Sense and Nonsense

Consumers' Adoption of Technologies

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic posted an interesting item yesterday about the rate of adoption by consumers of various new technologies over the past century -- electricity, phones, automobiles, cellphones, etc.   The fascinating graph below is from that piece. 

Bad Apple

I've always been a big fan of Apple's products.  I don't have or want the stupid iPad, but I think very highly of Apple computers, and when I decided to buy a smartphone I went with the iPhone.  But I haven't upgraded to the iPhone 4 and don't intend to until Apple clearly has solved all the problems with it.  Apple's idiotic reaction to those problems is creating a massive PR problem for the company.  This article highlights the issue nicely.  Bad, Apple.

Hi Tech

Digital File Cabinet

I'm still knee-deep in work and unable to attend to things I'd love to blog about -- the Supreme Court's outrageous decision on campaign finance, and Obama's tardy conversion to populism, the MA election (yes, more to be said on that!).  But I will get to these and other topics soon.

Meanwhile, a quick note about another matter.  I got up at 5:00 this morning to work.  After making coffee, I thought I'd just spend a few minutes catching up with some newspapers I hadn't gotten to this week.  One of the things I look forward to reading each week is Walter Mossberg's "Personal Technology" column in the Thursday edition of the Wall Street Journal.  He devoted his column this week to a fabulous "hybrid computing" program/website (he explains the term in his column) called Evernote.   I read the column, went to Evernote's website, and then lost an hour exploring its possibilities, setting up an account (free!), downloading the free iPhone app, etc.  

Evernote is a fabulous tool that I expect will be something I come to depend on every day.  Explore it for yourself.  I expect you'll be glad you did.

I lost an hour of work this morning, but I've already "clipped to Evernote" a number of items I want to blog about later when I have time.  More on all that when I resurface. 

The Pace of Change

I'm an old fogey, I guess.  But so are you.  You apparently became outdated about ten minutes ago.  See here.

Help with Converter Box

As you may have read, Joe the Plumber of recent campaign fame (a.k.a., Joe Wurzelbacher) has recently signed on with an online retailer of converter boxes to do a series of educational videos to inform TV watchers about what the upcoming transition to all-digital is all about, how to hook up an old analog television to a converter box, and how to get a government-sponsored coupon to help buy a box.

Well, here's a sense of how such videos might go down on the receiving end -- that is, with the largely elderly population (see end of post below about red wine's benefits) that will have to deal with this problem.

From Spike Feresten's "Talk Show" via Bob Cesca.

Videoconferencing

Tuesday's New York Times carried an interesting article by Steve Lohr about the growing use of videoconferencing (otherwise known as telepresence) as a replacement for business travel to meetings and conferences.  Lohr writes:

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small  are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies.

The cost of these telepresence rooms (around $500,000) is probably too high for most companies to build them, except for those firms whose employees spend a lot of time and money traveling to other cities to see their own company's employees in other places.

But there should be an emerging market for companies to step in and build these rooms in every city, providing a priced-per-visit use to firms that want to avoid the high cost of travel -- not only in terms of airline and hotel costs but also the human costs of fatigue and burnout.

My wife -- you all know my road-warrior wife, Sue -- travels extensively.  I would really be happy if some entrepreneur would make it possible for her to do less of it and stay in Boston more.

Get on it, you people!

Amazing Inventions

Here's an introduction to the Air Piano.  The company's website says:

"This instrument . . . enables users to emit beautiful tones without ever touching the "keys." It's even smart enough to sustain a note if you hold your hand over a particular area for an extended time."

Let's hope the inventor never tries to apply the technology to sex.

The Promise of a Cognitive Surplus

My son James sent me a link to a really interesting speech by Clay Shirky, who writes about the Internet and its social and economic effects. (Thanks, James.)

Shirky's speech is worth reading in its entirety for its optimistic take on the potential benefits of what he calls "cognitive surplus," the freeing up of attention and intellect that comes from spending less time in "cognitive sinks" (watching television) and more time engaging in activities (especially on the Internet) that collectively add up to social goods.  For example, he cites Wikipedia.

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.  I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching?  Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.  Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into . . . an architecture of participation.