encountering your past self
Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, now being performed at the Keegan Theatre, resonates poignantly in our age of cheap, easy, and ubiquitous digital recording. Imagine thirty years from now looking back at your Facebook News Feed, or at your e-mail archive. Imagine looking through the old digital photos piled up on your hard drive [...]
Tagged: review
balances in stress responses
In her interesting book, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, Esther Sternberg describes how the brain’s hormonal stress response balances susceptibility to inflammatory and infectious diseases. Stress stimulates hormones that repress immune cell functions that cause inflammation. Hence a rat strain that reacts more to stress is less susceptible to a common [...]
Tagged: biology
books or greeting cards?
“Content” producers — journalists and writers, book authors, musicians, film-makers, and similar professions — are becoming digital goods producers. Person thinking about how digital goods producers can make money might ponder two old-fashioned paper goods: books and greeting cards. According to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, from 2001 to 2007, greeting card publishers received about 50% [...]
Tagged: text
medicine
Gold and silver figures on wooden pedestals. Red velvet laid to make a boy’s trophy shelf. A grown man’s pride in heads mounted on a wall. The cure for a bad back is to lie on the floor. A glass of milk will ease insomnia. A shot of whiskey is good for the heart.
the fate of traditional print media
Traditional print media are facing major challenges from digital communications networks that allow everybody to share written words at low cost. The U.S. newspaper industry reports tremendous opportunities and exhibits fiery indignation at the newspaper industry’s ongoing meltdown. As recent analysis has highlighted, general-interest mass-market periodicals seem to have lost any special value as a [...]
Tagged: text
U.S. advertising expenditure, 1998-2007
The U.S. Census Bureau’s Service Annual Surveys include data on advertising expenditure from 1998 to 2007. I’ve extracted and compiled these advertising data and compared them to widely cited figures from the Coen advertising expenditure dataset. The Service Annual Surveys use statistically representative surveys of firms. The survey reports classify and aggregate firms’ revenues by [...]
Tagged: advertising
we interrupt this nerdfest…
To bring you a video report on a freaky fashion show in Crystal City:
U.S. information and communications industries revenue, 1998-2007
The U.S. Census Bureau’s Service Annual Survey is a great source of data on the information and communications industries. I’ve put together a dataset based on this source to make the data for 1998 to 2007 easier to use. The Service Annual Surveys cover various categories of revenue, expenditure, and inventories. The data are collected [...]