Who uses email? According to the New York Times, it's the same people who "still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records, and shoot photos on film." At left, Comscore, the Internet rating agency, graphs the startling demographic split in email use. The drop is sharpest among the Internet generation, while email use by those over 55 showed a sharp uptick, perhaps reflecting the fact that more and more, ahem, old people are getting on line. Total email use is falling too. The Times says the total number of unique US visitors to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail peaked in November,...

22 December, 2010

That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

16 December, 2010

A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service. [S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008. And then there's Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a...

23 November, 2010

China hand James Fallows expends a lot of time and words reassuring Americans that China is not the unstoppable, omnipotent superpower they fear it to be. Reality is more complicated, he argues, especially when viewed up close, from within China, where he has spent years. However, a Fallows cover story in the current Atlantic warns of one technology in which China is leaving the west in its dust: the quest for ways to burn coal without emitting carbon. In exhorting the west to greater effort in pursuit of clean coal, Fallows takes aim at one of the environmental movement's most sacred bovines: the...

13 November, 2010

In 1909, Henry Ford said buyers could have any color Model T they wanted, "as long as it's black." One hundred and one years later, Apple, too, seems unable to produce an iPhone 4 in any color but black. Here's why: [This video uses Flash, so Apple iWhatever users click here.] Source: JLE...

01 November, 2010

Please don't think me old, but I grew up in a suburb of New York City, listening to Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger games on a radio the size of a bread box, powered by vacuum tubes. The experience was formative in the sense that it left me with the belief baseball games are best seen on the radio, in singer Terry Cashman's evocative phrase. Tonight at 10, I set out from Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the 75 km. drive to my home on a remote stretch of Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes. Before pulling out of the parking lot, I plugged...

29 October, 2010

Contrarian reader Denis Falvey demurs: Heroism is not the same thing as sainthood; it doesn't mean doing the impossible, it means doing that which is in the finest nature of being human. Sully demonstrated the determination, willingness, and ability to apply his considerable skill and training under extreme pressure, with courage, grace, and hope, engendering these qualities in those around him, to succeed where others would probably have failed He behaved as we would all wish to - in the finest character of humanity, and with no apparent thought for headlines. That's not luck....

20 October, 2010

Patrick Smith, pilot-columnist at Salon, chides the media for cheapening the currency of heroism in the US Airways Hudson River ditching: Moneyquote: This is tough for the networks to work with, I know, but Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger and his first officer, for all their guts and talent, weren't heroes so much as the luckiest pilots in the world. If fate decrees that your engines are to become choked with geese with no chance of reaching an airport, by all means let it happen in daylight, in reasonably good weather, overhead a smoothly flowing river alongside a major city. Change even one of...

19 October, 2010

Benoît Mandelbrot, 85, the iconoclastic mathematician who coined the term fractal and helped inject the digital revolution with creative artistry, died last Thursday at his home in Cambridge, Madssachusetts. Here, in a TED talk, he talks about his work: ...

18 October, 2010
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