For some reason, it occurred to me to make the comparison between news sources and nuclear reactors. I think it may have been because someone said the CBS memo story had reached a "critical mass".
In nuclear engineering, a reactor is "critical" when the number of fission events produced in one generation produce enough neutrons to produce the same number of fission events in the next generation. If the next generation has more fission events, than the current one, the reactor is supercritical and the reaction is speeding up; if it has fewer, the reactor is subcritical, and the reaction is slowing down.
In a way, news cycles could be thought of the same way. A story is reported. If it's picked up by enough people to generate more stories in the next cycle, the story grows. If not, the number of stories shrinks in the next cycle, and the story is dying.
Can a useful analogy be drawn between reactors and the news media?
Maybe so.
One feature of nuclear reactors is the "cycle time". This is basically the amount of time it takes for a reactor's energy output to change by a given amount. Most reactors are run with fairly long cycle times, and are designed to shut down if the cycle time gets too short, especially while the power is increasing.
In a reactor, the cycle time depends on the multiplication factor, how many more neutrons there are in generation X+1 than there are in generation X. If this factor is 1% over break-even, then it will take just under 70 generations for the reactor to double its power output. If, on the other hand, if it's 1% under, 70 generations will see the reactor's power output cut in half.
Now, obviously, how long this takes depends on how long a "generation" is. Reactor engineers like to run reactors using the fraction of neutrons that are delayed, giving a generation time of some 0.2 seconds. In this case, doubling the power output would take about 14 seconds. They want to make sure that the multiplication factor, counting only the prompt neutrons, is less than break-even. If it ever went above break-even, the reactor would become "prompt supercritical", and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to control. A computer could probably react fast enough, but control rods and control plates don't move that fast.
The reactivity of a reactor is expressed as "dollars" and "cents". One cent is 1% of the fraction of neutrons that are delayed neutrons. Different parameters in a nuclear reactor are worth a certain number of dollars and cents, and change the balance of reactivity when applied. Control plates are typically worth many negative dollars, and when they're lowered, nothing's going to get the reactor going. The last few rods are balanced so that when they are raised, the reactivity is greater than zero, but never close to one dollar. As soon as you get above one dollar, the reactor becomes prompt supercritical, and the generation time drops to a ten-thousandth of a second or less. Even at one tenth of a cent into the prompt supercritical range, the power doubling time is suddenly 11 seconds, plus whatever the reactor was already doing. If it's already at a doubling time of 10 seconds, the cycle time is instantly cut in half.
Think fast!
I think Dan Rather has just experienced this phenomenon up close and personal.
It used to be that news cycles were fairly slow. As soon as a story hit the airwaves, you'd have a day or so to react to it. You could put out your spin the next day, and that would be the official story for at least another day. You'd want to make sure you assembled some facts to back up yor spin for the next broadcast, but you had a whole day to get researchers on it. The generation time was one day.
Furthermore, you had a bunch of the control rods for any given story, and if you didn't air it, the other two networks would have to work all the harder to keep it going. If all three networks agreed that a story was not newsworthy, it didn't get covered. Period. The local press simply didn't have enough reactivity to get a story moving, certainly not on a national scale. They just just couldn't compete with the national networks' dollars and cents.
Enter the blogs.
Blogs move information at the speed of the internet. Take a story that generates some interest, and it can be moved past any number of experts in a hurry. All of a sudden, the cycle time for a story becomes minutes instead of hours. This is a great deal faster than the control systems at the major media are capable of responding. A story can spread all over the web, and because people who notice it and comment on it can also link to it, anyone who spots an interesting fact in one location can find its source, and find other facts along the way. They can piece facts together on their own, or they can read other bloggers' attempts to piece them together and see if they ring true.
By the time the national networks have made their adjustments to the reactor, many, many generations of growth or decline have taken place.
They don't have enough dollars and cents to shut down the reactor.
This is just a thought, and I may play with it further, but I offer it for any readers who may wander along. (And if it's sitting here, I'll spot it again later and play with it some more.)
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