Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed

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Long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, cable guys (and gals) these days often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science. That kind of training is now required — along with a new dress code for some, calling for button-down dress shirts and slacks — as cable companies and their telephone rivals try to lure customers and increase revenue with a suite of products like cloud-based cable boxes and iPad apps that let subscribers set recording times remotely.

All that means added pressure for installers and new requirements for a job that traditionally appealed to high-school graduates looking for reliable blue-collar work.

“Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,” said Paul Holloway, an area manager based in Denton, Tex., and a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. “These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.”

Robert Kolb, a 33-year-old installation and service supervisor for Comcast’s Xfinity television, phone and Internet service, has a one-year certification in network engineering. He wore pressed slacks and a sporty fleece jacket on an Internet upgrade job in the Philadelphia suburbs recently, where he worked on a company-issued MacBook laptop and had a waterproof hand-held computer that could withstand a five-foot drop.

He was checking the family’s existing Internet service, which had been spotty, strained by the home’s six computers and multiple iPhones.

“My genius husband had the router in the basement,” joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters. Mr. Kolb helped Mrs. Hassinger set up her digital cable box while his colleague, Byron Smith, installed a “wireless gateway,” transforming an unused stairwell into a control room for the modem and router that can handle at least 24 devices at 22 megabits per second.

Mr. Kolb sighed slightly as the job was almost complete. “What I learned yesterday could be outdated tomgorrow,” he said.

To make sure he stays up to date, Comcast requires him and other installers to take classes at an in-house training facility known as Comcast University.

The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies competing in an increasingly Internet-based marketplace. Today, more than 90 percent of the 115.9 million homes with televisions in the United States subscribe to basic cable, either from a cable operator or a satellite or phone company, according to Nielsen.

The nearly saturated marketplace means growth for cable companies must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. In 2011 Comcast introduced 16 products, more than the previous two years combined. Time Warner Cable, which used to offer one or two models of cable boxes, now has 20 models.

“We think the consumer wants a state-of-the-art experience,” Brian L. Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and chief executive said, as he showed off the company’s forthcoming partly cloud-based cable box with the internal code name of Xcalibur. Remote control in hand he added: “We have to factor in Androids, iPhones, tablets and any other device in your life.”

All this trickles down to the cable technician. “Even though we get training, we have to learn as we go,” said Wing Lee, a 32-year-old foreman at Time Warner Cable. He has a degree from New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and has reached the company’s highest ranking for technology certification.

The adjustment to new technology doesn’t come as naturally for other longtime employees. “A lot of the old-timers have a hard time keeping up,” Mr. Lee said as he drove to a job at a housing project in Brooklyn.

For years, as he plugged in the family lifeline known as the cable box, the installer held a farcical place in popular culture. In the 1996 comedy “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey poked fun at the job as a manipulative installer. The cable guy on “The Simpsons” gives Homer illegal service, then breaks into the family home to sell them home security.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An article on Friday about the enhanced stature of cable installers misstated the speed of the Internet service that was set up in the home of a Comcast customer. It is 22 megabits per second, not megabytes.

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Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone

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Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Last week, I drove to Pacifica, a beach community just south of San Francisco, where I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?

What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.

Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”

Hence my New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.

I made this resolution out of a sense that I habitually reached for the iPhone even when I really didn’t need to, when I might have just enjoyed an experience, like the sunset, without any technology. And after talking to people who do research on subjects like this, I realized that there were some good reasons to give up a little tech.

For example, I was worried that if I did not capture that beautiful sunset and stuff it into my phone, I’d forget it.

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Sch?nberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

Constantly interacting with our mobile devices has other drawbacks too. There are more pictures in my iPhone of that 45-minute hike at Pacifica than most families would have taken on a two-week vacation before the advent of digital cameras.

As a result, I had no time to daydream on that hike, and daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.

“Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has focused his research on daydreaming, put it this way: “Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”

I don’t intend to give up my technology entirely, but I want to find a better balance. For me, it’s that 30 minutes a day for daydreaming.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and tell my Twitter followers about my New Year’s resolution.

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The Lives They Lived: Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941

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Novelties: Wordnik’s Online Dictionary: No Arbiters, Please

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Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.

No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.

“We don’t pre-select and pre-prune,” she said. “We show you what’s out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not.”

At one time, she was the head of the pruners, as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is also an author and columnist. (She wrote “On Language” columns for The New York Times as a substitute for William Safire.)

But Ms. McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. “Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way,” she said. “You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.”

When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term, she said.

“Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete,” she said. “Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”

To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik’s vice president for engineering. “But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.”

Where does all this text come from? “You’d be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web,” he said.

Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries, said William Kretzschmar, a professor at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Dialect Society. He provides American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary.

“It takes time for words to get into the more formal, published dictionaries,” he said. “Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now.”

Wordnik, which has raised $12.8 million in venture financing, plans to use its vast database of words and word associations at the site and in many business partnerships to be announced this year, said Joe Hyrkin, the president and C.E.O.

The products will be similar to recommendation engines, but more powerful, he said. If you like a particular book, for example, Wordnik can recommend a similar one based on its understanding of words used to describe the book, he said.

“We’re not just using tags and descriptors,” he said. “Our system understands and identifies matches at a concept level.”

The company is already providing many other word-based services, including one used on the Web site of The Times to define words in articles. Wordnik is also providing a financial glossary for SmartMoney.com.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a?linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who talks about language on “Fresh Air,” the NPR program, appreciates Wordnik’s breadth. “There’s a lot of useful information here,” he said. (He has also written commentaries on language for The Times.)

But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries.

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy,” he said. “Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

To illustrate his point, he noted flaws in a number of Wordnik’s definitions. The first definition of “davenport,” for instance, in three of the?fives?sources used by Wordnik is?a kind of small writing desk. “It hasn’t meant that since Grandma was a girl,” he said.

People use a dictionary to find out what is correct, and what is incorrect, he said. “If I were a journalist looking to see if a word was being used correctly,” he said, “I wouldn’t put my eggs in the Wordnik basket.”

Mr. Tam of Wordnik said the site was constantly improving.

“We discover these words with algorithms, but they are never perfect,” he said. “We constantly have to make them better.”

WORDNIK and other new linguistic databases have come about largely because of the vast body of text on the Internet and improved algorithms for searching it, said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We now have an archived shadow universe that contains almost everything we’ve written — trillions of pages of text of published books, and now, broadcast archives as well,” he said.

Readers could always tap this reservoir by looking up examples of new words in Google Books or Google News. “But what Wordnik is giving you is not as raw as a Google search of examples,” he said, “because Wordnik sorts and clusters the examples into different senses of the word.”

Another innovative database is at Brigham Young University, where Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics, has amassed a collection, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011, containing millions of words of running text from articles, transcripts of conversations, and other sources. The collection, which indexes 425 million words of text — 1,000 may be from a newspaper article, for example — has been built over the last three years. It shows how often a word is used, and the types of discourse in which it is found, be it conversational speech or academic prose.

The collection also lets users see words found near a new word. “If you want to see how a word is used and what it means, the best way is to look at words nearby,” Dr. Davies said. The words are called collocates. To look up collocates of “fantasy,” for example, see http://bit.ly/rImCuH.

Dictionary builders have come a long way since the days of Johnson and Webster, said Dr. Kretzschmar at the University of Georgia. “But we have computers,” he said. “We can manage this vast network of words online and appreciate it in ways that Johnson and Webster never could.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of Wordnik’s chief executive. He is Joe Hyrkin, not Joel.

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Bits Blog: Questions About Motives Behind Stratfor Hack

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When hackers used the Christmas holiday to attack Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex., they initially said they were aiming to steal the credit card numbers of its clients and use them to make $1 million in donations to charity.

But by Tuesday, it was unclear who was actually behind the attack, and whether the real goal was to play Robin Hood or release a trove of Stratfor e-mail correspondence.

On Saturday, hackers claiming to be members of the collective known as Anonymous defaced the Web site of Stratfor, which puts out a newsletter on security and intelligence issues, and posted a file online that they claimed was the organization’s confidential client list, along with credit card details, passwords and home addresses for those clients. The clients were affiliated with organizations including Bank of America, the Defense Department, Doctors Without Borders, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

The hackers claimed to have obtained 2.7 million e-mails from Stratfor’s servers, a number they later increased to 3.3 million. They said they were able to obtain the e-mail and credit card details because Stratfor had failed to encrypt its data — a basic first step in data protection.

IdentityFinder, a data protection software maker, found that hackers had released 47,680 unique e-mail addresses and 50,277 unique credit card numbers — of which 9,651 were not yet expired. Of the 44,188 encrypted passwords, IdentityFinder said 50 percent could be easily cracked.

Stratfor has not clarified whether its data was encrypted, and did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But on Sunday, with its Web site still down, it took to Facebook to respond to the attack. There it said that the published list of “private clients” was “merely a list of some of the members that have purchased our publications and does not comprise a list of individuals or entities that have a relationship with Stratfor beyond their purchase of our subscription based publications.”

By then, hackers had already begun posting receipts online that it said were for donations made with Stratfor subscribers’ stolen credit card details to organizations like the Red Cross and CARE.

In an interview on Monday, a Red Cross spokeswoman, Laura Howe, said that because her organization sees an uptick in giving around the holidays, it was difficult to ascertain how much of its weekend donations online were related to the Stratfor breach.

“We’re aware of the issue and our online giving team is looking into it,” Ms. Howe said. “If someone believes an unauthorized charge has been made, they need to contact their credit card company and we will work with the credit card companies on refunding the donation.”

Contacted Monday, Brian Feagans, a CARE spokesman, said he had not heard about the Stratfor breach. But on Tuesday he issued this statement: “We are looking into this matter and will work with any Stratfor hacking victims who did not intend to give to CARE to assure they get reimbursed.”

Computer security experts began weighing in on Stratfor’s breach Monday. Mikko Hypponen, an influential security expert, pointed out in a blog post that the hack was likely to do charities more harm than good. “When credit card owners see unauthorized charges on their cards, they report them to their bank or credit card company. Credit card companies will do a charge back to the charities, which will have to return the money,” Mr. Hypponen wrote. “In some cases, charities could be hit with penalties. At the very least, they will lose time and money in handling the charge backs.”

In a statement posted online on Monday, Barrett Brown, an Anonymous spokesman, said that the goal of the Stratfor attack was not to donate money to charities.

“Rather, the operation was pursued in order to obtain the 2.7 million e-mails that exist on the firm’s servers,” Mr. Brown wrote in a post on the Web site Pastebin. “This wealth of data includes correspondence with untold thousands of contacts who have spoken to Stratfor’s employees off the record over more than a decade.”

But by Tuesday, hackers had released only limited e-mail correspondence. They posted one e-mail from Stratfor’s chief executive, George Friedman, to a Stratfor senior programmer, thanking him for his help in promoting Mr. Friedman’s recent book.

There were also questions as to whether the Stratfor attack was really the work of Anonymous. On Sunday, someone claiming to represent Anonymous posted a message on Pastebin denying responsibility for the attack: “The Stratfor hack is definitely not the work of Anonymous.”

The confusion escalated Monday night when a separate note on Pastebin claimed that the authors of the first post were Stratfor employees and that the post “claiming the Stratfor hack is not the work of Anonymous is not the work of Anonymous.”

“With these sorts of operations, there will always be objections from one quarter or another that it’s not really an Anonymous op,” Mr. Brown said in an e-mail on Monday. He said that the denial message had been posted by someone “who has a history of putting up such things under false pretenses.”

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Op-Ed Columnist: A Time to Tune Out

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The agreement for now only affects about 1,150 of Volkswagen’s more than 190,000 workers in Germany, but it’s a start in encouraging employees to switch off, curb the twitchy reflex to check e-mail every couple of minutes, and take a look out at things — like family and the big wide world — without the distraction of a blinking red light.

Now I know we’re all supposed to be grown-ups and switching off should be a simple enough decision, but the fact is addictions to BlackBerries and other hand-held devices are powerful and nobody expects addicts to self-administer the right medicine without some help. The Volkswagen decision reflects growing evidence of stress-related burnout tied to employees’ inability to separate their working and private lives now that developed societies live in a 24/7 paroxysm of connection.

Employee burnout has become an issue in socially conscious Germany — the object of a Spiegel cover story following the resignation in September of a prominent Bundesliga soccer coach, Ralf Rangnick of Schalke, who complained of exhaustion. A Volkswagen spokesman in Wolfsburg told Bloomberg News the company had to balance the benefits of round-the-clock access to staff with protecting their private lives.

Inside those German private lives, I’d wager, couples are experiencing the now near-universal irritation of finding conversations interrupted by a familiar glance toward the little screen, or conversations deadened by the state of near-permanent distraction from their immediate surroundings in which people live. Device-related marital rows must now be running close to back-seat driving and how to raise the kids as the leading cause of domestic discord.

Connectivity aids productivity. It can also be counterproductive by generating that contemporary state of anxiety in which focus on any activity is interrupted by the irresistible urge to check e-mail or texts; whose absence can in turn provoke the compounded anxiety of feeling unloved or unwanted just because the in-box is empty for a nanosecond; whose onset can in turn induce the super-aggravated anxiety that is linked to low self-esteem and poor performance.

Inhabiting one place — that is to be fully absorbed by and focused on one’s surroundings rather than living in some diffuse cyberlocation composed of the different strands of a device-driven existence — is a fast-dwindling ability. This in turn generates a paradox: People have never traveled as much but at the same time been less able to appreciate the difference between here and there.

To be permanently switched on is also to switch off to what takes time to be seen. A lot of good ideas, as well as some of life’s deeper satisfactions, can get lost that way.

Companies are beginning to perceive these costs. Volkswagen is not alone in its move, which does not affect senior management or employees’ ability to make calls. Thierry Breton, the chief executive of Atos, the French information technology services giant, has said workers are wasting hours of their lives on internal messages at home and work. He plans to ban internal e-mail altogether from 2014. A survey found Atos’s 80,000 employees were receiving an average of 100 internal e-mails a day of which only 15 percent were of any use.

Henkel, the manufacturer of Persil detergent, declared an e-mail “amnesty” between Christmas and New Year, saying mail should only be sent in an emergency.

One interesting recent case of employee burnout came at the very top, with the stress-induced absence for a couple of months of António Horta-Osório, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank. The Portuguese banker, who will return to work Jan. 9, came after he was afflicted with what Sir Win Bischoff, the Lloyds chairman, called an “inability to switch off.”

Inability to switch off (ITSO) is a modern curse.

Horta-Osório has said he made the decision after not sleeping for five days in late October and realizing that there was, according to his doctor, such a thing as “getting close to the end of your battery.” He has now been pronounced fit by the Lloyds board but has said he will change his work habits, presumably in ways that will lower ITSO risks.

I’ve just returned to work after a few days with my 90-year-old father in Scotland. He lives without any access to e-mail or hand-held devices. It was interesting observing the effects of this vacuum on my teenage children, suddenly unable to center their lives around their laptops (and the screen-lowering gesture that seems to accompany the entry of an adult). They started to read voraciously. They were communicative. They got up earlier. To be fair, they also had a Dad with them who was not device distracted.

It’s the start of a new year, a time for resolutions. To each his own, but I know this: Nobody will ever lie on his or her deathbed and say: “I should have kept my device on longer.”

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

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Online Retailers Home In on a New Demographic: The Drunken Consumer

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“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany Whitten, of Dayton, Ohio, whose most recent tipsy purchase made on her smartphone — a phone cover — arrived from Amazon much to her surprise. “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”

Shopping under the influence has long benefited high-end specialty retailers — witness the wine-and-cheese parties that are a staple of galleries and boutiques. Now the popularity of Internet sales has opened alcohol-induced purchases to the masses, including people like Ms. Whitten, who works in shipping and receiving and spent just $5 on the cat-shaped phone cover.

Chris Tansey, an accountant in Australia, went shopping online after drinking late one night (to be precise, it was well into the morning). By the end of the session, he had bought a $10,000 motorcycle tour of New Zealand.

“The hang-ups of spending your hard-earned cash are so far removed from your life when you’ve had a bottle of wine,” Mr. Tansey said in an e-mail. The New Zealand trip was terrific, he said. But a pair of $3 sunglasses on eBay “turned out to be horrible fakes, with $17 of postage that I obviously didn’t see with beer goggles.”

Online retailers, of course, can never be sure whether customers are inebriated when they tap the “checkout” icon. One comparison-shopping site, Kelkoo, said almost half the people it surveyed in Britain, where it is based, had shopped online after drinking.

But while reliable data is hard to come by, retailers say they have their suspicions based on anecdotal evidence and traffic patterns on their Web sites — and some are adjusting their promotions accordingly.

“Post-bar, inhibitions can be impacted, and that can cause shopping, and hopefully healthy impulse buying,” said Andy Page, the president of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer that is adding more sales starting at 9 p.m. to respond to high traffic then — perhaps some of it by shoppers under the influence.

On eBay, the busiest time of day is from 6:30 to 10:30 in each time zone. Asked if drinking might be a factor, Steve Yankovich, vice president for mobile for eBay, said, “Absolutely.” He added: “I mean, if you think about what most people do when they get home from work in the evening, it’s decompression time. The consumer’s in a good mood.”

Nighttime shopping is growing over all. ChannelAdvisor, which runs e-commerce for hundreds of sites, says its order volumes peak about 8 p.m., and that shoppers are placing orders later and later: in 2011, the number of orders placed from 9 to midnight increased compared with previous years.

A recent array of nighttime offers sent to a shopper’s e-mail inbox included: from 6 to 9 p.m., a limited-quantity sale on fashions at Neiman Marcus; at 7:38 p.m., a promotion for three-day stays at Loews hotels; at 8:44 p.m., a promotion by Gilt for macaroons and faux-fur blankets; and at 2:23 a.m., an offer by Saks for a $2,000 gift card with purchase.

At QVC, the television shopping channel, traffic and viewers rise around noon, then quiet down until after 7 p.m. Then items like cosmetics and accessories sell briskly. “Call them girl treats — they seem to attract a really strong following once you get past dinnertime,” said Doug Rose, senior vice president for multichannel programming and marketing for the company. “You can probably come to your own conclusion as to what’s motivating her.”

Still, the nighttime spike requires delicacy among retailers: for reasons of propriety, they do not want to be seen as encouraging drunken shopping, and many people who inadvertently buy products in that state would most likely return them at high rates. On the other hand, a happy customer can lead to higher sales.

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