Category: Web/Tech

I want my Felix Salmon

Employees said they were told Thursday that most of Portfolio’s Web
site staff would be dismissed and that much of the content unique to
the site would be dropped.

Please keep him, we need him (and Zubin too).  I hold out hope in that word "most."  Here is the story.  Media, like new library books, are being hurt by the downturn and the slowing of advertising dollars.  I fear that the non-independent blogosphere may be in for a bit of a financial bloodbath.  So often the bloggers were an "investment in long-term name and image" rather than a profit center.

Update: So far, so good.  Felix lives!

Is there a credit crunch?

Here is a good piece rebutting the Minneapolis Fed study.  One point made is this:

…there is the inconvenient matter that the Federal Reserve and
the Treasury went out and did all that stuff they did in order to prevent a
massive breakdown in lending to the real economy. … Now this does
allow sceptics to say, "Well, how do we know things would have collapsed"? We
don’t, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that current lending takes
into account massive government intervention to make sure that lending
continued. The latter therefore can’t be used to argue that the former wasn’t
necessary.

On these questions I am more of a pessimist than is Alex.

The Singularity is Near

Telepathy has always been a sign of kookiness but synthetic telepathy heh that’s just around the corner.

The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would
allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The
concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an
electroencephalograph, or EEG…

The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new
one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some
training, could stop and start his brain’s alpha waves to compose Morse code
messages.

Here is a previous post in the series.