Recently in SCaN Category

New Jelly Belly Sport Beans, in Lemon-Lime and Orange flavors, contain electrolytes, vitamins C and E, and of course, all the refined carbohydrates you've come to expect from jelly beans.

Apparently, they're marketing them in association with the professional cycling team they sponsor, which makes a certain amount of sense. Pro cyclists eat all kinds of weird (read: gross) stuff on their bike to replenish lost calories and minerals.

Jelly Belly's VP of marketing poses it as a natural extension of how endurance athletes were already "using" Jelly Bellies: "Today's active adults and teens are exercising harder than ever, and are looking for optimal performance at play and in competition. We've heard from marathon athletes for years about how they use Jelly Belly beans for the carbohydrates they need to sustain energy and finish a race, so we developed a fun candy with additional nutrients the body needs during exercise."

In San Francisco International Airport, you can now buy a digital camera or iPod from a vending machine, side by side with Kit Kat and Skittles.

Pictures are here.

This brief article discusses the challenges and apportunities in automated retail. They liken the convenience of automated retail to that of ATMs. It's clearly working, at some level: "Zoom's airport stores are some of the most profitable performers in the retail industry, with annual sales exceeding $1,000 per square foot."

The Oregonian reports that when you drive through McDonald's in the Eastern Oregon town of Hermiston, your order is actually taken remotely by operators in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The order is transmitted back to Oregon over the datanets, and a digital picture is taken of your car, and associated with the order. Within a few months, 50 McDonald's restaurants will be connected this way, including five in the Portland area.

Why use such a seemingly needless, over-the-top, solution-seeking-a-problem?
A) Cost. The minimum wage in North Dakota is over two dollars an hour less than in Oregon. Why not go all the way, and send them to our sworn enemy, India?
B) Efficiency. In any given store, you're going to have waves of customers and dry spells where there's no one coming through, but once you aggregate a large number of stores, the demand for burgers should be nearly perfectly predictable.

I'm in favor of this new program, as I am in every instance that automated technology replaces human work, because it means more jobs for computer people, like me.

Google makes me weak in the knees. Today, they launched a beta of their new TV search service. It's actually quite simple -- they tape local broadcasts on eight channels, and index the text from closed-captioning.

Say you search for Michael Jordan. You find out the Michael Jordan Celebrity Invitational Golf Tournament was last weekend, you find out that Michael Jordan liked the voice of Morpheus in the Matrix, so he had Laurence Fishburne narrate his IMAX movie. You find that Jordan is investing in a luxury condominium complex in Las Vegas.

It's that easy!

The service is VERY beta. They're only tracking eight channels, and they're the local San Francisco affiliates, at that. There's no notification feature, like Google News Alerts, yet. You can't pull live video clips down off the site, probably for copyright reasons. But it clearly has huge potential.

The New York Times Magazine reports that an American scientist with a Russian name has developed a method to acoustically analyze an audio recording of typing, and determine what was typed.

From the abstract: We show that PC keyboards, notebook keyboards, telephone and ATM pads are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound emanated by different keys. Our attack employs a neural network to recognize the key being pressed.

They use a learning computer to hear what you're typing? This is one step away from HAL in 2001 reading those guys' lips! What about when it "learns" your voice mail password, ATM PIN, eBay login, etc?

It's $19 to buy the full research paper.