Science Talk January 31, 2007 -- TV of Tomorrow; Battle of the Science Journals; and U.S. Budget Crunch Threatens National Lab

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting January 31st. I am Steve Mirsky. This week on the podcast we will run the gamut from A to B with guests Michael Antonoff, Mark Alpert and David Biello. Scientific American editor, Mark Alpert, will talk about the federal budget crunch and how it may cause the Fermi National Lab to close down temporarily. Sciam.com associate editor David Biello discusses the pitch[ed] battle between free open-access science journals and the ones that still charge readers and journalist Michael Antonoff talks about the future of television. He is the author of the article "Digital TV At last?" in the February issue of Scientific American. I called him at his home in Forest Hills, New York.

Steve: Hi, Michael how are you?

Antonoff: I’m pretty good Steve.

Steve: Tell us the difference first of all between digital television and high-definition television.

Antonoff: High-definition television is a subset of digital television. It requires more bandwidth. It requires a better display to see it and a larger display to appreciate it. It's still digital TV, but it's a much higher quality form of digital TV.

Steve: And this is really interesting, this mix of technology and politics. Talk about how this budget act in 2005 winds up mandating that all broadcasting is digital in 2009.

Antonoff: (Laughs) Well it's funny, you know, the Federal Government is in hog, pretty much, you know, to spending so much more than it is taking in and the politicians have discovered one of the ways that will help balance the budget is to auction off some of the public airwaves and the logical place to go is the analog TV broadcasting spectrum. We've been trying to transition from analog TV broadcasting to digital TV for over a decade, and it has been postponed and it looks like it's finally going to happen on February 17th, 2009; and at that point, the government will be able to sell, you know, those current station channels for probably for telecommunications use to raise billions of dollars, you know, I mean, they are projecting it could be, you know, 70 billion dollars. I doubt that is[it's] going to be that much, but a lot of money could be raised. And some of that, actually, some of that bandwidth will be used for public safety as well, so it's not just a question of raising money, but actually using it for things like first respond[ers] is actually being able to talk to each other when disaster is unfolding.

Steve: Which amazingly enough, they still can't do in many situations.

Antonoff: Right. (laughs) Exactly.

Steve: Yeah! Can you talk about the current television situation, I mean, most of us just turn the TV on, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. What's the difference between how things are now and how they're going to be when the flips, when the switch gets flipped on February 7th, 2009?

Antonoff: Well, you know, the irony is, you're going to be hearing a lot of doom and gloom in the next couple of years about TV going dark, but the fact is that the vast majority people are not going to see any difference, because they get their TV signal through [a] cable box or through [a] satellite receiver. It's really, it is something like 15 percent of the public is still watching TV through an antenna and those old TVs are the ones with the analog-only tuners, and that's the signal that will disappear. But for the vast majority of us, we are not going to see any difference really.

Steve: We're not going to see any difference but for those people, these are probably the more disenfranchised members of the society to begin with.

Antonoff: Exactly.

Steve: And they're the ones still watching broadcasts; they have a limited number of channels; they might even be on old black and white sets&133;

Antonoff: Sure.

Steve: &133;till this day. And they are all of a sudden going to be completely cut off from any television signal.

Antonoff: Yes, unless they prepare to get a box that will convert the new digital signals to their old analog signals, so their old TVs can still see it.

Steve: And at the prices of some low-end televisions that are new, you['re] probably better off just buying a new TV.

Antonoff: Oh, yeah!

Steve: Right.

Antonoff: Oh! Absolutely and in fact by law, the new TVs have to include a DTV tuner in them, so it's a no-brainer. But, you know, if you want to save some money, you know, for $60 or something you're going to able to buy a TV converter box—a TV tuner converter box—that will at least just give you your basic over-the-air channels.

Steve: Right. [But] then but again we were talking about a segment of the population for whom 60 bucks may be a big deal.

Antonoff: Yeah. There's going to be a subsidy. I mean, the federal government is going to provide these two $40 coupons, so that will help.

Steve: Because there is a recognition that television is—in addition to entertainment—is a vital means of transmitting information that people actually need.

Antonoff: Right, they have to watch Caprotti , you know, so many things are important.

Steve: (Laughs) Okay, now sure for most of us, we're going to turn the TV on and there won't be any difference. But there will be a difference in terms of both the quality of the picture and in terms of how big the—I mean it's a same size of a pipe, but there's going to be a lot more stuff going through it. I'm starting to sound like Senator Ted Stevens here. It's a series of tubes, but that's not—I don’t mean that. One of the things that you get back by getting rid of analog TV is a lot of bandwidth that is currently cut— analog TV is a hog.

Antonoff: Right! Right! And in fact the broadcaster is looking forward to digital TV because all of a sudden instead of being able to send just one program at a time, they're going to be able to cut up that 6 MHz of bandwidth in multi-screen. They can send [a] high-definition program as well as a standard definition program and perhaps even more—and you know that's on the broadcast end. The cable companies are going to be, once they recover the analog space—this analog TV is still on the cable—once they recover that space they're going to be able to deliver a lot more high definition, a lot more digital channels.

Steve: So overall, is this a good thing or is it just a thing? Or is [it] just something that's going to happen? Or is it really a benefit for everybody?

Antonoff: Why, I think it's a benefit just because of two things—for diversity you are just going to be able to send a lot more program[ming] to people—you know, every special interest—and on top of that, for high-definition programming you're getting a picture that's something like six times sharper with surround sound; so if you've got a setup of larger speakers, you're going to be hearing discrete sounds coming from different corners of the room—I mean it's like a movie-theater experience.

Steve: Oh!

Antonoff: You know great screen, great great great sound—I mean, why wouldn't you want it?

Steve: This is bad news for those of us who live in apartments or attached houses though, where the neighbor's TV is already shaking my entire house.

Antonoff: (Laughs) Well I can always put air crates on the walls.

Steve: So are you already all outfitted for the changeover?

Antonoff: Yeah, I've got a high-definition cable box that receives two channels simultaneously and records simultaneously; and if I recorded something earlier, I can be watching a third program that's entirely different than the two programs that are coming in right [then]now.

Steve: Now one last thing is you were talking about the gloom-and-doom scenario possibilities, I mean, in a way reminds me of the Y2K thing

Antonoff: Yeah.

Steve: And what are people going to hear and how should their dismay kind of be assuaged by what you actually know?

Antonoff: Well, I mean, I just read today that there are some politicians that are demanding that warning labels be put on TVs—that it only has an analog broadcast tuner and it's not going to work after February 17th. Well, if they looked at the law, the fact is that this year—I think it's July 1st—every TV tuner—every TV being sold—has to have to a DTV tuner. It is[used] to be that it was certain—it had to be a certain size screen. Well by the time February 17th, 2009 comes around every tuner in every TV—every size, every tuner card in a computer, every DVR or VCR—has to include a DTV tuner in it. So you know this warning label doesn't really make a lot of sense in there; [the warning label,] that’s [for] a retailer selling, you know, TVs from a couple of years ago that he happened to find in the warehouse.

Steve: Alright, TVs off the back of the truck.

Antonoff: Yeah, exactly!

Steve: Okay.

Antonoff: (Laughs)

Steve: Well I guess the big problem that will remain and will always remain—because I get about 300 channels at home and still I surf around and there is often nothing worth watching.

Antonoff: Sure, well (laughs) that's not going to change.

Steve: (Laughs) I was hoping you could do something about that.

Antonoff: (Laughs)

Steve: Well Michael very good to talk to you. Thanks very much.

Antonoff: Thank you Steve.

Steve: Michael Antonoff's article "Digital TV At Last?" is in the February Scientific American and is also available on our Web site www.sciam.com. Antonoff notes that his last names begins analog but ends digital. By the way I misspoke at one point in the interview and said the rollout date for full digital TV was February 7th 2009—it's February 17th.

Now it's time to play TOTALL…….Y BOGUS. Here are four science stories; only three are true. See if you know which story is TOTALL…….Y BOGUS.

Story number 1: Forget the coffee; a scientist has created the caffeinated doughnut!

Story number 2: The tony town of Greenwich, Connecticut, home of CEOs, CFOs and COOs is apparently also home to a lot of c-o-y-o-t-e's—that is, coyotes.

Story number 3: Bald eagles aren't really bald, they just have those white head feathers; but Alaska is becoming so warm that bald eagles there actually have fewer head feathers now than they did 20 years ago, in effect going bald. And…

Story number 4: Damage to the part of the brain called the insula has the unexpected effect of enabling smokers to completely lose their nicotine addiction!

We'll be back with the answer, but first sciam.com associate editor David Biello recently wrote a piece for the Web site about the battle between free open-access science journals and those that charge readers. The article is called "Open Access to Science Under Attack". To find out more I called Dave. He was waiting to board a plane at JFK to cover the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which meets this week in Paris. I reached him on his cell.

Steve: Hi David, how are you?

David : I'm fine Steve, how are you?

Steve: I'm okay. You have this article on the Web site—January 26th is the date—and we're talking about this battle that's going on now between journals that you have to pay a lot of money to get and the free open-access journals; and it seems like there has been an event that precipitated lot of discussion and that was the hiring of this big PR guru.

David: Yeah—Eric Dezenhall by name. He is the—well I guess—he is most famous for defending or helping to orchestrate the defense of Jeff Skilling—if you may recall of the Enron scandal—but he's been involved in a lot of high-profile, I guess, public crafting of messages from Exxon Mobile on down. And in this case the American Association—the Association of American Publishers hired him to address their members—specifically their Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division—so that [they know] how to craft a message; and as he notes in his memo on the subject, they face enough skill [an uphill] battle because their opponents—in this case, the opponents of open access—have a really great message, a better message he calls it: free information.

Steve: Now apparently somebody got access to an internal memo that he sent to his new client.

David: That's correct, and I actually have a copy of that memo as well. I can't say who I got it from, but it's quite an interesting memo and I excerpted portions of it in the article; that's wh[ere]y that free information quote comes from. He basically was telling them to craft a message as much as possible to, I guess, align this battle as a battle between peer review and public access; and I believe the key quote is painting a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles; it's his main advice and that's a bit of a mistake since open-access journals such as PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology.

Steve: That's Public Library of Science…

David: …Public Library of Science journals are, opposed you know, heavily peer reviewed just the same as any of the other journals that [we] are looking at [or] may be familiar with—Nature, Science, what have you. So it's a bit of [a] misinformation campaign that [would be] fueled if they were to follow that advice.

Steve: Well it suffice[s] to say that it's really interesting times in the world of science publishing because peer review itself is under attack—open-access journals are threatening the old warhorses of the science publishing world, and we're talking about, you know, the journals in which science is initially reported.

David: Even the, I guess, the biggest warhorses of the peer reviewed, not-free journals will probably not be too heavily affected, at least right away—Nature and Science aren't going anywhere. They are published weekly and may get—they have a certain prestige factor—but smaller niche publications are the ones really feeling the heat on this. If you are in a college, just to say, studying the mating habits of—and I don't want to pick on any one particular branch of science—but the mating habits of, I don't know, tree shrews; you have a very small specialty audience and you also have a very small specialty funding, so you know, being asked to pay for your own publication—which is how the open access journals work—[it] can be difficult to convey the difference between, you know, your grad student being able to attend the conference on the subject or not, but at the same time it will allow that research on the—what did I say—the tree shrew …

Steve: (laughs) Yeah …

David: … to get out to a wider audience gradually.

Steve: Right. Because the fees to publish in this [these] open-access journals can be substantially—it can be in the thousands of dollars.

David: Correct. Typically—according to Mark Patterson who I spoke to from PLoS, which a[re] kind of the main line open-access journals—the fee ranges from $1,500 to $2,500 per article.

Steve: Well the article is called "Open Access to Science Under Attack"—that's dated January 26^th, 2007—by David Biello. David thanks very much for your time. Have a good flight.

David: Thank you very much Steve.

Steve: David Biello's article is at our Web site www.sciam.com. Also check out his blog entry on the subject—dated January 27th—called "The Open Access Debate"; that's at [www.]blog.sciam.com.

Now it's time to see which story was TOTALL…….Y BOGUS. Let's review the four stories

Story number 1: Researcher creates caffeinated doughnut.

Story number 2: Affluent Greenwich, Connecticut has bunches of coyotes.

Story number 3: Warmer Alaska—home to bald eagles that are actually going bald. And…

Story number 4: Specific brain damage ends nicotine addiction.

Time's up.

Story number 1 is true. We now have the caffeinated doughnut. Of course, I thought I had invented the caffeinated doughnut when I cleverly dipped my doughnut in coffee, but no—North Carolinian Robert Bohannon claims to have figured out how to mask the normal bitter taste of caffeine effectively enough to add the stimulant to foods like doughnuts and bagels. No truth to the rumor that the NYPD is[hand] named him man of the year.

Story number 2 is true. Coyotes are making a decent living in and around the Greenwich, Connecticut; a City University of New York graduate student is currently studying the area's coyote population. A few dozen of the "Wile E. Coyotes" appear to live in Greenwich and the surrounding areas.

And story number 4 is true. Damage to the insula region of the brain apparently makes [a] smoker's nicotine addiction disappear.

For more, listen to the January 26th edition of the daily Scientific American podcast 60-Second Science, all of which means that story number 3, about bald eagles at[in] Alaska actually going bald is TOTALL…….Y BOGUS. But what's true is that a bald eagle recently caused a power outage in the Juneau that affected 10,000 people. The eagle found a deer head in a landfill on January 28th and attempted to fly off with it. With that heavy load in toe, the eagle failed to gain altitude fast enough and crashed into some power lines on take-off, causing the power outage—a clear example of two heads of not being better than one.