Jay Parkinson is a private physician practicing in Williamsburg, New York. In addition to house and office calls, he'll examine your boo-boos by emailed photos or webcam and let you know whether you need stitches, cream, or a pat on the head and a lollipop.

An e-Visit is a rapidly emerging concept that uses communication technology to manage health and disease. Many doctor visits can be avoided by simply talking with your doctor, or emailing photos, or video chatting face-to-face. Nearly every young adult has a digital camera or phone camera. Video chatting is becoming increasingly more common. I believe in harnessing these ubiquitous technologies to optimize your health. It's the wave of the future for affordable healthcare.

Link (via Apophenia)

ICANN -- who run the Internet's top-level domain system -- have been trying to retire .su, the old domain used by the Soviet Union. They ordered the .su registrar to stop selling .su domains, but the registrar continues to sell thousands of domains every year -- and they've just declared fire-sale pricing for new signups.

. One address that hasn't been retired is ".su" - assigned to the Soviet Union in 1990. It is still operating despite the country no longer existing, and despite the ".ru" TLD assigned to Russia in 1994.

There are currently 9648 sites under the domain. And apparently it is getting more popular - this time last year there were only 7206. Add to this the fact that the body operating ".su" has cut prices in response to an ICANN request to freeze new registrations, and the number of ex-Soviet sites that will have to be reassigned, and you have one almighty mess.

Link (via /.)

London has spent £200 million installing 10,000 CCTV cameras, and yet the proportion of crimes solved is going down, not up -- and some boroughs with the more cameras have the worse crime-solving rates.

• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.

• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.

• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.

• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.

• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.

• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras. cameras.

Link (via /.)

The Guardian has published a collection of annotated photos of famous writers' "writing rooms." I haven't lived in one place long enough for a decade to have a real writing room, but I'm hoping to put down roots soon and get something more permanent than a flat-pack desk covered in random toys surrounded by unsorted piles of books. Maybe a mahogany study lined with creepy Haunted Mansion-style busts, a wall of exotic masks and swords, deep horsehair armchairs, secret panels, and a fireplace.

I especially like the rooms from Geoff Dyer and Will Self (holy war room, Batman!), and JG Ballard's room is pretty swank:

On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour's cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.

Link (via Kottke)

MIT researchers are demonstrating a new robotic exoskeleton leg system that takes the weight off your back when carrying a heavy pack. In recent experiments, they've demonstrated that the contraption can take 80 percent of the load of an 80 pound backpack. The current prototype apparently screws with your natural walking gait, but they're hoping to tweak the design to enable a normal stride. The research was led by professor Hugh Herr, a double amputee whose pioneering research in the Media Lab's Biomechatronics Group is focused on new prosthetic devices. From the MIT News Office:

Exoskeleton devices could boost the weight that a person can carry, lessen the likelihood of leg or back injury and reduce the perceived level of difficulty of carrying a heavy load.

The person wearing the exoskeleton places his or her feet in boots attached to a series of tubes that run up the leg to the backpack, transferring the weight of the backpack to the ground. Springs at the ankle and hip and a damping device at the knee allow the device to approximate the walking motion of a human leg, with a very small external power input (one watt).

Link

ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter's blog, discussing the race to be the default identity system for the Internet..

"I wouldn¹t count out Google, they've got a lot of users, and a lot of money. I think they could probably buy Yahoo, but someone else would have to do the math."

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan did the math.

Here are still more interesting county fair / carny images by photographer and Boing Boing reader Charles Kamm.

Above: "This photo is one of the worlds largest horse at the orange county fair," he explains. "I'm currently living in Barcelona, Spain, photographing the city."

Hey! Speaking of steeds! Remember ZOO, that stylized feature film directed by Robinson Devor, about men who like to situate themselves "on the business end of horse flounder," as one astute Amazon reviewer put it? Welp, it's out on DVD as of this week: Link.

The film is described as a semi-fictionalized, romanticized, quasi-documentary about that guy in Washington state who famously died in flagrante horse-a-licto, in 2005.

Zoo looks interesting. But I have not seen it, and am not entirely sure that I am prepared to. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Back in the early days of e-commerce, it wasn't too surprising to see the various studies saying that people often had bad e-commerce experiences, but you would hope that these days it wouldn't be so common. Unfortunately, a new study suggests that plenty of people are still having terrible customer service experiences with various e-commerce sites. And, of course, those bad experiences are leading them to do less business with the companies. Obviously, things fall through the cracks here and there and not every customer experience is going to be perfect -- but you wouldn't expect it to be so bad that nearly 90% of people surveyed said they'd had a bad e-commerce experience lately.

Here's a video, released today, of his much-discussed talk at Gnomedex in August.

Iddo Genuth writes "A U.S. based company introduced an innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months) and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling. The system, which may dramatically affect interplanetary space travel is called the Miniature Magnetic Orion (Mini-Mag Orion for short), and is an optimization of the 1958 Orion interplanetary propulsion concept."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon: "Many of our customers have already discovered that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3s is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves."

Here's a screen shot.

It's common-sense advice, but still somewhat remarkable that they're addressing the issue of DRM right there on the home page. It could be that I'm seeing it and you're not (possibly because I just bought a Linux hand-held computer from Nokia). It's hard to tell.

Here's their guide to ripping CDs.

Mike writes "London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any. Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked about how patents have become a sort of nuclear stockpiling system, where companies hoard a bunch of patents for defensive purposes, mainly to keep competitors from lobbing patent claims at them -- knowing that the original company would just toss a bunch of patent claims right back. However, sometimes that detente breaks down and nuclear war ensues. You can see exactly that in the ongoing three way patent battles between Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nokia. We've been covering some of the individual skirmishes in posts here over the past few years, but the link here pretty much sums up how nuts things are. There are lawsuits in courts all over the country, followed by counter suits from the opposing companies in many of those courts as well. On top of that, there are reviews going on at the International Trade Commission, which has increasingly become a second chance way for companies to fight patent battles. If someone can explain how all of this helps to promote innovation, we'd appreciate it.

An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in the U.S., a company is being taken to court for a GPL violation. The Software Freedom Law Center has sued Monsoon Multimedia over alleged GPL violations in the Hava, a place- and time-shifting TV recorder similar to the SlingBox. Interestingly, Monsoon Multimedia is run by a highly experienced international lawyer named Graham Radstone. According to his corporate biography, Radstone has an MA in Law from the University of Cambridge, England, and held the top legal spot at an unnamed "$1 billion private multinational company." He also reportedly held top management positions with Philip Morris, Pfizer, and DHL. Sounds like the makings of a good old legal Donnybrook ahead."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Notley Hawkins let me know about his carnival photos. They are far superior to mine. Check them out on his Flickr account. Link

As the debate continues over e-voting machines, we're seeing some more misplaced whining over attempts to make elections more fair and accurate. In San Francisco, election officials are complaining about the rules set by California's secretary of state, which will mean that this year's mayoral election ballots will need to be checked and counted by hand. Effectively, that means that results for the election won't be known for a few weeks -- rather than instantly. This leads to all sorts of whining and complaining from election officials about how unfair this is -- but since when should speedy results be more important than accurate vote counts? And, the problem is not the secretary of state at all (as the election officials imply). It's because of two separate e-voting firms who refused to take the necessary steps to make sure their machines could be properly reviewed.

First, there's Election Systems and Software (ES&S) makers of buggy e-voting machines (that they admitted in internal memos) that have been known to lose votes or count them in triplicate depending on the election. San Francisco currently uses ES&S machines to count ballots, but those machines don't work very well -- especially if the voter isn't using exactly the right type of pen or pencil. When the secretary of state demanded that ES&S allow outside security experts to examine their machines and software, the company refused to allow it, and then finally gave in, well past the deadline, and included an angry petulent letter threatening the secretary of state. This, despite the fact that the company was caught providing uncertified equipment for the last election. With all that baggage, is it any wonder that the secretary of state would ask for a more thorough method of counting the votes?

The second e-voting firm, Sequoia, was chosen by San Francisco as a replacement vendor to get rid of the questionable ES&S machines. Of course, Sequoia has its own share of problems. Last year it was revealed that there was a button on the machines that would put the machine into "manual" mode and let you vote multiple times. Sequoia claimed this button was a feature. Reasonably, San Francisco's board of supervisors requested that Sequoia hand over their software to be reviewed -- a request which Sequoia refused. Thus, the board rejected the contract... leaving everyone in the situation they're in today. So, while elections officials may complain about the rules for counting votes, it's not the secretary of state they should blame, but the e-voting companies who continue to stonewall when it comes to actually making sure their machines are secure and accurate. And, in the meantime, can someone explain to elections officials that their job is to conduct fair and accurate elections, rather than elections with quick results?