Email was the second “killer App”, a feature so obviously superior, useful or even necessary that the need to get hold of it and make it work for you drives the further adoption of the parent technology. Using email was the force behind the rapid expansion of access to the Internet once the National Science Foundation turned it over to the public at large.  And the thing just grew and grew to the point at which it is now a fixture, something taken for granted, which gains notice only when it’s not available for some reason. A number of start-up operations are seeking to get email off the dime on which it now reposes. Their arguments are not inconsiderable one: the available systems are all based on old technology…in terms of the subjective digital calendar, it’s ancient technology.There is too much traffic from sources you don’t know and don’t want to hear from.  It’s hard to do certain things with email. And so on and so on. There’s plenty wrong with email as we know it.  So, some bright sparks are doing a re-think of email, and the various little companies are thrashing out various techniques they feel might re-invigorate email and give the old tub a good shot of  wind in the sails. And it’s not an easy task.  The new versions have to offer something dramatically new and better, without  allowing any degradation of existing performance or loss of capabilities. It may be turn out to be a case similar to that of the QWERTY keyboard. There is plenty wrong with the QWERTY layout. And some interesting and definitely superior keyboard layout designs have been suggested over the years, almost all of them better than what we have.  But the old pattern is so widely displaced that the momentum for changing it is very hard to generate and keep up.  So,Burn on, Bright Sparks and good luck to you!

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508471/startups-aim-to-bring-e-mail-back-to-the-future/

Way, way back boys and girls, there was a man named Newton Minnow. He was an official of the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory body charged by Congress to do various things.  Mr. Minnow made a speech to some association of TV producers, at one of their meetings. He was pretty critical of it all. In fact he called American TV, with a very few glorious exceptions, ’a vast wasteland’.  This  phrase went into general language and was applied in other contexts by people who wanted to get a dig in at somebody else’s operation by calling whatever it was ‘a vast wasteland’.  TV folks were not happy with the indictment, because by their standards American TV was phenomenally successful. Mr. Minnow meant that US broadcasting was vapid, dull, insipid, uninspired, at times frankly boring and at other times close to degrading. What is that song? “If they could see me now!” Poor Minnow, were he to re-appear, would find every one of his strictures raised to the power of ten. Now a new book examines one aspect of the Waseland: the amount and kind of broadcasting devoted to explaining science to the public. It sounds quite interesting. One of the themes explored is the tendency to include Zap! and Bang! into science programming,either in the form of Things That Go, well, Bang, or as speedy, colorful graphics which end in a big explosion. There is quite clearly a tendency to go with explorations of erupting volcanoes, potential mega-disasters, asteroid impacts, tsunamis, earthquakes and similar spectacular events. The science often gets reduced to a commentary on how, why or when the spectacular event can unfold. OK, maybe. But I think  making scienceTV, is very difficult.  And the surprising thing is that so much of it is so good. Finding analogies in our macro world for processes on the molecular or quantum levels must be pretty tough. It’s almost as tough as translating that analogy into a program, without doing violence to the facts or creating a parade of equations and talking heads.If anybody asks me, the main thing wrong with science on TV is that there is too little of it and too much Pseudo-Science. Ancient astronauts? Mayan Death Calendar? No, sorry. I sometimes watch one of those while fixing supper but I almost always lose my temper and start shouting at the TV set. You’d think I’d learn. So, keep it up the real science TV, fellas. It’s tough, but you’re getting better. And shoot down an Ancient Astronaut for me, preferably into the Bermuda Triangle.

Science on American Television: A History

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette University of Chicago Press: 2012. 296 pp. $45

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7428/full/492184a.html

A publication called The Old Farmers Almanac has been appearing for the last 117 years. The OFA is a compendium of information that might prove useful to an audience largely employed in working the land and anxious to take  advantage of any break to be had in that very tough game. One of the OFA’s strong points for its original rural audience and for a large number of modern folks who dig either for fun, for a living or for science’s sake is the publication of “moon signs”. OK, no more smirking.  The moon signs are said to clue farmers, gardeners and others of the agra persuasion about when to plant and when to hold off. According to accumulated lore, when certain lunar positions obtain, the weather on earth is mild and good for letting crops get a head start. Conversely, when the signs are of another configuration, the weather will be cooler and more unpleasant. Long range weather forecasts are also a feature of the OFA. These are made by a man with the pleasant title of  Prognosticator. What a cool thing to say at a party, when somebody asks what line of work you’re in! Oh, I’m a Prognosticator, you say, and watch the faces. The current Prognosticator at the OFA is a a retired math prof, who uses methods old and new to predict what the weather will be a year from now. So, how does he do?  May, he gets mostly right. The winter months are trickiest. I used to love Almanacs when I was a kid.  There were about half a dozen on the market. They had everything in them: the Constitution, the names of all the States with capitals, stuff about science, history, politics. I could stretch out on the carpet for hours and just flip through the thing. A lot of them are gone now, casualties of the Web. But the OFA trudges on, in the light of the moon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/us/for-40-years-predicting-weather-for-grubers-almanack.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1355331707-jTywzDudSgpv4fSJ52lsmQ