Plug in iPot for a nice cup of tea

Net Results: IPods for the masses? Not this year - although more correctly, one should say iPods for the classes, rather than the masses.

That's what Duke University in North Carolina decided last week, when it announced that it wouldn't repeat its 2004 policy of giving an iPod to every incoming first-year student.

In a programme that cost the well-known private university some $500,000 (€388,000) for the hardware, the salary for an academic computing specialist, and grants to the participating faculty, Duke thought that the iPods could be used by students to record lectures and notes and play language learning teaching aids.

The iPods' hard drive gives them plenty of capacity for holding data other than music files. Indeed, in one well-known case, an academic researcher at the Hubbard Centre for Genome Studies in New Hampshire has downloaded the full human genome onto an iPod, where it sits quietly next to his music collection.

The researcher can plug the iPod into his Mac and start work, rather than waiting for the whole genome - all three billion chemical letters of it - to load onto his computer.

It's not that Duke wasn't happy with the experiment. The university will issue iPods to students in select classes this year, a spokeswoman said, and a memo to the faculty from the university's provost noted that he was pleased with the overall results of the trial.

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The Japanese have come up with a great product for keeping tabs on the elderly while not being intrusive, the San Jose Mercury News reported last week.

Called the iPot (for information pot), the device is your basic granny's electric kettle - but is also a wireless device.

Like most Irish people, the Japanese use a kettle several times daily to boil water. In their case, it's for green tea and miso soup - which is usually enjoyed for breakfast, especially by older and more traditional Japanese citizens.

When a person turns on the iPot to boil some water, it sends a message wirelessly to a server, which then sends an e-mail to a family member to let them know that the person is up and about.

It's a very low-key but reliable way for relatives or a neighbour to know the older person is going about their business as usual.

Elderly people like it because they don't feel like they are being "minded" or that their privacy is compromised, and they can retain their independence.

A company called Zojirushi rents the pot for a €40 deposit, and then charges about €23 a month for the e-mail service.

Subscribers can check a website to see a recent usage history of the iPot and, twice a day, the company e-mails a designated recipient the times of the three most recent usages of the pot. Maybe it could catch on here?

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Silicon Valley has taken a quiet note of the anniversary one of its most abiding laws - the one which arguably both created it and continues to sustain it.

Forty years ago this month - on April 19th - Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published a paper that contained a prophesy now known as Moore's Law.

It predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every year. A decade later, he updated the law to say every two years - and he was, by and large, right.

Moore's Law is now the bedrock on which Silicon Valley is built.

Ever since 1965, microchips have packed more computing power on ever smaller spaces and at ever decreasing prices.

As the Mercury News notes, as a result of the law's dynamics, a €30 Furby toy today contains more computing power than the 1969 Apollo moon landing vehicle.

Intel's first microprocessor in 1971 contained 2,300 transistors. This year, the chipmaker will unveil a tiny chip with 1.7 billion transistors.

I like the analogy to explain the law made by Paul Saffo, director of California's Institute of the Future, quoted in the paper.

If you gave a child a penny and promised to double that allowance every week, by the 20th week, you would be handing over more than a million pennies.

Yes, the mind does indeed boggle. However, I don't know if we'd all feel that a major benefit of the law is to be condemned to hearing the voice of a Furby.

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