Upside-Down House, Edinburgh – NYT

A Scottish House, Traditional Yet Modern – NY Times 16sep08

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/greathomesanddestinations/17gh-scotland.html

… the architects envisioned a house that combined the coziness of a Highland croft with the airiness of a Swedish or Danish modern home. The result? A pair of rectangular boxes, one perched on the other, with the sleeping areas downstairs surrounded by windowless 12-inch-thick white walls, and the light-filled living areas on top. Not surprisingly, the original owners called it the Upside-Down House.

Sea Power – update

Power From the Restless Sea – NYT 23sep08

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/23tidal.html

Roughly 100 small companies around the world are working on converting the sea’s power to electricity. Many operate in Europe, where governments have pumped money into the industry. Companies and governments alike are betting that over time, costs will come down. Right now, however, little electricity is being generated from the ocean except at scattered test sites around the world.

Scottish companies:

http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
http://www.pelamiswave.com/

NYTimes – Air Taxis Fly Into Financial Turbulence

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/business/20taxi.html?adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1211308166-Yok7l59Ik9cGTb20QzIOSA

DayJet has about 1,600 members, nearly all of them business travelers, who pay an annual fee to register. About 200 are frequent fliers. “Our average ticket price is in the $600 to $700 range, exactly where we want to be” for flights of less than 300 miles, he said. But the tight credit markets have put its future in jeopardy.

Test post from Treo

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NYTimes – Robot surgery

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04moll.html?ref=health

A robot’s ability to deftly handle small tools may lead to a less invasive procedure and faster recovery for a patient. Robots also can protect surgeons from physical stress and exposure to X-rays that may force them into premature retirement.

NYTimes – Friend-based Web indexing

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/technology/04essay.html?ref=technology

The proliferating number of blogs, user-generated content services and online news sources has created a dense information jungle that no human could machete his or her way through in a lifetime, let alone in an afternoon of surreptitious procrastination at work.

Search engines like Google, so effective for general information hunting, do a poor job of cutting through these thickets of user-generated material…

“The question from our standpoint is, how you find signal in the noise?”…

That’s where the sites like FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Readr, Mugshot and others try to harness the wisdom of friends. They let their users choose whose feeds they want to follow — the relationship does not have to be reciprocal — and allow them to restrict their own feeds only to people with whom they feel comfortable.

Following the feeds of people you like and admire, these companies say, allows the serendipitous discovery of needles in the information haystack. “Friends are likely to have some similar interests and tastes. Just the fact that your friends find it interesting should make it more interesting to you,” said Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed’s four founders, all of them former Google engineers.

NYTimes – Xobni: Outlook index/search

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?ref=technology

…free downloadable software that, once installed, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages quickly and easily searchable.

www.xobni.com