An 8mo hears for the first time. Truly awesome that we have the technology to give a baby the chance to hear.
26 May 2010
Apple Is Now Bigger Than Microsoft
So, it's happened. By at least one metric, for at least this very moment—it could change tomorrow—Apple is now bigger than Microsoft. Apple's market cap passed Microsoft's today, just two months after edging under Walmart. The latest showing from Google Finance puts Apple's market cap at $225.98 billion to Microsoft's $225.32 billion.
A Google-Eye View of the Newspaper Business
(via The Atlantic)
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A fascinating look at media revenues. Slide number three really compells one to strategize toward a long-term goal of limited- or even zero-print production.
Are the Sex Rules That Determine Who Can Donate Blood Outdated?
BANNED BLOOD: AIDS research pioneers think the lifetime ban that prevents men who have sex with men from donating blood is unscientific and wrong.
ISTOCKPHOTO/vladm
The victim of a car accident can require as many as 100 pints of blood—that's blood from 100 generous donors across the country, meticulously matched for blood type and screened for diseases. More than 38,000 blood donations are needed daily in the U.S., but only 38 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, and of those, only 8 percent actually do.
The list of eligibility criteria that a donor must meet is long, ranging from simple characteristics such as age and weight requirements to more complex ones surrounding medical and travel history. Among them is the risk for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Certain factors thought to increase this risk, including illicit intravenous drug use and, if you're a man, having had sex with another male even once since 1971, currently prohibit you from ever donating blood. But AIDS research pioneers from the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University in Montreal think the ban is outdated. In their report, published May 25 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal , they call for a change in policy, which was created by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1983—before HIV/AIDS screening tests were available. "Today's technology makes it almost impossible for HIV to slip through, and the total ban puts a huge burden on blood agencies and the blood supply," said lead author Mark Wainberg, in a prepared statement. He helped in the discovery of 3TC, one of the first drugs to control HIV. "We constantly have blood shortages that would not occur, perhaps, if we had a more reasonable policy."(via Scientific American)
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I've been aconsistent blood donor since I turned 18, and I've often wondered about these questions that seem almost ignorant for our time and current medical technologies. Does it really matter whether a man has come into contact with another man's genitals? We're talking about saving lives, and all blood is run through a series of tests before it's accepted by the blod bank in question. So can we stop judgin whether someone has had sex for payment in the past, and let that person potentially save a life if their blood is accepted?
20 May 2010
Barnes & Noble announces Pubit!, new independent book publishing platform
With e-books and eReaders on the rise, this decade may go down in tech history as the coming of age of the digital book platform. Barnes and Noble advanced this cause by announcing a new book publishing platform that targets the independent publisher and self-publishing writer. No longer required to sell your story to the major publishers, the Pubit! system will allow you to distribute your books via Barnes and Noble using the ePub format and B&N’s digital rights management technology. Published books will be distributed through B&N’s growing e-Book store and authors will be paid according to B&N’s yet-to-be disclosed royalty model and compensation process. With Amazon already entrenched in the independent publishing business and B&N now on its way, prospective writers should start penning typing their next novella as the world right now is your oyster.
(via BGR)
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I could go either way with my feelings about this. I think it's great that some of the red tape and bureaucracy is being lifted for self publishers and new authors. At the same time, will books and novels become as ubiquitous as blogs? Is this the final nail in the publishing coffin? My concern isn't that there is more content, but that content will be watered down. The publishing process is one with many quality controls. I know, IRL I'm an editor. Will the average layman be able to create a book that is worthy of publishing if he foregoes even a copy editor? And what about fact checking - publishers check and recheck every statement in their publications before they send it off to print. What will happen to out language if there is no standard, and what will happen to our collective knowledge if there is no accountability?
19 May 2010
*SWOON* Google Introduces Font API and Directory
Google just launched a font directory and a font API that will make it easier for web developers and publishers to use high-quality open source fonts on their sites. Good typography on the web is still in its infancy, but Google wants to make it easier for developers to use a wider variety of fonts on the Web that go beyond the standard set of "web-safe" fonts that come pre-installed on most modern computers. The Google Font API uses Google's infrastructure to automatically convert a font into the right format for whatever browser the user is using. According to Google, these fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling.
WebFont Loader
Google's font directory currently features 18 fonts (some with multiple variants), including the popular Droid fonts. For now, Google is only supporting Western European languages, but the company expects to offer support for a more diverse set of languages soon.
(via RWW)
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I am a font geek (among other types of geek), so this is especially dear to my heart. Notgonnalie, sometimes I practice fonts. As in writing them. For fun. And of course I am of the phiosoply that Comic Sans should be the sarcasm typeface because it should NEVER be taken seriously.
Also, as I learned earlier this week from Broken Secrets, Frederic Lardinois has confused font for typeface. A typeface is a family of fonts, including various sizes and effects. So, for example, Arial size 12 italic is a FONT. Arial is a TYPEFACE. The whole areicle is pretty short and a great read if you're a font geek like me.
I'm Remembering...
I'm seriously obsessed with I'm Remembering, the site that flash you back to 1990 when you loved things like Happy Mean Transformers...
or this pencil case...
or POP QWIZ popcorn
or SQUEEZITS
Seriously, I'm on page 34 now. It's like crack...
18 May 2010
Remote-controlled robot surrogate could attend your next meeting for you
It may look like a floor lamp mounted on a vacuum cleaner, but Anybots, Inc.'s new QB is actually the latest in surrogate robotics. QB is designed to serve as your eyes, ears and voice when you can't be there in person. Even better, it's mobile, rolls around on two wheels like Rosie (from The Jetsons) and can be navigated remotely via the Web and a Wi-Fi connection.(via Scientific American)
I want one of these! I'm already mildly obsessed with robots AND laziness, so combining the two so I can get the inside scoop at the office from the comfort of my overstuffed, oreos-at-arms-length couch sounds like the greatest idea EVER.
Need Some Perspective?
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Do you wonder just how big is the really big oil spill everyone keeps talking out? Try comparing it to where you live. I was horrified when I laid that shadow on top of the San Francisco Peninsula. Try it where you live.
MILLENNIALS: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
(via PewResearch)
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It's a lengthy article, and a novel of a report, but it has some fascinating statistics about my generation.
GQ’s iPad App Does…OK
So we’re six weeks past the iPad launch. Has Apple’s (AAPL) gadget saved the publishing business yet?
Nope. But it might be generating a few extra bucks.
Publishers are being tight-lipped and/or vague about their iPad sales, but here’s some directional news from Conde Nast, which launched one of the first magazine apps for the device. Conde says its iPhone/iPad version of GQ has sold 57,000 copies since its launch in December. (By comparison, Conde moves 900,000 print copies a month to subscribers and newsstand buyers).
Fine. But what about iPad sales, which kicked off in April? Astonishingly, Conde doesn’t actually know, because it doesn’t sell an iPad-specific app. So it can’t tell if any particular sale was bought with the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad in mind.
GQ spokeswoman Peri Dorset allows that the company did see a spike with the April 3 launch of the iPad. And then again with the launch of the 3G model, but that’s about as precise as she’ll get.
We do know, though, that 3 weeks into January, GQ had sold 12,000 copies of that month’s app, and that was just iPhone/iPods. So I’m not convinced the iPad has provided GQ with a huge boost.
Best case scenario, for now, is that the apps provide some ancillary income. How much? GQ sells its app for $2.99, but repeat buyers can get subsequent issues (or back issues) for $1.99. For argument’s sake, let’s guess that two-thirds of GQ’s app buyers are first-time buyers. By my math, that’s about $150,000 in gross sales revenue — $112,400 from $2.99 sales, and $37,400 from $1.99 sales. Knock off 30 percent for Apple’s take and you’re down to $105,000.
Needle-mover? Nope. But Conde also gets the chance to sell some advertisers the right to be a premium app sponsor, so the dollars could pile up, eventually. Enough to cover development costs, at the very least. Call it a decent start.
OK, Conde rivals: Anyone else want to share their numbers?
(via Media Memo)
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I think the important thing to remember here is that this is close to 100% profit. They didn't have to print anything or ship aything. This is revenue above and beyond what they ever expected to get. Going digital like WHOAH.
Talk is Cheap
According to Hitwise, it's all added up to a 3% increase in visits last week accounting for nearly 9% of all U.S. visits.
(via RWW)
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I desperately want to chuck my FB account due to my increasing concerns for my privacy. But I am cripplingly dependent on it as my social network. Seriously, I think I'm more popular on the FB than I am IRL. There's Always Collegiate Nation, but you need your @edu address to sign up. I sitll have mine, but why would I want to go hang out with a bunch of kids three to seven years my junior? <<shudder>>
Computer Algorithm Can Recognize Sarcasm (Which Is Just Soooo Cool)
Posted 05.18.2010 at 9:38 am 6 Comments
Recognizing Sarcasm with Computer Algorithms
The pursuit of machine intelligence means we have to come up with ways to communicate with our computers in a way both entities can understand. But while computers process verbal commands in a straightforward fashion, humans tend to use more sophisticated speech forms, employing slang or symbols to convey an idea. So an Israeli research team has developed a machine algorithm that can recognize sarcasm.
SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, can recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with pretty astounding 77 percent precision. To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
(via PopSci)
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Clever. But not as clever as the CleverBot. Seriously, when I first found this guy I spent like three days talking to it, 40% convinced that it's really just some grad student being an asshole (The CleverBot is seriously sarcastic, which I think says more about the users who chat with it than it does about the technology).
Maniacal Rage
Back in Action
I know. I KNOW! I'm sorry. The past two weeks I have been dealing first with my birthday celebration (I highly recommend the Mexican Party Bus for bar tours if you're in the Bay Area. Mine was 1980s Prom themed and it ROCKED) and then with Bay to Breakers. Both were fantastic, I assure you. But now they are over and I need to get back to aggregating all the fabulous trendy tech news I can. Get excited.
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