Luvpuri’s Weblog

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.” The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society.
Soon after that article was printed, the financial edifice Mr. Weill took credit for helping to build collapsed, inflicting immense collateral damage in the process. Even if we manage to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, the world economy will take years to recover from this crisis.

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels.

Why is this disturbing? Let me count the ways.

First, there’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks.

Remember that the gilded Wall Street of 2007 was a fairly new phenomenon. From the 1930s until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels turning.

So why did some bankers suddenly begin making vast fortunes? It was, we were told, a reward for their creativity — for financial innovation. At this point, however, it’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes.

Consider a recent speech by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, in which he tried to defend financial innovation. His examples of “good” financial innovations were (1) credit cards — not exactly a new idea; (2) overdraft protection; and (3) subprime mortgages. (I am not making this up.) These were the things for which bankers got paid the big bucks?

Still, you might argue that we have a free-market economy, and it’s up to the private sector to decide how much its employees are worth. But this brings me to my second point: Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a “welfare.”

I’m not just talking about the $600 billion or so already committed under the TARP. There are also the huge credit lines extended by the Federal Reserve; large-scale lending by Federal Home Loan Banks; the taxpayer-financed payoffs of A.I.G. contracts; the vast expansion of F.D.I.C. guarantees; and, more broadly, the implicit backing provided to every financial firm considered too big, or too strategic, to fail.

One can argue that it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy as a whole — and in fact I agree. But given all that taxpayer money on the line, financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007.

Furthermore, paying vast sums to wheeler-dealers isn’t just outrageous; it’s dangerous. Why, after all, did bankers take such huge risks? Because success — or even the temporary appearance of success — offered such gigantic rewards: even executives who blew up their companies could and did walk away with hundreds of millions. Now we’re seeing similar rewards offered to people who can play their risky games with federal backing.

So what’s going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again? Claims that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those people going to go?

No, the real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can. They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not? After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be regulated.

Or maybe not. There’s a palpable sense in the financial press that the storm has passed: stocks are up, the economy’s nose-dive may be leveling off, and the Obama administration will probably let the bankers off with nothing more than a few stern speeches. Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the corner.

We can only hope that our leaders prove them wrong, and carry through with real reform. In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance to do it all over again.
The NYT

That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.

But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”

Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth.

MySpace says it may make Profile Light the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google, which owns YouTube, disputed the analysis but offered no details on the site’s financial situation.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

“We may choose to set a limit to how much we are willing to pay in bandwidth cost,” Mr. Pickett said. In some countries, he said, “there may be particular peak times where instead of high definition, we might decrease the resolution.”

The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.

The NYT

The rest of the nation may be getting back to basics, but on Wall Street, paychecks still come with a golden promise.

The NYT

Workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began, because of the strong start of the year for bank profits.

Even as the industry’s compensation has been put in the spotlight for being so high at a time when many banks have received taxpayer help, six of the biggest banks set aside over $36 billion in the first quarter to pay their employees, according to a review of financial statements.

If that pace continues all year, the money set aside for compensation suggests that workers at many banks will see their pay — much of it in bonuses — recover from the lows of last year.

“I just haven’t seen huge changes in the way people are talking about compensation,” said Sandy Gross, managing partner of Pinetum Partners, a financial recruiting firm. “Wall Street is being realistic. You have to retain your human capital.”

Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, was more critical. “Like everything on Wall Street, they’re starting to sin again,” he said. “As you see a recovery, you’ll see everybody’s compensation beginning to rise.”

In total, the banks are not necessarily spending more on compensation, because their work forces have shrunk sharply in the last 18 months. Still, the average pay for those who remain — rank-and-file workers whose earnings are not affected by government-imposed limits — appears to be rebounding.

Of the large banks receiving federal help, Goldman Sachs stands out for setting aside the most per person for compensation. The bank, which nearly halved its compensation last year, set aside $4.7 billion for worker pay in the quarter. If that level continues all year, it would add up to average pay of $569,220 per worker — almost as much as the pay in 2007, a record year.

“We need to be able to pay our people,” said Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman, adding that the rest of the year might not prove as profitable, and so the first-quarter reserves might simply be “sensible husbandry.”

Indeed, last year, when Goldman lost money in the fourth quarter, it did not pay out some of the compensation it had set aside when earnings were stronger.

At other banks, pay scales tilt in favor of particular units. JPMorgan Chase, for example, is setting aside what would total $138,234 on average for workers. But in the bank’s trading and investment banking unit, if revenue stays at first-quarter levels, workers are on track to earn an average of $509,524 over the year. That figure was $345,147 in 2006.

To try to blunt criticism of high pay, some banks have introduced reforms to take back bonuses from individual workers whose bets later lose money. Moreover, executives say that for many well-paid bankers, a good portion of their bonus compensation is in stock, whose value can decline if the performance of the bank lags.

Representatives of several of the largest banks said much of their compensation budget covered expenses other than bonuses, like salaries, health care, pension plans and severance.

Still, the compensation expense is the only publicly disclosed figure related to pay at the banks, and it is the best figure for calculating pay per worker.

This expense includes money for year-end bonuses. For high earners, bonuses can account for three-quarters of pay.

Compensation is among the most cited causes of the financial crisis because bonuses were often tied to short-term gains, even if those gains disappeared later on. Still, as profits return, banks do not appear to be changing the absolute level of worker pay — or the share of revenue dedicated to compensation.

Historically, investment banks have paid workers about 50 cents for every dollar of revenue. The average is lower at commercial banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, because they employ more people in retail branches where pay is lower.

But every dollar paid to workers is a dollar that cannot be used to expand the business or increase lending. Some of that revenue, too, could be used by bailed-out banks to pay back taxpayers.

Wall Street, of course, has a long history of high wages. Not all that long ago, most investment banks were private partnerships, and the workers were also typically the owners. Even when those firms began listing their shares on public stock exchanges, a standard was set in which half of their revenue was paid out to workers.

Wisconsin has unveiled a new official state slogan, “Live Like You Mean It,” much to the dismay of some Wisconsinites who wondered why their tourism department spent $50,000 to come up with a catchphrase that used to be in a Bacardi Rum ad campaign.

“It wasn’t so much we didn’t like it as — it’s been used,” said Warren Bluhm of The Green-Bay Press-Gazette, who wrote an editorial denouncing the choice. Under further questioning, Bluhm admitted that he also didn’t like it.

I have been thinking a lot about state slogans this week. Some days when you’re confronted with the Chrysler bankruptcy and the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, you just decide that this is the moment when you’re going to take a cold, hard look at the difficulty marketers have in coming up with a good state tourism campaign.

Besides, I am a big fan of State Things — the ever-growing national collection of mottos, songs, slogans, nicknames and state birds, flowers, rocks and animals. This began back when I was a legislative reporter in Connecticut and covered a hard-fought contest for official status between the deer and the whale, during which the State Senate, in a moment of extreme pique, voted to make Connecticut’s state animal the human being.

Even as we speak, the spotted salamander is engaged in a fierce battle to become Ohio’s state amphibian, and its chances of success are said to be excellent. Go salamander!

It’s hard to go wrong when you’re picking a state flower, but the number of bad slogan-driven tourism campaigns is legion. For a while, Louisiana was trumpeting “Come As You Are. Leave Different,” which sounded sort of sinister, recalling that TV series about vampires roaming the bayous.

Until fairly recently, Connecticut’s slogan was “We’re Full of Surprises,” which was really bad. While the state has a long shoreline and nice bed and breakfasts, when you think of Connecticut surprises, you mainly remember the time the governor went to jail. And we will not dwell on the period when Rhode Island christened itself the “Birthplace of Fun” and allowed the tourism division to dot the landscape with 6-foot-tall statues of Mr. Potato Head.

Happily, all of these states have moved on. But the slogan arc does not always move upward. West Virginia replaced “Almost Heaven” with “Open for Business.”

And Wisconsin has “Live Like You Mean It,” which sounds less like an invitation to vacation than a self-improvement project. As a matter of fact, besides being an old Bacardi slogan, it is also the title of a motivational book whose authors promise to guide you toward “a meaningful, fulfilling, and happier life with results worthy of legacy building.”

I don’t know about you, but when I want to get away from it all, I do not want to take my legacy along with me.

Kelli Trumble, the secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, said she was heartened that the new slogan already has an “amazing” 90 percent awareness rate in the state, although it’s pretty easy to get attention when you have a radio news anchor in Milwaukee blogging “Wisconsin: We have a lame slogan … AND WE STOLE IT!”

In a telephone interview, she insisted that people were getting past the issue of originality and beginning to tell each other: “I see how this speaks to the essence and spirit of Wisconsonites.”

The essence and spirit of Wisconsinites was unearthed by a panel of brand experts brought together to determine what makes the state different from its competitors — i.e., Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan. This is where the trouble started. Wisconsin always proudly billed itself “America’s Dairyland” and that is still on the state license plates. But if you ask a bunch of brand experts to report on what people think of when they think of Wisconsin, do you think they’re going to come back with “cows?” No.

“What we identified is — our brand essence is that the Wisconsin culture fuels creativity and embraces original thinking in business, travel and education,” Trumble said.

I know, I know. Don’t write to me, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois. I don’t want to hear about how you have so much original thinking and creativity it’s sloshing over the border. Tell it to the Wisconsin Department of Tourism.

I went to school in Wisconsin, and it never struck me as the sort of place where people were worried about living like they meant it. But they were so deeply into being the nation’s dairy capital that they once banned the importation of margarine across state lines.

Then, in 1985, Gov. Anthony Earl of Wisconsin decided “America’s Dairyland” was boring and sponsored a contest for a new state slogan, which drew an avalanche of suggestions. A screening committee declined to consider the popular favorite: “Eat Cheese or Die.” I truly believe that nothing has gone right for Wisconsin on the slogan front ever since.

The NYT

In his second month as a professor at Arizona State University, Tim McGuire was standing in front of 13 students teaching “The Business of Journalism” when his inner voice interrupted. “You dummy,” he recalls thinking, “you are teaching a history course.” It was fall 2006, and he was talking about the production of a daily newspaper, but not about the parallel production of a 24-hour-a-day Web site. He was explaining the collapse of the print classified advertising market, but not the striking success of Google search advertisements.
The course, new to the curriculum, was in desperate need of a revision already. Mr. McGuire, a 23-year veteran of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, was in need of a re-­education himself.

“I knew what I knew until I realized there was an earthquake underfoot,” he says. He immersed himself in Internet business models. He started a blog. The course was renamed “The Business and Future of Journalism.” He quickly learned that today’s journalism students don’t enroll to hear, in Mr. McGuire’s words, “old newspaper farts telling them that the business is doomed.”

“They know the model is broken,” he says. “They think, We’ll just have to fix it.” And so he started this semester by outlining an intimidating theme for the course: “How do we pay for journalism?”

Right now, there may be no other field of education where “I don’t know” is spoken so often.

At the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, on Arizona State’s Phoenix campus, and across the country, professors are hustling to figure out how to teach journalism at a time when the field is undergoing a sweeping transformation.

The American Journalism Review estimates that 15 percent of the nation’s newspaper newsroom jobs were lost in 2008 as news consumerscontinued to gravitate to online sources and as traditional revenue streams dried up; so far this year, major newspapers in Denver and Seattle have folded altogether. At the same time, the shift from a print-based, scheduled world of media to a digital, on-demand world of options is changing how journalists do their jobs. “New media” doesn’t mean transplanting old media to a new medium; it requires a new vocabulary, a new relationship with the audience — a massive social network that now talks back — and, sometimes, a new set of expectations about objectivity and timeliness.

At stake is a generation of reporters, and the continued role of journalists as the eyes, ears and questioners for the public.

The changes are forcing colleges and universities to rethink what a journalism education should look like. The perennial debate about journalism programs — theoretical teaching versus professional skill building — has been displaced by more urgent questions: How can you help students find sustainable business models, while introducing the formerly verboten subject of the business side? What are the implications for the craft of journalism in the shift to digital? And how do you position students for an uncertain future in the media?

“I don’t know a journalism dean in the country who knows what the solution is, or where the journalism industry is going,” says Christopher Callahan, the dean of the Cronkite School. “I am convinced that those answers are going to come from people of their generation,” he says of the students. “Not my generation.”

To raise its national profile, Arizona State has invested heavily in its journalism program. In a new curriculum, Mr. Callahan is trying to instill an ethos of innovation — a sea change for an industry that has acted for decades like a slow-moving train, with J-schools the caboose. “Newsrooms have tended to be highly inflexible; innovation was not encouraged,” says Mr. Callahan, former associate dean at the University of Maryland’s journalism school. Deans across the country say they can’t afford to be the caboose anymore.

The new forward-thinking approach is to bracket traditional journalistic values withWeb classes and an entrepreneurial spirit. Take the weekly entrepreneurship course at Arizona State taught by Dan Gillmor, a former columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, in which students create products for news consumers — last fall, a team built a site for local filmmakers. The purpose of the course, Mr. Gillmor says, is to learn to “invent your own jobs.” (Because they may have to.) Mr. Gillmor also runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, a catalyst for the student projects; that the center even exists is a testament to the changes that are afoot within journalism education.

First-year students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University now take “Multimedia Storytelling” and “Introduction to 21st-Century Media.” In the fall, the school of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be adding an immersion experience in “communication, business and entrepreneurship.” With $8 million from the former newspaper executive Leonard Tow, the graduate schools at Columbia University and the City University of New York are creating two centers for new media innovation.

The NYT

By BONO

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.

I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of …

Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours …

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up … self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

•

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin … stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates … the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.

A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.

But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.

Your soul.

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.

•

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

The C.E.O. of Google doesn’t look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.

But there is a vaguely ominous Big Brother wall in the lobby of the headquarters here that scrolls real-time Google searches — porn queries are edited out — from people around the world. You could probably see your own name if you stayed long enough. In one minute of watching, I saw the Washington association where my sister works, the Delaware beach town where my brother vacations, some Dave Matthews lyrics, calories Panera, females feet, soaps in depth and Douglas Mangum, whoever he is.

The 53-year-old Schmidt is soft-spoken, exuding the calm knowingness of a therapist as he explains why privacy is passé and why passé newspapers are not going to pry more money out of Google to save themselves.

The therapist tone works with me because my profession is in a meltdown. Firms, like Google here and Craigslist in San Francisco, have hijacked journalism, making us feel about as modern as the Tyrannosaurus rex model that sits on the Google campus.

Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.

Robert Thomson, the top editor of The Wall Street Journal, denounced Web sites like Google as “tapeworms.” His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google “steal our copyrights.” The A.P. has threatened to take legal action against Google and others that use the work of news organizations without obtaining permission and sharing a “fair” portion of revenue. But what’s fair will be hard to prove.

“So,” I ask Schmidt in a small conference room that, disturbingly, has an ejector seat. “Friend or foe?”

“We claim we’re friends,” he replies, maintaining equanimity even when a cartoon stuffed doll on a desk behind him falls on his head.

Why can’t Google, which likes to see itself as a “Don’t Be Evil” benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories? After all, Schmidt acknowledges that a lot of what’s on the Internet is “a sewer.” He told me people don’t come to Google for “crap,” but for what’s “useful.”

He declines to pony up money, noting that newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free and adding, “We actually like making our own money for obviously good capitalist reasons.”

He says: “The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.”

He admits that it’s harder for newspapers to target ads as precisely as Google does. If you’re reading about a murder with a knife, he says, you can’t show a cutlery ad. He’s talking to newspapers about a new ad model that “understands your history” and your interests.

“They’d know enough about your demographic to know male, female, age group, what have you,” he says. “The whole secret here is the ads are worth more if they’re more targeted, more personal, more precise.”

To save journalism, Google has to know my most intimate secrets?

“Johnny Carson smoked, and for 30 years he was never pictured smoking a cigarette,” Schmidt says. “Today that would be impossible.”

Of course Google is a leader in stripping away privacy, although Schmidt says if anyone complains about being captured in an embarrassing shot by Google Street View cameras, they will implement a “de-facing” device known as “the anonymizer.”

“It’s fair to say that there will be no heroes,” Schmidt says. “Heroism requires understanding the person in the absolute best light. I’m not sure this is good. What was Barack Obama like in elementary school? ‘Oh, yeah, here’s a picture of him picking his nose. God, he’s no longer a hero.’ ”

When I ask him if human editorial judgment still matters, he tries to reassure me: “We learned in working with newspapers that this balance between the newspaper writers and their editors is more subtle than we thought. It’s not reproducible by computers very easily.”

I feel better for a minute, until I realize that the only reason he knew that I wasn’t so easily replaceable is that Google had been looking into how to replace me.

NYT

Where recruiting clashes with immigration limits

Matt Richtel

Where’s Sanjay?

The question comes from one of dozens of engineers around a crowded conference table at Google. They have gathered to discuss how to build easy-to-use maps that could turn hundreds of millions of mobile phones into digital Sherpas — guiding trav ellers to businesses, restaurants and landmarks.

“His plane gets in at 9:30,” the group’s manager responds.

Google is based in Silicon Valley. But Sanjay G. Mavinkurve, one of the key engineers on this project, is not. Mavinkurve, a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay the foundation for Facebook while a student at Harvard, instead works out of a Google sales office in Toronto, a lone engineer among marketers. He has a visa to work in the United States, but his wife, Samvita Padukone, also born in India, does not. So he moved to Canada.

“Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’” he said.

“The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realise how dumb they’re being.”

Immigrants like Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 per cent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard.

The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove, the Hungarian-born co-founder of Intel; Jerry Yang, the Chinese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google’s Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin. But technology executives say that byzantine and increasingly restrictive visa and immigration rules have imperilled their ability to hire more of the world’s best engineers.

While it could be said that Mavinkurve’s case is one of a self-entitled immigrant refusing to live in the United States because his wife would not be able to work, he exemplifies how immigration policies can chase away a potential entrepreneur who aspires to create wealth and jobs in the U.S.

His case highlights the technology industry’s argument that the United States will struggle to compete if it cannot more easily hire foreign-born engineers.

“We are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power — not hypothetically, but as we speak,” said Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel.

Barrett blames a slouching education system that cannot be easily fixed, but he says a stopgap measure would be to let companies hire more foreign engineers.

“With a snap of the fingers, you can say, ‘I’m going to make it such that those smart kids — and as many of them as want to — can stay in the United States.’ They’re here today, they’re graduating today — and they’re going home today.”

The idea is opposed by staunch foes of liberalised immigration and by advocates for American-born engineers.

“There are probably two billion people in the world who would like to live in California and work, but not everyone in the world can live here,” said Kim Berry, an engineer who operates a non-profit advocacy group for American-born technologists. “There are plenty of Americans to do these jobs.”

The debate has only sharpened as the country’s economic downturn has deepened. Advocates for American-born workers are criticising companies that lay off employees even as they retain engineers living here on visas. But the technology industry counters that innovations from highly skilled workers are central to American long-term growth.

It is a debate well known to Google, and it is a deeply personal one to Mavinkurve. — © 2009 The New York Times News Service

PRESIDENT OBAMA has embarked on a promising new course to fight hunger and promote economic growth and political stability in countries like Cambodia, Honduras and Malawi. These countries, and many more, have large populations of impoverished farm families. Tough climates, environmental degradation and a lack of modern farm technology often limit food production to one-third or less of its potential. President Obama recently called upon Congress to double financial support for agricultural growth in developing countries to more than $1 billion in 2010. His program aims to help smallholder farmers get things like better seeds, fertilizer, small-scale irrigation and access to markets so they can overcome hunger and break out of extreme poverty. This new program could have amazing results — if it is properly carried out.

A crucial factor in determining the program’s success will be how Washington delivers aid to the farmers. The traditional approach, and the wrong one in this case, would be for Washington to try to decide what’s best for each country, and then spend considerable time and money on report-writing, site visits and professional advice. When aid programs are operated this way, they can end up spending half or more of their funds on United States-based travel, personnel and administration, and take years to get off the ground. The benefits for poor countries are then much too little and too late.

Rather than have Washington decide the kind of aid each country will receive, the recipient countries should be invited to prepare plans and budgets that would be reviewed by independent experts. These plans would describe the inputs needed by the farmers, the expected increase in production, how the strategy would be put into place and how much money would be required. Such plans, if described with care, could then be closely monitored by the United States and other donors to gauge results and avoid corruption.

Two international programs during the last decade, championed jointly by the United States, other governments and the Gates Foundation, have demonstrated the benefits of such a scientific, results-based aid approach: the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. These programs have saved millions of lives and protected hundreds of millions more from disease and infection. Here’s how they work: Low-income countries submit national action plans to the two programs, which then scrutinize the plans on their scientific, financial and management merits. If the plans are properly put into effect, recipients get more financing.

It’s time to adopt these strategies to fight hunger. The good news is that many poor and hungry countries already have elaborate and sophisticated plans for their smallholder farmers, but until now they’ve lacked the financial means and donor support to put those plans into action.

This is not to say that these countries must do all the planning on their own. They can also draw upon the expertise of international farm experts from respected global agencies like the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome, and food research centers in the United States and abroad. They can also seek guidance from America’s land-grant universities, as the Obama plan envisions, and leading agricultural companies.

For maximum effect, the United States should also pool its efforts with other donor countries and the United Nations. America’s $1 billion per year could be at least doubled by the contributions of others, including Spain and the European Commission. The overall program — pooled financing, country proposals with independent scientific review, and technical assistance for recipient countries — could be based at the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The Obama administration recognizes that many volatile regions — the Horn of Africa, parts of the Middle East like Yemen and areas of South and Central Asia — are unstable in large part because they are hungry and poor. The next step is to empower recipient governments to map their own path to development. Mr. Obama’s new initiative could be a major pillar of a strategy that is based on generosity, good science and rigorous management.

The NYT

While Turkey was displaying clout on Friday, challenging its NATO partners over the choice of the alliance’s new secretary general, President Hugo Chávez was in Tehran, inaugurating the Iran-Venezuela Development Bank.

That in an increasingly hostile region Iran’s lone best friend seems to be the controversial Venezuelan — even as Turkey dictates policy at NATO, lectures at Davos and holds a seat on the U.N. Security Council — hints at the immense distance between two of the Muslim world’s most important nations.

So much separates Iran and Turkey in the court of world public opinion today that it is easy to forget just how many similarities they share. Both have ancient, pre-Islamic civilizations and were, for long stretches, empires. Both cover strategic territory in or near the Middle East and possess relatively large, well-educated populations (66 million for Iran, 76 million for Turkey). Neither is Arab, yet both are overwhelmingly Muslim. The two countries also share more than a millennia of rivalry and cooperation.

In the early 20th century both Iran and Turkey underwent military coups, with the putchists, Reza Shah and Ataturk, then becoming unlikely reformers. Ataturk introduced a secular constitution and women’s suffrage; he also made such a deep impression on the Iranian monarch that Turkey was the only foreign country Reza Shah visited in his reign.

By the mid-1970’s, when my family moved from Tehran to Ankara, Iran was awash in oil money and seemed well ahead of its neighbor in every respect. Barely a few years later it underwent a violent and traumatic revolution, followed by the bloody 10-year war with Iraq. A massive brain-drain to Europe and America followed — roughly one third of Iran’s physicians and almost half of its academics left in the years after the revolution, depriving the country of desperately needed talent.

Turkey, meanwhile, notwithstanding student riots, military coups and labor strikes, was building a strong industrial base. (The running joke among our Turkish neighbors in those days was that they would not shave until the country was able to produce its own razor blades.) Not cursed by oil, like Iran, Turkey was better able to diversify its economy and master its political destiny without outside meddling.

Today Turkey is an economic powerhouse in the region, holding sway from Central Asia to North Africa. Its image of a democratic, secular and thriving Islamic country is sustained by unprecedented diplomatic efforts. In recent years it has opened some 12 embassies and 20 consulates across Africa, and last year acted as host in Istanbul to the first Turkey-Africa Cooperation Summit, attended by 50 African states at the highest levels.

Iran, meanwhile, seems endlessly mired in an ever-deepening nuclear controversy; it has been put thrice under sanction by the U.N. Security Council; its citizens are pariahs at international gatherings. In 2008, Turkey’s stock of foreign investment abroad reached $14 billion; Iran’s was barely $1 billion.

Since the Islamic revolution in Iran, the paths followed by the two countries have vastly separated — nowhere more so than in the exercise of Islam itself.

Turkey’s secular credentials, despite having an Islamic party in power, remain strong. Last year it took the remarkable initiative of setting up a commission of scholars to conduct a revision of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet and one of Islam’s most sacred texts. Turkey has also tried to establish academic and scholarly standards for its religious leaders, thereby strengthening its place as a real center of Islamic learning.

And while historically Iran had always been the more tolerant to its minorities, on this front, too, Turkey is gaining the upper hand: In March this year, the Turkish government commissioned the translation of the Koran into Kurdish in its continued efforts to rid itself of past demons and align itself with the European Union on granting political and cultural rights for its minorities.

Not surprisingly, the situation of women reflects the two differing ideologies: Turkey’s most famous entrepreneur, Guler Sabanji, is a woman, head of a multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate and frequently honored and feted by her government. Iran’s most prominent citizen on the other hand, the Nobel Prize winning lawyer Shirin Ebadi, regularly faces harassment for her efforts on behalf of human rights.

Today, only 2.8 percent of Iran’s parliamentarians are women, compared to Turkey’s 9.1 percent. Meanwhile the talents and potential of Iranian women, who make up 65 percent of all university students, are being wasted in countering edicts on the size of their veils or the length of their Islamic uniforms.

When my family lived in Turkey, we were frequently impressed by our Turkish friends’ confidence in their multiple and sophisticated identities. They seemed proudly and instinctively to feel Turkey as a real bridge between East and West. Modernism, secularism, their ancient culture and Islam seemed to sit together, ever so comfortably. This philosophy has served their nation well.

In the great narratives of national destiny, Iranians today look upon their Turkish cousins with admiration, but an admiration distinctly tinged with envy.

Nassrine Azimi is director of the Hiroshima office of the U.N. Institute for Training and Research.