May 2001
Thursday, 31 May 2001
The Myth of “Internet Time”: “eBay, for all its successes as a Web auction site, has so far had little impact on the classified ads that sustain newspapers”
Wednesday, 30 May 2001
Open-source spat spurs software change: “That it fits under the title of ‘open source’ is not of concern to me; that it is available to as many people that want to use it on Unix is.”
Tiny ‘big bang’ performs quantum computations: “They’ll say you can’t get a fractal pattern this way, but that’s because they are thinking of where the particle is. They’ve never looked where the particle isn’t”
Monday, 28 May 2001
U.S. government outsells Amazon: “The Treasury Department’s site sold the most goods, selling $3.3 billion in savings bonds, T-bills and notes. The Defense Department operates at least eight sites selling items from toothpaste to Army trucks.”
Friday, 25 May 2001
Study Casts Doubt on the Placebo Effect
Wednesday, 23 May 2001
Microsoft Survey Finds Tech Optimism in Europe: “Although European firms still believed in investing in IT, the survey showed that over half the companies polled used IT spending to increase their internal efficiency rather than to generate new business.”
Advertising: Reruns May Become Testing Ground for Digital Insertion: “Marketers are striving to find nontraditional ways to reach consumers who are becoming increasingly resistant to standard methods of pitching products, like commercials, that interrupt TV shows, which can be zapped, fast-forwarded or edited out as they appear or reappear.”
Tuesday, 22 May 2001
Deregulation will cause significant fluctuations in electricity prices, new study reveals: “In general, the study concludes that importing regions now paying higher prices will experience relative rate reductions if they obtain more transmission access, while low-cost exporting regions will experience higher prices.”
‘Iron Chef’ to America: “Shatner will play the part of The Chairman, the program’s host who oversees the competition and is famous for dramatically biting into a hot-pepper at the beginning of the show.”
A permanent germ killer- “the polymer kills bacteria by destroying the outer membrane of the microbe. This action is a chemical reaction that probably would not allow the bacteria to develop a resistance, such as happens with antibiotics”
Sunday, 20 May 2001
After the Griping, Dot-Coms Can Learn from Webvan: “I have a couple of suggestions for dot-coms far and near. The first is: Get Real.”
Time twister: “if you increase the intensity of the light enough, space and time swap roles”
Young star blows baffling bubble: “‘There’s nothing in our current theories’ to describe how the putative star managed to produce spherical ejection of matter”
Saturday, 19 May 2001
A Front-Row Seat as Amazon Gets Serious: “What the company is finding, over and over, is what many skeptics have long contended: its magical offering is complicated, expensive and inefficient.”
Thursday, 17 May 2001
The Accidental Curist: “soon after the publication of the fruit-fly genome project in Science, government researchers said they found errors in the fruit-fly map. Celera refuted the claims, calling them ‘petty.’ Now, Karlin says half of the proteins that would be produced according to Celera’s fruit-fly sequence do not match up with those in a Swiss public database”
Wednesday, 16 May 2001
Burning Questions, Final Answers: “What chart best sums up why the Nasdaq has fallen from its high of 5,000?”
Mystery force tugs distant probes: “The mystery deepened further when an analysis of the trajectory being followed by its sister spacecraft, Pioneer 11, launched in 1973, showed that it too was being subjected to the same mysterious effect. But Pioneer 11 is on the opposite side of the Solar System from Pioneer 10, about 22 billion km (about 14 billion miles) away.”
Monday, 14 May 2001
Siebel: New Ideas, Old Economy: “Many enterprise application companies are inclined to create an international crisis if their customers choose someone else’s software.”
Sunday, 13 May 2001
When in ROAM: Why wireless executive still don’t get it: “Mr. Natsuno was cheerful, which immediately set him apart from the crowd. On stage, he squashed rampant talk that the mythical ‘killer app’ – like e-mail or short messaging service – might save them. “
Carbon clock could show the wrong time: “Evidence from North Atlantic sediments suggests that the Earth’s magnetic field may have dipped around 40 thousand years ago, but this would still only account for - at best - half of the observed peak in carbon-14 concentrations.”
Saturday, 12 May 2001
Cisco’s $2.25 billion mea culpa: “There were signs last summer from Nortel and Lucent that this market was ready to crash … In the end, this just proves that the technology industry is just as cyclical as any other despite what everyone kept telling themselves in the past few years.”
Scientists Claim to Revive Alien Bacteria: “Those bacteria seem to be too similar to the terrestrial ones. I can’t avoid thinking about possible contaminations.”
Japan Confronts Leprosy’s Legacy- “We used to raise chrysanthemums that won top prizes … But we began to hear the complaints from buyers that the chrysanthemums died too quickly. … Only later we learned the reason … The chrysanthemums were sterilized when they left here. The flowers carried no sins, but they were killed.”
Fee Based Compensation on the Rise: “Although 69% of respondents claimed that they will work with their agencies to ensure the shops are profitable, 43% are not clear about what their agencies believe to be a fair profit, and 14% believe their agencies’ profit goals are clear but excessive.”
Hitch Hiker author Adams dies: “Douglas Adams, author of the cult science-fiction comedy The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has died at the age of 49. British-born Adams died on Friday of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, his London spokeswoman Sophie Astin said. He was married with a daughter.”
Wednesday, 9 May 2001
Archived Memepool Post: May 9, 2001
Faced with a tough moral question? Ask yourself: WWJD? What Would Journey Do? (Posted to Religion)
Tuesday, 8 May 2001
Scientists consider protocol for massive asteroid impact: “It was a very normal scientific process, but in the public’s eye it looked like a mistake … It’s a trade-off between being very open and honest about what we have and waiting and waiting until we have every last piece of data in hand.”
Monday, 7 May 2001
Deft strategy / Apple’s Steve Jobs is pulling the company back from the brink again: “And, remarkably enough, the Cupertino company has seemingly turned itself around just by getting its own act together, without waiting for renewed growth in the overall economy and any sharp upturn in demand for PCs – and without huge job cuts or eliminating major projects.”
Soros: May Day protestors do have a point: “The new market fundamentalism is more dangerous to the world now than Communism”
Another ancient civilization found: “The fortress-like buildings of the civilization are larger than the biggest structures of ancient Mesopotamia or China, said Harvard’s Lambert-Karlovsky. ‘The size at the base of some of the buildings is equivalent to the base of the pyramids,’ he said. The Soviet archaeologists determined them to be temples because of their size and distinctive layout, but Hiebert, who spent time looking for bone shards, seeds and other remnants of living patterns, came to a different conclusion.”
Tuesday, 1 May 2001
Neigh Sayers: “Amazon’s $130 million outlay for advertising last year, including TV and print, equaled 5% of sales; about average for brick-and-mortar retailers. Starbucks spent just $28 million–1.5% of $2 billion sales. Its one-to-one marketing is that everyone sees at least one Starbucks every day and the counter personnel interact with millions of customers one at a time. I want my $3 cup with service and ambiance, not e-mail ads. Most people perceive Amazon as a retailer of books and music because that’s what Amazon mainly sells. They’re right. Without physical stores, Amazon’s marketing has to rely on technology. That doesn’t mean Amazon’s business is technology any more than cash register company NCR is a retailer.”
…But Can They Write?: “No, ideal candidates don’t have to be English majors. … But they should know drivel when they see it. And they should have an appreciation for great writing.”
Can Firestone Rise From the Dead: “The gold standard of product-recall crisis management, of course, was Johnson & Johnson’s handling of 1982’s fatal cyanide poisonings at the hands of a product-tampering sociopath. So rapid and responsible was the company’s withdrawal of all Tylenol products from store shelves that, after the crisis had passed, the brand actually gained market share.”