A new world view
A German software company has done an odd thing on the World Wide Web: It’s put up a useful site that costs nothing to access and contains no advertising. The site, www.worldtime.com, invites you to click anywhere on a globe to learn the current time in that spot. The globe obligingly spins as you inch to new spots. It shows sunrise and sunset and latitude and longitude, as well as the current edge of night.
Too bad CBS didn’t consult this site before timing its telecasts of the Winter Olympics.
BRAINSTORMS
Perchance to dream
Scientists have long puzzled over how sleeping people can pick out certain sounds and rouse themselves when needed, as when a mother is awakened by her baby’s cry, but can sleep right through noise made by a passing truck. Using electrodes implanted in the brains of patients awaiting brain surgery, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University now has mapped which parts of the brain’s cortex monitor sounds as people sleep.
Perhaps as interesting as the discovery itself is the identity of the researcher behind it: She is Serena Gondek, a 21-year-old Johns Hopkins junior from Oak Brook who reported her findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
TELEPHONES
Search and annoy
If there’s a silver lining to the cloud of area-code changes afflicting the land, it’s that maybe the telemarketers won’t find you at your new number just as you’re sitting down to dinner. Don’t count on it, though. New software sold by the Chicago-based Information Technology Group automatically updates a business’ database of phone numbers as area codes change.
But at an annual subscription fee of $295, ITG’s Area Code Update at least is unlikely to be used by that brother-in-law in Iowa who’s always trying to borrow money.
TECH SUPPORT
May I (ho-hum) help you?
Secret shoppers doing an undercover probe of how ordinary customers get treated by computer geeks hired to provide support for technology gadgetry came back with a classic good news-bad news yarn:
The good: “There were only a few instances of arrogance or condescension–a situation computer neophytes frequently complained about a few years ago,” said Susan Smith, principal at Seattle’s Service Intelligence Inc.
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The bad news was that a whopping 75 percent of tech support folks were pointedly bored with the customer asking for help.
“High-tech support service,” said Smith, belaboring the obvious, “still has a long way to go.”