Bluebird

Disrespect

Editorial

Oh, Grow Up

Published: September 1, 2011

Whenever we think Washington couldn’t get more cynical or more craven, it proves us wrong. So we will resist the temptation to say it’s hard to imagine anything more base than the food fight over President Obama’s planned speech to Congress.

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"The President... campaigned on what needs to be done. He just needs to do it."

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The contemptuous reaction from the House speaker, John Boehner, to the president’s request to address a joint session next Wednesday — the day Congress returns from its summer recess — was appalling. No matter how he feels about Mr. Obama personally or politically, there can be no excuse for his lack of respect for the office, to which he is second in the line of succession. And it was distressing to watch President Obama fail, once again, to stand up to an opposition that won’t brook the smallest compromise.

What made this even more appalling is that the president will be speaking on the country’s most pressing problem — the need to create jobs and stave off another destructive recession.

Mr. Obama’s request should have been routine. And The Times on Thursday quoted a White House official as saying it was: Obama aides consulted Boehner aides and then sent a formal request for a joint session on Wednesday. But Mr. Boehner said the date wasn’t convenient, a rebuff of the chief executive that the Senate historian’s office said seemed unprecedented.

It’s possible that the White House failed to seek Mr. Boehner’s back-room agreement before making its formal request. That’s hard to believe, even from an administration that is maladroit politically, to put it kindly.

But even if that were true. So what?

Mr. Boehner said there are votes scheduled on Wednesday evening, but they seem to be profoundly unimportant and, in any case, this is the same speaker who repeatedly postponed votes on whether to save the nation from default. What could possibly be so pressing this time?

It’s also possible that the White House failed to notice that the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination have a debate on Wednesday, or deliberately tried to upstage it. If either is true, shame on the White House.

But, again, so what?

The Republican candidates did not seem to care. Some seemed eager to be up against Mr. Obama on television. And a presidential address on jobs and the faltering economy certainly trumps one of 20 planned debates among the contenders for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Obama’s people negotiated with Mr. Boehner’s people behind closed doors. When they emerged, the White House caved, to no one’s surprise. The speech will take place on Thursday.

One day won’t make a difference, but the political spectacle and the final result only served to further underscore the president’s weakness. Worse, the vital importance of the speech — and the need for Congress to take its full responsibility for creating jobs and reviving the economy — was upstaged by yet another Washington soap opera.

Memo to my husband

Op-Ed Columnist

Sorry, Wrong In-Box

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: August 31, 2011

The other night I did something silly. In a hurry to reach my friend K., I made the mistake of calling him on his mobile phone.

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Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Frank Bruni

“You should have texted,” he chided me the next morning, when he finally heard the voice mail I’d left. “You know that’s the fastest way.”

It’s hard to keep track. Because my friend A., who frequently sends text messages, somehow fails to recognize that she might receive them as well and almost never checks. With her, I’m supposed to call.

But not with my friend D. Between his two mobile phones, two office phones and one home phone, you can never know which number to try, and he seems never to pick up, anyway. E-mail is his preference. He has three e-mail addresses, at least that I know about, but I’ve figured out the best one. I think.

You hear so much about how instantly reachable we all are, how hyperconnected, with our smartphones, laptops, tablets and such. But the maddening truth is that we’ve become so accessible we’re often inaccessible, the process of getting to any of us more tortured and tortuous than ever.

There are up to a dozen possible routes, and the direct one versus the scenic one versus the loop-de-loop versus the dead end changes from person to person. If you’re not dealing with your closest business associates or friends, whose territory and tics you’ve presumably learned, you’re lost.

There are some people partial to direct messages on Twitter and others oblivious to that corner of the Twitterverse. There are some who look at Facebook messages before anything else, and others whose Facebook accounts are idle, deceptive vestiges of a fleeting gregariousness that didn’t survive their boredom with Rebecca’s bread dough (“It isn’t rising! Tips?”) or Tim’s poison ivy (“Itching and itching! Remedies?”).

I know only a handful of people with just one e-mail address, but I know many with three or more, and not all of these people understand automatic forwarding. My friend M. was recently reacquainted with an in-box unattended for a year. It was stuffed with hundreds of unread messages — some, remarkably, from people flummoxed by her aloofness.

During a cyberbinge a few years back, I set up three new, uncoordinated e-mail accounts, though I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I had some vague notion that I’d be a subtly different person with a subtly different life on each. In fact, I remained the same person with the same life on the same two e-mail accounts I was already using, and that person couldn’t remember the passwords or user names for the additional ones. My debit-card P.I.N. is challenge enough.

Recently, I missed an interview because I was 20 minutes late and the subject assumed I was a no-show. I’d been texting her about my delay because we’d communicated that way before. But it turns out that she has two mobile phones, and was monitoring the one whose number I didn’t know. Meanwhile, she was sending me e-mails, but it didn’t occur to me to look for those.

Speaking of interviews, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, arrived for one two years ago with four BlackBerrys. Maybe it was some elaborate anti-hacking system, a Murdoch Defense Shield.

Communication can become a multistep, multiplatform process. My friend J. and I like to talk on the phone, but only after she has sent me a gmail to propose a gchat, during which we determine if a call is actually warranted and whether I should use her home, mobile, main office or satellite office number. By the time voice meets voice, we’re spent. There’s a lot of heavy breathing; none of it the fun kind.

To her egalitarian credit, she gives out all of her contact information freely. Others use theirs to create castes of acquaintances: those with only an outer layer of business coordinates; those with “private e-mail” penetration; and those with the vaunted home phone. I’m no longer sure why I have a home phone, whose voice mail I neglect. A message from my friend L. languished there for two weeks. She really should have e-mailed.

Newly minted relationships come with operating instructions.

“Try his cell first, then shoot him an e-mail,” says a bigwig’s assistant. “Or circle back to me. Here’s my cell, and my e-mail, and ...” Contact information is now contact exegesis.

And contact itself is subject to infinite vagaries. An e-mail can go to spam. A call can bump up against a voice mailbox not taking new messages. Its owner, managing too many mailboxes, has let it fill.

My friend E. just texted, two days after my text. “Didn’t see it,” she reports. “On this new phone, I can’t figure anything out.”

In this new world, neither can I.

Ode to the blue box on the corner

Mailboxes disappearing as usage drops off

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle August 31, 2011 03:40 PM

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Mailboxes stand in front of the Chinatown post office in San Francisco, where only 1,700 of the once-ubiquitous boxes remain.

San Francisco -- Chalk up another casualty of the digital revolution: the blue corner mailbox.

Because of steeply declining use, the U.S. Postal Service has removed more than 60 percent of the blue boxes, once as common on the American streetscape as lampposts and ice cream trucks.

"Nothing says you're on an American street more than the blue mailbox," said Nancy Pope, postal historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "It's part of a neighborhood identity, it's reassurance, it represents our ability to communicate with one another. When you take this away, something is lost."

In 1985, nearly 400,000 blue mailboxes graced American streets. Now only 160,000 remain, and more are vanishing every day. San Francisco has removed more than 800 in the past few years, dropping the total to 1,700. Dozens, if not hundreds, more are likely to meet the same sad fate, according to the post office.

Rarely used mailboxes

The chief culprit is the Internet. More people are paying bills, sending invitations and writing personal letters online. The volume of mail dropped into mailboxes has dropped 35 percent since 2006, said Sue Brennan, a U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman.

If a mailbox gets fewer than 25 pieces of mail per day over a six-to-eight-week period, it gets targeted for removal. The Postal Service posts a 30-day warning notice on the box, during which time people can complain to the postmaster, then it's off to the great dead-letter office in the sky.

"To be honest, we don't get a lot of complaints," said James Wigdel, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service's San Francisco office. "The younger generation is moving everything online."

The defunct mailboxes are either stored for spare parts or sent to the scrap heap, a humbling fate for something that was the high-speed Internet of its day.

Convenient and fast

When they were introduced in the 1850s, mailboxes were an enormous leap forward in communications. Until then, people had to drop off mail at a post office, which, in most cases, was miles away, or wait for the mailman to come to their homes, not always a reliable event and, in many areas, nonexistent.

Mailboxes allowed people to send mail 24 hours a day, only steps from their homes. The pickup times, posted on each box, coordinated with local train schedules, so people knew exactly when their letter would be shipped and had a decent idea when it would arrive.

In a rapidly expanding country, this was revolutionary, Pope said. Speedy communication was good for commerce, journalism and personal relationships, and was an overall boon for democracy, she said.

"The ability to communicate with each other, it's in our Constitution," she said, referring to the First Amendment. "If people don't know what's going on, they can't make informed decisions. The Postal Service - including mailboxes - helped make all that possible. They really helped build this nation."

Through the years

The first mailboxes were mounted on lampposts, but by World War I, as mail volume increased, the boxes became four-legged, stand-alone objects on the sidewalk. The "snorkel" - the jutting drop-slot designed to keep out rain and snow - was added in the 1930s, and the modern mailbox was born.

The first mailboxes were mounted on lampposts.

They weren't always navy blue, though. They've been olive drab, fire-engine red, baby blue and multicolored. In the 1960s, the post office adopted the businesslike, dark blue model, and not much has changed since then.

What has changed is us. In the 1970s, when women entered the workforce in earnest, letter writing began to decline because women - who had been the primary letter writers - had less spare time. At the same time, long-distance phone calls became cheaper.

"The Internet didn't kill mailboxes. We started the process long before the Internet came around," Pope said.

The Internet was the death knell, though. With online banking and e-mail, the only letters left in the big blue boxes are wedding invitations and the occasional birthday card from Grandma.

Matter of trust

Still, the mailbox isn't likely to vanish entirely. Even in the age of instant communication, nothing is quite as reliable as the U.S. Postal Service, Wigdel said.

"We're the most trusted federal agency. We have an extremely high regard for customers' privacy and the sanctity of the mail - something you don't always find on the Internet," he said. "People tend to trust us."

Bob Dixon does. The 73-year-old contractor from Stockton, sitting outside an Oakland post office Tuesday afternoon, remembers riding a mule to the local mailbox when he was growing up on a farm in Lake Providence, La.

"It was a treat for me," he said. "If you come from a small town, the mailbox is a big deal."

Mailboxes were a big deal in the city, too. William Reed, 47, grew up in San Francisco and has fond memories of running his parents' mail to the blue box at the corner of Crescent Avenue and Prentiss Street in Bernal Heights.

"You always knew that whatever you dropped in the box would get there," he said. "But times have changed. We're getting lazy. We'd rather push a key than walk one block to the mailbox. I'm not sure we're better off."

 

USPS mailboxes

365,000

Number of mailboxes nationwide in 2000

160,000

Number of mailboxes nationwide in 2011

25 pieces

Mail a mailbox must receive each day to remain in operation

35%

Drop in first-class mail since 2006

32%

Drop in the number of mailboxes in San Francisco in past few years

42%

Drop in amount of mail collected from mailboxes in San Francisco over past five years

Source: U.S. Postal Service

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/31/MN571KTSJ0.DTL#ixzz1WiWdFlQX

Misquoted bumper stickers

Op-Ed Contributor

Falser Words Were Never Spoken

By BRIAN MORTON

Published: August 29, 2011

Bronxville, N.Y.

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Open, N.Y.

 

IN a coffee shop not long ago, I saw a mug with an inscription from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

At least it said the words were Thoreau’s. But the attribution seemed a bit suspect. Thoreau, after all, was not known for his liberal use of exclamation points. When I got home, I looked up the passage (it’s from “Walden”): “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Now Thoreau isn’t quite saying that each of us can actually live the life we’ve imagined. He’s saying that if we try, we’ll come closer to it than we might ordinarily think possible. I suppose that the people responsible for the coffee mug would say that they’d merely tweaked the wording of the original a little. But in the tweaking, not only was the syntax lost, but the subtlety as well.

Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug.

Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.

When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

My favorite example of the fanciful quotation is a passage that’s been floating around the Internet for years. It’s frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and said to be an excerpt from his 1994 inaugural address.

“Our deepest fear,” the passage goes, “is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others. It’s hard to imagine it without laughing. Of course, it turns out it’s not actually an excerpt from this or any other known address of Mr. Mandela’s. In fact, the words aren’t even his; they belong to a self-help guru, Marianne Williamson.

Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.

But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Brian Morton, the director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of the novels “Starting Out in the Evening” and “Breakable You.”

Check yer spelling

July 17, 2011, 5:30 pm The Price of Typos

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

 

Virginia Heffernan on digital and pop culture.

Tags:

authors, book publishing, Spelling, typos

 

 

Some readers like to see portraits of authors they admire, study their personal histories or hear them read aloud. I like to know whether an author can spell. Nabokov spelled beautifully. Fitzgerald was crummy at spelling, bedeviled by entry-level traps like “definate.” Bad spellers, of course, can be sublime writers and good spellers punctilious duds. But it’s still intriguing that Fitzgerald, for all his gifts, didn’t perceive the word “finite” in definite, the way good spellers automatically do. Did this oversight color his impression of infinity? Infinaty?

Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of “algorithm” or “Albert Pujols” — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.

For readers who find humanity in orthographic quirks, these are great times. Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist with a book and a Web site about corrections called “Regret the Error,” expressed chagrin. “We seem to keep removing steps that involve editing and checking and don’t bother to think about how we replace them with something better,” he told me. At the same time, as a connoisseur of errors, he praised the “wonderfully human experience of being wrong.”

The Pollyannaish upside to writerly inattention and cutbacks in publishing, then, is that readers sometimes see more of the human writer, and less buff and polish.

Rushing to publish and overlooking glaring typos may have become part of the new economics of traditional publishing. But on the Web, typos sometimes come with a price. “Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales,” said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half.

While the idea that sloppy spelling can sink whole businesses seems far-fetched, even casual bloggers recognize the imperative to spell well online. This is because search engines look for strings of characters in sequence, and if your site has misspellings, Google is less likely to list it at the top of search results. With misspellings, according to the tech site Geekosystem, “You aren’t going to get nearly as many hits as you deserve.” The imperative to spell correctly on the Web, and attract Google attention, means that even the lowliest content farmer will know that it’s i-before-e in “Bieber.”

At the same time, if you get something wrong online, readers and commenters will point it out, and editors can fix errors 10 seconds later.

By contrast, the errors in a print book’s first edition are forever. Recently, I noticed “Buckminster Füller” and “habberdasher” in good-looking new books. These errors — creative misinterpretations on someone’s part — are endearing, and evocative. I didn’t send in corrections, though maybe I should have. (Book-error fanatics tell me you rarely get a response when you point out typos to publishers.)

When I asked around on Twitter for examples of rich typos in books, Lisa Hendrix, a romance writer, directed me to the Library of Congress — a giant archive of errors by our nation’s scribbling millions. I suddenly imagined a new library, made up exclusively of human mistakes. It sounded like a gold mine.

Beer halls and Old Navy

Foursquare has more than 10 million users

June 20, 2011 |  3:56 pm

Foursquare has surpassed the mark of 10 million users this month, which the location-based social network announced Monday in the form of a large infographic highlighting a few figures.

"One of the most amazing things about building Foursquare has been seeing a tool we designed for our friends turn into something now used by over 10,000,000 people," the New York start-up said in the graphic. "And as our community grows larger, we get to build things that start to fulfil our larger vision for the future."

The maker of the "check-in" app wouldn't say just what those things were, but it said to "stay tuned for much much more."

According to the Foursquare graphic, since the company's founding in March 2009, there have been:

-- 4.7 million check-ins on Main Streets across the U.S.

-- 169 countries visited by U.S. users

-- 358 million check-ins outside the U.S.

-- Check-ins at 1,105 beer halls in Germany

-- Check-ins at 6,230 sake bars in Japan

-- Check-ins at 225 weddings at city halls

-- 1,602 birth announcements on hospital check-ins

Old Navy, Bank of America, 7-Eleven, Home Depot and Target are among the most popular business chains in the U.S. to check in at, the Foursquare graphic said.

Foursquare has surpassed the mark of 10 million users this month, which the location-based social network announced Monday in the form of a large infographic highlighting a few figures.

"One of the most amazing things about building Foursquare has been seeing a tool we designed for our friends turn into something now used by over 10,000,000 people," the New York start-up said in the graphic. "And as our community grows larger, we get to build things that start to fulfil our larger vision for the future."

The maker of the "check-in" app wouldn't say just what those things were, but it said to "stay tuned for much much more."

According to the Foursquare graphic, since the company's founding in March 2009, there have been:

-- 4.7 million check-ins on Main Streets across the U.S.

-- 169 countries visited by U.S. users

-- 358 million check-ins outside the U.S.

-- Check-ins at 1,105 beer halls in Germany

-- Check-ins at 6,230 sake bars in Japan

-- Check-ins at 225 weddings at city halls

-- 1,602 birth announcements on hospital check-ins

Old Navy, Bank of America, 7-Eleven, Home Depot and Target are among the most popular business chains in the U.S. to check in at, the Foursquare graphic said.

Cellphones and cancer

May 31, 2011, 4:30 pm

Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says

By TARA PARKER-POPE and FELICITY BARRINGER

Loic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCellphones are “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” reports a World Health Organization panel.

A World Health Organization panel has concluded that cellphones are “possibly carcinogenic,’’ putting the popular devices in the same category as certain dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides, as a potential threat to human health.

The finding, from the agency’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, adds to concerns among a small but growing group of experts about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted by cellphones. The panel, which consisted of 31 scientists from 14 countries, was led by Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Southern California and a member of President Obama’s National Cancer Advisory Board.

The group didn’t conduct any new research but reviewed numerous existing studies that focused on the health effects of radio frequency magnetic fields, which are emitted by cellphones. During a news conference, Dr. Samet said the panel’s decision to classify cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic” was based largely on epidemiological data showing an increased risk among heavy cellphone users of a rare type of brain tumor called a glioma.

Last year, a 13-country study called Interphone, the largest and longest study of the link between cellphone use and brain tumors, found no overall increased risk, but reported that participants with the highest level of cellphone use had a 40 percent higher risk of glioma. (Even if the elevated risk is confirmed, gliomas are relatively rare and thus individual risk remains minimal.)

Most major medical groups, including the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, have said the existing data on cellphones and health has been reassuring. For years, concerns about the health effects of cellphones have been largely dismissed because the radio frequency waves emitted from the devices are believed to be benign. Cellphones emit nonionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancers. Scientists have said repeatedly that there is no known biological mechanism to explain how nonionizing radiation might lead to cancer or other health problems.

The W.H.O. panel ruled only that cellphones be classified as Category 2B, meaning they are possibly carcinogenic to humans, a designation the panel has given to 240 other agents, including the pesticide DDT, engine exhaust, lead and various industrial chemicals. Also on the list are two familiar foods, pickled vegetables and coffee, which the cellphone industry was quick to point out.

“This I.A.R.C. classification does not mean cellphones cause cancer,’’ John Walls, vice president for public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry group, said in a statement. Mr. Walls noted that both the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have concluded that the weight of the scientific evidence does not link cellphones with cancer or other health problems.

This year, The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on research from the National Institutes of Health, which found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna. The study was among the first and largest to document that the weak radio frequency signals from cellphones have a measurable effect on the brain. The research also offers a potential, albeit hypothetical, explanation for how low levels of nonionizing radiation could cause harm without breaking chemical bonds, possibly by triggering the formation of free radicals or an inflammatory response in the brain.

“We looked carefully at the physical phenomena by which exposure to such fields might perturb biological systems and lead to cancers,” said Dr. Samet. But he said the result was inconclusive, adding, “We found some threads of evidence about how cancer might occur but have to acknowledge gaps and uncertainties.”

The panel made no comment on how large or small a risk cellphone radiation may pose to human health. “Our task was not to quantify risk,’’ said Dr. Samet.

Although the panel did not make specific recommendations to consumers, a representative did note that using a hands-free headset during a conversation or communicating via text message would be options for lowering radio frequency exposure.

The panel’s recommendation is unlikely to have any immediate effect, but is expected to be used as guidance by the World Health Organization, which may make recommendations about cellphone safety.

Dr. Meir Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who is a paid adviser for the cellphone industry, said it was important to remember that the panel’s decision to rank cellphones as a “possible” carcinogen was very different from saying that they pose a real health risk.

“It’s a very thoughtful group, but the important thing is putting it into the perspective of what ‘possible’ means, and the likelihood that this is really something to be concerned about,’’ Dr. Stampfer said. “The evidence doesn’t support that. Comparing this to going out in the sun or any number of normal everyday activities that we’re not really concerned about, I would put cellphones in the lower part of that category.’’

Still, Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a newsletter that focuses on nonionizing radiation, said in an e-mail that the fact that the W.H.O.’s cancer panel had expressed concern had the potential to change the debate about the health risks of cellphones. “It’s a wake-up call for the telecom industry and for the U.S. government to take cellphone radiation seriously,” he said. “The first step should be limiting the use of cellphones by children.”

Henry C. Lai, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in electromagnetic fields, said the credibility of the W.H.O. panel made it difficult to dismiss the findings.

“The debate will go on, except this is the first statement from the W.H.O. saying we should be careful with exposure to this kind of radiation,’’ he said. “It’s quite a mixture of people, and some very respectable researchers. If someone says this panel isn’t good, I don’t know who else we should be listening to.”

Dr. Lai added that the solution to concerns about cellphone risks is relatively simple. “A precautionary approach is the best policy,” he said. “If people use cellphones, they should consider using an earpiece. Just keep the phone away from the head.”

Walls with ears

The Trouble With E-Mail

 

May 29, 2011, 5:30 pm By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Among Internet users with secrets, including bankers, lawyers, hackers and people who visit porn sites or confide in friends — so that would be all of us — there’s a widespread apprehension that the Web is no longer a safe place to spill them.

You can see that wariness in e-mail, which for years has been considered a spontaneous and freewheeling form, better known for gaffes and rants than anxiety and circumspection. As recently as 2008, Will Schwalbe and David Shipley described e-mailers as inveterate hotheads in their manual “Send.”

“On e-mail, people aren’t quite themselves,” they wrote. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.”

Oh, how times have changed. The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.

And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” — which means “let’s discuss live” — is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman, Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral. How do the pros use it? Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

See how that works? Wanna talk about junky mortgages? Let’s get off the %#^ Internet.

It works with other topics, too. Problems at home? LDL. State secrets about Egypt? LDL. How much you paid for your house? LDL.

“LDL” and its equivalents — tonal inversions of the carefree LOLs of e-mail past — are the most succinct ways Internet-users now express the desire to ditch the Web and seek analog pastures. And as much as the banker chat that was revealed in e-mail seems galling, it’s the rare Web-user who’d willingly submit his own e-mail archive to prosecutorial scrutiny. LDL, for those who have the option, is an extremely good idea. Nearly everyone needs some form of communication that’s not searchable, archivable, forwardable, discoverable and permanent. Of course, the longing for more in-person exchange is also part of the broader nostalgia a time before the Internet, when copyright and privacy seemed enforceable, and traditional business models obtained.

These grander sentiments were on theatrical display scale last week at eG8, the Internet-themed prelude to the G8 conference in France. Both conferences, like other jetset global conferences, are the very definition of LDL, existing solely to facilitate actual, physical elbow-rubbing among human beings like Jimmy Wales, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

At eG8, McKinsey submitted eye-popping research that showed that Internet-related consumption and expenditure in the G8 nations is now bigger than agriculture or energy. As if freshly aware of this economic monster, scores of high-profile global lawmakers, including Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, then spoke of the Internet as wilderness that they intended to colonize with official government overseers.

But it’s not just French rhetoricians, using the language of the 19th century, to whom the Internet of today seems dangerously anarchic. Bloggers and others now chronicle their breaks from the Internet, periods of withdrawal from electronic communication. They also tighten privacy settings; they close Facebook pages. Their e-mails, texts and IMs become more pro forma and less expressive.

It’s been a year since the arrest of Bradley Manning, the army intelligence analyst who yanked thousands of documents off the government’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. Manning passed those documents on to WikiLeaks using Tor Hidden Services, a secure network that protects users from surveillance and traffic analysis. WikiLeaks started to publish them. And then Manning described his feat in an online chat with a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who turned him in.

To many observers, the lesson of WikiLeaks was not about Turkey or Saudi Arabia or national security. It’s that no one’s online communication — not the government’s Secret Internet Protocol, not Bradley Manning’s hacker chatroom — is secure. WikiLeaks has become a kind of Ruby Ridge for some Web users: an event that crystallized the perception that the Internet is embattled and that spies are everywhere.

Suddenly it seems, as they used to say in Tintin comics, these walls have ears.

I see how this happened, but I can’t help but remember the day I became 73773.143@compuserve.com. It was 1993, and I’d clearly lucked into a good address — highly memorable with all those 7s and 3s. (That same year, President Clinton became 75300.3115@compuserve.com.)

With e-mail, my inhibitions about traditional conversation fell away: there was no blushing or lisping or stuttering on e-mail. If traditionalists who disdained typing or excelled at office banter felt left out by electronic communication, millions of other personalities were brought to life by it. In the early 1990s there were some 15 million e-mail accounts worldwide. By the end of 1999 there were 569 million. Today there are more than 3 billion.

E-mail, then, c’est nous. But we can’t say no one warned us. We’ve all seen too many crises, personal and public, not to know that e-mail is not a place for secrets.