William F. Garrity

From Josh Lowensohn in Webware.com: 

Scour is a search tool that blends results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN together in one stream. You can hot-swap between the three, or break out any single result into another search. If you come across a bad result, or one you think should go above the others, you can also vote it up (or down) or leave a comment--something similar to what Wikia did with its hackable search engine.

On top of the basic layer of search interaction there's also a paying element to the site. Every query you make has a certain point value, with interactions like commenting and voting giving you more points. Once you reach a certain point limit you can then convert points you have into a cash gift card. There's also a referral program where you get a small percentage of the points from the searches your friends do. 

From http://www.healthmap.org/about.php: 

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Anne Eisenberg in today's The New York Times writes about flexible displays.  Such would lead to tremendous advances in portable devices. 

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled

By ANNE EISENBERG

CONSUMERS like large displays on the mobile devices they use for reading an e-mail message or an e-book, but they also like to tuck those devices into their pockets. But the bigger the screen on a cellphone or an e-reader, the sooner it outgrows pocket size.

Now a hallmark feature of these screens — their rigidity — is changing. New technologies are developing that make displays flexible, foldable or even as rollable as papyrus, so that large screens can be unfurled from small containers.

One new mobile device, the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger.

Because the Readius is pocket-sized, but has a generous, supple screen, people with five minutes to spare in a taxi, bus or subway can use the dead time to open it, read a page or two of a book and then return the device to a shirt pocket, said Karl McGoldrick, the chief executive of Polymer Vision, the company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that created the device.

The Readius may even help stop people from obsessing over their e-mail: with the device, spare moments for reading may be put to a possibly better use — say, a novel by Stendhal. But if their good intentions fail, the device has a wireless connection to download e-mail as well as books.

The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.

The Readius will be introduced in England, Italy and Germany this fall, and in the United States early in 2009, Mr. McGoldrick said. Its battery lasts for about 30 hours of reading — long enough to get through “The Red and the Black,” and possibly a chunk of “War and Peace.” Pages can be read under a variety of lighting conditions, even including full sunlight, he said. The price is not yet set, but Thomas van der Zijden, vice president for marketing and sales, said the Readius would be more expensive than the Kindle, which now is selling for $359.

The Readius is not the only entry in the area of flexible displays. “It’s an exciting example, but there are going to be a slew of other devices coming soon, too,” said Shawn O’Rourke, director of engineering at the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University at Tempe, which focuses on the technology’s future commercialization.

Mr. O’Rourke defined flexible displays as “different than a BlackBerry or notebook,” with their traditional glass backings. “These displays are thin, lightweight and rugged — and they bend,” he said. The underlying substrates that support the display are typically either plastic or metal foil.

The market for flexible displays is likely to grow rapidly, said Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at the iSuppli Corporation, a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif. “Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are mobile, but also have compelling user interfaces,” she said.

Flexible displays offer the advantages of easy, relatively inexpensive and safe shipping and handling, compared with conventional rigid screens, she said. Her firm forecasts that the total market for flexible displays will grow to $2.8 billion by 2013.

Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, says that flexible displays are not entirely new on the market, but that previous ones have been relatively low-resolution applications — like those in smart cards and point-of-purchase signs — “not high-resolution ones that have the kind of image quality that users expect.”

The Readius images have this potential, he said, because the displays are powered by what is called an active matrix — transistors behind each pixel that can potentially provide fast switching and high performance.

“Polymer Vision’s technology is unusual,” Mr. Semenza said. “It’s hard to make an active matrix on something other than glass.”

If Polymer Vision succeeds in “making these transistor arrays,” he said, “you’ll have the ability to make high-performance displays on flexible substrates that look as good as a notebook display on any high-performance L.C.D.”

THE Readius, which so far displays 16 shades of gray on its screen, is not at that state yet, but Polymer Vision is hoping to add color and video capability in the future, Mr. McGoldrick said. A prototype for a color model was demonstrated at a trade show in May.

Mr. O’Rourke of the Flexible Display Center likes the look of the new generation of supple screens, but he also likes their toughness. “Some of them we’ve beaten with hammers, and they still run,” he said. “No one could do that with a BlackBerry.”

Luis Suarez writes in today's The New York Times how he's using email less and other forms of messaging, more. 

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

By LUIS SUAREZ

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.

I was in a good position to give up most of my other e-mail because I’m a “social computing evangelist” for I.B.M. and have used social software tools for years to collaborate on projects and to share knowledge. I live in the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain and report to managers in the United States and the Netherlands. Between time differences and participation in various projects, it’s important that I spend my time efficiently.

I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions — maybe they will have a better idea than mine.

I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall. The postings in response were overwhelmingly positive — but I also encountered some skepticism. Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.

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Maggie Johnson in the June 23, 2008, Business Week writes about software tools/applications designed to help keep workers on task in workplaces ever more full of distractions (created by software tools/applications). 

Managing June 12, 2008, 5:00PM EST

May We Have Your Attention, Please?

With the workplace ever more full of distractions, researchers are developing tools to keep us on task
It's official: The average knowledge worker has the attention span of a sparrow. Roughly once every three minutes, typical cubicle dwellers set aside whatever they're doing and start something else—anything else. It could be answering the phone, checking e-mail, responding to an instant message, clicking over to YouTube (GOOG), or posting something amusing on Facebook. Constant interruptions are the Achilles' heel of the information economy in the U.S. These distractions consume as much as 28% of the average U.S. worker's day, including recovery time, and sap productivity to the tune of $650 billion a year, according to Basex, a business research company in New York City.

Soon, however, the same kinds of social networking software and communications technologies that make it deliciously easy to lose concentration may start steering us back to the tasks at hand. Scientists at U.S. research labs are developing tools to help people prioritize the flood of information they face and fend off irrelevant info-bytes. New modes of e-mail and phone messaging can wait patiently for an opportune time to interrupt. One program allows senders to "whisper" something urgent via a pop-up on a screen.

Innovations like these belong to a sub-branch of computer science that's geekily called "attentional user interfaces." The goal, says Scott E. Hudson, a professor in this discipline at Carnegie Mellon University, is finding a way to reap benefits from the data deluge "without having it destroy us on the attention side."

Ours is hardly the first generation to fret about distraction. Humans are essentially interruption-driven because they must be alert to change, says Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. "We're not built to stay on task," he contends. But people in past eras never had to cope with so much beeping, blinking, pinging, and ringing. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine, monitored thousands of hours of workplace behavior. Her studies documented that most workers switch gears every few minutes, and once they're distracted, it can take nearly half an hour to get back on track. "When you see the hard numbers, it kind of hits home how bad it really is," says Mark.

A TRUSTED "PRESENCE"

One solution might be to construct a work world supported by all-seeing, ultra-organized digital assistants. Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher at Microsoft (MSFT), has spent more than a decade creating artificial-intelligence systems that observe humans at work. These software programs, which reside on computers and various handheld gadgets, watch and listen to the user, tracking digital calendars and noting key contacts. And they apply mathematical formulas known as Bayesian probability models to predict the cost and benefit of interrupting someone at work. Having served as a guinea pig, Horvitz considers his latest prototype a trusted "presence." Recently, he received an urgent e-mail from a new intern. His e-mail triage program, called Priorities, ranked the message 100—a perfect score on a timeliness scale of 1-100. That afternoon, an announcement of "free food" down the hall ranked an ignorable 6.

This trusted presence isn't ready for prime time. But Priorities inspired Microsoft to create Outlook Mobile Manager, a product that enables Outlook to recognize urgent e-mails and to do "presence forecasting." That means users of OMM 2.0 can essentially let the software decide whether e-mails should be routed to their computers, phones, or some other device. Future versions of Windows will likely include another feature born in Horvitz's lab. Called Bounded Deferral, the feature holds messages in reserve until the recipient is ready for a "cognitive break." The ideal, says Horvitz, is "software that takes the fragility of human attention into deep consideration."

In contrast to Horvitz's sweeping, soup-to-nuts attention management strategy, IBM (IBM) favors a human-centric à la carte approach. One prototype it's testing is an instant-messaging answering machine known as IMSavvy that allows messages to tap gently at your consciousness. Invented by Gary Hsieh, a graduate student of Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon who served as an intern at IBM, the program can sense when you are away or busy by your typing and mouse patterns. It protects your focus by telling would-be interrupters you are not available. But it also suggests ways they can get through to you. Future versions may gauge "interruptibility" by using audio sensors, too. "It's just what your mom said: Don't interrupt when someone is talking,'" Hudson says.

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