nichole's auxiliary storage

Froot Loops Cereal Straws not as corny as they could be

I just finished the chapter on corn in Omnivore's Dilemma, which has as one thesis that hyperproductivity in America's farmland means marketers have to constantly create more added value to sell more corn-derived products. (The book mentions that bowling-ball-and-pin cereal never made it through the moms' focus groups. Schade.)

So when I read about cereal straws, the newest in "milk-sippin' fun" from Kellogg's on The Impulsive Buy (via Boing Boing), I was sure there'd at least be some HFCS in these tropical-fish-colored delights. There isn't, at least as described in the nutrition facts on the Kellogg's website - unless the fructose is HFCS. (Can they get away with that?) Some of the other ingredients (maltodextrin and glucose syrup, and maybe the natural flavors and tocopherols) are corn-derived.

For the record, simulating the flavor of leftover cereal milk is genius. It's why I love horchata, though soggy Cinnamon Toast Crunch postdates the rice-based beverage by more than a millenium.

Cineplexity (and John, John, Sean and JM) on the local tee-vee news

Monday's Channel3000 5 o'clock news had a profile of John Kovalic that happened to feature an awful lot of Cineplexity.

Wanted: pheneticist(s)

Palmer's made a great point about Madison's local online news ecology:

[...] the blog aggregators at dane101.net, POST, and The Daily Page's Miscellany are now virtually unusable. Content needs to be segregated to make it more easily accessible. [...] There's a lot of repetition and posts on disparate subjects are all lumped together into a gigantic agglomeration that must be parsed with the aid of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My first reaction was that a librarian needs to jump in there and help these aggregators get organized. (Typical - suggest this kind of thing to a librarian and her nervous tic comes back, but she does roll up her sleeves.)

My next reaction was that some sort of Digg-local would help do the trick (not a new idea, of course). It gets around the gatekeeper problem, and is more scalable (and seems cheaper) than curating by hand.

User-generated and -rated content has been called a "holy grail." Like the grail it's a myth. The trouble is the critical mass required for a community effort to turn out anything useful. In a smallish place like Madison, no matter how wired, it would be hard to reach that point for a local news and blogosphere aggregator.

Plus, "regular people may not be interested in interactive news in the way geeks are." Surprise. Then again, nothing about Madison is regular.

Still, the news that Digg's planning to expand into product and restaurant (restaurant?) reviews is interesting.

I suspect the path of least resistance will be somewhere in the middle.

How's that for noncommital?

Update: thedailypage.com does tag their posts, but the path to a tag cloud is labyrinthine (example). And I completely forgot about outside.in (d'oh).

LOLcar

Geek.Kon Madison

Whoa, the first Geek.Kon sounds prefect-ly geeky. I will so be there.

Isthmus reports a local Elvish expert is going organizers are thinking of inviting a local Elvish expert (apologies for messing up the facts). Hm, wonder just who that could be...

Literacy Behind Bars

The National Institute of Corrections just pointed to this study of literacy rates for prisoners. The data is from 2003. Some key findings:

• the prison literacy rate is higher than it was in 1992.
• the prison literacy rate is lower than the rate for adults living in households, though race, sex, age, educational attainment, and first language are also factors.
• "Prison inmates who read newspapers and magazines, books, or letters and notes had higher average prose and document literacy than prison inmates who never read, regardless of the frequency with which they read." - p. vii
• "Prisoner inmates do not always have easy access to a library, but 75 percent of inmates reported that they used the prison library at least once or twice a year. Although 59 percent of prisoners were usually able to access the library within 2 days of wanting to do so, 22 percent had to wait 2 to 6 days, 10 percent had to wait 7 to 10 days, and an additional 10 percent had to wait 10 days or more." - p.62.

The report is chock full of charts and info related to literacy. Worth at least a skim to anyone interested in jail & prison library work.