Costume ideas

Need a last-minute Halloween costume? The P-I's Susan Phinney offers some cheap, quick ideas.

Of, if you prefer twisted but topical, check out The Stranger's 2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes.

Relating to bloggers

"The new world isn't about managing bloggers. It's about working with them, having a conversation with them," Dan Gillmor wrote about a public-relations firm's pitch to do just the opposite.

That post sparked an interesting discussion among his readers about how ethics, responsibility and trust relate to blogging.

On October surprises

With a little more than one day left in the month, it's getting pretty late for anyone to pull off an October surprise that could swing the election. What exactly is an October surprise? Slate's Andy Bowers explains all (the term has been around longer than you might think).

In another Slate piece, chief political correspondent William Saletan offers an interesting analysis on how Osama bin Laden's latest message -- while not exactly the October surprise that had long been rumored -- might well ensure President Bush's re-election: "Bin Laden would like to see Bush thrown out of office. ... More likely, by showing up four days before our election, he'll scare Americans into re-electing Bush."

The White State

What color did Crayola pick to represent the Evergreen State in its new Crayola State Crayon theme pack?

Would you believe ... white? Or "Space Needle," as it's called in this case.

As our features department's writeup notes, "Our neighbors got such cool colors as Tater Tan (Idaho), Big Sky (Montana) and Sacra-minto (California)." All the colors were nominated by "crayon fans."

Besides a differently colored crayon for each of the 50 states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, the collection also contains 12 patriotic-themed colors chosen by Crayola employees. My favorite is Amber Waves of Grain, formerly known as Canary.

Tech-friendly in Congress

News.com has released a scorecard ranking the "tech-friendliness" of members of Congress based on how they voted on 10 key technology-related bills dating back to 1995. (The lists differ between the Senate and the House.)

Not surprisingly, Republicans scored much higher than Democrats. GOP Senators scored an average of 61 percent, 15 points higher than Democrats. House Republicans, meanwhile, averaged 68 percent compared with 52 percent for Democrats.

From our neck of the woods, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, a former RealNetworks executive, scored 80 percent on the five votes taken while she was in office. That puts her in a four-way tie for second place in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Sen. Patty Murray, also a Democrat, scored 70 percent. Her GOP opponent for re-election, Rep. George Nethercutt, scored 64 percent. By News.com's assessment, that makes him less tech-friendly than Reps. Adam Smith (D., 78 percent), Norm Dicks (D., 73 percent), Jennifer Dunn (R., 68 percent) and Doc Hastings (R., 67 percent) -- but more tech-friendly than Rick Larsen (D., 63 percent), Brian Baird (D., 55 percent), Jay Inslee (D., 55 percent) and Jim McDermott (D., 50 percent)

(See the full results for the House and Senate for more detail.)

In an interesting reflection of its techie audience, nearly half of the main analysis is dedicated to a critical examination of News.com's methodology.

Your brain on politics

Do the brains of Republicans and Democrats work differently?

Researchers at UCLA are trying to find out, employing functional magnetic resonance imaging to literally peer inside voters' heads to see how they respond to candidates, the Associated Press reports.

In a recent experiment, AP says, Drs. Joshua Freedman and Marco Iacoboni scanned the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats while they viewed images of President Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader:

When viewing their favorite candidate, all showed increased activity in the region implicated in empathy. And when viewing the opposition, all had increased blood flow in the region where humans consciously assert control over emotions - suggesting the volunteers were actively attempting to dislike the opposition.

Nonetheless, some differences appeared between the brain activity of Democrats and Republicans. Take empathy: One Democrat's brain lit up at an image of Kerry "with a profound sense of connection, like a beautiful sunset," Freedman said. Brain activity in a Republican shown an image of Bush was "more interpersonal, such as if you smiled at someone and they smiled back."

And when voters were shown a Bush ad that included images of the Sept. 11 attacks, the amygdala region of the brain - which lights up for most of us when we see snakes - illuminated more for Democrats than Republicans. The researchers' conclusion: At a subconscious level, Republicans were apparently not as bothered by what Democrats found alarming.

Freedman and Iacoboni's findings could be a boon to political consultants. They even predict that MRI might soon become a common research tool.

That prospect alarms some. Gary Ruskin, executive director of marketing watchdog group Commercial Alert, tells the AP: "This is a story of the corruption of medical research. It's a technology that should be used to ease human suffering, not make political propaganda more effective."

For more background on this research, check out this New York Times story from earlier this year.

Hollywood's producer-itis

Ever wonder what all those people credited as "producers" on recent movies actually do?

The Wall Street Journal explains:

In Hollywood, it doesn't take much to get a producer credit. Stars regularly push to have their managers or even relatives listed as producers on their films. Studios and networks often use producer credits as bargaining chips; an actor may get one for agreeing to a lower fee, a financier may get one for bankrolling a film.

The Producers Guild of America is fed up with what a spokesman calls "the Milli Vanilli syndrome of producer credits," and is now waging a campaign to rein in rampant producer-itis with more precise guidelines defining who qualifies.

Calling all bands

SeattlePI.com is relaunching its online directory of local bands. If you know someone who'd like to -- or should -- be listed, send them to this URL.

PowerPoint with iPod

The astonishing versatility of Apple's iPod never ceases to amaze me. Now, Glenn Fleishman points out an inventive use of the latest model, the iPod Photo:

I'm a business geek, I guess, in that my first reaction to the iPod Photo wasn't, "Cool, I can transport photographs!" Rather, "Hey, I can do PowerPoint/Keynote presentations without a laptop."

You won't be able to do fancy transitions--at least you won't be able to program them individually--in an iPod Photo slide show, but you can use PowerPoint or Keynote to export individual slides at high-resolution, load them up, and look like a very modern person indeed with your slick presentation tool.

The new morning ritual

Today's Rhymes With Orange strip is a sign of the times:

(Via my boss.)

Online and informed

The latest Pew Internet & American Life Project survey (PDF) finds that wired voters are going online to read up on opposing points of view:

At a time when political deliberation seems extremely partisan and when people may be tempted to ignore arguments at odds with their views, internet users are not insulating themselves in information echo chambers. Instead, they are exposed to more political arguments than non-users ... even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions.

The report's abstract notes that this is important because "prominent commentators" had voiced concern that the Internet would be "harmful to democratic deliberation" by making it easier for people to tune out messages they didn't want to hear.

Find that polling place

Planning to vote but not sure where to go? MyPollingPlace.com can pinpoint your correct polling place anywhere in the country, based on your street address and ZIP code. You can even sign up to get an Election Day reminder via e-mail or text message.

(Via BeSpacific.)

Boombox revival

Boomboxes are back, according to Wired News.

But, they're not just for blaring music very loudly anymore:

Mark Argo and Ahmi Wolf, students in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, have removed the tuner and tape deck of a large 1980s ghetto blaster and filled it with a computer and Wi-Fi access point to make their Bass-Station. People can access shared media stored in the Bass-Station and manipulate playlists of music that gets amplified through the box's original speakers.

On the West Coast, sound artists such as five-piece group Rajar and collaborators Guillermo Galindo and Chris Brown use boomboxes along with other radios as part of their musical arsenal. Both groups performed at a recent event at Southern Exposure, a San Francisco artists' organization and gallery.

Rajar uses sounds captured from radio -- whether radio stations or the sounds of other transmissions such as faxes -- as its raw sonic material. At Southern Exposure, the group also picked up its own sound as it was being broadcast by the low-power FM transmitter managed by a community radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, and fed the noise back into its mix.

Boomboxes are also used to form ad hoc broadcast networks and mobile amplifier arrays for street protests, playing content from an iPod with a short-range FM transmitter.

What we search for

Sex just isn't the draw it used to be online, according to a new book tracking changes in how people search the Internet.

Searches for sex and pornography constituted 1 out of every 5 search-engine queries back in 1997, co-author and University of Pittsburgh professor Amanda Spink tells the Associated Press. Now it's more like 1 out of every 20. By contrast, searches for e-business and commerce have jumped 86 percent during the same period.

One depressing finding, the AP notes, is that people haven't gotten much better at using search engines over the years. Most queries contain just two words, which in many cases will return far too many irrelevant matches.

Bush site goes U.S.-only

BBC News reports that GeorgeWBush.com, the official Web site of the president's re-election campaign, is blocking visitors from outside the United States: "The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp."

No official explanation has been offered.

On Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin is logging some interesting reader feedback on which countries are excluded, theories on how it's done, and various workarounds and mirror sites.

The great undecideds

Elections officials say we may see a record number of new registered voters this year.

The New York Times raises an interesting question, though: Will they actually vote? "Historically, newly registered voters - because they are younger, more independent or less politically engaged - have voted at lower rates than the rest of the electorate, typically under 50 percent, experts say."

Search engine as confidant

Online search engines are the first resort of men seeking advice, according to a new survey by MSN Search. Nearly half of men will look online before consulting human beings, such as family and significant others, VNUNet reports:

MSN Search marketing manager Clare Bolton said: "Search services have become so central to our lives that in many cases they're being treated like trusted friends.

"Men in particular seem to be turning to them like a mate in the pub to give advice, provide entertainment and even help out in rating potential girlfriends."

About 8 percent of men also admitted to looking up ex-partners, compared to just 4 percent of women.

VNUNet further notes: "Male search vanity apparently knows no bounds. Almost a third of men admit to searching for themselves online and awarding themselves an average 80 per cent satisfaction rating for their general searching abilities. By contrast, just over one in five women have searched for their own name."

That finding prompted today's daily poll on SeattlePI.com's home page: Have you ever Googled yourself? (Votes accepted through midnight, Pacific time.)

Other ways to vote

You probably won't be surprised to learn that experts deem the uniquely American electoral college one of the worst possible ways to hold an election. What are the alternatives? Wired outlines five other voting systems currently in use -- and notes that they all have shortcomings, too:

In a democracy, every vote is supposed to count. But the outcome of an election really depends on how you do the math. Different balloting systems - from cumulative voting to instant runoffs - can lead to different results. Some systems encourage citizens to vote tactically, others can be gamed. All can lead to results that don't reflect voters' intentions ...

Dirty driving

Great. We live in a society where they have to pass vehicular obscenity laws to protect unsuspecting passersby from drive-by porn.

The care and feeding of memes

In Buzzing the Web on a Meme Machine, New York Times critic Sarah Boxer examines how memes propagate (or don't) on the Web, which she calls "the perfect Petri dish for memes."

Can a wanna-be meme become a real meme? People on the Web are doggedly pursuing this very question right now. ...

Flu shot frenzy

When flu-shot tourism to Canada takes off, you know something's up. But is the concern about scarce flu shots overblown?

For many people, the answer is "probably," according to sanity checks that have been coming out from various news organizations the past couple of days.

"I call it the Beanie Baby effect," Gregory A. Poland, director of vaccine research at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, tells The Wall Street Journal's Tara Parker-Pope. "It's a scarcity mentality. People perceive that it's not available, and now they want it."

Cutting through the hype, Parker-Pope notes:

The truth is that the push over the years for flu shots has never been about a personal risk for healthy individuals. In a given year, about 80 percent of people who don't get flu shots never get the flu anyway. Among healthy people who are exposed to flu, many will have only mild symptoms.

Instead, the call for healthy people to get the shots has much more to do with broad public-health concerns -- the greater the number of people who get shots, the less likely they are to spread flu to someone particularly vulnerable. In addition, employers have pushed flu shots among healthy workers because they want as few people as possible to miss work. Worker absence due to flu costs employers as much as $12 billion a year in lost wages and other costs.

A story from the Associated Press sounds a similar note, pointing out that the vaccine may only work 52 percent of the time anyway.

No more checks in mail

In his column today, Paperless checking comes one step closer, Bill Virgin offers an insightful illustration of how technology has affected the way different generations deal with personal finances:

Do you get your checks back?

If you are of a certain age, your response is more likely to be: "You bet I do. Having the checks is how I reconcile my statement and my checkbook every month, and in the event of a dispute, having the original check is crucial in proving that I made a payment and the check cleared."

Should your birthdays number a few less than those of the previous group, your response would be more along the lines of: "Oh, I used to, but it wasn't worth the bother and expense; I never used them, the information I need is on the statement and if I need a copy I can always order one."

Still younger, and the response would sound like: "You can get your checks back?"

And the youngest generational cohort, maybe one that hasn't reached banking age yet, might answer: "What's a check?"

A recent phone survey the American Bankers Association backs up that example, Bill notes. Among customers 55 and older, 50 percent get their original checks back while only 23 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds do.

The end of memory

Why bother to remember anything when you can just Google it?

That's my nomination for Meme of the Week. It has popped up in some disparate places over the past several days, including a software review, a newspaper column weighing in on the election conspiracy du jour and stories about a best-selling humor book:

• Dan Gillmor argued in his San Jose Mercury News column that the whole question of whether President Bush was wired during the debates is misplaced:

  Voters would have been better off if the candidates had all kinds of technology at their disposal, so they could double-check their own facts and precisely rebut opponents' misstatements.

  In the Information Age, the ability to find relevant information quickly and use it intuitively will be at least as important as the ability to memorize numbers or slogans. This will be as true for everyday people as presidents and their staffs, and powerful tools will soon be at our beck and call.

• On Salon.com, Andrew Leonard lauds Google Desktop Search because it takes him "a quantum leap closer" to the ideal of never having to worrying about organizing the files on his hard disk or keeping track of the information stored therein:

  One hour with Google Desktop Search and I realized that I'll never worry about where to put something again. Not only do I no longer have to remember how to spell, or when something happened, or who is running for president, I now no longer have to remember where anything is! ... The clear lesson here is that we work best with computers when we have to think the least.

• To write his new book, "The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World," A.J. Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover. Most interviews of Jacobs and reviews of his book that I've read spotlight the spectacular pointlessness of his undertaking (of which the author himself seems well aware). A typical example: The Oregonion noted that "what Jacobs does ... is illustrate the gulf between information and wisdom."

I suspect that many people would love it if they no longer had to remember even the important facts, numbers and dates in their lives. As search technology continues to improve, that no longer seems like an outlandish idea. But it is an idea with wide-ranging implications.

In a post-memory world, the ability to retain and retrieve information -- a common standard (however flawed) for gauging intelligence -- would be far less important a life skill than being able to describe the information you seek so your search engine could find it for you. Even the ability to navigate abstract information spaces, a key skill during the Internet's early days, would fall by the wayside if the search engines get good enough.

It would also mean the end of the trivia-based TV game show as we know it; "Jeopardy" might well become as irrelevant as competitive cotton spinning. More profoundly, using software as a substitute for human memory leads us toward a symbiotic relationship with technology that borders on scary dependence. Composing good search-engine queries becomes a critical skill for daily living. How long, I wonder, before elementary schools start teaching kids how to formulate good search-engine queries in elementary school?

The river tells all

Can the color of a running river predict when a volcano will erupt? People living along the Kalama River in Southwest Washington, near Mount St. Helens, maintain the answer is yes:

A good week before seismograph needles in labs across the Northwest started jumping, and several days more before geologists, volcanologists and -ologists of just about every other stripe warned of impending eruption ... the good folks who live along the forested banks of this southwest Washington stream already knew.

It all began early on a cloudless day in mid-September, locals say, with the Kalama's waters running low and as clear as gin.

The -ologist people, of course, say that their theory is all wet.

Bumper sticker bonanza

Recently, the P-I asked readers to submit their own designs for political bumper stickers that they'd like to see during this election season. We received hundreds. Today, we published the winners of our first-ever bumper sticker contest -- and also listed several dozen additional slogans that caught the judges' attention for one reason or another.

As our panel of judges noted:

It was incredibly tough to judge so much creativity and, of course, any judging process is subjective. About 10 staffers voted for their favorites. The ones that we liked the most tended to make us laugh out loud, or blended wit with art.

Traffic can kill you

German researchers have discovered that people caught in traffic are three times more likely to have a heart attack with an hour than those who weren't, BBC News reports:

Being stuck in a traffic jam seemed to increase risk no matter what form of transport the patient was using.

Heart attacks were 2.6 times more common for people stuck in cars, 3.1 times higher for people taking public transportation, and 3.9 times greater for cyclists.

However, because people on public transport seemed to be at risk, the researchers believe that stress is unlikely to be the only factor.

The researchers weren't able to determine precisely what risk factors are to blame.

Their full report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Techno-lust at work

The workplace can be a great enabler for techno-lust, notes the Wall Street Journal's Jared Sandberg:

Such is the endless quest that results from gadget envy, an affliction that appears to mainly affect men. Their insatiable need for the latest techno-doodad is compounded at the office, where other sufferers of male-pattern gearness have sparked an arms race. In an effort to win this contest -- and get the company to subsidize them -- gearniks employ wit, diplomacy and a sudden vocal dedication to "productivity" and "profits." Armed with a potential solution (wireless, color screen), they will spare no effort to find a problem.

Most popular last week

What stories caught our readers' interest for Oct. 19-24, 2004? Here's the rundown:

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Dreaded foot injury has Sonics' Lewis in limbo
2. Stranger takes over Georgia woman's house
3. Red Sox victory helps ease pain of 2003
4. Brunett's remarks on gays, sex abuse by clergy stir anger
5. Box is secure, but mail isn't coming
6. Denial aside, Bush will restart draft
7. Mariners hire Hargrove as manager
8. Busy winter just starting for M's
9. Nurse pleads guilty to raping disabled girl
10. Seahawks acquiring Rice

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. Jon Stewart's 'Crossfire' attack satisfying, real
2. Stranger takes over Georgia woman's house
3. Puyallup schools ban Halloween festivities
4. Selective Service updating plans to draft health care workers
5. Filmmaker Moore slams Bush as get-out-vote tour rolls into Seattle
6. Coffee and a custom CD to go at Starbucks
7. Remaking South Lake Union: Seattle is on fast track to build biotech hub
8. Denial aside, Bush will restart draft
9. Microsoft links PC to phone, to create communication hub
10. Tiny TV-B-Gone turns off most any boob tube

Gmail does Atom

Recently and quietly, Google added Atom feeds to its Gmail service. Now you can check for new e-mail without leaving the comfy confines of your favorite news aggregator (provided that it supports HTTPS and HTTP authentication since you still need to log in).

Some Gmail users actually see an "Atom" button in their left-hand navigation bar. If you don't, you can subscribe using the URL https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.

The Atom feed includes the 20 most recent messages in your inbox and each entry displays the first 90 or so characters of the message body. I suspect this is much more useful if all the messages don't come from Poynter's online-news listserv and begin with the 48-character sentence "This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list."

Even so, I can see enormous potential in converging e-mail, the Internet's original killer app, with feeds, which are so versatile that they could become the simple, all-purpose information "thin client" interface that the Web sorely needs.

Think of all the other useful information that can already be conveyed via RSS or Atom: weather forecasts, traffic updates, coupon specials, Netflix account info, the most popular searches on Yahoo! ...

(Via Micro Persuasion.)

The privacy dilemma

They surf websites without registering. They set up filters to defend their e-mail accounts from spam. Some 64 million households have signed up for the "do not call" registry to keep their home phones from jingling incessantly.

But there's a second axiom of the age: People want to be available, sometimes 'round-the-clock, for certain family members, friends, or even business offers. As companies exploit that desire, individuals will find it hard to keep a low electronic profile, experts say.

And nowhere is the trade-off between privacy and convenience more evident, the Christian Science Monitor says, than in the debate over creating a national directory of cell phone numbers.

Final frontier, Murphy-style

The long struggle between human incompetence and ingenuity is the focus of an interesting piece by NBC News space analyst James Oberg that traces the unfortunate partnership between Murphy's Law and space exploration. (Think Genesis.)

I learned quite a few things from this piece, including an account of the origin of Murphy's Law that's rather different than what I'd read before (no surprise but Murphy didn't really say it). Oberg also reveals that the popular account of the Mars Climate Orbiter's doom in 1999 -- a bit of confusion between feet and meters in computing altitude -- was largely a smokescreen for more technical, and more deeply rooted, problems.

Red Sox win -> Bush loss?

In a really strained attempt to apply a baseball metaphor to politics, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter speculates on what the Boston Red Sox's ALCS victory portends for the 2004 presidential race. His most coherent argument is this:

The Red Sox victory makes the Bush-is-inevitable line harder to pursue. A last-minute come-from-behind win by Kerry suddenly seems more plausible, which in turn will rally Democrats to work harder on Election Day. If Kerry goes in to the final weekend down by five points, well, the Red Sox won, for the first time ever, when they were down by three games.

Bush’s basic argument is that electing Kerry would upset the natural order of things, where grownups like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld—no matter how incompetent at the plate—keep us safe at home. Now the natural order of baseball—where the Yankees beat the Red Sox every year—has been upended, making it suddenly more plausible to throw out the incumbent in Washington, too. In the showdown series, change beat the status quo.

Spray-on spacesuits?

MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle offers a glimpse inside the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, the little-known agency charged with exploring crazy ideas that might bolster space exploration:

You don't hear about the 6-year-old Atlanta-based institute as much as you do about space shuttles or Mars probes. But across the country, NIAC's research fellows are churning away on crazy ideas that could become positively ho-hum in decades to come.

This week, NIAC's leaders and research fellows met in Seattle to review some of those crazy ideas: skin-tight spray-on spacesuits for a trip to Mars ... static-electricity fields that would protect future lunar bases from space radiation ... even a lunar lab that could develop microbes for terraforming Mars.

RFID in passports

Wired News reports that new U.S. passports will start carrying embedded RFID chips that will broadcast the holder's personal information at border crossings and other security checkpoints.

The story uses an interesting metaphor to explain how RFID works:

The RFID passport works like a high-tech version of the children's game "Marco Polo." A reader speaks out the equivalent of "Marco" on a designated frequency. The chip then channels that radio energy and echoes back with an answer.

But instead of simply saying "Polo," the 64 Kb chip will say the passport holder's name, address, date and place of birth, and send along a digital photograph.

None of that data will be encrypted because of "the risks involved in sharing the method of decryption with other countries." A lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells Wired News that encryption might not boost security much anyway since the readers would be so commonplace.

As expected, pro-privacy forces are already painting horror stories about potential abuses of chipped passports.

No profit on pennies

Can you really make a profit selling something for 1 cent on eBay?

The New York Times' Lisa Guernsey talks to the experts ... and confirms that the answer is no:

To list the item on eBay costs 30 cents. To attach the "Buy It Now" label costs another nickel. Putting aside the cost of using the PayPal service to collect payment and less tangible costs like time and labor to ship the goods, the seller is 34 cents in the hole even assuming the item sells. ...

But deep in the nooks and crannies of the infinitely variable and sometimes bewildering world of eBay, there exist sellers who think that the seemingly nonsensical makes sense. Something about the peculiarities of the auction site, with its accommodation of overstocks, liquidators, bulk buyers and makeshift basement storage, leads sellers to resort to penny sales. What gives?

The answers are various: some penny sellers are eager to dump unwanted inventory while others want to entice new customers or test the waters for new products and services. Still others start auction bidding, even for high-ticket items, at 1 cent to let the marketplace set the final price.

Rankings score online

The latest insight (full report PDF) about online users from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: 33 million U.S. Internet users -- 26 percent of the total -- have "reviewed or rated someone or something as part of an online rating system," whether it's at Amazon, eBay or AmIHot.com.

Not surprisingly, participation in reputation systems is higher among Gen-Yers (30 percent) than Gen-Xers (28 percent) or boomers (23 percent). And more men (29 percent) than women (22 percent) leave ratings.

A drive away from oil

The Christian Science Monitor examines new plans and new technologies that might just help move the United States further down the road toward energy independence:

Achieving energy independence really means retooling the car. Coal, natural gas, and other domestic fuels can heat and power US homes and factories. But some 70 percent of oil is used in transportation, four-fifths of that by cars and trucks. Replacing them with alternative vehicles will be tough. Hydrogen cars are still at the prototype stage. Hybrids ease but don't solve the problem. Other alternatives - such as driving less - dredge up uncomfortable memories of the 1970s.

Even today, the three-decades-old injunctions to drive 55 miles per hour and buy "unsafe, sluggish, squinchy" little cars - as one new report says - still haunt consumers as a step backward for the American dream.

But a number of hard-edged new proposals suggest something different: heavy federal investment in new technologies.

Among the possibilities: building tomorrow's cars out of lighter-weight carbon fiber: "Nobody has to give up their SUV, according to this plan. Just build it with carbon fiber instead."

Martha's time in tedium

What will life behind bars be like for Martha Stewart? Her people are reportedly asking millions of dollars from prospective publishers for a book that will reveal all, but Wired News columnist Adam L. Penenberg tries to beat her to the punch. He consults reformed hacker Kevin Mitnick, who spent five years in federal prisons like Camp Cupcake, where Martha's staying.

Mitnick outlines a typical, mind-numbing daily routine for Penenberg, drawing from his own incarceration experience. "There is nothing she could write about," he declared.

Maybe not, but she is taking advantage of her "time off" to improve herself, according to her lawyer. Walter Dellinger said on NBC's "Today" that Martha is learning "innovative ways to do microwave cooking."

That's right: "Martha Stewart's Prison Cookbook" might turn out to be more than just a silly joke ...

Form field foils fraud fighters

MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan spotlights an ingenious hack that scam artists are using to work around online merchants' address verification systems for credit-card orders:

It's a harmless-looking part of every a Web site retailer's checkout page.  The form filled out by customers ordering products almost always has a second line — sometimes it’s used for apartment numbers or other information; it's usually left blank.  But that innocuous-looking second line could become a big headache for Internet merchants soon, says one fraud expert.  Credit card criminals have figured out a simple way to use that second line to foil the most basic anti-fraud measures online merchants use. 

Already, five major Web merchants — with sales of $75 million or more each year — have been hit by the hack, says Julie Ferguson, co-chair of the Merchant Risk Council.

ADHD a vision problem?

Do many children diagnosed with ADHD and other learning disabilities really suffer from misdiagnosed vision problems? Advocates of a controversial new treatment approach called vision therapy say that's the case -- and they can help:

[Dr. Sharon Berger,] one of 1,600 members nationwide of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development, said that thousands of children who are tagged with the "learning disability" label actually have correctable problems involving eye muscles or a disconnect between what the eyes see and what registers on the brain.

The college contends that up to one in four kids starting school has vision problems that affect his or her performance in the classroom. And most of them have 20-20 vision.

What that means is they often can read the eye charts in their pediatricians' offices, but those lines of letters don't reveal flaws with eye or hand-eye coordination, lazy eye or other problems such as "eye teaming," which involves depth perception.

Such conditions often cause teachers or parents to think children have learning disabilities. ...

But vision therapists are having a hard time getting the word out, in part because the American Academy of Ophthalmology dismisses the techniques in an official policy statement. Optometrists have their own studies, however, that show that vision therapy works.

Iraq by the numbers

Today's P-I includes a full-page, illustrated status report, "Iraq: The Cost of War" (available online as a poster-size PDF), that compiles and graphs many key statistics showing where the billions of dollars being spent to rebuild the country are going.

The numbers charted include coalition troop contributions by nation, coalition deaths by month, the rise in insurgent attacks over time, electricity and oil output, spending of reconstruction funds, how close Iraqi security forces are to meeting recruitment goals, and much more.

They also include background details such as the contents of a typical household's monthly food ration.

Error, error everywhere

Regret The Error is a new blog dedicated to tracking newspaper corrections, with sarcastic commentary. It's more entertaining than you might expect.

(Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits.)

Reporting by proxy

"Journalism by Remote Control" is a fascinating Slate article looking at how foreign media in Iraq have come to depend on local helpers to be their eyes and ears in covering a country where it's now too dangerous for them to travel:

What's gained with the use of Iraqi stringers and staffers, obviously, is coverage. In these dangerous times, Iraqis can blend into the scene in a way Western reporter can't. They can talk to people without arousing suspicion. They understand the important differences between tribes. They can phone in breaking news. They can talk to women without accidentally violating local taboos. They're not as ripe a target for kidnappers. ...

What is lost, says [Cox Newspapers Baghdad correspondent Larry Kaplow], is "the feel" he and other reporters had for the country and its people when they did their own reporting alongside their translators.

"We now speak with a little less authority," says Kaplow. "We work off of fewer interviews."

"We're deprived of detail, intimacy. Deprived of a degree of reporting depth and on-the-ground observation seen through the eyes of a foreign correspondent," [Washington Post foreign correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran] says.

More about the Bulge

The mysterious Bush Bulge is proving to be one of those stories that just won't die. Today, Slate chimes in with a concise yet "comprehensive guide to the best theories, photos, video clips, denials, and testimony—expert and otherwise—available on the Web." As a bonus, writer Louisa Herron Thomas recaps the seldom-told tale of how the bulge first came to light.

Fictional but rich

They don't exist but, together, they still grossed more than $25 billion last year. They're the top-earning fictional characters, according to Forbes:

1. Mickey Mouse & friends
2. Winnie the Pooh & friends
3. Frodo Baggins
4. Harry Potter
5. Nemo, from "Finding Nemo"
6. Yu-gi-oh
7. Spongebob Squarepants
8. Spider-Man
9. Wolverine
10. Pokémon

Answer's not in the mail

Concerned about mail and identity theft, Sal Dena and his neighbors in Burien installed new, more secure mailboxes after obtaining permission and directions from the U.S. Postal Service. Now, postal workers refuse to deliver their mail to those boxes -- and no one seems to be able to tell them why.

Not surprisingly, this is our most popular news story so far today.

TV-B-Gone's many uses

TV-B-Gone is much more than a useful keychain widget that shuts off just about every TV in its vicinity. It's also a statement about what's wrong with modern society, a nifty prankster's tool and a portable sociology experiment, Wired News notes:

For [creator Mitch] Altman, founder of Silicon Valley data-storage maker 3ware, the TV-B-Gone is all about freeing people from the attention-sapping hold of omnipresent television programming. The device is also providing hours of entertainment for its inventor.

At a Laundromat and cafe down the street, a lone man sorted clothes in the glow of larger-than-life bikini babes on a 60-inch Sony HDTV. A punch of the button and the screen instantly went dark. He went on folding his T-shirts, seemingly unaware of the change.

"It's always like that," Altman said. "It's so much part of the environment in the U.S. that people don't even notice when it disappears."

It is different in Hong Kong, Altman said. There, when he clicked off store TVs, everyone looked around to see who did it.

At Best Buy, neither customers nor staff responded as one set after another turned off -- Sony TVs first, then a JVC and an Apex, all from a single click.

Not surprisingly, demand for the $14.99 device has been overwhelming, the AP reports.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo posted a scathing review of Altman.

Time ripe for Java?

Judging from the intense skepticism that greeted a Maui company's claims that it had created a speedy MacOS emulator for PCs, a lot of people believe that deftly breaking down the walls between operating systems is akin to building a perpetual motion machine.

It wasn't always that way. Less than a decade ago, Java promised to finally give the world "write once, run anywhere" code. That promise was thwarted, on the desktop at least, by a monopoly whose name rhymes with Cy Crow Coughed. But Slate's Paul Boutin posits that the promise might yet become reality in the burgeoning world of portable data devices:

More than 350 million cell phones already have Java built in, allowing software makers to sell the same downloadable games, instant messaging clients, and other software to any brand of phone. By contrast, there are only about 1 percent as many Windows-powered phones, and the pint-sized Windows CE operating system they run is completely different from the bulky Windows XP on your desktop. Programs built for one don't work on the other.

I can't imagine that a generation from now, people will still tolerate incompatible breeds of digital devices, any more than we'd accept a Sprint phone that couldn't take calls from an AT&T phone. Java, or another run-anywhere programming language (even Microsoft has one, C#), will most likely become the lingua franca of the world's gadgets. Once that happens, PCs will have to follow. My hope is that, in another decade, when I find a cool new piece of software, I'll be able to run it anywhere I want.

Podcasting overview

The Los Angeles Times looks at podcasting, which seems to be officially shaping up as a Next Big Thing for do-it-yourself techies:

They follow in the footsteps of blogs, from which podcasts were born. In the blogging world, success isn't measured in market share and ad dollars. It's measured in the personal satisfaction of creative expression and the organic growth of a relatively small audience via word of mouth.

iPod killer? Not!

Om Malik explains -- and pretty succinctly, too -- why souped-up cell phones won't kill off the iPod:

I just don't buy "phone as an IPod Killer" argument. Sure on some occasions, I use Treo 600, or a borrowed Pocket PC phone as a Mp3 player, but the sound quality doesn't match; the user interface sucks and oh did I mention, the sound quality sucks. IPod is a music player and music player only. Phone makers are turning these handsets into swiss army knives, but are not focusing on making them easy to use, or improve the interfaces. Sure you can turn it into a PDA and an MP3 player, but then a $50,000 GMS truck with DVD player and all the other crap is still a truck.

So much for the idea of convergence gadgets ...

'Help!' cried the TV

There's an amusing story moving over the Associated Press wire this morning about a Corvallis, Ore., man whose new TV set surprised everyone by emitting an international distress signal that was picked up by satellite, sending emergency responders rushing to his home.

The original account in the Corvallis Gazette-Times, however, is a much more entertaining read:

The flat-screen Toshiba came with its own set of stereo speakers, a 181-channel tuner, built-in VCR, DVD and CD players, a V-chip for parental control over content and, of course, a remote control.

[Chris] Van Rossman, unfortunately, does not have cable and can only get four channels in his apartment. He mostly watches Oregon Public Broadcasting, which comes in clearest, and he's acquired a taste for OPB children's programming.

Maybe the television suffered an identity crisis. Maybe it aspired to higher things.

Whatever the reason, van Rossman's TV set sent out a cry for help. It began emitting the international distress signal on the night of Oct. 2....

On Google Desktop Search

The beta's been out less than a week, but Google Desktop Search has already sparked a boatload of buzz, a lot of praise and just as much criticism:

• Todd Bishop rounds up the wide-ranging reaction from Microsoft insiders on his blog -- a post that's encouraging readers to chime in with their thoughts.
• A common thread that emerges is Google Desktop Search's usability, and the accuracy of its search results. Elsewhere, Don Park laments the lack of Google's storied PageRank algorithm, which taps into the collective wisdom (or favoritism) of the Web to help gauge a document's relevancy to a given search.

  In my admittedly limited tests, I've also noticed that Desktop Search isn't that great at fingering the most relevant matches, especially in Outlook e-mail. Todd had a similar observation: "While there are often fewer results -- say, a dozen, compared to hundreds with Web search -- it seems to take just a little longer to find what you want in the search results because they don't seem to be prioritized. How much that matters appears open to debate."

  Greg Linden argues, on the other hand, that the lack of PageRank is not a great loss.




• As SearchEngineWatch's Danny Sullivan wrote last week, "Search tools ... will make it much easier to find and locate information on a particular computer. That shouldn't be a privacy issue, as long as ordinary security procedures are followed. Unfortunately, they often aren't." Fortunately, he offers some tips on what to do.

  The privacy and security risks are amplified, however, if Google Desktop Search is installed on a public computer, or a private one where several people use a shared logon, the Associated Press reports.

• Meanwhile, Mitch Radcliffe takes issue with how marketing is integrated with Desktop Search: "If Google can find out that you are searching for particular terms on your hard drive it gives the company another way to see inside your interests in order to target ads based on your most pressing needs. It's a profound vision, for sure, but one that offers such deep insight into our personal preferences that we should be discussing more completely what it means to our privacy. Google's constant claim that it is 'not evil' seems designed to prevent people from considering the implications of the company's access to personal information. But unbridled power has a vast potential to corrupt."
• Google's decision to release Desktop Search exclusively for Windows is, not suprisingly, prompting some lament from users of other platforms. Glenn Fleishman, for one, urges fellow Mac users to ask for a port to their computer of choice.

By the way, if you're interested in the technical details of just how Google Desktop Search works, "Google Hacks" co-author Rael Dornfest explains all (well, all that most people would ever want to know).

U2 iPod details

Forbes has the scoop on the yet-to-be-announced but already eagerly anticipated U2 special-edition iPod.

The basics: it'll be black and come preloaded with a number of U2 songs, including the band's new album, "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb."

Who needs Lex Luthor?

In hindsight, this was almost inevitable: BushKilledSuperman.com.

As Xeni Jardin put it on Boing Boing: "Stem cell politics, comic mythology, and the death of Christopher Reeve all collide here." She also posted an amusing mock comic strip panel that picks up the meme and runs with it.

Possible election woes

Florida 2000: The Sequel is a Salon article by Loyola Law School professor Richard L. Hasen that sketches out five "nightmare scenarios" under which this year's presidential race could end up in the courts. "Ironically," he writes, "the Florida debacle and our reactions to it have increased, not decreased, the chances of a post-election problem."

10 steps to tomorrow

Newsweek spotlights "ten innovations that may change the way we live," from microchips made from plastic or synthetic diamonds to drive-by-wire automobiles to mutant space vegetables.

The end of privacy?

A Washington Post analysis piece looks at how privacy is eroding, bit by byte:

... if it feels like you can’t do anything these days without someone looking over your shoulder, you’re not just paranoid. Cheap computers, blazing fast networks and clever engineers are finding more and more ways to keep tabs on where you go and what you buy, generally with your permission. They’re even getting better at guessing what you’ll do next.

Another 'bulge' theory

J.D. Lasica rounds up some links that put forth an intriguing theory: the mysterious bulge beneath President Bush's jacket could be a Lifecor LifeVest, a specialized portable defibrillator.

By any other name, you can fly

The federal "no-fly list" has become infamous for complicating the lives of innocent passengers whose names resemble that of someone who managed to attract the government's attention. But a TSA spokesman tells the Washington Post that it's surprisingly easy for those fliers to reduce the chances of become false positives: just modify their names with a middle initial, middle name or suffix like "Jr."

(Via Boing Boing.)

Top clicks, top picks

The presidential campaign and the rumbling volcano in the southwest corner of our state continued to hold readers' interest last week, as you can see from the lists of most popular stories for Oct. 11-17, 2004:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. Serious times require re-election
2. 3 state utilities may offer Internet via power lines
3. Local archbishop a man of drive and mystery
4. Some believe animals sensed St. Helens' mood
5. Voters' choice is clear: John Kerry for president
6. Campaign 2004: Vote by poor may skyrocket this year
7. In a tie, Edwards could be named Bush's VP
8. Here's what happened to the Republican Party
9. Seattle near the bottom in hospital care study
10. Fantastic Forage: Wild matsutake mushrooms

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Some believe animals sensed St. Helens' mood
2. 3 state utilities may offer Internet via power lines
3. Family members don't believe police version of lottery winner's shooting
4. 10 security fixes are released by Microsoft
5. Winner in third debate was ...
6. Sonics' Allen offers appraisal of Bryant in post-Shaq/Phil era
7. Allen looking to do 'something special' with Sonics rather than force a trade
8. People in the News: Supermodel objects to 'Porn Star' account
9. Serious times require re-election
10. Lava makes it out top of volcano

A national sales tax?

Perish the thought. No, seriously: the New York Times does a pretty good job outlining why the idea is probably unworkable. Basically, in order to generate the same revenues as the current federal income tax, while still allowing exemptions such as food and clothing, the national sales tax rate might need to be 18 percent. Try to retain popular current subsidies such as mortgage interest and medical expenses, and the tax might need to be 25 percent or more.

There is one bright side, the Times points out: a national sales tax would eliminate many of the loopholes that allow high wage earners to avoid paying income tax now.

Not so smooth design

Gizmodo describes the new Disney Smoothie Maker thusly:

Nothing quenches like the liquified innards of a cartoon mouse's dome, especially when dribbled out though his tracheal shunt. Available soon in a child's nightmare near you.

They just don't write catalog copy like that anymore ...

Learning to live with more

Once upon a time, people were able to survive without microwaves, cell phones and broadband Internet. Now, they're seen as essential utilities by many consumers, the Washington Post reports:

A generation ago, mortgages, utilities and newspaper subscriptions made up a short list of payments due each month. Now Americans pay an average of 12 bills a month, including fees for a broad range of services such as television programming, home security-system monitoring and online gaming Web sites. And each individual bill may increase as consumers add incremental improvements such as Internet access to their cell phones and premium channels to their satellite radio service.

Beyond personal pocketbook impacts, this trend has real implications for the society at large, experts tell the Post:

Economists and academics are growing concerned about Americans' willingness to cede a regular chunk of their monthly paychecks to new conveniences and services, saying it is taking a serious bite out of discretionary spending, a key driver of the nation's economy. ... there is also growing concern among some economists that the introduction of expensive new technology services is dividing the nation into digital haves and digital have-nots.

More on the Bush Bulge

Some new tidbits related to the Bush Bulge controversy:

• Never mind the conspiracy theorists. Salon consults the experts -- like people who make and teach others to use in-ear prompting devices -- and soberly examines the available evidence to try and get to the bottom of this whole thing. More questions than answers are found.
• Portland's Willamette Week notes that questions about whether the president wears a wire date back at least to August, when he visited the Rose City and "astonished national and local reporters on the scene with 90 minutes of eloquence" (it's the fifth item).
• Larry Angell muses, could it be ... an iBulge?

(Thanks to Ruth for the Willamette Week tip.)

Pirates and emperors, oh my!

Pirates and Emperors is a satirical cartoon that parodies (and emulates perfectly) the Schoolhouse Rock series of animated musicals that ABC used to air on Saturday mornings.

As filmmaker Eric Henry explains:

While critics decry the United States' current brand of military and economic imperialism as dangerously unprecedented, great powers have been throwing their weight around like schoolyard bullies since St. Augustine's time. This playful but pointed cartoon shows that while Uncle Sam has been an especially bad apple of late, he's following a pattern of bad behavior which goes back decades.

(Via Boing Boing.)

A visit to Spamtown

Spam used to mean something good, or at least nourishing, long before it became the label for unwanted e-mail. That glorious history is celebrated at the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn. ("16,500 square feet of pure pork fun").

Michelle Delio stops by during a road trip for Wired News. She asks manager Shawn Radford the obvious question: How does Spam maker Hormel feel about having its brand name co-opted by a scourge of modern life?

"The company decided that instead of turning the lawyers loose we'd just assume that people can tell the difference between good canned meat and bad e-mail and that people wouldn't confuse the two. All Hormel asks is that people not use uppercase letters when referring to spam e-mail. Spam -- all uppercase letters -- is our product."

MP3 share falls

Another iconic technology starts fading into history: the MP3 format is steadily losing ground to proprietary music file types from Microsoft and Apple, News.com notes.

Blogs as news sources

Ryan Pitts, of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, summarizes the key findings of a newspaper industry survey on what print readers think of blogs. Surprisingly, about 20 percent of newspaper readers polled said they read blogs, about twice the penetration of overall U.S. Net users, according to Pew.

Interesting, readers say that it's the very messiness of discourse in the blogosphere that makes it a credible news source for them:

Readers who find blogs important say the online writers discuss stories mainstream journalists ignore, and are eager to question the decisions news networks make. They recognize the fallibilities that go along with blogging, but say those drawbacks are balanced out by openness, interactivity, and a communal nature that helps honesty rise to the top.

"If someone posts something that is inaccurate or incorrect, hundreds of people will correct them -- and the good ones acknowledge any mistakes made," said Megan Casto, of Olympia, Wash.

Readers get a greater overall view of the news, said Michael Hodges of Nashua, N.H., because each blogger speaks in the context of one big conversation. "In the aggregate, bloggers are much more balanced because they instantly call one another on bias, slant, errors in logic, and inadequate information. It's a network effect that is better than the mainstream 'networks.'"