Search Results for: ted

Telemarketing: the fight-back

By
on

Here is a beautiful, beautiful thing.  A piece of technology ("TeleCrapper") that allows you to fake a conversation with a telemarketer… without ever answering the phone.  You record some random conversation snippets, and the software plays them back to the marketer every time there’s a silence on the line. So you have the pleasure of […]

HabitatJam …brave!

By
on

The world seems to bursting right now with big ideas.  Lots of people have twigged that in an interconnected world, any individual can make a difference. So why not try to set up something online to facilitate this. Of course, the large majority of these efforts will fail to get to critical mass… but you […]

Music

Acoustic Video Game Music

By
on

Each year I make a pilgrimage to the E3 conference.  E3 is the largest annual conference for the "interactive entertainment industry" — also known as the video game industry.  The conference is one of the most tumultuous and cacophonous gatherings you could care to experience (I learned my lesson after the first year and now […]

Design

10 Reasons to Hate Your iPod

By
on

Everyone raves about the iPod’s design. Call me cranky, but I think it could be massively improved. Here are my top peeves: 1)  Battery life.  On every iPod mini, Shuffle and Nano that I’ve owned, it has been atrocious. Less than 4 hours.  My five-year-old 6-gig PJB-100 MP3 player comfortably delivered 10.  Apple advertises 14 […]

Technology

Steven Pinker on Jews and genetics

By
on

What to make of recent research positing that ‘selective breeding’ over the last two milennia has resulted in superior intelligence (and rare genetic diseases) among Ashkenazi — or Eastern European — Jews? The unpublished study has been backed up, shot down and certainly hyped. If you’re looking for insight — and you’re in New York […]