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POPSMore and more e-books being stored on the 'cloud' It will be very interesting to see which of these approaches becomes the preferred option, and especially how popular "demand" affects "price". Given the increasing availability of "annotation" services that overlay web content and the increasing demands on personal time, it is easy to anticipate that "user generated" annotation content may well become the modern equivalent of the Reader's Digest "condensed" book.
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POPSA Pen Everyone Needs in the Digital Age Was just suggested to me last week that turning on a recording feature in my laptop would assist with product orders when onsite with my customers. I think this pen sounds like a good idea too.
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POPSPatient trapped in a 23-year 'coma' was conscious all along Mr Houben said: 'All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.' His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys. 'Medical advances caught up with him,' said Dr Laureys, who believes there may be many similar cases of false comas around the world. The disclosure will also renew the rightto- die debate over whether people in comas are truly unconscious. Mr Houben, a former martial arts enthusiast, was paralysed in 1983.
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POPS101 Ways To Be Annoying More: 14. Name your dog "Dog." 15. Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions "to keep them tuned up." 16. Reply to everything someone says with "that's what YOU think." 17. Claim that you must always wear a bicycle helmet as part of your "astronaut training." 18. Declare your apartment an independent nation, and sue your neighbors upstairs for "violating your airspace". 19. Forget the punchline to a long joke, but assure the listener it was a "real hoot." 20. Follow a few paces behind someone, spraying everything they touch with Lysol. 21. Practice making fax and modem noises. 22. Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and "cc:" them to your boss. 23. Make beeping noises when a large person backs up. 24. Invent nonsense computer jargon in conversations, and see if people play along to avoid the appearance of ignorance. 25. Erect an elaborate network of ropes in your backyard, and tell the neighbors
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POPSMore than a coincidence................. "Dunn was the lead critic of Fox News for reporting on the ACORN prostitution scandal, which originally broke on September 10. Dunn subsequently launched a public attack against Fox News on October 11, and she even stated 'let's not pretend they're a news network' in reference to Fox. .
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POPSTo whom it may concern: I resign More: I want to return to a time when life was simple. When all you knew were colours, multiplication tables, and nursery rhymes, but that didn't bother you, because you didn't know what you didn't know and you didn't care. All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the things that should make you worried or upset. I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreams,the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow. So.... here's my cheque book and my car keys, my company badge, my credit card bills, and all 32 of my computer passwords. I am officially resigning from adulthood. And if you want to discuss this further, you'll have to catch me first, cause, TAG!! YOU'RE IT!!
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POPSNational Writing Day Now there's the computer and the internet. In the digital age, anyone with a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks can put material into cyberspace. The digital revolution means everyone's an author, every day is National Writing Day. And this sudden democratizing of the writing process generates its own set of complaints: * it's wrong to give so many people access to authorship -- after all, most people won't be very good at, and some people are going to write things that we don't agree with * computers make writing too easy -- something so important should only come with effort -- no pain, no gain -- maybe we should increase the entrance fees? * we need to control, license, censor what's on the 'net: after all, the web is full of lies, misinformation, nonsense, pornography, fraud, Nigerian money scams, and hate, not to mention all those pictures of little cats But despite the complaints, writers everywhere are grabbing their keyboards...
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POPSSet Your Alarm For The Orionids!
"Last but not least, the display will be framed by some of the prettiest stars and planets in the night sky. In addition to Orionids, you'll see brilliant Venus, red Mars, the dog star Sirius, and bright winter constellations such as Orion, Gemini and Taurus. Even if the shower is a dud, the rest of the sky is dynamite." "According to Japanese meteor scientists Mikiya Sato and Jun-ichi Watanabe, 2006 marked Earth's first encounter with some very old debris. "We have found that the was caused by dust trails ejected from 1P/Halley in 1266 BC, 1198 BC, and 911 BC," they wrote in the August 2007 edition of Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan. In their paper "Origin of the 2006 Orionid Outburst," Sato and Watanabe used a computer to model the structure and evolution of Halley's many debris streams stretching back in time as far as 3400 years. The debris that hit Earth in 2006 was among the oldest they studied and was rich in large fireball-producin
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POPSDoes a nation's mood lurk in its songs and blogs?
“And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.” ... From another site, http://wefeelfine.org/ , they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009.They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25). Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day. “Now, these are bloggers, and they certainly are not representative of everyone,” Dr. Dodds said. “But the pattern is very pronounced.”
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POPSHow Chuck Darwin made it from reception to the corner office Thought this was a very colorful piece and worth the quick read at the source. It was written by a long time publishing exec who provides a personal view into the evolution of an industry caught smack in the middle of a technology and media revolution. Having read a number of insightful posts recently (here on Amplify) regarding magazine industry's struggle to bridge traditional and new media, this particular story resonated with me. I wonder if any old school mag publishing execs are still the decision makers. If so, do they realize Mr. Darwin is still sitting in their corner office...
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POPSPolaroid using Zink Paper Polaroid's inkless mobile printer called Polaroid Pogo offer users the chance to print colour photos from their mobile phone via Bluetooth or digital camera without the need for a computer. The heart of the inkless printing is the ZINK Paper™, an advanced composite material. Crystals in this paper are activated and colorized by heat in the printer.
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POPST-Mobile to gouge customers $1.50 per month for paper bills Sign of things to come for other carriers? Aside from the reality that not every cell phone user owns a computer, when you contract with a service provider their billing has already taken into account the cost of all aspects of billing. This would in effect amount to a double billing. They are eager to pass off any expenses to them onto their customers, so, if T-Mobile realizes a savings in not printing bills, they should pass that savings off to their customers as well.
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POPSSun Not Responsible For Climate Change Professors Peter Adams and Jeff Pierce did a bunch of things that those throwing around the solar excuse didn't: a) They did detailed work analyzing the actual effects of such activity b) They actually understood what such effects would really even be c) They rigorously applied scientific procedures to this research, constructed computer models, and would have reported the results either away d) They spent many, many years earning PhDs in scientific research and the title of "Professor." We have to say, d) is our favorite. "This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the sun responsible for present global warming," Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told the journal Nature. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3300177/Sun-not-responsible-for-climate-change.html
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POPSA Study of Women Inventors, Part 1 The social appeal for women to become inventors at that time was best expressed when Scientific American tried to assure them “that there was nothing inherently unladylike about the process of invention. Like novel writing, it could be done in the parlor at home, and did not require traffic in the factory or marketplace.” Follow to Part 2
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POPSThe Coming Superbrain Some more excerpts: not all humans of the industry are optimistic, "The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines." And some worst fear is the Moses Syndrome being just one generation before: "Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity; Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”
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POPSE-Money (That’s What I Want) There is a host of reasons why we should adopt a “cashless” society: 1-the cost of printing bills and stamping coins (in 2008 taxpayers paid $848 million to print hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bills, two thirds of that went to minting coins that most of us find is a nuisance to handle.) 2-more than 14,823 tons of zinc, 23,879 tons of copper, and 2,514 tons of nickel went into making coins last year. 3-cash is germ-smeared, bulky, carbon-intensive and expensive. Two years ago, card-based payments exceeded paper-based ones – cash, checks, food stamps – for the first time. The most efficient method of commerce would be to use the cell phone as a point-of-sale terminal which would lend itself to bartering. Imagine paying for a beer with frequent flier miles. Killing currency wouldn’t be a trauma, it’s be euthanasia.
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POPSDownload the ecofont!!!! Sometimes is even too easy. Save the world and your pocket, make some holes in your letters! This font makes you save the 20% of ink when you print. Under size 20 the holes aren't visible. Download at ecofont.eu
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