After Three Months, Only 35 Paying Subscriptions for Newspaper's Web Site

After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

[...]

The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they’ve grossed about $9,000.

[To be fair, a huge part of their audience gets free access.]

Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.

More from the New York Observer

Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light

Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light

The solar-powered sea slug Elysia chlorotica can live entirely from energy from the sun. It's about three centimetres long.(PNAS)

U.S. researchers have found that the sea slug Elysia chlorotica can photosynthesize, using energy from light to convert carbon dioxide into sugars.

"If you shine light on these slugs, they fix carbon dioxide and make oxygen just like a plant," Sidney Pierce of the University of South Florida told CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks.

...

The slugs look just like a leaf, green and about three centimetres long, and are found off the east coast of North America from Nova Scotia to Florida.

They acquire the ability to photosynthesize by eating algae and incorporating the plants' tiny chlorophyll-containing structures, called chloroplasts, into their own cells.

More on CBS News

Bottlenose dolphins' Buffet: mud-ring feeding

Bottlenose dolphins Buffet: mud-ring feeding - Amazing hunting technique

Mexican Superhuman Tribe: The Tarahuma

Longevity: "In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of Indians carries an ancient secret: a diet and fitness regimen that has allowed them to outrun death and disease. We set out to discover how the rest of us can catch up."

A tribe of superhumans, the Tarahumara Indians have zero diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease or cancer. They can run nonstop for days, chasing their prey until it dies from exhaustion. Age seems to have no effect on them. And they live in a society free of theft, murder, or suicide.

More from Men's Health

MagicJack's Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees - ABC News

MagicJack's Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees - ABC News

MagicJack CEO and founder Dan Borislow holds up the new and improved MagicJack at the Consumer...

(AP)

The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that's been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that's sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.

The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.

YMax Corp., which is based in Palm Beach, Fla., said this week at the International Consumers Electronics Show that it plans to start selling the device in about four months for $40, the same price as the original magicJack. As before, it will provide free calls to the U.S. and Canada for one year.

The device is, in essence, a very small cellular tower for the home.

The size of a deck of cards, it plugs into a PC, which needs a broadband Internet connection. The device then detects when a compatible cell phone comes within 8 feet, and places a call to it. The user enters a short code on the phone. The phone is then linked to the magicJack, and as long as it's within range (YMax said it will cover a 3,000-square-foot home) magicJack routes the call itself, over the Internet, rather than going through the carrier's cellular tower. No minutes are subtracted from the user's account with the carrier. Any extra fees for international calls are subtracted from the user's account with magicJack, not the carrier.

More from ABC News

BIDI SCREEN (Bidirectional Screen) from MIT Media Lab may allow gestureal computing

BIDI SCREEN (Bidirectional Screen) from MIT Media Lab

Google demonstrates quantum computer image search - tech - 11 December 2009 - New Scientist

Google demonstrates quantum computer image search - New Scientist

"Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications."

Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications.

Writing on Google's research blog this week, Hartmut Neven, head of its image recognition team, reveals that the Californian firm has for three years been quietly developing a quantum computer that can identify particular objects in a database of stills or video.

Google has been doing this, Neven says, with D-Wave, a Canadian firm that has developed an on-chip array of quantum bits – or qubits – encoded in magnetically coupled superconducting loops.

The team set themselves the challenge of writing an algorithm for the chip that could learn to recognise cars in photos, and reported at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Vancouver, Canada, this week that they have succeeded.

Using 20,000 photographs of street scenes, half of which contained cars and half of which didn't, they trained the algorithm to recognise what cars look like by hand-labelling all the cars with boxes drawn around them.

After that training, the algorithm was set loose on a second set of 20,000 photos, again with half containing cars. It sorted the images with cars from those without faster than an algorithm on a conventional computer could – faster than anything running in a Google data centre today, Neven says.

Classical computers use what is known as a von Neumann architecture, in which data is fetched from memory and processed according to rules defined in a program to generate results that are stored. It is pretty much a sequential process, though multiple versions of it can run in parallel to speed things up a little.

Quantum computers, however, promise much faster processing, by exploiting the principle of quantum superposition: that a particle such as an ion, electron or photon can be in two different states at the same time. While each basic "bit" of data in a conventional computer can be either a 1 or a 0 at any one time, a qubit can be both at once.

Quantum Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quantum Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quantum Man (2006) by Julian Voss-Andreae.

Quantum Man is a modern sculpture created by Julian Voss-Andreae, which is located in the City of Moses Lake, Washington^[1].

Drawing inspiration from Voss-Andreae's background in physics^[2], “Quantum Man” is the image of a walking man seen as a quantum object. Made up of over a hundred vertically oriented steel sheets, the 8’ (2.50 m) tall sculpture provides a metaphor for the counter-intuitive world of quantum physics. Symbolizing the dual nature of matter, the sculpture seems to consist of solid steel when seen from the front but nearly disappears when seen from the side, as light shines through the spaces between the slabs^[3].

In 2007, Voss-Andreae created a second version called "Quantum Man 2" in stainless steel^[4].

Mind-Machine Breakthrough: People Type With Just Thoughts

Mind-Machine Breakthrough: People Type With Just Thoughts

By focusing on images of letters, people with electrodes in their brains can type with just their minds, scientists now reveal.

These findings make up one more step on the road to mind-machine interfaces that may one day help people communicate with just their thoughts. Researchers have recently employed brain scans to see numbers and maybe even pull videos from inside people's heads.

The neuroscientists were monitoring two patients with epilepsy for seizure activity with electrodes placed directly on the surface of their brains to record electrical activity generated by the firing of nerve cells. This kind of procedure requires a craniotomy, a surgical incision into the skull.

How it works

Lead investigator Jerry Shih, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla., wanted to test how well their fledgling mind-machine interface functioned in these patients. He reasoned it would perform better when electrodes were placed directly on the brain instead of when placed on the scalp, as is done with electroencephalography, or EEG.

(...)

After the system was calibrated to each patient's specific brain waves, when the patient focused on a letter, the letter appeared on the screen.

"We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy," Shih said. "While this is comparable to other researchers' results with EEGs, this approach is more localized and can potentially provide a faster communication rate. Our goal is to find a way to effectively and consistently use a patient's brain waves to perform certain tasks."

More from LiveScience

Sharp shows plant with no workers on the floor

Sharp shows plant with no workers on the floor

SAKAI, Japan — Huge sheets of glass are guided by robotic arms, sliding and turning in a towering germ-free plant, the world's first making giant "10th generation" panels for flat screen TVs.

Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp.'s futuristic-looking plant doesn't have a single worker on the floor. Each sheet, measuring about 3 meters (3.3 yards) by 3 meters, is being made and tested by computerized machines.

/ AP

In this undated photo released by Sharp Corp., interior of the firm's factory is seen in Sakai, western Japan. Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp.'s futuristic-looking plant doesn't have a single worker on the floor. Each sheet of glass, measuring about 3 meters (3.3 yards) by 3 meters, used for flat screen TVs, is being made and tested by computerized machines. (AP Photo/Sharp Corp)