Tuesday, September 23, 2003

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More Broken Arms in Children Article in NYT on the sharp increase in broken arms in children. Speculation that diet is the major contributor. Check. Some speculation that increased female participation in sports is a secondary contributor. Okay. Surprised to see no discussion of childhood obesity as a factor--heavy kids fall more often, and harder. 8:19:13 PM    comment []

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I see a new tactic of a few spammers is to send email with a falsified "Sent" date, far in the future. So for people like me--who order their message by descending received date--it will always receive "top billing" (until deleted). I assume this tactic would make it easy for spam filters to identify it as spam. I also don't quite understand why the fictitious Sent date gets mapped to the Received date, which is how I have my mail sorted. So, IMO, the Received date should be the date on my email server, and should be completely independent of the Sent date. 8:15:57 PM    comment []

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Fall has finally come to the twin cities, I suppose it is arriving just on time, per the vernal equinox. And it arrives with a fairly light touch. Last night was a bit raw, with all the rain, but today is partly sunny and crisp. Next 10 days highs are mostly around 70. Can't complain, just hate to see the days grow so short. 8:15:54 PM    comment []

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NYT has a fairly positive article about the interesting new Cingular cell-phone cradle which will automatically cause calls to cradled handsets to be forwarded to a home number. It is a very interesting and clever idea, probably the biggest attempt at strategic product innovation since the Nextel walkie-talkie mode. It would have made lots of sense about five years ago, when incremental cell phone minutes were pricey. But now, with bundles of minutes being so incrementally cheap, I just don't see the case for it. Using the product does require a significant mental model of how cell phones work (un-docking without canceling, and all that). I posit that anyone who cares enough about cell phones to understand what the product is supposed to do and how it works probably already has a plan with lots of incremental minutes. (I have Sprint with 2000 monthly shared family minutes, mobile-to-mobile not even counting against them, and I consider that to be essentially infinite). I predict little or no success for this product. 8:15:44 PM    comment []