Monthly Archives: June 2007

Buy radio advertising slots on eBay

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From yesterday’s Radio Time to Join List of eBay Items Up for Auction – New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — The auction giant eBay said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers starting Wednesday, expanding into a business that Google entered last year

EBay, through a partnership with Bid4Spots, a 2-year-old company in Encino, Calif., will offer advertisers a way to buy unsold radio inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 media markets in the United States

Advertisers can go shopping for airtime on the eBay Media Marketplace, originally a forum for cable television ads which began in March. EBay was hired to create the service by a consortium of major advertisers like Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Home Depot.

But the eBay ad exchange has had little success so far. Broadcasters have vocally protested that they were not adequately consulted on its development and that it goes too far in removing people from the process. Only Oxygen, the cable network, currently sells some of its ad time on eBay’s service…

Genetic markers for certain diseases

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Wow! Technology Review report:

A massive genetic study carried out in the United Kingdom has pinpointed 24 genetic markers that increase risk for illnesses such as diabetes, arthritis, and Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. The findings illustrate the success of a new approach to gene hunting known as genome-wide association, made possible by recent advances in gene-sequencing technologies. The results were published in this week’s issue of Nature.

“This is a powerful way of identifying genes for common diseases,” says Anne Bowcock, a geneticist at Washington University Medical School, in Saint Louis. “These genes will point to altered pathways that will then point to novel therapies.”

Scientists analyzed 500,000 genetic markers in each of 1,700 people, making it the largest such study to date. By comparing the DNA of 2,000 patients with one of seven different diseases–Crohn’s disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and bipolar disorder–with 3,000 healthy controls, researchers identified 24 genetic regions strongly linked to specific diseases: one in bipolar disorder, one in coronary-artery disease, nine in Crohn’s disease, three in rheumatoid arthritis, seven in type 1 diabetes, and three in type 2 diabetes. Known as the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, the project is a collaboration among 50 different research groups…

Wonder how long it will take insurance companies to start demanding genetic scans before providing insurance.

Money for jam

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Behold the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. This little masterpiece took two years to develop and cost £400,000 (according to the Today programme this morning).

James Cridland has some intriguing things to say about it. He’s also knocked up a more attractive alternative.

Apple sells DRM-free music. Throws in your personal data for free

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Well, well. I’d been wondering about this, and now ArsTechnica confirms it…

With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple’s new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.

We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we’ve found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there’s more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn’t much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.

Concerned users could convert selections to MP3, but there will be a generational loss in quality resulting from the transcoding. We also have to wonder: who is buying DRM-free music with the plans of slapping it up on a P2P share, anyway? It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other ways to get access to music without paying for it…

Photosynth

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Now here is something genuinely original from Microsoft — Photosynth. (Well, some of it seems to rely on Seadragon, a technology developed by a company recently acquired by Microsoft, but still…)

It’s software that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

There’s a fascinating TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas which demonstrates the idea.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.

Later… Quentin points out that the online demonstrations will only work in IE. Well, what do you expect…?

Science and Nature cannot handle Word 2007 files

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Before you submit that Nobel-winning article, it might be worth having a look at this from Rob Weir…

It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.

“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”

Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news:

“Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 — for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us — was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word.”

Nature appears to have the same problem…

Coffee-table booking

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This morning’s Observer column…

The most interesting event at the conference was the appearance of the two great metaphor snatchers on the same platform. So far as I know, this is the first time that Jobs and Gates have ever appeared live together in public. And it happened, wrote one commentator, ‘despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum’.

Fortunately, no such singularity occurred. The pair were interviewed, if that is the correct term for emollient ego-stroking, by Mr Mossberg and his sidekick, Kara Swisher. It was fascinating to observe the differences between them. Jobs gets more distinguished-looking as he gets older. He now looks like a Marine corps general from the Vietnam war. Gates is still a nerd trapped inside an expanding waistline. Jobs is suave, charming, articulate, manipulative and dangerous. Gates struggles to get his thoughts out via the relatively impoverished medium of English. As I watched him I was reminded of George Steiner’s description of the music of Bach: ‘Intense force channelled through a narrow aperture.’ But why not see the whole show for yourself. Just go to tinyurl.com/2b95cr – and keep that garlic handy.

User-generated porn

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Wow! This New York Times report is interesting.

The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.

But now the established pornography business is in decline — and the Internet is being held responsible.

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.

After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.

Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings. But to their chagrin, making and distributing pornography have become a lot easier.

“People are making movies in their houses and dragging and dropping them” onto free Web sites, said Harvey Kaplan, a former maker of pornographic movies and now chief executive of GoGoBill.com, which processes payments for pornographic Web sites. “It’s killing the marketplace.”

Aw shucks! The poor dears. Porn industry leaders should get together with record company executives for joint therapy sessions. Primal scream therapy, perhaps?

The podcaster’s friend

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I’ve been looking out for ages for an acceptable way of recording MP3 audio — without going in for the kind of obsessive pre-amp sophistication that audiophiles insist is mandatory. I think I’ve found the answer — the Zoom H4. I’ve been testing it out and it produces audio that is, in Roger Needham’s timeless phrase, “good enough for government work”. Not that I do any of that, of course.

The H4 records onto an SD card in Wav or MP3 format and has two modes: stereo and 4-track. Plug it into the USB port of my Mac and it looks like an external drive. Useful review here which says that the 4-track operation is a bit lightweight. But that doesn’t bother me: all I wanted was ol’-fashioned stereo.

I got it from here. £220 inc. VAT.

It was Dan Bricklin who put me onto it, btw.