loose wire | blog – Page 141 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

The Big Chill

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

Freeman and Ferguson in a tank

Football (OK, soccer) is pushing to the forefront of adopting interesting technologies. Here’s one I hadn’t heard from Bolton Wanderers, where players enter a chamber at minus 120 degrees Celsius to enhance muscle recovery after training. It’s called cryotherapy, according to the Daily Mail:

The technique was originated in Japan in 1978 to help arthritis sufferers and patients with joint conditions. In time, athletes claimed it enhanced muscle recovery and reduced muscle pain. [Bolton’s new head of sports science and medicine Richard] Freeman said: “It’s made from liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen mixed to the right proportion to become liquid synthetic air. It’s quite safe despite the temperatures.

“It’s still in its infancy but players benefit. It’s like stretching before a game. There’s little scientific evidence why it works but it clearly does. The players like it and feel they benefit. After a heavy training session, a weights session or an intense game, they feel better quicker and it has been shown to improve muscle structure and muscle function.

Cryotherapy, according to Wikipedia, stretches from applying an ice pack to this chamber approach, which is properly called cryogenic chamber therapy:

The chamber is cooled, typically with liquid nitrogen, to a temperature of –110 C. The patient is protected from acute frostbite with socks, gloves and mouth and ear protection, but in addition to that, wears nothing but a bathing suit. The patients spends a few minutes in the chamber. During treatment the average skin temperature drops 12 C, while the coldest skin temperature can be 5 C. The core body temperature remains unchanged during the treatment, while after it, it may drop slightly. Curiously enough, some patients compare the feeling to sauna at +110 C. Release of endorphins occurs, resulting in analgesia (immediate pain relief).

Want one of your own? Buy the CryoCabin CYRODOC from the Zwolle-based company of the same name:

Treatment in the CRYODOC CryoCabin takes only 3 minutes at a temperature of -130 Cº to -150 Cº , producing several important salutary effects throughout the body: energy boost, skin regeneration and rejuvenation, protection against fading skin, strengthening of the immune system, fighting stress and chronic fatigue, increased metabolic rate, weight reduction, fighting cellulite, pain reduction, and generally improving the overall state of health.

I’ll spare you some of the more graphic pictures on their website (think cellulite and elbow rash. But I like the way this lady’s earrings twinkle in her CryoCabin:

Come in, the air is lovely

Why giving players the cold shoulder – and everything else – is keeping Bolton Poles apart | the Daily Mail

Technorati Tags: cryotherapy, football, soccer, therapy

Enough Mainstream Silliness, Please: The Social Web Works

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

0 Comment

I’m a big fan of mainstream media — course I am, I work for them — but I’m also a big fan of the other stuff. Like Wikipedia. It’s usually the first place I start if I’m trying to familiarize myself with a new subject, even a new one.

Which is why I get uppity when mainstream media disses Wikipedia with the kind of broad-brush strokes it usually accuses the online world of making. Like this one from The Boston Globe, in a story (not a column) about social finance sites:

The wisdom of the crowd may be a fine way to discover the most amusing YouTube video, but Wikipedia has been vilified for inaccuracies, and the online world hardly has a reputation as a trustworthy source.

In one short sentence the writer manages to dismiss

YouTube as a mere site for “amusing” videos,
the “wisdom of the crowd” as a mere mechanism for finding stuff,
Wikipedia as apparently the mere butt of vilifiers, and
the online world as, basically, untrustworthy.

Sources? Examples? A measure of balance? Er, none.

Now I like the Globe, and I love the IHT, where I read this, so I’m guessing this might just have been a bit of sloppy editing or last-minute “background” so enamored of editors. But frankly I can find very little vilifying of Wikipedia, at least if one counterbalances the criticism with the praise — and the sheer numbers: nearly 2 million articles in English, in the top 10 websites. (The best source, by the way, for criticism of Wikipedia is, er, Wikipedia; the piece has 125 external references.)

So, come on, mainstream journalists. The time is past for sniffy, unsubstantiated asides about things like Wikipedia. The social web has already established itself and proved itself. It ain’t perfect, but neither are we.

Sharing the wealth – The Boston Globe

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, journalism, media, web 2.0, social networks, social web

Cellphone Spikes and Disaster Management

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

2 Comments

Steven Levitt makes a good point on the Freakonomics blog about the spike in cellphone usage after the Minneapolis bridge collapse which alerted at least one carrier to an emergency before the news hit. His conclusion:

This would seem to hints at strategies that could be useful for coordinating quick emergency response more generally, as well as military/intelligence applications.

One commenter suggests that this may simply throw up lots of false positives, while another says the real problem is in identifying the cause of the spike — disaster, or a radio station offering $1,000 to the 26th caller?

Seems to me that you should be able to tell pretty quickly where the spike originates — lots of people calling from stranded cars on a bridge are unlikely to indicate a phone-in competition. Perhaps if cellphone masts and base stations also included cameras and/or two-way communication devices it would be possible for cellphone engineers to be able to not only assess the situation but open their communications up to rescue services, who could then monitor the situation and convey instructions and information to those in the affected area.

Technorati Tags: disasters, cellphones, minneapolis, bridge, networks

How To Blow It From “From”

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

1 Comment

I’m amazed by how many times this happens, and it always seems to be PR folk in the technology industry who are the culprits: An email where the sender, say Geoff Blah, hasn’t filled in the ‘From’ field in his email program or service so it appears in my inbox as from ‘gblah@aol.com’ or, sometimes, just gblah. (Yes, very lame for a PR person to be using their AOL account to send out pitches, but that’s another story.)

Why is not having any ‘from’ name not good?

Well, first off, it looks shoddy. It would be like sending me a letter and not bothering to actually put your name at the bottom, requiring me to decipher your handwriting. Or handing out namecards without an actual name on. Your emails are your business cards.
Secondly, it suggests a lack of technological prowess that may undermine you, or your agency’s, claims of being ‘best of breed’ or whatever is the cool term these days. One I received this morning was from a PR agency that claims expertise in consumer technology and IT technology. (The same agency hasn’t bothered to check its DNS registration, so entering the website’s name without the www’s — blah.com, not www.blah.com – – will result in an error. This further erodes my confidence in their much trumpeted ‘technical savvy.’)
Thirdly, it raises the chance of the email itself being discarded as spam. A lot of spam filters check these header fields for unusual or inconsistent activity and not having the ‘From’ alias field filled is one of them.
Fourthly, it irritates me and I hate being irritated in the morning.

So, all together now: Fill in your name in your email program or online service. Anything less looks like you’re either in a real hurry or you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Technorati Tags: email, public relations, pitches, etiquette