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Saturday, October 18, 2003
Cross-promotion 
ourPod
| | Imagine an iPod that listens to FM, records off the air, and transmits as well. That's wht the new Napster 'pod does, it says here. |
20,000
| | That's the number of jobs, it says here, that Sony will cut. |
Is there a word for Fear of Oppportunity?
| | Howard Rheingold was here in Santa Barbara a few days ago. I missed him, but my wife got to say hi (and report that he gave a great talk). |
| | The multimedia messaging service era is just beginning, but it's already created a monster. That monster is mobile blogging (m-blogging or moblogging to some). Right now, it's a pretty small monster, but in the coming years, it has potential to wreak havoc on everything from carriers' marketing plans to their billing systems. |
| | The power of its threat is that when groups of users employ their wireless phones to coordinate collective activities — an application that may not have been imagined by the carriers themselves — the industry will have to learn to respond quickly, with new pricing structures, promotional strategies, service reliability guarantees and network management gymnastics. |
| | "Mobile blogging can create a lot of new service options," said Eric Anderson, vice president of practice development at Ericsson USA. "It's almost like the network operator is not 100% in control of what hits their network anymore. Blogging users can use the phone in ways we hadn't thought about, allowing those small groups of users to be great influences." |
| | Will the providers take advantage of the opportunities here? Aren't these the same guys who block port 80 and port 25 in their high speed internet services to homes? |
| | Be interesting to see where this goes. |
Bromide, cont'd
| | The paragraphs that follow were written a couple weeks ago. I put them up briefly, then yanked them because I rememberd that one of us (a well-known blogger who probably would read this) was going into surgery shortly, and I didn't want to freak them out. Warning: If you're about to go into surgery involving general anesthesia, you might want to skip this post. |
| | The day our friend Susan died, I received a pointer to this item in the New York Times. (If that link doesn't work, here's another to the same basic story.) It's about pancuronium bromide, the lethal chemical used to execute prisoners in many states. Pancuronium bromide is coincidentally among the portfolio of poisons with which anesthesiologists cause a patient's body to stop breathing while mechanical ventillators take over the same function. By itself pancuronium bromide does not stop consciousness. In executions it will cause the prisoner to die of asphyxiation, unable even to blink while the brain gradually passes out from oxygen starvation. This, some complain, is cruel and unsual, even if the drug is mixed with others that stop consciousness before asphyxiation occurs. |
| | Reading the piece gives me chills, because I had my own horrifying experience with the misadministration of pancuronium bromide, or something very much like it, before hernia surgery in 1996. Laying on the operating table waiting to fall asleep, I found myself fully awake and unable to breathe, or even to move the tiniest muscle. I wanted to scream but couldn't make a sound. It felt as if a vast invisible blanket lay over me; that I was buried alive in full view of clueless professionals who were about to carry out several hours of surgery while assuming I was asleep even though I was not. I don't know how long I lay awake like this, but it was long enough to experience the Xtreme level of fear best expressed by Edgar Allen Poe in in The Premature Burial — or worse, by the 1961 Roger Corman movie with the same title, starring Ray Milland. At times like this, these associations come to mind. |
| | The surgery was successful, but I awoke in a state of delerium that only cleared when memories of the event flashed back into my head. When I finally became coherent enough to reconstruct all the known events, I confronted the anesthesiologist. |
| | He admitted a mistake. Even though I had told him before the surgery that I don't react normally to many drugs (owing to an obscure and otherwise unimportant blood disorder), he said he ignored my input and handed the job off to a subordinate. "But she did notice that in fact you were still awake before the surgery, and she did put you to sleep. You were never in any danger." True, but the experience was no fun, and it contributed plenty of doubt to my already shaky faith in the medical profession. |
| | Mistakes in medicine are worse than common. They're standard. We live and die by statistical rules for which success is the generally (but not entirely reliable) exception. We usually survive. But not always. Imagine if you knew that one out of every 100 drivers coming your way would hit you; but that you also have little choice but to drive if you want to live. That's how the bargain goes. |
| | By the way, we still don't know why Susan died, since the toxicology reports aren't back yet. Our best nonprofessional guess (by process of the autopsy having eliminated just about every other possibility) is that her death was caused by some kind of delayed effect of the anesthesia. But in fact all we know is that she just stopped breathing, and that she was not being monitored by maninery or nursing at the time. This is standard in the U.S.today, when surgery involving general anesthesia is routinely done on an outpatient basis.You can draw your own conclusions about that one. |
Intelligent agency
| | Buzz is on the phone, quoting something Feedster's Scott Johnson said over dinner in Boston last night, about the RSS+aggregator-enabled blog world. What Scott said (Buzz says) was, |
| | The people I read are my intelligent agents. |
| | Context... Remember the "intelligent agents" scare from a few years back? (Wonder how much VC money got wasted on that one?) Never happened. (Not in a big way, anyhow. Are you using one now? I mean, in addition to the ones you read in your aggregator? See what I mean?) |
| | Now, thanks to RSS, it's happening. |
| | Makes me think back to Doug Engelbart's thinking about augmenting human intelligence, and how the best augmentation in fact comes from other connected human beings. |
Neoblogism
I was overseen to have said...
Conserving journalism
| | Jay Rosen is becoming Required Reading, if you care about What It Is and What It's Doing.. He's a professor at NYU, where he chairs the Dept. of Journalism & Mass Communications, and his credentials are first rate. So are the intentions embodied his blog, which is subtitled Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine. |
| | What Jay writes matters because we're still leaning here, and the dude is an ace teacher. Dig this from his September 19 interview with Merrill Brown: |
| | It is not a straightforward matter to learn what technology can do for storytelling. Which brings up newsroom learning and the staff¹s intellectual capital. Journalism the American way presents some major hazards for the worker¹s mind. Newsrooms have never known as good learning environments. They¹re too busy! Professional development and training have never been priorities in the news business. This is strange because human capital is increasingly important there, as it is everywhere in the knowledge fields. |
| | Whether you're a professional journalist or not, development is an unavoidable consequence of reading Jay. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Bromide, Steve MacLaughlin, 10/21/03; 9:15:22 AM Re: Susan, your paralysis, and commenting on physicians, enoch choi, 10/20/03; 7:01:09 PM Re: Saturday, October 18, 2003, Shelley, 10/20/03; 6:20:15 PM
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