Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future

“Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website ‘Hot or Not’. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward.” “When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an “irrational” way – they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.” New Scientist article about the ability of men and women to think rationally after being presented with a picture of an attractive person.

Following around a Tablet PC user for a day

Scoble writes : “Maybe we should have a film crew follow a Tablet PC user around for a day.” An entire day would not be necessary. Just a typical meeting I think. Microsoft aims at the information worker and increasing productivity. It would be cool to define the purpose of the device in infomercial style. Have someone walk into a meeting with a 17″ PowerBook and someone with a Tablet PC. Both are very cool, but it is nice to compare functionality. The same method of questions you used to describe a sale at Best Buy could also apply here. The price difference needs to be thrown in early as well since people assume this tablet functionality adds a lot of cost to their purchase. Get corporations to earmark a Tablet for their laptops of choice and Microsoft and its OEMs are well on their way. The tablet can be sold as an intelligent note taking and free idea station, that also is a full blown computer when you choose to dock it. The first question people wonder about is whether the machine runs a full Windows OS or something like Windows CE. So where is the film crew? Even at Microsoft’s offices at One Market here in San Francisco the Tablet is bolted down for a limited experience.

Tablet PC on a daily basis

Mark’s post promted me to write about my daily experience with my Tablet PC.

I use the Compaq Tablet PC TC1000. First generation, convertible design, 3 pounds, integrated 802.11b, and powered by a 1GHz Crusoe 5800 with 512 MB of RAM. The power of a Tablet is the same as you would find for a regular laptop. I am sure some extra power is needed for the inking input, but I have not noticed a difference. Most tablets now use Intel’s Centrino chips. I am not running Lonestar.

I bring my tablet with me to business meetings. A laptop screen sticking up at a conference table would not go over well, and I would feel isolated from the rest of the people at the meeting if I were using one. The tablet allows me to scan through PDF files in portrait format, and ink any notes I may have in Journal or OneNote. For reoccurring meetings I have set up a OneNote template. This setup makes it very easy for me to go back and review my notes sequentially, and I can even pull up what was said in the last meeting. I can ink a diagram and transfer it into Visio for UML extraction. The flat, notepad type surface allows me to take notes flat against the table and I can choose to keep my handwriting or translate into text.

Another advantage of the Tablet is you can take a presentation platform with you. Want to show someone a data model you just created or a flow diagram of how a new system might work? Ink it up and hand them your slate tablet.

Software compatibility is not an issue to me. Office 2003 has a lot of inking capability, which I use all the time. To skip a page in PDF I will highlight a page number, pop open the input panel, and write a number. I have hardware hot buttons for Microsoft Journal and the input panel so I am never far away from ink.

The novelty of the tablet has not worn off for me. One limiting factor you may want to consider is screen size. My tablet has a 10.4″ screen. I am used to my 19″ LCD on my desktop machine, so this is definitely a change for me. With a smaller screen comes a longer battery life and a closer replica of a notepad’s form factor. I have been happy with the convertible design, especially for easy use on cramped airline flights.