Today's Economist: Health Care Prices Move to Center Stage

Disappointing Fall for ‘Rock Center,’ a News Program With Big Ambitions

The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment — not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days.

To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of “Rock Center,” said in an interview: “I hope that’s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.”

“Rock Center” was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added “60 Minutes II” in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to “Rock Center” was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired.

The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS’s “48 Hours” and NBC’s “Dateline,” which are mainly about crimes and court cases, “Rock Center” presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the “60 Minutes” model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to “60 Minutes” were rarely complimentary; “It’s a very hard standard to match,” Mr. Hartman said.

More important, “60 Minutes” was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand.

“60 Minutes II,” on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And “Rock Center” was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of “Rock Center.”

At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with “Rock Center” may have simply overestimated the public’s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: “You can’t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they’re around, they’re watching cable news.”

There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, “Vice,” and OWN has “Our America,” hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine.

If the decision to cancel “Rock Center” was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday’s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network’s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity.

An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program’s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of “Rock Center.”

Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled “Mormon in America.”)

Unboxed: N.Y.U. Center Develops a ‘Science of Cities’

THE notion of a “science of cities” seems contradictory. Science is a realm of grand theory and precise measurement, while cities are messy agglomerations of people and human foible. But science is precisely the ambition of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Founded last year, the center has been getting under way in recent weeks, moving into new office space and firing off its first project proposal to the National Science Foundation.

The center’s director is Steven E. Koonin, a Brooklyn native and graduate of Stuyvesant High School, who came to N.Y.U. after a stint in the Obama administration as the under secretary for science in the Department of Energy. He is both a theoretical physicist and science policy expert. The center shouldn’t lack for intellectual rigor.

The initiative at N.Y.U. is part of a broader trend: the global drive to apply modern sensor, computing and data-sifting technologies to urban environments, in what has become known as “smart city” technology. The goals are big gains in efficiency and quality of life by using digital technology to better manage traffic and curb the consumption of water and electricity, for example. By some estimates, water and electricity use can be cut by 30 to 50 percent over the course of a decade.

Cities from Stockholm to Singapore are deep into smart city projects. The market looms as big, lucrative business for technology companies. “The Smart City movement,” according to a report this month from IDC, a technology research firm, “is emerging and growing as a significant force of innovation and investment at all levels of government.” The N.Y.U. center’s partners include technology companies like I.B.M., Cisco Systems and Xerox, as well as universities and the New York City government.

City governments, like other institutions, have collected data for years to try to become more efficient. There have been some notable achievements, like CompStat, the New York Police Department’s system for identifying crime patterns, introduced in the mid-1990s and later widely adopted elsewhere.

What is different today, says Dr. Koonin, is that digital technologies — sensors, wireless communication, storage and clever software algorithms — are advancing so rapidly that it is becoming possible to see and measure activities in an urban environment as never before.

“We can build an observatory to be able to see the pulse of the city in detail and as a whole,” Dr. Koonin explains.

Dr. Koonin’s digital “observatory” of urban life raises questions about privacy. He is keenly aware of that issue, and vows that the center is engaged in science rather than surveillance. For example, individuals’ names or tax identification numbers would be stripped from personal records.

The collected data, he says, will be the raw material for modeling outcomes — say, the steps required to reduce electricity consumption in a high-rise office building or in an individual apartment. Those modeled predictions, he adds, can guide policy or inform citizens.

“I’d like to create SimCity for real,” Dr. Koonin says, referring to the classic computer simulation game.

To help, Dr. Koonin is forging partnerships with government laboratories to tap their expertise in building complex computer simulations, like climate models for weather prediction.

The path to SimCity will come step by step, through tackling specific projects. The first one is a program to monitor and analyze noise. The largest single cause of complaints to New York’s 311 phone and online service is noise. It is a quality-of-life issue, Dr. Koonin says, and one related to health, especially when noise disrupts sleep.

The 10-member project team includes music professors, computer scientists and graduate students. The group will use the city’s 311 data, but also plans to employ wireless sensors — tiny ones outside windows, noise meters on traffic lights and street corners, perhaps a smartphone app for crowdsourced data gathering. To inform policy choices, data on noise limits for vehicles and muffler costs might be added to the street-level noise readings. Then, computer simulations could predict the likely effect of enforcement steps, charges or incentives to buy properly working mufflers for vehicles without them.

The project, Dr. Koonin says, might also pull in data on traffic flows, garbage pickup times and building classifications. For example, he says, a 2 a.m. garbage pickup could be routed to a neighborhood with little residential housing.

Louisiana State University Launches Energy Law Center

By Karen Sloan All Articles 

The National Law Journal

November 16, 2012

The Louisiana State University Paul M. Herbert Law Center has launched an energy law initiative with the assistance of a deep-pocketed alumnus.

John Laborde, former head of offshore service vessel company Tidewater Marine Inc., donated $2 million to the law school -- its largest gift to date. The money will fund an endowed chair and support the new LSU John P. Laborde Energy Law Center.

"Given my lifetime career in the energy service industry, and recognizing how my law degree served me well in navigating the complexities of running a public company in the international arena, I am pleased to give back to the school that has given me so much," Laborde said. "My gift will establish the energy law center and, hopefully, serve as the catalyst for future growth and perfection in the energy law field."

LSU's becomes the only energy law center in Louisiana, and administrators hoped the facility would help prepare the next generation of lawyers and energy business leaders. The center will be a hub for energy law courses, offer continuing legal education and serve as a repository of energy research.

Robert Sloan, former general counsel of New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., will lead the center.

"Starting with the broad and deep range of new courses and programs focused on energy law, we will be striving to build on the tremendous academic strengths found across LSU," Sloan said. "Our program will have ties to engineering, geology and other sciences; to coastal studies; to business and finance -- all with the goal of providing graduate students with enhanced training opportunities with a practical, cross-cultural approach. At the same time, we aim to make the center a recognized focal point of academic knowledge, experience and overall excellence in the energy field."