Taste of Tech

So far today, our mail server has tagged about 1950 email messages as spam. It’s still early. In a typical day, we see about 4500 spam messages. That’s about 56% of our total email volume.

Every week, I field questions about spam. What can we do? How do we get on these lists? Don’t we have a filter that takes care of this stuff?

The problem is this: Spam works. According to CipherTrust, it costs $0.0004 to send a spam message. Let’s say half of those messages are actually delivered to people. The others are sent to bad email addresses or are caught by filters and not delivered. Now, 500,000 people see the spam message. Let’s say 1% of them actually click on the link and go to the site, and of them, 1% actually buy something. How much money does each person have to spend to make this worthwhile for the spammer? $8. After that, it’s all gravy.

Unfortunately, spam is much more lucritive than that. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 5-6% of adults purchase products from sales spam. CipherTrust pegs the response rate for pornography-related spam at 5%. With numbers like this, it’s easy to see why the problem is getting worse.

The response rates for other types of spam are lower. Only one in 13,000 people respond to Rolex watch spam, while one in 150 buy prescription drugs through spam messages. Still, until we stop clicking on the links and buying the products, the problem isn’t going to get any better.

Looking for an energy-efficient vehicle? The hybrids may not be the best bet. With gas prices soaring at $3 per gallon and higher, many people are turning to hybrid vehicles to help with the energy crunch. If we can all do our part to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil….

CNY Marketing Research, a quirky research company in the northwest, undertook a long range "Dust to Dust" study to look at the average cost per mile for every vehicle sold in the United States in 2005. They included design and development costs, manufacturing and delivery costs, vehicle operation and maintenance costs, and disposal costs. When taken within the context of the average number of miles each vehicle is expected to last, they have been able to compute an average cost per mile for every vehicle.

The winner? The Scion xB, at 48 cents per mile. The Ford Escort, Jeep Wrangler, Chevrolet Tracker, and Toyota Echo round out the top 5. A total of 26 vehicles cost less than $1 per mile. The industry average is $2.48 per mile.

As a group, the hybrids averaged $3.22 per mile, mostly due to high development, manufacturing, and disposal costs. The Toyota Highlander Hybrid was the least expensive, with an average cost of $2.74 per mile.

My car, the Acura TSX, costs $1.73 per mile, while my only blog reader’s car, the Honda Odyssey, costs 2.27 per mile.

This reminds me of the debate over ethanol. If we have to produce six gallons of ethanol to save one gallon of gasoline, how are subsidies for ethanol going to solve the energy problem?

Online maps are a dime a dozen. You can go to Mapquest or Google Maps or Yahoo Maps and get pretty good maps of most of the United States. Some of them have driving directions. Some have satellite photos. The interfaces are all intuitive and easy. If that’s not good enough, you can get Google Earth and do maps on steroids. There’s no reason to use anything else.

But the National Atlas is still worth a visit. This site is a service of the U. S. Department of the Interior. On the surface, it’s just a regular map of the United States. The interface is a little clunky compared with some of the other online maps. But the cool part is in the layers. In addition to the usual demographic layers (political boundaries, highways, city names, etc.), there are lot of other available options. In the agriculture layers, for example, you can show the average number of cattle, or crop distribution (wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton).

If farming’s not your thing, take a look at biology. We have lots of gray tree frogs here in Ohio, but they’re not as common in other parts of the country. Wildlife mortality due to lead poisoning is a big problem in California. It’s much less of a problem in Ohio.

Other categories of map layers include climate, environment, geology, history, people (population, health, economy, crime, energy consumption), transportation, and water.

All of the maps can be saved, printed, or emailed.

Through the Forensics in the Classroom project, Court TV provides free curricular materials for science teachers in grades 7-12. Using one of five different cases, teachers can incorporate national science standards in an exciting and engaging instructional unit that teaches the students to apply forensics science to solve a crime.

The units include the mystery, instructions, handouts and activities for students, and project extensions. The lessons and activities are flexible and modifiable, so you can tailor each unit to fit your classroom schedule and style. The classroom activities involve simple lab experiments and align with national standards. The units can be taught as introductions to basic chemistry ideas and forensic techniques, or used as creative ways to review information already covered. The units vary in length and are labeled according to level of difficulty.

I first wrote about this about five years ago, and I still think it’s really neat. At Heavens Above, you begin by selecting your location. It will then tell you where everything is in the sky. This includes stars, planets, satelites, and space vehicles. Want to see the International Space Station? If you’re in Cleveland, your next chance is May 31 at 4:49 AM. At that time, it’ll be in the Southeast at 14 degrees.

The brightest satelite in the sky tonight will be Lacrosse 3, a military recon satelite launched in 1997. You can see it at 10:30 tonight in the Northeast sky, at 39 degrees.

You can also get whole sky charts, look at constellations and planets, and track the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft.