October 21, 2008
Funeral Industry Sees Boom
All those boomers could fuel funeral industry
For thousands of professionals gathered here at the National Funeral Directors Association convention, the current economic slump does nothing to dampen longer-term hopes pinned to the projected rise of the U.S. death rate as the cohort born between 1946 and 1964 passes away.
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"It sounds kind of morbid, but they are looking at boom times," said Tara Olson, the owner of AllPoints Research, a marketing research firm that has worked with funeral homes to develop business plans. "They're just sort of waiting for the baby boomers to start dying off."
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Isard and others note cremations, which generally cost less than burials, and questions about what else boomers will want could mean the amount spent on each service goes down. And it's possible that some families may turn to event planners to take care of funeral arrangements and just use funeral directors for essentials such as transporting and embalming the body.
"Other than the fatality, what's the difference between a wedding and a funeral?" he asked.
October 2, 2008
Kevin Kelley on Lifelogging
The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.
Some form of this total recall is inevitable, at least for some people. Partial recall from partial recording seems inevitable for the rest. We are all likely to record more and more of our lives.
Still the overriding concern is how to read, retrieve, and use this huge – and I mean huge – ocean of data that your life will generate. There’s one solution not normally offered in discussions of lifelogging that seems reasonable to me. Ten years ago computer scientist David Gelertner envisioned a new organizing metaphor for one’s growing cache of personal data. Instead of boxes and “windows” a lifelog should be centered on well, a life log, a timeline, chronological log of one’s life. "We're going from an artificial information storage scheme to a far more natural one. The idea of a timeline, a chronology, a diary, a daily journal, or a scrapbook is so much older and so much more organic and ingrained in human culture and history than the idea of a file hierarchy."
