July 2010 Archives

These findings reinforce the researchers' hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information

"Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies...the individual is empowered... The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other."

Story illusrates the promise of libraries. And problems: "(Side note: About a year ago, I tried to give my local library a stack of promotional Blu-ray movies I’d received from movie studios, figuring they'd make great loaners for library patrons. However, the friendly but puzzled library clerks — who weren’t quite clear on what a "Blu-ray" was — turned me down. I ended up putting them on the library’s "free stuff" shelf instead. Oh well.)"

“If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that?” Schmidt asked rhetorically. All it would take, he said, is $10 per user per year. Among other things, Google might earn such sums from selling access to digital content from newspapers.

the magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps–much to Time Inc.’s surprise.

Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes but would pay Time Inc. directly. But Apple rejected the app at the last minute, forcing the Time Warner (TWX) unit to sell single copies, using iTunes as a middleman, multiple sources tell me.

The bold new design has led to some unintended consequences for Apple as well as a great deal of heat. With the rising level of competition from Google(GOOG) Android-powered devices, every little hitch gets big attention.

While the antenna glitch doesn't seem to have any impact on iPhone sales, Apple has been called on by Consumer Reports to make more than a Band-Aid fix to the problem. This of course raises delicate questions about how Apple's antenna fix won't turn into a total iPhone recall.

I like the concept of “enabling opportunity for all.” But what does that mean in practice? Do we Federalize education? Under our current system, which is typically funded by local property taxes, children in poor communities are trapped in poorly funded schools. That’s doubly true if surrounding communities are also poor. And this gets compounded by the fact that poor families are more likely to be single-parent families with households headed by poorly educated, young people too tired to give their kids’ education much attention and poorly equipped to do much good, anyway. How do we break this cycle through the government?

George W. Bush and Barack Obama did a pretty good job stabilizing the economy and kickstarting recovery after the financial crisis began. That, at least, is the conclusion of a paper (pdf) written by Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi and Princeton's Alan Blinder. They estimate that without the financial interventions and the stimulus, "GDP in 2010 would be about 6½% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation."

“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”

Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.”

They are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds,” MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck told Wired.com.

Those most likely to criticize the iPad, on the other hand, don’t even own one. This group tends to be “self-directed young people who look down on conformity and are interested in videogames, computers, electronics, science and the internet,” Koelkebeck said.

At a press event at Google’s headquarters today, the company said that it has received FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) certification, which allows Google to store sensitive, yet unclassified, information, which makes up about 80 percent of all government data, the company said.

In addition, the company said it has built a segregated physical set of servers for Gmail and calendaring for government customers and that other apps will soon be housed on those servers, as well. It also said that all government data will be stored within the borders of the continental United States.

Now that "hot news" is back with a vengeance, more and more organizations are realizing they can effectively claim copyright on some facts by hiding it under a hot news claim. Costco tried to get this dismissed by arguing (1) that the hot news claims are pre-empted by the copyright claims and (2) that there was no real hot news claim. Once again the court refuses to dismiss this, suggesting that Banxcorp has properly hit on all the prongs needed to file a hot news claim, though it notes that these can and probably will be "revisited" during motions for summary judgment. So the hot news claim lives on to another day. Watch out folks. Repeating a reported average financial rate may put you in hot water for hot news. How long until this comes back to bite a newspaper who is in favor of hot news?

BUMMER! "While we have decided that it no longer makes financial sense for Princeton to host the UChannel, we still believe that noncommercial, quality educational programming is an important part of the World-Wide Web," Ms. Anderson wrote. "Therefore, in the coming months, we will be pursuing options to ensure that many of the Woodrow Wilson School lectures and conferences are posted on our school’s Web site, and we hope that you will do the same at your institution."

Google Inc. has missed the deadline on its high-profile contract to take over Los Angeles' e-mail system, leaving nearly 20,000 city employees on an aging system that the city is paying the Internet search giant $7.25 million to replace.

The delay marks a significant setback for Google's push to enter the lucrative business of shifting companies and governments to computer systems that reside online. The contract with the city is considered a marquee deal and is being closely watched by other governments looking to move to "cloud computing."

The Obama White House is too white.

It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel “racist elements” in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a “parody” on the Web — a letter from “colored people” to Abraham Lincoln berating him as “the greatest racist ever” and complaining about “that whole emancipation thing” because “freedom means having to work for real.”... In truth, it’s not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state "Southern strategy," the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).

Despite a very vocal group of detractors, the vast majority of iPhone users love AT&T.

That's the key finding in a survey released this week by Yankee Group, which reports that 73% of iPhone users are very satisfied with AT&T's service. That rating compares favorably to how non-iPhone smartphone users feel about AT&T, and even to how non-iPhone users feel about other wireless providers.

" a public defender: I have this belief – it may be a naive belief – that most trials are won not because the jury upheld the presumption of innocence, but because the defense overcame the presumption of guilt."

Zuckerberg has been dogged with allegations he stole the idea for Facebook and double-crossed former friends and Harvard classmates — several of whom have been placated with ownership stakes in the company. The lawsuits and allegations are intricate and rich enough to form the heart of a Hollywood movie called The Social Network set for release this fall. Facebook would like to stamp out speculation that Facebook’s history could be even darker.

Before the infamous tweet, she used the same word on Fox news in reference to the NAACP. Evidence is, the deleted tweet was actually hers.

A customer complaint dialogue is structured around a two-position toggle: a) it’s terrible, b) it’s nothing. The first one to grab a position forces the other person to assume the only one left. When Dear Customer calls, “Canon Law” dictates the first words out of my mouth: ‘This is terrible, how could we have let this happen to you!’. This forces the caller to concede: ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, I just would like to…’ A cooperative conversation ensues. However, if I argue that it isn’t the end of civilization, civility goes out the window. ... Steve Jobs’ cavalier dismissal worked as per the theorem: Dear Customer got mad. The media saw red meat, planted its teeth, and won’t let go.

The problem is that conservative leaders and Republican politicians, in their blind rage against Obama these last 18 months, invited the epithets of the fringe into the mainstream. ... Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck's show on Fox News since Obama's inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama -- as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck's nightly "report."

What has been overlooked in almost every single report of that incident is why Grigorieva was tape recording Gibson in the first place. She needed proof. Proof that Mel Gibson was abusive to her not only emotionally, but physically. She had already provided dental records in their custody fight to prove that he knocked her teeth out but Grigorieva still felt she needed more evidence to show the court that Gibson is much more than just politically incorrect, he's dangerous.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

In sum, there are zero historical examples of conservatives mobilizing to make the deficit smaller. What is true is that most conservatives oppose increases in non-military spending when those increases are proposed by Democratic presidents. A minority of conservatives are more consistent opponents of increases in non-military spending. But the key element of conservative fiscal policy is that tax revenue as a percent of GDP should be made as low as possible. This isn’t a goal they pursue that stands in some kind of balance with concern about the deficit, it’s the only goal they pursue.

Many of the landmark moments in American journalism are carefully nurtured myths—or, worse, outright fabrications. William Randolph Hearst never said, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast didn't panic America. Ed Murrow's "See It Now" TV show didn't destroy Sen. Joseph McCarthy. JFK didn't talk the New York Times into spiking its scoop on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Far from being the first hero of the Iraq War, captured Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch was caught sobbing "Oh, God help us" and never fired a shot.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word - "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable.

The proposed ban on puppy and kitten mills became a proposed ban on the sale of just about every animal that might end up in a shelter: gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, hamsters, turtles, snakes, rats. Sales of rabbits and chicks are already banned in the city.

The idea came back to bite the commission. It led to the panel's biggest, longest monthly meeting in recent memory, not to mention blogger fodder around the world.

The obvious danger of celibacy is that it forces lust into obscure and terrible channels. But the subtle danger is that it diverts love, affection and trust away from the dangerous inhabitants of the sexually active world around you and into your safe and fellow-celibate family. I know that the standard justification of a celibate priesthood is that it frees its members from particular and specific loyalties and enables them to serve and love all their parishioners equally. This isn't nonsense: as any clergy spouse will tell you, a proper vocation does tend to squeeze out family life, and vice versa. But celibacy does not so much solve that problem as displace it. To live without any particular and specific group loyalties is almost impossible. If it's hard not to put your family ahead of your parishioners, it must be even harder, deprived of a family, not to put your fellow celibates ahead of them.