Brian Gongol
Gmail's "priority inbox" should be a warning sign
Gmail has done an excellent job of morphing into one of the best webmail services (if not the solitary best) available to the public. It didn't take long for Gmail to surge ahead of the competition -- just five years ago, it was still available by invitation only, and its storage limits were ten times bigger than the competitions' -- but the "priority inbox" tool is like a canary in a coal mine. First off, it's visually cluttering. Google's been the main battleground for a fight between visual clutter and new utilities for a while now, including on the iconic Google search homepage. But the emergence of (and apparent demand for) the priority inbox also telegraphs two other things: One, at least some users are so overwhelmed by their incoming email that they're willing to turn over the categorization and management of that incoming email to computers; that's a whole lot of abdication. Two, it says that users don't know how to effectively manage Gmail's filtering feature, which has been around almost since the start of the service. Filtering isn't difficult, and it's one of the most attractive options available in Gmail -- and it's also one of the most robust tools available for managing to repel spam and flag the messages that truly are the most important. Gmail users should already know to create a filter on behalf of the senders they really care about that either stars their messages automatically or adds a "priority" label to them.
Bernanke says the Federal budget deficit is "not sustainable"
Talk about your categorical understatement. He spoke at a news conference following the FOMC meeting today, which was the first time that's happened. The committee discussed inflation and economic-growth projections for the coming two or three years that really seem to hold out hope for a very strong 2013.
Apple says it wasn't trying to track users' movements
In response to public outcry from about a week ago that the iPhone was (apparently) secretly recording the movements of iPhone users and transmitting that information back to Apple via hidden files, the company has released a statement saying that the records weren't what people thought they were (Apple says they were records of nearby cell towers and WiFi hotspots, not GPS data), that it wasn't trying to track them (Apple says the data shouldn't have been stored as long as it was, and that a correction is coming), and that the company wasn't trying to use the data to track individuals at all (a claim whose veracity can't really be known from outside Apple's corporate walls). The initial announcements from the researchers who found the bug and the public outcry that followed were probably both overheated, and on the other hand there's probably at least someone at Apple who knew this was a problem long before it became public and either didn't speak up or didn't get anything done about it.
Yahoo sells the social-bookmarking site Delicious...
...to the guys who sold YouTube to Google. Now, that's some peculiar horse-trading. Social bookmarking was a fad that's past its prime already. That doesn't mean people won't continue to share links of interest, but the concept takes too long to explain and thus isn't really capable of working on a mass market. The appeal of YouTube, for instance, is quite simple: Watch videos anytime. The appeal of social bookmarking is harder to explain. And all of this happens against the backdrop of "What happened to Yahoo?" The company, once the name above all names among Internet directories, is still decidedly unclear about what it wants to do or be. It's still managed to turn a nice profit in the last few years, but its revenues have been in decline.
Facebook for scientists
It's called ResearchGate, and its founder is hoping to accelerate the pace of scientific research by connecting scientists to one another without making them wade through the stuffy scientific literature. One might note, though, that its main advantages -- speed and informality -- are likely to be what makes it less than durable. Bound sets of scientific journals will last virtually forever. Social networking websites won't.
Frightening video of the Tuscaloosa (Alabama) tornado
(Video) The trees between the cameraperson and the tornado really put its size into perspective. The outbreak of tornadoes yesterday looks like it was one of the biggest ever.
"The idea of hereditary legislators is as [...] absurd as an hereditary mathematician." - Thomas Paine
Who cares about the "royal" wedding?
"The prudent thing to do is assume earthquakes will continue"
That's not a prognostication for the Pacific Rim -- it's one for the central United States, where there's no substantial reason to believe the New Madrid Fault is anything but a still-ticking time bomb. The 200-year anniversary of the great quake there is coming up, and the long time that has passed is no guarantee there won't be another.
Let's not be surprised that internships are being abused
A research project finds that 17% of British companies in a small survey admitted to using interns as a source of cheap labor. The concept of an internship is not to displace paid labor, but to enhance the skills of an otherwise less-experienced potential worker in a way that benefits them more than it benefits the employer. Otherwise, it has to be a paid position.
