A thousand words

Another little reminder of how differently things are done in other parts of the world:

	AP
A couple walks past men dressed as condoms at an AIDS awareness activity held in Beijing Saturday ahead of World AIDS Day, Dec. 1. Famous Chinese personalities made appearances and medical students handed out condoms and information on AIDS prevention to passersby along Beijing's main shopping street, Wangfujing. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

Terms too sensitive for tech

If you've ever installed a second hard disk in your PC, you've probably run into the terms "master" and "slave." In technical contexts, they describe situations in which one piece of hardware controls another.

But, are those words too politically and historically loaded to use even there? According to Los Angeles County, the answer is yes, according to Snopes.com.

Cringely on MSFT, APPL

In his recent columns for PBS, Robert X. Cringely tries to explain Microsoft's strategy for making money and how the company intends to remain a player -- at the cost of independent consultants who sell its products.

Just as interesting, this week he outlines why he thinks Apple Computer will enter the tablet computer market, despite vehement denials. Its entry point: a "digital hub" device that finally does a good job bridging the computer and the TV.

More takes on outsourcing

With recent announcements that Boeing and AT&T Wireless are both looking at sending jobs overseas -- to Japan and India, respectively -- the issue of offshore outsourcing is in the headlines again.

Seattle Weekly looks at how the news is energizing local labor groups, and rattling the world-view of "elite," high-tech workers who once imagined that they were safe from such concerns.

It's all part of a growing backlash against outsourcing -- which may be causing some employers to rethink the matter. News.com reports that the state of Indiana canceled a software contract with an Indian company in an explicit bid to protect local jobs. And Dell decided to stop sending support calls from corporate customers to a help desk operation in India after some customers complained, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Meanwhile, experts are noting that the actual savings of offshoring high-tech jobs may not be as great as advertised, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. There are other costs involved and, as an inevitable side effect of the demand, salaries in the Indian tech center of Bangalore are rising 20 to 25 percent a year.

When you are your wallet

If you think money matters get under your skin now, imagine what it would be like if you could buy things using an implanted microchip with a radio transmitter. Just another possible use for RFID technology, Wired News notes.

Your inner entrepreneur

Quitting your job and striking out on your own sounds tempting, but do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

You can test your entrepreneurial potential with this 26-question quiz at the Wall Street Journal's Startup Journal site. It was based on Joseph R. Mancuso's research into the characteristics typical of entrepreneurs.

Amazon goes back in time

Continuing its push to make the sum total of human knowledge available at your fingertips, Amazon.com's British division has entered the antiquarian book market by licensing the British Museum's extensive catalog of more than 2.5 million titles.

Most importantly, BBC News explains, the deal makes information on 1.7 million pre-ISBN titles available to Amazon's customers. The online bookseller did not previously list works published before the book-identification scheme went into effect during the 1970s.

Of course, this probably means bad news for independent rare-book dealers, the Independent notes.

Seattle, SF: Separated at birth?

Our sister paper in San Francisco published an amusing feature headlined You Know You're in San Francisco When ... that catalogs the wacky zeitgeist of the City by the Bay.

The funny thing is, quite a few of the items on that list could apply equally well to Seattle. Some examples:

• There is an extreme housing shortage, but the political establishment responds by not allowing builders to build.
• You lament the negative impact of those awful big-box stores on local mom-and-pop hardware stores while you're complaining to the cashier at Home Depot.
• You're an unemployed dot-com refugee and college dropout with no job prospects, and you think it's the president who is stupid.

How well do you think the piece describes the Emerald City?

(Thanks to Tracy in S.F. for the link.)

Making over Mickey

Mickey Mouse turned 75 this year -- and, like many oldsters, he's no longer connecting with young people. But Disney is trying to give its mascot a makeover for the new millennium, the New York Times reports.

Even the company's own research suggests that the 75-year-old mouse is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans of all ages to relate to - particularly children, whose entertainment world is filled with online computer games and other distractions.

"Mickey hasn't really changed, and I guess the question is, have the times passed him by?" said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Company who covers Disney. "I think they've had chances to upgrade the character, but they haven't done a lot with it."

Disney, though, is now trying hard to find Mickey's 21st-century footing - an effort for which it bought additional time last January when the United States Supreme Court upheld the extension of the Mickey Mouse copyright through 2023.

A more wired nation

The Internet is becoming more central to daily life for more Americans, according to a new survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life project.

The researchers identified eight distinct groups of technology users, ranging from Young Tech Elites (who flock to wireless) to Low-Tech Elderly (who prefer "old media"), providing a potentially useful framework for future discussion.

Many of the findings seem to confirm things you already suspected -- like not many people are paying for online content. But a couple are worth noting:

• 31 percent of the population constitute a "technology elite" -- early adopter types for whom digital technology isn't just commonplace but essential
• Computers and the Internet are becoming the media of choice for everyone, with most saying it would be harder to give up their computers than their telephones or TVs.
  

On a related note, CBS MarketWatch notes that more seniors are going online now -- users aged 65 and older increased by 25 percent this year -- but people who build Web sites (cough, cough) aren't meeting their needs.

Top picks, top clicks

Sports, weird crime and sex drew the most traffic for the week of Nov. 17-22:

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Ex-cops plead guilty to damaging car
2. Ibanez returns to M's
3. M's target star in Japan
4. Boston shows interest in Melvin
5. Be 'sex positive' and fear no pleasure
6. Sonics' early success may not be true indicator of final standing
7. Sonics' Allen promises to 'fit in' upon return
8. Ibanez: 'I'm so excited'
9. 2003 Apple Cup: It's sweet against sour
10. Sick of Michael Jackson? You ain't seen nothin' yet

As usual, we saw a bit more variety in the list of stories that users e-mailed to one another:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. Jones' Turkey & Gravy Soda to be sold online only
2. Prejudice breeds stupidity, study says
3. Go 2 Guy: Helping UW fans prepare for worst
4. The chronically late have their reasons, but the price can be high
5. In The Northwest: The energy bill would be a hoot if it wasn't so sad
6. They're on a quest for what's cool -- here and everywhere
7. Be 'sex positive' and fear no pleasure
8. Makah Tribe's trail eases access to a wild stretch of coastline
9. Fire chars girls dorm at Auburn Christian school
10. Ibanez returns to M's

Dates that matter

Nov. 22, 1963, is one of those dates that has been seared into our cultural memory, a touchstone for our civilization.

Why does it still resonate 40 years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated? There are other momentous dates in our history -- indeed, something happened on just about any date you can pick -- but only a handful are held up as truly important.

P-I reporter Kristin Dizon consulted the experts to try and answer the question What makes one important date iconic and another forgettable?

Historians and authors we talked with identify several things that make a date truly significant in our shared national experience: that you live through it, or your family talks about it; or, it touches you personally or morally; and that it changes or challenges one's world view.

That's the beginning of an interesting, objective exploration of the answer. For a more subjective view, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter reflects on the fickle nature of historical significance and whether the JFK mystique can endure.

Evidence in hand

Fingerprints are so 20th century. Palm prints are becoming the biometric evidence of choice for today's investigators, the New York Times reports:

Surveys of law enforcement agencies indicate that at least 30 percent of the prints lifted from crime scenes from knife hilts, gun grips, steering wheels and window panes are of palms, not fingers.

Patenting spam tricks

Here's an inventive tactic for fighting spam: get a patent on the tricks spammers use. That's what AT&T did. U.S. Patent No. 6,643,686 gives the company legal rights to methods for evading spam filters by making minor changes to each message sent out so no two are exact duplicates.

InternetNews notes that "AT&T could theoretically forbid spammers from using it to improve delivery of unsolicited e-mail. ... Whether that could prevent spammers from using the method or win AT&T sizeable patent infringement awards is unlikely, however, since few spammers or fraudulent mailers have been successfully prosecuted under existing state and federal laws."

For more analysis, see this thread on Slashdot.

Mob smarts

In CodeFellas, Wired's Simson Garfinkel tells the story of an IT guy for the mafia. Seems that the mob is pretty behind the times as far as technology goes, and life in organized crime is a lot quieter than The Sopranos would have you believe:

My sense is that the mob works a lot like GE or Time Warner. It's more Jack Welch than John Gotti. ...

Then there's the misconception that if you don't pay your debts, the mob will break your legs. I've seen that on TV but never in real life. ... If somebody doesn't pay their debts because they're broke, maiming them isn't going to put cash in your bank account. Still, the threat of pain remains a valuable deterrent. Tell your customers that you're breaking people's legs and there's no reason to actually do it. Truth is, when people don't cover their debts, we put them on a payment plan. If that doesn't work, we spread the word that they're a bad risk. Basically, we fuck up their underground credit rating.

The key to cool

D. Parvaz interviewed Carl Rohde, one of the leading authorities on what's cool and why. The key to coolness, he told us, is empowerment:

In other words, at the end of the day, no matter what kind of value we assign to our clothes and other objects we surround ourselves with, it's all about not feeling weak, alone and dull. We want to be heard, and to some extent, we rely on our cell phones and gadgets to give us a voice, a place, in the world.

Rohde says this is universal and transcends culture, race and economic strata. So the jeans you chose to wear empower you in the sense that they represent something about your personality to the world. They reinforce your character.

Rohde also supplied a short -- and, sadly, somewhat uninspiring -- list of what's cool in Seattle.

Blogging on the job

We find the most interesting sites sometimes by seeing who's linking to our stories. Today, Todd Bishop's Oct. 30 story on the fired Microsoft blogger is getting many referrals from a handy article on How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog.

Matters of state

With President Bush in England for high-profile state visit this week, the inevitable question rises: What exactly is a state visit?

The British monarchy's Web site offers a detailed explanation of what it entails. It begins with a personal invitation from the queen.

Slate's Andy Bowers offered a concise explanation for NPR (audio only).

Naming nonsense

Sick of all the made-up words companies are adopting as names? So were the folks at The Design Conspiracy, so they created What Brand Are You to mock the trend. It's supposedly a program that suggests ideal brand names for your company by letting you select core values and goals from menus. In reality, it just spits out one of 150 mostly nonsense words the Design Conspirators made up.

Naturally, the joke has escaped some. BBC News reports that 20 of the 150 fake names have already been registered with U.K. authorities.

The Beeb followed up with two of the registrants, who claim that they'd never heard of the spoof site and had invented their new brand names all on their own.

I sense at least one sad commentary in there somewhere.

(Via Fast Company Now.)

Co-workers = home wreckers

We all know that some jobs can be tough on a marriage. But a Swedish study suggests that just going to work can boost the chances that your marriage will fail, the Wall Street Journal reports. Why? It's the co-workers:

The seven-year study of 37,000 employees at 1,500 workplaces provides empirical evidence that working with people of the opposite sex is hazardous to your marriage. Working with co-workers who are all of the opposite sex increases the divorce rate by a startling 70%, compared with an office filled with co-workers of the same sex. Whether the co-workers were single or married had no impact, says author Yvonne Aberg ...

She also found that divorce is "contagious," with a married person being 43 percent more likely to get divorced if one-third of his or her co-workers are recently divorced people of the opposite sex. The risk jumps 60 percent if there are co-workers of the same sex who are single, possibly a "grass is greener" effect.

So, it looks like we need to move carnal temptation up a notch on the list of workaday workplace hazards. But, on a contrasting note, the Christian Science Monitor says that the job is also becoming a center of spiritual life.

Last week's top stories

What seattlepi.com users read, and referred to others, Nov. 10-16:

Top picks (most e-mailed):

1. Poverty stalks an island paradise
2. Law firm fined for 'piling on' claims
3. Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
4. Our Place in the World: Road map leads to darkness
5. UW study examines possible benefits of Reiki
6. Top spots troopers spring the trap on speeders
7. Naked sushi leaves a bad taste
8. Sapped by cancer, Jim Clowes rings out his message one last time
9. On Food: Seeking the best Chinese food? Look to Richmond, B.C.
10. Group Health will market program to quit smoking

Top clicks (most read):

1. Murray fills the bill
2. Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
3. Law firm fined for 'piling on' claims
4. Naked sushi leaves a bad taste
5. Top spots troopers spring the trap on speeders
6. Concorde's arrival capped by thievery
7. Residents pick up food, board for zoo critters
8. M's show Shiggy a move
9. Poverty stalks an island paradise
10. Kazuo Matsui may reconsider playing in major leagues

Stories children tell

A fascinating piece recently rediscovered on the blogosphere: The folktales and myths that children tell in Miami's homeless shelters. It's from 1997 so I don't know if it's any of these tales are still current, but if you're at all interested in folklore, it's worth a read.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast's fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret stories" are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

Things learned last week

Four things you could have learned (or, at least, that I did) from reading the P-I the past few days:

• One Kalakala just isn't enough for the guy who ended up owning it after a problem-plagued auction. He wants to create fabric replicas.
• The greatest invention of the past 40 years, according to Britons: a "widget" that puts a head of creamy, draft-style foam onto cans of beer. Cultural priorities, ya know.
• Washington Mutual gets employees' consent before taking out dead peasants insurance on them.
• If your concession sales are dropping, but you want your concessionaire to increase your cut of the take, no one will want to be your concessionaire. That might seem obvious, but apparently it was news to the state ferry system.

The way of all flesh

So you're dead. Now what? is a fascinating, if morbid, look at what happens to the bodies left behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil, courtesy of Creative Loafing Atlanta.

It's filled with fascinating trivia, such as why bodies are traditionally buried six feet under (dates back to the Black Plague), what the "in" caskets are made from nowadays (fiberglass and plastic, with 500-year warranties) and how all the preservatives in our food are helping preserve our corpses, too.

But the main focus is on the myriad ways in which we can dispose of bodies, including donating them to science. What happens to those, exactly? Anything from crash tests to practice tools for cosmetic surgeons to, of course, penile enhancements. One of the more interesting uses is the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee, where corpses are left to deteriorate in simulated crime scenes so police and medical examiners can study decomposition in different environments.

What about head transplant experiments? Glad you asked:

While in search of just such a ghastly possibility for her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, author Mary Roach traveled to Cleveland and visited retired neurosurgeon Robert White. In the '60s, White began experimenting with "isolated brain preparation," a procedure in which a living brain was taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal's circulatory system, and kept alive. In 1971, in what is either an absolute abomination or miracle of nature -- we report, you decide -- White cut the head off a monkey and connected it to the neck of a second, decapitated monkey. Then, in a series of complex medical procedures, he hooked up respiratory and circulatory supplies to the Frankenstein monkey. In a paper White wrote about the experiment, he said the monkey's eyes "tracked the movement of individuals and objects in the room," and when food was placed in its mouth, it "chewed it and attempted to swallow it." White performed this procedure on several different monkeys, all of which died within six hours to three days.

When Roach asked White if he would ever conduct such an experiment using humans, he replied, "Of course. I see no reason why it wouldn't be successful with a man."

Grossly underpaid

Following up on the previous item about the most overpaid U.S. jobs, CBS MarketWatch's Chris Pummer lists the 10 most underpaid jobs, too.

Exactly what constitutes "underpaid" requires some explanation, apparently:

The degree to which someone is underpaid isn't just a matter of how much money he or she earns: Two of the 10 jobs below pay more than the U.S. median of $37,500 a year. Rather, it's a function of how valuable -- or loathsome -- the work is relative to the earnings.

Several jobs frequently cited as underpaid don't make the list below for that reason.

So who's on this list? Dishwashers, loan collection agents, meatpackers, EMTs, preschool teachers and police officers, among others.

Getting a grip on gripe sites

More and more disgruntled customers are starting, or flocking to, Web sites dedicated to dissing companies that drew their disfavor. How the companies respond spans the gamut, the Sacramento Business Journal reports (free registration required):

Consumers are ranting and raving about the companies they love to hate with Web sites intended to let the world know how they were sorely mistreated.

From IHateStarbucks.com to HomeDepotSucks.com, online corporate gripe sites are springing up all over the Web with a vengeance.

In response, some corporations have gone to court, seeking to pull the plug on the Net squawkers. Other companies have bought up potential hate site registration names. Many corporations publicly decline to comment on these Internet lambastings, not wanting to give the Net malcontents further publicity.

There are more than 25,000 "I hate" and "sucks" URLs on the Web, according to DirectNIC, a domain registration company. That doesn't count the virtually endless variations on the theme, with verbiage often profane or scatological.

Reveal your soul via iTunes

New technology often has unexpected social implications. For example, Apple Computer's iTunes jukebox software is giving people a new way to embarrass themselves, Wired News reports:

Thanks to the ability of Apple's iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone's taste in music -- or lack of it -- in a way that previously required a certain level of intimacy.

The ability to examine the music collections of co-workers, neighbors or fellow students is akin to peering into their souls: Someone who appears cool and interesting from the outside is revealed as a cultural nincompoop through the poor sap's terrible taste in music.

Students at Wesleyan University have even invented a new form of discrimination based on iTunes; it's called playlistism.

Grossly overpaid

CBS MarketWatch's Chris Pummer assembled a list of the 10 most overpaid jobs in the U.S., according to compensation experts.

Some are pretty obvious, such as CEOs of poorly performing companies (No. 3) and wedding photographers (No. 10; "Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon they're not, but some charge fees as if they're in the same league.").

But others are quite surprising, such as airport skycaps (No. 7), who can pull in more than $100,000 a year -- most of it in tips. What exactly is that they do again? Honestly, I can't recall exactly, although I know I've automatically stuffed $2 into the hands of some in "reward" for service that could best be described as indifferent.

Horsey on spam

If you haven't already seen it, cartoonist David Horsey weighs in today on a scourge of modern life.

My copy, right or wrong

Amazon.com's Search This Book feature has authors in a tizzy, but it may be perfectly within its legal rights to offer it without getting their permission, copyright lawyer Doug Isenberg -- himself the author of a searchable book -- writes in a perceptive analysis for News.com.

Isenberg bases his conclusion on whether Amazon meets one of the key criteria for "fair use":

One of the four factors required by the U.S. Copyright Act to determine whether a copy is legal under fair use is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." In other words, what impact will Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature have on sales of books in this program?

So far, at least, Amazon reports that its new program is actually increasing sales. "In the first five days, sales growth for titles included in Search Inside the Book outpaced growth for titles not in the program by 9 percent," the company said.

Obviously, Amazon must have thought the feature would drive sales, since it makes money not from searching but from selling. And the publishers who signed up with Amazon must have thought the same thing. I think I agree.

Avoiding the speed trap

Where are you most likely to get a ticket for speeding on Washington's highways? The P-I reviewed 907,142 speeding stops by the State Patrol from August 2001 to August 2003 and came up with the answers.

The top three ticketing hot spots: Milepost 110 on Interstate 5 (Carpenter Road/SR 510), Milepost 210 on I-5 (236th Street Northeast in Snohomish County) and Milepost 17 on I-405 (near Northeast 70th Place, Kirkland).

Finger lickin' healthy??

Is fried chicken good for you? So suggests a new ad campaign for KFC, which Slate ad critic Rob Walker dissects. Ruthlessly.

In a particularly brilliant maneuver, KFC's press release further suggests that you can make its chicken even more healthy by removing the skin. You have to appreciate the comedy of telling people to buy fried chicken and then toss the skin away. I only wish they'd had the guts to go further and point out that you can make your KFC bucket-meal healthier still by removing the skin, and then throwing away the chicken and preparing yourself a nice salad. (Try it. It's so good for you that afterward you can have a cigarette—provided you don't smoke it, of course.)

Spam for the holidays

Spammers are getting the holiday spirit, too, it seems. Net filtering firms say that they're starting to hawk more gift-oriented merchandise as the Yuletide shopping season nears, BBC News reports. I guess those folks go straight onto Santa's blacklist ...

Last week's top stories

Not surprisingly, the latest developments (denouement?) in the Green River Killer story dominated our top traffic charts for Nov. 3-9.

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Letter from a serial killer (a P-I exclusive)
2. Last 'Matrix' lands a solid blow for the bold trilogy
3. Driver drove with man in windshield, police say
4. Green River Killer confesses
5. In cruel detail, a monster reveals himself
6. Radio Beat: It sounds like '90s music could be the next big format on Seattle dials
7. Grieving dad loses second son
8. People in the News: Parents fear Paris' porn will be on Web
9. Sex scandal breaks out over -- well, we can't tell you
10. Steinbrenner to M's: Bug off

No. 11 is a story from Saturday that's actually pulling in more readers this week: Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
2. Last 'Matrix' lands a solid blow for the bold trilogy
3. Green River Killer confesses
4. Simon & Garfunkel concert a groovy reunion of sorts
5. Numbers game could shake cell industry
6. A soldier dies in Iraq, a family mourns in Kent
7. Letter from a serial killer
8. In cruel detail, a monster reveals himself
9. Thousands welcome Concorde to Seattle
10. Prosecutor faces assault, unlawful conduct charges

Kasparov as 'The One'?

Gary Kasparov, champion of free-thinking humans everywhere, is preparing to take on yet another chess-playing computer program -- this time, in virtual reality, Wired News reports.

Any resemblance to the greatest living organic chess player and the hero of the "Matrix" movies is purely coincidental. I think.

Worth a read today

Judging from our server logs, many Buzzworthy readers don't come in via the home page or other parts of the site. (Let me know if you think that's wrong.) So, from time to time, I'll point out noteworthy pieces elsewhere on seattlepi.com that are worth checking out.

Today's picks:

• Matters of size at work: "With 64 percent of American adults now overweight or obese ... some heavier workers say they are tired of insensitivity and discrimination on the job. As feelings about fitness and fairness collide at work, "size-ism" is emerging as the latest diversity frontier."

• Poverty stalks an island paradise: Yes, the San Juan Islands are an idyllic rural getaway, but as reporter M.L. Lyke notes, they're also a place "where the gap between the rich and the poor is becoming a treacherous divide, the widest in the state."

Seattle's a brain-gain city

That means we're one of the metro areas benefiting from "a new, brain-driven, winner-take-all pattern in urban growth," according to the Washington Post:

In a Darwinian fight for survival, American cities are scheming to steal each other's young. They want ambitious young people with graduate degrees in such fields as genome science, bio-informatics and entrepreneurial management. ...

"A pack of cities is racing away from everybody else in terms of their ability to attract and retain an educated workforce," said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. "It is a sobering trend for cities left behind."

That pack of brain gainers includes Atlanta, Austin, Boston, San Francisco and Raleigh-Durham -- basically, just the tech hubs that you'd expect. The big losers in this battle for brains include Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Miami, Newark, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

Being on the first list also pays dividends beyond the arenas of business and technology: brain-gain cities are also more diverse, tolerant and boast richer local arts scenes, the Post reports. On the flip side, demographers say, they also tend to lose residents "of lesser educational attainment."

From the mind of Homer Simpson ...

Inspired by an episode of "The Simpsons," Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Ore., created a hybrid tomato-tobacco plant, Wired News reports:

The two plants can successfully become one because they come from the same plant family, which also includes eggplant and the deadly nightshade. The tomacco even bore fruit, although Baur said he believes it's poisonous because it likely contains a lethal amount of nicotine.

Taking the 'phish' bait

"Phisher" scams, which con people into giving personal information using forged e-mail that looks like it came from reputable businesses, have become lamentably common in recent months.

But who falls for them? More people than you would think, MSNBC.com reports:

The e-mails are remarkably successful, say Internet scam artists who’ve discussed their techniques anonymously with MSNBC.com. One claimed as many as 10 percent of recipients fill out the forms, which take advantage of the ease with which genuine Web sites are copied. With imitation artwork and text a fake Web site can look like the real thing to anyone not looking closely. ...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, most of the victims were Internet-savvy. Several regularly check their credit cards and bank statements online, for example, and discovered their identities had been stolen just that way. Still, the e-mail was convincing enough to dupe them.

Contrary to conventional wisdom

A quick round-up of recent findings that are on the counterintuitive side:

• Playing computer games at work could increase job satisfaction and worker productivity, based on a study conducted at a Dutch company, BBC News reports. So, there might just be a business rationale for Minesweeper.
• Government efforts to tighten security around potential bioterror agents could leave the country more vulnerable to future attacks and/or disease outbreaks, according to New Scientist. New requirements are so onerous, and criminal penalties so severe, that many scientists and labs are simply abandoning research and destroying existing microbe samples.
• Women make up a significant portion of visitors to online porn sites, Newhouse News Service reports.

A finger in your ear

What will they think of next? BBC News reports that Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo has developed a wristwatch cell phone that doesn't require a handset or an earpiece. You just stick your finger in your ear to hear the caller. Works via sound induction through the bones in your hand.

And here, I thought wearable computing was on the cutting edge ...

An inventor's lot

What's the reward for inventing a revolutionary machine that completely transforms modern civilization; i.e., the computer?

For John Mauchly, it was years of legal hassles and the grand-daddy of high-tech patent disputes, Michelle Delio reports for Wired News. On top of that, no one remembers he invented the skateboard, too.

Hyperbole the size of ...

Ever notice how journalists are always comparing things to the size of Rhode Island? Slate has an amusing Explainer on just why that is and how the Ocean State became an all-purpose yardstick:

Rhode Island comprises 1,545 square miles. However, if you exclude the area of Narragansett Bay, the land mass of Rhode Island is 1,045 square miles. And those two measurements are handy for journalists, because something can be either 1,000 or 1,500 square miles, and still be about the size of Rhode Island.

Slate also lists examples of things which are conveniently Rhode Island-sized, including Yosemite National Park, disintegrating Antarctic ice shelves and the area served by Houston's bus system.

(Update: Thanks to Bill Fain for pointing out my error with the state's nickname.)

Cloning, then and now

In a stark example of how attitudes toward biotechnology have changed in the past 15 years, the New York Times points out that back in 1988, no one much cared if the food they ate came from cloned animals.

Scientists at two companies, the Granada Corporation and American Breeders Service, made and sold hundreds of cattle clones. Consumers bought their meat and ate it, unaware. Milk from clones was sold with no public outcry. In fact, said Dr. Mark Westhusin, a cloning expert at Texas A&M, "there may be some cows out there still, producing milk."

These days, Granada and American Breeders are no longer in that cloning business. But cloning is back. And this time, the F.D.A. and consumer groups are involved, asking, Is it safe to eat a clone? Can you safely drink a clone's milk? If you breed a clone, can you eat its offspring?

Some consumer groups are wary and some industry groups said they wanted to be sure consumers would accept milk or meat from clones or clone offspring. Public interest groups are weighing in and the F.D.A. will hold a public meeting to air the issue. It expects to decide by next spring whether to regulate food from animal clones.

What changed?

Read on for the answer.

Nanotech risks

Is nanotechnology bad for the environment? Good question. And researchers are only beginning to look for the answer, the New York Times reports in a mildly alarming story:

Don't ask, don't tell is the operating mode for much of the nanotechnology industry these days when it comes to where discarded products end up. Many companies assume that because they are working with compounds that are deemed safe in larger sizes or because the nanomaterials are embedded in larger products, the particles will not pose environmental threats.

Following your job to India

Shipping jobs to places like India is quite controversial these days. But what if you shipped the employees overseas with their jobs? Ebookers, a London-based travel agency, is doing just that, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The company is pitching the jobs as a way to see the world, the information-age equivalent of joining the Peace Corps or the Foreign Legion. So far, it has drawn more than 50 adventure-seeking recruits from Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Ireland and Germany.

Net insecurity

With yet another e-mail worm making the rounds, you have to wonder just why connecting your computer to the network is such a high-risk endeavor.

In a commentary for News.com, Gregor Freund, CEO of firewall-maker Zone Labs, blames a reactive, industrywide security model that's "the digital version of closing the barn door after the horse gets out":

If we take a step back, it's obvious that our fundamental security philosophy--responding to damage--is flawed. Why do we accept that for every worm or virus, we'll spend millions of dollars in containment and cleanup ...?

To make matters worse, after-the-fact cleanup is inadequate, even when worms are caught by antivirus software and expunged from networks. Malicious code can weaken network defenses--opening backdoors, stealing files or confiscating passwords--and pave the way for a secondary attack. Who has time to run exhaustive security audits--checking files' integrity, changing passwords, etc.--after network infections?

Certainly not most consumers. On that note, Scott Granneman makes some good points about why Joe Average User Is In Trouble when it comes to securing his home computer against viruses and other digital nasties.

Odds of dying

In case you wondered, the National Safety Council has assembled a handy table listing your odds of dying in various ways.

Not exactly ice-breaker material for parties, but it is interesting in a morbid way. For instance, did you know that you have a better chance of being killed by exposure to hot tap water (1 in 65,092) than by a dog attack (1 in 137,694)?

(Via The Morning News.)

A strange thing is human nature

More stories that probably confirm your suspicions about how the world works:

• "How do you get teens to crave milk? Load it with caffeine." It's called Hyper Cow.
• Miscommunication apparently led to the stabbing death of a Turkish man hawking Eminem T-shirts when another man, hearing his sales pitch, took it for an insult to his mother.
• A convicted sex offender is leading an anti-porn group in protesting the presence of an adult bookstore in his community by photographing patrons and posting their photos online.
• And, from our own news section, "Driver drove with man in windshield, police say". (He claimed that he had to drive to a spot with better cell-phone coverage.)

'Latte liberals' logging on

Can coffee-house Wi-Fi networks be the key to denying President Bush a second term? A new political action committee called the Committee to ReDefeat the President thinks so, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The group will sponsor gatherings at WiFi-enabled coffee shops and other locations where wireless networks allow people to gain access to the Internet on their laptop computers. There, volunteers will be coordinated via a Web site, and use their cell phones to call unregistered voters in Democratic neighborhoods in key states around the country.

(Via J.D. Lasica's New Media Musings.)

E-voting Down Under

While e-voting systems in the United States have been mired in controversy because they're proprietary and, critics charge, insecure and unaccountable, the Australians have found an obvious end-run around all those problems: make the technology open source, Wired News reports.

When suicide makes $en$e

Suicide, it turns out, can actually improve your standard of living. So concluded Dave Marcotte, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland who discovered that trying to kill yourself can yield economic benefits -- assuming, of course, that you fail.

Charles Duhigg recounts Marcotte's findings in a fascinating article for Slate. A sample:

Marcotte's study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—"hard-suicide" attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don't seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become "cheaper" after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you.

Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.

Top picks, top clicks

What caught our readers' interest, Oct. 27-Nov. 1, 2003:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. In The Northwest: An open letter to Dick 'Grass-roots' Cheney
2. Being busy is not being honest
3. Art Thiel: Time for Hedges to make her exit
4. In The Northwest: Responsibility is never out of style at O'Dea High
5. Fierce windstorm slams region
6. Tuition break has surprise beneficiaries
7. What your Halloween costume says about you
8. Seattle has the Midas touch for making charitable auctions fun and profitable
9. Venture Capital: Seattle is quickly becoming the Boardwalk of popular board games
10. Train traveler's arm stuck in toilet trying to retrieve phone

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Sonics' Allen faces ankle surgery
2. What your Halloween costume says about you
3. Sonics' Allen on injured list for five games
4. Microsoft fires worker over weblog
5. Yanks' pain could be M's gain
6. Lewis hits the big 5-0
7. Former anchor Hutchison is suing KIRO
8. Microsoft may preview 'next big breakthrough'
9. Art Thiel: Time for Hedges to make her exit
10. Father held in teen's slaying dies

By the way, our database of unclaimed IRS refunds in Washington state got more traffic than some of the articles that made the list, but that's probably no surprise.

On scare junkies

Yes, Halloween is over, but MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle's exploration of why we like being scared is still worth checking out.

High cost of phoning home

You'd think that with today's technology, phoning home would be easier -- and cheaper -- than ever for U.S. troops overseas.

That's probably true -- if you don't need to factor in bureaucracy, miscommunication, the costs of monopoly and the fallout after smart people exploit loopholes in the system. As Newsweek's Martha Brant explains, they're among the many reasons why soldiers in Iraq are now paying at least twice as much to call loved ones Stateside as they were just a couple weeks ago.

AOL's toast by 2013?

It's always fun to project trends out to the point of absurdity.

America Online lost 700,000 U.S. subscribers last quarter, and the total has dropped 7 percent in the past year to 24.7 million. Tig Tillinghast at Marketing Wonk projects that, at that rate, "AOL will have only one member left on August 17, 2013."