Artists Take Up Digital Tools

Manipulating 3-D scans of his own body on the computer, Mr. Dupont then marries digital fabrication methods like rapid prototyping and computer numerically controlled milling with traditional plaster casting and other laborious hand work to make figures that can appear both archaic and futuristic. One of his standing nudes, similar in posture to the Kouros statues from ancient Greece, appears to melt into ripples when viewed on one axis, suggesting the psychic experience of man in the modern world.

“The forms I end up with couldn’t have been done without using digital tools, but you have to disrespect them on some level,” he said. “It’s much more interesting if you can disrupt the expectations of what the technology can do.”

His work is on view now in “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, an exhibition of works by 85 international artists, architects and designers including Frank Stella, Maya Lin, Daniel Libeskind, Ron Arad and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who are bending digital techniques to their own expressive ends.

“There’s been an explosion of creativity during the last decade as many artists are exploring the technologies and what boundaries they can push,” said the exhibition curator, Ronald Labaco. He notes that while some of the digital technology has been around since the 1990s, early practitioners approached it more as a novelty. “In recent years I’ve seen a shift in thinking from ‘What can the machine do?’ versus ‘How can I use this as part of the tool kit to achieve what I want to do?’ ”

For Chuck Close, known for his monumental portrait paintings transposed from photographs, the computer’s ability to convert images into data that can be read by an electronic loom got him deeply interested in the age-old medium of tapestry. In the exhibition, his 2009 digitally woven tapestry based on daguerreotypes of five angles of his own face looks almost like a holograph. The faces seem to emerge from the black matte background with a kind of aggressive clarity, an effect he loves.

While traditionally a tapestry might have taken a year or more to weave on the loom by hand, now it can be run off in a day. But the labor is shifted upfront. Mr. Close can spend a year creating a digital weave file on the computer that will direct the loom — establishing a palette with hundreds of steps from the lightest light to the darkest dark, changing thread colors and transitions, making test strips.

“It’s wonderfully complicated because you’re building an image,” said Mr. Close, who compared the process to both photography, in milking the contrast out of a negative in the darkroom, and painting, in mixing up lighter and darker colors. “I find these old-time systems — the daguerreotype and the loom — have real appeal and are something to breathe new life into.”

Many of the artists in the exhibition are playing with 3-D printing, a newer form of rapid prototyping that is beginning to be recognized by the general public with the advent of desktop 3-D printers and newsworthy developments in the medical field like the 3-D printing of a mouse heart capable of beating with electrodes attached.

“The technology allows you to design an object in virtual space and transmit the data to another machine to ‘grow’ or ‘print’ that object in 3-D,” the industrial designer Marc Newson said of these printers, which can dispense a variety of materials — plastics, metal powder and binders, plaster, animal cells — in very thin slices directed by a laser and build an object in layers.

The process allows for the seamless construction of incredibly intricate designs, including Mr. Newson’s 2006 “Random Pak Chair,” on view in the show, made from a perforated metal skin that mimics cellular structures. The physical fabrication of the chair was simplified through the technology, yet the design of its skin using generative software was more complex than anything Mr. Newson had previously done.

“With the assistance of the inventors of the technology, we used a series of algorithms that made billions of decisions about how to grow this object,” Mr. Newson said.

XFR STN Offers a Digital Update at the New Museum

Artists, editors and the occasional MTV producer are making pilgrimages to its fifth-floor gallery, where the museum’s XFR STN project helps them preserve, and in some cases, excavate, artworks stored on floppy disks, videocassettes and other obsolete media.

“It’s like Noah’s ark,” said Ben Fino-Radin, a digital conservator for the project. “Some of this stuff hasn’t been seen in 30 years.”

It can be something of a random archaeological dig, dependent on what is brought in by the artists seeking free one-on-one time with technicians to digitize their work. Most of it is then uploaded to archive.org, the Internet’s Wayback Machine, where it is available for anybody to experience.

The project, pronounced “transfer station,” runs through Sept. 8 and allows anyone to bring in their work after signing up on the museum’s Web site. It’s also open to museumgoers, who can see an exhibition of retro videos, posters and machinery, and witness the artists and technicians midrestoration. Along the way there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia, as well as the smack of recognition that time, or at least technology, travels rather fast.

In the space of a few hours “you go from U-matic,” an analog tape deck from the 1970s, “to watching it on your phone,” Mr. Fino-Radin said.

A recent tour revealed how art buried in the audiovisual graveyard lives again.

At a tower of outdated machines — a U-matic, an oscilloscope — Walter Forsberg, an audiovisual conservator for the project, worked with the artist Matthew Geller to digitize a tape of the artists Kiki Smith, Rebecca Allen and Ellen Cooper fronting the Cardboard Air Band in a performance at the Kitchen. Mr. Geller guessed that it was from 1981, when the artists were at the beginning of their careers. Even so, the footage, of men and women in skinny pants and floppy bangs singing and playing cardboard instruments, looked remarkably contemporary.

“It’s certainly interesting seeing a lot of this stuff, with the knowledge now of what comes after it,” said Mr. Geller, a site-specific installation artist. “We were all in our 20s, and no one ever imagined being famous until our 30s or 40s.”

Museum visitors watched footage from the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club, an art collective begun in the 1980s, led by the artists and writers Alan W. Moore and Michael Carter. The club was spun out of Colab, Collaborative Projects Inc., a downtown group that also helped start ABC No Rio, a cultural space still kicking on the Lower East Side.

Andrea Callard, a Colab artist, has helped digitize hours of tapes from the MWF club that span a 10-year period. In 2004 New York University acquired her papers, including the first videos she made in the 1970s and ’80s. “I was at a point in my life when I really wanted to see what that stuff looked like,” she said, taking a break from her headphones and monitor. “If you want to experience the continuity of your work, that’s important. It’s really fun to see it. Now they have a new audience. It’s like a second life.”

The New Museum is digitizing some of its own archives, too. On an unlabeled Betamax tape, Tara Hart, the institution’s archivist, uncovered the museum’s founder, Marcia Tucker, discussing art in an early TV appearance.

“It’s very much high-’80s,” said Johanna Burton, the director and curator of education and public engagement at the New Museum, sounding enthralled about this window into the past.

As artists stream in to XFR STN, “histories are being told,” she said. “There are instant connections between the technicians and the people who are in the space. It feels very intimate in a space that we were afraid would be cold and technical.”

Because of the “precarity of the medium,” she added, “there’s something in the room that makes people aware of how easily histories get lost.”

Gabriel Tolliver, an associate producer on “Yo! MTV Raps” in the early 1990s, brought in a tape of performances by Public Enemy, Run DMC with the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest and the Wu-Tang Clan — the foundations of contemporary hip-hop.

In an era overstimulated by images, “there will be a need,” Mr. Tolliver said, “to look back, at certain points, at our cultural timeline to try to find moments to connect with, to revisit or be inspired by.”

Mr. Tolliver also digitized rap ephemera, like a 1992 Harlem boxing match. “Willie D of the Geto Boys knocked out Melle Mel” of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, he recalled. “That was one of the first times I ever picked up a camera. It was wild looking back at that.”

The nostalgia doesn’t extend to the older devices, which are nearly useless and often hard to come by. The majority of the project’s budget went to hiring people adept at wrestling with the temperamental machinery. Floppy disks and hard drives are jury-rigged with new software used in forensics and video games. The museum borrowed old cassette decks from other institutions or scavenged for them on eBay, where even an outdated cord might go for $200.

“If you think Apple’s cables are expensive now,” Mr. Fino-Radin said, “wait until they’re vintage, and you have to get grandpa’s old photos off his iPhone that you find in a shoe box.”

The obsolescence of tools that were once cutting edge highlights the limits of the digital anthology the New Museum is creating; its collection is just a small fraction of what’s out there, Ms. Burton said, “and it’s rather arbitrary.”

“It’s going to be a great collection, and a weird collection,” she said, “but it will be just the beginning of something that we wish could keep going.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 12, 2013

In an earlier version of this article, a quote by Gabe Tolliver misstated the group with which Melle Mel was affiliated. He was with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, not Sugar Hill Gang.

Searching Big Data for ‘Digital Smoke Signals’

But the office in Manhattan is not dedicated to the latest app. It is the base camp of the United Nations Global Pulse team — a tiny unit inside an institution known for its sprawling bureaucracy, not its entrepreneurial hustle. Still, the focus is on harnessing technology in new ways — using data from social networks, blogs, cellphones and online commerce to transform economic development and humanitarian aid in poorer nations.

“We work hard, play hard and tend to stay well-caffeinated,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, who leads the group. “This is an exercise in entrepreneurship.”

The efforts by Global Pulse and a growing collection of scientists at universities, companies and nonprofit groups have been given the label “Big Data for development.” It is a field of great opportunity and challenge. The goal, the scientists involved agree, is to bring real-time monitoring and prediction to development and aid programs. Projects and policies, they say, can move faster, adapt to changing circumstances and be more effective, helping to lift more communities out of poverty and even save lives.

Research by Global Pulse and other groups, for example, has found that analyzing Twitter messages can give an early warning of a spike in unemployment, price rises and disease. Such “digital smoke signals of distress,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said, usually come months before official statistics — and in many developing countries today, there are no reliable statistics.

Finding the signals requires data, though, and much of the most valuable data is held by private companies, especially mobile phone operators, whose networks carry text messages, digital-cash transactions and location data. So persuading telecommunications operators, and the governments that regulate and sometimes own them, to release some of the data is a top task for the group. To analyze the data, the groups apply tools now most widely used for pinpointing customers with online advertising.

“We’re trying to track unemployment and disease as if it were a brand,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

Global Pulse is small, employing 11 people in New York. Seven more people work at a laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia, that opened last fall. And Global Pulse is hiring for another lab in Kampala, Uganda, to open this fall.

The research labs are initially working on demonstration projects to show the potential of the technology. “But the larger role of Global Pulse is as a catalyst to foster a data ecosystem for development, bringing together the private sector, universities and governments,” said William Hoffman, an associate director who leads the data-driven development program at the World Economic Forum, which has worked with Global Pulse.

Its United Nations pedigree helps Global Pulse serve as an impresario for data-driven development efforts. “Global Pulse has been central in raising awareness,” said Alex Pentland, a data scientist and director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And it is a trusted party in an area that is sensitive for many governments and companies.”

The group traces its origins to the 2008 financial crisis and concerns about how the economic pain would sweep through the developing world. But as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said in a speech, “Our traditional 20th-century tools for tracking international development cannot keep up.”

Global Pulse is intended as a 21st century answer to that problem. It was set up in 2009, as an innovation arm in the office of the secretary general. Mr. Kirkpatrick joined in early 2010, began assembling a team and emphasized tightly focused projects and rapid experimentation, while traveling the world to spread the data-for-development gospel at conferences and in private meetings.

Embracing Tablets, Comic Book Publishers Cash In on a Digital Revolution

At Comic-Con International, the annual comic book convention here last week, publishers embraced tablets and e-readers to show off their wares, and companies like comiXology demonstrated technological innovations to better distribute those offerings.

ComiXology, which has become one of the biggest distributors of digital comic books, hit a milestone in June when it reached 180 million unique comic book downloads since it started business in 2009, said David Steinberger, the company’s chief executive, and a co-founder. Of those downloads, 80 million were in the last six months.

The company’s success mirrors a surge in digital sales, which reached $70 million last year, up from $25 million in 2011, according to a report released July 15 by ICv2, an online trade publication that covers pop culture. Digital sales made up 19 percent of the total North American market, which rose 13 percent to $750 million in 2012, up from $665 million the year before.

At the comiXology booth at Comic-Con, fans swiped their fingers across a variety of tablets to view the offerings as comiXology employees explained how the system worked.

“Amazing!” said Chris W. Palmenberg, a visitor from Tucson, Ariz., as he gave the comiXology team a thumbs-up. “When I first saw the iPad, I knew this would be great for comics,” he said. A longtime reader of print comic books, Mr. Palmenberg made the switch to comiXology’s platform two years ago for the ease of portability.

“I think that we contributed to the revolution in digital comics,” Mr. Steinberger said. Supported by in-app purchases, comiXology was No. 3 on Apple’s list of top 10 apps in 2012. Its business model helped persuade DC and Marvel to sign deals to distribute their comic books digitally through comiXology the same day they are released in print.

Working with partners like comiXology on distribution allows DC to better focus on producing good stories, said Jim Lee, the co-publisher of DC Entertainment, adding, “The Holy Grail was the distribution issue.”

For years, comic book publishers faced a problem of poor distribution. In the 1960s and ’70s, comic books were sold at newsstands and bookstores. As they migrated to specialty shops, publishers broadened their offerings and aimed at a niche audience, fueling a speculation boom among collectors in the 1980s. After an eventual bust a decade later, the number of specialty shops shrank. By this time, distribution had become too focused on existing readers and had failed to attract new ones.

But with the digital revolution, publishers seem to have overcome their distribution woes. Through computers and mobile devices, they can now reach readers anywhere in the world.

DC said it had been able to take advantage of the new distribution model to reach new readers. Thirty percent of readers of Injustice, a book based on a video game, were new to comic books, Mr. Lee said.

Not only does technology promote innovation, it lowers barriers to the market, allowing new publishers to enter.

After taking two years to develop its technology to create motion books, Madefire, based in Berkeley, Calif., opened for business last year. Its initial strategy was to focus on original content with features like animation, sound and music and deliver it through its own app. Madefire also has a Web distribution deal with DeviantArt.

“We’ve optimized for a digital-first reading experience,” said Ben Wolstenholme, a co-founder and the chief executive of Madefire.

To broaden its audience, Madefire started working with small publishers like Top Cow and Boom Studios. It recently announced a deal with IDW to create motion books for Star Trek, My Little Pony and Transformers. Now, Madefire has to balance its original content with licensed properties, but Mr. Wolstenholme said the strategy was to reach a more mainstream audience.

Lion Forge Comics, a start-up based in St. Louis, is also taking a similar approach. This was its first year at Comic-Con, but it has already announced a deal to publish comic books based on old NBC shows like “Knight Rider” and “Punky Brewster.”

“I think it’s a good time for new companies,” said David Steward II, managing partner and creative director at Lion Forge. “You can do new things in different ways, versus changing direction, which the more established companies can’t.”

Vampire Diaries Comes to DC Digital

DC Digital held a panel at Comic-Con this year to discuss their digital initiatives. Expert moderator Bob Wayne got the ball rolling by pointing out that DC released a new digital first comic every day of the week.

First up, Derek Fridolf and Dustin Nguyen spoke about an upcoming issue of Lil’ Gotham, which would feature Gotham City’s own Comic-Con. They said the issue was a love letter to comic book fandom and would be tons of fun. “We don’t worry too much about stuff, we just have fun,” Fridolf said.

Writer Tom Taylor then talked about Injustice, the digital first series that serves as a prequel to the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game. “This book explains what happened and why Batman and Superman want to tear each other’s spins out,” Taylor said. He pointed out that he loved Superman and it tears him apart to write him so sinister and violent. The bestselling series will have an upcoming annual that featuring Harley Quinn fighting Lobo. “I just wanted to write an issue where Quinn beats up Lobo. That was my pitch,” Taylor laughed.

The panel then quickly touched on Batman ’66, which is the launch of the DC Squared initiative. Some art from upcoming issues was shown which featured Penguin and the Joker. “There’s a big fan base,” editor Jim Chadwick said. He said that many creators were reaching out to him and begging to work on the series. The panelist joked that they wanted to bring Batman ’66 into some of the other digital series, like a Lil’ Gotham ’66. The audience cheered loudly at this joke. Seriously, this needs to happen.

Kyle Higgins and Christos Gage discussed the DC Beyond Universe next. Higgins expressed how much he loved the Beyond series and what a big fan he was of the original cartoon series. Some artwork from the series was showed off and it featured Batman battling a Man-Bat. Gage then showed off some art from Justice League Beyond. “Can I say who the villain is?” Gage asked and was quickly told he couldn’t by nearby editors. “It’s an old Superman villain returned, that we can say.”

Hank Kanalz then announced that The Vampire Dairies would become a weekly digital first series. The series would include lots of threads setup by the television series. “We’re very excited about this,” Wayne said. The only artwork previewed for the new series was a cover which featured a drawing of the cast of the show. No further details were given, but Kanalz stressed that lots more news would be coming up regarding this new series.

Coming in November, Scooby-Doo Meets Batman and Robin would be launching. The panel stressed this was not a one shot, but rather a continuing, bi-monthly series. “This leaves the door open for the Royal Flush Gang vs. The Harlem Globetrotters, right?” Miller said to cheers from the crowd. “I want to write that,” he laughed.

Also coming up are Beware the Batman and Teen Titians GO! series. Both would be launching in the fall and follow the tone and stories of the new Cartoon Network television’s shows.

When the floor opened up to fan questions, an audience member asked about the recoloring of a Stephanie Brown character in the Halloween issue. The panel deftly dodged the question and instead focused on the proper coloring of peppers in the comic.

Benjamin is a writer and storyteller. He owns many leather-bound books and his office smells of rich mahogany. Follow Benjamin on Twitter @616Earth, or find him on IGN.

Gadgetwise Blog: Training From a Difficult Digital Coach

FX-Sport VR1 Programmable Personal Trainer Headphones are a smart concept — a pair of headphones that have a built-in coach. But the coach could be easier to work with.

The FX-Sport is an on-the-ear-style headphone with a springy wire that runs behind the neck and curls up for storage. You can buy an accessory silicone cover to use the headphones when swimming as well.

The FX-Sport can be used in a few ways: to play music stored on its eight-megabyte internal drive; to allow a user to run against a virtual opponent while listening to music; or to set up audible instructions, say for interval training, for when to sprint and when to rest.

The value of racing a pretend competitor is pretty well established. In a test in England, cyclists exceeded their previous limits when faced with a virtual opponent.

Because the virtual opponent runs against the clock — there is no GPS —  it can spur increased effort even on treadmills and stationary bikes.

The idea is terrific, but the setup had problems.

To use the headphones you have to download software for them to work with an Apple computer or PC. I used a Mac, and the software was easy enough to download.

On my test unit, music came preloaded. And it worked well. But I found it difficult to load my own music because each song must be selected individually from a music library. For me, sorting through 10,000 songs for the 100 or so I might want would take too much work. If you have a group of songs listed consecutively, you can grab them as a group and move them to the device.

Once I had loaded some of my music, I had some trouble playing it. Duncan Walsh of Mi-Sport Global, the company behind the FX-Sport, said the problem might have been with a song in my folder — that it was either corrupted or copy-protected. “The only digital music files that cannot be played on the FX-Sport are DRM-protected files,” said Mr. Walsh, referring to files that cannot be copied.

The “race mode” was easy enough to set up. I entered my name and that of an imaginary competitor, then set the range of time for the competitor’s finish. The competitor can change speeds, so he could challenge a comfortable lead with a sprint finish. I set it slightly faster and slightly slower than my typical finish. The program would pick a random finish time within that range. You tap the headphone control to hear your opponent’s progress.

In “pace mode,” you choose a finish time for the opponent, who plods at a steady speed to the finish at that exact time.

The programmable trainer lets you write custom messages that a computerized voice reads back at the times you set. So you can have it tell you “go” for a 20-second sprint, followed by “rest” for 10 seconds over a four-minute period, for instance. It worked, but required a couple of tries to get right.

At a price of $190, the headphone may be in the race, but it has to improve its performance for a podium finish.

Bits Blog: A Digital Diaper for Tracking Children’s Health

A screen shot from Pixie Scientific’s Web site, showing its diapers and accompanying smartphone app that can transmit certain health information to a physician.

Talk about changing with the times.

A New York start-up called Pixie Scientific has developed a diaper that the company says can detect possible urinary tract infections, kidney dysfunctions, and dehydration, accompanied by a smartphone app that can transmit the information to a physician.

“I was driving with my wife and daughter one day, when my wife asked if the baby had wet herself,” said Yaroslav Faybishenko, Pixie’s founder. “I realized she was sitting in data.”

Other so-called quantified self products have been developed for adults, like products from Jawbone and FitBit that create digital records of calorie expenditure and sleep habits. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, a Taiwanese company called AiQ showed off shirts that it said could measure things like heart rate and other biometric signals.

In contrast to those things, the technology behind the diaper is relatively simple, and it owes as much to the quality of smartphone cameras as it does to clever chemistry.

At the front of the diaper is a patch with several colored squares. Each square represents a different interaction with a protein, water content or bacteria, and changes color if it detects something is outside of normal parameters. There is also a neutral white square, to more easily check for color changes in the other squares.

A smartphone app takes a picture and can make precise readings of the chemical data based on  color changes. The data is uploaded to a central location, where physicians can get information about how the child is doing and whether the baby needs further testing.

The diaper is expected to be tested at Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco this September. Columbia University’s children’s hospital is considering a similar study. If successful, the product may then be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for final approval.

Mr. Faybishenko said he thought the diaper, which he said would cost about 30 percent more than regular diapers, had potential as a consumer product, for parents who want to keep regular tabs on their child’s health. Rather than overwhelming parents with data, the app is likely to let them know whether they should see a pediatrician for one or more possible conditions. With the parents’ permission, the detailed urine analysis data could be sent to a doctor’s office.

“You really don’t want to overload parents with data they don’t understand,” he said. “Eventually the quantified self idea will be mostly silent and unobtrusive, just something inside the existing flow of life.”

Mr. Faybishenko said the company was working on other tests, but would not specify what they were.

Gadgetwise: Scanning a Signature for Digital Documents

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Digital Diary: Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy

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Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Touring the Library of Congress Digital Collections

American history buffs who do not have the time or money to travel to Washington can find plenty to browse – for free — on the Library of Congress Web site. Digitized sound recordings from the National Jukebox Project, archival newspapers and thousands of photographs are there for viewing, with many available items for download. Other sections of the site host classic posters from the Works Progress Administration, a collection of 2,100 early baseball cards and a “Show Music on Record” database that catalogs musical recordings. With Memorial Day just ahead, the Veteran’s History Project, which collects and preserves the personal stories of American war veterans, may also be of particular interest.

Innovation: Who Made That Digital Camouflage?

What started on vehicles eventually moved onto clothing. In 2002, the Marines adopted a uniform inspired by the digital-

camouflage idea, with a pixel pattern that gave soldiers the look of video-game characters. O’Neill, who retired in 2001, found himself working on the project. “I helped the Marine Corps out,” he says, “particularly on the physical descriptions for patent rights.”

The fabric came in two color schemes — one for woodland terrain and one for the desert. In 2004, the U.S. Army announced that it would use digital camouflage on its uniforms as well. But O’Neill was dismayed when it issued the camouflage pattern in only one color meant to hide soldiers anywhere in the world, from sand dunes to jungles. “I had 10 cat fits and a dog fit,” he says, because he believed a so-called universal camouflage would be “useless everywhere.” After prodding by Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Army began to re-evaluate the pattern in 2009.

“Everybody suddenly wanted digital camouflage,” O’Neill says. The problem was that “everybody didn’t know how to do it.”

The Army has been field-testing new camouflage to replace the universal pattern and, in the interim, has issued an unpixelated fabric called MultiCam to some troops. The pattern uses seven colors.

INVISIBLE CITIES

Guy Cramer is the chief executive and president of the HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation, which specializes in camouflage design.

Your company has been working on a “Harry Potter” cloak that you claim can render people invisible. How does it work? It bends light in the same way a fiber-optic cable bends light. So if a soldier was wearing this, it would work from every angle. Right now, research scientists have made objects disappear, but you have to be looking directly at the object, and it can be only a half-inch tall. But our company can do an entire building or a ship or a submarine.

You’ve reported that you have shown this to the U.S. and Canadian militaries, but some remain skeptical. Why won’t you demonstrate this to the general public? Do you want the North Koreans to have access to this? I’ve been bombarded by people who want to see the real thing and wonder how much it costs. But this is not a moneymaking scheme. This is about the safety of the troops.

What’s the next step? We have to put it into production. But how do we do that so that people who are on the production line don’t talk about how this thing works? We’re talking about using retired Special Forces people on the assembly line — retired Navy SEALs, for instance.

Hearst Hires Troy Young as Digital Media Chief

The job will go to Troy Young, 45, who will be responsible for content, revenue production and development strategies for Hearst Magazines’ 26 online properties, which include Cosmopolitan.com, Elle.com and RealBeauty.com. The job’s purview extends only to magazines’ online brands, not to their print editions.

Mr. Young has not been employed in traditional media since the 1990s, when he worked for Canadian television. He has spent the last 20 years of his career in what is known as the “pure play” digital-only space.

Mr. Young comes most recently from Say Media, an integrated digital media company that builds its own online brands around themes (like ReadWrite, a technology Web site) or charismatic editors (like xoJane, edited by Jane Pratt, the founding editor of Sassy magazine) and then helps advertisers build branded content for those properties.

Before his time at Say, Mr. Young was chief experience officer of the Omnicom digital agency Organic, with clients such as American Express, Virgin Mobile and Chrysler.

David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said he chose Mr. Young because “Pure plays are increasingly the companies to watch in terms of how quickly they produce product, the orthodoxies they set aside and how they assemble their talent.”

“We want the pulse of a pure play,” he added.

Mr. Young said he had always worked “at the intersection of strategy and content,” which was particularly useful for what he described as a coming era where advertiser content would blend “seamlessly” with editorial content.

“We are seeing an integration of the advertisers and the content in native advertising,” he said, “and this is not going away.”

Enstitute, an Alternative to College for a Digital Elite

Ms. Gao decided that she didn’t want to continue studying at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. At first she considered transferring to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but she changed her mind when she saw that her tuition bill would be around $44,000 a year, with only a small amount of financial aid available. “I didn’t want to come out of college with $200,000 in debt and have to spend 10 years paying it off,” she said.

Yet she still sought a way to nurture her interest in technology. A year later, Ms. Gao holds the title of data strategist at Bitly, the URL-shortening service based in New York.

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

The Enstitute concept taps into a larger cultural conversation about the value of college — a debate that has heated up in the last few years. In important ways, the value is indisputable. The wage gap between college graduates and those with just a high school degree is vast: in 2010, median earnings for those with a bachelor’s degree were more than 50 percent higher than for those with only a high school diploma, according to the Department of Education.

But college is expensive, and becoming more so — between 2000 and 2011, tuition rose 42 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — and students fear being saddled by debt in a bleak job market. (Students from the class of 2011 who took out loans graduated with an average debt of $26,000.) And some employers complain that many colleges don’t teach the kinds of technical skills they want in entry-level hires.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor, upped the ante to this argument when he started the Thiel Fellowship, which pays a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 for young people not to attend college and to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams instead.

Enstitute doesn’t offer anything like $100,000 to its apprentices. Still, it is aimed at intelligent, ambitious and entrepreneurial types — people like Ms. Gao, who participated in the Technovation Challenge, a nine-week program and competition for high school girls to design a mobile app prototype at Google in New York.

“If I had known at 19 what Jasmine knows, I would be ruling the world,” says Ms. Mason, who is 34.

The concept is not a perfect model by any stretch. For one thing, a college degree is still the assumed prerequisite of most any professional job. But more people seem interested in testing alternatives.

“We need educational research and development for a new time,” says Tony Wagner, an innovation education fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the author of “Creating Innovators.”

“I have no idea whether Enstitute is going to be successful,” he adds. The only way to find out, he says, would be to follow the apprentices over time after the program and compare them with their college-educated peers. “Yes, you get exposed to a lot of great things by going to a liberal arts school,” Mr. Wagner says, “but you have to look at the cost-benefit analysis.”

MR. SARHAN and his co-founder, Shaila Ittycheria, met when they worked at LocalResponse, a social media company in New York. They selected this year’s first class of fellows — 11 in all — from a national pool of 500 applicants ranging in age from 18 to 24.

Ms. Ittycheria, 31, and Mr. Sarhan, 26, call the program “learning by doing.” Students train under a master, in the way that many trade professions have operated for centuries. “It’s a level of experience that an intern never sees,” Ms. Ittycheria says.

For participating companies, the program offers cheap, talented labor for a much longer period than a typical internship. But the fellows are betting that their minimal wages will turn into full-time jobs once they complete the program — perhaps even at the very company where they apprenticed.

Nine of the fellows have attended at least one year of college, and three are college graduates. Most say they do not plan to return to school. But what will the apprentices miss if they forgo the four-year period of intellectual exploration and cultural knowledge that college is meant to provide? Defenders of higher education argue that college students gain important knowledge as well as critical-thinking skills that are crucial to a meaningful life and career.

The Enstitute’s founders contend that their program does teach critical thinking, but in different ways. “They are not debating Chaucer; they are debating product features,” says Mr. Sarhan, who graduated from Pace University. “But it’s the same idea of how do I write down and communicate an argument.”

Digital Subscribers Buoy Newspaper Circulation

“Overall circulation industrywide is flat and digital is growing,” said Neal Lulofs, an executive vice president with the Alliance for Audited Media, which released the figures on Tuesday. “Newspapers are engaging with readers in a variety of media types, wherever and whenever.”

The 593 audited daily newspapers had a 0.7 percent daily circulation decline, the group reported. The Wall Street Journal had the highest circulation, at 2,378,827, a 12.3 percent jump from the same time the year before.

The New York Times overtook USA Today for second place with a circulation of 1,865,318, a 17.6 percent rise from a year ago. USA Today’s circulation was down 7.9 percent, dropping to 1,674,306. The Los Angeles Times and New York Daily News followed in fourth and fifth places.

The figures include both print and digital subscriptions.

For the 519 Sunday newspapers audited, total circulation declined 1.4 percent. The New York Times ranked first with an average circulation of 2,322,429, a 15.9 percent increase from the same time the year before.

The Houston Chronicle ranked second, despite a 5.8 percent decline to 1,042,389. The Los Angeles Times was third; its circulation remained essentially flat at 954,010.

Mr. Lulofs cautioned that the growth for some newspapers could be attributed to how they have incorporated the community newspapers they own into their figures. For example, The Chicago Sun-Times counted an 11.6 percent rise in daily circulation, which included 55,241 copies sold by its regional papers. The Orange County Register recorded a 26.8 percent increase in its daily circulation, largely from the 84,071 copies generated by its branded newspapers.

Other papers showed growth because they started to include more varieties of digital editions, Mr. Lulofs said, citing The Star Ledger of Newark, an Advance Publications paper that has been facing potential cuts in its daily coverage. The paper’s daily circulation jumped 22.2 percent, with its digital circulation more than doubling in the last year.

Still, these digital figures should not be dismissed as simple maneuvering, Mr. Lulofs said. Digital circulation for The Wall Street Journal grew by 62.6 percent, to 898,012 in March 2013 from 552,288 in March 2012.

Last week, The New York Times Company announced that paid digital subscribers to The Times and The International Herald Tribune had grown to 676,000 by the end of March.

From GoalControl, a Digital Eye to Watch Over Soccer’s Trouble Spots

There is no large sign trumpeting the offices of the organization, GoalControl, and one could easily walk past without noticing the tiny sticker on its front door; in some ways, the modest setting is appropriate for a company that did not officially exist until late last year.

But the expectations for GoalControl are significant: the success of its cameras-and-software system, which will be used to judge goal-line decisions at this summer’s Confederations Cup in Brazil — and, ostensibly, next year’s World Cup, too — is crucial in helping soccer catch up to other sports in its use of technology.

That is why executives at GoalControl see this as only the beginning. The system they have created to provide clarity in goal-line scoring situations could also potentially be used, they say, to assist in ridding soccer of its other most-prevalent flash point: the incorrect judging of soccer’s complex offside rule, which so often either denies a team a scoring opportunity or unfairly leads to a tainted goal.

Imagine the all-too-familiar scene: a long pass is played from the midfield, and an attacker races to it while defenders throw up their hands claiming offside. Instead of relying on the eyes of an assistant referee, though, as he sprints down the sideline and tries to determine where the attacker was at the moment the ball was played, the referee could count on a computer to read images provided by the cameras. It could determine the attacker’s location and send a signal to the referee’s watch within a second. A picture of the play could then be shown on video screens in the stadium, as well as to viewers on TV.

“Technically, yes, offside is absolutely possible — it would just take a few more cameras in the stadium,” Dirk Broichhausen, GoalControl’s managing director, said in a recent interview at the company’s offices. “This is the direction the sport is going. We are hoping to be at the start of something here.”

Björn Lindner, the chairman of the board for the company, added from across the table: “We could even track the players’ hands and arms, for a handball.”

Ambitious as they are, however, the executives behind GoalControl are also realistic about progress in a sport that has been notoriously slow to embrace changes. First, they must see their product succeed in eliminating the maddening is-it-or-isn’t-it debates that arise with split-second goal-line decisions.

After all, as recently as three years ago, Sepp Blatter, the head of soccer’s governing body, FIFA, said he was vehemently opposed to instituting any sort of technological advances to aid in officiating the game. It was only after a glaring mistake at the 2010 World Cup, when England’s Frank Lampard was denied an obvious goal after the on-field officials failed to see that his shot had gone over the goal line, that Blatter reversed course.

That led to a lengthy process that culminated in 18 companies’ submitting bids to be recognized as certified providers of G.L.T., or goal-line technology, each with a different take on how to solve the problem of a game that sometimes — often, even — involves more precision than humans can accurately judge.

Potential solutions were varied: some companies advocated embedding computer chips in the ball or putting stickers on it, while others promoted the use of so-called light curtains in the goal or laser beams on the line.

Ultimately, FIFA narrowed the field to four companies and then, on April 2, selected GoalControl to provide G.L.T. at the Confederations Cup in June. GoalControl’s system involves 14 cameras — seven trained on each goal — that look similar to the security cameras one might see in an A.T.M. vestibule. In Brazil, the cameras will be attached to the catwalks beneath each stadium’s lights and will constantly take full-frame, full-color pictures — 500 per minute — to determine the ball’s location.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2013

A photo caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the men pictured. The man on the right is Björn Lindner, not Rene Beaujean.

Digital Domain: Apps Help Find Online Workers Quickly

These services have a drawback, however: the work is not done in real time. Workers pick up the tasks that interest them and for which they are qualified, but as independent contractors they work on their own schedules.

Computer science researchers have been trying to build systems that summon online workers on demand and produce immediate results. Much initial work has focused on completing tasks for people with disabilities, because that is where the need is great. For example, a blind person may need to identify the contents of a can from a kitchen cupboard right now, not later. A deaf college student may want to follow the give-and-take of a seminar discussion as it unfolds in the classroom, and not wait to read a transcript the next day.

VizWiz, a free iPhone app developed by Jeffrey P. Bigham of the University of Rochester and colleagues in its Human Computer Interaction program, gives real-time help to blind users.

VizWiz users take a photograph as best as they can — it may take several tries before the desired object is properly framed — and then record one question about it (“What is on the label of the can?”). Besides needing help identifying food labels, they may want to know the denomination of paper currency, say, or whether a baby’s head shows signs of a rash.

In the app’s first version, the picture and the recorded question were sent to several contractors at Mechanical Turk, to be answered for a tiny fee paid by the Rochester researchers. (More than one person can answer the same question, to ensure accuracy.) The current version offers additional options, like free “friendsourcing” of the question to the user’s Facebook friends, Twitter followers or a particular e-mail correspondent. Professor Bigham says that so far, the service has answered about 60,000 questions from 6,000 users.

FOR a typical Mechanical Turk request, it may take a few minutes, hours or days before a worker picks up the request. VizWiz helps blind users achieve real-time help by going into action as soon they alert the service that they’re preparing to take a picture. While the photograph is being shot, VizWiz posts the assignment on Mechanical Turk. If workers come online to help, but the picture isn’t yet ready, the software keeps them busy identifying archived photos. That way, they are at the ready when the real photo appears.

The crowd turns out to be a superior source of aid, compared with one’s social network, in the opinion of recently surveyed VizWiz users. As one respondent said, “When I need something identified like a can or TV dinner I am going to use it now, not whenever my friends get around to telling me what it is. :)”

Another smartphone app developed at Rochester, called Scribe, helps the deaf and hearing-impaired. With the app, users send an audio stream to many workers who provide real-time transcription. No single unskilled worker could transcribe all of the words in a live stream — only highly trained transcribers with special equipment can do that. But the software makes it possible to achieve the same results by coordinating a group of six or seven amateurs.

The software feeds the stream to each member of the crowd, but parts of it are, in effect, assigned to different people by slowing down short passages, making them easier to transcribe. Each worker transcribes the highlighted portion, and then the Scribe software stitches together the various pieces.

Computer scientists at M.I.T. have developed a “retainer model” for Turkers who need to be recruited before requests come in. Instead of keeping workers in a holding pattern with make-work, their software pays workers to remain on standby until a real request arrives on their screen.

As the researchers hone their technology and techniques, real-time help may expand to other uses. For example, an online crowd could help edit an e-mail draft, supply feedback about changes to a Web site, or do bilingual interpretation — all without delay. And researchers are now experimenting with a live video feed in VizWiz in place of individual photos.

As in most every other part of life, so it is in gaining the help of the crowd: no form of gratification beats instant.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Bits Blog: Google Introduces a Tool for Planning for Your Digital Afterlife

One of the most haunting questions facing Web companies and their users is, what happens to the stuff of our digital lives after we die?

Are our Facebook status updates, Flickr photos and Gmail messages like physical journals and photo albums for our families to flip through? Should our iTunes playlists be like records passed down through generations? Would we rest easier knowing that our digital lives would exist for eternity, or that our private postings would stay that way?

On Thursday, Google announced a new tool for managing your digital afterlife. Google users can choose whether they want their information deleted or to name a beneficiary, as in a will. Users can have different directives for different products — deleting Gmail and Drive but sharing Picasa and YouTube content, for instance.

“We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone,” Andreas Tuerk, a Google product manager, wrote on the company’s public policy blog.

Google users choose whether to activate the feature after their accounts are inactive for three, six, nine or 12 months. Google will send a text message and e-mail before taking any action. The feature, called Inactive Account Manager, is accessible on the account settings page.

Before, survivors could gain access to data stored with Google only with a court order, and that was rare.

Google introduced the feature as states begin to pass laws about what happens to digital remains. Federal privacy laws do not generally address the issue, but Congress is considering it. Google often says it prefers technological solutions to legislative ones.

Other companies are also thinking about the issue. Facebook has grappled with how to confirm that users have died — so the site doesn’t suggest becoming friends with them, for instance — and how to handle it when survivors use a deceased person’s page as a memorial.

And Evernote is working on Evernote Century, which would guarantee that information stored on Evernote is accessible for 100 years and let people designate who can have access to it, even if Evernote goes out of business.

Of course, if we reach the Singularity, as many in the tech world believe we will, we will not need these tools because we will all live forever.

DealBook: Never Mind Facebook; Winklevoss Twins Rule in Digital Money

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler — Olympic rowers, nemeses of Mark Zuckerberg — are laying claim to a new title: bitcoin moguls.

The Winklevii, as they are known, have amassed since last summer what appears to be one of the single largest portfolios of the digital money, whose wild gyrations have Silicon Valley and Wall Street talking. The twins, the first prominent figures in the largely anonymous bitcoin world to publicly disclose a big stake, say they own nearly $11 million worth.

Or at least $11 million as of Thursday morning — when trading was temporarily suspended after the latest and largest flash crash left a single bitcoin worth about $120 and the whole market worth $1.3 billion. At one point, the price had plummeted 60 percent.

To skeptics, the frenzy over the bitcoin network created by anonymous programmers in 2009 looks more like the mania for Dutch tulip bulbs in the 1600s than the beginnings of an actual currency.

“To say highly speculative would be the understatement of the century,” said Steve Hanke, a professor specializing in alternative currencies at Johns Hopkins University.

Whatever else it is, bitcoin has become the financial phenomenon of the moment.

In addition to the identical twins, Silicon Valley investment firms, while not holding bitcoins, are starting to show interest in the technology.

On Thursday, a group of venture capitalists, including Andreessen Horowitz, announced that they were financing a bitcoin-related company, OpenCoin.

Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesA sticker on the window of a pub in Berlin signifies acceptance of bitcoin for payment. Few places accept the digital currency.The New York Times

The Winklevosses say this week’s tumult is just growing pains for a digital currency that they believe will become a sort of gold for the technorati.

“People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble,” said Cameron Winklevoss. “People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.”

While little is known about the creator of bitcoin, or if it even was a single person, the work involved serious programming chops, building a system that could live on borrowed computer space around the world. It was determined that only a finite number of bitcoins could be created — the count is currently around 11 million. New coins are “mined” by programmers who solve mathematic riddles and can sell their coins on upstart exchanges.

For now, there are few places where bitcoins can be used. One marketplace is an online bazaar, Silk Road, where narcotics are reportedly the main wares for sale. But bitcoin believers imagine a future where the e-cash can be used at their local Starbucks. The Winklevosses have paid in bitcoin for the services of a Ukrainian computer programmer who has worked on their Web site.

“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

This is not the brothers’ first gamble on an unproved technology. As students at Harvard, the twins founded a social networking site, ConnectU, and enlisted their schoolmate, Mark Zuckerberg, to help them build the company. After Mr. Zuckerberg went off to start Facebook, the brothers sued him, accusing him of stealing their idea — a story that was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” The case was settled with the brothers being given $20 million in cash and Facebook shares that are now worth more than $200 million.

They have parlayed that fortune into Winklevoss Capital. Their first two investments were in Hukkster, a start-up shopping Web site and SumZero, an online community for professional money managers.

The brothers began dabbling in bitcoin last summer when the dollar value of a single coin was still in the single digits. To keep their holdings secure from hackers, they have taken the complex codes that represent their holdings off networked computers and saved them on small flash drives, putting the drives, in turn, in safe deposit boxes at banks in three different cities.

It’s hard to verify how the Winklevoss holdings compare with other bitcoin players, given the anonymity of accounts, and the twins say they believe that some early users of the system probably have holdings that are at least as large.

A Maltese company, Exante, started a hedge fund that the company says has bought up about 82,000 bitcoins — or about $10 million as of Thursday — with money from wealthy investors. A founder of the fund, Anatoli Knyazev, said his main concern was hackers and government regulators, who have so far mostly left the currency alone.

These investments were all in an uncertain state on Thursday after the big price swings and the shutdown of trading on Mt. Gox, a Japanese-based company that claims to handle 80 percent of all bitcoin trades. Mt. Gox said in a statement that the problems were a result of the currency’s popularity, making it impossible to process all the incoming orders. It added that it was not the victim of hackers but “instead victim of our own success!”

The 6-foot-5 Winklevoss brothers were unfazed. The brothers said they took advantage of the low prices to buy more.

“It has been four years and it has yet to be discredited as a viable alternative to fiat currency,” Tyler Winklevoss said. “We could be totally wrong, but we are curious to see this play out a lot more.”

Digital Domain: Wearable Video Cameras, for Police Officers

Now, some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.

William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.

But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”

He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”

Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge an assistant professor at Hebrew University.

Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.

A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

As small as the cameras are, they seem to be noticeable to civilians, he said. “When you look at an officer,” he said, “it kind of sticks out.” Citizens have sometimes asked officers, “Hey, are you wearing a camera?” and the officers say they are, he reported.

But what about the privacy implications? Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, says: “We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse.” But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he says: “When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.”

Mr. Stanley says that all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Mr. Farrar says officers have told him of cases when citizens arrived at a Rialto police station to file a complaint and the supervisor was able to retrieve and play on the spot the video of what had transpired. “The individuals left the station with basically no other things to say and have never come back,” he said.

The A.C.L.U. does have a few concerns about possible misuse of the recordings. Mr. Stanley says civilians shouldn’t have to worry that a video will be leaked and show up on CNN. Nor would he approve of the police storing years of videos and then using them for other purposes, like trolling for crimes with which to charge civilians. He suggests policies specifying that the videos be deleted after a certain short period.

A spokesman for Taser International said it had received orders from various police departments, including those in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and Hartford, as well as Fort Worth, Tex.; Chesapeake, Va.; and Modesto, Calif. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the police department of BART, the transit system, has bought 210 cameras and is training its officers in their use, part of changes undertaken after a BART police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man in 2009.

Before the cameras, “there were so many situations where it was ‘he said, she said,’ and juries tend to believe police officers over accused criminals,” Mr. Stanley says. “The technology really has the potential to level the playing field in any kind of controversy or allegation of abuse.”

Mr. Farrar recently completed a master’s degree in applied criminology and police management at the Universiity of Cambridge. (It required only six weeks a year of residency in England.) And he wrote about the video-camera experiment in his thesis.

He says his goal is to equip all uniformed officers in his department with the video cameras. “Video is very transparent,” he said. “It’s the whole enchilada.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Etiquette Returns for the Digital Generation

Their apparent goal: to help members of Generation Y navigate thorny, tech-age minefields like Paperless Post invites, same-sex weddings and online dating — not to mention actual face-to-face contact with people they encounter in the offline world.

For instance, you may not think you need a tutorial on shaking hands when being introduced to someone for the first time, but Gloria Starr, an image consultant based in Newport Beach, Calif., begs to differ.

“When you shake hands, it’s two or three times up and down — from the elbow and not the wrist,” Ms. Starr says in one of her 437 YouTube videos, helpfully bobbing her right hand up and down in demonstration. Then “smile and introduce yourself.”

Or how about the way to conduct yourself at the gym? Videos on gym etiquette are a particularly hot Web topic of late, said Kevin Allocca, the trends manager for YouTube. One video, “Don’t Be That Guy at the Gym,” shows five men demonstrating various sweat-soaked faux pas, like the “meathead” who grunts loudly each time he performs a rep, or the self-anointed “coach” who offers unsolicited (and largely unwelcome) advice to other gym-goers. Posted last April, it has been viewed some 3 million times.

No arena of modern life, it seems, is too obscure or ridiculous for consideration. An instructional Web site called Howcast.com has a popular channel on YouTube that tackles weighty issues like how to handle flatulence in yoga class or how to behave at a nude beach. “If it would be unseemly to gape at that body part while it’s fully clothed,” the latter video instructs, “it’s downright rude to gawk at it undressed.”

On another video, one veteran of the fast-food industry proffers advice on how to act at a drive-in window (“Do not scream ‘hello’ as soon as you pull up to the speaker. Wait to be greeted”), while there are more than 500 videos on the momentous subject of how to properly set the dinner table.

But perhaps the fastest-growing area of social advice — one that has spawned not just videos but also Web sites, blogs and books — is the Internet itself, and the proper displays of what’s been termed “netiquette.” There are YouTube videos on using emoticons in business e-mails, being discreet when posting on someone’s Facebook wall, limiting baby photos on Instagram, retweeting too many Twitter messages and juggling multiple online chats.

“We’re living in an age of anxiety that’s a reflection of the near-constant change and confusion in technology and social mores,” said Steven Petrow, an author of five etiquette books including “Mind Your Digital Manners: Advice for an Age Without Rules,” to be published in 2014. (Mr. Petrow is a regular contributor to The New York Times, writing an advice column on gay-straight issues for the Booming blog.)

“Whether it’s wondering how many times it is acceptable to text a date before being seen as a stalker, or what the role of parents is at a same-sex wedding,” he said, “etiquette gurus are popping out from under tablecloths everywhere to soothe all those living in fear of newfangled faux pas.”

Such advice is dished out on Web sites run by protocol professionals like the dapper Thomas Farley, a television talk-show staple, and Elaine Swann, a San Diego County-based consultant, and in the online newsletter Dot Complicated, published by Randi Zuckerberg, the former Facebook executive.

“Many of these emerging etiquette issues are complicated because there are no clear-cut, black-and-white answers,” Ms. Zuckerberg said. A recent post on Dot Complicated dealt with how to respond to a request for money, something that Ms. Zuckerberg, C.E.O. of Zuckerberg Media, said she has had to deal with quite frequently. (Her advice: “Say no and say it quickly.”)

Young people “are getting sick of the irony, rudeness and snark that is so prevalent in their online lives,” said Jane Pratt, the editor in chief of xoJane, a women’s lifestyle site where etiquette posts are a popular feature. “The return of etiquette is in part a response to the harshness of the interactions they are having in the digital sphere.”

“Nice is very cool right now,” she added.

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY is scurrying to catch up, with a flurry of new etiquette books. “Etiquette is a popular publishing subject right now because, yes, it’s true, good manners never go of style,” said Christine Carswell, the publisher of Chronicle Books, which will publish “The Forgetful Gentleman” by Nathan Tan in May.

Last year alone, three books that tackle such subjects were published by contributors to The Times: Henry Alford’s “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners”; Philip Galanes’s “Social Q’s: How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today”; and the former “Ethicist” columnist Randy Cohen’s “Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything.”

Other notable titles include “Miss Jane Austen’s Guide to Modern Life’s Dilemmas,” by Rebecca Smith, a British novelist who says she is a direct descendant of the “Pride and Prejudice” author, and “What Would Michelle Do? A Modern-Day Guide to Living with Substance and Style,” by Allison Samuels, a Daily Beast senior writer, who looks to the White House for guidance.

The social quandaries seem to be endless. Are you obligated to respond to Facebook party invitations? Is it rude to listen to your iPod while car-pooling?