The light of day

Think you're smarter than me?

One of the little-noted provisions in that legislation floating around Washington -- it has to do with payroll tax cuts and an oil pipeline -- is a suspension of the ban on 100-watt lightbulbs.

I've been stocking up on these babies, because I hate these new CFL bulbs. It's like we're back in pioneer days living by candlelight.

Well, here's an inside look at who gets what in all this mess. Just read it all.

When Republicans suspended the 100-watt-light-bulb ban, they said they were trying to protect consumer choice. But they also managed to show how regulations help big business at the expense of the little guy. 

The light-bulb ban was part of an energy bill pushed by Democrats in 2007 that set efficiency standards that traditional incandescent bulbs could never meet. The first to go was supposed to be the 100 watt bulb in 2012, followed by 75 watt bulbs the next year and the ubiquitous 60-watt bulb in 2014. 

The argument is that forcing consumers to buy more efficient — and far more expensive — bulbs will greatly reduce energy consumption, and in turn, air pollution and global warming.

Earlier this month, Republicans suspended the law until October by denying funds for its implementation as part of a massive spending bill. For Democrats, this move was another sign of how out of touch the GOP is. 

But look who else is complaining. As Politico reported, "big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania (are) fuming." Allegedly these companies are mad because they invested lots of money getting ready for the new rules.

Fact is, they were pushing for the ban all along. 

In 2007, Philips urged an incandescent ban as a way to force the market toward high-efficiency bulbs, complaining that without such laws, "purchase price and functional performance often take precedence over environmental concern." 

That same year, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, which represents companies making 95% of bulbs sold in the U.S., told a Senate panel that a ban was needed "to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products."

You can believe if you want these companies only had Mother Earth in mind with this ban. But more likely they saw it as a chance to fatten their bottom lines. Who wouldn't jump at the chance to outlaw a low-margin, 60-cent product when you're trying to hawk a high-margin $3 alternative? 

This would hardly be the first time big business teamed up with big government to enhance profits through competition-crushing regulations. Timothy Carney's book, "The Big Ripoff," detailed many cases where businesses "profit from big government policies that rip off consumers." 

Thanks to the GOP, consumers now can see this seedy process at work, clear as day.

Journalism -- we bring good things to light.

So is talking and driving unsafe or what?

Don't do this, either.

A federal agency is calling for a nationwide ban on all cellphone use while driving, Investor's Business Daily reports. The National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all cellphone use by drivers, including texting, be outlawed. The ban would include hands-free calls.

There are a few problems here. 

There's no compelling reason for it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 3,092 traffic deaths last year involved distracted drivers. But using a cell phone is only one of many driver distractions. Eating and drinking while behind the wheel are two others, and they are far more dangerous than yapping on a phone. 

In fact, a 2009 NHTSA study found that 80% of all car wrecks are caused by drivers eating or drinking — not cellphone use — with coffee-guzzling the top offender. 

Then there's this. According to federal data, traffic deaths have fallen from 2.1 per 100 million vehicle miles in 1990, when virtually no one had a cellphone, to 1.1 in 2009, when almost everyone does.

The newspaper asks: Banning cellphone use? Why aren't the Potomac nannies going after Starbucks sippers and Big Mac munchers instead? Why not prosecute women who put on their makeup while on the road and men who shave? Shouldn't combing while driving be outlawed as well?

Righto. Flossing, too. Nose-picking. Reading Proust.

One way to control the cost of healthcare

More than 3,000 people in England with diabetes, heart failure or COPD (a serious lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) took part in a recent two-year trial of telehealth technology for monitoring people who are chronically ill.

According to the results of the trial, published by the Department of Health, telehealth can reduce mortality, reduce the need for admissions to hospital, lower the number of days spent in a hospital bed and cut the time spent in A&E.

Here's how it works.

First thing in the morning, Terry Munro always puts the kettle on. "Then I take my blood sugar, take my blood pressure and my weight and in that time the kettle's boiled.

"And I've got a record of it on my TV. It's marvellous, it really is." 

Terry, who is 67 years old and has diabetes, has been keeping tabs on his own health using nothing more than his television. The testing equipment uses Bluetooth so when Terry has taken his daily measurements they are automatically uploaded to the TV. 

A trained nurse can access and monitor the readings from a central location and make decisions about potential changes in treatments. "I like walking, but I used to go out and go hypo. Now I know I can't go out if my blood sugar is too low, so I am more aware now. 

"It's like having a doctor there all the time."

Patients like Terry are constantly being watched by nurses, albeit at a distance. Any unusual readings entered onto the TV are picked up straight away and will prompt a visit by a nurse or an alert to the patient's doctor.

12345!

Imperva, a security company, has made some suggestions to NASA about passwords to they can protect their secrets about alien space invaders.

Here's what they recommend:

• It should contain at least eight characters
• It should contain a mix of four different types of characters - upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;" 
• If there is only one letter or special character, it should not be either the first or last character in the password.
• It should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address.

Following that advice, of course, means you'll create a password that will be impossible, unless you try a trick credited to security guru Bruce Schneir: Turn a sentence into a password.

For example, "Now I lay me down to sleep" might become nilmDOWN2s, a 10-character password that won't be found in any dictionary. 

Can't remember that password? Schneir says it's OK to write it down and put it in your wallet, or better yet keep a hint in your wallet. Just don't also include a list of the sites and services that password works with. Try to use a different password on every service, but if you can't do that, at least develop a set of passwords that you use at different sites.

Last year, Imperva looked at 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, a hacked website, and released its own Top 10 "worst" list:

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. Password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

Tech company Splashdata also compiled a list of the worst:

1. password

2. 123456

3.12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passw0rd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

My recommendation, on advice from the Gumbo Blog High Tech Security Division, is that you create one giant password out of those lists. This will also help you develop your memory.

Facebook is really, really big

Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

Facebook’s active user base is…

• 2.5x the population of the United States
• 3.9x the population of Brazil
• 5.8x the population of Russia
• 6.3x the population of Japan

Another fact: Facebook is bigger than a bread box.

Make your own stuff

Designer shoes.

Rick Chin, director of product innovation at SolidWorks, where he develops new products, says two technologies will transform they way we get new stuff.

Computer-aided design (CAD) products are popular among engineers, designers and students for creating 3D product designs. But the software is often too advanced for the average consumer to design his or her own products.

In the future, however, CAD will allow the average consumer to design his own custom products that are both manufacturable and affordable. Consumers will be able to use simple software to combine predefined, configured product features. They’ll be able to personalize further by adding their own color palate, pictures, shapes and even personalized sizing.

Add another technology, and things really get fun.

3D Printing (3DP) is another amazing technology that will take a 3D CAD model and “print” layers of material, one on top of the previous, to produce a real physical model. It can create almost any shape, even those that can’t be made by traditional manufacturing. The downside today is that the process is slow, costly, and often doesn’t produce parts strong enough for real world use. The technology in this industry is always advancing, and in the future, it will be able to produce robust parts quickly and cheaply.

3D Printing in an industrial setting is often referred to as “additive manufacturing.” As products are ordered online, versatile manufacturing stations controlled by robots will quickly and affordably crank out custom-manufactured products. The robots will be controlled by process software that will be integrated with future CAD.

Online custom products are slowly gaining popularity.

You can go to NIKEiD and design your own customized Nike shoes. The downside is that they are pricey and will take several weeks to get to you. Other websites such as ShapeWays and Ponoko are useful for many DIYers. The mass market appeal of sites like these will grow in the future (when combined with the simpler CAD described above) with fast, flexible and inexpensive manufacturing.

Think I'll design me a nap.

Coming soon to a shoe and dishwasher near you

Just printed these suckers out.

Here's a big change in the way we make and buy things that could creep up on us much as the Internet did: 3D printing. We can understand it intellectually, but it's hard to imagine how it will change our everyday lives. Consider:

Soon it will be possible to print out products at home ranging from appliance parts to shoes. You will be able to have that dishwasher part made just for you instantly. This promises to empower a new wave of design and customization fueled by our personal taste and imagination.

It's here already.

Nike with its Nike iD services lets customers personalize and design their own Nike merchandise, down to their favorite colors and materials. Amsterdam-based Freedom of Creation, renowned for its lighting designs, has 3D-printed fixtures gracing the interiors of luxury hotels around the world. Canada-based Weatherhaven, which supplies portable shelters, digitally explores and validates its custom designs without having to build physical prototypes. This saves the company up to $100,000 per shelter. 

As a result, yesterday’s factory is evolving into a global community of custom design and personal fabrication services. And manufacturers are creatively embracing the changes.

Myriad industries – from automotive (which already created the first 3D printed car) and aerospace to footwear and jewelry – have embraced 3D printing that creates objects by laying down successive layers of materials.It is estimated that 3D printing will grow to become a $5.2 billion industry by 2020, up from $1.3 billion last year.

I'm going to print me out the perfect napping couch.

They're watching you

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

As consumers become savvier about protecting their privacy online, the new techniques appear to be gaining ground.

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, identified what is known as a "history stealing" tracking service on Flixster.com, a social-networking service for movie fans recently acquired by Time Warner Inc., and on Charter Communications Inc.'s Charter.net.

Such tracking peers into people's Web-browsing histories to see if they previously had visited any of more than 1,500 websites, including ones dealing with fertility problems, menopause and credit repair, the researchers said. History stealing has been identified on other sites in recent years, but rarely at that scale.

Gathering information about Web-browsing history can offer valuable clues about people's interests, concerns or household finances, the Journal says. Someone researching a disease online, for example, might be thought to have the illness, or at least to be worried about it.

Creepy.

The new face of work

Use it to sell buggy whips.

Some years ago I met a fellow who sold fine art prints out of a store here in my town. Buyers either stumbled upon him or heard of him by word of mouth. Why don't you put your business on the Internet? I asked.

He hadn't heard of the thing -- this was awhile ago. But he got someone to do a website, and soon he was connecting with buyers all over the world.

How will we solve our very serious problem of unemployment -- more than 16 percent of our population is out of work or working less than they want? My friend pointed the way.

The answer won't be propping up the industrial dinosaurs like the Detroit automakers. The era of a gold watch at 65 and a pension and healthcare forever is gone. So what comes next?

You've heard of Skype, right? It's a new kind of enterprise, what Hal Varian calls a micromultinational.

Just as the mechanical innovations of the 19th century led to dramatic changes in our way of life, the still-evolving computing and communication innovations of the early 21st century will have a profound impact on the world's economy and culture. For example, even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago. If the late 20th century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micromultinational: small companies that operate globally.

Silicon Valley today seems to be overflowing with these enterprises, Varian writes.

They can already draw on email, chat, social networks, wikis, voice-over-Internet protocol, and cloud computing -- all available for free on the web -- to provide their communications and computational infrastructure. They can exploit comparative advantage due to global variation in knowledge, skills, and wage rates. They can work around the world and around the clock to develop software, applications, and web services by using standardized components. Innovation has always been stimulated by international trade, and now trade in knowledge and skills can take place far more easily than ever before.

Think of all the information technology you use for free. The browser you're reading this on, for example. To go geek on you for a moment, here's the technology of the micromultinational.

Today, a substantial amount of software development on the web involves connecting standardized components in novel ways. The Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and the Python programming language are prominent examples: the LAMP components that serve as basic building blocks for much of the web. Once your application is developed, the cloud computing model offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others changes fixed costs for data centers into variable costs for data services, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the pace of innovation.

Change is scary, but there has always been change, and it's always been scary. If you've got a nice little buggy whip business going there in Detroit, you can always form a union to protect your healthcare benefits. That'll stop the change.

Tat tech: skin-deep electronics

This is just weird.

It may soon be possible to wear your computer or mobile phone under your sleeve, with the invention of an ultra-thin and flexible electronic circuit that can be stuck to the skin like a temporary tattoo, The Independent reports.

The devices, which are almost invisible, can perform just as well as more conventional electronic machines but without the need for wires or bulky power supplies, scientists said. The circuit is about the size of a postage stamp, is thinner than a human hair and sticks to the skin by natural electrostatic forces rather than glue.

Try not to scratch.

What can you do with this thing?

A simple stick-on circuit can monitor a person's heart rate and muscle movements as well as conventional medical monitors, but with the benefit of being weightless and almost completely undetectable. Scientists said it may also be possible to build a circuit for detecting throat movements around the larynx in order to transmit the information wirelessly as a way of recording a person's speech, even if they are not making any discernible sounds.

Tests have already shown that such a system can be used to control a voice-activated computer game, and one suggestion is that a stick-on voicebox circuit could be used in covert police operations where it might be too dangerous to speak into a radio transmitter.

This could give a whole new meaning to a hickey

A better way to charge your stuff

Way cool charging thingy.

It's not a new idea that technology created for the developing world might find its way back to the United States. It was true of the so-called $100 laptop -- which actually cost $200, but who's counting? It might happen with MRI machines developed for China market at half the cost. What's to keep them from being sold here?

Well, here's a bit of encouragement for cell phone users and others. Chargers proliferate around my house like weeds. The phone companies will happily sell you a car charger for their phone for $35. It won't work with anything else. Pretty good work if you can get it.

Now a company called Fenix International has developed a charger for use in Uganda and other developing world countries.

It's part of a whole suite of products Fenix designed to help local people to become one-stop electricity providers. But you can use it yourself, too. 

Here's how the device works. Instead of using some proprietary cord conversion system, the charger just has little contacts that can clip onto almost any Li-Ion battery. 

The charger can plug into any computer or USB wall adapter, but Fenix designed it specifically to be plugged into the ReadySet, an all-in-one "intelligent battery" that can take in power from a variety of sources (bicycle generator, solar, the grid), store and smooth it, then spit it back out to charge phones or other appliances.

The one downside to the Fenix charger is that it requires you to pull the battery out of your gadget to charge it, which means that you can't use it with your iPhone.

Get with the program, Apple.

Way cool charging thingy does a camera battery.

Take it and leaf it

I recently noted that you can now order earthworms using your smart phone, and now comes another app for the high-tech naturalist: it allows you to identify leaves.

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

A free version for the iPhone is available now. Apps for the Droid and iPad are coming soon.

Here's a video.

This is spooky

This is sort of a big deal, Nathan Goulding writes. Apple is, without your consent or any warning labels, logging all of your iPhone’s location data and then transferring it over to your computer when you backup or sync your iPhone. 

The information is easily accessible — unencrypted and in a standard database format. (The option to encrypt is there, though I haven’t tested whether this option obscures your location data.) 

Upshot? Any program you install or anyone you let on your computer could access this data, giving that program or that person full access to where you were and when you were there. 

What does it look like? We tried it out on one of our employees:

This person drove from Winnipeg to New York City. Had a weekend trip up to Montreal to visit friends. Spent most of the time in New York City.

Think I'll duct tape my phone on my Crazy Lab to see where she goes.

What if Moses had the Internet?

(Thanks, Lainey)

Don't talk to strangers

If a stranger came up to you on the sidewalk and asked for your Social Security number, you wouldn't give it to him. If a stranger on the sidewalk invited you to go through a door into a building with him, you wouldn't.

So when an email asks for some personal information, or invites you to click to go somewhere else, why would you?

The subject comes up, because a security breach that exposed the email addresses of potentially millions of customers of major U.S. banks, hotels and stores is more likely than traditional scams to ultimately trick people into revealing personal information.

Security experts are alarmed that the breach involved targeted information -- tying individuals to businesses they patronize -- and could make customers more likely to reveal passwords, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data.

Smart Money has some insight.

“Now the bad guys know who you do business with,” says Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at online security firm Sophos. “The likely outcome as far as fraud is concerned will be people impersonating the institutions they’ve compromised. If they contact you it will likely come in the form of a phishing attack [an email, or phone call if your number is listed, asking you for more information] or try to lure you online to a malicious link.”

And some advice. Read the whole article, but here is some of it.

When to do nothing: Don’t reply to emails that ask for personal information such as passwords, bank account or credit card details – even if the email mentions Epsilon and tried to scare you by saying your account is compromised. No legitimate company would ask you to do this. If you receive a suspicious phone call from your bank, hang up and call the bank yourself. Don’t let curiosity get the better of you either: don’t open email attachments or follow links by email, Twitter or Facebook, even if they have been “forwarded” to you by a friend.

When to take action: If you already use your email as a password for an online account, change it. If you use your name, or an easy variation of your name as a password like JohnDoe123, change it. But do this on the company’s own website. Never do this if asked to by email.

What to do in the future: Use secondary, less important email addresses when registering online accounts. Keep one for this and others for businesses, friends and family. If a secondary account starts receiving spam, it will be easier to shut it down without too much inconvenience.

Toss those cookbooks

I've been going through the business throwing stuff away. Seems I've saved every telephone I've ever owned. There are three computer printers down there. And more books than the Library of Congress. What to keep?

An article in the New York Times has some advice, including this on books.

Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries. 

But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies a $5 app for the iPad, is the wave of the future. Every recipe has a photo of the dish (something far too expensive for many printed cookbooks). 

Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. When something needs to be timed, there’s a digital timer built right into the recipe. You can e-mail yourself the ingredients list to take to the grocery store. The app does what cookbooks cannot, providing a better version of everything that came before it.
Now all Martha has to do is make a decorative splashguard for a tablet and you will be all set.

How the Japanese people are communicating with each other

App for your smart phone.

When the earthquake hit northern Japan on Friday, voice calls from mobile phones became immediately unavailable in order to leave room for emergency calls, The Japan Times reports. However, in the Kanto area, mobile Internet connection was mostly kept on, and many people turned to the Web to exchange information.

On Japan's main social networking site, mixi, some communities were set up soon after the quake to keep people informed. The largest onenow has over 300,000 members and it has guides to communities by region and purpose.
Mixi also has a function that displays how recently your friends logged in, so you can check if your friends have accessed mixi after the quake. Another feature, ashiato (footprints) — which was once one of the key attractions to mixi — shows when another user viewed your page (profile/diary/message/etc). While it is possible to send messages to your most important family and friends, features that do not require any direct interaction meant that even those who are not close friends can see who is OK. 

Twitter was heavily used as well. When most railways stopped in greater Tokyo on Friday evening, many office workers were isolated in central Tokyo and decided to either stay put or walk back home. A lot of assistance was offered over Twitter by stores, restaurants, campuses and even people in houses along main roads who tweeted that help was available. Twitter even set some official hashtags to help identify your tweet, such as #jishin (general earthquake information); #j_j_helpme (requests for rescue or other aid); #hinan (evacuation information); #anpi (confirmation of safety of individuals, places, etc.); #311care (medical information for victims). And although it is not official, #jishin_e seems to be used for English, too.

Meantime, I've found another smartphone app for earthquakes.

Earthquake Lite, which is free for Apple or Android. (If you hate ads, buy the $2 iPhone version). The software displays global seismic activity in a nicely designed format, and offers lists of events that you can filter by location, magnitude and time. 

On Thursday, for instance, the app listed the afternoon’s most recent earthquakes, including nine significant tremors near Japan’s east coast, and one in western China. The map view lets you dial down to see the epicenter.

Where to get real-time news on Japan

I consider myself fairly sophisticated about the news, but it's hard to sort out the rapidly changing situation in Japan. Curt Hopkins at the blog ReadWriteWeb has compiled some sources of real-time news about the crisis.

@timeouttokyo The Twitter account for the Tokyo version of the weekly entertainment and event guide is focusing a lot on what's happening and what residents and visitors should do, reflecting the focus of their website.

@survivinginjapan Ashley, a Seattlite teacher and writer in Shizuoka, usually gives out expat advice. These days that advice is more urgent.

@ambassadorroos John Roos has been the U.S. ambassador to Japan since 2009. A good source for information on official U.S. actions, such as the Marines delivering a Forward Arming and Refueling Point for use in the assistance operations.

@Matt_Alt Writer Matt Alt's tweets are more analytical, giving some background into the actions of Japanese press, politicians and industry.

NHK English The English channel of Japan's most prominent television network provides text and video news updates from all over Japan.

Crisis Commons. The crisis network has put together a Honshu Quake wiki.

Donating. Rick has pulled together four excellent resources for those wishing to donate.

Ushahidi Crowd-sourced crisis map on the Ushahidi platform. (In Japanese.)

Google Person Finder Google's released a Japanese version of their people-finding service for anyone having difficulties getting a hold of family and friends. The Red Cross has their own, called Family Links.

WNYC News and explainers regarding the Fukushima nuclear plant from the New York-based public radio station.

Your laptop can detect an earthquake

Yikes!

If you drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. Researchers are putting the chip to work detecting earthquakes with a network of volunteer laptops that can map out quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers.

I can't determine whether smart phones can be used on this particular network, the Quake-Catcher Network. But I found this one: the iShake Project.

With the Quake-Catcher program, a laptop monitors local activity and only alerts the network for strong new signals. If the network's central server receives a bunch of these all at once, then it is likely that an earthquake is happening. If the server receives a notification from only one laptop, it knows the laptop was shaken by something smaller and more local (like your sister running by, or the door slamming).

You can check all of this out, and sign up, here.

Disaster: there's an app for that

New app saves the day.

It has always seemed to me that these smart phones everyone is carrying around these days can do more than tell your friends you're eating a bacon cheeseburger at Cardiac Shack.

I found an article, via Instapundit, that points to a few apps that seem interesting. One is a manual of advice for all sorts of disasters. The iPhone version, the Droid version.

Another is a first aid manual from the American Heart Association. For iPhone, for Droid.

And an emergency radio scanner: for iPhone, for Droid. Those link to the pro version, but there's a free one as well. Might be fun when you're watching a rerun of Law & Order.

While you cower in your storm shelter, you can always connect to the source of all life here.

Your TV is watching you

He's watching you.

I had no idea this was going on.

Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people's TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using it to help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain kinds of people. 

At the same time, cable and satellite companies are testing and deploying new systems designed to show households highly targeted ads. 

One of the most advanced companies, Cablevision Systems Corp., has rolled out a system that can show entirely different commercials, in real time, to different households tuned to the same program. It can deliver targeted ads to all the company's three million subscribers concentrated in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Darn. The Wall Street Journal article says my cable company, Comcast, isn't doing this yet. I was hoping it explained why, when I'm simply trying to watch a Law & Order rerun from 1996 to lull me to sleep, I'm bombarded with GEICO ads. I prefer ads for the slap chopper and sham-wow, stuff relevant to my lifestyle.

Buy now, or wait for the new version?

She's got all the answers.

I just bought a Motorola Droid X phone, and I know something better will come along in a few weeks, if it's not already out there.

And folks who got an iPad for Christmas are probably wishing they had waited.

So I noticed the Best Buy ad saying the company will sell you that gadget you just have to have and then buy it back when the newer version comes along.

What's the catch?

Joshua Gans, an economics professor at Melbourne Business School and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, writes in a Harvard Business Review blog (you wanted my opinion?):

Here's how it works. If you pay $59.99 to Best Buy, you can make sure that you get a certain amount back if you want to upgrade your iPhone later. For instance, if you want to buy in a year's time, Best Buy will pay you 40% of the price of your old phone. Let's do some math. Pay $299 originally and you get around $120 back. So if the new model costs the same amount, then you will effectively pay $180 to upgrade (I'm ignoring sales tax here). Of course, you actually paid $359 originally so the automatic upgrade price is really $240 but perhaps you feel better about it at the time or in explaining the credit card bills to your spouse.

It took me a minute to parse that. You have to figure that the first $59.99 reflected a contract commitment, and the $240 you'd pay for the new phone doesn't give you the contract commitment deal.

But that's not even the real issue.

The choice is not between paying Best Buy more, twice, or paying them slightly less. You could do what I did last year. I put my old iPhone on eBay. That cost me a little time but it netted me much more than 40% of the phone's purchase price. Indeed, in my case, I received 100% of that price because the phone was free of a contract. For items in good condition, eBay really allows you to do well on the second-hand market. Forecast that and you can see that Best Buy is costing you a fortune.

He goes through a lot more stuff only an economist could love, and you're welcome to read it, but I think we all see why we just buy something impulsively, as I did. You can't have your own personal economist following you around in Best Buy, or Costco, where I bought my phone.

And as Gans sums up: For doubters out there considering whether you should get yourself an iPhone now or wait, here is my simple statement that I have used to sell a ton of iPhones: "No one is going to be sitting on their death bed saying, "'I wish I had waited to buy an iPhone.'"

Your health in digits

This could be you!

I've long believed that one answer to our healthcare mess is digital health records. I look at my family doctor's office, and I see mounds of paper, a half dozen clerks frantically shuffling them, and a wall of manilla folders holding the health histories of hundreds of people.

Above all this is a fire sprinkler. Not at all reassuring.

Last year I went to an eye surgeon who was introducing digital records to his practice. As I watched from the chair, he and his assistant labored at a laptop to enter my data into the many fields of my record.

Right there we see the problems. There's not a lot of money lying around in family practices. Given the absence of standards, why should my doctor invest in something that may be outdated next year? And given all the upcoming changes in the government's role, how could anyone make a rational decision? And as my eye surgeon demonstrated, it's not as simple as it seems.

Digitalization makes a lot of sense. Each year there are tens of thousands of phone calls from pharmacists to physicians to clarify prescriptions. I've experience this. Throw out the little paper pads, type it into a gizmo hanging on your belt and off it goes to the pharmacy. Plus, the gizmo could warn both about drug interactions and the like.

The government has got it in its head (oxymoron alert!) that it's going to push everyone to a digital world.

In the 2009 economic recovery package, the administration and Congress allocated billions — the current estimate is $27 billion — in incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic records. 

Late last year, the administration, working with health professionals and the technology industry, set out a roadmap for what digital records should include and how they should be used, for doctors to qualify for incentive payments, typically up to $44,000. The program begins this year, and the requirements for using the records to report and share health information increase in stages through 2015. After that, penalty payments from Medicare and Medicaid kick in for doctors who don’t meet the use and reporting rules.

Carrot and stick. We'll see how that works out.

This is your brain on electricity

"Yes, Midge, I'm dying."

Whether cell phones hurt our brains -- and I'm not talking about the effects of chatting with your idiotic friends or having your boss find you on Saturday -- has been debated for years. A new study adds to the clamor:

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones. 

The researchers urged caution in interpreting the findings, because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain scans, have any meaningful effect on a person’s overall health.

As with the health effects of coffee, I urge you to remain calm: pour a cup and call a friend to talk this over.

The leader of the research, Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said:

“Unfortunately this particular study does not enlighten us in terms of whether this is detrimental or if it could even be beneficial. It just tells us that even though these are weak signals, the human brain is activated by them."

Dr. Volkow said future research may even show that the electromagnetic waves emitted from cellphones could be used to stimulate the brain for therapeutic reasons.

She said the research should not set off alarms about cellphone use because simple precautions like using a headset or earpiece can alleviate any concern. 

“It does not in any way preclude or decrease my cellphone utilization,” she said.

Never trust headlines: you have to read to the end of the New York Times article to get that.

"Hey, I have an idea!"

Meantime, we get this:

New scientific research suggests that by stimulating parts of their brains electrically, people can be induced to think more creatively than they normally do.  

The researchers took 60 normal, healthy, right-handed volunteers and asked them to try to solve a task that required clever insight. All of them were told they'd be receiving some kind of brain stimulation. But just 20% of the control group (who received no stimulation) could solve the task. That's compared with 60% of the volunteers who received electrical jolts to their brain--cathode stimulation of the left ATL (anterior temporal lobe) to suppress activity and anodal stimulation of the right ATL to increase activity.

Shocking.

Are you smarter than your laptop?

Smarter than me!

Imagine a world in which millions of farmers in China can access most of human knowledge with devices they carry in their pockets.

Oops! That's true today.

Imagine a world in which your laptop has the power of Watson, the IBM super computer that emerged the victor against human competitors on "Jeopardy!".

Not far away, says Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist.

The ratio of computer price to performance is now doubling in less than a year, so 90 servers would become the equivalent of one server in about seven years, and the equivalent of one personal computer within a decade. However, with the growth in cloud computing—in which supercomputer capability is increasingly available to anyone via the Internet—Watson-like capability will actually be available to you much sooner. 

Given this, I expect Watson-like "natural language processing" (the ability to "understand" ordinary English) to show up in Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years.

"Jeopardy!", Kurzweil writes, involves understanding complexities of humor, puns, metaphors, analogies, ironies and other subtleties.

That's something I can't do today.

Those little lights that glow in the dark

You can get interested in this if you feel a personal responsibility for saving the planet, or if you feel a personal responsibility for not going broke.

We know the big energy hogs are refrigerators and ovens and the like, but consider this:

Digital picture frames are small, so it's hard to think of them as energy hogs. But if each U.S. household had one of these frames running around the clock, it would take five power plants to run them all, says the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an electricity-focused research and development nonprofit.

It gets worse:

Other small energy hogs include mobile phone chargers and laptop power adapters that are always plugged in to electric outlets. These chargers continue to draw energy even when the devices they charge have been disconnected. And "always-on" appliances like printers or speakers are called "energy vampires" because they also suck up power even when they're turned off or in an idle state.

I had no idea. I thought the fact that various rooms are lit up at night by the little lights on gadgets was entertaining for the dog and cats. I didn't know I was paying for it.

Here are some other fun facts from Forbes:

• The typical home has 30 always-on devices.
• While a refrigerator  accounts for about 8% of a household's energy consumption, "vampire devices" account for about 4%.
• It's estimated that estimates that gaming consoles consume around 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year, roughly the same energy usage as the city of San Diego.
• Chargers for mobile devices like cellphones and PDAs use only 7 to 10 watts. But if they are left plugged in to electric outlets even when the charged device is not connected, they continue to draw power. Add them all up across the country, and they could consume the energy output of several power plants.

My pets will just have to get around in the dark.

Some facts about passwords

Most-used passwords: 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, abc123

Time it takes a hacker's computer to randomly guess your password:
 
Length: 6 characters
Lowercase: 10 minutes
+ Uppercase: 10 hours
+ Nos. & Symbols: 18 days

Length: 7 characters
Lowercase: 4 hours
+ Uppercase: 23 days
+ Nos. & Symbols: 4 years

Length: 8 characters
Lowercase: 4 days
+ Uppercase: 3 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 463 years

Length: 9 characters
Lowercase: 4 months
+ Uppercase: 178 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 44,530 years

-- Bloomberg Businessweek

Safer driving from cars that gossip with each other

Imagine that your car could learn from an oncoming car that the road ahead is icy or closed by an accident. That technology is now being designed and debated.

Many researchers believe we’re about to enter a new phase in transportation safety. If the last 50 years were about mitigating crashes, in the next 50, technology could enable us to actually avoid them — and revolutionize in the process how we get around using all types of transportation.

The vision is that millions of vehicles on the road will “talk to each other” through a kind of advanced Wi-Fi and this could potentially address 81 percent of the light-vehicle crashes currently involving unimpaired drivers.

The new technology would rely on Dedicated Short-Range Communications, a wireless connection with a 1-mile radius that is both faster and more secure than traditional Wi-Fi.

Vehicles with the technology could communicate with each other in real time about everything from upcoming icy roads to approaching vehicles in a driver’s blind spot. Emergency responders could be notified the moment an airbag deploys.

Instead of waiting to learn about a distant accident through the chain-reaction of brake lights illuminated in front of you, your car could automatically warn you the moment a nearby crash occurs (the system would not, however, push the brakes for you).

No word yet on whether this technology will side with your wife and force you to pull over and ask for directions.

Choosing between iPhones at Verizon and AT&T

I watch everyone using their smart phones, particular their iPhones, and I'm thinking I need one of those. Especially now that Verizon will be selling the iPhone. I switched from AT&T to Verizon several years ago, because AT&T's service wasn't reliable where I live.

Except I really don't need one. And the cost is rather staggering.

Popular Mechanics sums it up: Over the course of a two-year contract, the total cost of AT&T's service (not including the cost of the phone) ranges from $1320 to $2760 (assuming you don't incur overages). Verizon's plans range from $1680 to $3360 (more expensive, for sure, yet with the unlimited plan, the potential for overage fees is seriously diminished).

There are a couple of differences between Verizon and AT&T.

• First, the CDMA technology that Verizon uses will not allow users to talk on the phone and use data services at the same time. 
• Second, AT&T's GSM iPhone works in other countries (albeit with steep international roaming fees), while Verizon's does not. 

So I guess if you're in Paris wanting to talk to Mom back home in Schenectady and simultaneously look up the weather forecast there, you're out of luck with Verizon. Darn.

Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist, concludes: In my tests, the new Verizon version of the iPhone did much better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and offers some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T.

Using technology when your flight is canceled

Most carriers automatically notify travelers — at least those who have signed up for flight alerts by e-mail, text message or phone call, The New York Times reports. Those alerts, which many passengers fail to sign up for, combined with Twitter, can put you ahead of the pack.

Increasingly airlines, including JetBlue, Southwest and Delta, are using Twitter to notify passengers of major flight cancellations and assist in rebooking. Last year, Delta created a dedicated Twitter account for customer service issues, @DeltaAssist, with reservation agents online Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Because of the viral nature of Twitter, with Twitterers habitually “re-tweeting” one another’s posts, customers who reach out to the airline via Twitter may get a quicker response than they would by phone or another communications channel as airlines attempt to quell any negative publicity. 

New gadgets to monitor your aging parents

Here are two of the new devices you can use to remotely watch over a loved one.

Sonamba

For about $200 (plus monitoring fees of about $100 per month), you can buy any number of home monitoring devices that use sensors to alert caregivers if their charge has fallen or might need medical attention, according to Caring.com . But for an additional $349.99, you can upgrade to the Sonamba , which uses sound and motion sensors to monitor all movements, alerting caregivers with periodic text messages like "all is well," or "attention needed."

The Sonamba, which looks like a digital picture frame, is placed somewhere in the house; smaller sensors are placed in other rooms so that the device can theoretically monitor most of a home. Something else experts like: It doesn't require technical expertise on the part of the patient. Although the $549.99 price and the $39 monthly fee are higher than those of many other devices on the market, the Sonamba does have additional bells and whistles — like reminder messages about doctors' appointments and medication routines.

Lifecomm mPERS 
Lifecomm's new mobile personal emergency response system (mPERS) uses cellular network signals to transmit messages to a caregiver in the event of a fall. Just slightly bigger than an iPod Nano, the wearable battery-powered belt clip, watch or necklace has as an embedded GPS (in case help is needed away from home) and a sensor that tracks the number of steps a person takes, along with their activity level. Veer from the norm and the device sends a caregiver alert. It also comes with online support tools where caregivers can sign up for things like low-battery alerts.

The system works well as long as it's in range of a strong cell signal — and there's still no getting around the fact that its owner must remember to wear it to get the high-tech benefits. The company says the device will be "comparable" in price to other systems (Wellcore offers a similar product for $199 with a $49.99 monthly fee).

Our online world

Map of the Internet

Pingdom, an Internet monitoring service, corralled a number of research reports and company statistics to create a picture of the year in online stuff. Here's the data:

Internet Users

• 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
• 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

Email

• 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 480 million – New email users since the year before.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.

Websites

• 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
• 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Social Media

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
• 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Videos and Pictures

• 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
• 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
• 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
• 130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
• 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
• 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

New power in cell phones

I've been predicting that cell phones will become the new laptop, and here's a new model that is leading the way. Popular Mechanics reports from the Consumer Electronics show:

In the tablet free-for-all that promises to characterize 2011, the Motorola Xoom will be a principal challenger to the Apple iPad. 

It hits one cutting-edge mark after another: Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, ample power with a dual-core 1 GHz processor, a GB of RAM, and both front- and rear-facing cameras for video conferencing as well as shooting photos. The screen is big: 10.1 inches with a wide 16:10 aspect and a resolution of 1280 x 800. 

For now, the Xoom is a step ahead of the competition when it comes to connectivity. The first Xooms will launch on Verizon’s 3G network in the first quarter of 2011, and the company promises that those units can be upgraded to the 4G LTE network in the spring. (Units shipping in spring will be on 4G from the start.) And HDMI compatibility means that the Xoom can share its video with a home entertainment center.

When video games are more than games

The Tianhe-1A

This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world's fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second. This is the shape of the world to come—but not in the way you might think.

Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing cores from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that has sold hundreds of millions of graphics chips for videogames. That's right—every time someone fires up a videogame like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the state of the art in technology advances.  

Not the first time, Andy Kessler reports in The Wall Street Journal.

Consider the Apple iPhone, often touted as the tech symbol of our era. It's actually more evolutionary than revolutionary. Much of its technology—color LCD displays, low power usage, precision manufacturing—was perfected for hand-held videogames like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, which sold in the tens of millions. Think about how much more productively workers are now able to communicate because of some silly games.

We've only just begun, Kessler writes.

Videogames will influence how next-gen workers interact with each other. Call of Duty, a military simulation game, has a mode that allows players to cooperate from remote locations. In World of Warcraft, players form guilds to collaborate, using real-time texting and talking, to navigate worlds presented in high-resolution graphics. Sure, they have funky weapons and are killing Orcs and Trolls and Dwarves, but you don't have to be a gamer to see how this technology is going to find its way into corporate America. Within the next few years, this is how traders or marketers or DNA hunters will work together.

No more meetings! 

Now that's got promise!

(Thanks, Jeremy)