2009 Year in Review

New York Times quiz - whose quotes are these, click on pic to expand.



Answers are to the right, click to expand.

Documenting the First Decade of 21st Century

A timeline of pictures from the first decade of the 21st century,

Link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/2009-decade.html?th&emc=th

'Smartbooks to Join Crowded Computer Market

The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show will be a coming-out party for a new breed of ultra-small laptops that act more like smart phones—designed to be always on and connected to the Internet via 3G cellular networks, ready to call up a Web page or post an update on Twitter.

Promoters of the new devices have been pushing the term "smartbooks," partly to distinguish them from the low-end portables called netbooks that have been the hottest thing in the PC industry over the past two years.

But there are unanswered questions about features and pricing for the new hardware, leaving the possibility that consumers could get confused with existing netbooks.

Smartbooks are expected to carry lower prices than netbooks—which can be found for as little as $250 these days. Most smartbooks are also being designed to have built-in cellular connections, so they are more likely to be sold at subsidized prices by cellular carriers along with data plans.

Although smartbooks will carry lower price tags, backers say they could generate higher profit margins for manufacturers because of savings on chips and operating systems.

Unlike netbooks and most other laptops, smartbooks don't use x86 microprocessors from IntelAdvanced Micro Devices Inc., nor popular versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. Corp.

The most vocal proponents of smartbooks, indeed, are makers of chips for cellphones that are angling for a new market. They include Qualcomm Inc., Nvidia Corp., Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and Marvell Technology Group Ltd.—which license microprocessor designs from ARM Holdings PLC and combine it with their own technology.

ARM-based chips tend to draw less power than x86 chips, helping to extend battery life. They also carry lower price tags; with savings on chips and low-cost operating systems, backers say smartbooks could generate higher profit margins for manufacturers.

Industry executives predict a wide variety of smartbook designs, some that look like conventional laptops and others that are much different.

"I think you'll be amazed at what can be done when you're not boxed in by the rules of innovation dictated by Intel and Microsoft," says Henri Richard, Freescale's senior vice president and chief sales and marketing officer.

Most smartbooks, which are expected to be built by both PC makers as well as manufacturers of cellphones and consumer-electronics, will run versions of the Linux operating system and low-cost chips based on designs licensed by ARM Holdings PLC.

Windows or x86 chips have not proven to be essential in cellphones, nor in some other wireless devices. Amazon.com Inc.'s hit Kindle and other electronic-reader devices use ARM chips and internally developed software, for example. Apple Inc., which uses ARM chips in its iPhone, is expected to make waves over the next few months with a tablet-style portable that will use the same chip technology. (Apple has declined to comment on any such product).

The resemblance of many smartbooks to netbooks may lead consumers to assume smartbooks can handle the same computing tasks. But smartbooks running Linux or its offshoots, such as Google Inc.'s Android, won't run applications like Microsoft Word or Apple's iTunes. Early netbooks that ran Linux ran into customer resistance and were quickly replaced with Windows-based models.

"Customers will likely continue to choose Windows netbook PCs over Linux smartbooks for these same reasons," predicts Ben Rudolph, a Microsoft senior manager for Windows.

Assuming smartbooks cost $200 or so, the new hardware will wind up facing uphill competition against products such as smart phones and portable gaming devices that are well understood, argues Patrick Moorhead, AMD's vice president of advanced marketing. Companies that choose to offer both netbooks and smartbooks face a particularly tricky marketing effort.

"It's too big to be a phone and too small for easy content creation," says Roger Kay, a market researcher with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "There has been little evidence that people really like that category."

Competition may also be tough. Intel recently introduced a new, more-compact version of its Atom chip for netbooks, which is expected to prompt a flurry of low-priced models that could reduce the appeal of smartbooks. Netbook shipments doubled in 2009 to 33.3 million units and should grow another 19% in 2010, market research DisplaySearch estimates.

"Netbooks have just been a phenomenon," says Thomas Kilroy, an Intel vice president who is general manager of its sales and marketing group.

Delays in delivering smartbooks—some of which had been expected to be available in the fourth quarter—haven't helped their image. So far, manufacturers have mainly offered pocket-sized devices with ARM chips, such as Nokia Corp.'s N900 and Sharp Corp.'s PC-Z1 Netwalker, rather than a full-sized keyboard that is sometimes considered a defining attribute of smartbooks. Mr. Richard of Freescale expects that many designs will remain under wraps until mid-2010.

Reasons for the delays include the job of adapting some key software—particularly Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash, which is needed to play popular video sites such as YouTube.

"The experience didn't live up to what people expected," says Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business.

But there are signs of movement. Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs, at a meeting with analysts in November, showed an ultra-thin red portable by Lenovo Group Ltd. running Flash and high-definition video, which he proclaimed to be the first true smartbook.

Lenovo won't provide any details about the device, which is expected to be formally unveiled at CES. But Peter Gaucher, executive director of advanced technologies for the Chinese PC maker, argues that a new generation of young users is not nearly so locked into the PC environment as their elders—moving easily among smart phones and other gadgets that are designed to do fewer things well.

"As costs come down, people are going to use more purpose-built devices," Mr. Gaucher predicts.

Smartbook supporters also say that critics underestimate the appeal of a device that is always on and connected. A greater proportion of the forthcoming devices are expected to come with built-in 3G networking than netbooks; short-range Wi-Fi connections are expected to be common to both.

So email is more likely to be pushed automatically to smartbooks rather than requiring users to log on to the Internet and fetch messages. Similarly, calling up movie times, weather forecasts and posting to Twitter and Facebook will be a matter of seconds, executives in the smartbook camp say.

Some wireless carriers, eager to expand beyond voice services, already offer netbooks at a subsidized price along with a 3G service plan. For example, AT&T Inc. offers Acer Inc.'s Aspire One netbook for $149.99. Smartbook backers expect that business model to become much more prevalent with the new hardware, which could allow carriers to offer even lower prices.

"We see subsidy being a key factor for the launch of smartbooks," says Luis Peneda, a Qualcomm senior vice president of marketing and product management. Qualcomm's Mr. Jacobs said AT&T would be supporting the launch of Lenovo's smartbook; a spokesman for the carrier declined comment.

by Wall Street Journal

Data Explosion: 2009 Triple The Amount Of Content We Consumed in 1980

Over the past year, Americans have spent an average of 11.8 hours a day consuming information, sucking up, in aggregate, 3.6 zettabytes of data and 10,845 trillion words. That is triple the amount of “content” that we consumed in 1980.

Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, begins, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” When it comes to data to make wise decisions, answer critical questions, and resolve significant problems, today truly is the best and worst of times. There is more data than ever and it’s growing by 30% a year, according to recent industry analyst estimates.

Thanks to this gargantuan download from all forms of media, we now know vastly more than we did a year ago about bankers’ bonuses, Sarah Palin, “death panels,” Glenn Beck, where Barack Obama was born, Jon and Kate, and cocktail waitresses who have spent quality time with Tiger Woods.

Hidden among that avalanche of diverting gigabytes were some developments of more enduring significance. Here are just a few:

ROBOTIC WARFARE

The use of drones became a central part of the American antiterrorism strategy this year, with President Obama sanctioning about 50 Predator strikes — more than George W. Bush approved in his entire second term. As Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported earlier this year, most of the targets of these assassinations were in the tribal regions of Pakistan, with as many as 500 people killed. Those killed in the missile attacks include many high-ranking Qaeda and Taliban figures and dozens of women and children who lived with them or happened to be nearby.

The military is so enthusiastic about these remotely piloted planes that it is building new ones as fast as it can (including a more heavily armed version called the Reaper). It also announced that it will deploy drones to scour the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean for drug smugglers. What’s more, the government is now working on “nano” drones the size of a hummingbird, which would be able to pursue targets into homes and buildings.

CAR CRAZY IN CHINA

This year, China surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of that iconic American machine — the automobile. China’s emerging middle class has fallen in love with cars, with sales up more than 40 percent over 2008; there are now long waiting lists for the coolest and hottest models, ranging from the Buick LaCrosse to BMWs. Automakers are expected to sell 12.8 million cars and light trucks in China this year — 2.5 million more than in America.

China’s auto boom, of course, has major implications for global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The nation of 1.3 billion is on pace to double its consumption of gasoline and diesel over the next decade.

REAL WORKING WIVES

In more than a third of American households, women are now the chief breadwinners. This reversal of traditional roles was accelerated by a brutal two-year recession, in which 75 percent of all jobs lost were held by men.

Even in homes where both spouses work, one in four wives now earns more than her husband. That’s partly because of rising education levels among women, falling salaries in manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and the growing need for both spouses to bring home a paycheck. Wives’ earnings, said Kristin Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, have become “critical to keeping families afloat.”

A NEW SOURCE OF STEM CELLS

Scientists re-engineered regular skin cells from mice into stem cells that are just as versatile as embryonic stem cells. To demonstrate that these re-engineered adult cells could be used to create any kind of cell in the body, the Chinese research team inserted just a few of them into placental tissue and developed them into healthy mice. “We have gone from science fiction to reality,” said Robert Lanza, a cell biologist.

If further research on the new technique proves successful, it may create a viable means for scientists to use a patient’s own tissue to produce a replacement liver, kidney or other organ — without the ethical concerns attached to the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. But reprogramming adult cells opens the door to a new ethical problem: a rogue scientist could use the method to create human beings from a few cells scraped from a person’s arm. “All the pieces are there for serious abuse,” Mr. Lanza said.

TEEMING WITH PLANETS

Astronomers are closing in on identifying distant worlds that may have the right conditions to support life. Techniques for detecting “exoplanets” are becoming more sophisticated, and over 400 have been discovered so far — 30 in October alone. This year brought two particularly intriguing finds. One is Gliese 581d, orbiting a star at a distance that could indicate surface temperatures not so different from Earth’s. Astronomers also discovered a “waterworld” composed mostly of H2O, which would be a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life if it were just a little farther from its sun.

The discovery of Earth-like planets, with water and moderate temperatures, is now so likely that the Vatican held a conference of astrobiologists this year to discuss the theological repercussions of extraterrestrial life. “If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs biochemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound,” said Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Discovering that we have company in the universe, in fact, might open our eyes to what’s important on Earth.

New York Times, William Falk

Contentment in 2010

with thanks to Rabea...

1. Drink plenty of water.
2. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar.
3. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants..
4. Live with the 3 E's -- Energy, Enthusiasm and Empathy
5. Make time to pray.
6. Play more games
7. Read more books than you did in 2009.
8. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day
9. Sleep for at least 7 hours.
10. Take a 10-30 minutes walk daily. And while you walk, smile.
11. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
12. Don't have negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
13. Don't over do. Keep your limits.
14. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
15. Don't waste your precious energy on gossip.
16. Dream more while you are awake
17. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
18. Forget issues of the past. Don't remind your partner with His/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don't hate others.
20. Make peace with your past so it won't spoil the present.
21. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
22. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
23. Smile and laugh more.
24. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
25. Live witht the 3 C's - Cooperation, Communication, and Consideration.
26. Each day give something good to others.
27. Forgive everyone for everything.
28. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 6.
29. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
30. What other people think of you is none of your business.
31. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
32. Call your family often.
33. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
34. God and time heals everything.
35. However good or bad a situation is, it will change..
36. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
37. The best is yet to come...
38. When you awake alive in the morning, thank God for it.
39. Allow yourself to be happy. Read "Learned Optimism" and "The Authentic Self" by Martin E. Seligman.
40. Do the right thing!

Hurry, Hurry, Just Hours to Shop - Where To Shop on Web

Here’s how to make your last-minute shopping quick and easy.

PICKING OUT A GIFT

Maybe the hardest part of last-minute shopping is thinking of a good present. You could ask your social network for suggestions, but that tips off everyone that you’ve been lollygagging and may tip them off to their gifts, too.

Instead, try doing the same thing anonymously through Aardvark, a query service that sends questions to people who have designated themselves as experts in their fields. Ask for a gift for a cyclist, for example, and the question will be sent to gift experts and cycling experts. It pings a few people at a time until you get a suitable answer, so you’re not bugging a lot of people. For best results, ask a focused question, like “what is a good gift for a 60-year-old opera lover?”

You can also anonymously see what people suggest on Twitter. I like to use Twitter Search. Enter “Christmas gift list” to see lists people have compiled for golfers, children and others. Be advised that there is also a lot of promotional spam out there. A narrower search, like “tennis Christmas gift” gets better suggestions. A site called the Christmas It List culls comments from 50 sites to determine the 25 hottest products. Or check its Twitter site to see day-by-day changes, which show a larger selection.

FINDING THE RIGHT DEAL

With some ideas, you can hit the Web, but rather than laboriously check each product at several stores, let Web browser add-ons search out deals and discounts for you.

I like to use the Firefox browser with the add-on Invisible Hand. It works in the background on Firefox and Google Chrome (Internet Explorer is coming, the company says), automatically checking prices at about 50 online stores as you shop. A subtle alert in the toolbar tells you if it finds a lower price than the one you have found yourself.

Another tool for smoothing online shopping is Billeo, which works on Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers when using the search engines Yahoo, Google and Bing. Billeo shows an icon next to a search entry if Visa, American Express, Bank of America or Chase offers a reward for the purchase, or if the retailer is offering a discount. Billeo said it tracked offers from 720 retailers, like Target, Macy’s, Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart.

Billeo also streamlines one big online shopping headache, filling out forms at checkout. Fill out Billeo’s form once and it should auto-fill most checkouts you’ll encounter, as long as the forms are fairly standard and are not Flash-based.

Need something quick — and cheap — for the office Secret Santa exchange? I like the Web site CouponMap.com. It shows available coupons in your immediate area (the results are shown on a map), so you can print the coupon, run right out and get a discount gift. I’ve looked at dozens of coupon sites, and find them to be pretty inaccurate, but CouponMap did well. It even found an extra hidden discount on a gift certificate to a local crab house, reducing the price of a $25 gift certificate to $7.50.

The Web site RetailMeNot.com also maps coupon deals for nearby businesses, a total of 40,000 stores nationally, it says. The site then asks users to rate the effectiveness of the various offers, helping to weed out expired deals.

COMPARING ON THE GO

If inspiration has not struck and you find yourself milling around the mall, there are still some excellent comparison-shopping tools to use on the spot.

RedLaser, a bar code-scanning app that recognizes the product you are looking at and then goes online to find other prices, has proved to be a huge hit on the iPhone App Store.

Part of its brilliance is you don’t have to take a picture of the bar code, you just frame the code with the camera and it quickly and automatically scans and returns results. When you know the Web price, you can decide if it’s worth paying extra to have the gift right away — think of it as an optional late fee.

In the past I’ve relied mostly on the ShopSavvy app for Android, which is now also available for the iPhone. Although the bar code reader can be a bit finicky, it returns not only online pricing but also prices at nearby stores. It gives you an option of calling the store or getting directions.

Bar code scanners do have a weakness. They work best for products that are distributed nationally to a variety of stores, items like books, CDs, DVDs and electronics. They don’t work as well on items exclusive to a single chain — those products may have a proprietary code. They tend not to work well on items like clothing and groceries, either.

Some of these weaknesses may be overcome by Google Goggles for Android phones. Using the camera, it conducts a visual search. It can scan writing as well as bar codes, so it can search results based on the writing on a toy’s box, a logo or a label. Sometimes that returns a result when a bar code doesn’t work. But it’s a last-ditch effort: the app is still a work in progress, and doesn’t always produce a useful result.

It may not be in the best holiday spirit, but when you’re pressed for time in the gift-giving season, you really can phone it in.

from N.Y. Times

Tiger Woods Holiday Poem

Tiger Woods Holiday Poem

Twas the night of Thanksgiving and out of the house

Tiger Woods came a flyin’, chased by his spouse.

She wielded a nine iron and wasn’t too merry,

Cause a bimbo’s phone number was in his Blackberry.

He’d been cheatin’ on Elin, and the story progressed.

Woman after woman stepped up and confessed.

He’d been cheatin’ with Holly, and Jaimee, and Cori,

With Joselyn, and Kalika. The world had the story.

From the top of the Tour to the basement of blues,

Tiger’s sad sordid tale was all over the news.

With hostesses, waitresses, he had lots of sex,

When not in their pants, he was sendin’ them texts.

Despite all his cryin’ and beggin’ and pleadin’,

Tiger’s wife went investin’ — a new home in Sweden.

And I heard her exclaim from her white Escalade,

“If you’re gettin’ laid then I’m gettin’ paid.”

She’s not pouting, in fact, she is of jolly good cheer,

Her pre – nup made Christmas come early this year!

1999 - 2009 - A Losing Decade for U.S. Stocks

In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s. he U.S. stock market is wrapping up what is likely to be its worst decade ever.

Please click on image to expand it.

Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress.

Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of 0.5% a year thanks to the twin bear markets this decade.
Many investors were lured to the stock market by the bull market that began in the early 1980s and gained force through the 1990s. But coming out of the 1990s—when a 17.6% average annual gain made it the second-best decade in history behind the 1950s—stocks simply had gotten too expensive. Companies also pared dividends, cutting into investor returns. And in a time of financial panic like 2008, stocks were a terrible place to invest.

The declines since the end of 1999 make the last 10 years the worst calendar decade for stocks going back to the 1820s, when reliable stock market records begin.

The past decade also well underperformed other decades with major financial panics, such as in 1907 and 1893.

While the overall market trend has been a steady march upward, the last decade is a reminder that stocks can decline over long periods of time.
To some degree these statistics are a quirk of the calendar, based on when the 10-year period starts and finishes. The 10-year periods ending in 1937 and 1938 were worse than the most recent calendar decade because they capture the full effect of stocks hitting their peak in 1929 and the October crash of that year.

From 2000 through November 2009, investors would have been far better off owning bonds, which posted gains ranging from 5.6% to more than 8% depending on the sector, according to Ibbotson. Gold was the best-performing asset, up 15% a year this decade after losing 3% each year during the 1990s.

This past decade looks even worse when the impact of inflation is considered.

Since the end of 1999, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has lost an average of 3.3% a year on an inflation-adjusted basis, compared with a 1.8% average annual gain during the 1930s when deflation afflicted the economy.

Even the 1970s, when a bear market was coupled with inflation, wasn't as bad as the most recent period. The S&P 500 lost 1.4% after inflation during that decade.

That is especially disappointing news for investors, considering that a key goal of investing in stocks is to increase money faster than inflation.

For investors counting on stocks for retirement plans, the most recent decade means many have fallen behind retirement goals. Many financial plans assume a 10% annual return for stocks over the long term, but over the last 20 years, the S&P 500 is registering 8.2% annual gains.

Should stocks average 10% a year for the next decade, that would lift the 30-year average return to only 8.8%.

It is even worse news for those who started investing in 2000; a 10% return a year would get them up to only 4.4% a year.

There were ways to make money in U.S. stocks during the last decade. But the returns paled in comparison with those posted in the 1990s.

Of the 30 stocks today that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average, only 13 are up since the end of 1999, and just two, Caterpillar Inc. and United Technologies Corp., doubled over the 10-year span.

So what went wrong for the U.S. stock market?

For starters, it turned out that the old rules of valuation matter.

"We came into this decade horribly overpriced" said Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of money managers GMO LLC.

In late 1999, the stocks in the S&P 500 were trading at about an all-time high of 44 times earnings, based on Yale professor Robert Shiller's measure, which tracks prices compared with 10-year earnings and adjusts for inflation. That compares with a long-run average of about 16.

Buying at those kinds of values, "you'd better believe you're going to get dismal returns for a considerable chunk of time," said Mr. Grantham, whose firm predicted 10 years ago that the S&P 500 likely would lose nearly 2% a year in the 10 years through 2009.

Despite the woeful returns this decade, stocks today aren't a steal. The S&P is trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 20 on Mr. Shiller's measure.

Mr. Grantham thinks U.S. large-cap stocks are about 30% overpriced, which means returns should be about 30% less than their long-term average for the next seven years. That means returns of just 1.6% a year before adding in inflation.

Another hurdle for the stock market has been the decline in dividends that began in the late 1980s.
Over the long term, dividends have played an important role in helping stocks achieve a 9.5% average annual return since 1926. But since that year, the average yield on S&P 500 stocks was roughly 4%. This decade it has averaged about 1.8%.

That difference doesn't sound like much but you've got to make it up through price appreciation.

Unless dividends rise back toward their long-term averages, investors may need to lower expectations. Rather than the nearly 10% a year that has been the historical average, stocks may be good for only about 7%.

From 2000 through November 2009, investors would have been far better off owning bonds, which posted gains ranging from 5.6% to more than 8% depending on the sector, according to Ibbotson. Gold was the best-performing asset, up 15% a year this decade after losing 3% each year during the 1990s. from WSJ, 12/21/09

Funny clip from Badder Santa

Funny clip from Badder Santa, should have added this to our Christmas newsletter

Click on link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVRmXc8PPqk

What's Old Is New: Vinyl Records Are Back

At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

J&R Music, at 23 Park Row southeast of City Hall Park, now carries 21 different turntables at prices ranging from $85 to $875. Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.

Rachelle Friedman, the co-owner of J&R, said the store is selling more vinyl and turntables than it has in at least a decade, fueled largely by growing demand from members of the iPod generation.

“It’s all these kids that are really ramping up their vinyl collections,” Ms. Friedman said. “New customers are discovering the quality of the sound. They’re discovering liner notes and graphics.” In many instances, the vinyl album of today is thicker and sounds better than those during vinyl’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sales of vinyl albums have been climbing steadily for several years, tromping on the notion that the rebound was just a fad. Through late November, more than 2.1 million vinyl records had been sold in 2009, an increase of more than 35 percent in a year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That total, though it represents less than 1 percent of all album sales, including CDs and digital downloads, is the highest for vinyl records in any year since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Sales of CDs, meanwhile, have been falling fast, displaced by the downloading of digital files of songs from services like iTunes. Sales of albums on CD, which generally cost half as much as their vinyl counterparts, have dropped almost 20 percent this year, according to Nielsen.

With overall sales down, numerous big music-store chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and HMV have pulled out of Manhattan, leaving music sales largely to online merchants and the few small, die-hard record shops scattered about Greenwich Village and Brooklyn.

One exception has been Best Buy, a national electronics chain that recently opened its sixth store in Manhattan. A year ago, the chain started stocking vinyl albums in about 50 of its stores, including one on the Upper East Side. Their presence, with their alluring cover art, still has the power to stun.

“Some individuals come into our store and they stop in their tracks,” said Andre Sam, a sales representative at Best Buy’s store on East 86th Street. “They don’t expect to see this. You can see them reminiscing as they start looking at the album covers.”

Last week, that store and a new Best Buy on Union Square installed departments, dubbed Club Beats, where customers can test out turntables and other equipment that DJs use to mix music. “They can spin, they can mix, they can scratch, whatever they want to do,” Mr. Sam said.

He suggested that video games deserved some credit for the resurgence of interest in vinyl albums and turntables. Popular games like Guitar Hero and Rockband have introduced young customers to classic rock and pop artists like the Beatles and Metallica, while DJ Hero has inspired some to try their hands at mixing music for real.

Not all of the turntables in these stores are designed to do anything so old-school as spinning actual records. A few models are still made for that purpose, many of them with cables that connect to computers so that the music can be transferred to portable devices. But others simply allow their users to simulate the manipulation of records while the songs they are mixing are being fed from iPods.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”

Driven to Distraction: Industry Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks

This is a timeline about the history of selling what was called the car phone or mobile phone -- and warnings unheeded about distraction while driving.

Martin Cooper (shown here) who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving.

Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones.

“There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”

It was the early 1960s, a timeline is below:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/07/technology/07distracted-timeline.html

Long before cellphones became common, industry pioneers were aware of the risks of multitasking behind the wheel. Their hunches have been validated by many scientific studies showing the dangers of talking while driving and, more recently, of texting.

Despite the mounting evidence, the industry built itself into a $150 billion business in the United States largely by winning over a crucial customer: the driver.

For years, it has marketed the virtues of cellphones to drivers. Indeed, the industry originally called them car phones and extolled them as useful status symbols in ads, like one from 1984 showing an executive behind the wheel that asked: “Can your secretary take dictation at 55 MPH?”

“That was the business,” said Kevin Roe, a telecommunications industry analyst since 1993. Wireless companies “designed everything to keep people talking in their cars.”

They succeeded. The federal government estimated in 2007 that 11 percent of drivers were talking on their phones at any given time. But that success has come at a cost. Researchers at Harvard have estimated that, even seven years ago, drivers using cellphones were causing 2,600 fatal crashes a year in the United States and 570,000 accidents that resulted in a range of injuries, from minor to serious.

And studies show that a driver talking on a cellphone is four times likelier to crash and that using a hands-free device does not eliminate the risk.

The industry notes that the mobile device has moved well beyond its origins as a car phone and argues that research on the dangers of distracted driving is inconclusive, even as wireless companies have spent millions on campaigns to educate drivers.

But the industry’s chief spokesman, Steve Largent, acknowledged in recent interviews that those efforts have fallen short. He said the companies plan to do more, particularly in light of the explosion of text messaging, which they say poses a profoundly serious risk.

The CTIA, the industry’s trade group, supports legislation banning texting while driving. It has also changed its stance on legislation to ban talking on phones while driving — for years, it opposed such laws; now it is neutral.

“This was never something we anticipated,” said Mr. Largent, head of the CTIA, adding that distracted driving is a growing threat now that more than 90 percent of Americans have cellphones. “The reality of distracted driving has become more apparent to all of us.”

Critics of the industry argue that its education efforts over the years provided a weak counterbalance to its encouragement of cellphone use by drivers and to its efforts to fight regulations banning the use of cellphones while driving, or at least requiring drivers to use hands-free devices.

The critics — including safety advocates, researchers and families of crash victims — say the industry should do more, by placing overt warnings on the packaging and screens of cellphones.

The critics also say that even as the industry continues to pay lip service to the risks, companies are marketing a new generation of technology, like GPS applications for smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry, and wireless Internet access for cars. A description of one new application for the iPhone reads, “Maps on iPhone shows you live traffic information, indicating traffic speed along your route in easy-to-read green, red and yellow highlights.”

Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group, was invited last month to speak about distracted driving by the Federal Communications Commission. He told the audience that the cellphone industry was selling a product consumers can use dangerously — without properly warning them or providing safeguards.

He added: “The only questions are: what did they know, and when did they know it?”

Dawn of the Car Phone

On Oct. 13, 1983, hundreds of people, including reporters, photographers and TV crews, gathered at Soldier Field in Chicago for a special event.

The big draw? A cellphone call.

An executive from Ameritech, the regional phone company that sponsored the event, sat in the driver’s seat of a Chrysler convertible and phoned a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, who was living in Germany.

That call signified the introduction of mass-market commercial cellphone service, the equivalent of a moon shot for the telecommunications industry.

“The whole idea of placing a call from anywhere — without wires — it was amazing,” said Joe Colson, then a department head at Bell Labs, the prominent research arm of the nation’s telephone giants, who was part of the crowd.

Their work capped an effort that began decades earlier with radio telephones.

On its Web site today, AT&T notes that the first mobile telephone call, using that early radio technology, took place in 1946. An accompanying picture shows a trucker, phone to his ear. “A trucker rolls with one of the first mobile phones,” the caption says.

But because of the expense and limits of that radio technology, wireless phones were used early on mostly by truckers and other professional drivers. In the 1960s, AT&T says, New York City had 2,000 customers with these phones, and they typically waited 30 minutes for a call to go through.

Early innovators, like Mr. Colson, saw new possibilities with the advent of smaller computer chips and batteries, as well as advances in wireless technology to simultaneously carry millions of conversations.

In ads, the industry promoted car phones as must-have accessories for the elite. In addition, it made sense to market to business people, who could justify the cost of cellphones as a way to make commuting time more productive.

In August 1987, an ad in The New York Times for Metro One, a mobile service provider, showed a man talking on a cellphone while driving a sports car with a surfboard in the back. The ad read: “You can reach all those important clients and still beat the traffic.”

A television commercial for Centel, an early cellphone provider that merged with Sprint, shows a handsome businessman leaving the city in his Jeep while talking on his phone. His wife is on the other end, using her own portable phone, standing in a speedboat.

The marketing paid off. Cellphones, including portable models with brick-size batteries, became status symbols, used by Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” (The first phones, like the one at Soldier Field, cost about $2,800, with installation — around $6,000 in today’s dollars.)

“It was like carrying around a Prada bag,” said Ray DeRenzo, now chief marketing officer for MobiTV, a TV service for phones, who in 1986 worked at Pacific Telesis.

In the late 1980s, one company even succeeded in selling tens of thousands of a $16 replica of a car phone called the “Cellular Phoney.” The company motto: “It’s not what you own, it’s what people think you own.”

In late 1985, wireless companies had 340,000 customers. Only 10 years later, as the price of phones fell sharply, there were almost 34 million.

The industry poured profits back into expanding networks. In just 10 years, the number of cell sites rose to 68,000 in 1995 from 913. The industry planted many cell sites near highways, partly because it was easier than persuading homeowners to put them in neighborhoods, and drivers were crucial customers.

Mr. Roe, the longtime industry analyst, estimates that in the 1980s and early ’90s, wireless companies got 75 percent or more of their revenue from drivers, a figure that fell below 50 percent by the mid-’90s and is now below 25 percent (the cellphone industry says it does not break out such figures).

In the late 1980s, the market remained heavily focused on drivers, even though the original car phones gave way to slimmer and less expensive portable cellphones.

Well into the 1990s, Mr. Roe said, wireless companies focused on three questions: “Can we cover the highways, do we have enough capacity to handle all the people on the highways, and is the signal strong enough?”

Mr. Colson, the engineer, said he was astonished by the popularity of cellphones, but he and others in the industry rarely paused to wonder about risks. “Driver distraction?” he said. “I mean, come on.”

Troubling Studies

Mr. Cooper, now 80, and commonly referred to as the father of the cellphone for his early work at Motorola, sensed early on that the technology had risks.

“I’d pass by the exit I was supposed to take because I was talking on the phone,” he said. Thinking back, he said he was “absolutely” aware of potential dangers but did not think roads would become filled with distracted drivers.

Other early innovators of cellphones said they felt nagging concerns. Bob Lucky, an executive director at Bell Labs from 1982-92, said he knew that drivers talking on cellphones were not focused fully on the road. But he did not think much about it or discuss it and supposed others did not, either, given the industry’s booming fortunes.

“If you’re an engineer, you don’t want to outlaw the great technology you’ve been working on,” said Mr. Lucky, now 73. “If you’re a marketing person, you don’t want to outlaw the thing you’ve been trying to sell. If you’re a C.E.O., you don’t want to outlaw the thing that’s been making a lot of money.”

Revenue for wireless service providers was soaring — to $16 billion in 1995 from $354 million in 1985. The industry had revenue of $148 billion in 2008.

One researcher who spoke up about his concerns was quickly shut down. In 1990, David Strayer, a junior researcher at GTE, which later became part of Verizon, noticed more drivers who seemed to be distracted by their phones, and it scared him. He asked a supervisor if the company should research the risks.

“Why would we want to know that?” Mr. Strayer recalled being told. He said the message was clear: “Learning about distraction would not be very helpful to the overall business model.”

Outside the industry, others started raising red flags. In 1984, the AAA urged drivers to park before using their phones. In 1991, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety financed a laboratory study that found that drivers talking on cellphones had difficulty responding to challenging situations.

In 1997, the Canadian Ministry of Health and other groups helped finance research to determine whether drivers distracted by cellphones were more likely to crash. The researchers’ answer: a resounding yes.

They found that drivers using cellphones were four times likelier to get into accidents than drivers who were focused entirely on the road.

“This relative risk is similar to the hazard associated with driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit,” the researchers wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. They said hands-free devices were no safer than hand-held phones because of the distraction that comes from focusing on a conversation, not the road.

In subsequent years, dozens of researchers also determined that phone use by drivers divides attention, slows reaction time and increases the risks of crashing. Their ranks included Mr. Strayer, who left GTE for academia to research distracted driving.

Using a driving simulator at the University of Utah, he showed that drivers distracted by calls miss otherwise obvious sights along a virtual highway and that they face a four times greater crash risk, echoing other studies’ findings.

The research was not easy for the industry to ignore, particularly given that a wireless company, AT&T, had helped pay for a widely publicized study.

AT&T paid Harvard researchers to study the economic value created by drivers using cellphones. In 2000, the researchers put that value at $43 billion. But in late 2002, based on an update to the findings, it was those researchers who estimated that distracted drivers using phones also caused 2,600 deaths each year and 570,000 accidents that caused injuries.

Similar findings piled up. In 2005, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a bibliography of more than 150 scientific papers from the previous eight years about the dangers of cellphone use by drivers.

“It’s been a very consistent picture,” said Chris Monk, a researcher at the agency. “Frankly, I get a little annoyed that we continue to see studies that investigate the effects of cellphone use on driving, because they all show the same thing, whether you’re talking hands-free or not.”

Mixed Messages

Critics say the wireless carriers have sent mixed messages about the risks posed by drivers using cellphones.

The industry has resisted legislation to regulate cellphone use and, critics say, it has not warned drivers about dialing and talking as forcefully as it now warns them about texting.

Cellphone companies point out that for a decade they have run numerous public service ads, like AT&T’s 2001 “Be Sensible” campaign, telling customers not to talk while driving through bad weather or heavy traffic. On its Web site, Verizon Wireless cites government recommendations that the safest course is to stay off the phone while driving.

The CTIA ran its first distracted-driving campaign in 2000, with the tagline: “With Wireless, Safety Is Your Most Important Call.” Its latest slogan: “On the Road, Off the Phone.”

On its Web site, the CTIA offers safety tips including, “Do not engage in stressful or emotional conversations that might divert your attention from the road” and “Use a hands-free device for convenience and comfort.”

Those warnings do not acknowledge the many studies that show that hands-free devices do not eliminate risks. The industry says the research is inconclusive. One widely cited study, for example, shows that hands-free devices do limit the risk of talking while driving. However, that study, by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, also showed that the act of dialing while driving poses serious risks.

Cellphone industry leaders also say studies have not shown a link between cellphone use and crashes. But little data exists on the number of crashes caused by drivers using cellphones because police either do not collect such data or started doing so only recently.

The industry says the number of reported accidents fell to six million in 2007 from 6.7 million a decade earlier — at the very time cellphone use has soared. Its critics say that the drop reflects the many safety improvements to vehicles and roads and that, besides, fatality rates have stayed fairly constant.

Ultimately, the industry has been motivated to educate customers because of good corporate citizenship, not because of research, said Mr. Largent, the head of the CTIA. “We don’t like to see our devices used in a way that puts drivers at risk,” he said.

The most aggressive education effort has come in recent months, focused on texting. “Texting or mobile device usage in a car is an issue on par with drunk driving itself,” said Daryl Evans, a vice president at AT&T, which has begun adding a sticker that reads “don’t text and drive” to the screens of nearly all new phones.

Verizon Wireless has put up billboards and is running television and radio spots. Last month, Sprint Nextel put out a news release urging customers not to text and drive and urging employees to agree not to do so. The CTIA has started a public service campaign to warn teenagers.

But why, critics ask, does the industry accept researchers’ findings on the dangers of texting when it found their studies lacking on the dangers of dialing or talking on the phone while driving?

“There’s probably little difference between making a phone call and texting,” Mr. Largent conceded. “If you have to take your eyes off the road, it can’t be a good thing.”

But he said the industry is not taking a position on whether states should ban dialing or talking while driving. “We’re not saying anything about that,” he said. “We’re going to let our consumers make their voices heard.”

For critics, it adds up to an effort by the industry over the years to appear responsible without hurting its core business. The companies’ warnings, critics argue, have not been loud enough to register (Over the last decade, the percentage of drivers talking on the phone at any given time has doubled, the government estimated).

“The landfill-sized accumulation of studies about the dangers of using these devices while driving should have prompted a much more engaged posture on the part of the industry to be leaders to attempt to rein in this behavior,” said James E. Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers.

Other critics go further. “The real message was: continue to use our product,” said Mr. Ditlow, from the Center for Auto Safety.

He and others say a legislative battle in California shows that the industry’s actions speak louder than its words.

The Fight for California

“I am at an absolute loss,” Joe Simitian said, standing at the podium, facing fellow members of a California Assembly subcommittee.

It was April 23, 2001, the day Mr. Simitian, Democrat of Palo Alto, submitted legislation to require California drivers to use hands-free devices.

Mr. Simitian could not understand why major cellphone companies opposed his legislation, even though their educational materials urged drivers to use hands-free devices.

He cited such materials published by AT&T, Cingular and Sprint — companies that opposed the bill. “When using your Sprint PCS phone in the car, focus on driving, not talking, and use your hands-free kit,” Mr. Simitian said, reading from Sprint’s own materials. “Failure to follow these instructions may lead to serious personal injury and possibly property damage.”

Mr. Simitian, who seized on the issue after seeing dangerous behavior on the roadways, told his colleagues the legislation merely sought to codify “the very practices this industry has been promoting for the last several years.”

Verizon Wireless was the first wireless company to testify. Breaking with the other major companies, as it often has on this issue, it supported Mr. Simitian. Its representative called the Simitian legislation necessary because education was not enough.

Representatives from AT&T, Sprint and Cingular said their education efforts were working. Their lobbyists added other concerns: research did not show cellphone use as a major cause of accidents; wireless phones should not be singled out from other kinds of distractions like eating; and mobile phones were essential emergency tools.

The representative from AT&T said the legislation did not adequately define “hands-free device.”

Mr. Simitian saw a contradiction. “These are the folks who wrote the brochure and now tell us they don’t know what a hands-free device is,” he said.

The legislation did not make it out of committee, a result Mr. Simitian attributed to heavy company lobbying. In each of the next five years, major wireless companies opposed the same proposal in California, saying education was sufficient.

Companies also said they were looking out for consumers. They argued, for instance, that a hands-free law would provide an excuse for police officers to pull over minority drivers. There is “the very real possibility it will lead to unfair and discriminatory consequences,” Sprint Nextel wrote in a letter opposing the 2006 bill.

But that version passed and the law took effect in 2008.

The industry’s position has since changed. In a recent interview, Mr. Largent conceded that the opposition in California was “a mistake.”

“At the time, we were all operating on the science that was before us and the evidence we had,” he said.

Mr. Simitian, now a state senator, finds that position “disingenuous.”

“The science at the time was the science that caused them to publish brochures telling people to use hands-free devices,” he said.

And Mr. Simitian says the industry had ample evidence at the time that its education efforts were not working.

Mr. Largent conceded recently that the industry’s education efforts were inadequate. He added that if people say, “ ‘That’s not your position 10 years ago,’ I say, ‘You’re right.’ This industry continues to evolve. We think it’s evolving in the right direction.”

“The bottom line is safety. That’s our position.”

The Next Wave

The industry is evolving. It focuses less on marketing the car phone. But some ads promote a new generation of devices for cars.

A recent Sprint television ad shows a driver and four passengers in a car. The ad is for a mobile wireless service that allows people to use the Internet not just on phones but also computers. “Right now, five co-workers are working from the road using a ‘Mi-Fi,’ a mobile hotspot,” the voiceover says. One person is checking e-mail, another is streaming music, a third is using Mapquest and two are downloading and revising a presentation, the voice says.

Sprint says that despite what the voiceover says, not all five co-workers are actually working. “Throughout this television commercial, the driver has both hands on the wheel. He is not engaging in any unsafe behavior and is focused on driving,” Sprint says. The company also says the product’s instructions warn about distracted driving.

And the newest phones let people do many tasks at once. A recent ad in People magazine for the Nuvifone, sold by AT&T, shows a woman, apparently in the lawn-ornament business, explaining how she got directions from her phone while making a work call.

“I just tapped the address and followed spoken, turn-by-turn directions right to the front door,” it reads. “And I was able to take the call about pink palm trees — while still navigating.”

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said safety is paramount. “Your first priority in the car is driving safely,” he said. The marketing for the Nuvifone, he added, is “not intended to override our position.”

By MATT RICHTEL, New York Times