northern redbelly dace
Originally uploaded by Ardea.

China's Export Woes - Seafood
The Washington Post reports China exports farm-raised seafood contaminated with antibiotics and carcinogens despite repeated warnings and even visits to farms. The FDA now requires inspection of shrimp, eel, catfish, basa and dace from China before they are sold.

The chemicals found in the seafood were "nitrofurans detected in shrimp, malachite green detected in dace, eel and catfish and basa, and gentian violet detected in eel and catfish. In addition, fluoroquinolones were found in catfish and basa."

Again, the levels are just detectable but should not be present in the firs place.

iPhone Strategy
iPhones hit stores at 6 p.m., 1 week from now (June 29). Details about the plan are still vague but news estimates have it at $60/month phone service + $20/month unlimited data = $80/mo. or $960/year. The phone itself will cost ~$600 (8GB model) and there doesn't seem to be any AT&T subsidy to buffer the cost. I want one, but practically I can't afford it.

Just like iPods, part of the initial draw would build on the fact that only a select few--the affluent and trendy have it. If you follow the music player market, as it grew, the white headphones became more widespread, a turn off to some early adopters (no longer elite), but the larger draw shifted to a stage of belonging, being in, an elevated expectation of norm. How else could you answer, "What's on your iPod?" (not that I could answer that)? The iPhone's price point has it's role in maintaining cool. A strategy which Apple will not exercise is making the phone first available only for the Mac, as they did with the iPod.

People believe the iPhone has greater function and customization than a Treo, Blackberry Curve, Blackjack, etc. Sure it has a full operating system (Leopard) and full web browser (Safari); yet the OS's potential may choke at outset. Security restrictions have not opened the phone to third party developers ("Where's the iPhone developer kit?"). The only means of expanding function are via webwares and working at Apple; perhaps that's enough. The interface is great intuitive eye candy but these do not replace the office. In the least, the iPhone would benefit from having document & spreadsheet software. The current absence of these imply that Apple is targeting trend setters and consumers not business-types and industry. Expectations are overblown. Gear lust - it's real and it's hungry.

Update: iPhone Guide video on Apple's website. It looks beautiful and its surface is optical glass. "Nothing compares to holding one in your own hand."
Features: phone, email, SMS text messaging, browser... plus Notes, Stocks, Google Maps, Weather, the ability to read .doc and .pdf, YouTube. Integration is well done, something that 3rd party developers will likely be unable to access.

No games shown. It would be cool if programs were written to take advantage of the proximity sensor (used to detects if the phone is close to your face), accelerometer/gyroscope (detects if phone is in landscape or portrait mode), the touch screen, and microphone. It could be the sleek alternative to Nintendo DS.

Haha :)

The days of Big Solar have come. Yay! I had said we should convert that sun drenched expanse of the Southwest into a solar power generator for the U.S. Two concerns: Can the energy be transported to far off states? Is there an ecological impact on the desert?

Apple Trailers shows a new Pixar movie for June 27, 2008. WALL∙E a robot that draws similarities to Spielberg's ET in voice + body habitus (prominent eyes, thin neck, squat body).

I hope it follows in the Pixar tradition of dynamic heartfelt characters. With Pixar running Disney animations, are all their subsequent animated features falling under Pixar's name? (Banish the duality formed around "Chicken Little," "Meet the Robinsons" & "Incredibles," "Cars.")

In the same vein as Gmail Chat, Yahoo has integrated it's chat into it's Yahoo mail system.

Mr. Wizard passed away from multiple myeloma on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. He was part of a better Nikelodeon.

Several years ago Microsoft's ramped up its recruitment of researchers in the field of voice recognition and other multimodal interactions (touch, vision, voice, position/motion) for the HCI (human-computer interaction). Only now is its efforts becoming commercial and reaching market. Of note is their research in computer vision, which will only trend larger unless limited by privacy issues (Big Brother watching or Minority Report iris/retinal scans). Microsoft's Surface uses cameras to track interaction with the table interface and is an example of how refined vision has become.

It's not a far stretch to see future payoff in Microsoft's investment in robotics. I'd say robotics is essentially computing empowered with motion. The payoff (reaching consumers) comes with applying that vision to hand-eye coordination and then applying AI. This is not to say, robots do not already exist for the consumer (Roomba), but it has yet to hit critical mass.

Not only are our senses interacting with computing more but computing devices are increasingly sensing us. For example xuuk has a camera with infrared eye tracker to detect if you are looking at it. They are marketing it as a way for advertisements (Wired magazine says billboards) to tell if you are looking at them. Not too long ago, a Wired magazine article described military research on computers scanning our brains to monitor which sensory input was overloaded or underutilized. The computer would then select the optimal mode of communication (image, text, or audio) to the user.

Gypsy Cab Project - reality webTV in a VW Rabbit.

Safari to PC
Apple has released a public beta of the latest version of Safari AND it's available for Windows XP or Vista. It claims the current title of fastest major browser--faster than Firefox 2 or Opera 9.

YouTube - New Interface
more Aqua on the bottom.
You can still browse the current video at this point (by adjusting the scroll bar).

Amazonian Tree of Services
I am developing greater respect for Amazon. A9.com and Mechanical Turk are two sub-corporations of Amazon. Yet, there is little media buzz surrounding Amazon's branching reach (besides Bezos' space endeavors).

• A9.com is tempting to be my search portal of choice (or 2nd) because it is a search aggregator allowing simultaneous search with multiple and specialized search sites. You can choose to include Wiki to less common/more specialized portals like German, Japanese, programming, or law. Yes, it is annoying for it's lack of Google searches among all the searches they offer to aggregate. Another feature I have yet to find on A9 is a news aggregator.
  
• Mechanical Turk uses what Jeff Bezos calls Artificial Artificial Intelligence (hmmm... clever name). As Wiki tells us it is computers outsourcing tasks to humans regarding tasks that humans do faster.
  

In other search explorations, Microsoft's Live.com has become oh so similar to Google.com. Consider the minimalistic interface, map search (note Virtual Earth's nice new Bird's Eye view), Academic search (like Google Scholar), and most telling, the caching of web sites.

Poison for Your Pearly Whites
China is really killing it's international reputation. Toothpaste labeled "Excel" & "Mr. Cool" containing the poison diethylene glycol (DEG) was confiscated in Nicaragua. Not surprisingly the toothpaste was smuggled from Panama (note post regarding poisoning in Panama).

The FDA has issued warning and stopped imports of Chinese toothpaste into the U.S. The Associate Press reports that the former head of the China's FDA was sentenced to death four days ago (Tues., May 29, 2007) for taking bribes to allow companies to bypass drug regulations. A senior official of China said the levels of DEG were not harmful. However, the U.S. FDA rightly notes that such a poison does not even belong in toothpaste.

Googlenope by Weingarten

i + You = AppleTube (...no, not quite = Wii)
or
Instant Content Boost
Oh, man. Just look at this. Come June Apple's looking to pop!

Wishing I invested in Apple in 1996.

Hand in hand with that is the fact that music labels are allowing YouTube to broadcast their music videos.

If Apple wants to take on the threat of Microsoft head-on, they should come up with a device that transforms ordinary TV's into multi-touch screens. I don't see that technology anytime soon. What Apple has going for them is price difference, portability and the fact that Microsoft Surface is not slated until later in the year and then only available for businesses.

In other news, Ars Technica reports "New RealPlayer to rip YouTube video streams" and other streams.

Microsoft Surface
Microsoft Surface look promising and will threaten Google and Apple. SciFi is definitely a source of inspiration -- Minority Report, that is. The multi-touch surface will be the interface for Apple iPhone (as you know) and the newly announced Microsoft Surface (a 30 inch monitor). It looks as though the spider web of Microsoft has come together in a product integration akin to Apple, but even tighter. The Surface looks like one of Apple's older monitors (before they went silver) and the music interface is shamelessly copied from iTunes. Have they out-Appled Apple?


Let me list some of the ways of integration and clever promotional tie-ins:

• Microsoft mobile operating system on mobile devices (take that Palm)
  
• Microsoft Live Search, Virtual Earth Maps (take that Google)
  
• Microsoft Zune (take that Apple)
• T Mobile deal (take that Cingular...ummm AT&T)
• Increased multiplayer interactivity (take that Nintendo...maybe?)

A YouTube search of FTIR or Reactable shows that the interface technology has been in development for quite a while not just by Apple or Microsoft, but only now is it becoming more comercialized. However it doesn't seem Mircosoft uses FTIR but instead uses near-infrared cameras.

Sunday night. Perfect weather at the Millennium Park. Uncrowded. Monster Percussion Concert. It was awesome. Percussionists may have the most fun of all instrumentalists... usually don't take themselves too seriously and are not above gimmick if it sounds cool. The xylophone cannot sound unhappy. Will I ever see a marimba orchestra again? Wish I brought a camera...

Something to give you a smile. The Balloon Hat Experience.

Lingo
The need to process more info. and communicate faster promotes more acronym use and likely a bit of elitism for those in the know. Two which I recently came upon via friends:

• Q.E.D. - quod erat demonstrandum - has been around for quite a while but I never knew its meaning. It is used "to indicate that something has been definitively proven" (Wikipedia) usually found at the end of mathematical proofs... and used by cocky math students, so I'm told.
• gosu - a term for one who is highly skilled at martial arts or the boardgame Go, redefined by the online gaming community as the acronym for "god/guardian of Starcraft universe"--an expert gamer. Therefore according to Wikipedia it is a bacronym. It is often used as an adjective as in:
  That is so gosu! or... 7|-|47 15 50 605|_|! (Is gosu used in l337 speak?)
  

Listening to David Crowder Band A Collision... not as readily accessible as Illuminate but it is still so wonderful to share in joy. There is a joy where you're laughing so hard, laughing so hard...maybe not so often while existing in this fallen world.