Deep space, deep thoughts

A few thoughts on the future of space exploration from a couple of deep thinkers:

• Lawrence Krauss, chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, explains to Wired just why he's down on the whole notion of sending a manned expedition to Mars. Among other reasons, humans are "bulky, fragile, and expensive to maintain. Almost all of the cost of a manned mission goes into keeping the humans alive and getting them back to Earth."
• Science fiction writer Ben Bova, in his latest column for the Naples Daily News, reminds us of the incredible return on investment that this country -- and society at large -- has gotten from NASA so far. But, he thinks a big part of space exploration's future may be in the hands of private entrepreneurs. ("The frontier has always been a place of high risk and high rewards. Space is no different.")

Big Day with Kalakala

I was in Florida on a business trip several years ago when a wedding reception was held at the hotel where I was staying. Unfortunately, the happy couple apparently didn't realize that a science fiction convention was also taking place there that day. It probably wouldn't have been a big deal if not for the band of Klingon warriors, in full regalia, who insisted on presenting themselves as an honor guard when the wedding photos were taken.

The bride was not pleased, to put it very mildly.

Having unwanted guests on the Big Day can be quite distressing -- as some local brides have learned during the past year when they booked the ferry Skansonia for nuptials. The Skansonia is moored on Lake Union right next to the historic, but decrepit, Kalakala. That vessel's departure for Neah Bay -- already postponed from last Sunday -- couldn't come soon enough for the Skansonia's operators, P-I reporter Carol Smith reports today:

It's every bride's nightmare -- the uninvited guest lurking, like someone's Weird Uncle Al, in the corner of every photograph.

The profile is unmistakable -- the Neanderthal slope of its foredeck, the beady window eyes, the rust collected like cigar spittle along the seams of its face.

For brides getting married on the Skansonia ferry, moored next door on Lake Union, the hulking wreck of the Kalakala managed to put the proverbial rabbit ears over an otherwise postcard-perfect Seattle skyline backdrop for their weddings.

Get the whole story in Kalakala: The unwanted guest that won't leave.

Bettering Google?

Google's deceptively simple interface masks a lot of hidden power.

Soople gives you an alternative -- and, at first, deceptively complicated -- interface that gives you ready access to Google's advanced features.

Jonathan Dube explains in more detail at the Poynter Institute's Web site.

Not quite paper-free yet

Continuing my custom this week of linking to something Bill Virgin writes every day, I draw your attention to his latest column, a status report on the infamous march toward a paperless society.

As he points out, "The prospects of a paperless society have about as much chance of being realized, at least in our lifetimes, as the wheelless society."

Nonetheless, in talking with Michael Jackson, vice president of fine-paper businesses at Weyerhaeuser Co., Bill notes that new technology is gradually doing away with some paper products, while creating more demand for others. For example, PDAs have eaten into the demand for paper tablets and, although you'd think that increasing e-mail use would erode the need for envelopes, it turns out that the direct marketers are keeping that sector nice and healthy.

Quiznos critters

They're certainly the most-talked-about TV commercials of the year around our office: Quiznos' bizarre spots with the "singing road kill," as one co-worker describes them. (Click here if you don't know what I'm talking about -- but please remember that ignorance is bliss.)

So, what the blazes is going on here? Slate ad guru Seth Stevenson tries to explain. Believe it or not, there's actually a sound advertising theory behind this campaign.

Killing the patient

Yale Law School's Ernest Miller posted an interesting line of reasoning on why a constitutional amendment defining marriage could, in fact, open the door to end marriage as we know it:

Whether or not the [Federal Marriage Amendment] will permit states to have both heterosexual marriage and homosexual civic unions, there is strong case to be made that it will permit one-size-fits-all civic unions if the state abolishes civic "marriage."

After all, is there anything that requires a state to recognize the institution of marriage?

(Thanks to J.D. Lasica for the link.)

All about Google

Wired has posted its current cover story, The Complete Guide to Googlemania.

It loses something in the translation from print, but it's still an almost mind-numbing overview that largely lives up to the headline. Points covered include an inside look at pre-IPO hysteria, a common-sense (but perhaps impractical) guide on how competitors can kill Google, the war against content spam and an intriguing, but pointless, exercise in redesigning Google's interface.

Neon nostalgia

From the blazing "Add Bardahl" that greets people driving into Ballard to the Pike Place Market's distinctive clock, Seattle is aglow with landmark neon signs. The Museum of History and Industry is running a tour of some of the most memorable on March 6, as Bill Virgin reports.

To see what he's talking about, check out our photo gallery of some select signs.

How to amend

With President Bush voicing public support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, you may be wondering just what amending that key document entails.

If so, About.com has a clear, concise explainer.

Offshoring overview

BusinessWeek takes a sobering -- and refreshingly sober (i.e., hysteria-free) -- look at the offshoring of high-tech jobs. If you've been following the issue closely, there may not be much new information here but the article is an excellent summation of the topic, written with an eye toward the future.

It quotes both the cheerleaders who voice undying faith in the U.S. economy's ability to adapt and pragmatists who warn that the window to adapt successfuly looks alarmingly small (say, by 2010). Also, it buttresses the emerging wisdom that adapting will require an "extreme makeover" for American code jockeys:

Traditionally, the profession has attracted brainy introverts who are content to code away in isolation. With so much of that work going overseas, though, the most successful American programmers will be those who master people skills. The industry is hungry for liaisons between customers and basic programmers and for managers who can run teams of programmers scattered around the world.

At the same time, it points out that an emerging venture capital market in India, coupled with an enterpreneurial mindset, could keep that country's programmers from being relegated to the grunt work that's been the bread and butter of outsourcing firms to date.

By the way, there's an interesting sidebar to this story that looks at a wrinkle the Europeans have added to the outsourcing debate. Dubbed "near-shoring," it's creating new job opportunities in Eastern Europe.

For a more critical take on both the pro and con arguments in the offshoring debate, check out Bill Virgin's column today.

Lose your job, die early?

Getting laid off can be bad for your health -- perhaps lethally so -- according to an ambitious study of more than 22,000 government workers laid off in Finland during the 1990s, New Scientist reports:

A team of researchers used employer and death records to study the workers from 1991 to 2000. Between 1991 and 1993, unemployment in Finland nearly tripled - to 16.6 per cent - before a national recession ended in 1996.

Those hit hardest by layoffs - losing more than 18 per cent of their colleagues during the worst years of recession - suffered the highest risk of death from cardiovascular disease. They were five times as likely to die of cardiovascular disease in the next four years as those who suffered no layoffs.

And over the 7.5-year study, they were twice as likely to die from cardiovascular conditions than those in a steady work environment. ...

Employees who weathered the most severe downsizing also reported more health-related absences than workers untouched by downsizing. But the change was most pronounced in permanent employees. That suggests temporary workers, whose jobs are less secure, may simply go to work sick, say the researchers.

All the world's a stage

BBC News cites an interview on the gaming site HomeLan Fed with a vice president from massive-multiplayer-game maker There describing an ambitious project to create a simulated Earth that the U.S. military would use for training purposes.

Functional flash mobs

Some graduate students at the University of San Francisco have come up with a new practical application for a flash mob, the New York Times reports: building an instant supercomputer.

The idea is that everyone turns out with their computers, which will be networked together. The first such attempt will be April 3. More details at FlashMobComputing.org.

I can't decide if this heralds a revival of interest in flash mobs, or if it's more evidence that the fad's glory days are over.

Who's special now?

Bad parenting is the problem and "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell is the cure. That's the basic message of a thought-provoking piece Alexandra Wolfe wrote for the New York Observer (and reprinted at SFGate.com) lamenting what she dubs the Too Much Positive Reinforcement syndrome. It's the "the belief, against all available evidence, that one is meant for special things" and Hayne says it has reached "epidemic proportions" in this country:

After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgment of his talents, it's no wonder we need television shows like "American Idol" and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, "The Apprentice." These shows are delivering the spanking -- sorry, the time-out -- that our culture of bloated self- evaluation is subconsciously craving. Their success signals that we may be reaching the end of a long national delusion. There is simply not room enough at the top these days for everyone raised to believe they belong there -- and, deep down, we all know it.

Wolfe has tongue at least somewhat in cheek, but this is a real topic of discussion in parenting circles. For example, the March 2004 issue of Parenting magazine has a feature story headlined "Too much self-esteem? When praise can backfire -- and how to raise kids with a healthy sense of themselves." As author Christina Frank sums it up:

... due to a mix of permissive parenting, school agendas, and pop psychology, the "love thyself" message has taken over to the point where it's begun to backfire. Today's kids are often impossibly self-absorbed, yet fragile. By smothering them with positive messages about themselves, we may have kept them from developing some basic and important emotional survival tools."

(Thanks to Tracy for the original tip.)

Top picks, top clicks

What SeattlePI.com readers found most interesting, and most worthy of passing along, for Feb. 16-21, 2004:

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Big bonuses for AT&T Wireless execs, worthless options for workers
2. A-Rod, Yanks plague M's
3. Studies find pain is a matter of the mind
4. M's anticipate sweet relief
5. Two millennia later, it doesn't matter who killed Jesus
6. Sonics' future may be in past
7. Yahoo! ends deal with rival Google in favor of its own software
8. Park at your peril -- the tow trucks are lurking
9. Flip's big Friday may have been audition
10. Pakistan steps up efforts to find bin Laden

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Big bonuses for AT&T Wireless execs, worthless options for workers
2. Two millennia later, it doesn't matter who killed Jesus
3. Scientists rip into Bush's policy, charge 'suppression of information'
4. It only seems as if your teenager hates you -- really
5. A-Rod, Yanks plague M's
6. Studies find pain is a matter of the mind
7. Obsolete UW card catalogs for sale
8. At AT&T Wireless, sale sparks job fears
9. Their job: Cure the health care crisis
10. A $20 million tug of war over a widow's will

Victory by the hair?

Amazing the things you never really notice until someone points them out. For example, did it ever occur to you that John Kerry has more presidential hair than George W. Bush?

Not new at Amazon

You may have read in today's Chicago Tribune (registration required) that Amazon.com is rolling out PriceKut, "a social network where customers can meet each other to discuss bargains, but only after first purchasing something at the site."

Unfortunately, it's not true, Ross Mayfield explains, citing the original, satirical press release.

Oops.

(Update: The Tribune has since removed that reference from the story and published a correction.)

Nowhere is safe from war and commerce

Two out-of-this-world stories from Wired News today:

• The Pentagon is looking seriously at space-based weapons systems, according to an Air Force report from last fall that's getting renewed scrutiny. And not just to protect valuable satellites, but to attack other countries' orbiters and strike at ground-based targets as well. Critics worry that such efforts could trigger a new arms race in space, where America has the most to lose.
• IBM is eyeing a new growth market in make-believe realities. Its new Business Integration for Games project is pitching software to makers of networked, multiplayer games such as EverQuest and Ultima Online that would help them better manage the complex virtual economies that have arisen on their gamescapes:

  In many of these worlds, in addition to slaying monsters and building empires, commerce has become a central activity, catching the developers by surprise. The economies have grown so complex that players have to take their transactions to other markets -- primarily eBay.

  "People put things up for auction on eBay," like real estate, for example, and make plans to meet for delivery of the goods in the online world, says [project manager Rob] Smith. "There are often online muggings. People are losing significant amounts of money by doing it that way. If you kept the auction within the game, you remove the risk."

  And, of course, the game publishers can get a piece of the action.

Morse code adds @

Another sign of the times: the "@" symbol has been added to Morse code, reports the Baltimore Sun. It's the first new sign added in living memory, as far as anyone can tell.

As far as the practical implications:

The change will allow ham radio operators to exchange e-mails more easily.

That's because - in an irony of the digital age - they often use Morse to initiate further conversations over the Internet.

"People trade their e-mail addresses a lot," said Nick Yocanovich, a Morse code enthusiast who lives in Arnold.

(Inspired by a note in Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log.)

Enabling wireless

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are finding innovative ways to use off-the-shelf wireless and mobile computing gear to help disabled individuals navigate and control their environment, The Feature reports:

One system, called an "auditory display," combines GPS, a mobile PC, and headphones outfitted with a head-tracking sensor to help blind individuals navigate on their own. The GPS receiver pinpoints the wearer's location and the head-tracker monitors which direction he or she is facing. Meanwhile, the computer generates spatial sound signals, tones that the user perceives to be emanating from a specific direction. Once a path has been programmed into the system, the user then follows the sound cues like virtual trail markers to get to his or her desired destination.

... The Center's "gesture panel" and "gesture pendant" help simplify the interaction with household devices by translating movement into computer commands, not unlike Tom Cruise "conducting" his computer in Minority Report.

The panel contains 72 light-emitting diodes that beam infrared light at a video camera. As the user breaks the beams with a hand movement, his or her gestures are translated by computer into wireless commands for household appliances. The gesture pendant is essentially a wearable universal remote that instead of buttons features a tiny video camera that captures hand movements. A thumbs-up, for instance, might increase the volume of a mobile telephone. Not surprisingly, this kind of gestural computing technology has applications beyond aiding the disabled.

(Thanks to Wi-Fi Networking News for the link.)

Second chances for tech

"Too cool, too soon" is an apt phrase to describe many new technologies that hit the marketplace before there's a market for them. Many fall by the wayside, destined to be forgotten; others, however, resurface after technology and consumer interest have caught up.

In Seattle Weekly, Frank Catalano looks at two oh-so-'90s technologies that are getting a second chance: giant wall screens that display artworks, and multimedia CD-ROM extravaganzas.

A FAILED IDEA isn't always a bad idea. It might be an idea whose time hasn't come. That's especially true in the short history of personal technology. Hundreds of really bad ideas have piled on and buried good ones in a mad rush to make money off of the latest big thing. Recall the boom-bust cycles of personal computer software (early 1990s), multimedia CD-ROMs (mid-1990s), and the Web (late 1990s)? Sometimes bad ideas suck up all the development capital. Sometimes the idea is good, but the market (people, price, hardware) isn't ready.

Requiem for the index card

On the surface, it's just a story about the University of Washington selling off old card catalogs its libraries no longer need. But look a little deeper and it's yet another emblematic tale of how quickly digital technology has displaced the knowledge icons of an earlier age.

Body image issues

I'm not saying that these two articles necessarily shed insight on one another, or that they are somewhat related thematically, but both offer some food for thought:

• Nature: Caustic comments get girls a date
• P-I: Breaking the laws of beauty

Lessons from the Bubble

A lot of smart people were bamboozled, brainwashed or simply seduced by the Dark Side during the dot-com bubble -- and quite a few have since written books about it, trying to explain where they, or everyone else, went wrong.

FastCompany does a good job summarizing the key points in What We Learned In The New Economy. The writers don't dismiss the Bubble Years outright, pointing out that "the New Economy isn't dead. It just didn't happen in the way we all imagined. And now it's been long enough that we can think more analytically about which of the shiny and alluring ideas of the New Economy were lasting and real, and which were just the iridescent glint of a bubble."

A sample reality check:

Boom-Time Buzz: Move first--or die.
Cold Reality: Move first without a real business--and die.

War over a will

A $20 million tug of war over a widow's will is a real page-scroller from today's P-I:

In almost 101 years of life, Evelyn Egtvedt had a front-row seat to aviation history and a hefty fortune that she and her late husband -- an early president of The Boeing Co. -- shared with colleges, churches and other charities.

After her death, however, her wealth has pitted more than a dozen well-known charities against a Portland minister in a dispute over what she intended to do with roughly $20 million. ...

My first thought, when I read it, was: "My, that seems so turn-of-the-last-century." Just goes to prove that some things just don't change very quickly, if at all.

A remote that really clicks

Quick! Name a technology company that's known for creating gadgets that are stylish, user-friendly and elegantly functional.

I'll bet the first one you thought of was not TiVo.

And yet, as New York Times reporter Katie Hafner writes, its distinctive remote control is "a textbook blend of complexity and ease of use.

"The peanut-shaped TiVo remote is at once playful and functional. A smiling TV set with feet and rabbit ears, the company's logo, graces the top. Distinctive buttons like a green thumbs-up and a red thumbs-down button have helped the remote win design awards from the Consumer Electronics Association."

And thus she launches into a fascinating behind-the-scenes story about how it came to be.

Outwitting Pepsi & Apple

Ways to Beat the System No. 1,248: MacMerc explains how to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway by employing an amusingly low-tech solution.

Ephemeral retailing

Here's one way to ensure that your fashion boutique doesn't fall behind the times: close the doors after one year, even if turns out to be a success.

Fasting infantry

Wired News looks in again on DARPA's ongoing efforts to create the super-soldier of tomorrow. Latest up: figuring out how GIs can go without food for five days.

Handicapping FlipStart

Is Paul Allen's new FlipStart handheld computer the answer to road warriors' dreams, or is it just another solution in search of a problem?

Forbes' Arik Hesseldahl weighs in with a critical, yet ultimately hopeful, analysis:

Will consumers trade off the full-size keyboard and the traditionally mouse-keyboard interface common on the desktop to carry their whole system and all their important files with them? A full-blown notebook PC, while popular now, may not be the mobile computing platform of choice within a few years. Allen's fantasy computing device may just be crazy enough to work.

Beware backstabbers

How can you tell when a co-worker is out to get you? A couple of recent columns on the Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal site provide some food for thought:

• How Devious Colleagues Can Harm Your Career: "By the time you finally understand that some workplace saboteur is climbing your back, there's a footprint on your head, and you've been portrayed variously as incompetent, witless, power hungry, adulterous and, above all, as worthy of a demotion as the assailant is worthy of a promotion. Rebounding from such an assault can be a long and difficult process."
• Handle Office Adversaries With Dignity and a Smile: "How well people fend off attacks from colleagues helps determine how far they will advance. The more adept players rise through organizations and accumulate more power."

Inside intelligence

From the Boston Globe, an interesting story about how job seekers are making unintended use of InternalMemos.com:

Ever wonder what's really going on behind closed doors at the office? You might find a clue at a new Web site.

Called InternalMemos.com, the site posts company memos for public view. The documents are sent by anonymous employees who, as of Jan. 30, had e-mailed more than 2,000 memos to the site, according to Philip Kaplan, the founder. ...

Though not designed with job seekers in mind, InternalMemos.com is among a growing number of Internet sites that recruiters and applicants looking for high-tech work periodically check when trying to evaluate the inner workings of a corporation.

What's your data worth?

What's your address worth to a marketer? About $1. Your Social Security number is worth $8, your credit report about $9 and your military service record a whopping $35.

Those are some examples of the valuations on 46 different bits of personal data that businesses can buy about you, according to the SWIPE Toolkit's Data Calculator. The values are based on pricing information from nine national data warehouses.

After the jobs go abroad

Dozens of bills have been introduced in state legislatures and in Congress to try and stem the outsourcing of jobs -- especially high-tech jobs -- overseas, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Whether they can halt the momentum remains to be seen.

Assuming they don't, though, the obvious question is: Is there still a future for high-tech employment in the United States after the jobs go overseas?

Two articles I came across recently suggest that yes, there is -- but it may be quite different from what the code-slingers of old are used to.

Daniel H. Pink, author of "Free Agent Nation," wrote an in-depth article for Wired magazine in which he studied the offshoring issue from many angles, here and abroad. And he sees an intriguing opening for the knowledge workers (or post-knowledge workers) of tomorrow:

As I meet programmers and executives [at Patni, India's sixth-largest software and services exporter] I hear lots of talk about quality and focus and ISO and CMM certifications and getting the details right. But never - not once - does anybody mention innovation, creativity, or changing the world. Again, it reminds me of Japan in the '80s - dedicated to continuous improvement but often at the expense of bolder leaps of possibility.

And therein lies the opportunity for Americans. It's inevitable that certain things - fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work - will be done overseas. But that leaves plenty for us to do. After all, before these Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined and invented. And these creations must be explained to customers and marketed to suppliers and entered into the swirl of commerce in a fashion that people notice, all of which require aptitudes that are more difficult to outsource - imagination, empathy, and the ability to forge relationships. After a week in India, it seems clear that the white-collar jobs with any lasting potential in the US won't be classically high tech. Instead, they'll be high concept and high touch.

That sounds abstract and vague, but a New York Times examination of the topic cited examples that suggest this is already happening:

That process [of adapting] has begun, as companies and people enhance their skills. The result is new hiring, even as other jobs move offshore. Intel has added 1,000 software engineers in China and India in the last two years, but it has added even greater numbers in the United States.

I.B.M. , the world's largest computer company, is also doing both. The company says it plans to transfer 3,000 jobs overseas, many of them white-collar jobs like computer programmer. But I.B.M. also says it intends to add 4,500 employees this year in the United States, including programmers and software designers with specialized skills.

The people in demand, says Hershel Harris, vice president for strategy in I.B.M.'s software unit, are those who are fluent in technology and in how technology can be applied to solve problems in particular fields of business or science.

Mary Trombley, 27, was hired last year by the I.B.M. software group as an engineer in San Jose, Calif. She was an English major at the University of Michigan, which she attended from 1994 to 1998, making her part of the first generation of college students with wide-open access to the Internet. She got enough of a taste for technology that she decided to change course. "It looked exciting and I jumped in," she said.

At I.B.M., she is a "human factors engineer" who helps tailor software tools for companies in the life sciences, retailing and financial services industries so they can more easily sift through vast databases to quickly mine useful nuggets of information. She works with programming languages, C++ and Java, but her main focus is a level above the code itself. "It's understanding a customer's needs and business strategy, and then translating that into solutions," Ms. Trombley explained.

Top clicks, top picks

Here are the most read and most e-mailed articles on SeattlePI.com for Feb. 9-14, 2004. Once again, there's not much overlap between the two lists:

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. UW may face severe sanctions from NCAA
2. 'Boobgate' made for a supersterile Grammy show
3. Read the small print for idea of exec pay
4. 'Survivor' Insider: Say bye-bye to Jerri, Jenna or Sue
5. Mariners reunite with an old friend
6. Driver of jeep shot and killed
7. Sonics' struggles in Barry's absence spice up contract talks
8. Microsoft Notebook: Making spammers pay -- a very British idea
9. Pro Bowl sets up Hawks for big '04
10. Cyberstalker just out of reach of law, but finally, he stops

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Ex-envoy won't back off of Bush
2. Kerry doesn't deserve veterans' support
3. Artistic directors to retire from Pacific Northwest Ballet
4. Indians decry Grammy act as racist
5. UW may face severe sanctions from NCAA
6. High-voltage lines, negative ions and rats
7. Support grows for higher ed tuition vouchers
8. The Mac lovers of Microsoft
9. Microsoft warns consumers about major Windows security flaws
10. Zags' Turiaf is one of a kind

A question for those of you who check this report on a regular basis: which list best matches your interests?

Inside Trader Joe's

There's a Trader Joe's store just up the hill from the P-I's offices near Myrtle Edwards Park. Every time I venture inside, I end up buying something that not only wasn't on my shopping list but that I would never have thought of putting on my list.

Apparently, I'm not alone: Trader Joe's is designed to encourage such impulse shopping, according to The Grocery Chain That Shouldn't Be, a Fast Company article that concisely analyzes the chain's unique mystique:

With only about 10% of the number of products found in a typical full-service supermarket, Trader Joe's doesn't aim to provide everything you need. Instead, it entices you with things you never knew you wanted, like that tub of dried figs. Shopping at a Safeway can be a chore. Shopping at Trader Joe's is somehow fun.

"When was the last time you voluntarily went to go browse in a supermarket?" asks Bill Bishop, president of Willard Bishop Consulting Ltd. "People browse in Trader Joe's." Indeed, its appeal is so contagious that Trader Joe's is adding 15 stores a year with no more promotion than a few radio spots and a newsletter. The private, German-owned chain says its sales have grown an average of 23% a year since 1990.

How does Trader Joe's do it? It relies on tightfisted cost control, a function of low-rent real estate and 2,000 private-label products. Then there's thoughtful product selection: Everything gets tasted first, either by one of 10 buyers around the globe or by employees in the Monrovia, California, offices. And it's all wrapped in an offbeat yet homey style meant to attract educated, hip consumers and employees.

Wanna lie? Pick up the phone

Your inbox may be drowning in scams and exaggerated sales pitches from spammers but, surprisingly, people actually lie more over the phone. That's the conclusion of a new study that's giving psychologists some serious cognitive dissonance, New Scientist reports:

Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.

Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.

Why might that be the case? Hancock thinks it's because email is automatically recorded, so fibbers are more likely to be found out.

People appear to be afraid to lie when they know the communication could later be used to hold them to account, he says. This is why fewer lies appear in email than on the phone.

People are also more likely to lie in real time - in an instant message or phone call, say - than if they have time to think of a response, says Hancock. He found many lies are spontaneous responses to an unexpected demand, such as: "Do you like my dress?"

Zoo TV

Two lucky gorillas at the Moscow Zoo are going to get their very own TV set, right in their cage. It's to bolster their intellectual development, the zoo's director tells Pravda: "We want them to pick their noses less and think more instead."

Diet doughnuts doable?

Is it really possible to create a low-fat doughnut? Nope, says a recent Wall Street Journal story:

The low-fat doughnut is the Holy Grail of the food industry. Food companies have been able to take most of the fat out of everything from cheese to Twinkies. But no one has succeeded in designing a marketable doughnut that dips below the federal low-fat threshold of three grams per serving. Doughnuts typically range from eight grams of fat for a glazed French cruller to more than double that for a cake-like doughnut.

Perhaps no other bakery good is so dependent on fat. After the batter is shaped into rings and dropped into hot oil, the deep-frying process preserves the shape, gives the doughnut a crust and pushes out moisture, allowing for the absorption of fat. The fat itself is responsible for most of its flavor. A doughnut contains as much as 25% fat; the bulk of that is the oil absorbed during frying, according to the American Institute of Baking, a research and teaching outfit funded by the baking industry.

The low-fat doughnut, declares Len Heflich, an industry executive at the American Bakers Association, is "not possible."

That hasn't stopped almost everyone in the approximately $3 billion doughnut industry from trying.

Latte tax idea lives on

Seattleites rejected a proposed 10-cent-a-cup tax on lattes last fall. But since the story garnered international attention, it was inevitable that the idea would resurface somewhere else.

That place is New York, where the Independent Budget Office is pitching a similar tax as one way to raise $12 million for city coffers -- although it isn't getting nearly as much press as a proposed "botax" on cosmetic surgery.

New York Newsday columnist Ellis Henican riffs on other ways to raise money, given that in the Big Apple, there are "so, so many things just begging to be taxed:

Like white people who insist on saying "bling-bling" all the time. Sorry, folks, but one tired rapper slang won't give you street cred. It must be taxed.

Like self-promoting chefs who keep clamoring for their own "Food Network" shows. ...

Tax Paris Hilton. Tax Janet Jackson. Tax Michael Jackson, twice. Maybe they'll all just go away. ...

Science from Seattle

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference, the world's largest general science meeting, is taking place in Seattle this week. Here's a roundup of the P-I's coverage of some of the intriguing goings-on:

• U.S. scientists fear losing out on cloning
• Will love survive? You just have to do the math
• Asian air pollution can reach U.S., study says
• Scientists warn U.S. ignores global warming at its own peril

AvantGo, OS X meet at last

Mac-using Palm PDA owners had to leave AvantGo behind when they upgraded to OS X, unless they were really determined and willing to wrestle with cumbersome workarounds. AvantGo has never updated its HotSync conduit for OS X.

It took a while but the open-source community has come to the rescue. The kindly minds behind MacZipIt.com have released a MAL Conduit that works seamlessly with the Palm HotSync Manager for OS X. I just installed v1.02 on OS X 10.2.8 and it worked like a charm.

There are other options for using AvantGo with OS X, including Tom Whittaker's free, command line-based Malsync (which I used up until now), the freeware AvantGo USB Sync and the commercial Missing Sync. But, it's hard to beat a Palm Desktop conduit for simplicity.

So, OS X owners, try out the MAL Conduit and give our AvantGo channels a whirl.

(By the way, in case you've wondered exactly what "MAL" is, here's an explainer.)

Segway speed bumps

Being banned from Walt Disney World isn't the only headache facing Segway these days.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the company selling inventor Dean Kamen's topple-proof scooter is in pretty wobbly shape:

Mr. Kamen recently raised $31 million in fresh money to supplement the $100 million initially raised.

People familiar with the company's finances, who asked not to be named, say the original funds are all gone and that the company needed the new money because operating expenses were exceeding revenue. ...

Sales totaled just 6,000 through last September, when the Consumer Products Safety Commission issued a recall of all Segways on the market to correct a software problem that was causing riders to fall off the device. That's far short of the pace needed to reach the projected 50,000 to 100,000 units that Mr. Kamen's camp predicted the company would sell in the first year.

There are some positive signs, the Journal notes: lobbying efforts have made Segway scooters sidewalk-legal in 41 states, institutional customers remain interested, and the company is looking to set up a network of dealerships around the country, taking a lesson from auto makers' playbook. (After all, would you pay $4,000 for a vehicle without ever "test-driving" it?)

Update: I'm now linking to a version of the story that's accessible to non-WSJ subscribers, too.

Is that water stale?

Does bottled water really go bad after the expiration date? The Wall Street Journal's Andrea Petersen addresses this pressing question of modern life.

In brief, the answer is: No, probably not.

Despite the labels reminding consumers to drink up, there is virtually no evidence that drinking water beyond the expiration date has any health impact at all. The Food and Drug Administration considers bottled water to have an "indefinite shelf life." Even the bottled-water industry is hard-pressed to justify the labels.

However, sources inside and outside the industry agree that bottled water can taste "stale" if it's kept too long, possibly because of minerals that enter the water at some point.

So, if there's no health basis for expiration dates, why do bottlers bother with them at all? There's actually an explanation for that ... sort of:

To some degree, the fact that bottled water carries expiration dates can be blamed on New Jersey, the only state that officially requires it. That regulation dates back to 1987, though it's not completely clear what prompted it. The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services says only that: "The intent of the law was to protect the safety and quality of drinking water."

The industry says that, given the New Jersey law, it's easier - and cheaper - for water companies to stamp dates on every bottle, whatever the destination, than to do it selectively. "That's why you'll see it, so you don't have a hodge-podge of labels going to different states," says Stephen Kay of the International Bottled Water Association, an industry trade group.

Like, it's here to stay

Do you, like, say "like" a lot? You're in good company, notes the Wall Street Journal's Andrea Petersen:

Two decades after the song "Valley Girl" popularized it, a fresh effort is afoot to stamp out this linguistic quirk. The generation that grew up saying "like" is hitting adulthood - and the workforce. As a result, it is now in the lexicon of investment bankers, doctors and even teachers, where it can sound especially jarring.

It is, as you may surmise, an issue of considerable consternation in some quarters -- and it's a habit of speech we're now exporting to other English-speaking nations as well.

Hunt for a cyberstalker

Cyberstalking is not a crime in this state. House Bill 2771 would change that. Today, the P-I presents the story of Joelle Ligon as one example of why it needs to be changed:

When Joelle Ligon found her first love at age 15, she could not have known that her teenage romance would morph more than a decade later into a malevolent force relentlessly stalking her from cyberspace.

After years of enduring graphic sexual harassment, amorphous threats, creepy mind games and public humiliation, Ligon was on the verge of an emotional meltdown after moving to Seattle three years ago.

Anonymous e-mails -- vicious lies about her sexual history and character -- went out to co-workers. She had strong suspicions, but no proof, about who was tormenting her. Police could do little to help because there's no law against Internet harassment unless physical threats are made.

Read on ...

Parental concerns

More proof that everything changes after you have kids:

The Whitehouse.com Web site, one of the best examples that the Internet isn't always what it seems, is getting out of the pornography business.

Its owner says he is worried what his preschool-age son might think.

Video fun for the office

If you're a fan of America's Funniest Home Videos, then you might want to check out this amusing use of your company's bandwidth that a colleague pointed out to me.

(He also recommended the videos titled Puppy Love! and Watch Yourself!)

Deep meaning in Dr. Seuss

Well, someone's been having fun in Amazon.com's user book reviews. Witness this subversive spin on Dr. Seuss' seminal "Green Eggs and Ham":

Green Eggs and Ham is more than a simple children's tale of the need to try new foods. It is a disturbing glimpse at the Cold War forces that made Eisenhower-era America the stifling society it was, a nightmare for the creative and intellectual classes. ...

Escaping phone-tree hell

University of Southern California professor Shrikanth Narayanan has created software that can tell when callers are frustrated enough by navigating an automated phone system that they need to be transferred to a human operator right away, Wired News reports:

The system works by analyzing not only what callers say, but also how they say it. Callers get transferred if they start to spit out expletives or if they simply sound angry.

Treating the symptoms and not the disease, I think is the expression ...

The bubble candidate

To the surprise of few, John Kerry has emerged as the winner in Washington state's Democratic caucus, billed in recent days as a must-win for Howard Dean.

On a related note, Clay Shirky posted the most thoughtful, expansive piece I've seen yet on why so many bought into the collective delusion that Dean was the front-runner mere weeks ago.

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost – the voters didn’t like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he’d win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.

Shirky pinpoints several important factors underlying Dean's illusory momentum, including (and I'm paraphrasing extensively):

• Most of the fervor, the passion, the excitement was about the campaign itself and its innovative tactics, rather than about the candidate or his ideas.
• The Internet has made so many things easier -- from getting hundreds of strangers to congregate, to raising millions of dollars -- that traditional yardsticks for gauging political support no longer apply.
• Fundamental misunderstandings of how both the real world and the online world work:

You can ring doorbells and carry signs and donate and stay up til 4 in the morning talking with fellow believers about the sorry state of politics today, and you still only get one vote. If you want more votes than that, you have to do the hardest, most humbling thing in the world. You have to change someone else’s mind.

Internet culture is talking culture, so we’re not used to this. In our current conversational spaces, whether mailing lists or bulletin boards or weblogs, the people who speak the loudest and the most frequently dominate the discussion.

Imagine if a mailing list had to issue a formal opinion on the issues discussed, and lurkers got a vote. The high-flow posters would complain that the lurkers votes would not reflect the actual discussion that took place, merely the aggregate opinions of the group, and yet that is how the primaries work. Talking loudest or most or even best means nothing.

Some interesting ideas there about the world-view of the Internet crowd.

Ironic negative ion news

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory think they may have identified the "smoking gun" that explains higher rates of illness among some people who live near high-voltage power lines -- and that could be bad news if you're a fan of negative-ion air fresheners.

Basically, exposure to certain electromagnetic fields can trigger a chemical reaction in rats' bodies that produces higher-than-normal levels of ozone, generally deemed a toxic pollutant. The same thing may happen in human bodies, too, the researchers believe.

Details in High-voltage lines, negative ions and rats.

Attachment issues

Derek K. Miller lists six very good reasons why you shouldn't send people really large e-mail attachments.

Free guilt trip here

Don't want to feel guilty about venting your frustrations on less-than-helpful customer service reps? Then avoid reading How Abusing Employees Creates a Domino Effect from the Wall Street Journal.

Those lightning bolts you send crashing down on customer-service people shoot beyond the workplace into workers' homes and families. Customer-service representatives have a far larger-than-average problem with "work-family spillover," or job stress poisoning home life ...

The new name game

Random name generators are now popular with spammers seeking ever newer ways to outfox anti-spam filters, the New York Times reports, creating some pretty odd-sounding "From:" lines.

The article also lists several online tools that can spew out random names for your amusement, including:

• August Kleimo's Random Name Generator (drawn from names in census records)
• Behind the Name (multiple languages and mythologies)
• Chris Pound's Name Generation Page (based on many, many influences)

One that isn't listed is Flywheel.org's generator, which also spews out amusingly ostentatious titles.

Silence isn't free

What's the price of silence? Just 99 cents on Apple's iTunes Music Store.

The store sells you any track from any album in its catalog for a flat rate of 99 cents -- even if the track in question is devoid of actual sound. News.com has some fun running with this tidbit.

The iTunes Music Store also lets you hear 30-second previews of every track it sells. And yes, there are tracks that run less than 30 seconds in their entirety.

The box watches back

The surprisingly far-reaching consequences of Janet Jackson's tete-a-teat moment now include a predictable backlash from TiVo owners. After learning that TiVo could tell it was the most rewound segment in the company's history, they're up in arms over the realization that their DVRs are watching them as well, News.com reports.

So what information does TiVo collect about its viewers? The company can indeed tell what has been watched on a particular TiVo box, down to the second, including the number of times a moment was rewound and played again, or a commercial was skipped.

The information is transmitted back to TiVo headquarters in Alviso, Calif., via the same phone line used to download show schedules to the DVR inside a home. The information itself is used to automatically suggest which shows a viewer would like based on previous selections.

But for all the granularity involved in tracking viewing habits, TiVo said there's nothing personal attached to the resulting data, as promised in its subscriber privacy policy.

On a related note, Aaron Schatz noted in his daily Lycos 50 report yesterday that Jackson's performance is the most-searched event in Internet history.

Librarians not yet obsolete

Bottom line: You still can't find all the answers through an online search engine. So, then where do you turn?

How about the reference librarian?

As the New York Times explains, they haven't been rendered obsolete by Google & Co., although it might look that way at first:

"When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google." ...

What is more, few people scrutinize the information they find on the Web. A study in 2002 by Google found that 85 percent of search-engine users examine only the first page of results. On the other hand, librarians say they often use Google's advanced search features, asking it, for example, to search only pages that have been updated in the last three months, or just nonprofit or educational sites, which they find are sometimes more reliable than commercial sites.

Another thing that librarians do is vet the information they pass along for accuracy and currency, something that even Google's vaunted PageRank algorithm can only approximate.

"People forget that there's no filter on the Web," said Nina Fried, the head of general reference at the Cleveland Public Library. "Everything you see on the library shelf has gone through a tremendous filtering process. Publishers don't just publish anything. Libraries don't carry just any old book."

... Librarians fear that people are too trusting of the Web, particularly for health and corporate information, areas in which some libraries say they have been receiving fewer inquiries in recent years. In both fields, the accuracy of the information often depends on its source. In New York and at many other libraries, cardholders can gain access to subscriber-only databases - including popular ones like Medline Plus for medical information and Gale for business resources - from a remote location.

Why women miss out

Why Women Professionals Miss Great Opportunities is an interesting Wall Street Journal story positing that one reason the fabled glass ceiling endures is because women are knocking at it too softly:

[T]hree decades after they entered the business world in droves, women still aren't climbing nearly as fast or as high as their male counterparts. ...

Researchers and female executives cite a variety of reasons for this meager showing: male executives' reluctance to mentor women, women's exclusion from informal networks, a hesitancy to consider women for the toughest posts, and women's own struggle to balance careers and families -- sometimes leading them to settle for less-demanding roles at work.

But a big factor holding women back is their good-girl, or good-student, behavior. "Women will work themselves to death in the belief that if they do more and more, that will get them ahead, when it isn't so," says Terri Dial, former vice chairman of Wells Fargo, and president and CEO of its Wells Fargo Bank. "They think, 'If I do the work, my bosses will see it and reward me.' " ...

That may never happen. ... "Good girls don't advertise, only prostitutes advertise," she says. "We feel dirty promoting ourselves." As a result, women are still getting stuck in the middle, shut out of "the club at the top."

Undeniably implausible

Columnist Bill Virgin has a very interesting take on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl brouhaha: He sees it as an object lesson in how "plausible deniability" often doesn't work:

"Wardrobe malfunction" is rapidly becoming the least credible defense in American current events since "I did not have sex with that woman" (Bill Clinton) or even going back to "I'm not a crook" (Richard Nixon, in dismissing the suggestion he was tied to a "third-rate burglary.")

Missing the call on Dean

Hard to believe, isn't it, that just three weeks ago Howard Dean was still seen as the front runner for the Democratic nomination? Now, he's fighting for his political life in Washington's upcoming Democratic caucuses.

What happened? Here are some of the more interesting answers I've run across:

• Los Angeles Times columnist David Shaw blames reporters who try to play astrologer: "many journalists now want to be the first to tell readers what will happen tomorrow. Or, rather, what they think will happen tomorrow."
• Writing in Salon, Thomas Schaller offers an intriguing analysis that Dean's primary-season collapse was largely self-inflicted. In essence, his campaign became trapped in a vicious feedback loop, preaching to the converted but failing to attract enough voters overall.
• Our sister publication, the San Francisco Chronicle, bypassed the critics and pundits and asked ordinary people on the street. Their answers may well be the most insightful of the bunch.

On a somewhat related note, San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor explains why the inevitable comparisons between cybercandidate Dean's fortunes and the dot-com boom-and-bust are off-base.

IKEA: The Game

Here's an amusing thought: Shopping at IKEA as a role-playing adventure game.

IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure ... In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized.

Big Tobacco, arts patron

I guess you could look at this as another example of artists' fabled counter-cultural bent. The Lucky Strike cigarette brand has become an important patron of the alternative arts scene in Seattle, reports P-I art critic Regina Hackett.

Although the notion that Big Tobacco is evil has permeated the mainstream zeitgeist, most of the artistic folks Regina interviews don't seem to have any qualms about taking the money:

Big Tobacco has also been great to Seattle's alternative press -- The Stranger and The Weekly -- as well as its alternative arts groups, such as the multidisciplinary contemporary arts center known as ConWorks, the Center on Contemporary Art, Bluebottle art boutique and the dance group 33 Fainting Spells.

Not only that, teams of attractive young Seattle smokers are on Lucky's payroll, hanging out in bars and passing the word about Lucky-sponsored arts events. The teams don't pass out cigarettes, partly because companies are barred from that in King County and partly because that would be too direct for this kind of campaign, known as guerrilla advertising.

Instead of battering the brain of the target audience, Lucky slides neatly into consciousness, trailing clouds of glory gathered from discreet arts funding. Credit spreads by word of mouth, making the product -- which was launched as a brand in 1871 -- appear modest and friendly.

On Justin and Janet

For once it wasn't a standout commercial, let alone the game, that kept people talking about the Super Bowl. No, it was the halftime show, specifically the moment when Justin Timberlake ripped away part of Janet Jackson's costume, exposing her breast to a nationwide TV audience.

Everyone from the NFL to the FCC to CBS is worked up over the incident -- which, according to the performers, was premeditated but didn't work out quite as planned.

Here's a quick look at some of the more interesting angles on this story:

• TiVo owners replayed that segment so many times that it set a new record, News.com reports.
• The Palm Beach Post's Rachel Sauer focuses on what Jackson was wearing after her costume was ripped away.
• This could spell the end of truly "live" telecasts. The New York Times reports that CBS will add a seven-second delay to its "live" telecast of the Grammy Awards this Sunday.
• For the historical record, the urban-legends fact-checkers at Snopes.com confirm that this incident did, in fact, happen. (When you think about it, people might not be sure a few years from now.) But, they question how unplanned or accidental it might have been.

Foreign policy foibles

Seattle Weekly's Geov Parrish interviews former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, no stranger to political scandal after someone leaked the news that his wife is a CIA agent, following Wilson's own report debunking claims that pre-war Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa.

The ex-diplomat speaks candidly, broadly and quite critically about the Bush administration's foreign policy. He touches on going AWOL from the Mideast peace process, shadow governments and weapons of mass destruction, and gives a sobering appraisal of the nation's chances for fostering democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The best line I’ve ever heard about democracy is that it’s a bit like an English lawn. You have to seed it, you have to