Advertising: Air Force Asks Students to Solve Real-World Problems

THE Air Force, as part of its recruitment efforts, is approaching young people for help in solving real-world technological problems using a collaborative online platform.

The initiative, which will be introduced on Thursday, will create a digital program called the Air Force Collaboratory, in which young people will be challenged to develop technologies for search-and-rescue operations in collapsed structures; to create software code for a quadrotor, a type of unmanned, aerial vehicle; and to determine where to place the newest GPS satellite.

The Air Force hopes the program will attract students in so-called STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — to work with its airmen on developing solutions for the three challenges, and, ideally, consider enlisting.

The initiative — which the Air Force will promote through digital advertising, social media and partnerships with groups like Discovery Education — is the latest recruiting effort created for the Air Force by GSD&M, an agency based in Austin, Tex., that is part of the Omnicom Group.

GSD&M has been the Air Force’s agency since 2001, developing campaigns to help it attract the over 28,000 recruits it needs annually; the agency said its work had helped the Air Force meet its recruiting goals each year.

GSD&M’s recruiting strategy for the Air Force — which has always sought tech-savvy candidates — previously featured an “Airman Challenge” online video game. A separate campaign included television spots whose theme was, “It’s not science fiction.”

Col. Marcus Johnson, chief of the strategic marketing division of the Air Force Recruiting Service, said the Air Force focused on “going after the best and brightest young men and women, with an emphasis on the STEM subjects. Whether they’re in high school or college, those topics translate into what we do in the Air Force.”

He said the collaboratory program was meant to appeal to men and women ages 16 to 24, including high school students still determining their future plans.

Ryan Carroll, a creative director at GSD&M, said the Air Force was “very much like the Apples and Googles of the world in recognizing the huge need for scientists and engineers. They reach out to kids at an early age and show them the amazing things they can do with science and technology.” He pointed to initiatives like the Google Science Fair, an online, annual, global science competition for teenagers, as an example.

Similarly, the collaboratory program aims to “inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians, and to show them all the amazing, science-related things the Air Force does,” Mr. Carroll said. The program will also allow students to “participate and solve real problems the Air Force solves every day,” he added.

Young people will be able to learn more about the initiative’s challenges at the Web site airforce.com/collaboratory, which will act as a forum. Challenge participants will be able to use custom-built tools to share ideas and work with airmen and other experts to develop solutions.

Not surprisingly, digital media will primarily be used to promote the program. Custom editorial content is being developed for the STEM hub of Good.com, a global community of “pragmatic idealists,” while custom videos are being filmed for DNews, an online video series from Discovery Communications; the videos will feature the DNews hosts Trace Dominguez and Anthony Carboni. The technology network Technorati is asking bloggers to create custom posts on the collaboratory and related subjects, while the Air Force will pay to place videos on Web sites like YouTube, Blip and Machinima. In addition, the Air Force will promote the initiative on Facebook and Twitter.

Digital banner advertising will run on the Web sites of Scientific American, Popular Science and The Verge. One set of ads depicts an Air Force helicopter approaching a scene of destruction after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that has trapped dozens of survivors. The copy reads, “Your idea could save them. The Air Force Collaboratory. Search and rescue 2.0 is now open. Start collaborating.”

The Air Force also is working with Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, on an outreach program for high school science and math teachers.

Colonel Johnson said that although the collaboratory would run through November, new challenges could be created after that. In addition, he said the Web site would carry no overt recruiting messages, nor would the Air Force actively recruit challenge participants, since the initiative was meant to raise interest in the Air Force and possibly encourage participants to seek out more information about opportunities there.

The budget for the campaign is $3.7 million.

Diane H. Mazur, a former Air Force officer, professor emeritus of law at the University of Florida and author of “A More Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger,” said that although the collaboratory concept was “good, it’s not sophisticated to the degree it needs to be to attract the people they think they want to get.” She added, “This is a good direction if you do it well.”

David R. Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who specializes in military sociology, said that while recruiting high school students to “work in military laboratories on military problems” was not new, “what seems new is having interns work online with Air Force scientists.”

“I think they will certainly recruit a good number of high school students interested in science, engineering, technology and math to work on the problems identified. That part is easy,” he said. “Recruiting the same people then to come into the Air Force as enlisted men and women might be more difficult. They are likely to want to go to college.”

As a result, he said, the collaboratory would probably be more successful recruiting Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps students than airmen.

Bits Blog: Larry Page Says Vocal Cord Paralysis Causes His Voice Problems

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Both of Larry Page’s vocal cords were paralyzed after virus infections.

5:28 p.m. | Updated to clarify that one of Mr. Page’s vocal cords has limited movement but is not paralyzed.

Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said Tuesday that he has a rare and chronic health problem that forces him to speak hoarsely and constricts his breathing.

The announcement is the first time that Mr. Page has explained his voice troubles. It comes nearly a year after Google said that he would avoid public speaking for a time because he had lost his voice. Since then, he has spoken publicly, but with a weak and raspy voice.

One of Mr. Page’s vocal cords was paralyzed after a viral infection 14 years ago, and the second was left with limited movement after a cold last summer. Voice specialists said that it was extremely rare for a patient to experience paralysis or limited movement in both vocal cords, and that as of now, it cannot be reversed.

“Thankfully, after some initial recovery I’m fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before,” Mr. Page wrote in a post on Google Plus.

“And Sergey says I’m probably a better C.E.O. because I choose my words more carefully,” he added, referring to Sergey Brin, who founded Google with Mr. Page.

The condition can become life-threatening, doctors say, when it inhibits breathing. Mr. Page addressed that in his post.

“Vocal cord nerve issues can also affect your breathing, so my ability to exercise at peak aerobic capacity is somewhat reduced,” he wrote. “That said, my friends still think I have way more stamina than them when we go kitesurfing!”

Mr. Page also said that in 2003, he had been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an inflammatory thyroid condition that he said caused him no problems. He said it was unclear whether it was related to his vocal cord paralysis.

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is an autoimmune disorder that is the most common cause of hypothyroidism in the United States, particularly among middle-age women, and can cause fatigue, hoarseness, pain and stiffness, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is treated with hormone replacement drugs, though doctors often delay treatment if the thyroid is functioning normally.

Mr. Page’s health had raised concerns among Google shareholders, particularly after the death of Steve Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, and questions about an executive’s responsibility to reveal health problems. Google had refused to give any details on Mr. Page’s condition, until now.

The condition is not life-threatening and doctors have ruled out cancer, according to a person briefed on Mr. Page’s health who was not authorized to speak publicly. He speaks regularly in meetings and has continued to run daily operations at Google, the person said.

Mr. Page also said Tuesday that he had given a personal grant to the Voice Health Institute, a group founded in 2003, for a research program on improving vocal cord nerve function. The research will be led by Dr. Steven Zeitels, a laryngeal surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center, one of several doctors who treated Mr. Page.

“The Pages’ generosity will enable us to help steward a new era of pioneering surgical, medical and engineering innovations that will provide new solutions for the millions of individuals suffering from voice loss and breathing problems in the upper airway,” said a statement from John L. Ward, president of the Voice Health Institute. Well-known singers like Julie Andrews, Steven Tyler and Lionel Richie are on the institute’s board.

To begin, the group has asked people with a similar condition to Mr. Page’s to complete a survey about their symptoms.

A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that both of Mr. Page’s vocal cords were paralyzed. One is paralyzed, but the other has limited movement.

Disruptions: Disruptions: Google Flu Trends Shows Problems of Big Data Without Context

Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency Google’s Flu Predictor overestimated how many people had the flu this flu season.

Several years ago, Google, aware of how many of us were sneezing and coughing, created a fancy equation on its Web site to figure out just how many people had influenza. The math works like this: people’s location + flu-related search queries on Google + some really smart algorithms = the number of people with the flu in the United States.

So how did the algorithms fare this wretched winter? According to Google Flu Trends, at the flu season’s peak in mid-January, nearly 11 percent of the United States population had influenza.

Yikes! Take vitamins. Don’t leave the house. Wash your hands. Wash them again!

But wait. According to an article in the science journal Nature, Google’s disease-hunting algorithms were wrong: their results were double the actual estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put the coughing and sniffling peak at 6 percent of the population.

Kelly Mason, a public affairs spokeswoman for Google, said the company’s Flu Trends site was meant to be only one source in addition to the C.D.C. and other flu surveillance methods. “We review and potentially update our model each season,” she said.

Scientists have a theory about what went wrong, as well.

“Several researchers suggest that the problems may be due to widespread media coverage of this year’s severe U.S. flu season,” Declan Butler wrote in Nature. Then add social media, which helped news of the flu spread quicker than the virus itself.

In other words, Google’s algorithm was looking only at the numbers, not at the context of the search results.

In today’s digitally connected world, data is everywhere: in our phones, search queries, friendships, dating profiles, cars, food, reading habits. Almost everything we touch is part of a larger data set. But the people and companies that interpret the data may fail to apply background and outside conditions to the numbers they capture.

“Data inherently has all of the foibles of being human,” said Mark Hansen, director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. “Data is not a magic force in society; it’s an extension of us.”

Society has encountered similar situations for centuries. In the 1600s, Dr. Hansen said, an early census was recorded in England as the Great Plague of London killed tens of thousands of Britons. To calculate the spread of the disease, officials started recording every christening and death in the city. And although this helped quantify the mortality rate, it also created other problems. There was now an astounding collection of statistical information for scientists to review and understand, but it took time to develop systems that could accurately assess the information.

Now, as we enter a world of big data, we have to learn how to apply context to these numbers.

Dr. Hansen said the problem of data without context could be summed up in a quote from the playwright Eugène Ionesco: “Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.”

I experienced this firsthand in the spring of 2010, when I was an adjunct professor at New York University teaching graduate students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

I created a class called “Telling Stories With Data, Sensors and Humans,” with the goal of determining whether sensors and data could become reporters and collect information. Students built little electronic contraptions with $30 computers called Arduinos, and attached several sensors, including ones that could detect light, noise and movement.

We wondered if we could use these sensors to determine whether students used the elevators more than the stairs, and whether that changed throughout the day. (Esoteric, sure, but a perfect example of a computer sitting there taking notes, rather than a human.)

We set up the sensors in some elevators and stairwells at N.Y.U. and waited. To our delighted surprise, the data we collected told a story, and it seemed that our experiment had worked.

As I left campus that evening, one of the N.Y.U. security guards who had seen students setting up the computers in the elevators asked how our experiment had gone. I explained that we had found that students seemed to use the elevators in the morning, perhaps because they were tired from staying up late, and switch to the stairs at night, when they became energized.

“Oh, no, they don’t,” the security guard told me, laughing as he assured me that lazy college students used the elevators whenever possible. “One of the elevators broke down a few evenings last week, so they had no choice but to use the stairs.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

F.C.C. Describes 911 and Cellphone Problems

The Federal Communications Commission also said “a small number” of 911 service centers — the sites that receive emergency calls and link them with first responders — also were out of service after the storm, the second time in recent months that 911 service has suffered weather-related failures. Many emergency calls were rerouted, officials said, to call centers that survived the storm.

“Our assumption is that communication outages could get worse before they get better,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday afternoon. “I want to emphasize that the storm is not over,” he said, referring to both the weather and the facilities.

Verizon Wireless said Wednesday that 6 percent of its cell sites remained down in storm-affected areas, although all of its switching and data centers “are functioning normally.” T-Mobile issued a statement saying that roughly 20 percent of its network in New York City was out of service, as was up to 10 percent of its network in Washington.

AT&T declined to specify the status of its systems on Wednesday. All of the companies said they were working to assess and repair the damaged networks.

Some of the emergency calls that were affected by the storm were rerouted to new 911 service centers without electronic location information, which tells the operator where the call originated. This means public safety officials must rely on callers for details about where an emergency was occurring, Mr. Genachowski said.

F.C.C. officials declined to identify where the affected 911 centers were located, or which phone companies were responsible for servicing them.

Roughly one-quarter of the residents of the 10 states that were affected by the storm also lost cable television and broadband Internet service, killing most or all of the connections that millions of consumers were relying on for information.

Few radio broadcasters were affected by the storm, said David Turetsky, the chief of the F.C.C.’s public safety and homeland security bureau. Three stations received F.C.C. permission to broadcast at higher power levels, and one station relocated its transmissions on the broadcast spectrum because of damage to its radio tower.

The F.C.C. activated its disaster reporting information system during the storm, a voluntary system through which wireless, landline, broadcast, satellite and cable TV companies can report the status of their systems. Based on those reports, and its own on-the-ground assessments, the F.C.C. knows where the problems are and which companies are responsible for addressing them, but officials declined on Tuesday to make that information public.

In its manual for use of the disaster system, the F.C.C. says that the information “is sensitive for national security and/or commercial reasons” and therefore will be treated as “presumptively confidential.”

Similar storm-related 911 failures have been the subject of previous F.C.C. scrutiny. The commission is currently in the middle of a formal inquiry into the causes of widespread failures of 911 networks in June resulting from the derecho, a violent wind and thunderstorm.

“From isolated breakdowns in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to systemic failures in Northern Virginia and West Virginia, it appears that a significant number of 911 systems and services were partially or completely down for several days,” the F.C.C. said in statements related to that inquiry.

Roughly one million people in Northern Virginia were affected by 911 failures in June, which primarily occurred in systems managed by Verizon. Company officials said before this week’s storm that they had made a number of improvements to their emergency systems and backups that would help them maintain service during the storm.

The commission collected public comments on the 911 failures over the summer, but it has yet to report its findings.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting from New York.

DealBook: Despite Its Problems, Dodd-Frank Is Better Than the Alternatives

Harry Campbell

Repeal Dodd-Frank? It sounds so simple. But repealing the Dodd-Frank Act won’t end “too big to fail” banks, and it may even make things worse.

Mitt Romney raised the issue at the first presidential debate, contending that Dodd-Frank should be repealed and replaced because “it designates a number of banks as too big to fail, and they’re effectively guaranteed by the federal government. This is the biggest kiss that’s been given to — to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”

It’s a seductive idea. Dodd-Frank contains provisions that go much further than regulating banks in order to prevent another financial crisis.

In Section 1,502, to take one example, is a provision requiring public companies to disclose whether they use conflict minerals. What this has to do with the financial crisis is beyond me. So, some parts of Dodd-Frank may already need renovation or even repeal.

But the core of the law dealing with the big banks is another story. Simply repealing Dodd-Frank wholesale will turn back the financial clock to 2006 for these banks. That doesn’t seem very smart given what happened, something that Mr. Romney recognizes when he talks of replacing the act rather than repealing it.

The problem is that possible replacements are unlikely to work or to be politically feasible.

The fundamental issue is that a few banks have grown to be enormous over the last two decades. According to SNL Financial, four banks each had more than a trillion dollars in assets at the beginning of the year. JPMorgan Chase was the largest with $2.3 trillion in assets, while Bank of America had about $2.2 trillion in assets and Citigroup, $1.9 trillion. Goldman Sachs is fourth with about $950 billion in assets.

That’s a lot of money, but not only are the banks big, their share of the market has grown. In the 1980s, the 10 largest banks had less than 30 percent of bank depositary assets. By 2012, this amount had almost doubled to 54 percent.

And size has paid off for these select banking giants. They enjoy a subsidy of reduced borrowing costs because investors believe the government will bail them out if things go awry. The size of the subsidy is debated heatedly by economists, but one recent study estimates that before the financial crisis, the banking behemoths obtained a subsidy that made their financing cheaper by 45 basis points, 0.45 percent. And at least one study has found that banks overpaid in the years leading up to the financial crisis to acquire competitors in order to get bigger and gain this advantage.

So, Dodd-Frank didn’t create “too big to fail” institutions. The banks themselves did because it made them money.

The financial reform law takes two tacks in dealing with these institutions. First, Dodd-Frank tries to figure out who they are and charge them for being too big. This is done by raising their regulatory costs through more oversight and supervision.

It means more governmental red tape for these banks, but also ostensibly fewer problems because of it. Regardless, one purpose of this increased regulation is to impose a regulatory tax on big banks to push them to be smaller.

Second, Dodd-Frank addresses the “Lehman” problem — that bankruptcy may not work for a huge financial failure. Instead, a new regime is created to put big institutions into what is hoped to be an orderly receivership that avoids a general financial panic, something that unfortunately happened when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

Repealing Dodd-Frank will not make these banks go poof and disappear. Instead the banks, which have only grown larger and more concentrated since the financial crisis, will continue to enjoy a subsidy. After all, when push comes to shove, no president will simply let a $2 trillion institution go down. It would destroy the economy.

The real question then is whether there are any alternatives to Dodd-Frank other than repealing it.

The two options that are most often discussed are to break up the banks or impose a capital charge.

A breakup is the favorite choice of many and has even been mooted by Sanford I. Weill in July, a number of years after he left Citigroup, the behemoth he created. Daniel K. Tarullo, a Federal Reserve governor, recently proposed a simple suggestion: capping the size of a bank’s balance sheet. But in a large financial system, you need large banks as lenders.

Even if you can function without large banks, the political feasibility of a bank breakup in a Democratic administration, let alone Republican one, is unlikely.

Luigi Zingales writes in his provocative book “A Capitalism for the People” (Basic Books) that the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that separated investment banking from commercial banking, was good because it led to competition among banks rather than allowing them to bond together to fight for their bigness.

In other words, the big banks would now resist such a solution to the death. (Mr. Zingales, by the way, is a member of the University of Chicago faculty and has been a co-author with Glenn Hubbard, a central Romney economic adviser.) Like it or not, we are probably stuck with large banks. And there will always be smaller institutions that are simply too interconnected to be allowed to fail.

This leaves the second option and probably the one that Mr. Romney is likely to favor: higher capital requirements or leverage limitations for the biggest banks. This may work but essentially does the same thing that Dodd-Frank claims to do — make it more costly to be a “too big to fail” bank.

This solution has the virtue of being easier to administer and certainly requires less regulatory power. But the solution would leave a future administration gasping if one of these banks went down.

And the capital charges would have to be agreed on internationally in order to keep American banks from being outgunned by foreign competitors. This is what the Basel III accords are supposed to do, but raising the capital or leverage limits would require a whole new international bargain.

This is unlikely to happen anytime soon because the European banks lack the wherewithal right now to raise their capital even if they wanted to. Even more problematic is that raising capital and leverage requirements may reduce lending more than the current regulatory provisions do because banks would be forced to keep more money on their books rather than lend it.

The bottom line is that there are real problems with Dodd-Frank. It contains tons of extraneous stuff, and even the provisions dealing with the large banks are sometimes too convoluted and intricate. The mess that the regulatory agencies are in as they try to sort out the Volcker Rule is a good example.

But while it is nice to talk of repealing or watering down Dodd-Frank, the alternatives may not be much better as long as we have big banks. And those don’t seem to be going away any time soon.