‘Sesame Street’ Widens Its Focus

Enter Super Grover 2.0. Out from his bottomless “utility sock” comes an enormous ramp, which, as the cow cheerily notes before clomping on down, is “a sloping surface that goes from high to low.”

Simple ABCs and 123s? So old school. In the last four years, “Sesame Street” has set itself a much larger goal: teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience — with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what’s making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.

The content is wrapped in the traditional silliness; these are still Muppets. But the more sophisticated programming, on a show that frequently draws an audience even younger than the 3- to-5-year-olds it targets, raises a question: Is there any evidence that it is doing anything more than making PBS and parents feel good?

Officials at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces the show, believe the new approach has succeeded in introducing children — at least, the target-age audience — to scientific ideas and methods.

“This is working,” said Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president, curriculum and content. Still, they acknowledge there are challenges in measuring a young child’s scientific understanding, and experts are only just beginning to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Each new season of “Sesame Street” starts with a curriculum, drawn up by educational consultants and a research staff, laying out concepts and ideas to be taught. The show’s writers incorporate these into scripts acted out by the beloved Muppets. The science curriculum began in 2009 with new programming that tried to capitalize on children’s natural interest in the world around them, an effort inspired by Richard Louv’s 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Dr. Truglio said.

Bigger words, like “pollinate,” “hibernate” and “camouflage” were added to the “Word on the Street” rotation. In one episode, Jimmy Fallon played a “wild nature survivor guy,” who found water in leaves and shunned a coat in favor of warm feathers.

After the program’s educational consultants requested more emphasis on urging children to investigate, as opposed to simply explore, the show introduced the “Super Grover 2.0” segments. A blue Muppet known for confidently getting things wrong, Grover uses magnets, springs and “superpowers” of investigation, observation and reporting to solve problems through trial and error. Before settling on a ramp for the stuck cow, for instance, he tries a trampoline.

Elsewhere on the show, Murray Monster conducts mini-experiments on the streets of New York with children, discovering what bridge design holds the most weight and how a boat’s shape helps it float. Last season, Elmo began starring in a daily musical of his imagination that sneakily incorporates math; in “Guacamole,” he quizzes the “Rhombus of Recipes” and adds up the avocados on two trees.

On Sept. 24, the material — as well as new videos, online and mobile games, and parent and teacher resources — will find a new home online when Sesame Workshop unveils a hub on the “Sesame Street” Web site called “Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More.” In one game, little fingers manipulate a virtual spring to launch pieces of trash into Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, a “Sesame Street” version of “Angry Birds.”

“Sesame Street” is just one of many television programs trying to teach math and science to preschoolers. Even young children can learn basic scientific concepts, experts in educational development say. Most children are already curious about everything from weather patterns to what sinks and floats in the bath.

“They actually are already thinking about these things,” said Kimberly Brenneman, assistant research professor at Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research and an education adviser for PBS’s “Sid the Science Kid.” Educators, she said, can “create a show that is likely to meet kids where they are, and go a little further.”

Results of two studies with nearly 600 children conducted by the Workshop “demonstrate that children can learn sophisticated vocabulary and valuable science concepts from ‘Sesame Street,’ ” according to a presentation by Dr. Truglio and her colleagues at the International Communications Association in May 2011.

A just-completed third study with 337 children confirmed the results, said Jennifer Kotler, the Workshop’s vice president for research and evaluation. Ms. Kotler’s team tested elements of the show’s programming with children in low- and middle-income day care centers. Through one-on-one interviews, the researchers assessed what the children knew before watching the programming and what they retained afterward.

Retired U.S. General Is Focus of Inquiry Over Iran Leak

The leak investigation, being carried out by the United States attorney for Maryland, Rod J. Rosenstein, was announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. after articles in The New York Times described an ambitious series of cyberattacks under the code name Olympic Games that were intended to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb. That General Cartwright is a focus of the leak inquiry was first reported by NBC News.

The general, 63, who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011, became a favorite adviser of President Obama and was considered an influential voice in the White House on security matters.

A lawyer for General Cartwright, Gregory B. Craig, who served as White House counsel early in the Obama administration, declined to comment.

Marcia Murphy, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rosenstein, declined to confirm or deny whether General Cartwright was being investigated. “We don’t have any comment at all,” Ms. Murphy said.

Since his retirement in 2011, General Cartwright has joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has spoken in favor of major cuts in nuclear weapons and warned of possible “blowback” from the use of drone aircraft by the United States in Pakistan and Yemen.

Asked about the NBC News report, Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, said, “We don’t comment on our confidential sources.”

Since President Obama took office in 2009, seven current or former government officials or contractors have been charged under the Espionage Act with leaking classified information, compared with three under all previous presidents. The seventh person charged was Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has acknowledged giving classified documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

Press advocates have criticized the unprecedented crackdown on leaks, in which F.B.I. investigators have used e-mail and telephone records to track exchanges between reporters and sources, saying it endangers reporting on national security. But Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder have said that leaks can put American security at risk.

N.S.A. Leak Puts Focus on System Administrators

As the N.S.A., some companies and the city of San Francisco have learned, information technology administrators, who are vital to keeping the system running and often have access to everything, are in the perfect position if they want to leak sensitive information or blackmail higher-level officials.

“The difficulty comes in an environment where computer networks need to work all the time,” said Christopher P. Simkins, a former Justice Department lawyer whose firm advises companies, including military contractors, on insider threats.

The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, acknowledged the problem in a television interview on Sunday and said his agency would institute “a two-man rule” that would limit the ability of each of its 1,000 system administrators to gain unfettered access to the entire system. The rule, which would require a second check on each attempt to access sensitive information, is already in place in some intelligence agencies. It is a concept borrowed from the field of cryptography, where, in effect, two sets of keys are required to unlock a safe.

From government agencies to corporate America, there is a renewed emphasis on thwarting the rogue I.T. employee. Such in-house breaches are relatively rare, but the N.S.A. leaks have prompted assessments of the best precautions businesses and government can take, from added checks and balances to increased scrutiny during hiring.

“The scariest threat is the systems administrator,” said Eric Chiu, president of Hytrust, a computer security company. “The system administrator has godlike access to systems they manage.”

Asked Sunday about General Alexander’s two-man rule, Dale W. Meyerrose, a former chief information officer for the director of national intelligence, said, “I think what he’s doing is reasonable.”

“There are all kinds of things in life that have two-man rules,” added Mr. Meyerrose, who now runs a business consulting firm. “We’ve had a two-man rule ever since we had nuclear weapons. And when somebody repairs an airplane, an engineer has to check it.”

John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, agreed that the “buddy system” would help. “But I just don’t see it as a particularly good long-term solution,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to scrub all your I.T.’s for security issues,” he asked, “and see if there is another Snowden?”

The two-man rule “has existed in other areas of the intelligence community for certain exceptionally sensitive programs where high risk was involved,” he said, “but it’s not a standard procedure.”

Mr. Meyerrose and Mr. Schindler both said that software monitoring systems can also help, though they can be evaded by a knowledgeable systems administrator. The biggest issue for government and industry, they said, is to vet the I.T. candidates more carefully and to watch for any signs of disillusionment after they are hired.

“It’s really a personal reliability issue,” Mr. Meyerrose said.

Insiders of all types going rogue have become a problem for the government and industry over the last decade. One of the most prominent is Pfc. Bradley Manning, who downloaded a vast archive of American military and diplomatic materials from his post in Iraq and gave it to WikiLeaks. But there have been others, including scientists and software developers who stole secrets from American companies where they worked and provided them to China.

Now the spotlight is on the system administrators, who are often the technology workers with the most intimate knowledge of what is moving through their employers’ computer networks.

Bits Blog: YouTube Founders Focus on New Video Tools

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Steve Chen, left, and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube, in 2011 after their Internet company purchased a site called Delicious.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should consider itself very flattered.

Wanpai, a new smartphone video recording app available only in Chinese, bears a strong resemblance to Vine, Twitter’s fast-growing service that lets users shoot and post six-second snippets of video.

Perhaps even more flattering is that the Vine clone was created by Avos, the start-up created by the YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen after they left YouTube. (Google bought YouTube in 2006 and is an investor in Avos.)

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Hurley acknowledged that Vine was “the inspiration” for Wanpai (which he translated from the original Mandarin as “Play Shot”). He said that Avos’s development team in Beijing, which operates with some autonomy from the company’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., had developed Wanpai on their own initiative.

“They didn’t think Vine was serving the market,” he said. Vine “wasn’t translated and didn’t work well in China.” (Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government and Vine is tightly integrated into the social networking service.)

Mr. Hurley said Avos’s newest creation, MixBit, to be released in July or August, would be much more original.

Although he wouldn’t divulge many details about the project, which is in private beta testing, Mr. Hurley said MixBit would provide an “intuitive” interface to help people easily create content, much the way YouTube made it easy to post videos to a wide audience.

“What we ended up creating at YouTube is a solution for distribution,” Mr. Hurley said. “What hasn’t been solved yet is the act of creation.”

He said current platforms for creating and sharing images and videos, likeTwitter and Instagram (owned by Facebook), are too focused on self-promotion, which intimidates many people.

“It limits what they put online,” he said. “Unless it’s pretty, they don’t share it.” (Anyone who has spent even 10 minutes plowing through a heap of Instagram photos or Vine videos might beg to differ.)

MixBit will enter a crowded market. In addition to Vine, which has grown to 13 million users in just four months, Instagram is expected to soon introduce its own quick-video product.

Avos first surfaced publicly in 2011 when it purchased the Delicious social bookmarking service from Yahoo. It has since kept a low profile, working on several projects, including Zeen, an online magazine creation tool that was supposed to go live a year ago but is still stuck in beta.

In contrast to the situation with the Wanpai app, Mr. Hurley said, he is directly involved in MixBit’s development. “This is a tool that I’m going to use,” he said.

That contrasts with a certain video site that he used to run. “Me, personally, I don’t upload video to YouTube,” Mr. Hurley said.

DealBook: Faced With Overload, a Need to Find Focus

We are thrilled to introduce a new weekend column to DealBook called Life@Work by Tony Schwartz. Tony is one of the world’s top thought leaders on the workplace and getting the most out of people. He is a productivity maven and advises many of the Fortune 500 on how to build the right culture as the founder of the Energy Project. Earlier his year, he wrote a popular article for The New York Times’s Week in Review, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive.” We’ve followed Tony for many years — using some of his tips and tricks ourselves — and we’re excited to be able share his insights regularly on DealBook.

– Andrew Ross Sorkin

Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDealBook’s Life@Work columnist says that checking your e-mail shouldn’t be the first thing you do in the morning.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, before you even brush your teeth? Is it checking the e-mail that’s flooded into your inbox overnight? Does the pull feel increasingly irresistible, even Pavlovian? Do you get so immersed in responding to other people’s agendas that 30 minutes can go by before you even look up?

Here’s a radical proposal: Don’t check your e-mail at all tomorrow morning. Turn it off entirely. Instead, devote a designated period of uninterrupted time to a task that really matters.

For more than a decade, the most significant ritual in my work life has been to take on the most important task of the day as my first activity, for 90 minutes, without interruption, followed by a renewal break. I do so because mornings are when I have the highest energy and the fewest distractions.

I’m doing it right now, but in all honesty, it’s gotten tougher in the last several years. My attention feels under siege, like yours probably does.

For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have helped companies like Google, Genentech, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee and Facebook fuel sustainable high performance by better meeting the needs of their employees. Far and away the biggest work challenges most of us now face are cognitive overload and difficulty focusing on one thing at a time.

Whenever I singularly devote the first 90 minutes of my day to the most challenging or important task – they’re often one and the same — I get a ton accomplished.

Following a deliberate break – even just a few minutes — I feel refreshed and ready to face the rest of the day. When I don’t start that way, my day is never quite as good, and I sometimes head home at night wondering what I actually did while I was so busy working.

Performing at a sustainably high level in a world of relentlessly rising complexity requires that we manage not just our time but also our energy – not just how many hours we work, but when we work, on what and how we feel along the way.
Fail to take control of your days — deliberately, consciously and purposefully — and you’ll be swept along on a river of urgent but mostly unimportant demands.
It’s all too easy to rationalize that we’re powerless victims in the face of expectation from others, but doing that is itself a poor use of energy. Far better to focus on what we can influence, even if there are times when it’s at the margins.

Small moves, it turns out, can make a significant difference.

When it comes to doing the most important thing first each morning, for example, it’s best to make that choice, along with your other top priorities, the night before.

Plainly, there are going to be times that something gets in your way and it’s beyond your control. If you can reschedule for later, even 30 minutes, or 45, do that. If you can’t, so be it. Tomorrow is another day.

If you’re a night owl and you have more energy later in the day, consider scheduling your most important work then. But weigh the risk carefully, because as your day wears on, the number of pulls on your attention will almost surely have increased.

Either way, it’s better to work highly focused for short periods of time, with breaks in between, than to be partially focused for long periods of time. Think of it as a sprint, rather than a marathon. You can push yourself to your limits for short periods of time, so long as you have a clear stopping point. And after a rest, you can sprint again.

How you’re feeling at any given time profoundly influences how effectively you’re capable of working, but most of us pay too little attention to these inner signals.

Fatigue is the most basic drag on productivity, but negative emotions like frustration, irritability and anxiety are equally pernicious. A simple but powerful way to check in with yourself is to intermittently rate the quantity and quality of your energy — say at midmorning, and midafternoon — on a scale from 1 to 10.
If you’re a 5 or below on either one, the best thing you can do is take a break.

Even just breathing deeply for as little as one minute – in to a count of three, out to a count of six – can quiet your mind, calm your emotions and clear your bloodstream of the stress hormone cortisol.

Learn to manage your energy more skillfully, and you’ll get more done, in less time, at a higher level of focus. You’ll feel better — and better about yourself — at the end of the day.

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.” Twitter: @tonyschwartz

Gray Matter: A Focus on Distraction

TECHNOLOGY has given us many gifts, among them dozens of new ways to grab our attention. It’s hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought.

But what constitutes distraction? Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer.

In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching.

As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy to count the added expense of the hassle of change. When your brain is switching tasks, the cost is harder to quantify.

There have been a few efforts to do so: Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.

We decided to investigate further, and asked Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, and the psychologist Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon to design an experiment to measure the brain power lost when someone is interrupted.

To simulate the pull of an expected cellphone call or e-mail, we had subjects sit in a lab and perform a standard cognitive skill test. In the experiment, 136 subjects were asked to read a short passage and answer questions about it. There were three groups of subjects; one merely completed the test. The other two were told they “might be contacted for further instructions” at any moment via instant message.

During an initial test, the second and third groups were interrupted twice. Then a second test was administered, but this time, only the second group was interrupted. The third group awaited an interruption that never came. Let’s call the three groups Control, Interrupted and On High Alert.

We expected the Interrupted group to make some mistakes, but the results were truly dismal, especially for those who think of themselves as multitaskers: during this first test, both interrupted groups answered correctly 20 percent less often than members of the control group.

In other words, the distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber. That’s enough to turn a B-minus student (80 percent) into a failure (62 percent).

But in Part 2 of the experiment, the results were not as bleak. This time, part of the group was told they would be interrupted again, but they were actually left alone to focus on the questions.

Again, the Interrupted group underperformed the control group, but this time they closed the gap significantly, to a respectable 14 percent. Dr. Peer said this suggested that people who experience an interruption, and expect another, can learn to improve how they deal with it.

But among the On High Alert group, there was a twist. Those who were warned of an interruption that never came improved by a whopping 43 percent, and even outperformed the control test takers who were left alone. This unexpected, counterintuitive finding requires further research, but Dr. Peer thinks there’s a simple explanation: participants learned from their experience, and their brains adapted.

Somehow, it seems, they marshaled extra brain power to steel themselves against interruption, or perhaps the potential for interruptions served as a kind of deadline that helped them focus even better.

Clifford Nass, a Stanford sociologist who conducted some of the first tests on multitasking, has said that those who can’t resist the lure of doing two things at once are “suckers for irrelevancy.” There is some evidence that we’re not just suckers for that new text message, or addicted to it; it’s actually robbing us of brain power, too. Tweet about this at your own risk.

What the Carnegie Mellon study shows, however, is that it is possible to train yourself for distractions, even if you don’t know when they’ll hit.

Bob Sullivan, a journalist at NBC News, and Hugh Thompson, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, are the authors of “The Plateau Effect: Getting From Stuck to Success.”

Advertising: Online Video Creators Focus on Spanish-Speaking Consumers

Among the participants during the Digital Content NewFronts in New York this week — 17 presentations, from Monday through Friday, under the aegis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau — was Univision Communications, which took part in the NewFronts for the first time.

Univision executives on Wednesday discussed initiatives like Uvideos, a digital video network that offers original Web series as well as clips about the popular telenovelas that are the mainstays of the Univision broadcast network. (The clips are said to be spoiler-free; telenovelas are all about the cliffhangers.)

Some general-market media companies devoted bits of their presentations to the original digital content being created for Hispanics. For instance, on Tuesday, Hulu touched on Hulu Latino and CBS Interactive, part of the CBS Corporation, previewed plans to introduce in the fall a version of CNET for Spanish-speaking consumers.

Many presenters from the media mainstream “actually have a decent to strong-and-growing multicultural strategy,” said Marla Skiko, executive vice president and director for digital innovation at SMG Multicultural, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group unit of the Publicis Groupe.

“But they have so much to announce during the NewFronts, it gets only a mention,” Ms. Skiko said. “I think they could blow it out and make it bigger; it’s a story waiting to be told.”

Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, who attended the Univision presentation, said the Hispanic market is “indicative of the opportunity, and challenge, for digital.”

“Unlike other media, digital media can do everything because, by definition, you have global reach and theoretically unlimited programming and advertising inventory,” Mr. Rothenberg said.

At the same time, “the challenge is how to pick your shots,” he added, “and decide what to promote to whom at what time.”

Jim Lanzone, president of CBS Interactive, said in an interview that he was eager to introduce the Spanish-language version of CNET, which “will be its own distinct site” and offer Hispanics “a multimedia experience across all platforms.”

“It will not just be a machine translating our English content into Spanish,” he added, but rather will offer culturally specific content aimed at the 50 million person audience in the United States as well as Spanish-speakers in Latin America and elsewhere around the world.

And CBS Interactive is working on a Spanish-language version of GameSpot, Mr. Lanzone said, which is its Web site with content aimed at video game players.

The goal to beef up Spanish-language content at CBS Interactive is part of an ambitious agenda to add a variety of original content across its portfolio of more than two dozen disparate Web sites. For instance, the site devoted to CBS television shows, cbs.com, will add online series meant to complement two of the network’s dramas: “Baker Street Irregulars,” based on “Elementary,” and “Person of Interest: Animated,” based on “Person of Interest.”

“Even our musical act was one of our shows,” Mr. Lanzone joked, referring to the performance by the rock band Phoenix that concluded the presentation at the Hudson Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The band’s 45-minute set doubled as a webcast of the cbs.com original series “Live on Letterman,” which typically is streamed live from the Ed Sullivan Theater after that evening’s taping of “Late Show With David Letterman.”

At the Univision Communications presentation, at the Brasserie restaurant, the focus was on expansion. The company’s executives discussed original Web series, including “Salseras,” being introduced with the Web music company Vevo, about a fierce collegiate salsa-dancing competition; five channels being added to Uvideos, devoted to cooking, comedy, celebrities, fashion, beauty and lifestyle; and a new digital platform, to be called Flama, aimed at younger Hispanics who are part of the so-called millennial generation.

And Univision is opening an “idea lab,” said Cesar Conde, president of the Univision Networks division of the company, “dedicated to the creation of made-for-Web content, in Spanish and English.”

Univision will also offer advertisers opportunities at “transmedia storytelling that transcends platforms,” Mr. Conde said, combining content in genres like reality competition and sports that will be on television, on radio, online and in social media.

It was “very important for us” to take part in the NewFronts this year, Mr. Conde said in an interview after the presentation, to underline that “everything we’re thinking about, we’re thinking about with our digital hat on.”

“Univision, as a leader, has to be here,” he added, because “Hispanics overindex on everything technology.” His reference was to Nielsen research indicating that, for example, 72 percent of Hispanics own smartphones and they watch 62 percent more online video than white non-Hispanic Americans.

Ad spending for online video was estimated last year at $2.9 billion, a fraction of the $64.5 billion in ad spending on television, but it is growing at a far faster rate than its traditional counterpart. In 2013, according to eMarketer forecasts, the totals will increase to $4 billion for online video, up 41.1 percent from 2012, and $66.4 billion for television, up 2.8 percent from 2012.

The potential for online video was further underscored on Wednesday when, at the Condé Nast Entertainment presentation during the NewFronts, executives announced additions to their digital video network. The channels inspired by magazines like Glamour and GQ will be joined by channels suggested by Epicurious, Style.com, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Wired.

Also on Wednesday, AwesomenessTV, a YouTube-based video channel aimed at teenagers, agreed to be acquired by DreamWorks Animation SKG for about $33 million in cash and up to $117 million in possible additional payments.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 2, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this column misstated the day of the band Phoenix’s performance. It was Tuesday, not Wednesday.

Ron Conway, Tech Investor, Turns Focus to Hometown

He stayed longer than expected at a political fund-raiser with President Obama at a hedge-fund billionaire’s home in Sea Cliff, on this city’s northwest edge, because of the president’s security requirements and a missing valet. Unable to find his car, he would not make it across town to the Embarcadero for an event hosted by sf.citi, the civic organization he founded 14 months ago to unite tech companies, harness their political influence and, perhaps, change San Francisco.

Later that evening, after finding his car and his way home, he said: “The tech community is a closely knit group, which is why it’s so powerful. All of these companies have an affinity for each other, even if they compete with each other.”

Speaking at his home overlooking the city, with his blue blazer tossed on a couch and his wife, Gayle, and son Topher sitting around a large kitchen island, he said, “You need a catalyst, so I’m a catalyst.”

Having amassed a fortune by investing early in Google, Facebook, Twitter and other start-ups, Mr. Conway has become, in two short years, one of San Francisco’s power brokers, using his wealth and network to pursue his vision of a business-friendly, tech-driven city with single-minded clarity.

Mr. Conway, 62, lobbied successfully for tax changes favoring tech start-ups and helped elect Mayor Edwin M. Lee. He is the face and force behind sf.citi, or the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, which champions tech companies’ interests and is also creating and financing new technology to improve city policing and transportation.

The mayor and Mr. Conway are, by all accounts, very close, appearing often together in public here and recently going to Paris on a business trip.

In an interview, the mayor said he smiles when he is accused of being too cozy with Mr. Conway. “I feel pretty comfortable with getting close to people whose values benefit the city,” he said. “Ten more Ron Conways would be helpful.”

Other industries like health care and tourism contribute more to the city treasury, but they have been overshadowed by tech’s rapid growth here. Tech start-ups disappeared from the city with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, but a new generation of companies, especially in social media, has established roots. Sf.citi has about 500 member companies, accounting for 90 percent of the tech industry in the city, according to the organization.

“He’s really been able to unite what historically has been a politically nonengaged sector,” said Corey Cook, an associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.

Mr. Conway was not widely known outside the tech industry. But in Silicon Valley, he was a godfather or an elder statesman, said Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, a software company and the biggest tech business based here.

“He brings a level of maturity to the industry that it badly needs,” Mr. Benioff said, adding that he was surprised at how deeply engaged Mr. Conway had become in civic affairs. “Ron is a force of nature. Whatever he focuses on, he creates.”

After achieving success in the computer industry in the 1990s, Mr. Conway became an angel investor, taking early stakes in promising start-ups, mostly in Silicon Valley. In 2004, Mr. Conway, who was born in San Francisco, moved back to the city with his wife after the youngest of his three sons went to college.

It was in 2010, Mr. Conway said, when he first got to know city officials through his involvement in helping pass a city law that made it illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks in San Francisco for most of the day. He was the biggest donor to the campaign behind the law, which was supported by the city and business associations but was opposed by advocates for the homeless.

He began backing Mr. Lee after he, as interim mayor in 2011, passed a tax exemption for Twitter, which had been considering leaving the city. Enlisting the assistance of many tech heavyweights, Mr. Conway later formed an outside group that helped elect Mr. Lee to a full term.

Last fall, sf.citi scored its first big political success when voters approved a payroll tax change that benefits tech start-ups. Mr. Lee said the new payroll tax and other policy changes favorable to the tech industry would create jobs. But critics speak of favoritism.

“Ron Conway seems to be more interested in whatever political payoff comes for his industry instead of what’s in the best interest of the city he claims to care about,” said Art Agnos, a former mayor.

Others say the rising influence of Mr. Conway and the tech industry signals a fundamental change in the city’s character. The breaks given to his industry have attracted tech companies and highly paid tech workers, who in turn have contributed to rising rents and living costs.

“That’s really made it difficult for San Franciscans who have been here generations to survive,” said John Avalos, a city supervisor and a leading voice for the city’s progressive movement. “There’s a lot of displacement going on, mostly because people have been priced out of their housing as part of the tech boom. I don’t think Ron Conway considers these changes that we are seeing as important.”

Mr. Conway rejects the criticism, pointing to the jobs created by tech companies.

With the exception of an immigration overhaul, a perennial demand of the tech industry, Mr. Conway said he had little interest in national affairs until the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The shooting occurred while the Conways were hosting a Christmas party whose guests included Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was shot in Tucson in 2011.

Seeing her presence as “a sign,” Mr. Conway has thrown himself into the battle for greater gun control. Working with Sandy Hook Promise, a group of Newtown parents, Mr. Conway has started a campaign with other venture capitalists to encourage the development of gun safety technology. He has been attending Democratic and Republican fund-raisers to press for stricter gun laws, though he was unsure whether his efforts would have the impact his local ones have enjoyed.

“I really don’t have a lot of interest in national politics, and it’s because I’m a skeptic,” he said. “I think you can accomplish a lot more locally. I don’t want to spin the wheels and not get anything done.”

In Energy Conservation, a Focus on Bragging Rights

At Duke Energy, the country’s largest utility after its merger with Progress Energy, the effort has included something beyond the usual messages to turn down the air-conditioner. The company is promoting a series of Web videos featuring a fictitious girl named Shannon who appears with her family, the Powers, to dispense energy-saving advice.

“This summer, why not use a clothesline to dry your clothes instead of a dryer?” Shannon, also known as Bossy Pants, suggests while pinning up the family wash in a clip promoted recently on Youtility, Duke’s Facebook page for energy efficiency. “You’ll save a lot on your energy bill and your clothes will come out nice and fresh.”

The series, started last summer, is just one way that Duke and other electric companies across the country are trying to use social media, competitive games and Big Brotherish data analysis to push customers to buy less of the electricity they sell.

While it seems counterintuitive for utilities to discourage use of their product, it actually makes financial sense as they face government mandates to encourage more energy conservation and deal with the rising cost and difficulty of building power plants and distribution systems.

So in Chicago, a household that uses a lot of electricity might receive a mailing showing that more energy-efficient neighbors wash their clothes in cold water, along with a coupon for Tide Coldwater detergent. In Texas, customers can compete to be named the Biggest Energy Saver and get a shot at winning new appliances, home improvement gift cards or $5,000 to put toward a wind turbine. And outside Boston, customers earn points for saving energy that they can redeem for meals at local restaurants or a $10 discount at Whole Foods.

Motivating people to save energy isn’t really about the money, behavior experts say. Successful programs foster a sense of achievement and identity. And competing to beat your friends and neighbors at the savings game doesn’t hurt.

Many of these programs are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether a significant number of customers want to work with their utility companies over energy savings; most customers become interested in their electricity only when it doesn’t work, executives and experts say. The Duke Youtility page, for instance, has fewer than 3,300 “likes,” and most of the recent comments complain about power failures, rate increases and the company’s troubled merger with Progress Energy.

But utilities hope to tap into the same dynamic that works for video games and applications like Foursquare, where users compete against one another to earn bragging rights, like becoming “mayor” of a favorite restaurant.

Opower, a leading home energy management company, has shown promising results with its keeping-up-with-the-Joneses approach, sending people reports on how their electricity use compares with households in their neighborhoods — complete with a smiley face, or two, depending on how they stack up. The company has created an app with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council that can load a user’s energy data and allow people to compete with their friends and family.

Soon, said Daniel Yates, a co-founder of Opower, customers of the roughly 75 utilities he works with will be able to earn electronic badges saying things like “Congratulations: You are an energy saver” for cutting their bills.

While it might sound hokey, the strategy works. Tom Lyons, a customer of Pacific Gas and Electric in San Jose, Calif., said Opower’s feedback was reinforcing. “You’re getting some nourishment or some reward from the energy report and the smiley faces,” he said.

When his conservation efforts slip, he said, it makes him dig for the reason: extra company that month, working more from home or his daughter having a couple of sleepovers “where they were yakking, watching TV with all the lights on in the room until 3 a.m.”