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Thursday, July 18, 2002 |
The Register: JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab. A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images. And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation. Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain. [Tomalak's Realm]
6:37:30 PM 
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Ask the pilot. Do airlines cut down the flow of oxygen in the cabin to save fuel? Can wind shear rip off a plane's wing? [Salon.com]
Wow! What an engrossing column! Worth the time to read, I learned a lot about flying.
6:33:59 PM
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NYT. Fat rich diets healthier than carb rich diets. This is totally true. I have followed this philosophy for 20 years because it made me feel better. I have always eaten a high fat diet and avoided sugars like the plague. As a result, my cholesteral is 120-140 (with a high HDL) and my weight is marginally under control. I suspect that any weight I do carry over my target is due to a slight addiction to french fries and any attempts I make to "eat healthy" according to conventional wisdom. On a side note, my daughter has Type I diabetes. This provides my wife and I with a ring-side seat on the impact of carbs on blood sugar and insulin levels. Needless to say: carbs are bad unless you have just finished a workout and need a quick energy boost. Sugars are never useful.
Remember the data that said that if you want to loose weight eat less more often? You effectively get the same thing when you eat several fat/protein rich meals a day. The release of energy takes longer, doesn't spike, and you feel less hungry. In contrast, the quickest way to gain weight is to eat a single massive carb based meal once a day (this is what Sumo wrestlers do). Your blood sugars spike, your insulin spikes, and most of the calories get stored as body fat. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:09:47 PM
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Faseb. Unravelling the mysteries of protein folding. Cool. Nice data on prions (protein fragements that cause mad cow and CWD). Prions cause proteins in the brain to fold into a prion. What I didn't know that prions could be produced as a bi-product of transgenic bacteria. Very scary. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:09:13 PM
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Newhouse. WiFi theft. Cable companies get mad when their 90%++ profit margins on high speed Internet access are abused.
Did a Time Warner VP really say this?
"By having an open transmission, it leaves you really vulnerable," Digeso said. "If you have a Wi-Fi connection in a public park, what would stop, God forbid, a child pornographer or, God forbid, a terrorist using that network? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:08:22 PM
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The Economist. Dirt cheap organic solar cells about to take off. This is one more step towards a hydrogen economy. Excess energy from solar cells on the roof of a home could be stored as hydrogen through simple electrolysis (as an adjunct to hydrogen extraction from natural gas). This eliminates the need for expensive and bulky batteries. Additionally, this hydrogen could then be used to power power-plant fuel cells for use in the home or cars. Refuel your car at home! Good-bye OPEC. Hello decentralized energy. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Given that there are home power generation systems out there that run on either hydrogen or propane, Imagine if you used captured rainwater and or greywater. Now you have a constant supply of power, locally generated, and hopefully fairly easy to maintain. Again, do this in a rural area for a small co-op and you've got local power, off the grid. Either vent or bottle the leftover O2.
The trick to this is building cheap, reliable systems that are small enough to be easily transported, and reliable enough to handle harsh environments. Let's forget about the home for a moment. Imagine being able to fly in a town center wherever you wanted it. Power generation, communications, a health care center, mess hall, etc. Now instead of going to war, drop these units in place and use them as central distribution points for food and medical care. Have servers set up to show people how to recognize mines and other ordinance that is left behind, how to care for injuries, and who to contact for help in removing the ordinance.
That would generate some serious good will. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:57:09 PM
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CNet. China to become manufacturing powerhouse. They are welcome to it. Why? Manufacturing is rapidly declining. Both the number of people necessary to do it and the percentage of personal income devoted to manufactured items is falling. This is very much like what occured in agriculture. Today only 2% of the population in the US is in agriculture (much less than Europe -- 7% -- and Japan -- 15% -- but that is due to protected inefficiencies). Agriculture is also a commodity business, highly competitive, and mostly still family farms (90% plus of all farming output is still done by family farms and not agribusiness). It's a 100 a week business for $50k a year. Food is now a small portion of the budget of most homes. Manufacturing is following a similar path. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Well, when they have a large enough manufacturing base, as well as the tools to make cruise missiles (Thanks Bill!), mixed with the rumors that they are getting nuclear subs from the Russians, I start to worry. Plus they have been building dams for power generation, which they can in turn use to drive their manufacturing base. They have no shortage of able bodied young folks to fight for them, the only real problem they have is the logistics of feeding and transporting their soldiers.
Yes, I know full well how paranoid this all sounds, thank you, I've told it to myself many times over the years, and I really and truly hope that I'm wrong here. But looking at the evidence, looking at past history of nations that build up their forces, I've got a very bad feeling about this. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:55:16 PM
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The WSJ has an article about how to get started blogging. A reader forwarded me the article via email. I saved it into my upstream folder. It worked. Hey he's using Manila for his weblog. That's very cool. [Scripting News]
This is interesting to me as I have been thinking about ways of sharing TV shows between friends recently. One of the big things I would love to be able to do is send a friend a show, or else have it either on me or accessible to me at a moment's notice.
Example:
Person 1: "Were you watching Discovery over the weekend?"
Person2: "No, what'd I miss?"
Person 1: "Aw man, they had this show on sea monsters, you'd have loved it!"
Person2: "Really? You have it handy?"
Person 1: "Sure, hold on" Pulls out device, selects show in question, hooks into entertainment system and BOOM their watching it.
Person2: "Amazing! Thanks for tagging that for me!"
Person 1: "No problem."
I want to be able to tape a show that I just missed, or caught the last five minutes of. Basically, I want video on demand, with a PBS like advertising interface on the shows that I choose to store locally. No ads for other programs, no commercial interruptions, just me and the show, and I can pause it when I want. I want to be able to take my shows with me, and send them to friends as well.
"But Ryan," you say, "just buy a Tivo." Yeah, Tivos are extremely cool, and I am planning on buying one soon, but I want something that I can take with me wherever I go, and show the program to anyone I want.
While I could scratch build something, using the Bluetooth Pocket Server, a video capture card, and a SAN/media server combo with some gigabit ethernet thrown in for good measure, I'd rather buy a functional package that does everything I want, so I don't have to trouble the whole shebang. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:54:31 PM
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A Gadget King Lives by His Own Devices. Scott A. Jones has always liked the idea of being wired; his English Tudor-style home, outside Indianapolis, is dedicated to that idea. By John Leland. [New York Times: Technology]
Contrast this with my last post: This gentleman has a house that he is using as a testbed for a lot of the tech that I have gone on about. Touchscreen controls for the home systems, fingerprint biometrics for the doors. He's willing to live with the bugs in the system:
Locks with fingerprint sensors didn't recognize his children because their hands were dirty. "I've been locked out of the bedroom for a day," he said. "I've had no idea how to turn off lights in a room. Fireplaces won't go off. Gates open and close with a mind of their own. My maid had a horrible time getting into my bedroom."
In fact, he's got a CIO for his home to keep everything running smoothly. He also runs a set of companies that develops and markets the tech that he's living with. While the products are cool, they also come with a steep price, the 200 disc DVD manager is $7,500. I think I can live with getting up and walking across the room for that price.
Regardless, it is cool to see someone who is willing to make things better by really living with the tech as an effort to get it to improve. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:53:33 PM
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New Blogger With a Rant.
You know how I love my rants. :) Welcome new blogger Darrel Miller. He posted a rant today to the Off Topic mailing list, then posted it to his web log:
From a press release by Epicor[1]:
"Web services allow for dynamic integration between applications without costly and time-consuming programming."
Wow, I guess before long they won't be needing our services any more.
Subscribed, welcome, and good job. :)
Link Discuss [The .NET Guy]
3:49:25 PM
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Water baloons in space. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? NASA did.
The tests were conducted in part to develop the ability to rapidly deploy large liquid drops by rupturing an enclosing membrane. And they've some marvelous result videos to show for it. [raelity bytes]
3:42:14 PM
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How Long Until The Library Of Congress Fits On Your Keychain?.
This is the one I've been waiting for: FujiFilm Unveils Tiny Hard Drive (emphasis is mine)
 "FujiFilm is helping revive Sneakernet with the release of its straightforwardly named USB Drive, the newest in a growing array of pocket-size, large-capacity storage devices that easily move among PCs.
This small flash RAM 'drive' is available in sizes ranging from 32MB to 128MB, with a 256MB version expected out in the fall. The 32MB drive costs $50; the 64MB unit, $70; and the 128MB drive, $150. Fuji initially announced 8MB and 16MB versions, too, but isn't shipping them because apparently no one wants them.
The unit's physical size, not its capacity, will catch people's attention. Forget the proverbial pack of cards or cigarettes. Measuring less than 4 by 1 by 1 inches, the USB Drive more closely resembles a short, stubby marker or a fat electric thermometer with a nose that plugs directly into your computer's USB port. It weighs only 0.7 ounce and is powered by the USB port, so there's no need for a battery or AC adapter.
Besides being small and light, it offers real plug and play--not the usual process (plug in, install the driver, identify driver conflicts that keep it from working, update the driver over the Internet, and finally hope it plays). That's because the FujiFilm Drive comes with a built-in processor that lets it work (in many cases) without drivers....
...And unlike Archos's MiniHD 20GB, the USB Drive works driver-free with USB 1.0 as well as 2.0....
But it won't work that way with everything. The drive still requires drivers for Windows 98 and Mac OS 8.6, which are the earliest versions of those operating systems that it supports. (And yes, you can use it to share data between PCs and Macs.)" [PC World]
Suh-weet!
I find it particularly interesting that Fuji found out no one wants 8MB and 16MB storage devices. When I had my first Palm III, I lusted for 8MB, but nowadays that's nothing. In fact, I wouldn't even consider buying one of these USB devices until the 256MB version is available. What's the equivalent of Moore's law for storage?
Addendum: the Fuji USB Drive site shows it available in a 512MB version!! [The Shifted Librarian]
3:40:02 PM
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Nice If You Forgot Your Wallet, But.....
Pay at the Pump--With Your Cell Phone
"Alon USA, which operates Fina gas stations and 7-Eleven outlets in the Southwest, is readying a field trial of an 'm-commerce' system using existing cellular telephone technology and already-installed point-of-sales systems.
Dallas-based Alon plans to use mobile-commerce payment technology developed by Cellenium in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, that will let any cellular telephone, including aging voice-only models, conduct a mobile transaction....
Once a consumer signs up for the service, he needs to call a toll-free number and punch in a four-digit authorization code on his phone. He will then receive a code to enter at the pump in order to pump his gas.
To induce customers to do all these things, Morris says, Alon will use a loyalty program that will reward them with goods such as free sodas or food from the convenience stores attached to the gas stations....
Ed Kountz, an analyst at TowerGroup in Needham, Massachusetts, says that except for Exxon Mobil's SpeedPass, which uses a radio frequency key fob to authorize payment, the Cellerate trial is among the first large-scale trials of m-commerce in the gas station and convenience store market.
But, Kountz says, Alon and its Cellerate partners face a real problem in rolling out a service that requires a customer to punch multiple digits into his cell phone and the gas pump, when he could instead just reach into his wallet for cash or a credit card." [PC World]
Agreed! I wouldn't bother with this unless I could just point my phone at the pump and easily authorize a debit from my account. So maybe this is just one small step instead of a giant leap. [The Shifted Librarian]
3:39:05 PM
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The Sims By Knockout In The Second Round.
Showdown in Cyberspace: Star Wars vs. The Sims
"Are too many game companies chasing too few hardcore gamers? If so, we could be set for a disastrous year of reckoning, as the game industry's fixation on its own cultural inclinations sends it into a downward spiral of failure. With so many entrants fighting for air, companies will fold, game worlds will evaporate, investments of time and capital will dissolve into ether -- all lost in a narrowness of imagination and an unwillingness to build a space that accommodates the rest of the world. In the short term, the real battle for an online audience will most likely come down to two games in a clash of true titans: Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online.
But there's some hope. Because while Star Wars Galaxies may seem at first glance an exclusively geek nirvana, the developers have taken an effort to make it something more. Even more intriguingly, The Sims Online hints at a different future and could promise a true breakthrough: a world of online role-playing where everyone feels at home -- and everyone has a home....
A networked variation of Wright's game, The Sims Online arrives at a time when the original title is still a bestseller (two years after its release), joined by numerous expansion packs -- 6 million and 8 million sold so far, respectively, easily making it the most popular game of all time....
What you do there is entirely at your discretion. 'Naked-clown beauty pageants, superhero cowboy bars, and exclusive mountain hideaways are just a few of the many strange possibilities this game offers,' says Computer Gaming World's Robert Coffey. This is because the game comes with no overarching theme. Wright's idea is to provide tools that are robust enough for players to shape their own world, at their own leisure. 'We're trying to make [success] more correlated to your creativity than your time investment. What I want is a game where people play three, four, maybe five hours a week, and feel like they're getting a lot out of it....'
There will be no segregation between hardcore and casual players; rather, Wright is working to make their differing preferences complement each other. "If you have everybody in one area, and they're all trying to do the exact same thing, that's when it starts feeling kind of repetitive. But when you have people all mixed in pursuing different goals entirely, then it starts feeling like, you know, the real world." He guesses that the more dedicated gamers will devote their time to creating fictional businesses or pursuing other economic goals. But doing this creates, in his words, a 'pyramid of dependency.' A group of hardcore gamers can unite their properties to create a grand theme park with rides and entertainment, for example -- then sell tickets to casual gamers. 'I'd like to keep the game structured so that the hardcore people are continually interacting with the casual people.'
The user objects are designed so that players can even create their own games within the larger game. 'You could easily build a treasure hunt with this one object that we're making,' says Wright, 'and strew clues all over the world, and you kind of have to search the world and find the clues. Or play a game like Assassin, where everybody has an envelope and a name in it, and you have to go find that person ... We want to have a lot of activities that kind of span the world.' " [Salon.com]
While I look forward to playing Star Wars Galaxies, it's The Sims Online that's really going to be the 800-pound gorilla. Why? Because Brent (currently six-years old) will be all over Star Wars, but Kailee (currently eight-years old) will gravitate towards The Sims, and there are more of her type than there are of his.
For Kailee and her friends, it will be like playing virtual Barbies. Plus, it will be able to accommodate different levels of players - kids playing Barbies, adults creating neighborhoods, teens creating their own communities, and they all get to customize the game to make it what they want to play.
I call dibs on the public library - I finally get to be a director! [The Shifted Librarian]
3:38:05 PM
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Bandwidth Is King.
The Bandwidth Capital of the World
"At first glance, Seoul seems like just another sprawling metropolis: Its buildings, hastily constructed with dubious financing in the months leading up to South Korea's 1997 economic crisis, are the sort of blocky, concrete-and-glass high-rises that give many modern cities the air of prefab homogeneity. Wide boulevards are choked with the oppressive traffic common in East Asia or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. Megamalls and underground shopping centers filled with Body Shops and Burger Kings cater to teens and young professionals. There's none of the high tech visual overload you see in Tokyo, or the clean-scrubbed, old-meets-new urbanism of Scandinavia — nothing to indicate that Seoul is the most wired city on the planet.
Burrow a bit, though, down the alleys, up flights of stairs, or into the corners of malls, and you find something that sets Seoul apart and fosters its passion for broadband: online game rooms, or PC baangs, as they are called here. There are 26,000 of them, tucked into every spare sliver of real estate. Filled with late-model PCs packed tightly into rows, these rabbit warrens of high-bandwidth connectivity are where young adults gather to play games, video-chat, hang out, and hook up.
They are known as "third places" — not home, not work — where teens and twentysomethings go to socialize, to be part of a group in a culture where group interaction is overwhelmingly important....
And the numbers are impressive — South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration in the world. Slightly more than half of its households have high-bandwidth connections, compared to less than 10 percent in the US. The growth in broadband has surged in the last three years from a few hundred thousand subscribers to 8.5 million....
The government has even set up a certification program to rate buildings based on the quality of their data lines. Developers who install fatter pipes take the opportunity to bump up their prices - not an insignificant policy in a country where 50 percent of the population lives in large apartment complexes. Fast connections are even getting bundled into the rent, as construction companies repackage minuscule high-rise people-boxes as cyber-apartments. (A typical four-bedroom is 1,150 square feet and costs $2,000 a month, not counting utilities, cyber or otherwise). Built by conglomerates like Daelim Industrial and Samsung in partnership with broadband carriers and content providers, the sales pitch is oddly reminiscent of 1950s American suburbia - except that instead of lawns and trees, developers promise an endless expanse of bandwidth allowing residents to buy flowers, chat with neighbors, and search for the perfect kimchi recipe on the local Ethernet. It's all very Epcot.
Despite this utopian vision of e-domesticity, the real allure of high-rise broadband is escape from the constraints of real estate. Escape into the wide horizons of a computer game, or into the welcoming company of other micro-apartment dwellers — preferably at the same time. Not only is South Korea a more wired country than the US, it is also a more gregarious one. Even if most Koreans had an American-style mega home-theater cocoon, they would still go out. These people do not bowl alone, particularly if they're single (most don't move out of their parents' place until they get married). They want to be with their friends....
South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners — a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories....
So what about those of us in channel-surfing American cocoon-land? The vision of streaming media piped into the home, video-on-demand 24/7, and needle-narrow target markets is heralded as the way forward. Yet it is possible that this vision is holding us back. Perhaps the real market opportunities have nothing to do with connecting people to the Universal back catalog and everything to do with connecting people to each other. If Seoul is any kind of signpost, the way forward does not lie in the single servings of media we consume but in the playgrounds we share — no matter who's manning the turrets and storming the castles." [Wired]
I could have quoted this entire article because it's so fascinating, so make sure you read the whole thing for yourself. Suffice it to say that South Koreans aren't playing The Sims Online, they're living it.
Be afraid, entertainment industry. Be very afraid. [The Shifted Librarian]
3:37:31 PM
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Tinkerers' champion.
It is not just libertarians who are concerned about the restrictions caused by America's latest copyright law. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, argues that the "freedom to tinker" — the right to understand, repair and modify one's own equipment — is crucial to innovation, and as valuable to society as the freedom of speech. [Michael J. Hehir's Radio Weblog]
3:32:15 PM
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The Heian Web. A friend of mine on LiveJournal draws some interesting parallels between the intertextual relationships connecting pieces of Heian literature and the links connecting web pages:Large amounts of Heian poetry have survived, and scholars generally know what's what when it comes to references from one poem to another. These days, given... [0xDECAFBAD]
3:24:37 PM
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I just visited a very interesting site called "did you ever wonder?". Some of the topics included "How to rebuild the surface of a cell?", "How soil keeps the world in balance?", "About the invisible marvels of the nanoworld?", and "How to carve with light?". Each month the site features new questions and new personalities.
I discoved the site in the Scout Report, which I have been reading the every weekend for quite a few years. It is really excellenet. The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. However, anyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML).
The Scout Report provides a short summary about each new link. There are three categories: Research and Education, General Interest, and Network Tools. In the pre-Google days I would add a link or two that I thought was particularly interesting every week to the Favorite Places section of my web site. It grew to more than 1,000 links and it is organized into a dozen categories with additional sub-categories. I still get emails from people saying they find it useful. I am sure there are some broken links there but I do my best to keep the old ones pruned out and add some new ones.
Related links...
Current issue of the Scout Report
The Internet Scout Weblog [John Patrick's Weblog]
3:20:21 PM
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John Patrick, ex IBM senior exec and author, is actively blogging. Excellent. Wouldn't it be great if more senior execs had the vision and personal fortitude to post their thoughts? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
3:16:10 PM
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 Get a dose of literature in your INBOX every morning: "Classic Novels - In 5 Minutes A Day brings you the world's best Classic Novels, delivered in daily five minute installments to your e-mail. Our new service, Classic Novels On Demand allows readers to subscribe to a novel today and start reading it today." [Classic Novels]
[GranneWeb]
3:14:24 PM
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Create your own Venn Diagram:  Check out a database of Venn Diagrams, and use the Web-based interface to create your own. This is quite nifty. [Venn Diagram] [GranneWeb]
3:14:02 PM
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I need this for the parrot.....
CoolCam now names EvoCam. EvoCam v2.4 (was CoolCam). - EvoCam is a webcam application that provides WYSIWYG editing of text captions, picture badges, clocks, and blur items, plus scheduling, web upload, and more. It provides basic scriptability, attachability, and example scripts. AppleScript can be used to control EvoCam and customize behavior, capture current image, change path of saved file, change captions, and execute scripts when certain EvoCam events occur. Along with the name change, this version provides various bug fixes and enhancements. [MacScripter.net] [AppleScript Info] [Mac Net Journal] [Sample the Web]
3:12:19 PM
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ShowCode
Here's a neat little utility for those of us posting .NET sample code. It takes C#, VB.Net, SQL, ASPX/ASAX code and creates color-coded HTML code. I'm going to play around with it and get all of my samples updated. [Wrinkled Paper]
3:06:25 PM
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I have played a little with Mikel Maron new myRadio tool. Also if it's still in an early release stage, it looks incredibly promising. It starts solving the problem of too many channels in the news aggregator. I organized my feeds in 4 different pages (evectors, blogs, italians, news) and now everything is much less cluttered and since the GUI is very similar to my.yahoo it's somehow familiar. This is definely a very important piece for the future of Radio news aggregator. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
2:59:43 PM
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Making the point 
Hi-Fli
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...operating devices that emit RF on a commercial flight is typically forbidden. The more likely outcome of embedding Wi Fi in every notebook computer is a ban on computer use while in flight. We can't expect flight attendents to be up on which notebook has Wi Fi and which doesn't. The typical big biz response would be to simplify the matter and ban them all. |
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Someone out there that knows aviation electronics care to comment? |
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I know a little about RF, and about the kind of RF used by airplanes for navigation and for communication between planes and control towers. And while I think the situation is complicated, I don't think it's hopeless either for Internet service on planes, or for wi-fi (which is already there, frankly — more about that later). |
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First let's talk about interference. |
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Ever try to listen to a radio next to your computer? AM radio is nearly trashed. FM is in much better shape, but some radios are more immune to noise than others. Tune your Walkman to a weak signal, set it by your laptop and see what happens. |
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What's interesting here is that your laptop is putting out plenty of noise, even without a wi-fi signal. |
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Now try this one: tune a radio to an empty channel at the upper end of the FM band. Take 107.1, for example. Now take another radio, such as a walkman, and tune it back and forth between 96 and 97 on the dial. Around 96.4 or 96.6 you'll hear a blank signal on 107.1. That's because most radios are busy transmitting while they're also receiving. And they're doing it at frequencies about 10.7 or 10.5 MHz away from the channel to which they are tuned. Don't ask why; it's just the way most FM radios have been built for the duration. It's why you'll sometimes notice that SCAN on your car radio will stop at a station that has exactly nothing on it. That's because a car nearby is tuned to a station 10.x MHz up or down the dial. (Using a similar technique you can actually do non-invasive research into TV viewing and radio listening.) |
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Now look at the FAA's list of aviation frequency bands. Note all the radionavigation stuff between 108 and 118. Air/Ground communications (what United Airlines often shares on Channel 9 of the armrest audio system) starts at 118. These are all frequencies that your walkman can conceivably interfere with if you listen to FM on the plane (which is very easy to do, especially if you're sitting by a window). In fact, a few years ago PC Computing magazine did a test on a variety of devices, including laptops, portable radios and game players, and found that only walkman-type radios were a conceivable threat. But that was long before wi-fi was huge. Or even digital cellular telephony. |
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European cell phones use bands around 900 and 1800MHz. U.S. bands are around 800 and 1900MHz. Microwave ovens, Bluetooth and wi-fi are all up around 2400-2500MHz. There's aviation stuff near these bands, but not on them. |
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Now it's looking like the FCC will open up bands upwards of 2400MHz (2.4Ghz) for spread spectrum, frequency hopping and other techniques that will allow broadband communications to your laptops and other devices. |
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I think that's when the Internet shows up on commercial aircraft. |
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The dirty not-so-secret (it's actually a Good Thing) is that, as frequencies go up, the waves get stopped or absorbed by smaller and smaller things (though they might still be reflected by bigger ones — it all depends). Think of it in terms of sound. Play music in your living room and go around the corner into another room, then another room again. What you lose first are the highest treble sounds. As you get farther away all you'll hear is the deepest bass. Same goes with lightning and thunder. Lightning causes thunder. If you're nearby, you hear a loud crack, or a tearing sound followed by a boom. (In the latter case you're actually hearing the sound produced along the length of a liightning bolt striking nearby, where the sound produced by the bottom of the bolt arrives first, and the boom produced by the spreading roots of the bolt in the cloud above arrive last, but loudest because they're produced by a part of the bolt that's parallel to the ground.) But if you're far away you only hear a low boom or a deep rumble. Higher frequencies degrade over shorter distances. |
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The powers used by wi-fi and the new higher-frequency spread spectrum stuff are extremely low, and the frequencies are extremely high. They're also fairly isolated from the frequencies used by planes. The only thing close to the new 5.7 GHz spread spectrum band is TWDR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar), which uses 5.6-5.65GHz. I don't think that's an issue. |
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So I'm betting that the FAA is quietly monitoring the wi-fi situation. They'd be dumb not to, considering how many laptops come with wi-fi already. |
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The problem I have with the article is when Lou quotes Gartner wonk Joseph Byrne, "For example, you and I can swap files while sitting next to each other on a plane". |
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Yeah, right. Right after I get to place a call to my wife on my cell phone. |
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Well, this is already do-able, among Macintosh laptop users, and probably plenty of Windows and Linux users as well. I can make my laptop into a base station very a few clicks, and exchange files willy-nilly with any takers. I am sure lots of files have been passed back and forth in planes already, with nobody the wiser. | The clue train seems to be stopping there.
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David Reed: "I'm really excited by what may be starting to happen at the FCC." | A little humility, please
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Never mind what Google says, N.Z. Bear has me pegged as a lowly insect in the Blogosphere Ecosystem. Not sure what I used to be. Living ooze or something. | The wandering optimist
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The American identity can be summarised in a single polling question: we are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed - with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s - that next year will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world, especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power. The essential American credulousness - we believe in our nation, our system, our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God - must seem pretty obnoxious, too. | PointPower
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Blogging presentations live is a terrific new sport. I'm not sure if anybody was playing it when I gave this presentation to JabberConf in Munich last month, but bringing it up is an excuse to finally put it up, which I just did a few minutes ago. |
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And what the heck: here's most of another presentation I gave to a group assembled by Lance Knobel in London a few days later. It opens with my wireless adventures there. Still a fun story. |
Your loss
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Took my laptop in for an HD and memory upgrade yesterday. The guy behind the counter knew who I was and asked if I'd heard of Blog Wars. (Don't click yet. Keep reading.) "You mean warblogs?" Nope, he said. Blog Wars. "Watch out," he added. "It's really over the top." |
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More like it's really under the bottom. The site is flat-out pornographic. But not a porn site. I mean, it doesn't open 40 windows you can't close or anything like that. It is kind of a Slashdot for sex and gross-out topics. There are a few nuggets like this link to a bizarre idea for WTC2. But... man, there's some nasty shit on there. |
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Anyway, click at your own risk. | [Doc Searls Weblog]
2:36:01 PM
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Mark Hurst. Mark Hurst. "1. Identify users' goals on each page. 2. De-emphasize or remove any page elements (or areas of a site) that don't help to accomplish the goal. 3. Emphasize (or insert) those links, forms, or other elements that either take users closer to their goal, or finally accomplish it. " [Archipelago]
12:54:00 PM
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It's Even Worse Than It Appears, and now It's all up to us!. Robert Waldrop reports: World wheat production is declining, this year world consumption (594 million tons) will exceed production (581 million tons), drawing down existing world wheat stocks to 147 million tons. This is the fourth straight year that world wheat storages have contracted. Note that the annual carryover, now down to 147 million tons, amounts to about 3 months world consumption. Argentina's wheat production has declined 2.5 million tons "because of ongoing problems with planting the crop. Macro economic disruptions have caused a sharp drop in the exchange rate, providing an incentive to grow low cost export crops like wheat, but the lack of credit to finance production is compounded by a reported shortage of diesel fuel, severely limiting wheat plantings. This month, forecast area dropped one million hectares. . . " ... Timothy Wilken writes: Our human problems are reaching a level that may soon find our society in freefall. Its up to us regular and ordinary people. We can only rely on ourselves. We need individuals of integrity to join with us to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance even within the finite world we inhabit. Synergy means working together—creating together as in Co-Creation—laboring together as in Co-Laboration—acting together as in Co-Action and operating together as in Co-Operation. The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task by working together than can be accomplished by working separately. (07/18/02) [Synergic Earth News]
12:52:42 PM
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Blog output from scientific/engineering software?.
I wonder what the potential is for using blogs from scientific and engineering software, as a means of encouraging its users to comment as they go? It would make most sense in truly interactive packages that encourage experimentation. If I am doing statistical analyses on large data sets, for example, what if my stats software allowed me to jot a quick comment about what I was doing and why I thought it might be interesting. It could then blog a pointer to the data, a definition of the analysis (preferably in a form that the software could read to recreate the process later), the comments, and pointers to results.
I might make sense for the application to record several steps and associated comments, and only push a blog entry when the user requests it. Presumably there's no reason why blog entries couldn't contain rich markup - so MathML could be included, for example, and plots in SVG.
Does logging anything like that (even at a simple level) exist for any packages already, I wonder? [Hamish's Hydroinformatics Weblog]
12:50:27 PM
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Amazon API. Cool, Amazon releases their a web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move. There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and Similarities Graph creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For fun, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. When looking at the API one thing I noticed was both the WSDL and XSDs type everything as string even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is typed as xs:string, I would have expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any thoughts on why they chose this route? [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I would also love to see the date of release to be typed as date, but I agree with Sam: they took the least common denominator (LCD) approach to maximize interop. I just wonder, when will be the time when we don't need to think about LCD to interop? Seems like I still have a lot of work to do with SOAP::Lite. [toolbox]
12:49:13 PM
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First Monday: After the Dot-Bomb. Described below are some "pet peeves," some problem areas identified in the design of Web information retrieval to date. These problems are accompanied by suggested solutions, or, at least, directions to go in to develop solutions for the next round of Web information retrieval development. [Tomalak's Realm]
12:47:21 PM
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Dear Cameron Marlow:.
Hi, Cameron. I read your http://web.media.mit.edu/~cameron/ pages. Your posts and my responsa.
I'm interested in better ways for work to find workers. I mean more efficiently, effectively, and well matched than our labor information systems do now.
In this age of the information revolution, it is my belief that all of humanity should be enlightened by the limitless amounts of data that become available to them every day. Unfortunately, this process is becoming seemingly harder and harder as time progresses; many people have labeled this problem the "information explosion," and are predicting a Borgesian end with infinite information sources and no way to locate anything. Indeed, with the exponential growth of internet web resources, we will start seeing the demise of our indexing systems; this is my call to arms.
My call comes from a similar problem. Millions of employers and jobs and workers moving their metadata to the net. Soon to be billions. The reality described by the data changes every minute, as we live and work. So most of the resumes and job descriptions are stale when used. Navigating the fluxing work-space is nigh impossible and getting worse.
Bad data is rife. Workers describe themselves shallowly and inaccurately, are infrequently and incompletely described by their behavior and accomplishments, and rarely by other observers. We are notoriously poor at discovering for ourselves what we want, need, and will accept from a potential job, let alone express those needs clearly.
The flip side of the transaction, describing work, workplaces, offers and opportunities, is similarly bollixed up by a twisted culture of advertising and personnel compliance.
Wading through stacks of partial, vague, old, wrong, culturally biased, sales-oriented material is no one's idea of fun. But this happens a hundred million times every year.
Most ongoing research in this domain focuses on the information system as a provider. However, as the number of people using such systems increases, it becomes apparent that it is nearly impossible to meet the demands of every individual. At this point, most resort to methods resembling collaborative filtering, pleasing the largest number of possible individuals by focusing on similarities. But whenever this type of comparison is made, there will always be a group of disenfranchised folk who do not fit the mold. It is my belief that if we focus on the individual instead of the provider, we can attain the same goals without compromising individuality.
The net from the bottom up.
Niching is one of the labor market's responses. You get thousands of directories and job boards around some mix of geography, occupation, and industry (Three ultrasound job boards!). But it still forces all the players into neat little boxes defined by strangers. This leaves most people badly served. How do we evolve a system that respects the shape of individuals?
My research focuses on the individual as a consumer, creator, and editor of information. On the first front, I hope to build tools that help people find, navigate, organize, and remember the world that they perceive. As providers of information, I want to help individuals convey the meaning that they intend with technologies for organization, expression, and distribution. Finally, I hope to create systems that bring people together in an effort to navigate this world collectively. By drawing from the disciplines of computer science, philosophy and the social sciences, focusing more directly on issues in information retrieval, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and cognitive psychology, I hope to accomplish some of these goals.
Ambitious.
It looks like the right focus for the problem.
I suspect it is also the right focus for addressing the labor market's fundamental problems.
People are amazing accumulators of things. As our collection grows, it becomes difficult to find individual possessions, so we organize our things categorically. As our possessions are very personal, so is our categorization; just by looking at the way a person arranges their books or CDs, we can learn quite a bit about how they think about their belongings.
This applies to how people describe themselves. Ask people to describe what they know, what they've done, their capabilities. The language used, organization, and relationships among them vary from person to person. People rarely answer a question the same way twice.
Computers have become an important part of our daily tidings, and along with them comes a host of digital media. The emails, pictures, mp3s, and bookmarks that clutter our desktops are the personal possessions of the digital age. The intent of the catalyst project is to build tools which enable people with better digital classification systems, and utilize their behavior in such systems as a lens into their understanding of the world.
Might this be a direction for understanding individual perception and internal models of the world of work?
Online directories (Yahoo, ODP, etc.) all assume that there is some form of universal categorization of the world, whether decided upon by standards organizations or merely assumed by conglomeration of independent views. Sometimes, categorization is merely a matter of personal understanding. To Americans, CNN is a source of national and international news, but to people from other countries, it might be seen merely as an American perspective.
HR-XML and SIDES (industry standards for exchanging resumes, jobs, and related transactions) work as intended. They both suffer from the universal categorization fallacy. They are stiff, perpetuating "best practices" of the 1990's United States. The taxonomy, conceptual model (What is a "job"?), and nomenclature not only vary from culture to culture, they change rapidly in time and from person to person.
Utilizing email and bookmark categorization, we can learn the way that an individual looks at their media. We can use this understanding as a tool to help present information in a more personal way, and help people of different persuasions understand each other. In turn, we can take some of the pressure off of information providers by allowing them to focus on generality instead of appealing to the majority.
Blogspace, email traffic and archives, and other sources of tacit knowledge will provide raw material to help people describe themselves and shape their professional brands.
I'm following Cameron's work eagerly.
See also:
[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]
10:53:55 AM
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Understanding web classification. Fantastic white-paper about the problems and potential of web-classification systems.
The hot new term in information organization is "ontology." Everybody's inventing, and writing about, ontologies, which are classifications, lists of indexing terms, or concept term clusters (Communications of the ACM, 2002). But here's the problem: "Ontology" is a term taken from philosophy; it refers to the philosophical issues surrounding the nature of being. If you name a classification or vocabulary an "ontology" then that says to the world that you believe that you are describing the world as it truly is, in its essence, that you have found the universe's one true nature and organization. But, in fact, we do not actually know how things "really" are. Put ten classificationists (people who devise classifications) in a room together and you will have ten views on how the world is organized.
Librarians had to abandon this "one true way" approach to classification in the early twentieth century. As many are (re-)discovering today, information indexing and description need to be adjusted and adapted to a myriad of different circumstances. Why, then, use the misleading term "ontology"?
Apart from philosophical issues, there is another, more important reason to abandon use of the term. Recorded information does not work the same way the natural world does. Information is a representation of something else. A book, or a Web site, can mix and match informational topics any way its developer feels like doing. There's no such thing as a creature that is half squirrel and half cat, but there are many mixes of half-squirrel/half-cat topics in information resources and Web sites. Methods of information indexing have to recognize what's distinctive to information, as opposed to classifications of nature, and design the systems accordingly. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!! [Boing Boing Blog] [McGee's Musings]
10:52:35 AM
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Book Review: Fast Food Nation -- Read This Book!.
Book Review: Fast Food Nation -- Read This Book!
In my flurry of activity before I left the house for Italy, I stopped by the local book store and grabbed a handful of books -- and not my usual trashy science fiction or business case study choices. Among the books was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Now I'm a happily practicing carnivore, and I've even in years past, been known to hunt and fish (only ducks / geese and sport fishing, never Bambi and I'm a lousy shot to boot). So I shouldn't have any problems with what this book goes into, right? Nope! Reading this book was not only frightening in the extreme but it has also convinced me to swear off store bought beef, end the (infrequent) stops for fast food and generally avoid processed foods. I'm a decent cook anyway so that really doesn't bother me at all. Damn scary but highly recommended. It's basically not just about fast food, it covers the whole U.S. agribusiness in general and how out of control it is. For example, did you know that if the FDA suspects tainted meat they do not have the legal ability to order a recall? It's at the discretion of the different companies involved. That's scary.
Amazon Listing: Go! [The FuzzyBlog!]
10:48:53 AM
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FirstGov opens for business. The U.S. government announces it will open an online auction and shopping section on its FirstGov portal, consolidating sales of property, cars, books, gifts and government auctions. [CNET News.com]
10:43:48 AM
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Light therapy tackles eye injuries [New Scientist]
Cool. LED UV lights in the 670 nanometer range promote activity in the mitochondria of cells that have been damaged. Imagine if instead of going into a tanning booth, you go into a rejuvinator to help your body recover from injuries, or to inhibit scarring for people how have been badly burned or otherwise injured. My usual snake oil disclamers apply. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
10:38:11 AM
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Signs I need to switch to decaf.
FCC Chief Slams TV Makers on Digital TV Conversion. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell slammed consumer electronics makers on Friday for an inadequate commitment to accelerating the transition to higher quality digital television. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]
The digital transition, which was designed to be completed by 2006, has been slowed in part by limited available content, potential piracy of content, and high-priced equipment needed to receive the higher-quality signals. (emphasis mine)
I've spent far too much time lusting after the HDTVs they have at the local Best Buy, and you know what? Pirating content isn't one of my plans, for the same reason that I rarely watch movies on my PC: It looks like crap. I want to see the full blown, super crisp picture that God (and the folks who made the content) intended. I don't want to have my movie hiccup because I'm getting an email, or my system is checking for an update, or my screen-saver is trying to take over. I want to see it in frighteningly crisp, clear video that is going to serve as the glue that keeps my butt in the la-z-boy and my hand in the popcorn. I want to hear it in sphincter thrumming bass that makes the windows rattle, along with my belly. I want to turn down the lights, crank the volume, and look over my shoulder when I hear a gun cock behind me in surround sound.
"But Ryan" you say "You can get than on your computer." Excuse me, did you read the second sentence of my post? I'm on a plane, a bus, whatever, fine, laptop it is. I'm at home, I want to be able to reach into my cooler, grab a cold one*, put my feet up, and enjoy. I don't want to worry about how warm my UPS is, or what cord I have trapped between my toes. I want to sit back, and enjoy the movie, and you know what? I CAN'T, because some team of industry lackeys has decided that I, the consumer, am more likely to pirate their precious content than buy it. Never mind the collection of 200 movies that I have, half of which are on DVD. Let's ignore the mountain of CDs, the cassette tapes, and the LPs. I won't even get into my rental habits because I think you get the idea. As far as these bastards are concerned, I'm a pirate, and their afraid that I'm going to use my DSL connection to try to view some grainy, reduced quality version of their works, without watching the commercials, without paying for the content that they have slaved to create in an attempt to garner my attention. God knows that they are just paying out the ass for those airwaves, Hey wait, aren't a lot of these content creators on cable? How does that work? What kind of broadcast fee structure are they under? Doesn't matter.
Simply put, Gimme. I want my MTV, my VH1, my HBO, my Discovery channel, animal planet HGTV food network jumping monkey gator catching high speed chase from a helicopter in full surround sound on an HDTV that I can watch with funky 3d shutter lenses and I want it all and I want it right now. I am your market folks, I just bought the laptop equivalent of a ferrari and it'll be here soon. I work hard and dammit, I play hard too. Get your product out, drop the freaking early adopter tax and just like Ozzy, I'll put it in every room of my house. Because if you don't folks, if you big companies drop the ball that you've been bobbling since 1994 when I first read that a standard had been agreed to in Video Toaster magazine, folks you will be well and truly fucked, because you're already losing your precious eyeballs. Most of my friends don't watch TV, and when they do it's a special event like the Super-bowl. Mostly they play games, or surf the net. Your one way conversation is more boring than a lecture from a droning college professor, and we ain't being graded for watching this one bubbah.
We're too busy working on our homes, building up our own businesses, and getting our next degrees to be bothered with you old boy. We grew up watching you and we know all of your tricks. This is why Survivor was such a hit: It broke the formula of set up and payoff, it introduced a random element into the very structured programming that you've been throwing at us for years. What's sad is that a show can now consist of nothing but homages to other things you've thrown at us and we'll think it's irreverent and new, instead of the thinly veiled retread that it knows itself to be. Bore us and we flip flip flip away from you, surfing the channels and using the remote one handed like the extension of ourselves that we know it to be.
But you can change all that. Make a better mousetrap. Give us the bigger, bolder prettier spiraling shape and we'll pick it up and call it wonderful and denounce it and play with it and love it and hate it but more importantly, we'll buy the damned thing if you'll just get it out there. The longer you sit there in your board rooms and worry about the things that we, the unwashed masses of scurvy ridden entertainment pirates, are going to do with your precious content, the less likely we are to be here to buy it when it comes out.
You're not the only game in town anymore boss, and really, you never were. And for every day that you sit back and bicker, we're going elsewhere to be distracted from how bored we are by you. Every day that you snipe, we start entertaining ourselves. Photoshop tennis is just the start, wait until home video editing hits critical mass. Then you're going to see an explosion of crazy, half baked, wild and entertaining indeciferable, beautiful madness the likes of which you've never seen, let alone approved from your office in the sky. Jackass was the first flake of snow, the first drop of rain in a torrent that is coming. We've learned at your feet, the tools got cheap, and you no longer control the means of production OR distribution. We've got peer to peer video on demand 24-7 and every time you knock out a channel, another three pop up daddy. This is the hydra all over again, and this time, you ain't got a torch Herc.
This isn't to say that you're dead, oh no, we still need heroes to watch, doing things we can't do, someone to follow for fashion and lingo. We love paying five bucks for ten cents worth of popcorn, and sitting in small seats to gather and watch what you tell us is acceptable. You tell us who to love and like dutiful soldiers, we'll follow your commands until it's time for something new to come along. Then you'll act all suprised until you can either co-opt it and drown us in it, or sic your lawyers and political hacks on it till it's dead. But that'll only last until we figure out another way to go around you. Our desire is like water, it goes wherever it can, either wearing away or going around it's obsticles, roaring when the resistance overcome, and wiping itself out when the momentum takes us too far.
*Sadly, this is either Gatorade or Poland Spring bottled water of late
(I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas today, just finished Gonzo Marketing, and am starting Hot Text. This may well explain a lot about this post.) [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
10:36:39 AM
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Is KM a technology problem?. What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem?. I just came across a posting by Jim McGee in McGee's Musings that I found thought provoking. Here is how it starts :
What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem?
Current thinking holds that knowledge management's problems come from too much focus on technology when the key problems are about organizational processes and practices. I've said as much myself on many occasions. But this formulation risks perpetuating the myth that problems are either organizational or technological. We know the real world isn't that simple, of course. We shouldn't contribute to the confusion by oversimplifying our discussion. Like Jim, I have always thought that KM is about people - "psychology - not technology" but I always love it when so called 'truths' that we hold dear are questioned - including my own. We've only got to look back through history to see the many times when we thought we were right and had all the answers - only to see those views totally overturned a few years later.
So what if KM is really all about technology and not people? I don't think so! Like Jim, I agree the real world is not that simple. We tend to like either-or arguments - [right-or-wrong] solutions - but reality is not like that - the answer is usually fuzzy and some where in between the extremes. So should KM be more about technology than people? Maybe its just that our current technology is poor or we are not using it appropriately. What role will technology play in the future?
Take a look at what Jim has to say - some interesting thoughts ... What do you think? [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
» I guess that my view is that where traditional KM fails it is not especially because the technology wasn't sophisticated enough (and sometimes the reverse) but because it failed to address the social, emotional needs of the individuals it was supposed to be serving.
I think this is part of the reason why I suspect klogging will be such a huge success - it's a social thing. People can create social capital by klogging. They can network, foster communities, add evident value. It creates new opportunities for them. It's a win-win deal.
Is klogging a technological victory? Only in the sense of the technology getting the hell outta the way.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
10:03:05 AM
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TAO of topic maps.
The TAO of Topic Maps. Steve Pepper has written a succinct introduction to topic maps, titled The TAO of Topic Maps. To quote Steve: Topic [Column Two]
» I finally got a chance to read this paper on the tube going to London today. A key paragraph that leapt out at me was:
"But knowledge is fundamentally different from information: the difference is that between knowing a thing versus simply having information about it. And if, as one writer claims, 'knowledge management covers three main knowledge activities: generation, codification, and transfer', then topic maps can be regarded as the standard for codification that is the necessary prerequisite for the development of tools that assist in the generation and transfer of knowledge."
In general the topic maps approach seems very sound to me with very laudible goals. It also dovetails nicely with a lot of my liveTopics efforts and lends some new and credible directions.
For example I have already implemented code in the liveTopics plugin to export the topical references in the weblog as an XTM topic map. Additionally my idea for topic themes seems almost identical to the concept of themes in the document.
It also highlights some things I should address. The idea of synonyms and homynyms are clearly important once people start sharing their topics (via topicRolls). It may also be useful to allow people to define their own glossaries (maybe integrated with the existing Radio glossary). And in order to generate occurrence data the permalinks of each posting should be used as topic references to that posting.
All in all a useful guide to the capabilities of topic maps. What is required now is another work building upon this that details some of the applications that topic maps will enable.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
9:55:36 AM
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A hidden engine behind the stock declines (as opposed the obvious engine: the malfeasance of America's corporate executives) are hedgefunds that control $560 b in assets for the extremely wealthy (this is double 2 years ago). These unregulated and secretive funds are heavily shorting the market, driving it lower. The upshot is that as wealthy individuals get wealthier in the short term due to these actions, the process is helping to harm the market's long-term prospects and perhaps the economy in general. The presence of so much money in opportunistic, leveraged funds is troubling. These funds ride trends (up or down) and often accelerate and or exaggerate their impact. Given that the current trend is down, we can expect it to get much worse than it would have been given the aggressive actions of these funds. Further, it adds to the image that the US markets are only a playground for the wealthy or "the connected" and not a place for individuals and their hard earned dollars. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
9:20:46 AM
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Blogs as external brain packs.
Wired: "Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing weblogs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." [Scripting News]
» This is such a fantastic idea.
It does, however, raise some serious security issues. At the moment there is no real trust issue with what goes in a weblog. But if someone is really going to treat a weblog as their external brain pack then their going to have to be sure that no-one can tamper with it, thereby altering their perceived reality.
It puts me in mind of the Christopher Nolan film Memento (with Guy Pierce).
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
I think it would also be a good tool to allow seniors a way to create their own little 'book' of their life.
9:09:29 AM
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Minimalist Web Project. This is a collection of good-looking websites that are built with minimalism in mind, the idea of beauty through 'less is more.' I started this project June 27th, 2002 by posting a 'matchmaker' project on Kaliber 10000 and allowing people to submit all other sites. I started the list by posting 3 of the sites listed below, Pseudofamous, 37 Signals and Fifth Third Bank, and all others have been submitted by those who are fans of HTMLminimalism. [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE]
8:57:18 AM
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Cabbie, You Advertising to Me?. Taxi drivers in Toronto are cruising with thin touch screens in the passenger seats that are equipped with GPS-enabled, location-sensitive advertising. Charles Mandel reports from Canada. [Wired News]
8:56:05 AM
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Getting a Pixel Fix on the Enemy. Mathematicians develop algorithms that can help restore stained, scratched or otherwise damaged paintings. The Navy hopes it also will bring spy surveillance photos into better focus. By Erik Baard. [Wired News]
8:55:20 AM
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Next Dimension in Baby Watching. Ultrasound is getting a fourth dimension -- the element of time -- to enable obstetricians to observe fetal movements in real time. Expectant parents like watching, too. By Louise Knapp. [Wired News]
8:53:58 AM
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The TAO of Topic Maps.
Steve Pepper
Someone once said that "a book without an index is like a country without a map".
However interesting and worthwhile the experience of driving from A to B without a map might be in its own right, there can be no doubt that when the goal is to arrive at one's destination as quickly as possible (or at least without undue delay), some kind of a map is indispensable.
I think I need to print this out before I can read it - it looks interesting, but it's too dense for me to understand without "holding" the words... [Michael J. Hehir's Radio Weblog]
8:52:05 AM
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Japan, a Preview of Coming Attractions?. CNN Money -- For years, the Japan question has come up only to be quickly swatted down. There's no way we'd let our economy languish for 12 years like the Japanese have, said the optimists. This is America, and when we've got a problem we fix it. But a June paper from the Federal Reserve titled, "Preventing Deflation: Lessons from Japan's Experience in the 1990's," has got the U.S.-is-Japan worries revving again. The comparison isn't hard to draw. Japan had a bubble, the United States had a bubble. Japan's banks are unwilling to lend to businesses despite low interest rates, and U.S. banks are increasingly unwilling to lend despite low interest rates. And now the Fed paper raises a worry that the same deflationary forces that have helped prevent a Japanese recovery could happen in the United States too. (07/17/02) [Synergic Earth News]
8:51:03 AM
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Understanding 'Wealth'. Timothy Wilken writes: The human species emerged in the world of space-binding. Here the rule of survival was fight or flight. The values in this world were adversarial. Adversary relationship originates on earth in the animal world. Earth supplies limited space for the animals. Space is finite. Good space is even more finite. This means it is very limited. There is only so much good water, so much good grazing land, so much good shelter, and so much good food. There is not enough to go around. The space-binders must compete for this limited amount of good space. They compete adversarialy. They compete by fighting and flighting. They compete by attacking and killing other space-binders. Humans living as space-binders follow the adversarial rule. They compete by fighting and flighting. They compete by attacking and killing their enemies. In this world survival depends on securing good space and avoiding bad space. Bad space is where the predators live – bad space is where you lose – bad space is where you die. ... Physical force is what adversarial humans value most. The force to physically control other humans. Adversarial wealth is weapons, fighting men, horses, fortresses, that which gives me the adversarial advantage. In our modern world, adversarial wealth is B2 bombers, F15 fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, military satellites, explosives of all types from hand grenades to nuclear weapons, trained soldiers and last but not least guns. The adversary world is a game of with losers and winners. This is a world of fighting and flighting – of pain and dying. Survival depends on securing good space and avoiding bad space. To win in this game someone must lose. Winning is always at the cost of another. All humans living in the adversarial world are struggling to avoid losing – struggling to avoid being hurt. (07/17/02) [Synergic Earth News]
8:50:04 AM
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Solving the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. Timothy Wilken writes: Big government and big business cannot help us. They are the problem. They are invested in a model of society that depends on separation and scarcity. Big government wants only to get re-elected and big business wants only to make a buck. Together they completely dominate our current political-economic system by their reality of one dollar = one vote. They cannot solve our human crisis. They don't have a clue. They can only make it worse. Its up to us. We can only rely on ourselves. We need individuals of integrity to join with us to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance of matter-energy even within the finite world we inhabit. Modern society is currently ruled by a political-economic system that is controlled and determined only by money. Remember one dollar = one vote. The only votes that count in our modern human society are the dollar votes you exercise by buying or not buying products. (07/17/02) [Synergic Earth News]
8:49:02 AM
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What Is Wrong with Making Money?. Timothy Wilken writes: Making money is not the same as creating life support–synergic wealth. Buckminster Fuller told us 90% of employed Americans are engaged in tasks that make money, but produce no real wealth, what are these Amercans doing? ... Some of those making money, but creating no life support are engaged in selling products and services to satisfy human wants. Recall human wants are not human needs. Today’s great market the hallmark of neutral organization spends enormous amounts of money and effort in advertising to create human wants where none existed. When you really need something, you do not require someone to inform you that you need it. If you need something, you will automatically go and look for it. Wants now are a very different case. I don’t know I want something until I see or hear an advertisement for it. It is estimated that $170 billion is spent annually on advertising to generate demand for products and services that we almost never need. And the entire cost of all advertising is added on to the price of the products and services we are being urged to buy. ... Some of those making money, but creating no life support are speculating in currencies, commodities, and the stock and bond markets. Speculators buy low and sell high. They do not invest in anything. They are seeking to gain a momentary price advantage and realize a quick profit. Their only interest is making money. (07/17/02)
[Synergic Earth News]
8:48:04 AM
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Point. Click. Think?.
Quote: "'[The Web] never presents students with classically constructed arguments, just facts and pictures.' Many students today will advance an argument, he continues, then find themselves unable to make it convincingly. 'Is that a function of the Web, or being inundated with information, or the way we're educating them in general?'"
Comment: This article provides examples of how poorly many people interact with information and information resources.
Is the US socio-political-education system (and it's focus on multiple-guess/standardized exams) a causal factor in how students interact with the Web to accomplish their assignments? What do you think? (via Craig's Booknotes) [Serious Instructional Technology]
8:17:54 AM
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Biochip: Diagnosis in a Pinch. Technology being developed at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee will be able to test for several biological weapons quickly and simultaneously. Kristen Philipkoski reports from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. [Wired News]
6:49:40 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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