Alexis C. Madrigal

"Are you getting the iPad in tomorrow?" I asked the Walmart electronics rep in Landover Hills, Maryland.
"The iPad?" the rep asked.
"Yeah, the Apple iPad," I said.
"Do you want the iPad or the iPad," I heard her say.
"Uh, the iPad," I said.
"Do you want the I-P-O-D or the I-P-A-D?" she responded.
"The iPad. I mean, the iPad. I-P-A-D," I said.
"No, we don't have that," she replied.
"Are you getting it in on Friday."
"Nope, only the I-P-O-D."

That was the best customer service experience I had searching the Washington, D.C.-area for the iPads that will hit some Walmart shelves come Friday.

Other locations bounced me around their phone systems for ten or fifteen minutes before hanging up on me. Other operators sent me to the electronics department where the phone rang eternal. One store in Laurel, Maryland hung me up three times before the lady at the switchboard explained, "I'm in the middle of a Code Adam, that's probably why it disconnected you." A Code Adam, Wikipedia told me, is when there is a child missing in a store. Yikes. Another store rep asked me to call a different number because he couldn't forward me to electronics. I called back on the new number and was routed right back to the same guy.

All that to say, Walmart sure isn't the Apple Store.

The Apple Store is one of the most pleasant retail experiences ever created. The stores are nicely designed. The products are on display and always usable. Better yet, the employees know what they're talking about and seem trained to act like normal human beings instead of human bots. You get used to a nice experience buying Apple products, and it becomes part of how you think about the brand, even if you know that it's just a damn store like all the other ones selling you stuff.

It's one thing to buy deli meat or a rake from Walmart. That's cheap stuff that doesn't require a lot of handholding or knowledge to sell. But a $500 purchase is substantial. Before dropping that kind of cash, you might want to talk to someone who knows what the iPad can do and can explain it. In fact, it might be precisely the subset of new Apple customers who would purchase their device at Walmart who need some convincing.

Maybe the iPad sells itself, but if it doesn't, don't count on Walmart clerks systematically helping out.

One other note. We checked with the five closest Walmarts to D.C. and none of them will be selling the iPad tomorrow. The store in Hanover, Maryland has them in stock already, but won't be selling them until the 22nd of October. That implies a smooth phased roll-out as the weeks go by.

Dell shares did not soar with its earnings announcement, as investors "have come to expect good news from the PC giant, analysts say," USA Today noted. "They almost become kind of boring by their success," Barry Jaruzelski of Booz Allen Hamilton's Booz & Company global technology and electronics practice told Reuters.

Now, the Dell scheme is obviously a bad practice -- and I already excoriated Dell for it -- but in the wake of the settlement, there's another important angle to consider. Were it not for a fraudulent accounting practice, analysts would have been all over the company for missing its targets. Yet Dell was still a great company with an excellent business that really did innovate with its supply chain management and sales tactics.

Perhaps it is precisely the Wall Street top cover the Intel payments provided that allowed Dell management to innovate without fear that some 25-year-old Goldman analyst's opinion about what might maximize investor returns would hurt their share price.

So, while Dell deserves the lion-share of our scorn, a system that over-privileges quarterly results over a company's long-term needs -- and the analysts who run it -- should share in the humble pie. Our current way of pricing technology companies is broken.

This article has been updated. We originally stated that Barry Jaruzelski was from the wrong Booz.

If you work in online media, you probably don't need to tell me what the graph above shows. Only one website can serve up the kind of traffic that makes your Digg frontpages, Reddit hits, and Drudge links look puny by comparison. That website is Yahoo.

It sounds crazy, but across the media landscape Yahoo is baked into many sites' statistics. They can send as many uniques to your website in a few hours as you get for the whole rest of the month. And if you get a slideshow Yahoo'd, forget about it, your traffic stats will look like the chart above for a year.

Now, we read in the Wall Street Journal that AOL and some private equity firms are thinking about buying Yahoo. There's a lot of skepticism about the deal. New York venture capitalist Matt Harris tweeted, "As @pmaeder (the yoda of VC) once said to me: tying two rocks together won't make them float. /cc: yahoo, aol mgmt." Wired's Epicenter blog editor, headlined his article on the possible deal, "Yahoo + AOL = Really?"

But perhaps AOL is really serious about becoming a real media company and Tim Armstrong is serious about becoming a media mogul. Combine TechCrunch, the local blog network Patch, and AOL's buttoned-up journalism efforts like PoliticsDaily with the Yahoo traffic machine... and maybe you've got something?

That'd be bad news for the rest of the Internet as Yahoo traffic stopped propping up everyone's unique visitor and pageview counts. Already, the site has been keeping far more of its front page links within its own domain.

Well, there are houses and plants that Tweet, so the clear next step is a Snuggie that does, too. The do-it-yourself site, Instructables, has a hilarious step-by-step guide to embedding a switch into your Snuggie so that you can use your blanket thing directly to send a message like, "Mmmm... So warm in here #smuggie," to all of your Twitter followers.

The system isn't very sophisticated; you can only send out a single string of text. But it's great as a training task for those familiarizing themselves with the open-source microprocessor, Arduino, which has become popular among physical computing enthusiasts.

In any case, why am I ruining this with real-life context? The point is that someone figured out how to make your blanket Tweet!

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @laphamsquart, Lapham's Quarterly's feed.

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 pm (or thereabouts) every day, we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and giving you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Today's suggested Twitter follow: @LRBPersonal.

Let us know what you think. We think it could be a useful and interesting addition to your day.

Google's long-time interest in clean energy technology took an interesting turn today as the company announced an investment in an underwater grid project off the east coast of the United States. The New York Times pegged the investment at up to $200 million.

While onshore wind farms have carpeted the midwest, offshore wind farms have had a difficult time getting permitted and built in this country. The attraction of offshore wind is that the winds (generally speaking) blow stronger and steadier. The floating turbines can also be much larger than their terrestrial cousins. The Department of Energy would like 10 gigawatts of offshore wind power to be installed along our coasts by the year 2020.

Beyond the risk inherent in deploying a new major energy technology, the big offshore farms have faced protests from locals worried about their beach home views and marine birds.

Google's total project -- which is being developed by transmission builder Trans-Elect -- would run 350 miles from New Jersey to Virginia. It would supposedly allow turbines connected to it to be sited farther offshore, away from NIMBY complaints.

"This will serve as a clean-energy superhighway, with on-ramps for wind farms and the ability to be intelligently expanded," Rick Needham, Google's green business operations director, told a news conference, reported Reuters. "We can help kick-start an industry that can provide thousands of jobs."

Google's investment attempts to address another special American concern. The cost of wind is determined not just by the costs of building and operating wind machines, but by the ability to integrate them into the grid through transmission links. Onshore, building power lines is a complex process that, unlike natural gas pipelines, has to be negotiated on a state-by-state basis. One reason that Texas has been a leader in wind power is that the state contains both great wind resources in its western reaches and the ability to get transmission lines strung to the population centers of its east. The U.S., as a whole, has essentially the same need but a worse regulatory regime.

Offshore transmission is an even trickier business in some ways. Most submarine power cables use high-voltage direct current as opposed to the long-standard alternating current lines that constitute most of our grid. On the other hand, you're not trying to run a massive row of towers through anybody's ranch or past their exurban development.

The line could support up to six gigawatts of turbines, which would supply as much power as a few large coal plants, depending on how steadily the winds blow. While this is an exciting development, it's important to keep in mind the scale of the transition the country faces in decarbonizing the electric system. The Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates the U.S. has 54 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. The U.S. has more than 1,400 coal power plants with a nominal capacity of 337 gigawatts.

Image: Flickr/Muon.

When we discuss innovation, we tend to talk to talk about Bell Labs and Google. But a new paper challenges that notion, arguing that British consumers actually outspend companies on innovation.

When they adapt, change, hack and remake products they buy into better things, it's not a trivial thing. They are actually innovating, and in a first-of-its-kind paper, MIT researcher Eric Von Hippel has actually quantified the R&D power of the people.

Based on a survey of 1,173 UK households, Hippel estimates that 2.9 million Brits engaged in product development -- and that they spent 2.3 billion pounds in the process. That's more than twice what British firms officially spent on the innovation process.

Hippel's work suggests that people like you and me (and Mark Frauenfelder) are a hidden engine of economic development as we reshape the things that we buy. If we assume that American households are as innovative as their British counterparts, 14.5 million of us develop products, and we spend something like $18 billion a year doing it.

"We also find that consumer product innovation spans a wide range of fields, from toys, to tools, to sporting equipment, and to personal solutions for medical problems: clearly, consumer innovation is not a niche phenomenon," Von Hippel and two European colleagues wrote. "We discover that consumer-developed innovations generally diffuse freely from the perspective of consumer-innovators. Very few consumers protect their innovations by patents or other means, or receive payments for them."

It sounds a little unlikely that everyday people could somehow do more R&D than a nation's firms. But when you start to think about all the little things that we jerry-rig in all different areas of our lives, it starts to seem possible, even sensible. Here's the list of examples that Von Hippel included in the working paper, which is available on the Social Science Research Network website.

I'm personally trying to figure out how to disable the bell on my washing machine -- and when I do, I'll celebrate not just my victory over the loudest noise in the world, but also the power of consumer innovation. I'd love to hear about your hacks and fixes, too. I'm sure everybody's got at least one.

Image: flickr/leebennett

Let's see if we can write a post about social media and activism without mentioning M_____ G______.

Whoops! OK, nope.

But that'll be the only one in this article because other researchers are exploring distinctly different aspects of online organizing. Dave Karpf, a Rutgers assistant professor, studies how organizations are changing as the Internet becomes the primary means by which they reach and solicit their members.

The Berkman Center is a leading institution for important research into the uses and impacts of digital technologies. We'll be previewing their regular brownbag lunches here on The Atlantic Technology Channel.

"Internet-mediated organizations like MoveOn, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Organizing for America differ from the older organizations that have typified American politics over the last few decades," Karpf said. "We have underlying shifts in how organizations view members and how they raise money."

He'll be describing these shifts in a talk at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard today. And, as he sees it, a similar shift has already occurred once before in the rise of direct mail during the 1970s.

"Membership went from I show up to the meeting and I'm an Elk to I write a check and send money. That changed the types of groups that we had and the new fundraising scheme led to the single-issue advocacy groups," Karpf said.

In the direct mail era of advocacy, large organizations with a lot of overhead developed funded by money from supporters around the country. Now, organizations are smaller and more nimble. A place like MoveOn has 30 staffers and a relatively tiny budget, but they can reach five million people with their email blasts.

Meanwhile, direct mail's fundraising efficacy has fallen as more people communicate and pay bills online. The physical mail has assumed secondary importance, which has directly impacted the ability of old organizations to raise money.

Karpf sees these simultaneous changes in fundraising technology bringing big changes to the way advocacy is done. "That's leading to generational disruption within the advocacy group community," he said. "Not only are the older groups being outpaced by groups like MoveOn but they are having more and more difficulty paying for the programming."

The takeaway is that the possibilities for organizational structures afforded by new tech tools reach far beyond any narrow conception of the political efficacy of the Facebook like. The Internet is changing the way organizations fund themselves, and that's likely to yield profound changes in the details of those places.

"If we want to understand the ways the Internet is changing politics, we need to look at the organizational bases of activism," Karpf concluded.

The November issue of The Atlantic is out, and I've got my first print piece in it. I profile Kevin Costner and his odd desire to spend $20 million scaling up an oil-water separation machine. One thing that struck me in talking to Costner was this intensely American idea that the answer to technology's problems is more technology.

His catch-phrase, which he's brought to Congress and said to me, is that we should move into the "21st century of oil-spill cleanups." Think about that. He just can't believe that we're still cleaning up spills in roughly the same ways that we were during the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which he witnessed first hand as a kid growing up in Ventura.

In any case, you should check out the whole package. It's filled with interesting characters from Elon Musk to David Cameron.

And here's the conclusion to my Costner piece:

And so, along with his scientist brother, Costner spent the 1990s plowing money into the concept, securing patents and relying on a team of researchers in Nevada to develop the device. When they were close, the Costners reached out to every major oil company, only to be rebuffed by industry players who told the actor we'd never have another spill like the Valdez.

Of course, we did. And Costner's machines finally got a look. In the aftermath of this year's spill, BP bought 32 of them to use in the gulf. Now the actor is working with Edison Chouest Offshore, in Louisiana, to build first-responder ships that could be deployed around the world to clean up future spills. "We could move into the 21st century of oil-spill cleanups with this technology," Costner told me. "Whenever you're challenged, there is an opportunity." But this is about more than a personal investment that's paying off. Costner's magic machine is making good on a particularly American idea: when one bold technology gives us a problem, another can help us solve it.

Google is crawling the price data found in its shopping site to track inflation. The Google Price Index, which the company's chief economist Hal Varian discussed at a conference this weekend, would provide a lightning-quick alternative to the toilsome data gathering used in the standard Consumer Price Index.

There are certainly problems in the mix of goods that Google's Price Index captures. Google's data doesn't see housing or toilet paper, for example. But the Consumer Price Index is also far from perfect, particularly in reflecting changes in the basket of stuff that people are likely to purchase.

Way back in 1997, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis pointed out the particular role that technology plays in mucking up the numbers. New tech introduces a "new product bias:"

This occurs when new goods and services are introduced into the economy but are not incorporated into the fixed market basket of the CPI until much later. For example, computers were not incorporated until 1987, and cellular phones will not be added until 1998. A further problem is that a large part of the price declines for many of these new goods occur over the early stages of the product cycle, when they have not yet been included in the CPI.

The CPI relies on yearly survey data from consumers to determine its basket of goods, so it takes a while for the basket to change.

Perhaps the strangest thing about economic numbers like the CPI, though, is that they are calculated on a monthly basis, lagging the real-time economy by weeks. Each month, an army of research assistants has to call up stores and record prices on 80,000 goods. They do it all manually.

Meanwhile, traders are sending money flying all over the world every millisecond of every day. That's a serious time-scale mismatch. It's not an ultimate answer, but at least the GPI brings data and action closer together.

Google's announcement of small but successful trials of self-driving cars induces glee in any right-thinking tech nerd. As far as tech dreams go, self-driving cars are up there with helicopter-based ecotopias and jetpacks. The whole idea has been tickling our fancy since long before we could even conceive of the tech that could make it work.

I am bringing you a little bit of historical context here not to denigrate Google's achievement of 1,000 miles of autonomous driving, but merely for fun.

Here's the Pittsburgh Press from December of 1938. This self-driving car mention is pegged to the introduction of the, umm, self-heating hot dog.

And the Ottawa Citizen from August 13, 1985. What's great about this one is the way it transitions seamlessly from anti-lock brakes to the vision of a self-driving car. Here's the most relevant snippet:

The drunk argument has particular historical resonance because drunk driving became a terrible problem at the outset of the automobile's introduction. Though people had gone out boozing and then had to take their carts home sloshed, before the car, the "sober horse" had helped corral the problem, as Horseless Age once noted: