Author Archives: Steve Mays

Covering election returns

Posted on by

Election night was a big night for radio station news departments. Or, they were back in the 70’s in the little town where I worked.

The candidates would crowd into the county clerk’s office and watch as the votes were written on a big chalk board. The radio station news guy would setup a small transmitter and send back updates that were broadcast live. You were either there… listened to us… or heard the results the next morning at the local coffee shop.

When I started working with The Missourinet (a statewide radio network) in the mid-80’s, it wasn’t that different. One of our reporters would set up at the Secretary of State’s office with a dedicated land-line (before cell phones). Maybe they used one of the state’s phones, I don’t recall. But the reporter would phone in regular updates to the network newsroom where they’d go out to affiliate stations around the state.

Sometime in the 90’s technology improved to the point where we could Telnet into the the state computers (via very slow modem’s) and access the numbers directly. And then report them over the network.

Fast forward to the Web. No more Telnet but those early websites were very glitchy. And slow. But they got better every election. It was a wonderful thing. Anyone with internet access could see the returns as they were tabulated. But it was still easier for radio stations (and their listeners) to take our reports than produce their own.

Last week one of our news directors stopped by my office to talk about what we would do online for the upcoming election. Missouri’s Senate race is the Main Event and we’ll have reporters at both candidates venue. They’ll do interviews and feed those back to the network where reporters will be working the Secretary of State’s website.

One the other end of the information pipe, people will still be listening to the radio and watching TV but I expect Twitter and Facbook to be where many get their first information. (Does the Secretary of State have a Twitter feed?). And most of it will be mobile.

Eventually we’ll all vote electronically, without standing in line. And we’ll see the results in near real time.

Will this elections more susceptible to fraud? Girl, please! Is the TSA making flying safer?

Scott Adams: The “I Wonder” App

Posted on by

Posted in 2010

“You’ll be wearing your Bluetooth earpiece –  a future version of it – most of the day. And it will be listening to everything you say. When it hears you say, “I wonder…” it will fire up a search engine and wait for the rest of the sentence.  The software will know you’re using an earpiece, so the answer will be delivered as a brief verbal summary, like a smart friend whispering in your ear.

In the first versions of this service, you’ll ask simple questions, such as “I wonder what ingredients go into a margarita,” or “I wonder where the nearest Starbucks is.”  In later versions, as search engines and content sources evolve, you’ll have access to more complicated answers, all with whisper-friendly brevity.

Now imagine that your earpiece has a camera. Google is already working on a search engine that will identify an object from a digital image. Someday you will be able to look at a flower and say, “I wonder what type of flower that is,” and the answer will be whispered in your ear.

Now here’s the cool-spooky part. As the technology improves, the voice in your ear will become more natural, and smarter, and it will be like your invisible friend. It will learn your preferences in a way no human ever has.  I think it will be able to keep you company and make you less lonely. The whisper-in-your-ear aspect of this technology has the potential to feel like human contact but without the inconvenience of an actual human.”

New studies on effects of psychedelics

Posted on by

“…the brain is like a TV set that is “hardwired” into the single “channel” of everyday physical reality — Rick Strassman calls it “channel normal.” What psychedelics may do when used and administered properly is “retune the receiver wavelength of the brain,” thus providing us with regular, repeated, reliable access to other levels of reality that surround us at all times but are not normally accessible to our senses. It is even possible that these long-reviled drugs open a secret doorway inside our own minds allowing us to approach the Holy Grail of quantum physics — freestanding parallel universes and the intelligent beings who inhabit them. If that is so then the ability of psilocybin to release terminal cancer patients from their fear of death through “an abrupt change of consciousness” makes perfect sense — for they would know from direct experience that even when the television set is broken the television signal keeps right on broadcasting.”

— Boing Boing