If you’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma or anything else by Michael Pollen, then you are aware of just how ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is. Every can of Coke, dollop of Heinz Ketchup and Fig Newton is full of the stuff. It’s hard to avoid, but it’s also pretty easy to identify on a [...]
I’m not one for being rash and I am not particularly worried about privacy online. I used Friendster frequently for a couple of years and I remember when people’s accounts started mentioning “moving to MySpace because it’s better,” and frankly I can not remember for the life of me what the argument was. Nonetheless, I [...]
You waited in line, possibly overnight. You spent over $500 (not including accessories). You canceled all of your Friday night social obligations and went directly home to play with your new (and possibly only) friend, the iPhone. You plug it in and wait for the magic to happen, and for any number of reasons, your [...]
Going to Europe in the summer is about as much as you can ask for out of travel. Most people will tell you to stay away during the tourist season, but if you want to be there when the weather is great, you’ll have to put up with some other Americans making you want to [...]
There are a lot of angry people in the world. These people typically have a number of gripes, and sometimes one of them stands above everything else. Those who have web savvy might even take it to the rest of the world through a passionate blog or unifying community website. I was interested in what [...]
There are a number of personalized portals out there that help aggregate your personal world in one place: My Yahoo!, Windows Live, Google Ig, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and others. I use none of them; instead I prefer the venerable about:blank. But lots and lots of people do, and if not for the first generation of personalized [...]
After 9/11/01, the CDC Division of Public Health Surveillance with help from Homeland Security implemented a new program for tracking possible bioterrorist threats, known as syndromic surveillance. Instead of relying on medical diagnosis of individual doctors, the system looks for statistical anomalies across the symptoms reported in recent emergency room visits and notifies epidemiologists when [...]
Ever since George Soros announced that he would be donating $3 million to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, debate over the e-journal versus traditional journals has been heating up. An article today from the BBC points out some a few critics attacking the net journal initiative.
In many ways, these criticisms are the same ones being [...]
One of the great parts about having friends in town is the excuse it gives you to drag them to all sorts of places you always want to go, but never have the time. At the top of my list was the MIT Museum, which is just down the street, and offers free admission, but [...]
An experiment in distributed storytelling: while attending South by Southwest, every time I went to take a picture, I was preempted by another, more photo savvy individual. So where’s my photo album? Take a tour with some of my friends:
playing kickball, acquiring a “tan” (that’s me way in the back, credit: min jung)
first meal with [...]