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Good news. If you've ever been frustrated by the check engine light in your car and paid $100+ to get it diagnosed. And probably gotten it diagnosed multiple times because you didn't get any real info, there's now a bill in Congress to require car companies to release those codes to the public. See Drivers Want Code to Their Cars for more info.
Foresight Exchange. Another site where you can bet on the future. A political options market. This one is much more active than the previous ones I wrote about. Bet on (or buy options) things like "GW Bush remains US Pres. '04" or "US gasoline prices reach $3.00".
See a map of the world with the most recent weblog posts called out. It depends on geocoding to work and not all weblogs are geocoded.
How to Toilet-Train Your Cat. I always wondered how you would do this ...
The top search terms on Google. Overall popular search terms and category winners. As well as other information like the operating system people were using.
I was stumbling when I ran into this typing game on Zannah's blog. Since it reminded me of the typing game I learned how to type with, so I gave it a try. It wasn't nearly as fun as the one I learned on, but it was fun to remember what it was like. I will say that some people must have played for a very long time to get to those scores!
Frank got me these beautiful flowers and my friends threw an awesome surprise party!
Ordering Pizza in 2019
Just a little humor about information privacy in the future.
A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date
An article about flirting with blackberries wireless email devices. I have a blackberry and I have to say I'm not addicted. My tablet PC and my iPOD mini are way cooler.
Rowing Scholarships Available. No Experience Necessary.
Just in case your have a daughter getting ready to go to college. Or you are a young woman getting ready to go to college. Or you know a young woman going to college.
SmartMobs pointed me at this new service: dodgeball.com :: location-based social software for mobile devices. You can now use your cell phone to track the physical location of your social network.
A friend of mine's house was struck by lightening Saturday. Luckily they were not home and the dog was outside.
Way cool. A video game - that kids like - that involves "dancing" and eventually helps many lose weight.
CNN.com - Video game fans dance off extra pounds - May 24, 2004
Hear, hear! Yet another article trying to convince people that business travel is stressful. Not only stressful, but bad for your health. Yet we only worry about the dollar costs ...
The New York Times > Business > All Stressed Out and Everywhere to Go
One of these dogs, featured in a New York Times article, actually got his own apartment in NYC!
The New York Times > New York Region > Rooming With the Big Dogs
DidTheyReadIt is a service that allows you to track the email you sent out. According to the website, you can tell whether people opened your email, how long it was open, etc.
Their website does not explain how they are able to do this, and I'm a little sceptical about how it could work. Is my system going to send an email back to them without me knowing it? I don't think so! So what (and how) are they monitoring?
I'm not sure if this is scary or not, but it's definitely annoying. If it's doable and it becomes standard, I think you'll find people setting up their email to automatically open on arrival.
I think it's worth pointing out that in order to use their service, you have to send all of your email through them. Their Subscription Agreement says those emails will be "confidential in accordance with generally accepted standards of electronic mail usage" - what are "generally accepted standards"?
They have a free trial. If anybody tries it out, I'd be interested in learning how it works.
UPDATE:
Slashdotters discussed this. According to them, DidTheyReadIt embeds a small image in your email. When the user opens their email, the email client downloads the image from the DidTheyReadIt website, and they know the message has been opened. This wouldn't be the most reliable of tools.
Image downloading can be turned off in most email clients.
I was originally going to post about Fundrace.org
because it has some cool maps, visual representations of the amount of campaign funds (colored according to party) donated by county, city, state, etc. Then I started playing with it and thought, "This is pretty scary!" I typed in my zip code and it showed all of my neighbor's contributions along with their names, home addresses and company affiliation. I knew most of the names on there!
This has always been public information, but having it right at your fingertips, easily searchable and sorted, brings a whole new dimension to politics and privacy.
A New York Times article orginally pointed me to Fundrace.org.
Here's a newsmap, kind of like the market map from Smart Money that I posted a few months ago. It uses google news and color codes news according to type and shades it according to time. Size seems to be related to number of related articles.
(I found this on the They Rule blog.)
Smart Mobs pointed me at this website, THEY RULE, which has to be one of the coolest tools I've seen in a long time. The websites objective, according to the website, is:
"They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations."
You can type in two companies names and find out how they are connected. For example, IBM is connected to Microsoft because John Brooks Slaughter, one of IBM's directors, sits on the Northrop Grumman board with Charles H. Noski. Noski sits on Microsoft's board:
IBM - John Brooks Slaugher - Northrop Grumman - Charles H. Noski - Microsoft
These are the people that have strong influence in America's economy, politics and therefore society. Have fun!
P.S. A similar example of political networks that I found on the They Rule website is this map of who contributed to Bush's campaign funding.
Smart Mobs pointed me at this new tool: Political Friendster - Visualize!. This is a Standford tool, a paradoy on Friendster, called Political Friendster. Anyone can input people's names and relationships. You can use the Visualize! tool to see a map (for example, the Bush family) and then you can add other people (like Author Anderson contacts or politicians like Arnold Schwartzennegger) and see how they are related. It's fun!
VIP members of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona can choose to have RFID chip implanted in their arm instead of carrying an ID card. The chip is the size of a grain of rice and can be scanned at 10 cm. Drinks can be charged to the users account by scanning the chip.
Will we all soon carry a microchip in our skin instead of a wallet? Before that happens they will have to figure out how privacy rules apply, how an individual can control what gets scanned by different vendors, and develop a standard. Nobody's going to want 10-15 chips like we have 10-15 cards in our wallet!
Yahoo! News - Diet Device Makes You Take Smaller Bites
A $400 device that enforces Small bites-just like your mom taught you! What people will do to try to lose weight!
Intelliseek's BlogPulse is a website that tracks popular topics in blogs. They maintain three main lists: Top Links, Key People, and Key Phrases that appear in blogs.
My favorite, Brad Pitt has consistently ranked #1 in the most featured people list. Right before John Kerry and George Bush today.
Here's another form of social networking - a conference you can only attend if someone else invites you. Sounds like a party not a conference to me!
It'll be interesting to see how it progresses over the years. On a related note, Google's gmail beta service is only available via invite by somebody else who has service. I think that definitely adds to the mystic and gives them great publicity.
The editor of the Daily Mirror was fired for posting fake pictures of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, but Rumsfeld hasn't been fired for allowing real abuse to take place. As a matter of fact, nobody has really been punished for allowing real abuse to take place. From what I can tell that's not because Americans - nor the President - think the abuse was justified. Do our military leaders think it was justified?
A woman who has four children in foster care was ordered not to have any more until she can take care of them. (Turns out she was pregnant again by the time the ruling happened!)
I certainly understand where the judge is coming from. This couple should not have any more children. However, must not? Can the courts endorce that order? And without taking any kind of preventative action, can they enforce it all? Here's what the judge said:
"In a March 31 ruling made public last week, the judge said she was not forcing contraception or sterilization on the couple and was not requiring the mother to get an abortion should she become pregnant. But the couple could be jailed for contempt if they have another child."
The two costs to consider here are the costs to society of caring for these children temporarily (and probably permanently) and the cost to the children who will most likely have a more difficult time growing up in foster care and homeless shelters than they would have had they been born to more stable, well off parents. Balancing those two issues is very difficult. Whether children in this situation are better off with their parents or better off with others is a highly debated situation. Is the parents' situation temporary (and foster care is justified) or is it permanent in which case the best thing for the children might be to be adopted by someone looking for children to love?
I think the correct "punishment" for failing to agree with the judge's ruling would be to have the next baby put up for immediate adoption. (Especially if the mother continues her drug usage while pregnant, a serious abuse to the child.) However, that ruling implies so much power to the courts that it has serious, scary implications to our society.
I just read this blog entry, collision detection: Fixing Nemo, on Clive Thompson's blog yesterday about how much would you be willing to spend to save your pet's life. Clive says he'd pay $1000. I say it would depend on the expected outcome. I'd pay a lot more if I was guaranteed a 100% recovery. But if you said I was only prolonging life by a month or two or my dog would be in severe pain forever, I probably wouldn't pay anything. For problems in between, it's a hard decision, as I was reminded this morning.
How much you'd pay for a pet's health is a debate that I've had with many of my friends. I've also seen couples get into very heated arguments over how much was appropriate to spend on their dog's hip surgery or their ferret's cancer. It hit home this morning when I took my dog Teddy to the vet. When I watched them writing "acting funny" as the reason for the visit, I felt kind of stupid. It took a force of will to stay - to remind myself that I really did think there was a problem and what I had described was more than "acting funny" in my opinion. I felt stupid because I was about to pay $38 to find out if why my dog was "acting funny". That would pay for a very nice dinner tonight.
As it turns out, Teddy is in pain, so I was correct in thinking that "acting funny" might be serious. However, I spent $150 to find out that she has a disk protrusion, i.e. a slipped disk, so while I was right, something was wrong, I spent $150 to learn that Teddy should take it easy for a while (no running!) and take doggie aspirin. Was it money well spent?
See more dog posts at my Humans for Dogs blog.
I think that most people blindly follow the beliefs of their party.
I bet 80% of you that agree with the above statement agree because you think members of the opposite party are stupid, bull headed and blindly follow their party. They never listen to you. Right?
We waste way too much time pitting Democrats against Republicans and vice versa. And in reality both parties are so close to each other on the political spectrum that it makes our debates ridiculous. I mean look at the grand scheme of politics, the extreme right is some sort of dictatorship and the extreme left is some form of communism. Our Democratic and Republic parties (with capital letters of course) are right next to each other somewhere in the middle. And the members of those parties cross the lines quite a bit. I mean, how many Republicans do you know that are prochoice? And I know a few Democrats that are prolife. And that's just one issue in the larger portfolio of war, terrorism, voting, and educational systems to name a few.
Yet an independent will never make it in our political system because they don't have the financial backing of a party and all the votes a party can pull in.
I think debate is absolutely necessary. But a debate that only has two sides - the same two sides! - for the hundreds of issues that face us today is bound to reach some strange compromises. Compromises that we can't afford.
Fast Company | Don't Manage Time, Manage Yourself
"The typical businessperson experiences 170 interactions per day (phone calls, hallway conversations, emails) and has a backlog of 200 to 300 hours of uncompleted work." Wow! No wonder I feel like I'm never done!
A friend of mine just pointed me to StumbleUpon.com. (See his writeup.) If you sign up, it adds a toolbar to your browser. You can then rate web sites. Your friends can see which web sites you like, and you can tell Stumble to show you websites that you might like. As Tim says, it's like channel surfing for the web.
This article from USA Today tries to describe how the soldiers in Abu Ghraib, people that lived normal, caring lives in the US, could have gotten caught up in the torture of prisoners: USATODAY.com - Abuse less shocking in light of history. The article refers to several psychology experiements that I remember from Psych 101. In one the researcher has students "teach through punishment" and administer electric shocks. Suprisingly, most subjects followed orders and increased voltages even when their "students" were screaming in pain. In another study, the researcher sets up a mock prison environment. In that mock environment, some of the subjects did things similar to the Abu Ghraib situation. The experiment had to be called off before it was finished.
I don't think this excuses anybody, heinous crimes were committed and everybody involved is responsible, however I think this means that those in command should be even more responsible because they did not create a structure that would have prevented these crimes. Based on scientific studies, we knew something like this could happen and we didn't put adequate controls in place.
 | I finally got an iPod mini! And I didn't pay $400-$1000 for it on eBay. I took the advice of a friend of mine who is also an Apple employee. He told me to call the Apple Store because they occasionally get them in stock. (The wait is 6 weeks from Apple online.) So I called the Apple store every morning, and sure enough, yesterday they got some in. I now have several audio books and about 3 days worth of music on it. (Meaning if I played my music continuously, it would be three days before I had to listen to a song a second time.) The controls took some getting used to, but once I figured it out, I couldn't imagine why I hadn't been able to figure it out right away! I'm very happy with my new toy. |
The orange juice futures market predicts Florida weather better than the Weather channel.
Markets, "information markets", are very good predictors of the future, probably because they are able to incorporate the knowledge of a lot of people. And those people are betting real money, so they are making the best, most educated guess they can. If you want to see how it works, and try it out for yourself, The Iowa Electronic Markets run by the University of Iowa has a number of futures markets where you can buy options on different outcomes. For example you can buy a contract on who you think will win the Presidential Election in 2004. You can either try the trial version or you can open an account with real money.
I read about this in United's inflight magazine, Hemispheres Magazine.
| If you own stock in an American company, you should read this book. If you pay taxes in America, you should read this book. Obviously, I think everyone should read the book. |
David Johnston, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, describes what is wrong with our tax system. It taxes the poor and rewards the rich. It allows the rich and their decendents to continue getting richer while leaving middle class and upper middle class salary workers less and less to save.
Johnston covers a multitude of topics from:
- how the richest Americans are getting richer,
- to how the richest Americans pay the least percentage of their income in taxes (not the least because most of their income is not a salary),
- how executives abuse corporations, gaining huge incentives using such things as the corporate jet to defering income which allows them to pay less tax and gives the company less right offs,
- to how corporations aren't honest with their stockholders on where the money is going,
- to how corporations report one set of profits to their shareholders and another to the IRS,
- to how corporations are paying less and less tax at the cost of the middle and upper middle class,
- to how Bush's tax cuts won't really benefit anyone making less than $500,000/yr because of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and he knew that,
- how the repeal of the "death tax" is really a "how to make the really rich richer" but doesn't affect most of the US, including farmers, not a one of who has lost a farm to the estate tax,
- how Congress continues to pass tax laws and funding that meet the needs of the people that contribute to their campaigns, the rich,
- how the IRS polices the working poor and middle class to meet quotas instead of the really big scams that they know of that would bring in billions of dollars,
- and so on.
In conclusion, he says we all need to be well informed, talk to everyone we know, pay attention to the tax bills being passed, and push for more transparent tax law changes as well as a cleaning up of the tax bill and more funding to pursue the big time tax frauds.
| Pattern Recognition is a science fiction book by William Gibson that's not science fiction. Everything in the story is current, deployed technology, but Gibson describes it a way that we see how different our culture is becoming because of technology. The main character, Cayce Pollard, is a brand specialist; she's a contractor that helps corporations determine if their brands will work or not. She also has a very different way of observing the world, and although it took me a while to appreciate it, Gibson's style of describing everyday occurences through Cayce's eyes really grew on me. Cayce starts the book out working on a contract in London and is soon traveling around the world to solve the mystery of the "footage". The "footage" is a series of film clips being released on the web that has gathered a following, almost a cult, that is obsessed with figuring out if the footage is from one film, if the film is finished or not, and who is the producer. It's a good mystery as well. I enjoyed this book immensely both as a mystery and as a not-so-science-fiction book. |
When I first went looking for a blogging tool, the lack of good information about the different sites that host blogs was very frustrating. I did find a few tables that compared prices and features but they hadn't been kept up to date and they didn't include all of the sites I was looking at. I decided not to post anything about the tools because I wouldn't have created a complete comparison and I wouldn't have kept it up to date.
That said, I think there's a cool technology called RSS that would be interesting and useful to most people who read blogs. RSS, very simply, is a news aggregator technology. It provides a way of "subscribing" to blogs and news sites - you can pull all the information to one place instead of visiting each site independently. However, it's the technology, not an end user tool.
For a detailed technical description of what RSS is read this article.
I am looking for a good, simple, cheap RSS reader, i.e. the end user tool. A tool that will go to all my favorite websites (that use RSS) and show me the latest news and posts in one place. I'm looking for one right now. If and when I find one I like, I will share it here. If you have any input, please let me know via comments!
I'm beginning to really like Wired. I bought the paper copy before a nine hour plane ride the other day and I read it cover to cover. I remember when it first came out and my mom bought me the first couple of editions. I really enjoyed the magazine then as well but somehow lost track of it in the meantime until friends started sending me pointers to articles on Wired.com.
In the May edition of Wired there's an article about bionic ears. Two women who are deaf (due to tumors in their auditory nerves) had external microphones wired directly to nerve tissue in their brain stem. The article says it worked for one of them (no details given) and they are going to continue with the next group of 25 patients. The work was done by the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
Ordinarily, I would never comment or rank a book that I didn't finish, but this one bugged me enough to make an exception. "Off with Their Heads" is well ranked on Amazon.com, but a closer look shows that people either love it or hate it. I hated it - or at least I hated the first chapter. Dick Morris' book is supposedly what happened to our sense of unity and determination after 9/11. He blames a number of organizations and people for "sidetracking" us and devotes a section to each of them. The first section was about the New York Times. Morris claims that the NYT's is now extremely liberal and that they slant their poll numbers (that was interesting) and pick their stories to align with their beliefs. While I personally believe every newspaper picks stories that align with their beliefs, and I have no problem with it, I just like to know about it, so I was looking forward to hearing his NYT story. However, other than the issue of the poll numbers, all I heard was rants. Morris was very upset that any front page space was given to the civil rights of prisoners, the number of dead in Iraq, etc.
If the New York Times slanted their polls or weighted them inappropriately, then that's wrong. If they gave titles to news stories that weighted the news towards one side or another of the story, then I agree they are biased but not necessarily wrong.
If the New York Times decides that the civil liberties issue as manifested by the lack of prisoner rights granted to prisoners in Guantanomo Bay is a front page issue, then I think they have the right to put the story on the front page. I think it is front page news. I don't think it should be withheld because it might detract from our support of the Iraq War. I think it's atrocious that we don't give our prisoners captured during time of war (not those captured on the battlefield, but those captured in civilian places, like the Chicago airport) the same democratic process and "innocent until proven guilty" as every other citizen. We need to practice what we believe in. That is a separate, although not unrelated, issue than whether or not we should support a war in Iraq.
Wired News has a cool website, a hotspot finder. Go to http://wired.jiwire.com/index.htm and type in your address or zip code and it will list all of the nearest wireless spots and information about them including costs.
So while I believe that the ideal woman's body portrayed in magazines and television is way too thin, unhealthy and unrealistic, I also believe the large number of studies that have found a correlation between obesity and disease. I also believe that anybody who's not healthy and able to participate in a minimum amount of activity, like walking, misses out on a lot of opportunities in life. All that said, I think it's only fair to also point out that there is another side. This New York Times article, Demonizing Fat in the War on Weight, describes the other viewpoint. The author believes that our current obsession with obesity and dieting is a craze created by the media and unfairly creates discrimination particularly against certain minorities. It was an interesting article, and I do believe that discrimination against overweight people is an issue, but the article dismissed a lot of scientific study that correlates obesity to disease without offering any scientific backing of its own.
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