Even the bird-brained can follow a leader. When pigeons fly in flocks, each bird falls behind another with better navigational skill, and the savviest among them leads the flock, scientists report in the April 8 Nature. The research suggests hierarchies can serve peaceful purposes in the animal kingdom, where dominance by brute force is often the rule. “A pecking order tends to be just that — a pecking order,” says Iain Couzin of Princeton University, an expert in collective behavior who was not involved in the research.
The research also suggests that for pigeons, dominance isn’t set in stone. While one bird often emerged as the leader, other birds also stepped up. This flexibility in leadership had previously been seen only in some small groups of fish.
From schools to packs to swarms to flocks, collective behavior is widespread among animals. But in many cases, the important interactions are with nearest neighbors, and control of the group’s movement is distributed among members rather than hierarchical.
Biological physicist Tamás Vicsek of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and his colleagues studied flight dynamics in homing pigeons, which fly in flocks but conveniently return to their roosts. The researchers outfitted 13 pigeons with tiny backpacks carrying GPS devices that measured shifts in birds’ flight direction five times per second. Flocks of eight to 10 birds flew with the devices during homing flights (a roughly 14-kilometer trip back to the roost) and spontaneous “free” flights near home. Each bird also flew solo flights of about 15 kilometers each.
Analysis of GPS logs showed that for each excursion, the flock had one leader followed by at least three or four other birds. Each of these followers was in turn followed by other birds in the flock. Comparing the solo flight paths to the group flights showed that the birds with the best navigational skills led the flock.
While flocks have hierarchies, they’re not dictatorships, notes Vicsek. One bird led eight of the 13 flights, while other birds took the lead on the rest of the trips. Vicsek likens the dynamics to a group of peers deciding where to eat dinner. “Maybe someone knows the area restaurants best, or there is a person who’s a gourmand — or maybe they are the most outspoken,” he says. This one person might pick the place to eat for several nights, although another person might chime in now and then. And then there is the person with no say, whom everyone knows has terrible taste in food.
“These pigeons know each other. They know which is the smartest. The fastest bird will even follow the slower one who knows the way home the best,” say Vicsek. Videos of the birds’ positions during flight showed that if the best navigator moves a little to the left, it takes about a third of a second for other birds to do the same. But if the least savvy bird makes a move “the others don’t care,” Vicsek says.
Pigeons’ brains may be wired for follow-the-leader, comments behavioral neuroscientist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley. When the left eye sees something, for example, it sends all the visual information to the right brain hemisphere, and vice versa. This “extreme lateralization” may play a role in organizing flocks, the new work suggests. A pigeon following another was most likely to be flying on its partner’s right, seeing this leader with its left eye. “It’s very cool,” Jacobs says.
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says that Google and Microsoft's access to his newspapers could be limited to a "headline or a sentence or two" once he erects a pay wall around his titles' websites.
Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report on Tuesday, also said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties beginning with The Times of London.
"You'll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall," he said. "Now how high does it go, does it allow (visitors) to have the first couple paragraphs or certain feature articles, we'll see.
"We're experimenting with it ourselves," he said.
The News Corp chief said "we're going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing."
Search advertising had produced a "river of gold" for Google, he said, "but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers. And I think they ought to stop it, the newspapers ought to stand up and make them do their own reporting or whatever."
Murdoch said he did not expect search engines would pay for access to newspapers. "We'll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that's followed by a subscription form," he said. Murdoch dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news on the internet for free would be reluctant to pay.
"I think when they've got nowhere else to go they'll start paying," he said.
Murdoch was also asked about the rivalry between The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has announced plans to launch an expanded New York edition later this month.
"I've got great respect for the Times, except it does have very clearly an agenda," he said. "You can see it in the way they choose their stories, what they put on Page One - anything (President Barack) Obama wants. "And the White House pays off by feeding them stories," he said.
Murdoch also said he reads The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post each day "because I'm going to be responsible for them." He said he reads "a lot" of the New York Times," but rarely reads The Washington Post although he "probably should."
Murdoch also praised the Apple iPad calling the newly released tablet computer a "glimpse of the future." He predicted the iPad would have eight or nine competitors in the next 12 months and said the devices could save newspapers.
"There's going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world," he said. "It may be the saving of newspapers because you don't have the costs of paper, ink, printing, trucks.
"I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper," he said, but "if you have less newspapers and more of these that's ok."
"It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form," he said.
An US federal appeals court all but told the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Tuesday that it has no power to regulate the internet, putting large chunks of the much-lauded national broadband plan at risk. And the FCC has only itself to blame. Telecoms and many internet activists have long argued that the internet is a developing technology that was innovating so quickly that strict regulations would hamper it. In 2005, that argument drove the FCC under the Bush Administration to win a fight in the Supreme Court for the right to deregulate broadband providers, classifying them as an “information service,” largely outside the FCC’s power, rather than a “telecommunications service” that could be regulated like the phone system.
Following that win, the FCC simply issued a set of four principles of net freedom that it said it expected broadband companies to follow. They promised that broadband users could plug in whatever devices they wanted to their connection and then use whatever software or online application that they liked — without interference from their provider. Those principles never went through a rule-making period, and when the FCC went after Comcast for blocking peer-to-peer file sharing services, the company sued the commission in court. And, on Tuesday, won.
Now broadband companies effectively have no regulations that constrain them, as the FCC has left itself with no statutory means to control what telecoms do with their internet networks.
A broadband company could, for instance, ink a deal with Microsoft to transfer all attempts to reach Google.com to Bing.com. The only recourse a user would have, under the ruling, would be to switch to a different provider — assuming, of course, they had an alternative to switch to.
Companies can also now prohibit you from using a wireless router you bought at the store, forcing you to use one they rent out — just as they do with cable boxes. They could also decide to charge you a fee every time you upgrade your computer, or even block you from using certain models, just as the nation’s mobile phone carriers do today.
While this might seem like a win for the nation’s broadband and wireless companies, the ruling could be so strong that it boomerangs on them. For instance, if the FCC is left without the power to implement key portions of the National Broadband Plan — a so-far popular idea — then Congress or the FCC may have to find a way to restore power to the commission. That could leave the FCC stronger than it was before the ruling.
The option favored by public interest groups is for the FCC to take the drastic course of formally reclassifying broadband as a regulated service, reversing the position it held and defended just a few years ago.
“The FCC should immediately start a proceeding bringing internet access service back under some common carrier regulation similar to that used for decades,” said Gigi Sohn, the president of the pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge. “In our view, the FCC needs to move quickly and decisively to make sure that consumers are not left at the mercy of telephone and cable companies.”
The FCC’s own statement on the decision acknowledges it will have to do just that. “Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open internet,” said FCC spokeswoman Jen Howard in a written statement. “But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”
“Other methods” obliquely refer to either Congress passing a law giving it the power (a process that would likely take years) or the FCC reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service — in legal terms, moving broadband from Title I to Title II of the Telecommunications Act.
Title II-type regulations should be very familiar to most Americans — they are the rules that apply to phone services. For instance, phone customers have the right to attach whatever device they like to the phone network — from rotary-dial machines to modems to fax machines — so long as they don’t harm the network. They also have the right to call anyone else in the country from friends to astrology services, and phone companies are obliged to connect the call — making them into “common carriers.”
Phone companies that own the physical lines that connect to your house have to rent them to competing services at fair rates. They also have to provide cheap services to low-income customers — subsidized by a tax known as the Universal Service Fee. And they have their prices regulated.
That doesn’t mean moving broadband into “Title II” would impose the full spectrum of telephony regulation on internet service. The FCC has a power known as “forbearance” that lets it lift selected obligations, according to Free Press’s policy counsel Aparna Sridhar.
“Let’s say Title II has 50 provisions,” Sridhar said. “The commission can decide 48 of these don’t make sense for broadband, but one or two or three do. It will be a skinny Title II. Monopoly-style rate regulation is not necessarily the outcome.”
Another consideration is whether the FCC would then be in the business of regulating the content of the internet — as it famously does with fines against broadcasters for profanity on the radio or over-the-air television. Sridhar said that wouldn’t have to be the case.
“If the FCC decided to reclassify the underlying transmission, that doesn’t mean that Hulu or The New York Times or your favorite app will be regulated.”
Hoping to prevent the FCC from reclassifying broadband, the Wireless Association — an opponent of net neutrality rules — argued before the ruling arrived that the Comcast case wouldn’t undermine the national broadband plan.
“I don’t think the National Broadband Plan is in jeopardy, based on the Comcast case,” Guttman-McCabe said a day before the ruling. “Look at things about disclosure and even the Universal Service Fund — there is no need to have Title II authority to address those issues.”
But the court’s reasoning undermines Guttman-McCabe’s theory. While it was tangential to the net neutrality case, the appeals court took the time to point out that the Universal Service Fund was approved by the courts only because it was tied to the FCC’s “Title II responsibility to set reasonable interstate telephone rates.” In short, the court is saying that the Universal Service Fund couldn’t be changed to support broadband, since the FCC has no similar mandate to set broadband rates.
The Wireless Association welcomed the ruling in a written statement Tuesday, ignoring the tricky question of how the FCC could implement large portions of the National Broadband Plan without the authority to regulate broadband. “Today’s unanimous and very thorough opinion in the Comcast case makes clear that the FCC needs to focus on the important task of making the promise of the National Broadband Plan a reality by spurring investment, innovation and job growth, and turn away from calls to impose restrictive regulations on broadband providers and the internet ecosystem,” said Steve Largent, the group’s CEO.
Comcast also welcomed the ruling, while trying to strike a conciliatory note by saying it likes the idea of open internet principles.
“We are gratified by the Court’s decision today to vacate the previous FCC’s order,” said Sena Fizmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman. “Comcast remains committed to the FCC’s existing open internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC as it determines how best to increase broadband adoption and preserve an open and vibrant internet.”
Meanwhile, Thursday marks a now odd deadline the FCC’s attempt to bolster its net neutrality authority by creating a proper rule-making process last fall that would have codified the ad hoc principles it used to go after Comcast.
Companies and interest groups were set to file final comments by Thursday on that rulemaking — which rested on the same arguments the court just struck down.
That makes the proceeding mostly useless, even though the FCC will still likely take the comments to heart, if and when it ever regains any authority over broadband.
Nowadays, there’s no Internet user out there who doesn’t know what a blog is and that there are thousands of people blogging about every topic under the sun. Even though blogs attract reader traffic every day, there are a lot of people who are not aware that a blog can actually generate a profitable income and can be managed like a long term business. Many individuals of all types have begun blogging for a full-time job and are making good money from these blogs each and every day; this is a little-known fact that numerous individuals do not yet comprehend. Making literally thousands of dollars month in and month out, these bloggers earn a great living by simply posting what is on their minds for other to read. Regular individuals can also make money this way, not only blogger professionals, and in the following review we will demonstrate that Blogging to the Bank 2010 can help the little guys to do it well too.
The fact is that blogging has turned out to be one of the most profitable ways to earn automated money. All kinds of people, with different backgrounds, were inspired to start blogging, so they shared their thoughts with the world, and then got paid for it. Does that really happen? Can you actually make a good source income just by creating your own blog and posting information? Blogging to the Bank 2010 was launched to help people just like you answer those questions and start earning your own money. With Blogging to the Bank 2010 you’ll find everything you need to know to assure you that blogging for money is a viable venture and how you can make it work for you. The system will guide you through setting up your blogging business and instigating your automated income.
The things that Blogging To The Bank 2010 teaches you are not just simple tips and tricks. It goes much deeper. However, this system will revolutionize how you view blogs so that you will be able to confidently make money from yours. The creator of the system who has been backing it all the time, is quite experienced in this area and has been doing it for a long time now. He doesn’t speak theoretically or abstractly. He provides specific examples of blogging for money. He makes it clear that this is something you can do. Blogging for income doesn’t require a genius I.Q. All you need is the blueprint that he will provide you with and you will enjoy success quickly. Clearly, your end results will vary from others because every blog has different interested parties. Some bloggers will make more than the other ones.
If you are looking to make this system work for you and you want to get to be successful online, you will need to put some effort into it, as with any home based business you can expect slow growth at first but as you learn it will grow. Once you have put the work in and have the system in place and the methods down, your business will take off flying. Then you will be able to enjoy watching the money roll into your bank account thanks to the automated system.
So in the end, Blogging To The Bank 2010 is worth every penny. Its a great system that will allow you to make a good deal of money through blogging. While there are many other courses on the Internet that claim to offer similar programs, most of them are scams. This online course gives you everything you’ll need to build a successful online business. It will show you how to build a great blog, then keep building on it along the way. You ultimately decide how much money you will make using the world of blogging. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the video giant celebrates its fifth anniversary, Wired goes behind the scenes of the site that launched a million memes.
The Content
It elevated the absurd.
These early YouTube hits turned unknowns into Internet sensations. We tracked down five surprise superstars to see how they’ve capitalized on their fame. — Steven Leckart
“Evolution of Dance”
Date uploaded2006 Views to date137 million Motivational speaker Judson Laipply first performed his pop-dance montage as the finale of his act. Now it’s the second-most watched clip on YouTube. His popularity bumped up his speaking fees and inspired him to publish a self-help book, Might As Well Dance. Excerpts from an interview with Judson Laipply, inspirational comedian:
“Numa Numa”
Date uploaded2006 Views to date42 million Gary Brolsma’s spirited lip sync to a techno tune inspired legions of imitators — including a spoof on South Park. He has since launched his own Numa Network and appeared in a Vizio commercial during the Super Bowl. The 24-year-old still lives at home with his mom. Excerpts from an interview with Gary Brolsma, singer/musician:
“Here It Goes Again”
Date uploaded2006 Views to date50 million When LA band OK Go couldn’t afford to make a video, singer Damian Kulash tapped his sister, rookie filmmaker Trish Sie, to shoot it. The band’s treadmill moves won the vid a Grammy, and the album sold more than 250,000 copies in the US. Sie now directs TV commercials. Excerpts from an interview with Trish Sie, director/choreographer:
“Winnebago Man”
Date uploaded2006 Views to date1.5 million VHS copies of a 1989 sales video featuring foulmouthed pitchman Jack Rebney were circulating in the ’90s, but YouTube made them into a viral hit. The reclusive Rebney, age 80, is now the subject of a documentary, Winnebago Man, due out this summer. Excerpts from an interview with Ben Steinbauer, director/writer/producer:
“Chocolate Rain”
Date uploaded2007 Views to date47 million Tay Zonday’s piano balladeering took center stage when he was still a PhD student. The 27-year-old now lives in LA as a working musician, licensing songs, selling tracks, appearing in Dr Pepper commercials, and cashing in on the ads sold against his YouTube videos. Excerpts from an interview with Tay Zonday, singer/actor:
Wired’s YouTube Video Jukebox
Evolution of Dance
Numa Numa
Here It Goes Again
Winnebago Man
Chocolate Rain
The Business Model
It got creative with advertising.
Once YouTube broke out of the one-size-fits-all mindset, the money started to flow. — Fred Vogelstein
By 2006, YouTube was a hot property. Microsoft, Yahoo, and News Corp. were all reportedly looking to buy it. Deep-pocketed Google won the day, paying $1.65 billion. Free with purchase: a financial sinkhole. YouTube had no profits, and no plan for creating any.
Worse, the more popular the site grew, the more money it lost — a fiscal annoyance that soon became a huge problem for Google. True, the emperors of search built their own servers and negotiated some of the cheapest bandwidth rates in the world. But at YouTube scale, even cheap was starting to feel expensive. As YouTube topped more than a billion clips a day, Web video began to cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The losses proved so great — and a business model so elusive — that some company insiders wondered whether the deal might turn out to be one of the dumbest business moves in the short and frequently witless history of the Internet. Fast-forward almost four years and it looks like the Google team that was tasked with making YouTube profitable might have cracked the code. “We’re finally at a point where more traffic doesn’t hurt us. It helps,” says director of monetization Shishir Mehrotra.
The revelation that got the company to that point seems obvious in retrospect: YouTube stopped copying Google. The search giant’s success is based on the premise that all visitors want the same thing: to search, find, and leave as quickly as possible. But YouTube visitors have much more diverse needs. Some come to watch short clips of cats doing silly things, others to view TV shows or how-to videos. Some have 30 seconds to kill, others spend an afternoon. Mehrotra and his team developed different advertising approaches for each class of user.
So say you want to see a TV show. Mehrotra’s plan could let you choose a long commercial at the beginning or the more traditional interspersed format. He’s also toying with letting users skip the ads. Amazingly, Mehrotra says, sponsors love that last part, because viewers who choose not to skip them are opting in — priceless reassurance for advertisers that allows the big G to charge higher rates.
Another major step was the way YouTube approached illegally uploaded material (see “It Plays Nice With Hollywood,” right). Instead of pulling down copyright-protected clips, the system lets studios and labels cash in on the ads sold against their content. Rights holders can earn a cut off videos they didn’t even upload.
Between these new tactics and the ordinary ads, independent analysts expect YouTube to generate as much as $700 million in revenue this year. That’s still a long way from justifying its high price tag, but at least the sinkhole is starting to look a little like a cash cow.
Monkey, baby, kitten: Corbis
The Legal Picture
It plays nice with Hollywood.
YouTube has a smart way to spot copyrighted content. And the studios are cashing in. — Steven Levy
Star rating distrubtion
From the beginning, YouTube executives knew they had a big problem. For every grainy home movie posted on the site, countless copyrighted videoclips were also being uploaded — without permission. Hollywood started to freak. But rather than raise a Napsterian middle finger, YouTube agreed to yank the content whenever requested.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides video-sharing sites some protection against their users’ transgressions, but it’s still a legal gray area. “As traffic grew, so did the number of illegal files,” says Chris Maxcy, YouTube’s director of partner development. “We started to ask ourselves, how can we even control this?”
Engineers began taking a hash — a digital representation — of any infringing video. If someone tried to upload the same clip again, it could be blocked. But the system couldn’t recognize slightly different versions of the same content, so some copies slipped through. By 2007, at least six hours of video was being uploaded every minute, a good portion of it illegal.
YouTube needed a smarter system, and later that year it came up with something called Content ID. It works like this: Engineers create a spectrogram — a graphical representation of audio and video output — of each file. Unlike hashes, spectrographic data can be scanned for similarities, not just exact duplicates. When a user uploads something, it’s cross-referenced with a database that’s now brimming with more than a million reference files. If a close match turns up, the system checks the guidelines for that piece of content. If it’s cleared for posting, YouTube alerts the copyright holder, which can choose simply to monitor its stats or begin sharing the ad revenue.
Today a third of the ads on YouTube are served alongside copyrighted content found through the system. Companies like Sony, Warner Bros., EMI — even copyright stickler Disney — participate, allowing the movie-trailer remixes and kitten videos backed by pop soundtracks to keep on streaming.
YouTube Videos Watched Per Month (Per Viewer in the U.S.) Source: Comscore
The Content Producers
It launched a new creative class.
YouTube’s top celebs are quirky and lo-fi, but they draw audiences any cable network would envy. — Claude Brodesser-Akner
Fred Figglehorn
Joined YouTubeOctober 2005 Total views452 million Sixteen-year-old Lucas Cruikshank has been uploading videos of himself portraying a lonely kid for about five years. Annoyed by his grating, computer-enhanced voice? Wait till you hear about his six-figure income and freshly inked movie deal.
Ryan Higa
Joined YouTubeJuly 2006 Total views290 million At 18, Ryan Higa was studying nuclear medicine at UNLV. Now 19, he has switched his major to film and collects a tidy allowance from his channel, Nigahiga, which offers lo-fi parodies and polemics riffing on everything from Asian TV to the inanity of Twitter.
NewsPoliticsNews
Joined YouTubeFebruary 2009 Total views57 million* When “doctor Jon” started posting clips of the political commentariat’s latest distortions, he drew millions of views. Then he got banned for posting network content without permission. Twice. Now the anonymous MD curates the videos for Mediaite. *Includes sister channel news1news.
David Colditz
Joined YouTubeAugust 2007 Total views146 million The musician with the most subscribers on YouTube isn’t Jay-Z or Miley Cyrus. It’s David Colditz, aka Dave Days, whose power-pop parodies have earned him 146 million views. Colditz is at work on an album, but he might not seek a record deal. He might not need one.
Natalie Tran
Joined YouTubeSeptember 2006 Total views212 million A student at the University of New South Wales, the Internet-famous Tran has no interest in Hollywood. “I’m unambitious,” she says. She’s satisfied to upload her observational comedy while pulling down a nice income from the ads YouTube serves against her clips.
Wired’s YouTube Video Jukebox
Fred Figglehorn
Ryan Higa
NewsPoliticsNews
David Colditz
Natalie Tran
The Future
It’s willing to reinvent itself.
We asked Margaret Gould Stewart, YouTube’s head of user experience, to explain how her redesign of the site will keep you hooked. — Mathew Honan
Why mess with a good thing? The old YouTube worked really well if you knew what you wanted to watch, but there were a lot of situations that we could’ve been serving better. We want to get incredibly smart about putting videos in front of you that you compulsively have to watch. How do you do that? By bringing context into the experience. Historically, the site has been designed around the video you’re watching right now — related videos use that first clip as a starting point. But what if you’re not just looking for content related to that subject? People who come to the site from social networks might be more interested in what else their friends are watching. The idea is to understand the mindset that people bring with them and build off that. Does that mean a lot of the changes are aimed at users who have an account with YouTube? Exactly. If you log in, you can import contacts from Facebook or Gmail, and that’ll push a pretty rich set of videos at you immediately — things your friends have favorited or rated or uploaded. What if you don’t log in? We’ll still show you the five videos that everybody should watch today. You know — a plane has crashed in the Hudson River. But it’s kind of a give-and-take: We want to reward people who give us information, so they see that it’s worth it. What’s the ultimate goal? Once we process these social signals — your behaviors and actions — we’ll be able to deliver a whole playlist that’s made just for you. We want you to go into passive mode, sit back, and watch.
The Most Discussed Videos of All Time
01 “10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer” (909,978 comments) 02 “Macedonia Is Greece” (797,051 comments) 03 “Susan Boyle — singer — Britain’s Got Talent 2009” (507,691 comments) 04 “Leave Britney Alone!” (457,438 comments) 05 “Miley Cyrus — ‘7 things’” (453,649 comments)
Date uploaded 2006 
Date uploaded 2006 
Date uploaded 2006 
Date uploaded 2006 
Date uploaded 2007 
The losses proved so great — and a business model so elusive — that some company insiders wondered whether the deal might turn out to be one of the dumbest business moves in the short and frequently witless history of the Internet.
Joined YouTube October 2005 
Joined YouTube July 2006 
Joined YouTube February 2009 
Joined YouTube August 2007 
Joined YouTube September 2006 
How do you do that? 