Machinist

2008.05.09 • 15:17 EDT

The Hydro 4000: Save 60 percent on gas?

I just got off the phone with David Havanich Jr., president of Green Machine Solutions, a company in Jupiter, Fla., that promises to increase your car's gas mileage by as much as 60 percent.

The product is called Hydro 4000, a $1,200 device that sits under your hood and uses electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The hydrogen and oxygen are then fed into your engine, and the mixture causes gasoline to burn more efficiently, Havanich says.

"Instead of having anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of your fuel not getting used and going into your catalytic converter, you can burn all your fuel," he told me.

I learned about the Hydro 4000 from a local news report on WPTV Channel 5 in West Palm Beach. Jamie Holmes, the reporter there, was skeptical of Havanich's claims, so he tried the Hydro 4000 on the channel's Dodge Durango news van.

On a dynamometer -- basically a treadmill for a car -- the news van, running at 55 miles per hour for 20 minutes, got an average of 9.4 miles per gallon before installation of the Hydro 4000.

Holmes reports:

We then ran our truck on the street for close to a month with the Hydro-4000 running. The owners said this would give the device time to clean out the engine. We then put our vehicle back on the dynamometer, and did the same test all over again.

And guess what? With the device on, we were now averaging 23.2 miles to the gallon. That's 61 percent better than the gas mileage we were previously getting.

Channel 5's math is off there; a jump from 9.4 MPG to 23.2 MPG is actually a 147 percent gain in gas mileage. Which sounds amazing, doesn't it?

Havanich told me that Channel 5's results were ideal, and that more typical driving conditions -- i.e., not on a dynamometer -- would yield something closer to a 20 to 60 percent efficiency gain.

But if gasoline prices keep going up, even the smaller gain could make a Hydro 4000 a good investment.

Unless, of course, the whole thing's bunk. Which could be true: Hydrogen-injection devices aren't new, and as in many debates about energy, there remains fundamental disagreement about whether they work.

The basic problem is this: The device uses electricity produced by your car's alternator to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. Does the energy it uses for electrolysis exceed the energy it saves by making your engine consume fuel more efficiently -- and is it, therefore, phony?

Depends on whom you ask. There's at least one trucking company that swears by hydrogen boosting. And in online forums, some people report getting better gas mileage after installing such devices (just as WPTV did).

But there's skepticism that drivers may have adjusted their driving styles after installing the hydrogen boost, and that the adjustment might be the true reason for the savings.

Many online point out that the Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" once investigated hydrogen boosters and pronounced them busted: The booster device failed to produce much hydrogen at all, "Mythbusters" found.

But others criticize "Mythbusters'" methods there, and say that a more conventional test -- such as WVPT's -- would have proved that the thing works.

So, the question still seems up in the air. Havanich offers a 60-day money-back guarantee on the device, so if you're interested, you risk little by ordering it (you need to have it installed -- and, if necessary, removed -- by a mechanic).

I'm going to ask my bosses here at Salon to buy me a Hydro 4000 to review. If they go for it, I'll let you know whether it works.

MySpace|Facebook | 2008.05.09 • 12:06 EDT

MySpace frees your data. Will Facebook follow?

Among the tech set, Facebook's the social network that gets all the love. It's Facebook that allowed outside developers to create applications on the site, Facebook that's hiring off all the execs from Google, and Facebook that gets profiled by the likes of "60 Minutes."

And yet it's MySpace, still the world's largest social network, that has recently been acting like the Internet-ethics nerd. And I mean that in the best way: On Thursday MySpace announced Data Availability, a project that will let users move their data to sites across the Web.

This is a long-standing Web community request, not to mention a hobbyhorse of mine. When you put your data -- a list of your favorite movies, of your friends, your relationship status, all of life's coordinates -- into a Web app, there ought to be a way for you to easily, automatically move that stuff around to other places. After all, it's your data -- what right does Facebook have to tell you what you can do with it?

MySpace is allowing just that. Users will be able to choose among other sites -- Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter for now -- that they'd like to connect with their MySpace data. If you connect to Yahoo, for instance, then anything you change on MySpace will be reflected at Yahoo, too.

Facebook has been much more reluctant to allow other sites access to your data (with your permission). In a famous flap a few months ago, tech-blog wag Robert Scoble tested out a script to copy his Facebook contacts to the online address book Plaxo, only to have Facebook temporarily suspend his account.

Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's CEO, told reporters yesterday that the new project "is open to any site out there that wants to work with us, so we're happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project."

Let's hope they will. Facebook's unofficial mission is to build the world's social graph -- to map out all the connections between human beings on the planet. To do so, the company will need a lot of our data. The least we can expect in return is some control over it.

Video Games | 2008.05.07 • 15:28 EDT

"Grand Theft Auto IV" sales top $500 million in a week

Take-Two Interactive, the publishers of "Grand Theft Auto IV," announced today that sales of the game topped $500 million in the first week, more than what many analysts had expected. On its first day on the shelves -- April 29 -- 3.6 million copies were purchased, a retail value of $310 million.

The huge take boosts Take-Two's position in its wrangling with Electronic Arts, the video game behemoth that's put forth a takeover bid for the "GTA" publisher.

But there's another stat worth noting -- "Iron Man" took in more than $100 million at the box office over the weekend. There'd been some speculation that "GTA" would cause young men to stay indoors this week, lowering the take at the cinema. As Ars Technica notes, that didn't quite happen. Looks like movies and games can coexist.

Microsoft|Politics | 2008.05.07 • 12:47 EDT

You too can investigate the Pentagon's pundit program

Here are three quick morning items:

• Danger Room's Noah Shachtman points out that the Defense Department has released thousands of pages of documents relating to its controversial wartime pundit-recruitment program, about which my tenacious Salon co-blogger Glenn Greenwald has been all up in the Pentagon's and Brian Williams' grill.

  "Years' worth of internal Pentagon memos, military talking points and interview tapes and transcripts with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are all now posted to the Pentagon's website," Noah writes. He's asking his readers to go through the stash in search of the fishiest, juiciest bits.

  Already, people have found something interesting, if unsurprising: Talking points and a conference-call transcript show that the Pentagon was feeding inflated estimates of Iraqi troop strength -- and a promise that the insurgency was in its last throes -- to the generals, just as it was to the public.

• The Politico's Ben Smith notes that Hillary Clinton's political advisor Howard Wolfson and Barack Obama's political advisor David Axelrod are old friends. But the only recent conversation the frenemies have had is via instant message.

  One of Smith's readers imagined the IM transcript:

  TheRodster42: lol ur toast
  WolfieSweater69: stfu, we won IN
  TheRodster42: lol NC pwned u
  WolfieSweater69: rev wright said wut?
  TheRodster42: lol typ white person...

• My college classmate Mickey Rapkin, who's now an editor at GQ and the author of the forthcoming "Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory," interviews the Baudboys, an a cappella group made up of Microsoft employees.

  Actually, according to one of the Baudboys, they're just one of the a cappella groups at MS. There's also the Microtones, and a theater group, The Microsoft Theater Troupe, which does Christmas shows (such as, recently, "Grease.")

  Of a cappella groups at rival tech firms, Baudboys bass Dave McEwan tells Mickey,

  We sang the national anthem for the Microsoft Hockey Challenge -- where they play the teams from Sun Microsystems or Google. Someone from Sun said, We have an a cappella group that would kick your ass! But then they disbanded. Groups come and go at Google. We think they're running from us.... I'd love for someone from Google to hear that and challenge us.

  Watch a Baudboys performance here.

2008.05.06 • 16:24 EDT

Give the "drunken pirate" teacher a break!

To judge by her performance evaluations, Stacy Snyder was well on her way to becoming a great teacher.

During her training at Millersville University in Central Pennsylvania, Snyder's professors gave the 27-year-old student high marks for her professionalism and classroom conduct, marveling over the way she prepared lesson plans and engaged students.

But then her professors found Snyder's MySpace page. There, they saw a publicly accessible picture that bore the caption "drunken pirate," and showed Snyder in a pirate hat drinking from a plastic cup.

A Millersville administrator told Snyder that posting the picture was "unprofessional." The school refused to grant Snyder a bachelor of science in education degree and stripped her of her teaching certificate; she was allowed, instead, to graduate with a bachelor of arts degree, which is insufficient to secure teaching credentials in Pennsylvania.

Snyder has filed suit against the school; you can read an excerpt of her complaint at The Smoking Gun.

Millersville University denies that it dismissed Snyder for the MySpace picture alone. The school contends that she performed poorly as a teacher, and that the MySpace picture was "the straw that broke the camel's back." That story is hard to square with the list of glowing recommendations that Snyder produces in her complaint.

The school's defense suggests that it's wised up, and perhaps understands, now, that it would have been completely ridiculous to dismiss Snyder for what she did on MySpace.

Because in addition to being an apparently great teacher and a single mother of two, Stacy Snyder is, like the vast majority of teachers, a human being. And posting photos of oneself in potentially unbecoming poses isn't just the pastime anymore of uncivilized drunken perverts without decency who ought to be kept away from children at all costs. It is, increasingly, something all of us do, and there'll come a time, soon, when no one can honestly claim that there's nothing untoward about us on the Web.

Why not? Because people like to have fun. And adults -- and Snyder was over the legal drinking age when these photos were taken -- sometimes like to have fun in specifically adult ways, sometimes involving booze and boobs and butts and ... better not enumerate here, but you get the picture. Indeed, you've seen the picture.

It's entirely appropriate for people to have fun this way. But for fear of harming the children -- whom parents hope will not want to one day have such fun -- adults are usually encouraged to keep such things behind closed doors.

That used to be easy. It no longer is. In fact, because we live, increasingly, in an age of instant documentation and broadcast, it's nearly impossible to hide these things from the kids.

As I pointed out after the leak last September of nude photos of "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens, tech trends today almost guarantee that sometime in your life, you'll be photographed without your clothes on: "Unless you're a nevernude, I'll bet you an iPhone there'll be some moment in your life in which a camera, your naked body, and an implacable sense of joie de vivre will come together to produce, without the least bit of planning, a nude photo."

There's an even greater chance that you'll be captured with your clothes on doing something that is just marginally wrong -- say, wearing a funny hat while drinking from a plastic cup.

And nevermind photos! There's an embarrassment of purely textual detail about you online. Your Match.com profile, for instance, might list your romantic and/or sexual interests, and your blog probably describes your political affiliation.

Young people today -- and that's who new teachers are, young people -- live on the Internet. Every moment of their lives, from their first poop to their high school talent show solos to their Spring Break jaunts, is captured and posted online.

If we took Millersville University's approach, very few people would be allowed to enter the workforce. And that doesn't seem quite fair in a country with a president who once flipped off a TV camera.

Will it ruin children to see their teachers acting this way? Will one of Stacy Snyder's students see her MySpace page and become morally unmoored? Or will a kid have trouble following Snyder's lesson plan, knowing that, at one point, the teacher wore a silly hat?

That may happen, though it seems doubtful. The thing is, though, there's no avoiding it. As ABC News points out, you can already find many teachers who say things or are shown doing things online that aren't very kid-appropriate:

One first-grade teacher listed among her favorite activities "dancing like an a**hole." A Teach for America teacher in New York showed pictures of several friends drinking beer on the subway. A high school teacher in Los Angeles prominently displayed photos of her lying on the beach in a bikini....

Abby, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in New York, described "excessive drinking" as a favorite activity on her Facebook page and had a "bumper sticker" that said "let's drink so much we hate ourselves in the morning."

But remember, 20-year-olds were doing pretty much the same things two and three decades ago, too. We shouldn't hold today's youth to a higher standard just because their actions are easier to document.

Music|Copyright | 2008.05.06 • 13:40 EDT

An ulterior motive in the music biz's college fight?

Inside Higher Ed reports that colleges have recently been receiving a huge number of complaints from the music business regarding students' trading of copyrighted songs.

The recording industry has long sent legal letters to campuses when it suspects that a student might trading music, but there's been a sudden surge of such letters -- a mysterious surge, considering that network managers at the colleges have not seen any increase in the volume of songs being traded.

So why is the music business sending more letters?

Inside Higher Ed cites college officials who suspect that "the recording industry has altered the standards it uses to allege illegal behavior." Rather than targeting only the students who trade songs, the industry is also going after students who "have stored downloaded music in a folder visible to other users, opening the way to a potential violation."

This is a familiar music industry claim -- the "making available" offense. In several court cases, officials have argued that that I should be punished not only for giving you a copyrighted song, but also for putting a song in a place where you might take it. I should be punished, the industry says, even if you didn't take the song.

Courts have been split on this theory -- some judges have sided with the industry, while others gone with the argument put forward by the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: By itself, putting a song in a certain folder of your computer doesn't harm anyone. To exact legal retribution, shouldn't copyright owners have to prove, at least, that someone has copied something illegally?

Fortunately, reports Inside Higher Ed, some colleges are getting wise to these distinctions, and are beginning to throw out copyright complaints that simply complain of possible -- rather than actual -- infringement.

College officials have another theory about the surge in complaint letters -- they wonder if the industry is preparing to take its numbers to Congress as evidence of rampant copying at universities, in the hopes of persuading members to pass some sort of punitive legislation.

The Recording Industry Association of America denies any such motive. Cary Sherman, RIAA president, told Inside Higher Ed that the rise in copyright complaints is due mainly to improvements in its capacity to detect infringement.

2008.05.06 • 12:26 EDT

iPhony: HTC's Touch Diamond aims for Apple

At a press event today across the pond -- that's what clever people say for London -- the Taiwanese cell phone company HTC unveiled the Touch Diamond, a mobile aimed at taking a share of the iPhone's market.

That is, another mobile aimed at taking on the Apple. These days every cell firm on the planet is adding animated and touch-sensitive interfaces in an attempt to show that it, too, can be a bit iPhony.

The Touch Diamond does have some advantages over the iPhone -- it's shorter, narrower, and skinnier, and it's got 3G networking capabilities and GPS (the iPhone doesn't have either, yet). It's got a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, better than the iPhone's.

But from the demo video posted above, one is tempted to say that in its interface, the thing is iPhony: Where Apple's device responds like lightning to the slightest touch, the HTC, even in the company's own corporate video, seems to ponder a bit after a finger's flicked across the screen.

Or, as Gizmodo's Addy Dugdale, who got to handle the Touch Diamond a bit, says,

[The user interface] was much more attractive than I was expecting, but the touchscreen takes quite a bit of getting used to: it's sluggish to the touch, compared to the hot-butterish iPhone, but the HTC rep assured me that it's not a final version of the software, and everything should have been ironed out by the time of the European and Asian launches next month.

The sluggishness might have to do with its operating system, Windows Mobile 6.1, which isn't known for its capacity for pretty.

The Touch Diamond will be available through the carrier Orange in June in Europe, and then elsewhere at some unannounced time after that. The pricing, too, remains a secret for now.

See more about the Touch Diamond at Endgadget and Crunchgear.

2008.05.05 • 15:43 EDT

McCain, Obama, Clinton push dangerous vaccine-autism myth

Last week federal health officials announced an alarming health stat: The United States is on track to see its highest incidence of measles since 2001, an increase that reflects many new infections in children whose parents, citing "personal beliefs," eschew vaccinations.

What personal belief would cause people to refuse to vaccinate their kids? The parents put stock in a repeatedly disproven idea that immunizations cause autism -- a belief for which, insanely, all three presidential candidates have recently expressed some sympathy.

So far in 2008, there have been 64 cases of measles in the U.S.; there were just 30 cases in all of 2007. These numbers are far smaller than stats we saw in the early 1990s -- in 1994, the L.A. Times notes, there were more than 900 cases of measles. Since then, the federal government has funded immunizations for low-income children, and infection rates plummeted through the '90s.

During the last few years, though, parents -- mainly upper-income parents -- across the country and the world have begun to forgo vaccinations. And it's in their children that we're now seeing infections.

For instance in January, the Times reports, an unvaccinated 7-year-old boy contracted the disease on a trip to Switzerland, which is experiencing a measles outbreak. When he returned to his home in San Diego, the boy infected 11 other children -- his two siblings, four others at his doctor's office, and five more at his school.

All these kids were unvaccinated. Indeed, at the boy's school, the San Diego Cooperative Charter School, 10 percent of children have received "personal-belief" exemptions from immunizations. Similarly high non-vaccination rates plague communities all over the nation.

The Times says that of the 64 cases of measles reported this year, 63 were in patients who hadn't been immunized.

The idea that there might be a link between vaccines -- specifically, a mercury-based preservative in vaccines called thimerosal, a preservative that is only rarely used anymore -- and autism has been shot down in several scientific studies.

The most thorough study put a thousand children -- some who'd been exposed to thimerosal and some who hadn't -- through a series of standardized mental and physical tests. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last fall, the researchers concluded:

Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines ... and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.

Several other studies have echoed this finding.

Yet the vaccine-autism myth has been kept alive by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, who pushed the theory in a book and on "Oprah" last year, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who made the case in an article for Rolling Stone and Salon.

During the last few months, John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have gotten into the act.

McCain and Obama are the worst offenders. At a campaign stop in Texas in January, McCain, responding to a question from a mother of an autistic son, said (emphasis mine):

It's indisputable that [autism] is on the rise amongst children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates that it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines.

At a rally in April in Pennsylvania, Obama said:

We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included [referring to a person in the audience who'd asked him a question]. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.

When an autism advocacy group asked Clinton "Do you think vaccines should be investigated as a possible cause of autism?" she said she would fund further research into the question:

I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines. I have long been a supporter of increased research to determine the links between environmental factors and diseases, and I believe we should increase the NIH's ability to engage in this type of research.

McCain, Obama and Clinton are wrong. There isn't "strong evidence" that the rise in autism is linked to vaccines -- the evidence says just the opposite. The science is not "inconclusive" -- the science, in fact, has busted the myth. And there doesn't need to be further funding to search for a "possible" link between autism and vaccines -- the question has already been funded.

But the candidates are not only clueless on the facts; there's something more deeply wrong about their answers.

As I describe in "True Enough," my book about how myths persist in a niche-media society, when folks split into parallel universes of half-truths and pseudo-science, politicians are apt to follow them, because there's profit in telling people what they want to hear.

And when they do, dangerous policies follow.

Measles is a serious, highly contagious disease. A fifth of the cases reported this year resulted in hospital stays.

McCain, Obama and Clinton ought to counsel parents who are worried about vaccines that there isn't anything to fear -- that the greater risk to children and to society is in refusing immunizations.

That the candidates are instead lending credibility to these myths is sickening.

Correction: I initially said that thimerosal isn't used in vaccines anymore. In fact, a few vaccine preparations, including some flu vaccines, do still use thimerosal as a preservative. Childhood immunization shots, including the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, do not.

Yahoo|Microsoft | 2008.05.05 • 12:52 EDT

No victory: Yahoo feels the heat after Microsoft walks away

Even more so than usual, the tech world is glued to the market today, waiting to see how low Yahoo can go. Indeed, Google Trends says that YHOO, Yahoo's stock symbol, is, so far, the 28th fastest-rising search term today.

But that's the only thing about Yahoo rising today. Its stock opened at $23.02 this morning, about 20 percent down from Friday's closing price of $28.67.

Friday was, of course, a universe away: That was before Saturday's final meeting between Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer, Yahoo and Microsoft's CEOs, at which Ballmer refused to pay a penny over $33 per share for his takeover of Yahoo.

Yang stuck to his price, $37, and Ballmer flew back to Redmond. Ballmer could always come back -- but for now, Yahoo's got to face the consequences of its strategy.

Yang himself may be pleased with it. Citing "people close to" Yahoo, the New York Times on Sunday reported that Yang considered the outcome a "personal victory," and added that "high-fives were exchanged" among Yahoo execs when they learned of Ballmer's decision.

Yahoo employees -- whose wealth is tied up in the stock -- are surely less excited. On Jan. 31, the day before Microsoft made public its takeover offer, Yahoo's stock was trading at $19. Microsoft's first offer -- of $31 -- caused the shares to surge to $28. But now that a deal's off the table, folks at Yahoo once again face the prospect of sub-$20 shares.

Aware that he wouldn't win any support from his employees if he were seen as happy about standing in the way of a huge Microsoft-stock payday, Yang, in a post on Yahoo's company blog, denied any glee:

Frankly, there's a lot of nonsense and misinformation in what's being reported. Just so we are all clear, here's what happened. The board took its mission very seriously. We clearly indicated to Microsoft that we were open to a transaction but only if it were on terms that fully recognized the value of Yahoo! and was in the best interests of our stockholders.

No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months ... and no one should.

As Kara Swisher reports, though, many at Yahoo aren't buying it. Here are some quotes she pulled from distraught employees:

"I am in shock."

"I don't know if we won or we lost. I think we lost."

"I don't love that it was Microsoft, but I think everyone thought $33 was a pretty good offer from a pretty good tech company."

"Having to face my staff tomorrow will not be so much fun and I need some Prozac, since I don't know what I can say to them about how our leadership is going to get our company going again."

"Where's the Jelly memo when you need it?"

"I can't really talk to Jerry, since it is difficult to tell a founder tough things he probably needs to hear."

"Do you think we need to do an intervention with Jerry and the board?"

What should Yahoo do now? Many are pushing it to make permanent a search deal with Google, one that it first initiated as a way to avert the Microsoft offer.

As part of the deal Yahoo would outsource its search operations to Google -- it would get increased revenue in return for what would likely be the end of search-engine innovation at the company.

Henry Blodget argues that this is a fine trade, because Yahoo was never going to beat Google in search anyway. Why continue to invest resources in a game that's already over? Better to spend the money in new markets that Yahoo could potentially lead.

But even a Google deal may not pacify investors. If Yahoo's stock continues to slide, Microsoft could always return with another proposal -- and this time, Ballmer wouldn't have to offer anywhere near $33.