Ever wonder why it is that FuturePhone (now defunct), Radio Handi, FreeConferenceCall, and PartyLine Connect all have access numbers in the 712 area code? These services all claim to provide free services to you without a catch.

After a little research, I found out that you just have to make a long distance call to get them, so lunch isn’t entirely free. But I still wondered how these services get paid, and why are the access numbers all in Iowa?

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, “the founder created his own telephone company in Iowa. Iowa is apparently the only state taking advantage of an FCC kickback scheme that gives telco’s a portion of the fees generated from every inbound call to an Iowa number. So when you call (one of those Iowa telco’s access) phone number, a portion of any long distance fees you are paying go to the company. The kickback is apparently authorized via the Universal Service Fund. These kickbacks are enough on average to more than cover the international outbound calling fees (which are mostly carried via VOIP schemes).”

Alex Saunders goes into a little more detail how these services get paid. “The short answer is tax subsidies. The 712 model, as I refer to it, is really a variation on the 900 number model, but financed by taxpayers. Take a low cost call, terminate on a high cost carrier, and pocket the difference.”

• The first of these subsidies is the Universal Service Fund. Tiny Iowa, with just under 3 million residents last year, was the recipient of $86.5 million from the USF. The USF pays for maintenance and improvements to those local telephone plants, in addition to subsidizing user fees for local residents. The cost basis to provide service in those communities is dramatically lowered.
• The second subsidy is the tarrif itself. Most Iowa telephone companies (and there are a lot!) participate in the NECA Access Fee Pool. The NECA publishes a tarrif, which each company participating agrees to use, and then they split the revenues. The termination charges for those tarrifs are a significant source of revenue for the local phone companies. And, because they’re rural, the charges are often steeply higher than to terminate in an urban setting. In the “NFL” cities, you might expect to pay 6 to 8 tenths of a cent per minute for termination. The NECA tarrif is closer to 3 whole cents. Arbitrage the subsidized rural rate against your costs and, presto, you’ve got a winner!”

Read full article »

Check out this nicely designed site Spousenotes.com. It collects the random slips of paper that communicate life’s little thoughts. Post-It Notes, refrigerator whiteboards and loose-leaf paper—anything written from a loved one to another is a Spouse Note.

Why Spouse Notes? Because every relationship has its own language. Couples develop their own slang, pet names and catch phrases. There’s something terrifying, and liberating, about sharing these tiny personal moments with the rest of the world.

What if I dont have a spouse? Notes from boyfriends, girlfriends and live-ins will work too… I didn’t want to purposely exclude them, but the title “Significant-Other Notes” doesn’t roll off the tongue so well.

Check out the SN archive…

Are the United States intelligence services in a crisis, trying to fight 21st century threats with 1980s technologies? Blogs, wikis and modern web 2.0 technologies should be rolled out to every employee of NSA, CIA, FBI and law enforcement - now the New York Times agrees with me.

Ever since New York Times contributor Clive Thompson posted a piece on December 3, entitled Open-Source Spying, the blogosphere has gratefully picked up the discussion on why the US intelligence community hasn’t embraced modern technologies that every kid uses without second thought: Google, Flickr, Blogging, Wikipedia…. the list goes on and on.

I have posted about this topic back in March 2004, We Need Spy Blogs, so I am glad that Clive Thompson provides an update on how far the intelligence-gathering community has come over the last 30 months. Here’s an excerpt:

When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. The reality, he later wrote ruefully, was a colossal letdown.

Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to connect the dots.

By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. Web 2.0 technologies that encourage people to share information blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that scours the blogosphere, to find the most authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.

Read full article

With the holiday season getting underway, I meant to feature this recent post by David Pogue, technology columnist of the NY Times since 2000. He’s debunking the age-old question of whether there is any difference between a 13 vs. 5 megapix camera:

“We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13. I’m prepared to give away the punch line of this segment, because hey - the show doesn’t air till February, and you’ll have forgotten all about what you read here today, right?

Anyway, we ran the test for about 45 minutes. Dozens of people stopped to take the test; a little crowd gathered. About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. A handful of them attempted guesses’but were wrong. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.

I’m telling you, there was no difference.

Read full article 

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website, helping online travel shoppers save money by answering the question “Should you buy now or wait?”

I don’t know where I came across this site, but it puts you in touch with some serious data - predicting how airfares develop as a function of many variables, for example length of stay, day of travel, and where you fly. You can even slice the data any way you want, for example listing the cheapest destinations for a given day. One word: powerful.

• Know when to buy: Farecast’s airfare prediction shows if fares are rising or dropping. Based on the prediction, they provide a recommendation to buy now or buy later.
• Know where to buy: Farecast connects shoppers directly with the airlines sites. Travelers save money and get more value by booking directly - no booking fees, free bonus miles, and peace of mind with low fare guarantees.

Try it…

I came across a recent article in Real Simple, an article that’s fairly typical for this type of publication: 20 ways to plug hidden financial leaks — and save up to $3000 a year. When I first read the headline, I wondered how I stack up against their recommendations - I would rank myself pretty high, and it gave me the necessary push to fix the last remaining “money leaks” in my household.

A recently launched site by the makers of match.com offers a differerent approach to finding a meaningful relationship. While I didn’t find this particularly newsworthy, their domain name certainly caught my eye: chemistry.com. It’s their “belief that meaningful relationships are built on two equally important foundations: compatibility and chemistry. Other (match-making) sites may help you find out if you’re compatible, but only Chemistry’s next-generation system, based on years of research into human attraction and successful relationships, is designed to help you find both of these essential elements.”

Confused? Check out these sites with apparent references to scientific concepts:

• Nerve.com: A site about neuronal tissues?
• Nitro.com: Need to handle explosives?
• Oxygen.com: Surely, this must be about the all important element?

During a dinner conversation on my recent trip to Australia, one of the guests enquired about my line of work. After I mentioned that I am in pharmaceutical research, he professed his view that Big Pharma is “ignoring too many of the traditional medicines in favor of totally synthetic chemicals. Chemicals that are completely foreign to one’s body and inferior to nature’s own remedies”. It’s a sentiment that I hear all too often from non-scientists, providing me with an opportunity to set the record straight.

My guess is that part of the confusion comes from two sources:

• A synthetic chemical is somehow different from a nature-derived one, and
• traditional treatments originating from natural sources are most likely healthier than a synthetic chemical.

As to the first notion, your body couldn’t tell the difference between, say, Vitamin A from carrots vs. synthetic Vitamin A. Why? It’s the same molecule, the same darn thing. If anything, the synthetic Vitamin A has better quality because it is free from byproducts contained in the vegetable. The second idea posits that nature produces healthier medicinal drugs. Although there is tremendous value in traditional medicines developed over thousands of years, the lack of stringent quality controls has justly curtailed their use in the industrialized world. Concepts such as batch-to-batch consistency and a defined list of active ingredients are usually not associated with herbal concoctions, and as such, the end-user is taking his/her chances. In my view, traditional medicines taken out of their cultural context are dangerous indeed, much like illegal street drugs.

In a letter entitled Organic Rip-off in the December 19th issue of Chemical and Engineering News, Philip Sweetser of Hyde Park/VT takes aim at misconceptions about cancer-causing chemicals, something that plugs right into the previous discussion on natural vs. synthetic chemicals.

“The public has been brainwashed into believing that all synthetic chemicals are “bad” and are probable carcinogens. In reality, there is no difference between synthetic chemicals and natural substances when tested in the standard animal cancer test. Nearly half of all chemicals, whether natural or synthetic, test as carcinogens. This strongly suggests that the standard animal cancer tests are completely unreliable.”

“The amount of synthetic pesticide residue in plant foods is insignificant when compared with natural pesticides produced by the plants themselves. Of all dietary pesticides, 99.9% are natural toxins produced by the plants to defend themselves against fungi and animal predators.”

“Bruce Ames, professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that Americans are focused on synthetic chemicals that may cause cancer in humans, even at levels of parts per quintillion, while many of these same people are unaware that there are more than 1,000 natural chemicals in a cup of coffee. Only 22 of these have been tested in the standard animal cancer test, and 17 showed up as carcinogens. Thus, there are more cancer-causing chemicals in a single cup of coffee than you are likely to get from synthetic pesticides in a year. Ames says: “I don’t want to scare people away from drinking coffee. The problem isn’t the coffee - it is the high-dose animal tests.”

“The organic food industry is not only robbing the public’s wallet but, because of the exorbitant prices of organic foods, depriving many people of having adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables. The end result may well be increasing one’s risk for cancer by reducing fruits and vegetables in the diet. The reduced exposure to synthetic chemicals is insignificant.”

While I haven’t had much opportunity to redesign my clients’ websites lately, I have taken on a few tweaks for my own sites, www.iserloh.com and www.iserlohdesign.com. I suspect that some of you would join Cameron Moll in wondering why we creatives like to constantly redesign. “Like a kid in a candy store, we creatives redesign like it’s the new black. Why do we possess such an insatiable desire to refresh and remake? Why do we thrive on renewal?”

Moll’s article, Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign focuses on the difference between an “aesthetic-driven” desire to redesign, as opposed to a “purpose-driven” redesign. The former merely seeks “to refresh, the other aims to fully reposition and may or may not include a full refresh.”

Despite the obvious educational slant, I found his article remarkable for its case studies. Rather than pontificating about a concept, Moll pulls together several examples from the real world, complete with screenshots, that demonstrate how redesign is used to reposition a brand.

While checking out some of the best work on the web, I came across this acclaimed site, Low Morale, by cartoonist Laith Barani of Monkeehub. Low Morale is a series of animations portraying one man’s struggle to cope with the soul-sapping, will-to-live draining, life-force mugging, morale crushing experiences of office work.

Quite funny indeed.