Greatest Ideas This Year Part 1

The New York Times Magazine came out with the greatest ideas this year (A-C):

Accredited Bliss
By CHARLES WILSON
If you think financing a motion picture is difficult, consider for a moment the fund-raising bench mark that the filmmaker David Lynch set this year for his new David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace: $7 billion. The director of "Mulholland Drive" hopes to finance seven "universities of peace," with endowments of $1 billion each, where students would practice Transcendental Meditation.

Developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950's, T.M. is a technique whereby individuals repeat a mantra to themselves during two 20-minute sessions per day. Lynch began practicing it 32 years ago as a student. T.M. rid him of his deep anger, he says, and enlivened his creative process. "When you dive within," Lynch says, "you experience an unbounded ocean of bliss consciousness."

Lynch says he believes that undergraduates today - 3 of 10 of whom say they suffer from depression or an anxiety disorder - need to find that unbounded ocean even more than he did in 1973. To that end, he has recently offered to help underwrite for-credit "peace studies" classes, which would include T.M. instruction, at a number of universities. Pending approval, American University will offer one of these classes next year. Researchers there will also begin studying the technique's effects on student grades, I.Q.'s and mental health.

Drawing on the work of John Hagelin, a quantum physicist and T.M. practitioner, Lynch harbors broader hopes that the seven universities of peace could enable the square root of 1 percent of the world's population - about 8,000 people - to simultaneously do an advanced version of the T.M. technique called "yogic flying." Lynch and Hagelin say that a mass meditation of this size could have a palliative effect upon the "unified field" of consciousness that connects all human beings and thereby bring about the conditions for world peace.

This fall, Lynch toured 13 schools across the United States to promote his plans. Skeptics might wonder how a filmmaker renowned for his dark visions could devote so much energy to the cultivation of happiness. Lynch, however, sees no contradiction. "You don't have to suffer yourself to portray suffering," he says.


Anti-Paparazzi Flash, The
By ALEXANDRA BERZON
If you have ever felt sorry for celebrities hounded by cameras as they go about their daily business - be that pumping gas or entering a flashy nightclub - you can rest easy. A group of researchers at Georgia Tech has designed what could become an effective celebrity protection device: an instrument that detects the presence of a digital camera's lens and then shoots light directly at the camera when a photographer tries to take a picture. The result? A blurry picture of a beam of light. Try selling that to Us Weekly.

The Georgia Tech team was initially inspired by the campus visit of a Hewlett Packard representative, who spoke about the company's efforts to design cameras that can be turned off by remote control. Gregory Abowd, an associate professor, recalls that after the talk, the team members thought, There's got to be a better way to do that, a way that doesn't require the cooperation of the camera. The key was recognizing that most digital cameras contain a "retroreflective" surface behind the lens; when a light shines on this surface, it sends the light back to its source. The Georgia Tech lab prototype uses a modified video camera to detect the presence of the retroreflector and a projector to shoot out a targeted three-inch beam of light at the offending camera.

The current version is bulky and expensive, but the researchers say a more practical example could be ready for commercial sale within a year. They imagine their contraption installed in environments where cameras might not be welcome: locker rooms, for example, or trade shows. The Motion Picture Association of America has already expressed interest in mounting the technology in movie theaters to combat video pirating.



Anti-Rape Condom, The

By CHRISTOPHER SHEA
The vagina dentata - a vagina with literal or figurative teeth - is a potent trope in South Asian mythology, urban legend, Freudian rumination and speculative fiction (the novel "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, for example). But it took a step toward reality this August with the unveiling of the Rapex, a female "condom" lined with rows of plastic spikes on its inner surface.

The Rapex is the brainchild of Sonette Ehlers, a retired blood technician in South Africa who was moved by the country's outlandish rape rate, which is among the highest in the world. The device is designed to be inserted any time a woman feels she is in danger of sexual assault. Its spikes are fashioned to end an assault immediately by affixing the Rapex to the assaulter's penis, but also to cause only superficial damage. The Rapex would create physical evidence of the attack as well and, as Ehlers laid out a course of events for reporters at a news conference, send the offender to a hospital, where he would be promptly arrested.

Ehlers estimates that each Rapex would cost 50 to 60 cents - a pricey proposition in Africa for a nonreusable item. On a Web site, www.rapestop.net, she answers other frequently asked questions: How is it inserted and removed? In each case, with an applicator. Do you hate men? No. Won't it get some users killed? Many rapists kill anyway; you stand a better chance against a temporarily disabled man. (On this last point, some may find Ehlers a little blithe about the prospect of an enraged rapist.) In a phone interview, she said that she has found the Rapex prototype to be more comfortable than a tampon. But Chantel Cooper, director of the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, remains unimpressed. The Rapex, she said in an e-mail message, sends the retrograde message "that women should be responsible for their own safety."

Branding Nations
By CLAY RISEN
If the British consultant Simon Anholt had his way, sitting at the cabinet table with the secretary of defense and the attorney general would be a secretary of branding. Indeed, he foresees a day when the most important part of foreign policy isn't defense or trade but image - and when countries would protect and promote their images through coordinated branding departments. "I've visited a great many countries where they have ministers for things that are far less important," he says.

This year, Anholt, a prolific speaker, adviser to numerous governments and editor of the journal Place Branding, published "Brand America: The Mother of All Brands," in which he predicted that the days when countries will essentially open their own in-house marketing shops are right around the corner. "Governments understand this very well, and most of them are now trying or have tried in the past to achieve some kind of control over their images," Anholt writes. He may be on to something, since governments are quickly realizing that image maintenance isn't just about reeling in tourists - witness Karen Hughes's high-profile public-diplomacy efforts or Tony Blair's Public Diplomacy Strategy Board, an outgrowth of Britain's "Cool Britannia" campaign. Late last year, the Persian Gulf state Oman hired Landor Associates, a brand consulting outfit, to develop and promote "Brand Oman."

Public boosterism campaigns are nothing new. But true nation branding, Anholt says, involves close coordination of the often disparate factors that go into a country's international image: tourism promotion, trade, even foreign policy. Just as companies have learned to "live the brand," countries should consider their reputations carefully - because, he says, in the interconnected world, that's what statecraft is all about. "Today's community of nations is open, transparent and substantially democratic - in many ways, like a marketplace," he writes in "Brand America." "The state's reputation is therefore of critical importance." Given how difficult it is for an unpopular America to make its way in the world, maybe Anholt isn't as crazy as he sounds.


Cartoon Empathy
By JOEL LOVELL
For anyone who pays even the slightest attention to cartoons, the scene is familiar: birds flying, bunnies hopping, floppy-hatted Smurfs singing and dancing around a campfire. Then without warning a group of warplanes arrives and starts carpet-bombing. As the Smurfs scatter, their mushroom village goes up in flames. After the last bomb falls, amid the burning rubble and surrounded by dead Smurfs, Baby Smurf sits alone, wailing.

The scene comes from a 30-second TV commercial that began being shown on Belgian national television this fall, as part of Unicef's campaign to raise money to help rehabilitate child soldiers in Sudan, Burundi and Congo. The decision to use cartoon characters in the ad, rather than show images of actual children, was calculated not to lessen the horror but to amplify it. "We've found that people have gotten used to seeing traditional images of children in despair, especially from African countries," says Philippe Henon, a spokesman for Unicef Belgium. "Those images are no longer surprising, and most people certainly don't see them as a call to action."

Unicef's goal was to convey to adults the horror of war by drawing on their childhood memories, and Smurfs, Henon says, "were the image most Belgians ages 30 to 45 connect to the idea of a happy childhood."

The spot has generated a considerable amount of controversy. "People have been shocked," says Henon, who emphasizes that the ad is intended for an adult audience and is shown only after 9 p.m. "But we've received a lot of positive reactions. And this has also been apparent in the donations."

Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, a psychologist at the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, agrees that it makes sense to reframe the constant stream of images of suffering from Africa: "The more horrible the thing you're trying to raise awareness for, the harder it is for people to wrap their minds around it. We run up against that in America all the time. Maybe if we showed this stuff happening to Charlie Brown and Lucy and the gang, we'd break through

Celebrity Teeth
By REBECCA SKLOOT
Last year, if you walked into your dentist's office saying, "Hey, Doc, can you make my teeth look like Cameron Diaz's or Brad Pitt's?" the answer would have been, "Yeah, sure - with a lot of anesthetic, drilling and permanent reconstruction." But things have changed.

Meet the Snap-On Smile - a thin, flexible, resin shell of perfect teeth that snaps over your actual teeth like a retainer. No adhesive, no drilling. Its inventor, Marc Liechtung, is a dentist at Manhattan Dental Arts, where you can walk in on a Monday, make a painless plaster mold of your teeth and then pick up your new smile by Friday. All for $1,200 to $1,600. Patients can work with a "smile guide" to chose one of 17 colors ("yellow-white," "yellow-gray," even "Extreme White Buyer Beware") and 18 shapes ("squared," "square-round," "pointy"). But many patients just hand Liechtung a celebrity photo and say, "Make my teeth look like this." So he does. But he wants to make one thing clear: "I did not come up with the Snap-On Smile so people could mimic celebrities."

His goal was an affordable, minimally invasive dental tool. "I had patients with almost no teeth who didn't have $20,000 for reconstruction," he says. So this year, after months in the lab, he unveiled Snap-On Smiles. He is licensing them to dentists and has sold more than 300 to his own patients, many of whom have perfectly healthy (and often straight) teeth.

People don't ask Liechtung whether the Snap-On causes permanent damage (it doesn't) or whether you can eat with it (you can - even corn on the cob). "No," Liechtung says, "they just want to know: 'Which is the most popular celebrity?' 'What kind of girls get Halle Berry?' 'Who do guys ask for?'

"In the beginning, it made me sick. I thought I invented some serious medical device, but all people wanted to do was use it to make themselves look like celebrities!" Eventually he thought, Well, why not? "A person comes in, I say I can give them any teeth they want, who are they going to want to look like? Me? No!"

Liechtung wears a Snap-On every day. But whose smile is it? "I just made an enhanced version of my own," he says. But people rarely believe him. "I hate to admit it," he says, "but when they persist, I tell them my teeth are Brad Pitt's, because really, who wouldn't want his teeth?"


Cobblestones are Good for You (already appeared here)

Collapsing the Distribution Window
By CLAY RISEN
In February, the film industry as we know it may change forever. That's when "Bubble," a low-budget murder mystery directed by Steven Soderbergh, will appear in theaters - and on cable, and on DVD, all on the same day. The movie is the first in a six-film deal between Soderbergh and 2929 Entertainment, a partnership led by the media moguls Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, which includes theaters, cable channels and production and distribution companies. While no one expects "Bubble" to break box-office records, even a modicum of success could indicate the arrival of something many in the movie business have anticipated - and feared - for years: universal release.

With box-office revenue slumping and DVD sales skyrocketing, it's not surprising that moviemakers are looking for ways to collapse the period of time it takes for a film to make its way from the multiplex to home video - in industry-speak, the "distribution window." The universal-release strategy has a lot of appeal for moviemakers: in addition to taking better advantage of the red-hot home-video sector, it's also more cost-effective - instead of requiring separate marketing efforts for theater and video releases, universal release requires just one. Plus, the strategy undercuts film pirates, who sometimes offer knockoff DVD's of films before they even hit the big screen.

But not everyone likes the idea. John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theater Owners, has expressed fear that rather than create new revenue streams, the practice will "be a death threat to our industry." And some film purists, like the director M. Night Shyamalan, have said that universal release is also a threat to the traditional moviegoing experience.

Soderbergh, for his part, sees universal release as an inevitable evolution in the film business. "This is my response to certain trends in the entertainment industry," he told a news agency. "The movies are not the way they used to be when I grew up."

Consensual Interruptions
By JASCHA HOFFMAN
The problem is all too familiar: You're chatting with a group of people when someone's cellphone goes off, interrupting the conversation. What makes the intrusion irritating isn't so much the call itself - the caller has no way of knowing if he has chosen a good time to cut in. It's that the group as a whole doesn't have any say in the matter. Until now.

Stefan Marti, a graduate of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, who now works for Samsung, has devised a system that silently surveys the members of the group about whether accepting an incoming phone call would be appropriate. Then it permits the call to go through only if the group agrees unanimously - thus creating a more consensual sort of interruption.

The system, it must be said, is highly elaborate. It begins with a special electronic-badge or -necklace device that you and everyone else you might be conversing with must wear. Your badge can tell who is in conversation with you by comparing your speech patterns with those of people nearby. (Anyone within a few feet of you who is not talking at the same time you are is assumed to be part of your conversation.)

Each badge is also in wireless contact with your cellphone and a special ring that you wear on your finger. When a caller tries you on your cellphone, all the finger rings of the people in your conversation silently vibrate - a sort of pre-ring announcing to the group the caller's intention to butt in. If anyone in the group wants to veto the call, he can do so by simply touching his ring, and the would-be call is redirected to voice mail. If no one opts to veto, the call goes through, the phone rings and the conversation is interrupted.

Having solved the problem of when phone calls should interrupt us, Marti is now working on how they should do so. Inspired by the observation that the best interruptions are subtle and nonverbal but still somewhat public, he has designed an animatronic squirrel that perches on your shoulder and screens your calls. Instead of your phone ringing, the squirrel simply wakes and begins to blink.


Conservative Blogs are More Effective
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
When the liberal activist Matt Stoller was running a blog for the Democrat Jon Corzine's 2005 campaign for governor, he saw the power of the conservative blogosphere firsthand. Shortly before the election, a conservative Web site claimed that politically damaging information about Corzine was about to surface in the media. It didn't. But New Jersey talk-radio shock jocks quoted the online speculation, inflicting public-relations damage on Corzine anyway. To Stoller, it was proof of how conservatives have mastered the art of using blogs as a deadly campaign weapon.

That might sound counterintuitive. After all, the Howard Dean campaign showed the power of the liberal blogosphere. And the liberal-activist Web site DailyKos counts hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. But Democrats say there's a key difference between liberals and conservatives online. Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.

But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report - all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. "One blogger on the Republican side can have a real impact on a race because he can just plug right into the right-wing infrastructure that the Republicans have built," Stoller says.

Earlier this year, John Thune, the newly elected South Dakota senator, briefed his Republican colleagues on the role of blogs in his victory over Tom Daschle, the former Democratic minority leader. The message seems to be catching on. In Arkansas, the campaign manager for the gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson sent a mass e-mail message to supporters in May promoting the establishment of blogs "to comment on Arkansas politics as a counter to liberal media." With the 2006 elections coming, Democrats have begun trying to use blogs more strategically. But given their head start, Stoller says, conservatives "will certainly have an upper hand." Again.