More offshoring pros

Another contrarian voice in the debate over shipping tech jobs overseas belongs to economist Catherine L. Mann, whose views are explored at length by Virginia Postrel for the New York Times.

Mann cites parallels between the current controversy and the 1980s hand-wringing over foreign manufacturers breaking into the memory chip market, undercutting U.S. companies. Back then, Postel notes, the conventional wisdom was that it spelled doom for the U.S. electronics industry.

The dire predictions were wrong. American semiconductor makers shifted to higher-value microprocessors. Computer companies bought commodity memory chips and other components, from keyboards to disk drives, abroad. Businesses and consumers enjoyed cheaper and cheaper prices.

Far from an economic disaster, the result was a productivity boom. As global manufacturing helped to reduce the price of information technology sharply, all sorts of businesses, from banks to retailers, found new, more productive ways to use the technology.

Mann posits that shifting software work overseas would lower costs and make advanced technology available to more domestic businesses, too:

By building the components for new integrated software systems inexpensively, offshore programmers could make information technology affordable to business sectors that haven't yet joined the productivity boom: small and medium-size businesses, health care and construction.

There will still be jobs for domestic programmers, she says, but they may be in new sectors such as health care, and might require retraining.

(Update: Embarrassing typo noted by a reader was corrected.)

Online donations work

Here's another example of how the Internet can level the playing field, empower the voiceless, et al.

Although Democratic front runner John Kerry has attracted more online campaign contributions through Amazon.com than any other candidate, running a close second is someone you may not even have heard of: Gary Nolan, who's running on the Libertarian ticket.

Reporter John Cook has a status report on Amazon's little experiment in melding e-commerce with politics.

State of the spam fight

The current Seattle Weekly features a very timely package of stories on the current state of the Spam Wars. In a nutshell, it's not pretty.

As Frank Catalano notes in a piece on collateral damage, "the dirty little secret in the escalating war between spammers and anti-spammers isn’t that your e-mail may never get read. It may never get delivered."

Meanwhile, Mark D. Fefer explores the ambivalent feelings that anti-spam forces hold toward Microsoft, which is cracking down on spam even while numerous flaws in its products help spammers make the problem worse.

On a related note, Wired News looks at how some spammers are exploiting loopholes in the CAN-SPAM Act -- that is, when they bother at all with any pretense of compliance.

'No, not the mind probe!'

Can you build a better lie detector by reading brain waves? A company called Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc. thinks the answer is yes. Its technology also has possibile applications in medicine, advertising and combatting terrorism, P-I science reporter Tom Paulson writes.

On eBay, spelling matters

We've come a long way from the plain black text on gray background days, but the Web remains a text-oriented medium. Need more proof? People who can't spell or write well make less money selling on eBay, according to the New York Times.

Not only are their auctions missed by buyers searching for correctly spelled words, but they fall prey to entrepreneurs who buy misspelled items at low prices, then turn a profit by reselling the items with the proper spelling. (I never cease to be amazed at the new businesses that spring out of online commerce.)

Some experts say there is no evidence that people are spelling worse than they ever did. But with the growth of e-mail correspondence and instant messaging, language has grown more informal. And much as calculators did for arithmetic, spell checkers have made good spelling seem to quite a number of people like an obsolete virtue.

Not that spell checkers are used by nearly everyone. Indeed, experts say the Internet — with its discussion boards, blogs and self-published articles — is a treasure trove of bad spelling.

Random thought: So, if someone were to write a spider that crawled Web sites looking for misspelled words, then e-mailed its reports to the Webmaster, do you think that would be seen as helpful or a pest?

Coping with idiots

Don't bother waiting for an idiot boss to get smarter is a fun read from the Dallas Morning News. John Hoover, author of "How to Work for an Idiot: Survive & Thrive Without Killing Your Boss," offers some tips on how to cope and even a taxonomy of pointy-haired supervisors that he developed:

"Idiots have no problem connecting one dot. They can do this all day long if left without adult supervision," he said. "But God forbid if you ever ask them to consider triangulation. Their heads would explode."

Big Music's big misstep

Unintended Consequences Department: The music industry's relentless legal offensive against individual file traders is spurring users to adopt new technology that could hasten its demise, BusinessWeek Online reports:

One has to admit: The RIAA sure is tenacious in pursuing its strategy. What it doesn't seem to realize, though, is that it has already lost the war. ... The recording industry's hardball tactics have fueled a technological shift that'll make it nearly impossible to pursue file swappers in the future.

How so? The culture of fear and loathing that the RIAA has created is starting to put encryption on the must-have list of every Joe and Jane Internet user. The results will be wide-ranging and will pose a threat to the movie industry, the software industry, and just about any other industry involved with the creation and sale of intellectual property.

Can Jobs do it again?

Apple Computer is poised to revolutionize the world once again, this time in the realm of consumer entertainment -- that's the premise of a cover story in the new BusinessWeek.

Its major strength is, as ever, visionary but mercurial CEO Steve Jobs. His unique position of power, bridging technology and mass entertainment, could make Apple an important player:

For years, Jobs's perfectionist approach to product development has been experienced only by Mac users. But now, massive changes are roiling the worlds of entertainment, computing, and communications, giving him a broader stage. Increasingly, content -- that magical lifeblood of movie studios, record labels, and publishers -- is being transformed into digital form. At the same time, the Internet and wireless networks are evolving to deliver those bits almost anywhere, at speeds never before possible. Couple all that with disk drives, semiconductors, and high-resolution displays that are growing ever smaller and more powerful, and technology is liberating entertainment from its past. How we watch movies, look at photos, listen to music, even read a book promises to change profoundly in the next decade.

No one may have a better chance to make order out of this chaos -- and then profit from it -- than Jobs. He bridges the marketplace: He has a hand in the worlds of computing, music, and movies to see how they're evolving. He has the track record with consumers: His string of hits includes the original Mac, the candy-colored iMac, and the iPod. He has the pieces: Apple not only has a combination of software and hardware skills unique in the PC business, it also has strong product design and one of the world's best-known brands. And he has the silver tongue: When the record companies had dug in their heels against the Net in Napster-induced terror, it was Jobs who persuaded all the major labels to put their music on iTunes.

But there's a downside, too:

Jobs can be so enamored of his own vision -- and so bull-headed about pursuing it -- that it has blinded him at times. ...

While consumer-electronics giants develop scores of products at once and endure a few flops, Jobs's hands-on approach means Apple can focus on only one or two brand-new projects at a time. "Apple's problem is that it's just a blip by consumer-electronics measures," says consultant Paul Saffo, research director at Institute for the Future. "It's too big to play the Bang & Olufsen angle, but it's just a blip next to Sony or Samsung. That's a really awkward place to be."

BusinessWeek says rivals such as Sony are dismissive of Apple's prospects as a competitor. And skeptics caution that Jobs may be repeating with the best-selling iPod the same mistake he made with the Macintosh: keeping it pricey and cool but out of reach for many.

The challenge for Apple, then, comes down to innovation and design. Can it make products that are so much better than rivals' that it can command a premium and keep its market-share lead? Jobs seems capable of pulling it off.

Machines that imagine

The Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush is more remarkable than you might think: It was invented by a computer program.

Specifically, it was invented by one of Stephen Thaler's patented Creativity Machines, which supporters call the first truly thinking machines. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a long, fascinating story on how Thaler's research into the "near-death experiences of dying computer programs" yielded a technology that births entirely new ideas.

A Creativity Machine used two neural networks to study toothbrush design and performance. A brainstorming session between the two produced the idea to cross the bristles of the toothbrush for optimal cleaning. That toothbrush became the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush.

In one weekend, a Creativity Machine learned a sampling of some of Thaler's favorite Top 10 hits from the past three decades and then wrote 11,000 new songs. Some are good, Thaler said. ... Other offerings are the musical equivalent of a painting of dogs playing poker ...

But computer-composed music doesn't have to be bad. Human mentors with good taste could train a critic network to grade the Creativity Machine's songs, punish it for bad tunes and reward it for harmonious melodies. The feedback would hone the machine's composing skills.

Such a self-training system was the Creativity Machine's first invention, and the subject of Thaler's second patent.

Dieting on the brain

If you're having trouble shedding those extra pounds, it might be because your brain may be too evolutionarily challenged to let you diet.

That's the idea being tested in a massive, five-year European Union research project involving scientists from 13 countries, BBC News reports.

The theory is that the brains of overweight people have accepted obesity as normal and interpret attempts to diet as a threat to survival. They respond by slowing the body's metabolism to retain calories. It's a natural defense that developed in times when starvation was a common threat. But famine has been wiped out so quickly in the developing world that our brains haven't had time to adapt.

As Professor Jonathan Seckl, an expert in molecular medicine at Edinburgh University, tells the Beeb:

"We are facing the pressure of millions of years of mammalian evolution. ...Yet the phenomenon of a McDonalds on every street corner is only something seen in the last 20 years."

Toilets around the world

Globe-trotting correspondent Winda Benedetti says that if you travel to exotic places, you'll run into lots of exotic toilets, too (to put it kindly). She offers some useful survival tips in No. 1 problem with traveling can be going No. 2.

This is the side of travel rarely discussed in those glossy magazines touting the latest package tours to pretty places. When planning our foreign holidays from a postcard-perfect distance we prefer to imagine that our waste products will be mercifully and messlessly teleported in a blinding white light away from our bodies to some distant and uninhabited corner of the planet.

The harsh reality is, when traveling abroad nature will call and there'll be no familiar toilet to retreat to. The intrepid traveler has no choice but to explore strange and unfamiliar facilities, to do this most private business in the most alien of privies. ...

My year of in-depth experience has shown me that all it takes to survive the toilets of the world is a bit of common sense and the ability to learn from your mistakes or, better yet, the mistakes of others. Prepared to discuss the undiscussable, I offer you a few nuggets of hard-earned water closet wisdom.

Also check out Winda's photos of toilets from all over.

Rip 'em for a fee

Would you pay someone to convert your CDs into MP3 for you? Apparently, enough people would to keep a new business called RipDigital very busy, Wired News reports.

Yes, it's pretty easy to rip your own songs in the digital music player of your choice, but that takes time, says RipDigital co-founder Dick Adams:

"There are a lot of people out there who have more money than time," said Adams. "Most people don't roll their own cigarettes, and a lot of people don't want to do this themselves."

Instead, they can FedEx their disc collections to RipDigital and get MP3, AAC or WMA versions back on DVDs or external hard disks -- along with their original coasters. Pricing starts at $129 for 100 CDs, with unit cost falling as the library size increases.

Call this another milestone in the shift toward a world of digital, mobile music: the first support service -- and, I suspect, hardly the last -- that does the dirty work for you.

1-Click candidates

Amazon.com's latest contribution to online "commerce": You can now contribute to presidential candidates' campaigns using its patented 1-Click easy-shopping system.

According to the FAQ, the company is "trying to take the friction out of grass-roots contributions" by "making it as easy for people to contribute as it is to buy the latest Harry Potter."

I'll leave it to the real pundits to debate whether it's a good idea to turn lending financial support to a potential leader of the free world into an impulse buy.

However, I will say that it does seem to be a logical -- if rather surprising -- application of the online retailer's basic technology. It's also an intriguing step in the evolution of the interactive voters' guide: not only can you learn about a candidate's stance on the issues, but you can show your support right on the spot.

And, in true Amazon.com fashion, you can see just how much each candidate has raised and how many contributions have been made to his or her campaign. That's probably at least as interesting as, and no less reliable than, many other unofficial indicators of which way the political winds are blowing.

Blame Canada for this, too

Film crews were a common sight around Seattle 10 or 15 years ago. I used to work in Pioneer Square and there were times when we seemed to be tripping over out-of-town TV and film productions.

That was then. Nowadays, the city -- in fact, the whole state -- is hard-pressed to get Hollywood's attention. Producers are increasingly filming in Vancouver, B.C., and other foreign lands that offer better financial incentives and favorable exchange rates.

But, as Kathy Mulady reports, Seattle is trying new incentives that it hopes will lure small and indie filmmakers if not the big-budget productions.

The fight isn't hopeless. The New York Times notes today that aggressive efforts in New Mexico boosted film-industry spending in that state tenfold in just one year.

Foiling phobias fast

Researchers at Virginia Tech and Sweden's Stockholm University are investigating fast-track cures for childhood phobias, the New York Times reports:

The concept is a CliffsNotes version of traditional exposure therapy: the people with phobias are exposed to their worst nightmares until their bodies are too weary to respond with stress. But in this trial with children, the lessons typically experienced over several sessions are conducted in three hours.

Investigators claim a 75 percent cure rate, but some experts caution that intensive therapy isn't appropriate for all kids:

"One treatment session might be good for the highly motivated child," said Dr. Tamar Chansky, director of the Children's Center for O.C.D. and Anxiety in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. "But I think the message for parents is that you have to know your child. Is your child a microwave or a crockpot? Some kids need more time to stew and simmer. And that's O.K."

Most popular last week

There was much more difference than usual between the stories that SeattlePI.com users read and the stories they referred to others, during the week of Jan. 19-24. Only two items made both lists:

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Nintendo to launch a new hand-held device
2. Take a bow, Kaz: Pitcher makes his biggest save
3. No snag for M's, Sasaki
4. Melvin ponders lineup shift
5. How financing that new car can quickly turn traumatic
6. Queen Anne reels after Wright-style house is torn down
7. Gillick, M's scout to watch Cuban
8. Sasaki wants out of contract
9. The Insider: Picture It! Bachelorette is a software model
10. Officer's accuser faces charges

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. George W. Bush a divider after all
2. How financing that new car can quickly turn traumatic
3. Lab challenges usual theory on mad cow
4. Queen Anne reels after Wright-style house is torn down
5. The S factor explains Bush's popularity
6. Young people turning comedy shows into serious news source
7. Study: Sleep essential for creativity
8. Take care -- DVDs aren't indestructible
9. Buying fish off the boat is quintessential Seattle
10. Audiences can't seem to get enough of Josh Groban

Name that spaceship

MSNBC.com's Alan Boyle invited readers to suggest names for NASA's proposed Crew Exploration Module. They poured in, and now Alan's inviting everyone to vote on the most popular nominees -- Phoenix, Destiny, Freedom, Enterprise (naturally) and Serenity (an ode to Joss Whedon's "Firefly").

Also check out the excerpts from reader e-mail on the subject, which include explanations for some surprising and unconventional nominations.

Too many 'friends'?

Social networks like Friendster and the new Orkut are among the hottest things on the Internet nowadays. The basic idea is that you build a community by inviting people you know to join (still brand new, Orkut is already exploding).

David Weinberger puts on his curmudgeon hat and points out that this isn't necessarily a good thing:

I think I see where this is going: I’m going to have a different social network for every friend. ...

But, unlike the Internet, the value of the network of social networks won’t go up as the number of nodes increases for the same reason that my real social network doesn’t expand every time someone is born. In fact, when I reach my breaking point (which is scheduled to occur about 4 hours from now) and start autoresponding to those upbeat emails with a curt “No, you are NOT my friend!”, the Intersocialnet will turn me into a pariah wandering the digital earth friendsterless and friendless all my days.

Weinberger also points out that Orkut isn't named after a rude word in Finnish, at least not deliberately.

Dayparts by design

Come Monday, you'll see a very different home page on SeattlePI.com -- if you come in at the right times of day.

We're building around something that broadcasters have known for decades: different audiences want different content at different times of day. That may seem obvious in hindsight, but it's a relatively new way of looking at how people use the Internet. And it's one that online publishers have been buzzing about for the past year or so.

The foundations of dayparting for online news sites were laid by Minnesota Opinion Research Inc., which did a major study in late 2002 on what people did on the Internet, and when they did it.

The groundbreaking insight for the news media: Most people don't go online to look for news past noon. After lunch, their interests turn more toward entertainment and lighter fare; in the evening, they shift toward hobbies and shopping.

So, throughout the day, we're going to revise the home page to reflect those shifts. We'll still give you the top news at any hour, but we'll also try to give you other content that may be more useful as the day rolls along. You can preview the changes today.

To learn more about dayparting, and about other news sites that are doing it, check out these links:

• Dayparting 101: Making news sites more responsive (CyberJournalist.net)
• News Sites Experiment With 'Dayparting' by Tailoring Content (Online Journalism Review)
• Programming for Dayparts (MORI's summary of its study)

Keyword ad quandary

Can search engines make money by selling ads keyed to queries for other companies' trademarks? Playboy, Louis Vuitton and American Blind & Wallpaper Factory are among the companies suing, or threatening to sue, over that very question.

BusinessWeek Online's Alex Salkever assesses the situation and the implications it holds for Google & Co.:

Most search-engine outfits have policies that allow companies to remove their trademarked names from consideration for keyword sales. But many big companies haven't noticed the issue yet. If and when they do, they could cut into the revenue streams of Google, Yahoo, and others. And should the courts decide in favor of Playboy, Louis Vuitton, and American Blind, it could set off a rush of trademark complaints against search-engine companies.

Of this much I'm sure: Google will be forced to look a lot harder at its keywords in the near future. Take a Google search for Hallmark. It now returns three AdWords listings. One of them links to Speedycards.com, one of Hallmark's competitors in the greeting-card business. If every trademarked company made its name off-limits for use as a keyword, it would mean significant potential for disruptions in the online-ad marketplace.

Then there's the more frightening prospect, at least for search engines, of dealing with the masses of lesser-known trademarks of smaller to midsize companies. Plus the millions of domain names that could be construed as trademarks.

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

Behind the image

Gilbert W. Arias' photo at right, showing the jaws of a backhoe "swallowing" the helpless Space Needle, was one of the most striking images we published this past week.

Today, art critic Regina Hackett tells the unfortunate story behind the picture. The backhoe was cleaning up debris at a demolition site on lower Queen Anne. What was demolished? A Frank Lloyd Wright-style house of considerable interest. And the neighbors aren't happy about it.

propaganda.google.com

Google bombing is now turning the Web's leading search engine into a platform for political commentary, the New York Times reports:

Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site. ...

Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.

A Google spokesman downplays the disruptive impact of Google bombing campaigns, saying that they only see it with "obscure queries" that make up a small fraction of the 200 million searches handled each day.

He's probably right on the latter point but there's empirical evidence that Google bombing can co-opt very popular phrases, too. For instance, as the Times notes, if you search for weapons of mass destruction, the top result is very likely this amusing satire.

Buckling up does matter

The most dangerous objects in the car with you during an accident could be the other passengers, according to a new study from Harborview.

Researchers analyzed data from 80,000 fatal crashes and found that passengers who were securely buckled in were more likely to die if they were sitting by someone else who wasn't.

During a crash, unrestrained passengers are often hurled around the car, their bodies smashing into windshields, steering wheels or fellow passengers.

For example, for those sitting in the backseat, a rear impact could catapult a front-seat passenger back on top of them.

Assuming you are buckled in, your risk of dying shoots up by 22 percent if you're sitting in the back seat with an unbelted person in front of you, by 20 percent if you're in the front and with an unbelted person behind you and by 15 percent if someone without a restraint is seated beside you, according to the study.

Blocking pop-up blockers

You knew it was too good to last.

As pop-up blockers become more popular, it was inevitable that someone would devise a way to defeat them. A California company called FPBA Group appears to be the first, reports Mediapost's MediaDailyNews, with a product called Popstitial:

Popstitial doesn't defeat pop blockers. Instead, a code in the ad determines whether a pop-up or pop-under is being thwarted. Then Popstitial serves up a full-page advertisement that can either be a separate ad - using Flash, video, animation or static images - or the same style as the missed pop-up/pop-under.

The program attempts to steer a middle ground between a Web users' stated displeasure over pop-unders and pop-ups and the publishers' need to pay for content.

Database as detective

The idea of using software to troll databases looking for potential terrorists probably rates as one of the most controversial ideas of the past year. It raises many red flags about privacy and civil rights, not to mention questions about whether it would actually work.

But a story out of Canada shows that, in at least some cases, such a system might be effective. The Globe and Mail reports on ViCLAS, a central database used by police across Canada "to capture, collate and compare violent crimes." Investigators answer 262 questions about a crime that is submitted to ViCLAS, and trained analysts use that data to look for links to other crimes.

The paper cites one case where ViCLAS linked together seemingly unrelated assaults, leading to the arrest of a serial rape suspect.

Retired RCMP Inspector Ron MacKay, an FBI-trained profiler who started ViCLAS, highlights its strengths:

Unlike a police officer, ViCLAS does not retire, does not miss work, does not move to a new jurisdiction.

"ViCLAS never forgets the nitty-gritty of the case. And it's always there to compare."

That's either very reassuring or bone-chilling, depending on your perspective.

Vile verbiage

P-I pop culture maven D. Parvaz notes that the folks at Lake Superior State University have released their 2004 List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness -- and suggests a few deserving additions of her own.

Not-so-sweet success

One of the worst disasters that can befall a Web site is sudden, unexpected success. Mike Rowe, a teenager in Langford, B.C., learned that lesson over the weekend after news of his legal spat with Microsoft spread worldwide.

Rowe picked the domain name mikerowesoft.com for his part-time Web design business. The folks in Redmond weren't amused.

But, it turns out, lots of other people were. So many that Rowe says his Web hosting company couldn't handle the bandwidth and shut him down. Fortunately, another company offered to be his host, as he explains at the resuscitated site.

Update: Todd Bishop updates the story and rounds up other commentary on his blog.

If it reads like spam...

Advances in technology are forcing Internet users to develop yet another new skill: composing e-mail that can get past spam filters.

Wired News looks at this latest barrier to communication and offers a few useful tips:

Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail.

Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line.

Oh, and don't ever use the word opt, particularly in conjunction with the words "in" or "out."

Work for a jerk?

What's the main reason people quit a job? Based on a two-year survey of 3,000 workers nationwide, employee retention experts Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans say it's "problems with the boss."

To get at what those specific problems might be, they created an online Jerk Behavior Survey that asks people which of 42 things their bosses could do to push them out the door. The top vote-getter: Belittling people in front of others.

Kaye explains more about the survey on FastCompany's blog.

Kids: Have 'em your way

Designer children. They're making the leap from science fiction to scientifically feasible, Newsweek notes in a chilling report.

The brave new world is definitely here. After 25 years of staggering advances in reproductive medicine—first test-tube babies, then donor eggs and surrogate mothers—technology is changing baby-making in a whole new way. No longer can science simply help couples have babies, it can help them have the kind of babies they want. Choosing gender may obliterate one of the fundamental mysteries of procreation, but for people who have grown accustomed to taking 3-D ultrasounds of fetuses, learning a baby's sex within weeks of conception and scheduling convenient delivery dates, it's simply the next logical step. That gleeful exclamation, "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" may soon just be a quaint reminder of how random births used to be.

... The ability to create baby Jack or baby Jill opens a high-tech can of worms. While the advances have received kudos from grateful families, they also raise loaded ethical questions about whether science is finally crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed.

Songs not for sale

In Music Fans Find Online Jukebox Half-Empty, the Washington Post looks at how shopping for music online "can be alternately satisfying and frustrating. It is fairly easy to buy a song, but it can be much harder to find a song worth buying."

Many factors are to blame for why many big-name artists' songs aren't widely available, or not available at all, including the performers' reluctance, financial self-interest and outdated contracts that never considered Internet sales.

What I find most striking about this article is how it frames the whole story in what we used to call "Internet time." It suggests that some artists and labels have been very slow to respond to online market demand, that "intransigent" holdouts like the Beatles are really missing the boat. But let's not forget: it was just nine months ago that Apple kick-started the business by introducing its iTunes Music Store.

What people read last week

The most popular items on SeattlePI.com for Jan. 12-17, 2004:

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Bush admits he targeted Saddam from the start
2. Mad cow danger may even be bigger
3. The game is over for Xbox's Ed Fries
4. Streakers in restaurant watch as their car is stolen
5. Mariners eyeing Cuban defector
6. M's not yet set for spring
7. Locked on Sports: 'Boone factor' to grace new trio?
8. Aerospace Notebook: Tiny shrimp could be big problem for jet makers
9. 'L Word' turns on the lust appeal *
10. Lawyer Roe fights for the underdog, tackles Wal-Mart

* (This TV review also has one of the week's most memorable bits of wordplay, describing one character as "a pro tennis player so deep in the closet she can see Narnia.")

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. Mad cow danger may even be bigger
2. Streakers in restaurant watch as their car is stolen
3. Bush admits he targeted Saddam from the start
4. Sound's salmon carry high PCB levels
5. Pet owners worry about safety of dog and cat food
6. The S factor explains Bush's popularity
7. Dave Matthews stacks powerhouse tour with friends
8. Lawyer Roe fights for the underdog, tackles Wal-Mart
9. From Spanish Civil War to Iraq, activist Abe Osheroff looks back
10. Taking stock of meatless soups

No law breaking at Real

Here's an object lesson in looking for sneaky explanations when perfectly innocent -- and possibly more obvious -- ones exist.

On Thursday, DRM Watch editor Bill Rosenblatt raised the intriguing question of how RealNetworks' new RealPlayer 10 could play all major digital music formats, including "the secure versions of these formats used by online music stores." His guess: RealNetworks figured out how to circumvent those files' security, thereby breaking the law (i.e., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

The next day, DRM Watch retracted that assertion, explaining:

The truth of the matter is much simpler.  RealNetworks simply acquired the free software development kits (SDKs) of both Windows Media and Apple's QuickTime Audio, just as any other software developer might do. ... RealPlayer 10 simply relies on the presence of their player applications on the user's machine, and it posts an error message if those players are not available.

This information isn't new -- News.com and Ars Technica both explained how RealPlayer 10 worked with iTunes a week earlier -- but it evidently wasn't well known.

(Note: For some reason, neither DRM Watch article links to the other, as of this writing.)

Original item via PaidContent.org.

Tacomans: Who's stressed?

Sure, Tacoma was named the most stressful city in America by Sperling's Best Places, but the natives aren't too worked up over that. As several Tacomans tell P-I reporter Kristin Dizon, they still think the City of Destiny is a much nicer place to live than, say, Seattle (whose metro area came in 11th).

And Bert Sperling, whose firm compiled the list, says he's received just one complaint from an irate Tacoman.

Hm, I suppose you could interpret that a couple of ways, actually ...

Sick days aid natural selection

If you drag yourself to work while you're sick, you're not just endangering the health of your co-workers, you're also sabotaging the evolutionary process, Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg explains:

Or so says Paul Ewald, a biology professor at the University of Louisville and the author of several books on evolutionary biology.

Typically, disease organisms compete against each other. The aim of their game is to use a person to replicate themselves but not to lay that person so low that he or she can't parade around the office and infect us. Some pathogens may produce trillions of offspring, but if the viral baby boom makes a person too sick to stand up and, say, cough on other people, the virus's spread could be stopped dead in its tracks.

And that's Prof. Ewald's point. By staying home, you aren't simply catching up on daytime soaps. You are mounting a Darwinian counterattack against wicked strains of the flu and other maladies by stranding them on the Kleenex in your bedroom wastebasket. Meanwhile, as milder strains make the office rounds, they trigger immune-system responses that will defend against stronger strains. It is "like getting a free live vaccine," Prof. Ewald says.

The effect isn't unlike the domestication of wolves into puppy dogs. "We should be getting viruses that are so mild you wouldn't know you're infected," he says. In the short term, more people may be out sick and the cost to companies may be higher. But "in the long term, we would have less illness." In turn, he says, businesses could be far more productive, and people could defend against life-threatening diseases.

"The very best policy," he concludes, "is to have anybody who's feeling the least bit sick stay home."

A diet rich in PCBs

Following on last week's story about high levels of PCBs in farmed salmon, the P-I reports today that levels just as high have been found in wild salmon caught in Puget Sound.

Don't expect a major public health warning here, though, as our environmental team explains:

But state health officials, after studying Puget Sound salmon contamination levels for about a year, say they probably won't issue advice on how often the region's signature fish should be eaten.

The reason: They believe the heart-healthy benefits of eating salmon outweigh the risks posed by PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, stored in the fish. ...

Some argue that telling consumers to limit consumption of one kind of fish will cause some people to yank fish off the menu -- switching instead to meats that don't provide the same benefits to coronary health.

And don't think that you're safe from PCBs if you strip fish from your diet. They contaminate lots of other foods, too:

A Mountain State for $100M

Online auctioneer eBay, displaying its usual sense of humor, reminds everyone that you cannot put West Virginia up for sale. (At least, not if you don't own it.)

The bidding had reached $99,999,999 before they pulled the plug, in case you're wondering.

Streakers' getaway car stolen

It's never a good idea to leave your car unattended with the engine running -- especially if you stash your clothes inside so you can run naked through a restaurant. Three streakers in Spokane got that rude reminder this morning after their getaway car was stolen, KREM-TV reports (free registration required).

(Update: You can also get the details from this AP version, which doesn't require registration.)

Search Wars 2004

Can Google fend off new competition from Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines? Wired News surveys the developing battlefield and handicaps the contest.

If you sell it, will they come?

The startup costs are high, consumer demand is uncertain, business models are speculative and profit margins are almost nonexistent. Sounds like a classic dot-com from the Bubble Years, but it's actually a description of the current market for online music stores.

So why does everyone from Microsoft to Wal-Mart want to get into this business?

The New York Times tries to explain -- and offer a reality check.

[H]igh-tech companies fear being left behind, and the market for digital music is sure to grow. Apple alone has sold more than 30 million songs last year. It sold 730,000 of its iPods in the last quarter of 2003, reaching more than 30 percent of the market, according to the company.

Over all, consumers bought 3.5 million MP3 music players last year, according to Jupiter Research, and its analysts expect that number to grow 50 percent a year. ... The expectation of online stores is that legitimate downloading will grow rapidly with the spread of high-speed Internet access and intensive marketing efforts.

Hm, that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Bubble Years, too, doesn't it?

A screener escapes

Renewed efforts to prevent piracy of illicit "screener" copies of movies sent to award-show voters couldn't keep one Oscar voter's copy of "Something's Gotta Give" from reaching the Internet, Reuters reports.

Eating can kill you

Safety scares about beef and salmon, the anti-carb Atkins diet ... the list goes on and on. Are there any foods left that are still good for you to eat?

Maybe not, judging by this amusing (perhaps even enlightening) roundup of foods that are bad for you.

Cold comfort

Constant griping about the misery of winter might just be the best strategy for coping with cold weather. That's the surprising conclusion of a new study comparing how people with different temperaments reacted to the cold.

One possible explanation of the role reversals is that the neurotics expect bad things to happen and simply shrug it off.

The extroverts on the other hand are shocked by their sudden encounter with misery.

Nonsense-spouting spam

I'm seeing a lot more spam messages with text that mimics (more or less) actual, meaningful prose. It's clearly an effort to circumvent spam filters that key in on words and phrases that scream "junk e-mail."

But is it working? Wired News talks to the experts to find out. Bottom line: such verbal "white noise" probably won't fool a well-trained Bayesian filter. And, ironically, it can actually make it easier for filters to spot spam.

Annenberg's truth squad

"Truth squad" is a term you hear quite a bit around our newsroom during election season. We tend to use it as a verb, to describe the practice of checking the accuracy and veracity of statements made by a political campaign. The P-I truth-squads claims made in local and regional campaigns.

FactCheck.org, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania does it on a national scale, scrutinizing claims made by Democratic presidential candidates, among others.

Happy B-Day to Bezos

Amazon.com Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos turns 40 today.

To see how some at the company are honoring this milestone, go to Amazon's site and search for old fart (no quotation marks).

Then, just for fun, please take this poll.

Women want gadgets, not attitude

Women aren't known for purchasing as many high-tech gadgets as men. One big reason, writes BBC News Online technology editor Alfred Hermida, is that "they are still being treated like idiots" when they try to buy:

Research commissioned by the [organizers of the Consumer Electronics Show] looked at how women were treated when they went shopping for gadgets.

It found that most of all, women were irritated by unhelpful and pushy salespersons.

Many simply felt dumb, even though they considered themselves smart women. ...

The study showed that almost half of women go shopping with a man as they believed they were better treated if they had a male companion.

On their own, many women said they felt they were treated by salespersons as if they were thick, especially the younger ones.

Warnings for dummies

The winners of the seventh annual Wacky Warning Label Contest were announced last week. The big prize went to a bottle of drain cleaner which warned, in no uncertain terms, "If you do not understand, or cannot read, all directions, cautions and warnings, do not use this product."

Runners-up include a notice alerting consumers that a 12-inch CD rack was not meant to be used as a ladder, and a reminder that a snow sled "may develop high speed under certain snow conditions."

This year's list isn't quite as good as those of previous years -- my favorite remains a baby stroller that helpfully urged users to "Remove child before folding" -- but it's still pretty entertaining.

The end is 9 min. long

(To the tune of "Old Man River")

Closing credits
Those endless credits
They just keep scrolling along ...

Sorry.

The New York Times examines the complex factors -- union rules, tech advancements, favoritism, ego -- that are making movie end credits longer than ever (with credits running for 9 minutes, 33 seconds, "Return of the King" is "epic" even after the story stops) and asks the common sense question, does the guy who unfolds the catering table really need to be listed?

Top picks, top clicks

Outrageous statements, outrageous pranks and Mariners roster moves dominated our traffic during the week of Jan. 5-10, 2004:

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Microsoft Notebook: Microsoft has plans to take on ... Apple?
2. The S factor explains Bush's popularity
3. Family ate beef from recalled batch
4. Mariners find taker for Cirillo
5. Olympia man's house sitter coats apartment in foil
6. M's expected to have Aurilia in fold today
7. Mariners complete trade sending Cirillo to San Diego
8. UW Athletic Director Barbara Hedges announces retirement
9. M's add offense in Aurilia
10. Region braces for major snowfall

The list of stories readers referred to people they know is considerably more varied:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. The S factor explains Bush's popularity
2. Study warns of danger in eating farmed salmon
3. Family ate beef from recalled batch
4. Olympia man's house sitter coats apartment in foil
5. Some words better left unuttered
6. In The Northwest: Trend spotter deconstructs the House of Bush
7. Bastyr co-founder charged with killing woman while driving drunk
8. UW Athletic Director Barbara Hedges announces retirement
9. Pesto is a sauce for the ages
10. GM giving away 1,000 cars in $50M program

How to fix (or break) Wi-Fi

Pseudonymous cyberpundit Robert X. Cringely has offered up one of his characteristically audacious schemes to fix many of the problems we see with today's business models for selling Wi-Fi Internet service to the public.

Wireless-networking guru Glenn Fleishman counters with a point-by-point rebuttal arguing that Cringely's proposal doesn't make any sense.

If you're at all interested in this topic, you should definitely check out what they have to say.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I'm composing this Buzzworthy item at a local independent coffee house that offers free Wi-Fi. It's a growing trend that may actually make more sense for many merchants than trying to charge for airwaves.)

Blogging in perspective

We in the media like to think of blogging as a milestone in the evolution of digital journalism, but the New York Times Magazine reminds us that it's mostly just another way for young adults to socialize.

According to figures released last October by Perseus Development Corporation, a company that designs software for online surveys, there are expected to be 10 million blogs by the end of 2004. In the news media, the blog explosion has been portrayed as a transformation of the industry, a thousand minipundits blooming. But the vast majority of bloggers are teens and young adults. Ninety percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19, according to Perseus. Many teen blogs are short-lived experiments. But for a significant number, they become a way of life, a daily record of a community's private thoughts -- a kind of invisible high school that floats above the daily life of teenagers. ...

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Kudos to the carriers

Seattle Times executive editor Mike Fancher's weekly Inside the Times column usually isn't particularly relevant to the P-I, but today he hands out well-deserved congratulations to the delivery people who worked hard to ensure both our newspapers reached subscribers and newsstands during last week's snowstorm.

(Prerequisite explainer: The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, although owned and published by different companies, are in a joint operating agreement under which the Times' owner, The Seattle Times Co., handles advertising, production and circulation functions for both.)

Steve & Bill, apart again

Iconic tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates continue the point-counterpoint that has more or less defined the continuum of digital technology for the past decade or two.

As Todd Bishop reported, Microsoft is eyeing a future market in handheld video players. Elsewhere, Jobs tells New York Times columnist David Pogue why he thinks handheld video players are a bad idea.

In this case, the divergence in their world-views basically comes down to the difference between what consumers say they want (pocket video players sound nifty) and what they really want -- or don't want (a 3-inch screen just doesn't cut it for "Lord of the Rings").

Mars ho!

If "what the--?!?" sums up your response to President Bush's ambitious plan to send a manned mission to Mars and set up a permanent moonbase, you're probably not alone.

MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle has a good round-up of detailed coverage from around the Web -- including an account by two authors who weren't suprised by the news.

Cable made his wife fat

Timothy Dumouchel, of West Bend, Wis., blames four years of involuntary exposure to cable TV for his wife being fat. Now, he wants to hold Charter Communications responsible for his wife's condition and his own smoking and drinking because it failed to disconnect his cable in 1999 as he requested. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the latest juicy details in this bizarre story. (Requires free registration, but this article is worth it.)

Girl Scouts' hard sell

Girl Scout cookie season is approaching and legions of young saleswomen are being trained not to take no for an answer:

The scouts, mostly teenagers, learned about "the surly customer," the one who just won't say yes, and the best response to the customers who say they've already bought.

Cookie sellers were coached to appeal to people's patriotism: You don't have to eat the cookies, you can donate them to troops overseas.

And they covered the easy ones, too, such as those who say they don't have enough money.

If the hard-sell approach seems a bit much, bear in mind that the price has gone up to $3.50 a box.

(Via Fast Company Now.)

Terror by e-mail

E-mail from your boss can be hazardous to your health -- especially if it's written in an aggressive tone, according to British researchers, BBC News reports. Such messages raise the recipient's blood pressure, indicating a stress reaction.

Building a better browser

If you've never looked at any Web browser besides Internet Explorer, then you're missing out on some key innovations, writes Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg:

The Web browser is probably the most frequently used category of software in the world. But in recent years, the browser most people rely on -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- has been stagnant, offering very few new features.

This is a common pattern with Microsoft. The company is aggressive about improving its software when it first enters a market. But once it crushes its competitors and establishes an effective monopoly, as it has in Web browsers, Microsoft seems to switch off significant innovation. Other, smaller companies, however, have been plugging away at improving the Web browser. There are numerous competitors to IE that include integrated popup ad blockers, better privacy controls, easier searching and other enhancements.

Mossberg's vote for most important advance that Microsoft has yet to adopt: tabbed browsing. In fact, he calls it "the biggest fundamental improvement in the Web browser in years. It's like quickly navigating among paper folders in a packed file drawer by reading the staggered tabs that protrude from their top edges."

No argument here. Tabbed browsing persuaded me to switch to Safari and Mozilla for most of my Web surfing. The main reason: I typically have at least four separate Web pages up at the same time, and tabbed browsers simply make it easier to jump back and forth between them. (Note: I still use IE at work, mainly for compatibility with some internal systems.)

I know from looking at our server logs that about 80 percent of SeattlePI.com visitors are using some version of IE. But I'm curious: How many readers of this blog have tried, or normally use, some other browser? And how many windows do you usually have open when surfing?

Most read/e-mailed in '03

These are the stories that most captured our readers' fancy last year.

1. Highway workers lament increase of human waste
2. Nethercutt hails Iraq's recovery
3. Driver crashes after bee flies into mouth
4. Letter from a serial killer
5. Potomac Watch: Murray fends off criticism of her 9/11 fund-raiser
6. People in the News: Moore gets the news off her chest
7. Allen's Vulcan develops wireless Mini-PC
8. Court will decide if police need warrant for GPS 'tracking'
9. Sleeping screener forces evacuations at Sea-Tac
10. Last 'Matrix' lands a solid blow for the bold trilogy

1. Changing tactics speed growth of Jehovah's Witnesses
2. P-I Focus: Power of presidency resides in language as well as law
3. Driver crashes after bee flies into mouth
4. Highway workers lament increase of human waste
5. It's not just a Hummer, it's a tax break
6. War in Iraq a reason for shame
7. Grades are no longer simply A-F
8. Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
9. Go 2 Dog: For 14 years, it was a great run
10. As jobs flow overseas, the controversy deepens

While we're it, here are some other top traffic-getters for 2003:

The most popular PDF: Major League Pitching 101

Single most-viewed photo: Destiny's Child at the Grammy Awards.

Escaping the fire

File this under "Morbid But Potentially Life-Saving": The Madness of Crowds: Four ways frightened mobs flee from danger - and how you'll die if you don't escape (Wired magazine).

The business of blogging

Blogging about your company and its products can be an express route to unemployment, true, but it can also be good for business, writes the Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray.

Some companies are even backing employee blog efforts:

Perhaps the most blog-friendly company in America is Macromedia Inc., a multimedia software producer based in San Francisco. Blogging is at the core of Macromedia's customer marketing strategy. In 2002, as the company released a number of new products, it asked several employees to launch blogs where they could field questions from customers.

''We needed a mechanism to communicate incredibly quickly,'' said Tom Hale, Macromedia's senior vice president of business strategy. ''We hit upon the blog strategy as a mechanism to do that.''

Hale said the experiment succeeded beyond expectation.

''People really liked hearing directly from Macromedia experts, and getting really fast response,'' he said. Today there are at least 16 employee-run blogs providing assistance to Macromedia customers.

(Previously, I wrote about SeattlePI.com's take on blogging.)

Is downloading down?

Has the threat of legal action by Big Music persuaded people to stop downloading songs they haven't paid for from file-sharing networks? A new Pew survey says yes.

But, as reporter D. Parvaz notes in a story that tries to get at the truth behind the numbers, peer-to-peer industry insiders dispute that:

"I completely discount it all,"