October 2005 Archives
NY Times: The cost for starting up your own podcast may be as little as $10 for a microphone or as much as $30,000 for a well-equipped recording studio.
NY Times: Frightening health news lets people replace immediate dangers with more distant ones. Now I have new worry: Klebsiella, which has become so resistant to antibiotics that they've resurrected some that were dropped from use 30 years ago because of they were so toxic.
NY Times: The report says that the unusable equipment is being donated or sold to developing nations as a way to dodge the expense of having to recycle it properly.
NY Times: Increasingly, manufacturers are looking at the automobile as an extension of the home, a place to work and entertain.
NY Times: Dealers are drawing an average of nearly 230 monthly online prospects, defined as people who had winnowed their car choices on other Web sites before clicking through to the site.
NY Times: As kids log 6½ hours a day of screen time, parents worry their social skills are withering. The kids say, LOL!
Washington Post: The District's red-light cameras have generated more than 500,000 violations and $32 million in fines over the past six years. City officials credit them with making busy roads safer.
Continues the studies and reports mentioned in Jan. -- Do red light cameras work?
Wired News: Memeorandum doesn't just cut through the clutter to highlight the buzz in the blogosphere, it's changing how some people interact with the web.
Wired News: Some environmental activists are taking the unlikely stance of opposing wind farms in the name of ecological responsibility.
Wired News: School systems and county transportation directors across the nation are fueling up their diesel vehicles with a mix of diesel and veggie-oil biodiesel to reduce dependence on petroleum.
"They want to keep the baby-boomer lifestyle to which they've become accustomed," said a professor at a school that boasts a boatload of Pulitzer Prize winners among its alumni. "The thought of starting out at $25,000 or $30,000 to expose corruption and champion the underdog just doesn't do it for them. They have no interest."
Oct. 17 Follow up: Reporting the news for the love of the job -- The newspaper business has a long tradition of exploiting hardworking journalists, particularly young ones, with long hours and low pay. This is especially true at the smaller dailies and weeklies that make up the majority of newspapers in this country.
NY Times: The idea of offering high-speed Internet service to consumers over their power lines has been around for years in Europe, but the U.S. is just now catching on. Story focuses on efforts by Cinergy, which Duke Power plans to buy.
Also from Atlanta Business Chronicle: BellSouth, Yahoo! team up online. The two are join to offer high-speed package in BellSouth's region, but not until late 2006.
NY Times: Interesting article by Robert H. Frank on a introductory economics student assignment "to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed."
Why? "The initiative was inspired by the discovery that there is no better way to master an idea than to write about it."
Creativity Coaching: Best suggestion -- Get up early.
Wired News: For eons, mankind has dreamed of harnessing the power of the sun. Now investors are warming to the idea as well.
From NY Times:
The newspaper business is in a horrible state. It's not that papers don't make money. They make plenty. But not many people, or at least not many on Wall Street, see a future in them. In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts.And they are half right. Putting print on the grid is a necessity, because the grid is where America lives. But what the newspaper industry really needs is an iPod moment.
NY Times: E. B. White's essay is about the pleasure of not doing the things that need to be done.
I Want Meida: The co-founding editor of Wired and founder of The Industry Standard argues that print as the medium for news delivery is "passing." That's why he's launching a blog service company.
IWM: Is print media on its way out?Battelle: No, I wouldn't say that print media is on its way out, and I've been saying this since we launched Wired in '92. I would say, however, that it better be very well justified if it is going to exist.
Print is an extraordinarily important, wonderful medium. But I think we've seen the passing of print as the medium of news delivery. There are plenty of examples where print was the best we could do because it's all we had. But the online medium is better.
CS Monitor: A study found that two thirds of test subjects' waking hours were spent using media.