From Mars to a Second Life Bot
NASA has an artificial spokesman in Second Life to answer questions
Author Archives: jeremy
The Predictable Human (and a Privacy Issue)
A study of mobile phone data shows that we are extraordinarily consistent about our movements. Mobile phone data, unsurprisingly, provides rich pickings for researchers since we carry one around with us all the time, and, unlike dollar bills, it’s more likely to stick with one person. But some have questioned the ethics of such a… Read More »
Bluetooth Tracking
Research from Purdue University shows that Bluetooth would be a very good way to track travel time. Bluetooth devices give off unique IDs which could be used to measure speed and movement of pedestrians and vehicles. But why stop there? Wouldn’t it be possible to track people via their Bluetooth signal, if you knew one… Read More »
How to Get Your Pitch Read Part XIV
One way to try to get the journalist to read beyond the headline/subject is the EMBARGOED tag: Although it does sound somewhat pompous, and can backfire if it’s not a story worth breaking an embargo for. Likewise a subject line prefaced by BREAKING NEWS: As you can see, MySpace’s PR seems to think anything to… Read More »
The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News
(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net) CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the ‘freshness’ of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a ‘developing story’ label.) This kind of thing is helpful in that the… Read More »