Wuff, wuff, wu…. yawn, zzzzzzzz

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Guess what — Prozac for dogs!…

Anxiety-ridden dogs that go berserk when left alone by their owners will soon have a new treatment option–a reformulated version of the antidepressant Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine. To be marketed under the name Reconcile by Indianapolis-based drugmaker Eli Lilly, the drug is chewable and flavored with a doggie-delectable zing. It is the latest in a string of recently approved canine drugs, reflecting the growing market for pet pharmaceuticals.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Reconcile in February after clinical tests in dogs showed it significantly improved symptoms of separation anxiety, a problem that strikes 10 to 20 percent of canines with varying severity; dogs affected may bark, chew household items, or urinate in inappropriate locations when left alone. The drug, which will go on the market in April and will be sold along with a behavior modification program, is the first product introduced by a new division of Lilly devoted entirely to pets…

Don’t you just love that phrase “doggie-delectable zing”?

Forty years ago today…

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…Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. Peter Blake, the artist who did the cover, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He was asked if anyone had refused to allow their image to be used. “Yes”, he replied, “Mae West. She said ‘What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club band?'”.

What a dame! She left a legacy of quotes that rivals Dorothy Parker’s. For example: “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” And: “I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.” And: “Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”

She agreed in the end to appear on the album cover — but only after all four Beatles had written to her individually.

Sandals with built-in flask

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Beach sandals now available with hollow sole, liquor for the storage and transportation of. A snip at $44-$46 from Amazon.com. Form an orderly queue. Hic. No shushing or poving. Er, pushing and shoving. Hic.

I am reminded of Myles na gCopaleen’s design for trousers with hollow pipes running down the seams which could be filled with Guinness by publicans just prior to closing time, thereby enabling customers to continue drinking on the bus journey home.

[Source]

Why eBook readers won’t change the world

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Nice essay by Charlie Stross. The gist of it is:

publishers don’t manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra bells and whistles that sells for $350. We’ve had the tech for a $20 (or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they could sell the beast, they’d be churning them out by the bucketload — and it’s perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160×160 green screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The reason nobody makes such a beast is because it’s simply not profitable to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain’t gonna happen.

Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters of the “pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry” theory, until ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore them. And that’s regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and having the cultural artefact — is, well, it’s just bogus.

We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you’re paying $20 a pop. After a year you’ve got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and you’re out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will stay in (they’re set up for the club and they’ve already got a small bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the profits to pay for that first year’s loss-leader.

But 80% of readers don’t do book clubs. I’ve seen my book club sales, and they’re piss-poor (except in France, which is different).

Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter — at least for this generation — for the same reason that it’s near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more than US $24; consumers don’t like being milked.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the link.

Fact of the day

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From Owen Barder’s blog…

I have just learned from DFID’s Chief Economist, Tony Venables, that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.

I’m baffled by all this enthusiasm for ethanol (not to mention BMW’s absurd obsession with hydrogen-fuelled limousines). A good rule of thumb is that if George W. Bush is keen on something, then it’s baloney. And he’s very keen on ethanol.

Second thoughts about old and new media

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Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…

It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.

It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:

In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.

Web 2.0 in the corporate world

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Nick Carr has been pondering some contradictory data…

Some hard data is coming out this week on the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by companies. Yesterday, Forrester released some results from a December 2006 survey of 119 CIOs at mid-size and larger companies. It indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises. Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools – blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging – and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools. Although Forrester didn’t break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging.

Tomorrow, McKinsey will release the results of a broader survey of Web 2.0 adoption, and the results are quite different. In January 2007, McKinsey surveyed some 2,800 executives – not just CIOs – from around the world. It found strong interest in many Web 2.0 technologies but much less widespread adoption. McKinsey also looked at six tools. While it didn’t include tagging, it did include mashups; the other five were the same. It found that social networking was actually the most popular tool, with 19% of companies having invested in it, followed by podcasts (17%), blogs (16%), RSS (14%), wikis (13%), and mashups (4%). When you add in companies planning to invest in the tools, the percentages are as follows: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%).

Statistic of the day

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More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[Source]

Dell to sell Linux laptops

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Well, well… Looks like I was wrong to be sceptical about Dell’s attitude to Linux. At any rate, the BBC is reporting that the company has decided to ship desktop and laptop machines with Linux pre-installed.

Computer giant Dell will start to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems, the firm has said.

The second largest computer maker in the world said it had chosen to offer Linux in response to customer demand.

Earlier this year, 100,000 people took part in a Dell survey. More than 70% of respondents said they would use Linux.

Dell has not released details of which versions of Linux it will use or which computers it will run on, but promised an update in the coming weeks.

“Dell has heard you,” said a statement on the firm’s website. “Our first step in this effort is offering Linux preinstalled on select desktop and notebook systems.”

In mitigation, I plead that I was just going on what Dell said at the time — i.e. “There is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. We don’t want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.”