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!”

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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…

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.

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I came across this great selection of notecards at indexed.blogspot.com, certainly appealing to scientists or people with dark humor…

“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.

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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…

Here is a common question that I got quite often when new clients contacted me at Iserloh Design: “I just want a website. Can you design it for, say, …. $500?”

Ahem. No.

For starters, only clients without any previous website experience would lowball the price, and merely required some quick education. But the question triggered another thought: Does the name, Iserloh Design, still adequately reflect the scope of services that the company provides?

Iserloh Design - it seemed to imply that it is all about putting together a design. Just designing the page elements. Done. That can’t be that expensive, can it?

The reality is that creating a successful website requires many components, many specialist skills, and many hours. What’s often forgotten is that a website is only one form of communication, besides face-to-face interactions and print media. To find one seemless solution working across different media, clients indeed need expert help to formulate, shape and implement a concept. Here’s where Bright Launch comes in:

With core expertise in design & programming (websites, e-commerce, bulletin and blog applications), Bright Launch’s experts can also advise you on related legal, marketing, and advertising matters. We will guide you from concept development to website launch, and help you grow your business with a clean, attractive and accessible internet presence at affordable prices.

 
Everything You Need to Succeed Online.™ Visit BrightLaunch.com now…

Rock star and activist Bono accepts the 2005 TEDPrize with a riveting talk about our moral obligation (and economic incentive) to help lift Africa out of poverty. He unveils his TEDPrize wishes by challenging the TED community to help build a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa; to tell people one billion times about the ONE campaign; and to connect every hospital, health clinic, and school in one African country, Ethiopia, to the Internet. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 28:37)

Learn more at TED.com…

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?