And This is a Good Thing?

First, e-commerce turned us into our own data entry clerks. Now, technology is improving our lives immeasurably by potentially making us all our own check-out clerks. Funny how making more work for me is somehow believed to be a benefit. Sure, I use the self-service checkout kiosks in Price Chopper when the checkout lines are really long--but I find it to be less a convenience than an annoyance. (Now I know how my mother felt when she complained long ago about gas stations switching to all-self-service pumps.)

Rather than pitching the latest storage solution, the Container Store mailing touted a new customer service with a clunky label, GoShop Scan & Deliver, but a potentially transformative premise.
As of this month, shoppers at the Container Store in Manhattan can register a credit card number at the counter and get a wireless hand-held scanner. As they walk the aisles, they scan in barcodes on desired items then pay for the purchases, which are delivered to their homes the same day.
Such customer self-service devices have been talked about and tested for years, and various retailers such as sporting-goods chain Modell’s have armed store clerks with wireless devices to assist customers and track inventory.

The Google Story No One is Mentioning

Except The Onion, of course.

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

But don't think it ends there....

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
...
"At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."

"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."

Just a Matter of Time, Really

Sigh. What is wrong with these people?

The first serious outbreak of a mobile-phone virus in a company has been detected, according to security specialist F-Secure.

F-Secure security expert Patrick Runald said Tuesday that an outbreak of the Commwarrior.B virus occured at an unnamed Scandinavian company last Wednesday.

"This is the first time a mobile virus has infected an organization," Runald said. "It's a particularly nasty version of Commwarrior, as it just doesn't give up."

Commwarrior targets mobile phones that use the Symbian Series 60 operating system, and the bug spreads using Bluetooth and multimedia messaging technology, or MMS.

Oops

Sez Ad Age:

Martha Stewart Living, Family Circle and House Beautiful are the latest titles to be swept up in a circulation scandal that is tearing through the industry like “an apocalypse,” as one worried publisher dubbed it.

By one estimate, one of every three of the 300 or so leading consumer magazines that claim rate bases could be affected; others said the hit could disqualify as many as 2.5 million to 5 million copies previously classified as paid.

Friday Cat Blogging--A Day Late

Tsk.


(Via Maxspeak.)

The Other White Meat

Scientists can now make all-white-meat chicken:

The recipe involves adding excess water to ground-up dark meat to create a kind of meat soup, then spinning the mixture around in a tub at high speed. The centrifugal force makes the mixture settle into layers of fat, water, and extracted meat, which can be molded into breast-like patties of all-white meat.

That sounds delicious!

Where Have You Gone, Gary Larson?

Think how many Far Side cartoons this could inspire:

Controlling cattle over the net

Technology developed at the University of New England in NSW will enable farmers to remotely control and monitor livestock movement by using their mobile phone or the internet.

It will also eventually allow them to monitor and control the farm gate and water trough levels.

The system has been developed to allow in-built alarm systems in the farm gate and water trough to send an automatic mobile phone text message if an unannounced visitor opens the gate or the water levels fall too low.

Shhh!! Don't Tell PETA

Hamster inspires teenage inventor

An energetic hamster called Elvis gave a budding engineer a bright idea for charging his mobile phone.

Peter Ash, 16, from Somerset, realised that Elvis's fave activity of playing on his wheel could be used to create electricity to charge his mobile.

As part of his GCSE coursework, he created a device where he gets 30 minutes of talk time for every two minutes that Elvis goes for a spin.

Variable Data Printing

It's rare to find variable-data printing (VDP) stories from the point of view of the designer. While I generally like the idea of VDP and think it's cool, it is a very "buggy" approach to printing that, as Dr. Joe has pointed out, always seems to produce direct mail pieces that have wrong information on it.

Blog or Perish

Via Crooked Timber comes this story about how blogs (or blog-like tools like arxiv) are starting to replace journal publishing in academia--or at least in physics (for the moment).

Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

A Good Reason to Avoid Those Nigerian Internet Scams

Well, aside from the fact that they're, you know, scams... But there is this story from today's L.A. Times about a music producer who has gone missing. This seems to me to be a little different (though not much) from those stupid "missing white woman" stories that CNN, MSNBC, and rest of that miserable lot seem to love so much, but this does have what may be an object lesson for us all:

Several months ago, Irwin told his friend and former business partner Fortunato Procopio, 47, that he had been unwittingly drawn into a Nigerian Internet fraud and had been threatened by the con artists, Procopio said.

"I told him it was clearly a scam — don't be silly," Procopio said Wednesday. But Irwin later received a mysterious $50,000 check, friends and relatives said, and became increasingly concerned. Procopio and some relatives offered few details, saying police had asked them not to discuss specifics of the case.

On Sunday morning, Procopio said, he was awakened in his Venice home by a phone call that was picked up by his answering machine. When he played the recording, he heard Irwin asking for help. Irwin said he was in hiding and someone was in close pursuit.

Waiting for the Worms

Trivia question: which computer/platform was hit by the very first worm attack?*

eWeek has an interesting history of the computer worm. Ah, yes, the infamous "I Love You" worm of 1999. I knew there was a problem when I turned on the computer one morning and there were five e-mails from a Cygnus VP with the subject line "I Love You." If they had instead said "I Want to Lay You Off" or "I Will Cut Your Pay" or "I Am the Spawn of Satan," I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it.







*The Apple II, which was hit in 1982.

Pod People

Arbitron has come up with an ingenious way to get effective ratings for podcasts:

During the week of July 18, Arbitron encoded several podcasts by Clear Channel's WHTZ-FM (Z100) in New York, that were uploaded to the podcast portion of Apple's iTunes Music Store. The Z100 podcasts were then downloaded to an MP3 player and played over headsets using the PPM headset adapter. The PPM detected and recorded the unique identification codes that were embedded in the MP3 file.

I think that just the fact that Arbitron has sought to come up with a way to gauge the listership of podcasts is telling. It doesn't strike me as a perfect solution--but it certainly beats those little journals they ask people to fill out (a couple years ago I was tapped to be an Arbitron radio ratings journaler--they must have been disappointed that what few entries there were were Internet radio stations).

It's "Living Doll" All Over Again

Remember the episode of "The Twilight Zone" about the evil Talky Tina doll that kept trying to kill Telly Savalas? I don't quite know why that was the first thing that came to my mind when I read about the latest in toy doll technology:

...a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and facial robotics. She and her team have christened it Amazing Amanda.

...

[T]he 18-inch-tall doll promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to "listen, speak and show emotion." Some analysts and buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a cord in its back.

Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories - including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas.

Then of course there was the Simpsons Halloween episode with the Krusty the Clown doll that tried to kill Homer--"Here's your problem. This thing was set to 'evil.'" Parents should probably keep an eye on that.

My Beautiful [Online] Laundrette?

We all may need to download Google Talk because our cellphones are going to be tied up by our appliances calling us: you can now have washers and dryers call you when they're free.

Dubbed LaundryView, colleges and universities can set up networks of washing machines and dryers. Via an online site, students can see which machines are free and how much time is left on those that are currently in use.

What's more, the system will send alerts to mobile phones and PDAs when the machine a student is using finishes its cycle. According to the site, LaundryView will also track overall usage for the last two weeks, so students can determine which days and times are usually the busiest.

If I remember my college laundry experience (which remains ever-vivid, of course...), what's really needed is a washer or dryer that will go and physically drag someone down to the laundry room to remove their clothes when they're done. And from what I recall, the laundry room at my freshman dorm was purportedly haunted (the "evidence" presented being that, one time someone saw "a person there she didn't recognize"--well, Q.E.D.). Still, surely the ghost could be put to productive use monitoring washers.

A long time ago, when I lived in Astoria, Queens, a new neighborhood laundrette had opened--it was great; they had the newest machines and it was always empty (which probably explained why they went out of business in less than a year). But I was always amused by their sign, which in bold letters touted their "Drop Of Service." I could never determine if they meant "Drop Off Service" or if it was finally a case of truth in advertising ("We don't offer a lot of service, just a drop").

Google Talk Part II

The comments I've seen regarding Google's new Chat/VoIP service, GoogleTalk, have been encouraging. It's Windows only right now and until they come out with a Mac version I shall have to pass it by (I have a PC but I keep it offline--primarily because I've exceeded the number of IP addresses Roadrunner lets me use, but also because I don't feel like downloading virus descriptions and security patches very five seconds).

Of course, that may change. If Rupert Murdoch buys Skype, I will physically scrape the Skype application from my hard drive, never to use it again.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Going out of town? Let a robot housesit for you:

Worried about leaving your house empty while you go on vacation? Japan has the answer: a house-sitter robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors and a videophone.

Stores across Japan started taking orders on Thursday for the Roborior -- a watermelon-sized eyeball on wheels that glows purple, blue and orange -- continuing the country's love affair with gadgets.

Roborior can function as interior decor, but also as a virtual guard dog that can sense break-ins using infrared sensors, notify homeowners by calling their cellular phones, and send the owner's cell phone videos from its digital camera.

Hmm...I can envision a really weird remake of Risky Business...

GooglePlex?

So now Google, among a zillion other things, is getting into the IM/VoIP arena. Now things will get interesting.

Add yet another offering, actually two, from Google (GOOG ) that takes the search giant even further beyond its find-anything-on-the-Web roots. On Aug. 24 it announced a broad-ranging effort to attack both the instant-messaging and Internet voice-calling markets with a service called Google Talk.

Toward a Bookless Library?

The University of Texas's academic library has started getting rid of its books. OK, it's Texas, so insert own joke here. But still:

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The [University of Texas] library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go.

...
So to ease some of the apprehension, administrators took the word "library" out of their vocabulary when referring to the Flawn Academic Center. When classes start Aug. 31, it will be filled with colorful overstuffed chairs for lounging, barstools for people watching, and booths for group work. In addition to almost 250 desktop computers, there will be 75 laptops available for checkout, wireless Internet access, computer labs, software suites, a multimedia studio, a computer help desk and repair shop, and a cafe.

While students are still required to read books at the undergraduate level, they are increasingly being asked to use a variety of different online sources.

"Libraries are about information, and books were simply a way that information was packaged," says Judy Ashcroft, director of the Instructional Innovation and Assessment division at UT. "But more information is being packaged online, and we have a duty to provide access to [it]."

A Changing Landskype

Internet telephony--or at least voice-based communication over the Internet--has been around for a few years now, but I always avoided it, more out of laziness than anything. Well, I have to say, I tried out Skype's Internet telephony service for the first time today and I'm a convert--and not just because I'm weary of Verizon Wireless's extortionate rates (I also hate the idea of paying for incoming calls, especially when they're wrong numbers or people I don't want to talk to, like telemarketers).

If you have a microphone (which most PCs have built in) and a set of speakers or headphones, the Skype application is a free download. It takes little time to set up an account and all calls to other Skype subscribers are free--even overseas (after all, "overseas" has little meaning on the Internet). (There is also a for-pay service that lets you use Skype to talk to proper phone numbers.) Skype also has a chat feature, which means that you can talk and IM at the same time--which is only marginally more complex than walking and chewing gum at the same time. The sound quality is excellent; certainly better than the average cellphone.

Now to find a Bluetooth headset...