Cogitare

My old boss Steve Brill is back in the journalism game after a successful run as founder and CEO of Clear, the airport security pre-screening company. If real journalism is going to survive, the industry has to figure out how to get people to pay for it again--newspapers are coughing up blood and yet there's more news and journalism available than ever before. This effort should be a serious shot at creating a subscription model for quality journalism, but will it be enough? Beyond news junkies, will the average citizen pay enough for content to offset the gap between print and online advertising revenues? We'll see....

NEDO: EXPO 2005 Aichi Japan Next-generation robot

Link: NEDO: EXPO 2005 Aichi Japan Next-generation robot.

Practical next-generation robot systems

They are demonstrating over 65 robots at that show! Including "partner" robots and many more humanoid robots, including ones with "flexible backbones." Many of the robots appear to have been designed by graduate students.

Hmmmm, engineering graduate students, long nights in the lab, and humanoid robots with flexible backbones..... What ever could that be all about? Advice to said grad students however: next time buy a copy of Playboy Japan before designing the, uh, "user interface" on one of these things.

But seriously folks, holy Isaac Asimov! Time to start embedding the 3 Laws into these things before we wind up in Terminator land.

via Engadget

The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

Link: The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time.

The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

Mobile PC's list of top gadgets has some great gizmos and interesting tidbits about the origins of some of the world's primo gadgets. Yes, there was a time before the remote control, for example. Which brings me to a tangential anecdote. You know how some people (OK, old people) still call the remote "the clicker?" Well of course that's because from 1956 until the 80's or so, the wireless remote control was a little box with buttons that when "clicked" struck a little rod inside, producing an ultrasonic tone that the TV picked up and responded to with a channel change or volume change. Hence, "the clicker."

When I was at college, we had punch card meal tickets, little cardboard tickets that the cafeteria workers would hit with a hole punch to redeem one meal. By my senior year, these had been replaced with credit-card style cards with a magstripe that registered one meal credit if you were on the full-meal plan. We continued to call them "punches" of course. A decade later, the kids still called one meal credit a "punch." I'm sure few of them had any idea that the derivation was a physical hole punch in a paper card!

Spam Works? Duh.

Link:
Yahoo! News - Spamhaus.org: Warning 'Taken Out of Context'.

The biggest problem with spam, perhaps, is that recipients actually read unsolicited ads and act on them. According to recent research, 14 percent of users read spam and 4 percent actually bought something. Rockbridge Associates and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland released the report -- entitled "National Technology Readiness Survey" -- last week.

What's wrong with that statement? Not that I'm a big fan of spam, mind you, but can you imagine someone making a similar statement about TV ads? "The biggest problem with these obnoxious interruptions is that people actually remember them, and sometimes even discuss them the next day at work. Even worse, some people actually buy the products being advertised!"

If people are buying what's being sold in "spam" then why is it not "advertising?" Unsolicited, true, but how much of advertising is solicited? I think the problem isn't going to get any better until we have a more intelligent way of talking about this stuff. Lumping all commercial email together and saying it is bad because it isn't something you personally were looking to get just makes it harder to talk about reasonable access to markets for advertisers. It makes it harder to look at email marketing in the context of all direct marketing and decide how it should properly fit in.

WokFi

Link: WokFi

OK, I'm hardly the first to come across this, but these guys made Wifi equipment out of Chinese cookware!

Make 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes from cheap but sturdy Chinese cookware scoops & a USB WiFi adaptor !