A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate

Mr. Doernberg worked in chip design, before that industry shrank, and then for a solar energy company, before that industry shrank, and has been unemployed since the middle of last year. By his own account, his skills are not ideal for the current job market. Nor does it help, he says, that at 53, he looks older than he is; youth is at a premium in his industry. So, too, is optimism.

“It’s a question of convincing someone that with these skills, I can do this job, even though I haven’t done it before,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. I know I will find a job.”

The questions of skills, jobs and nationality are a combustible mix these days.

Silicon Valley companies, warning of an acute labor shortage, say it is too costly to retrain older workers like Mr. Doernberg, and that the country is not producing enough younger Americans with the precise skills the industry needs. Their arguments have persuaded a majority of senators to give them what they want: a provision in the immigration bill to let in many more foreign professionals.

But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas. If there is such a talent shortage, they ask, why are wages for most engineers not rising faster? Labor groups have pushed for a requirement to offer jobs to equally qualified Americans before hiring foreigners, a provision that the industry has fiercely resisted.

The pitched arguments of both sides, which are likely to resurface in the House when it takes up its version of an immigration overhaul, cloud a complicated reality. There is little empirical evidence to suggest that foreign engineers displace American engineers as a whole. If anything, one recent study suggests, the growth of immigrant workers in American companies helps younger American technical workers — more of them are hired and at higher-paying jobs — but has no noticeable consequences, good or bad, on older workers.

“In the short run, we don’t find really any adverse or superpositive effect on the employment of Americans,” said William R. Kerr, a Harvard business professor who conducted the study on the work force of 300 American companies. “People take an extremely one-sided view of this stuff and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.”

A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution reached a similar conclusion. It found that in the top 10 cities that bring in the largest number of high-skilled guest workers on H-1B visas, college-educated Americans — those who could compete for jobs with high-skilled guest workers — are not more likely to be unemployed.

At the same time, though, the industry’s claims of a labor shortage may be somewhat overblown. Most H-1B workers hold entry-level positions. Economists say that bringing in more of these workers would serve to keep wages down. It also saves employers the trouble of having to retrain workers.

There is a difference between what companies say they need and want, said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Saying we need people with these skills is like me saying I need a four-wheel drive,” he said. “They could retrain people.”

It is true that for certain categories of engineers, wages are not going up as sharply as one would expect if good engineering talent were indeed hard to find. But it is also true that engineers with certain specialties, like software development, are hard to find.

Intel, for instance, which has more than 50,000 employees in the United States, said it has 1,000 openings. Motorola Solutions said it was scrambling for software engineers. And unemployment among technology professionals is generally about half the national average, buttressing the industry’s claims.

Economists say there may be other reasons for opening the door to high-skilled immigrants. In cities where there are large concentrations of such immigrants in science and engineering, overall wages tend to go up, especially among college-educated American residents, and eventually, so do housing prices, according to a study by Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis.

The Congressional Budget Office weighed in this week too, concluding that the growth in high-skilled immigration would lead to “slightly higher” productivity and in turn higher wages overall.

Already, the fight over high-skilled immigration has led to arguments and counterarguments on the Senate floor, with one side warning that jobs will go to workers from overseas and the other rallying for Americans first.

But Ardine Williams, the vice president for human resources at Intel, said that hiring Americans is not always practical. Asked about hiring unemployed engineers in this country, she said, “I encounter those folks as well. They are skilled and have expertise outside of an area where we need engineers. In some cases they haven’t kept their skills current.”

The debate over the effect of foreign engineers on American ones has obscured the critical issue of why more Americans are not going into the thriving technology sector. Students in the United States consistently rank low on global math and science tests, suggesting that relatively few are prepared to go into rigorous science and engineering programs.

In engineering programs at American universities, a little more than 40 percent of all graduate students were from abroad, according to data from the National Science Foundation. Even among Americans who do graduate with computer science or engineering degrees, a third pursue careers outside the tech sector.

Mr. Doernberg is keeping his fingers crossed. A resident of Woodside, Calif., an upscale town south of San Francisco, he spends his days scouring online job boards and attending networking sessions at diners and church halls across Silicon Valley. One of them is a Thursday morning group that meets in a church in Saratoga, a short drive from his home.

It was set up years ago by Hamid Saadat, an electrical engineer who came to this country from Iran as a graduate student in 1978, worked at a series of semiconductor companies in the area, became a United States citizen and went through the same rite of passage as Mr. Doernberg.

In 2001, just as the technology industry slumped, he lost his job. He was 47 and he soon learned one lesson. In Silicon Valley, it may not matter where you were born, but when.

“As much as we like to believe there’s no discrimination, being younger usually helps,” Mr. Saadat said.

Room for Debate: Should Companies Tell Us When They Get Hacked?

Aly Song/Reuters Apple announced recently that some of its employees’ computers had been hacked.

The New York Times Company and others have come forward in recent weeks to say that they were hacked. Although hacking is common, it’s rare for companies to talk about it — even though doing so could warn customers about compromised data, or alert other businesses to a particular threat.

Should companies be required to disclose security breaches?

Read the Discussion »

Alan F. Westin, Who Transformed Privacy Debate Before the Web Era, Dies at 83

The cause was cancer, his family said.

A lawyer and political scientist, Mr. Westin was at his death emeritus professor of public law at Columbia, where he had taught for nearly 40 years.

Through his work — notably his book “Privacy and Freedom,” published in 1967 and still a canonical text — Mr. Westin was considered to have created, almost single-handedly, the modern field of privacy law. He testified frequently on the subject before Congress, spoke about it on television and radio and wrote about it for newspapers and magazines.

“He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis,” Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “He transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others.”

Since the first hominid grunted gossip about the hominid next door, every new communications medium has entailed new impingements on privacy. In a seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, were the first to articulate privacy as a legal right, defining it as “the right to be let alone.”

Brandeis and Warren were concerned primarily with covert photography; later scholarship, including work by Mr. Westin in the 1950s, centered on things like illegal wiretapping.

But by the 1960s and ’70s, as the widespread computerization of legal, financial, medical and other personal records loomed, technology had outrun the law.

Reproductive rights cases of the period — including the landmark Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — held that the Constitution protected an individual’s right to privacy in matters of the human body, including contraceptive use and abortion rights. But the law was largely silent on the question of how personal data might be used by government or the private sector.

During these years, long before the personal computer and longer still before the Internet, Mr. Westin set out to codify just this kind of privacy for the modern age.

“He knew social history, and he could appreciate the directions that the technology was pushing the social contract,” Lance J. Hoffman, the director of George Washington’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, said in an interview.

Individuals, Mr. Westin argued in “Privacy and Freedom,” have the right to determine how much of their personal information is disclosed and to whom, how it should be maintained and how disseminated.

“This concept became the cornerstone of our modern right to privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “Part of ‘Privacy and Freedom’ is the argument that privacy enables freedom.”

“Privacy and Freedom” received two prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award and the Hillman Prize.

The book, along with other work by Mr. Westin, is widely considered the foundation of a spate of modern privacy laws, among them the Privacy Act of 1974, the first law to delimit the gathering and use of personal information by the federal government.

Mr. Westin was no absolutist. In his early work on wiretapping, for instance, he condoned its use in certain instances, including cases where national security was at stake.

His argument prefigured the current national debate about privacy engendered by post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act, which Mr. Westin, in a 2003 interview, called “a justified piece of legislation.”

“He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance,” Mr. Rosen said. “Much of his work in the 1960s and ’70s appears so prescient after 9/11 and in the age of Internet.”

When it came to the use of consumers’ personal data by corporations, Mr. Westin also steered a middle course. Consumers were entitled to withhold such data, he argued, but were equally entitled, if they wished, to have it used to alert them to products and services targeted to their interests. (This stance caused Mr. Westin to be accused by some critics of allying himself too closely with business interests.)

Mr. Westin, who in the 1970s was editor in chief of The Civil Liberties Review, a publication of the American Civil Liberties Foundation, published and edited the newsletter Privacy & American Business from 1993 to 2006. He was a consultant on privacy issues to major corporations, including Equifax, the consumer credit reporting giant; GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical concern; and Verizon Communications.

Mr. Westin’s wife died before him, as did a son, David. His survivors include a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Debra Westin; and three grandchildren.

A posthumous book by Mr. Westin, about privacy as a historically and philosophically Jewish construct, is being completed by Mr. Rosen.

In recent years, Mr. Westin turned his attention to the Niagara of personal data loosed by Google, Facebook and their ilk. Trying to stem this tide was a hopeless task, and he knew it.

“He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can’t be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions,” Mr. Rosen said.

The son of Irving Westin and the former Etta Furman, Alan Furman Westin was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1929; received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1948, followed by a law degree from Harvard in 1951; was admitted to the bar in 1952; married Bea Shapoff, a teacher, in 1954 in a ceremony in which the bride wore a waltz-length white gown; joined the Columbia faculty in 1959; earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1965 (his dissertation topic was “Privacy in Western Political History”); lived for many years in Teaneck, N.J.; edited a string of books, including “Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America” (1964), “Information Technology in a Democracy” (1971) and “Getting Angry Six Times a Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons” (1979); once made a sound recording titled “I Wonder Who’s Bugging You Now”; was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Congress; had a Social Security number obtained in Massachusetts; and was a registered Democrat who last voted in 2011 — all public information, obtainable online at the touch of a button or two.

BUSINESS: Newspaper Cover Sparks Debate

December 5, 2012By Fritzie Andrade, Fritzie Andrade, Emily B. Hager, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Elaisha Stokes and Samantha Stark

TimesCast Media+Tech: A newspaper’s front-page photograph. | David Pogue compares desktops in 60 seconds. | Netflix and Disney make a deal.

Presidential Debate Instant Polls Show Narrow Win For Obama

WASHINGTON — After a poor performance in the first presidential debate two weeks ago, President Barack Obama came back strong in the second one, winning perceived victories over Mitt Romney in two instant-reaction polls — one of debate-watching registered voters, the other of debate-watchers who went into the debate uncommitted to either candidate.

A CNN survey of registered voters who watched the debate found that 46 percent said Obama won the debate and 39 percent said Romney did. The survey’s margin of error was four percentage points.

After a weak performance in the first debate, Obama outperformed expectations in the second: Seventy-three percent of respondents said Obama did better than they expected, 10 percent said he did worse, and 16 percent said he did about the same as expected. Romney, who had a much stronger performance than Obama did in the first debate, performed closer to expectations: 37 percent said he did better than expected, 28 percent said worse, and 33 percent said he performed the same.

Romney performed better on convincing respondents that he has a clear plan for solving the country’s problems: 49 percent said Romney did and 50 percent said he did not. Only 38 percent said Obama did, and 61 percent said he did not.

Respondents favored Romney on a variety of issues, including the economy (58 percent to 40 percent over Obama), taxes (51 percent to 44 percent) and the budget deficit (59 percent to 36 percent). Romney held a narrower advantage on health care, 49 percent to 46 percent. On foreign policy, 49 percent said Obama would handle it better and 47 percent said Romney would.

Obama and Romney split the advantage on more intangible measures. Romney took a slight (49 percent to 46 percent) advantage on being a stronger leader, while Obama scored points for being more likable (47 percent to 41 percent) and caring more about the audience (44 percent to 40 percent). Forty-five percent of respondents said Romney answered questions more directly and 43 percent said Obama did, while 49 percent said Obama spent more time attacking his opponent and 35 percent said Romney did.

The debate was unlikely to change many minds among CNN’s respondents: 25 percent said they were more likely to vote for Obama after the debate and 25 percent said the same about Romney. But 48 percent said they weren’t more likely to vote for either one. Debate watchers generally are more likely to be paying close attention to the campaign and more likely to already be committed to a candidate than the general population.

According to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the sample was composed of about 33 percent Democrats and 33 percent Republicans, or about 8 percentage points more Republican than the average of all CNN polls in 2012 among all adults (not registered voters specifically). CNN surveyed 457 registered voters who had participated in a poll earlier this week, said they watched the debate, and had agreed to be re-interviewed for the post-debate poll. The margin of error of the poll is 4.5 percentage points.

A CBS News poll conducted using an online panel of uncommitted voters found a 37 percent plurality said Obama won the debate, while 30 percent said Romney did and 33 percent said it was a tie.

Romney came into the debate with a big advantage on the handling the economy among the CBS respondents, and Obama was able to close that gap slightly. Before the debate, 71 percent of respondents said Romney had the edge on handling the economy and 27 percent said Obama did. After the debate, that narrowed somewhat to a 65 percent to 34 percent advantage for Romney.

Obama held the advantage on better handling the middle class, 56 percent to 43 percent. Fifty-five percent of poll respondents said Obama gave direct answers to questions, while 49 percent said the same about Romney.

The CBS News post-debate polls are conducted using the GfK KnowledgePanel, a representative Internet panel. CBS surveyed 525 uncommitted voters who watched the debate, for a four percentage point margin of error. The CBS defines uncommitted voters as those who are totally undecided before the debate or who were leaning to a candidate, but said they may still change their minds. The survey sample was composed of 56 percent who described themselves as independents, 23 percent Democrats and 21 percent Republicans.

Microsoft Xbox, working in partnership with the the polling company YouGov, conducted a live poll among more than 30,000 respondents who tuned in to watch the debate and answered survey questions via Xbox Live’s election channel.

The Xbox sample was neither randomly selected nor scientifically projective of any larger population, and the adult participants skewed heavily younger and male.

However, the sheer size of the participant pool allowed the Xbox/YouGov pollsters to isolate 988 respondents who said they were completely undecided before the debate, and they judged Obama the winner by a 51 percent to 17 percent margin. After the debate, most remained undecided, but 28 percent said they now will vote or lean to Obama, while just 10 percent said they will vote for Romney.

Surveys from CBS and CNN, plus a Democracy Corps/Women’s Voices Women Vote focus group, found that the first debate was a resounding victory for Romney among uncommitted voters as well as debate-watchers more generally. Since that debate, national polling has trended broadly toward Romney, and the current HuffPost Pollster estimate shows the two candidates essentially tied, with Romney at 47.1 percent and Obama at 46.9 percent.

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Obama-Romney Debate: Mitt Romney Stays Light On Detail

 

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spent much of his first presidential debate Wednesday walking back some of his core primary positions and highlighting similarities with President Barack Obama — from keeping bank regulations in place, bringing in more teachers, maintaining taxes on the wealthy, to making sure those with pre-existing conditions have health insurance.

But the president failed to respond effectively, drifting into his professorial demeanor and barely attempting to veil his annoyance with Romney. It wasn’t pretty, but Romney won, according to the general consensus among reporters and political operatives after the debate at the University of Denver.

Romney appeared more relaxed than Obama, who spent much of his time explaining policies he would likely rather be done selling by now. He hardly looked Romney in the eye during the debate.

There is one critical caveat, of course, in determining the winner of a debate: It’s difficult to know how the millions of voters, whose prisms are radically different than those of mainstream reporters, took in the debate. But, at minimum, Romney cleared the most critical bar, by appearing presidential.

Still, one issue continued to plague Romney: details. While he said he would end Obama programs, he was vague on how he would do so without eliminating a host of components he pledged to keep.

“At some point, you have to ask, is he keeping all these plans to replace [programs] secret because they’re too good?” Obama said. “Families are going benefit too much from them?”

The debate was the first of three presidential debates, this one with a focus on domestic policy. Obama and Romney each went into the debate attempting to tamp down expectations, insisting their opponent might have a bit of an edge and that they just hoped to do well.

Romney had more to prove, with Obama leading by large margins in swing states, according to a number of polls. Obama also has had more time to lay out his policy plans and present himself to the American people, while Romney is still being pressed for more specifics.

Romney did give one specific on taxes, making the promise that he will cut taxes only to the extent it doesn’t increase the deficit. Romney said he doesn’t want to cut taxes by $5 trillion, a widely reported figure, and put a strict limitation on how much he would actually lower taxes.

“If the tax plan he described were a tax plan I was asked to support, I’d say, ‘Absolutely not,’” Romney said. “I’m not asking for a $5 trillion tax cut. What I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit. … I’ve got five boys. I’m used to people saying something that’s not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it.”

Obama struck back.

“Now … he is saying that his big bold idea is ‘never mind.’ The fact is, if you are lowering the rates the way you describe, governor, it is not possible to come up with enough deductions or loopholes,” Obama said. “It is math. It is arithmetic.”

Romney insisted a few times that he would leave things as they were, or that he agreed with Obama. He said he wouldn’t cut funding for education and that he agrees more teachers are needed. Romney also said he and Obama agree that Social Security should not be changed for current seniors, effectively taking it off the table, although the two still attacked each other on the issue of Medicare. Romney also said the two men agree that young people should be kept on their parents’ insurance plans, even if he successfully repealed Obamacare.

He also said he supports another Obamacare component: requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Romney said he would continue that policy, a key part of Obamacare that isn’t actually part of his plan. Romney’s health care plan would require insurers to cover pre-existing conditions if they were switching from one insurer to another — but would do nothing for those trying to get insurance who do not currently have it.

But there still weren’t many details, something Obama pointed out. A few minutes after jabbing Romney on his math, Obama said the public can visit his website to see the specifics of his deficit-cutting plan, alluding to vagaries in Romney’s deficit reduction promises.

Romney pointed out, rightly, that Obama didn’t get behind the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction bill — which his vice presidential pick, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), voted against — even though he admitted he doesn’t support it either.

“The president should have grabbed that,” Romney said of deficit reduction, specifically citing the plan.

“Do you support it?” moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS countered.

“I have my own plan,” Romney responded. “I think the president should have grabbed it. If you have some adjustments, make it, take it to congress, go for it.”

Romney, when it came to bank regulation, played it both ways. He charged Dodd-Frank with leading to community bank closures, while also complaining that elements of it hadn’t been implemented fast enough. He praised some parts of it, criticized others, but declined to get specific.

Both candidates seemed a bit touchy, especially with the moderator. Obama kept talking at one point when Lehrer said his time was up, saying, “I had five seconds before you interrupted me.” Romney made even more of a fuss about the times, insisting on the first question that he get the last word, and refusing at several points to stop talking when asked. He also promised to cut funding to PBS, with an apology to Lehrer.

The debate ended with another attack from Obama over how Romney and Ryan would run the government. Romney promised to work with Democratic and Republican leaders “on day one,” or the day after his election, to work to collaborate, an idea Obama mocked.

“I think Governor Romney is going to have a busy first day because he’s also going to repeal Obamacare,” Obama said. “Which will not be very popular with Democrats as you’re sitting down with them.”

Media Decoder Blog: Presidential Debate Drew More Than 70 Million Viewers

The first of three presidential debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney reached more than 70 million viewers on Wednesday night.

Nielsen, a television measurement company, said 67.2 million viewers watched on television at home — the highest number for a first debate since 1980. That year, 80.6 million watched the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and the Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan.

A few second- and third-round presidential debates since then have attracted more than 67 million viewers, including the second debate of the 1992 cycle. Nonetheless, Wednesday’s totals were surprisingly high by almost any standard.

About 52.4 million viewers tuned into the first debate in 2008, according to Nielsen, though that debate was held on a Friday night, typically a lower-rated night of the week. About 62.5 million viewers tuned into the first debate in 2004, which similarly featured an incumbent president and a challenger.

Nielsen’s total for Wednesday’s debate did not count people who watched outside the home (in offices, bars or airports) or who watched in other countries. Nor did not count any of the millions of people who had access to the debate on computers, tablets or phones. CNN.com, for instance, said it recorded 1.2 million live streams of its debate coverage around the world. YouTube, the Web video giant, said its partners had “millions of live-streamed views of the debates,” but declined to release specific numbers.

Of the 11 traditional channels that televised the debate and subscribed to Nielsen ratings, ABC was the most-watched, with almost 11.3 million viewers during the commercial-free debate, Nielsen said. NBC and CBS were close behind, with 11.1 million for NBC and 10.6 million for CBS.

Fox News Channel was as big as any broadcaster, with about 10.4 million viewers during the debate (up from 8.2 million in 2008 and 9.6 million in 2004). The Fox broadcast network attracted about 6.9 million; CNN, 6 million; and MSNBC, 4.7 million. (Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all skew toward older viewers, but interestingly, CNN had a surge of 18- to 34-year-old viewers for the debate — nearly 1.5 million, versus 882,000 for Fox News and 772,000 for MSNBC.)

More than 2.6 million Spanish-language viewers watched on Univision, and another 248,000 watched on Telemundo, according to Nielsen. (Telemundo showed the debate on a tape delay.) The lowest-rated of all the channels with the face-off was Current TV, Al Gore’s fledgling liberal cable channel, which had about 100,000 viewers.

Another measurement company, Rentrak, found that the total audience for the debate was remarkably stable from 9 to 10:30 p.m. The company, which tracks viewership behavior in one million homes, found a slight uptick at 10 p.m.

TiVo, which tracks the rewinding behavior of digital video recorder owners, found that the most-rewound moment of the debate came at 9:27, when Mr. Romney mentioned his plan to cut funding from PBS (and gave Big Bird a shout-out). About 250,000 viewers watched the debate on PBS.

On Twitter and Apps, Audience at Home Scores the Debate

Presidential debates are customarily scored and picked apart the instant the moderator says “good night” at 10:30 p.m. But the Web is speeding up time. When the first of this season’s debates started on Wednesday in Denver, the scoring began at 9:01 p.m., as soon as Jim Lehrer, the moderator, said “Good evening.”

Jim Lehrer, the moderator, during the debate on Wednesday night in Denver. After the debate, television commentators tapped into social networks to gauge immediate reactions. More Photos »

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Mr. Lehrer’s open-ended questions, Mitt Romney’s plan to end the federal subsidy for PBS and Mr. Romney’s high energy level — against President Obama’s comparatively low energy level — all received spikes of attention from viewers who were chatting online along with the debate. The instant feedback helped harden conventional wisdom that Mr. Obama had turned in a weak performance, even before he had finished speaking.

On MSNBC, liberal hosts like Ed Schultz were taken aback by Mr. Obama. Mr. Schultz threw up his arms at one point after the debate and asked, “Where was the president tonight?”

His colleague, Chris Matthews, loudly suggested that Mr. Obama watch MSNBC’s programs for debating advice. “He will learn something every night on this show and all these shows,” he said.

After Mr. Obama was pronounced “rusty” by CNN hosts, the analyst David Gergen said, “I didn’t think he was rusty so much as I don’t think anybody’s ever spoken to him like that over the last four years. I think he found that not only surprising, but offensive in some ways.”

The recent surge in so-called second-screen behavior was vividly on display during the debate, both on social networking sites like Twitter that barely existed four years ago and on all manner of even newer apps promoted by media companies. At least half a dozen outlets, as varied as CNBC and The Huffington Post, had debate drinking games ready to go beforehand.

Afterward, the television networks that used to have a monopoly on pre- and postgame shows tapped into the torrent of online opinions. On NBC, Brian Williams quoted from the instant reactions of the journalists Ron Fournier and James Fallows. Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren cited Twitter messages from the progressive HBO host Bill Maher (“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he does need a teleprompter”) and the Republican strategist Mike Murphy (“It’s funny; tonight Romney is much better than his campaign; Obama is far worse”).

Mr. Romney’s mention of Big Bird — in the context of ending federal funding for PBS — stirred an enormous amount of online attention, as well as a few parody accounts on Twitter, with made-up names like “Fired Big Bird.” Hours after the debate concluded, Big Bird was still a trending topic on Twitter.

Outlets like NBC used the debate, the first of four this month, as a test bed for new online tools. Reflecting the changes in consumer behavior, Vivian Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News, said, “I can’t watch a debate anymore without having my iPhone in my hand. I don’t feel like I’m having the full experience if I’m not reading the reaction in real time.”

For the duration of the debate, many of the reactions were cynical, particularly on Facebook, far preferred over Twitter by normal viewers at home. Users there accused both candidates of dodging questions and lying their way through the 90-minute session. Joked one Facebook user afterward, “I should have played the debate drinking game!”

And in something of a Rorschach test, Votizen, a technology company, tracked Twitter messages from registered voters. Minutes after Mr. Lehrer ended the debate, Votizen found “love” to be the top term used by Republicans and “tax” to be the top term by Democrats.

And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud.

Room for Debate: Should the U.S. Seek More Tech Manufacturing?

Bobby Yip/Reuters Workers inside a Foxconn factory in China.

High-tech companies say they can’t afford to build their products in the United States. It’s too expensive, they claim, and there are too few workers with the appropriate training. But since many states were able to get Japanese car companies to build here, and Brazil was able to attract plants for iPhones and other products, could the United States get, or keep, more high-tech manufacturing? Google is trying.

What policies, if any, should the United States pursue to encourage high-tech manufacturers like Apple to build their products in America rather than largely in Asia? Is this manufacturing worth going after? Are there lessons to be learned from the trade negotiation tactics the United States used with Japan in the 1980s, when the Japanese began building more goods, especially cars, in the United States?

Read the Discussion »

Tech and Media Executives Are Likely to Debate Piracy

But lately some of the highest-paid executives at the world’s largest media companies have talked a lot about the lessons they learned from a failed industrywide attempt to pass antipiracy legislation six months ago.

In January, the technology industry led by Google, Facebook and Wikipedia revolted against two bills called SOPA and PIPA — short for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. The legislation, largely the product of media companies to protect movies, television shows, video games and music against online theft from rogue foreign Web sites, sparked a reaction that quickly shifted from an arcane policy debate to an online consumer rebellion.

Wikipedia went black to protest SOPA and more than seven million people signed online petitions, many of which said the bills would “break the Internet.” Congress, overwhelmed by the popular opposition, quickly backpedaled, leaving the legislation to die.

“They tsunamied the conversation with rhetoric, and we were unprepared to fight back,” Tom Dooley, chief operating officer at Viacom, said of the technology industry. “We’re going to have to find a solution that works better for everyone.”

On Tuesday, the titans of both media and technology will convene in Sun Valley, Idaho, for an exclusive annual conference sponsored by the boutique investment firm Allen & Company. It will be the first time since the piracy debate went viral that top technology and entertainment executives will assemble en masse on neutral ground to discuss major issues affecting both industries.

“There’s an agreement on both sides that there should be some period of time when everyone steps back and reassesses,” said Michael O’Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Sun Valley conference, known as “summer camp for moguls,” is off limits to reporters (though dozens still turn out) and famously private. In between bike rides, hikes and cocktail parties, the executives will hold meetings, listen to a variety of speakers and attend panel discussions with luminaries from sports to politics.

A preliminary list of attendees at this year’s conference includes Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey, the chief executive and chief operating officer of News Corporation; Philippe Dauman, chief of Viacom; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief of Time Warner; and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. Tim Cook, chief of Apple, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin are also expected to attend.

In the months since the SOPA debates, media executives have discussed piracy with obvious shell shock.

“I think we didn’t help ourselves down in Southern California by trying to jam something in Congress; we screwed that up,” Ari Emanuel, co-chief executive of the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, said at the All Things D conference in May. He added: “When SOPA died, a lot of conversations died. But they’ll start up again.”

In the aftermath, Hollywood has increased its efforts to get online payment companies, cloud services and Internet service providers to voluntarily help curtail pirated movies, TV and music, particularly from foreign Web sites.

Months before the debates erupted in January, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa agreed on a set of best practices to reduce the sale of counterfeited pirated goods. In 2010, Yahoo, PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and others formed a nonprofit intended to combat the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals online, one issue SOPA and PIPA were initially meant to address.

The Sun Valley conference could provide a tranquil backdrop for the continued construction of a fence between media and technology.

“We thought about what’s in the long-term interest of the Internet ecosystem. And that’s a set of best practices that people feel comfortable with,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Tech and Media Executives Are Likely to Debate Piracy

But lately some of the highest-paid executives at the world’s largest media companies have talked a lot about the lessons they learned from a failed industrywide attempt to pass antipiracy legislation six months ago.

In January, the technology industry led by Google, Facebook and Wikipedia revolted against two bills called SOPA and PIPA — short for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. The legislation, largely the product of media companies to protect movies, television shows, video games and music against online theft from rogue foreign Web sites, sparked a reaction that quickly shifted from an arcane policy debate to an online consumer rebellion.

Wikipedia went black to protest SOPA and more than seven million people signed online petitions, many of which said the bills would “break the Internet.” Congress, overwhelmed by the popular opposition, quickly backpedaled, leaving the legislation to die.

“They tsunamied the conversation with rhetoric, and we were unprepared to fight back,” Tom Dooley, chief operating officer at Viacom, said of the technology industry. “We’re going to have to find a solution that works better for everyone.”

On Tuesday, the titans of both media and technology will convene in Sun Valley, Idaho, for an exclusive annual conference sponsored by the boutique investment firm Allen & Company. It will be the first time since the piracy debate went viral that top technology and entertainment executives will assemble en masse on neutral ground to discuss major issues affecting both industries.

“There’s an agreement on both sides that there should be some period of time when everyone steps back and reassesses,” said Michael O’Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Sun Valley conference, known as “summer camp for moguls,” is off limits to reporters (though dozens still turn out) and famously private. In between bike rides, hikes and cocktail parties, the executives will hold meetings, listen to a variety of speakers and attend panel discussions with luminaries from sports to politics.

A preliminary list of attendees at this year’s conference includes Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey, the chief executive and chief operating officer of News Corporation; Philippe Dauman, chief of Viacom; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief of Time Warner; and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. Tim Cook, chief of Apple, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin are also expected to attend.

In the months since the SOPA debates, media executives have discussed piracy with obvious shell shock.

“I think we didn’t help ourselves down in Southern California by trying to jam something in Congress; we screwed that up,” Ari Emanuel, co-chief executive of the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, said at the All Things D conference in May. He added: “When SOPA died, a lot of conversations died. But they’ll start up again.”

In the aftermath, Hollywood has increased its efforts to get online payment companies, cloud services and Internet service providers to voluntarily help curtail pirated movies, TV and music, particularly from foreign Web sites.

Months before the debates erupted in January, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa agreed on a set of best practices to reduce the sale of counterfeited pirated goods. In 2010, Yahoo, PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and others formed a nonprofit intended to combat the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals online, one issue SOPA and PIPA were initially meant to address.

The Sun Valley conference could provide a tranquil backdrop for the continued construction of a fence between media and technology.

“We thought about what’s in the long-term interest of the Internet ecosystem. And that’s a set of best practices that people feel comfortable with,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America.