As the story goes, the term shoebie comes from years past when people brought everything they needed to take to the beach in a shoe box. For all I know, there was only one such sighting and the term has become more legend than fact.

As I continued my drive home, I thought about the circle of life as it unfolds at the Jersey shore. As a youngster, life begins in Ocean City, which is known as a family-oriented town. There is plenty for the kids to do, and it is a dry town which keeps out the rowdier bunch. Quite often, the shoobies vacation together with three or four generations. But as the kids grow into their late teens and early twenties, they fly the coop from time to time to sow some wild oats in Wildwood or Avalon where watering holes are found in great abundance. It is in these towns that the females of this mammalian species may be seen showing off their mammary glands in the hopes of attracting a mate.

Once they have attracted a mate, they may briefly depart the Jersey shore to experience the tropics in Hawaii, but after having that honeymoon baby they return back with their children to Ocean City, New Jersey – the family resort. At this point, the females use their mammary glands for feeding the young before they are ready to eat the fresh, healthy Jersey produce or the fresh but not quite as healthy Kohr Brothers frozen custard, Johnson’s caramel popcorn, and Mack and Manco’s pizza.

Once their kids fly the coop, they may choose to retire to either Ventnor or Margate, yet two other Jersey shore towns known that are quieter, less filled with tourists and ideal for the more mature crowd. And some who are fortunate enough will migrate like the birds to Florida for the winter and back to the Jersey shore for the summer.

Facebook and other new social media seem to fall outside any conventional rules of etiquette that apply to more traditional means of communication. We sometimes talk about our personal speech filters. The speech filter is the deliberate or intuitive mechanism that helps us decide which of our thoughts to share when speaking and which of our thoughts to leave unspoken. Our speech filter is what prevents us from making negative (or even positive) comments on a person’s appearance in spite of what we might be thinking. It prevents us from making politically incorrect statements. It prevents us from asking the teacher if there will be any homework.

We tune our speech filter differently based upon the setting and the audience. We tune differently when speaking with business colleagues, coworkers, friends, and family. We tune differently when speaking in front of an audience. We tune differently if we are in a public setting such as a restaurant where surrounding people may hear. We tune differently when speaking with children.

But what about the written word? In the case of the written word, we have the luxury of time to think about what we write. Our filters can be more deliberate. We can edit and reedit our written word before anybody else reads it. For example, I had thought about writing two paragraphs up that that our speech filter prevents us from calling somebody ugly. But I chose not to include that example in that paragraph because it might be politically incorrect.

My Facebook friend’s point was that Facebook users have a wide range of filter settings. The question that intrigues me is this. Given that people have time to think before posting on Facebook, what are people’s thought processes? In other words, how do people set their Facebook Post Filters? What makes a thought or event worthy of posting? What are the criteria?

I have three criteria:
1. Should I share this information with my Facebook friends?
2. Will others find this information interesting?
3. Will I offend anybody by posting this information?

The second question is at the heart of my Facebook friend’s point. Most of us have dozens or hundreds of Facebook friends. If we were to restrict our posts to those that we believe would be interesting to all our friends, we wouldn’t be posting much at all. And our perception of what may be interesting may be completely out of sync with that of our Facebook friends. Is this the reason that some people post uninteresting minutia on an hourly basis? Or is it that their filters don’t include question #2?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AND ENJOYMENT

Adaptive Digital Technologies is pleased to introduce Snowbot (TM) 1.0. Snowbot isn’t much to look at, but it packs plenty of Digital Signal Processing horsepower. The first its kind, Snowbot’s senses are driven by eight Texas Instruments TMS320C6000 series Digital Signal Processors (DSP) chips. Two DSPs at the top of Snowbot’s face handle the vision and five DSPs formed in an arc at the bottom of Snowbot’s face handle audio and speech. And within the the eighth DSP, positioned in the center of the Snowbot’s face, Adaptive Digital introduces Olfactory Signal Processing or OSP, which provides the snowbot with its sense of smell.

OSP is a field of study that is still in its infancy, but Adaptive Digital expects it to become as ubiquitous as the telephone within the coming decade as companies roll out the Smelliphone. The current state of the art is limited to the ability to identify smells by analyzing chemical makeup. But the smelliphone will be able to transmit information about the chemical makeup, along with voice and video information, across a Voice Over IP (VoIP) channel to the other party on a smelliphone call. The smelliphone on that end will recreate the smell by synthesizing the appropriate chemical compound.

The eight DSP chips provide a combined processing power of 4.8 GHz and can execute 38.4 billion operations per second. This is far greater than the capability of a typical desktop PC. But as we all know, a PC’s electronics require much power and hence dissipate so much heat that the PC requires a fan to keep it cool. The TI DSPs draw so little power and run so cold that they can be placed on Snowbot’s face without affecting its crystalline structure.

A Snowbot kit will be available in the 2010 holiday season. Using the kit, children and adults alike will be able to build their own snowbots. Availability will be limited to winter months in cooler climates.

Snowbot is a trademark of Adaptive Digital Technologies, Inc.

Happy Holidays!
Your friends at Adaptive Digital (ADT)

About Adaptive Digital Technologies (http://www.adaptivedigital.com)

Adaptive Digital continues to meet and exceed the current and future requirements of service providers, equipment manufacturers, system integrators and developers by bringing superior voice quality to speech-based applications. Adaptive Digitals highly optimized DSP Algorithms/Solutions include network, line, and acoustic echo cancellation, high-density conferencing, speech compression, telephony, and voice quality algorithms. Recognized internationally for its quality software, Adaptive Digitals customers include British Telecom, Cisco Systems Inc., Cantata Technology, Digium, General Dynamics, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Sonus, and Texas Instruments.

Adaptive Digital is a member of the Texas Instruments Third Party Developer Network and is located in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA).