Even the bird-brained can follow a leader. When pigeons fly in flocks, each bird falls behind another with better navigational skill, and the savviest among them leads the flock, scientists report in the April 8 Nature. The research suggests hierarchies can serve peaceful purposes in the animal kingdom, where dominance by brute force is often the rule. “A pecking order tends to be just that — a pecking order,” says Iain Couzin of Princeton University, an expert in collective behavior who was not involved in the research.
The research also suggests that for pigeons, dominance isn’t set in stone. While one bird often emerged as the leader, other birds also stepped up. This flexibility in leadership had previously been seen only in some small groups of fish.
From schools to packs to swarms to flocks, collective behavior is widespread among animals. But in many cases, the important interactions are with nearest neighbors, and control of the group’s movement is distributed among members rather than hierarchical.
Biological physicist Tamás Vicsek of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and his colleagues studied flight dynamics in homing pigeons, which fly in flocks but conveniently return to their roosts. The researchers outfitted 13 pigeons with tiny backpacks carrying GPS devices that measured shifts in birds’ flight direction five times per second. Flocks of eight to 10 birds flew with the devices during homing flights (a roughly 14-kilometer trip back to the roost) and spontaneous “free” flights near home. Each bird also flew solo flights of about 15 kilometers each.
Analysis of GPS logs showed that for each excursion, the flock had one leader followed by at least three or four other birds. Each of these followers was in turn followed by other birds in the flock. Comparing the solo flight paths to the group flights showed that the birds with the best navigational skills led the flock.
While flocks have hierarchies, they’re not dictatorships, notes Vicsek. One bird led eight of the 13 flights, while other birds took the lead on the rest of the trips. Vicsek likens the dynamics to a group of peers deciding where to eat dinner. “Maybe someone knows the area restaurants best, or there is a person who’s a gourmand — or maybe they are the most outspoken,” he says. This one person might pick the place to eat for several nights, although another person might chime in now and then. And then there is the person with no say, whom everyone knows has terrible taste in food.
“These pigeons know each other. They know which is the smartest. The fastest bird will even follow the slower one who knows the way home the best,” say Vicsek. Videos of the birds’ positions during flight showed that if the best navigator moves a little to the left, it takes about a third of a second for other birds to do the same. But if the least savvy bird makes a move “the others don’t care,” Vicsek says.
Pigeons’ brains may be wired for follow-the-leader, comments behavioral neuroscientist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley. When the left eye sees something, for example, it sends all the visual information to the right brain hemisphere, and vice versa. This “extreme lateralization” may play a role in organizing flocks, the new work suggests. A pigeon following another was most likely to be flying on its partner’s right, seeing this leader with its left eye. “It’s very cool,” Jacobs says.
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says that Google and Microsoft's access to his newspapers could be limited to a "headline or a sentence or two" once he erects a pay wall around his titles' websites.
Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report on Tuesday, also said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties beginning with The Times of London.
"You'll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall," he said. "Now how high does it go, does it allow (visitors) to have the first couple paragraphs or certain feature articles, we'll see.
"We're experimenting with it ourselves," he said.
The News Corp chief said "we're going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing."
Search advertising had produced a "river of gold" for Google, he said, "but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers. And I think they ought to stop it, the newspapers ought to stand up and make them do their own reporting or whatever."
Murdoch said he did not expect search engines would pay for access to newspapers. "We'll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that's followed by a subscription form," he said. Murdoch dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news on the internet for free would be reluctant to pay.
"I think when they've got nowhere else to go they'll start paying," he said.
Murdoch was also asked about the rivalry between The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has announced plans to launch an expanded New York edition later this month.
"I've got great respect for the Times, except it does have very clearly an agenda," he said. "You can see it in the way they choose their stories, what they put on Page One - anything (President Barack) Obama wants. "And the White House pays off by feeding them stories," he said.
Murdoch also said he reads The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post each day "because I'm going to be responsible for them." He said he reads "a lot" of the New York Times," but rarely reads The Washington Post although he "probably should."
Murdoch also praised the Apple iPad calling the newly released tablet computer a "glimpse of the future." He predicted the iPad would have eight or nine competitors in the next 12 months and said the devices could save newspapers.
"There's going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world," he said. "It may be the saving of newspapers because you don't have the costs of paper, ink, printing, trucks.
"I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper," he said, but "if you have less newspapers and more of these that's ok."
"It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form," he said.
An US federal appeals court all but told the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Tuesday that it has no power to regulate the internet, putting large chunks of the much-lauded national broadband plan at risk. And the FCC has only itself to blame. Telecoms and many internet activists have long argued that the internet is a developing technology that was innovating so quickly that strict regulations would hamper it. In 2005, that argument drove the FCC under the Bush Administration to win a fight in the Supreme Court for the right to deregulate broadband providers, classifying them as an “information service,” largely outside the FCC’s power, rather than a “telecommunications service” that could be regulated like the phone system.
Following that win, the FCC simply issued a set of four principles of net freedom that it said it expected broadband companies to follow. They promised that broadband users could plug in whatever devices they wanted to their connection and then use whatever software or online application that they liked — without interference from their provider. Those principles never went through a rule-making period, and when the FCC went after Comcast for blocking peer-to-peer file sharing services, the company sued the commission in court. And, on Tuesday, won.
Now broadband companies effectively have no regulations that constrain them, as the FCC has left itself with no statutory means to control what telecoms do with their internet networks.
A broadband company could, for instance, ink a deal with Microsoft to transfer all attempts to reach Google.com to Bing.com. The only recourse a user would have, under the ruling, would be to switch to a different provider — assuming, of course, they had an alternative to switch to.
Companies can also now prohibit you from using a wireless router you bought at the store, forcing you to use one they rent out — just as they do with cable boxes. They could also decide to charge you a fee every time you upgrade your computer, or even block you from using certain models, just as the nation’s mobile phone carriers do today.
While this might seem like a win for the nation’s broadband and wireless companies, the ruling could be so strong that it boomerangs on them. For instance, if the FCC is left without the power to implement key portions of the National Broadband Plan — a so-far popular idea — then Congress or the FCC may have to find a way to restore power to the commission. That could leave the FCC stronger than it was before the ruling.
The option favored by public interest groups is for the FCC to take the drastic course of formally reclassifying broadband as a regulated service, reversing the position it held and defended just a few years ago.
“The FCC should immediately start a proceeding bringing internet access service back under some common carrier regulation similar to that used for decades,” said Gigi Sohn, the president of the pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge. “In our view, the FCC needs to move quickly and decisively to make sure that consumers are not left at the mercy of telephone and cable companies.”
The FCC’s own statement on the decision acknowledges it will have to do just that. “Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open internet,” said FCC spokeswoman Jen Howard in a written statement. “But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”
“Other methods” obliquely refer to either Congress passing a law giving it the power (a process that would likely take years) or the FCC reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service — in legal terms, moving broadband from Title I to Title II of the Telecommunications Act.
Title II-type regulations should be very familiar to most Americans — they are the rules that apply to phone services. For instance, phone customers have the right to attach whatever device they like to the phone network — from rotary-dial machines to modems to fax machines — so long as they don’t harm the network. They also have the right to call anyone else in the country from friends to astrology services, and phone companies are obliged to connect the call — making them into “common carriers.”
Phone companies that own the physical lines that connect to your house have to rent them to competing services at fair rates. They also have to provide cheap services to low-income customers — subsidized by a tax known as the Universal Service Fee. And they have their prices regulated.
That doesn’t mean moving broadband into “Title II” would impose the full spectrum of telephony regulation on internet service. The FCC has a power known as “forbearance” that lets it lift selected obligations, according to Free Press’s policy counsel Aparna Sridhar.
“Let’s say Title II has 50 provisions,” Sridhar said. “The commission can decide 48 of these don’t make sense for broadband, but one or two or three do. It will be a skinny Title II. Monopoly-style rate regulation is not necessarily the outcome.”
Another consideration is whether the FCC would then be in the business of regulating the content of the internet — as it famously does with fines against broadcasters for profanity on the radio or over-the-air television. Sridhar said that wouldn’t have to be the case.
“If the FCC decided to reclassify the underlying transmission, that doesn’t mean that Hulu or The New York Times or your favorite app will be regulated.”
Hoping to prevent the FCC from reclassifying broadband, the Wireless Association — an opponent of net neutrality rules — argued before the ruling arrived that the Comcast case wouldn’t undermine the national broadband plan.
“I don’t think the National Broadband Plan is in jeopardy, based on the Comcast case,” Guttman-McCabe said a day before the ruling. “Look at things about disclosure and even the Universal Service Fund — there is no need to have Title II authority to address those issues.”
But the court’s reasoning undermines Guttman-McCabe’s theory. While it was tangential to the net neutrality case, the appeals court took the time to point out that the Universal Service Fund was approved by the courts only because it was tied to the FCC’s “Title II responsibility to set reasonable interstate telephone rates.” In short, the court is saying that the Universal Service Fund couldn’t be changed to support broadband, since the FCC has no similar mandate to set broadband rates.
The Wireless Association welcomed the ruling in a written statement Tuesday, ignoring the tricky question of how the FCC could implement large portions of the National Broadband Plan without the authority to regulate broadband. “Today’s unanimous and very thorough opinion in the Comcast case makes clear that the FCC needs to focus on the important task of making the promise of the National Broadband Plan a reality by spurring investment, innovation and job growth, and turn away from calls to impose restrictive regulations on broadband providers and the internet ecosystem,” said Steve Largent, the group’s CEO.
Comcast also welcomed the ruling, while trying to strike a conciliatory note by saying it likes the idea of open internet principles.
“We are gratified by the Court’s decision today to vacate the previous FCC’s order,” said Sena Fizmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman. “Comcast remains committed to the FCC’s existing open internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC as it determines how best to increase broadband adoption and preserve an open and vibrant internet.”
Meanwhile, Thursday marks a now odd deadline the FCC’s attempt to bolster its net neutrality authority by creating a proper rule-making process last fall that would have codified the ad hoc principles it used to go after Comcast.
Companies and interest groups were set to file final comments by Thursday on that rulemaking — which rested on the same arguments the court just struck down.
That makes the proceeding mostly useless, even though the FCC will still likely take the comments to heart, if and when it ever regains any authority over broadband.
