TimesCast Media+Tech: When Memes Become Reality TV

TimesCast Media+Tech: The effect of election coverage on news networks. Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton on the future of computer science. Ben Huh brings Cheezburger to television with "LOLwork."

Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

3:21 p.m. | Updated

Adding text-messaging statistics among corporate customers.

In countries around the world, text-message traffic has been shrinking because Internet-powered alternatives are becoming so widely used. American carriers have fought off the decline - until now.

For the first time, the American wireless market saw a decline in the total number of messages sent by each customer each month, according to a report published Monday by Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst who is a consultant for wireless carriers. In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter.

Though that's a small dip, the change is noteworthy because for several years, text messaging had been steadily growing in the United States. Mr. Sharma said it was too early to tell whether the decline here would continue, but he noted that Internet-based messaging services, like Facebook messaging and Apple's iMessage, had been chomping away at SMS usage. He said the decline would become more pronounced as more people buy smartphones. A bit more than 50 percent of cellphone owners here have smartphones.

The downward trend in text messaging is also evident among American businesses who offer cellphones to their employees. Tero Kuittinen, vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps people manage cellphone costs, said that employees at 10 of its corporate clients were sending 5 to 10 percent fewer text messages than a year ago.

Nonetheless, the seemingly imminent decline of text messaging, which is highly lucrative for carriers, doesn't mean they need to lose much sleep. Big carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless are still posting healthy profits, largely because of revenue from mobile data plans, the fees people pay to use the Internet over their networks. Among the top three carriers, mobile data accounts for about 45 percent of the average amount of money made from each customer, Mr. Sharma said.

Voting for U.N. Rights Council Puts Focus on Records of Panel\'s Member States

Those who criticize the United Nations as a toothless and dysfunctional organization often point to the membership of the Human Rights Council to make their case. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Russia currently hold seats. The body has been a vocal and reliable critic of Israel, but has been lenient on countries like Sri Lanka, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Even the United States refused to participate in the council, until the Obama administration reversed a Bush-era policy and ran successfully for a seat in 2009. On Monday, the U.S. won re-election to the body for another three-year term.

Today 18 new states will gain seats and activists have mobilized once again to denounce each potential member's human rights record. “We need better ingredients in the soup,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said about members on Friday at an event at the United Nations.

UN Watch and the Human Rights Foundation invited activists fro m Venezuela, Pakistan and Kazakhstan to speak about human rights violations. The three countries are likely to gain council membership today, even as the two groups consider them “not qualified” to serve, based on an examination of their domestic rights protections and their voting record at the United Nations.

“It would be immoral to let Venezuela join if it doesn't improve its behavior,” said the Venezuelan businessman Eligio Cedeño, who supported opposition politicians before being arrested and charged with circumventing currency controls.

As my colleague Simon Romero reported in 2010, a judge, María Lourdes Afiuni, freed Mr. Cedeño after a U.N. legal panel said his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law. The ruling by Judge Afiuni angered President Hugo Chávez, who, while contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret police to arrest her. She was senten ced to 30 years and is currently under house arrest. Mr. Cedeño fled to the United States.

U.N. Watch and the Human Rights Foundation also criticized Pakistan for failing “to meet the minimal standards of a free democracy.” A major point of international scrutiny and condemnation has been Pakistan's blasphemy law.

Sajid Christopher, a Christian activist, denounced the law as an instrument of intimidation against religious minorities. “The law requires neither proof of intent nor evidence to be presented after allegations are made, and includes no penalties for false allegations,” said Mr. Christopher, the head of a group called Human Friends Organization International.

He mentioned the case of Rimsha Masih. My colleagues Declan Walsh and Salman Masood reported in August that Rimshah, a 14-year-old Christian girl living outside Islamabad, was detained for weeks after being accused of burning pages from a religious textbook. Some reports said she had Down syndrome. Her case unleashed a public furor that showed the deep polarization in Pakistani society over the blasphemy law.

Igor Vinyavsky, a newspaper editor from Kazakhstan, denounced harassment and persecution against independent media outlets. In its latest press freedom index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Kazakhstan 154th out of 179 countries. Mr. Vinyavsky was detained in January and held for two months, accused of distributing leaflets calling for an insurrection, a charge he has denied. He was arrested after a raid on his Almaty-based newspaper, Vzglyad, in which the security forces confiscated all reporting equipment, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported.

“To elect Kazakhstan would be a baffling and shameful act,” Mr. Vinyavsky said Friday through a translator.

With each speaker, frustration about Venezuela, Pakistan and Kazakhstan joining the Human Rights Council became more palpable. But some, like Thor Halvorssen, the presi dent of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, remained hopeful that the system could be reformed.
“It is up to the news media and civil society groups to point out the contradictions within the Human Rights Council,” Mr. Halvorssen said.

But some think reform it's a lost cause. Critics of the council say the election system is flawed, giving equal say to all countries in the General Assembly, regardless of their record. “That's the problem with using the U.N. to address human-rights problems,” wrote Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford and former foreign correspondent for The Times, in an op-ed in July. “Every single state in the world, even the most reprehensible, is an equal member.”

Once they gain membership, repressive states use the council to craft Orwellian resolutions that seek to protect their political control under the banners of national sovereignty and international respect.

“The council is irredeemable ,” Mr. Brinkley wrote. “It's time the U.S. dropped out.”

Mr. Halvorssen, however, keeps trying. He founded the Human Rights Foundation after his mother was shot during a 2004 protest in Venezuela. In June, he was cut off by the delegation of Cuba in Geneva while delivering a fiery speech against Venezuela's human rights record.

Among the speakers on Friday was Marcel Granier, the president of RCTV, one of Venezuela's oldest television stations and a frequent government critic. The station went off the air after losing its license in 2007, in a move widely seen as political retaliation. Mr. Chávez accused RCTV and other private broadcasters of supporting a coup that briefly ousted him in 2002.

Mr. Granier lives in Venezuela and considers speaking up the only way forward. “I receive threats against my life almost everyday,” he said matter-of-factly as attendees to the lunch event overlooking the East River ate their chocolate desserts. “I'm used to it.”

How Cellphones Complicate Polling

With this election, math once again messed with the magic* in a media stalwart. Television pundits, usually with the authority left over from past political victories, turned out to be inferior seers compared to fast-moving analysts armed with a raft of polling data. The Times' own Nate Silver appears to be the biggest winner of all.

But other math, abetted by technology, could mean trouble down the line for our prognosticating overlords. Traditional polling is getting more expensive and less reliable. The emerging online alternatives are promising, but have problems of their own. Problems with the polls may also mean problems for the people who read them. (Nate Silver made a comparison of polling accuracy last week.)

The fundamental difficulty has to do with changes in phone technology and human habits. Much of the polling data you see comes from phone calls. Caller identification has made it easier to ignore calls from polling outfits. Cell phones have call er i.d., and people are likely to be using them from any number of places, where they don't want to be disturbed.

Last May, the Pew Research Center published a report which said that the number of households responding to phone polls has fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent today. If this trend continues, at some point response rates will be too low to show good representation.

Even if pollsters do get through, and convince people to cooperate with an in-depth poll, taking these kind of surveys to an increasingly mobile population is more expensive. A 1996 Federal law states that calls to cell phones have to be hand-dialed, not generated by computer. That increases the time in getting the answers.

A study published last spring looked at an effort by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to survey rents. It found that the cost of obtaining one completed survey ranged from $77.18 for a call to a landline phone to $277.19 for a call to a cell phone.

While it is not clear that this study is a perfect match for the costs a political poll, it is clear that calling the mobile population is expensive. That makes follow-up and in depth polls, which are more valuable, less attractive.

“The ultimate question is, how representative are you of the population?” says Michael McDonald, a professor of statistics at George Mason University who studies polling. “I tend to trust organizations that go the extra mile, with personal interviews, calls, and multiple call backs. Fast polls are a strategy if you want to make news, but they aren't as good.”

One alternative is to rely more on Internet-based surveys, something the pollsters at Rasmussen Reports and other outfits already do. Prof. McDonald says using Internet data, however, “trades one set of biases for another. We don't have full Internet coverage, and not everyone uses computers.”

Still, as more people get online, the Internet-based pol ls get much better. SurveyMonkey, which sells tools for all kinds of collective voting, carried out over several months an online presidential poll that had 96 percent accuracy, compared with the actual results of the vote.

“We looked at nine battleground states over 11 weeks,” says Philip Garland, vice president of methodology at SurveyMonkey. “On the day before election day alone, 60,000 people took the survey.”

The cost per person was negligible, he says, and the results may be more illuminating. “We got twice as many ‘don't knows' compared with phone or personal surveys,” says Mr. Garland. “When people are asked questions by a person, they feel like they should make a choice.” Still, like other pollsters, the online service was surprised at the turnout by Latino and African-American voters, indicating the survey isn't perfectly capturing the national population.

SurveyMonkey, which didn't make money off this poll, plans to continue the work for the 2014 midterm elections, and will make its data available to the public. “We expect to get a lot of interest from political organizations,” says Mr. Garland.

Just in case you thought this election thing was over.

*Note: A saltier version of the phrase “messed with the magic” was supposedly uttered by an old-media bigshot when he first toured Google, and learned how its algorithms could make advertising both cheaper and more efficient.

Malala Yousafzai\'s Father Thanks Supporters From Her Hospital Room

A video message from Malala Yousafzai's father, Ziauddin, includes footage of the young activist recovering in a British hospital.

Ziauddin Yousafzai, the Pakistani educator whose 15-year-old daughter, Malala, survived an assassination attempt by Taliban militants, thanked “all peace-loving well-wishers,” for their support in a video statement released on Monday by the hospital in England where she is recovering.

The video, which shows young Malala sitting up at a table in her hospital room, holding a teddy bear, includes excerpts from some of the cards and letters sent to her from around the world. “Malala is recovering well and wants me to tell you she has been inspired and humbled by the thousands of cards, messages and gifts that she has received,” Mr. Yousafzai said. “She wants me to tell everyone how grateful she is - and is amazed that men, women and children from across the world are interested in her well-being.”

Two weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham released video of Malala with her family in the hospital room. That clip was posted online without sound, but appeared to show the young girl speaking to her parents and two brothers.

Daily Report: After Apple-HTC Settlement, Other Patent Fights Linger

Apple has shut down one front in what Steven P. Jobs, the company's late chief executive, once described as a thermonuclear legal war against Android, Google's mobile operating system. But a wider truce in the patent battles engulfing the mobile industry is most likely still a long way off, Nick Wingfield reports in Monday's New York Times.

Late Saturday, Apple and HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone maker, announced that they had agreed to dismiss a series of lawsuits filed against each other in a feud that started more than two years ago when Apple accused HTC of improperly copying the iPhone. The companies said their settlement included a 10-year license agreement that grants rights to current and future patents held by both parties.

The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, though it is widely believed that HTC is paying Apple as part of the agreement. HTC doesn't expect the deal to have “an adverse material impact on the financials o f the company,” Sally Julien, a spokeswoman for HTC, said in a statement.

The deal was the first settlement between Apple and a maker of devices that use Android, an operating system that has rapidly swallowed most of the smartphone market and threatened Apple's position in the mobile business in the process. Other patent lawsuits continue around the globe, including far more significant ones between Apple and Samsung, by far the biggest maker of Android smartphones.

Apple's settlement of an Android-related lawsuit could be interpreted as a sign that Mr. Jobs's successor at Apple, Timothy D. Cook, is eager to end the distraction and risks of patent fights. In the past, Apple executives had been hostile in their remarks about companies they believed were copying their innovations.

“It's the first major sign of a stand-down we've seen in the smartphone wars,” said Christopher V. Carani, a patent lawyer with McAndrews Held & Malloy in Chicago.

Mr. Carani, though, cautioned against reading the HTC settlement too deeply as a sign that Apple would settle its legal fight with Samsung, a dispute that he believes involves more important patents.