of a similar shot of the wilds of New Zealand from the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. But I don’t think that’s it, either.

Normally, I can place things like this immediately, which is what is so crazy-making about this instance.

Where is it from?

David Shi, Furman president

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Shidavid

Today we had a visit from David Shi, president of Furman University. He also spoke to the Columbia Rotary, and his topic was the same, so if you were there you heard what Mike, Warren and I heard this morning.

He was here to stress Furman’s focus on public policy-related initiatives across the state, which he said was unique (at least, to this extent) among private colleges in South Carolina, and to a certain extent nationally. He knows of no private, liberal arts college anywhere else with the statewide focus that Furman has. Among the programs to which he referred:

  • The Riley Institute, named for former Gov. and Education Sec. Dick Riley, a Furman alumnus. You can read about it here. One program offered under the aegis of the Institute is the Diversity Leadership Academies across the state.
  • The David Wilkins Award, named for the ex-Speaker and current ambassador to Canada, which is awarded annually for bipartisan statesmanship. John Drummond, Bobby Harrell (Wilkins’ successor) and Hugh Leatherman have all received it.
  • The Rushing Center for Advanced Technology, which offers tailored training programs for businesses.
  • Being a signator of The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. One cool thing related to this — a model "green" home being built on the campus for an upcoming Southern Living cover, which after that will become office and meeting space for the university’s overall green initiatives.

There was more, but you get the gist. And why go to so much trouble to engender public leadership? One reason he offered, which I thought a masterpiece of academic understatement, was because Furman is in South Carolina, which is "not really known for prolonged, high-quality public leadership."

Contacts: Rickenmann, mental health advocates, McMullen

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As Doug Ross might testify, I make a point of breaking my fast most mornings in a place where I’m likely to run into newsmakers who tell me things I was not trying to find out, but needed to know anyway (to sorta, kinda paraphrase Dirk Gently).

At this time I will head off those of you who think this is an elitist pursuit by saying I also frequent Wal-Mart — but there, few people come up to me and tell me things I can publish.

Anyway, in keeping with my sporadic efforts to let you know about folks I interact with (part of the whole transparency thing, letting you know who might be trying to influence what you read on the editorial page, yadda-yadda), here’s this morning’s list of folks who dropped by my table:

  • Daniel Rickenmann, who seemed to be sort of working the room, eventually got to me. No substantial discussion. I asked him what he was hearing from constituents as he campaigned for April 1, he said he’d heard a lot (understandably) about the city’s problems keeping track of money, and suggested the creation of a citizens’ fiscal review panel. At least, I think that’s what he said. Does not being sure sound lax on my part? Well, I knew I would be sitting down formally with him next Tuesday for an endorsement interview, and that will be well documented, I promise.
  • A group of folks — one of them a surgeon I know from USC’s medical school, but I’m leaving his name out for now since he was not the instigator of the conversation (although he can remind me of the names of the other folks later) — approached me to say that the former Department of Mental Health property on Bull Street (you know, which was supposed to be redeveloped, but which hasn’t happened?) is still needed to provide mental health services, and to help train psychiatrists. I’ve heard this before, of course, but there seemed a new urgency in their concern. The doc mentioned the name of a good source, which I wrote on my copy of the WSJ.
  • Ed McMullen, late of the S.C. Policy Council, joined me as I headed for the elevator. We talked briefly about several things, ending with the Wireless Cloud, about which he promised to send me a line on a source. Don’t forget me on that, Ed.

Is this what it’s like writing a diary?

Tim Cameron’s GOP candidate sites

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Last week Tim Cameron of The Shot joined me for breakfastCamerontim (that’s him at right, at a Fred Thompson event last year), and talked about some of the Web sites he’s developed and is maintaining for political
candidates (mostly legislative). I already knew about Nathan Ballentine’s but the rest were new to me. The Glenn McConnell site, complete with spiffy video (above), just went up on Monday.

  • www.jimdemint.com — No, his seat’s not up this year, but why wait until the last minute?
  • www.nathansnews.com — You knew about this one.
  • www.talleyforsenate.com — Republican incumbent from Spartanburg County. (Never mind the party affiliations; they’re all Republicans. A House member trying to move up to the Senate.
  • www.shaneforsenate.com — This one kind of threw me, since it promised "HARD WORK TO SHAKE UP COLUMBIA." But he’s running for the senate, not city council, and he’s the incumbent. Isn’t there a rule that incumbents can’t run on the "shake-up" platform? In any case, he’s got his tie off and sleeves rolled up, ready for shakin’.
  • www.forresterforhouse.com — This candidate’s running for the seat Talley’s vacating. As with Talley, his site shows a penchant (Tim’s?) for the kind of cadences Mitt Romney used on his yard signs: "Integrity. Solutions."
  • www.senatorcleary.com — More of an incumbent sort of feel, with the main page dominated with "A WORD FROM YOUR SENATOR."
  • www.representativekelly.com — Another incumbent from Spartanburg? How many they got up there, anyway? I like what he says about no special privileges for lawmakers… not so with school consolidation, though (he’s against it in his district).
  • www.blairjennings.com — A change of pace, this one’s for a solicitor candidate. Not to be confused with my old friend Doug Jennings from Bennettsville, who wouldn’t fit in here on account of not being a Republican.
  • www.scsenategop.com — Here’s another I already had linked from my blog. This one’s for the whole Senate GOP caucus, just in case one Republican at a time isn’t enough for you.
  • www.myscmanews.com — Varying even further from our theme, this goes beyond party to a special special interest (I mean that in a nice way, of course).
  • www.repviers.com — Back to our one-candidate-at-a-time theme. Also very incumbent-y, it presents Thad as A SOLID REPUBLICAN. But you didn’t have to be told that, did you?
  • www.glennmcconnell.com — The newest of them all. Unusual color choice on the page — is that supposed to be sepia? OK, I get it. Anyway, the president pro tem dons modern mufti to do video clips, such as the one above, in which he explains that he wanted to be way tough on illegals, but those wimps in the majority didn’t want to.

That’s Tim’s list, which is just the beginning. Next, I’d like somebody out there to tell me about some Democrats. And if there are any UnParty candidates with sites out there, I’d really like to know about those.

If I can, I’d like to compile as complete a list as possible, to share with all y’all.

OK, who grabbed my rss?

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Have you noticed that it was a little lonesome on the blog the last couple of days? I did. Last night, I figured out why — my latest posts weren’t showing up as links on the main and opinion pages of thestate.com.

Consequently, there’s been nobody here but you regulars who come to the blog to see what’s here, rather than being pulled straight in to fresh posts. That’s one reason why there have hardly been any comments — or, more telling, page views — on any posts after this one, way back on Tuesday.

Apparently, it was a systemwide problem that, I’m happy to say, seems to be fixed.

But I’m still worried about a message I got from one of the tech gurus ‘splaining the problem: "not sure what’s happening but the rss feeds from the blogs is choking the rss
feed grabber that constructs those headline lists on thestate.com."

I don’t who was or wasn’t grabbing my rss, or choking my feeder, but I’m glad they quit doing it.

Dialogue about the ‘Wireless Cloud’

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This morning, noting this post and the comments on it, Cindi sent a note to Gordon and Mike, whom she knows from past lives (Gordon was my boss when I was Cindi’s boss when she was a reporter 20 years ago; Mike Cakora was one of our "community columnists" when we had that program on the op-ed page several years back):

Good morning Gordon and Mike

    I hope you’re both doing well.
    I’ve just been reading over your comments on Brad’s blog, and it occurred to me that if y’all read the legislative study committee report that is the backdrop for the news release he posted, 1) you might find it interesting and 2) you might be able to help me think through this — either via e-mail or through a continued discussion on Brad’s blog, whichever you prefer.
    I think the report should shed additional light on precisely what is being considered. In short, the majority report recommends hiring a consultant to further think through what to do with the ETV licenses; the minority report says this is plan is a recipe for losing a valuable state resource, which will revert to the feds if we don’t have a plan in place in less than a year.
    My initial, uninformed take is to agree with the minority report, written by Rep. Dwight Loftis. By way of background, Sen. Jim Ritchie — who along with Loftis first got this conversation going in the State House a year ago — had been spinning me in advance on the importance of the state taking action. He’s a proponent of a laptop for every student, by the way, a plan I am not sold on….
    I feel like this is something our editorial board needs to weigh in on at some point….
    Also, since Rep. Loftis has added me to his broadband e-mail list, I have received a handful of articles on the topic that I would be happy to share with either or both of you if you’d like.

Cindi

Gordon urged me to post the report Cindi referred to on the blog so we could have a discussion here. Here’s the report.

Mike also answered as follows:

To the extent that I can contribute, I will.  After my first scan of the report, I want to look at the FCC deadlines that the minority report is concerned about.  I need to get clear on FCC terminology too. 

Environmentally speaking, Clearwire looks to be involved with Sprint and Intel in trying to rescue WiMax according to breaking news. 
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/02/sprint_clearwir_1.html

Thus Clearwire’s role as a proponent in some of the BTAs in this state is interesting.  I pulled the latest lobbyist report and found that while all the usual players — Sprint Nextel, Intel, Time Warner, etc. — have lobbyists, Clearwire does not. 

Mike Cakora

So if you’re hip to the highly technical issues involved, here’s your chance to jump in. Personally, I’m depending on Cindi to figure it out and help me make up my mind. This is your chance to help Cindi — and Mike and Gordon as well.

Back before I started this blog, people like Dan Gillmor told me that the Blogosphere was chock-full of people who knew more about various issues (especially technical ones) than I or any other journalist did. While that is occasionally the case, it hasn’t been as often as I’d like. This seems like a good opportunity to realize the true potential of blogging.

 

The Wireless Cloud

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Just got this press release:

February 15, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Representative Cathy B. Harvin

Wireless Cloud to Support South Carolina Learners
    House Democrat Cathy Harvin, Clarendon & Williamsburg Co.’s, has collaborated with House Republican Dwight Loftis, Greenville Co. and 34 other members in introducing a Joint Resolution, H.4692 that would equip South Carolina Schools with a much needed wireless networking capability and would extend this capability to include a 10 mile radius around each school district education campus in support of homebound learners.  The resolution calls for ETV to utilize its existing towers for this purpose.
     Harvin indicates that this capability will allow enhanced learning experiences for students to use computing anywhere on the school grounds where students may now be limited to computer labs and will support children and adult learners in their homes.
     Harvin says,” South Carolina is truly blessed to have received many more communications licenses than any other state.  ETV has had these licenses for years and we must submit a plan to comply with FCC regulations by January 2009 that will indicate how we will move to digital delivery and how we will use these licenses.   What more perfect way to use the licenses than to empower learners in this state.  We now rank 48th nationally, so we have no place to go but up.  We seem to be in a timeframe where it is difficult to find any issue on which democrats and republicans can agree.”  Harvin was most pleased to find when it comes to helping South Carolina’s children learn, there is no argument.

I get excited every time I hear anybody talk about the "Wireless Cloud" proposal — not because I fully understand what it is, but because the name rocks. In fact, it’s now on my short list for names for the band that I’ve been meaning to start since about 1971 (you can’t rush these things, you know; got to find the right name first).

This legislation, or legislation related to it, came up in one of our edit board meetings last week, and I kept asking Cindi to explain it to me. And then I’d have to stop her because she’d get into explaining the politics — who would benefit and who would lose under each alternative (there was something in it about a plan that would give away bandwidth that belongs to the taxpayers, but I didn’t really follow it, because it was like talking about money) — and I wanted to hear the technical explanation: How would a "wireless cloud" work? Could I use it with my present laptop? Would it cost me to use it? Would more cell towers have to be built, or what?

I didn’t get all the answers I wanted. And this release, with all its talk about kids and education and stuff, didn’t help with the self-centered questions I had. For all I know, the idea may not be feasible, or it might cost to much, or something. But it sure sounds cool. Especially the name.

Are you having trouble loading my blog?

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The last few days, my browser has been freezing up whenever I go to my main page — which, unfortunately, I have to do a lot.

When it happens, at long last I get a dialog box that says:

    A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

I always click "stop script," and go on with my business. I don’t even know what it means.

I had sort of thought it was a problem with my laptop, but then the desktop started doing the same thing.

All I can guess is that there’s just too much stuff on that main page. Maybe I need to reduce the number of posts that appear there. (I think it’s set to show a month’s worth, but that’s way over 100 posts now, and maybe that’s just too much.)

Before I take the time to tinker around with guesses, though, I’m curious: Are y’all having the same trouble? That would increase the urgency to try to do something.

The next generation of spam?

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OK, this bit of spam, back on this post, almost had me going:

Oh my goodness! I heard from friends on campus that there was a guy
in front of the Statehouse telling everyone that C-Fed was dead!? I
knew that his brother’s crazy life would have an effect him sooner or
later. I don’t know what to think anymore.

With its reference to "a guy in front of the Statehouse," I thought it was a relevant comment. Then I was trying to figure out what or who a "C-Fed" might be. Later in the comment, "K-Fed" came into it. I was about to conclude that they were some sort of federal financial instrument, like Freddie Mac or Ginnie Mae. I then wondered if it had something to do with Ben Bernanke’s testimony Thursday.

Then I realized it was some sort of trashy come-on having to do with celebrity-obsessed Web sites called "vipglamour.net" and "thehollywoodgossip.com" (note that I’m not providing links):

With the Britney being
screwed up beyond compare, and the kids having to pay the price for her
crazy behind, C-Fed got mixed up in the crazy life! I hope K-Fed thinks
about what he has done. As soon as I go back I googeled C-Fed, and this
is what I got. I know everyone is heart broken, but here is what I
found for the latest…

If spam is getting sophisticated enough to come to MY site and figure out it can worm its way into a fresh post (most spam gloms onto old, inactive posts) by tossing out the word "Statehouse," we’re in deep doo-doo. If the Chinese get ahold of this, they won’t need to be able to shoot down our satellites to crash our economy. (And yes, I know they could just as easily call for payment on all our debt they own, but commies are big planners, and don’t want to leave anything to chance.)