A table that's made to order

By Shelley Emling

LONDON—You want to eat out. You want good food, nice wine, a convivial ambience. Why let a waiter stand in the way?

This is the premise of Inamo, a restaurant in Soho, central London, where diners use their table to order.

Each table turns it into a giant computer screen. With a few clicks, diners can order from an illustrated menu, pay their bill, summon a taxi, play interactive games with fellow diners and even change the look of the table itself.

Analysts say automation is one of the key trends in the restaurant industry, varying from kiosk-based ordering in fast-food outlets to the conveyor-belt experience offered in sushi joints.

"Oddly, despite the lower level of human engagement, such innovation can foster a greater sense of fun and interactivity for diners and has the added bonus for restaurateurs of reducing labor costs," said Bryan Roberts, a research manager at Planet Retail, a consulting firm in London.

"As with self-checkout in supermarkets, such innovations provide a greater perception of convenience and efficiency and have strong appeal for today's legion of tech-savvy consumers," Roberts said.

In the U.S., the uWink franchise allows diners to order food and drink via touch screens, as well as play games and watch movie previews. There's a place on the table for swiping your credit card when you're ready to pay the bill.

The brainchild of Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari Inc., the first franchise opened in Woodland Hills, Calif., in 2006, with restaurants also in Hollywood and Mountain View.

"UWink is the only touch-screen restaurant in the United States," said Alissa Tappan, a spokeswoman for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based company. "On our touch-screen terminals are short games, word puzzles, trivia quizzes, horoscopes and a wide variety of activities.

"You can play with one other person, or even compete against other tables or the whole room," she said.

As you enter Inamo, which serves Asian fusion fare, the white, sculpted pods above each table immediately catch your eye. These pods house projectors that beam information onto the black composite-surface tabletops. A sunken circle in the corner or the tabletop acts as a mouse, allowing you to scroll through menu options and view photos of those choices before double-clicking on the meal of your choice.

A Bluetooth signal is sent to the kitchen. With "chef cam," you can view your food being prepared on the tabletop screen. Then, a real human delivers the food.

Inamo is the brainchild of two Oxford graduates, Danny Potter and Noel Hunwick, neither of whom boast a high-tech background. The idea behind the restaurant was born three years ago from the pair's frustration at struggling for 20 minutes to get a waiter's attention at a local eatery.

A physics graduate, Potter and some friends were able to adapt existing Bluetooth and projection technologies for the restaurant market.

"We are using projectors and a custom-built panel that no one else is using," he said. "The client can't break the machine or crash the system."

Potter predicted that increased automation is the wave of the future in the restaurant business.

The one downside, at least at Inamo, is that an abundance of interactivity doesn't come cheap, with lunch running as much as $40 a person.

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308 - The Pop Vs Soda Map

When on a hot summer’s day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink.

The article was written by Luanne von Schneidemesser, PhD in German linguistics and philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. And although there might be weightier issues in life (or even in linguistics) than the preferred terminology for a can of soft drink, there’s nothing trivial about this part of the beverage industry.

“According to an article last year in the Isthmus, Madison’s weekly newspaper, Americans drink so much of the carbonated beverages sold under such brand names as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Mountain Dew, and 7-Up that consumption averages 43 gallons per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States,” Von Schneidemesser begins her article. “The Statistical Abstract of the United States (1994) confirms this: 44.1 gallons per person in 1992, compared to the next most consumed beverages: beer (32.7 gallons), coffee (27.8 gallons), and milk (25.3 gallons).”

It must be that ubiquity of soft drinks that has made this pop vs soda map the single-most submitted map to this blog, sent in by over 100 contributors. The map details the areas where certain usages predominate.

• coke: this generic term for soft drinks predominates throughout the South, New Mexico, central Indiana and in a few other single counties in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. ‘Coke’ obviously derives from Coca-Cola, the brand-name of the soft drink originally manufactured in Atlanta (which explains its use as a generic term for all soft drinks in the South).
• pop: dominates the Northwest, Great Plains and Midwest. The world ‘pop’ was introduced by Robert Southey, the British Poet Laureate (1774-1843), to whom we also owe the word ‘autobiography’, among others. In 1812, he wrote: A new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn. Even though it was introduced by a Poet Laureate, the term ‘pop’ is considered unsophisticated by some, because it is onomatopaeic.
• soda: prevalent in the Northeast, greater Miami, the area in Missouri and Illinois surrounding St Louis and parts of northern California. ‘Soda’ derives from ‘soda-water’ (also called club soda, carbonated or sparkling water or seltzer). It’s produced by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in plain water, a procedure developed by Joseph Priestly in the latter half of the 18th century. The fizziness of soda-water caused the term ‘soda’ to be associated with later, similarly carbonated soft drinks.
• Other, lesser-used terms include ‘dope’ in the Carolinas and ‘tonic’ in and around Boston, both fading in popularity. Other generic terms for soft drinks outside the US include ‘pop’ (Canada), ‘mineral’ (Ireland), ‘soft drink’ (New Zealand and Australia). The term ‘soft drink’, finally, arose to contrast said beverages with hard (i.e. alcoholic) drinks.

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Hidden College Costs: Rising Fees

By KATE PICKERT

Faced with rising costs, decreased funding and laws in many states designed to keep public universities from hiking up tuition, many state school systems are making up for budget shortfalls by tacking on fees for everything from "technology" to "energy." In some cases, these fees amount to several times a school's base tuition. Meanwhile, the average cost to attend a public school increased 47% between 2000 and 2007 (adjusted for inflation) according to the College Board, a non-profit that studies education costs and owns the SAT. State politicians are so eager to tout low-cost higher education that "tuition" has become a dirty word. The F-word, on the other hand — fees — has become a go-to charge for public universities strapped for cash.

The 2006-07 school year marked the first time fee increases outpaced tuition hikes, according to the College Board. Fees were up 8% and tuition 6% in 2007-08 compared to the previous year. Why the fee frenzy? State legislatures across the country have instituted strict limits on tuition increases and require arduous bureaucratic and political procedures to change them. With financing for public universities on the decline since the 1980s, "everybody got very interested in what they could do to affect revenues, and fees undoubtedly turned out to be one of the measures they could control," says David Brenaman, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies college financing. "There is a kind of circumvention of what was intended here."

In Oregon, so many extras had been tacked on over the years that in 2007, fees added as much as 40% to the cost of tuition. When campuses saw their energy bills go up, students were charged a fee. When classrooms had to be wired for new technologies, students were charged a fee. "There were some that were one-time things that ended up staying a little bit longer," concedes Diane Saunders, director of communications for the Oregon University System. These covert tuition hikes did not go unnoticed. The Oregon Student Association, which represents pupils at the state's seven public colleges, protested the hefty fees, arguing that they decreased transparency in the system and penalized students whose financial aid packages only covered tuition. In June, the system announced that mandatory fees would be rolled into tuition "so families know what they're facing up front and so students know what they're facing up front," says Saunders, who credits the students for being "co-advocates" with the Oregon University System that is constantly lobbying the state legislature for more funding.

In addition to getting around tuition caps, fees are also a way for universities to keep money they collect from being absorbed into overall state budgets. (Tuition is often treated like tax revenue and goes directly into state coffers.) This is the case at the University of Massachusetts, where fees across the four-campus system have increased so consistently that they are now about four times the cost of tuition, which has remained at the same level since 1999. This semester, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in-state undergraduates are paying $857 in tuition, plus a $675 "service fee," $47 in "activities fees," a $327 "basic health fee," and a whopping $3,209.50 "curriculum fee." Other fees that can be charged include an "undergraduate entering fee" of $185, a "freshman counseling fee" of $175 and a $102 "telecommunications fee." Eileen O'Connor, communications and external affairs director for the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, says the massive fee charges "are really a result of the colleges being underfunded over time." This is the case in scores of states where deficits, overdue budgets and cuts to education spending have become the norm. "When the college don't receive funds sufficient to operate at a certain level of quality, they have to raise fees," says O'Connor.

In a striking acknowledgment of just how much state schools are getting squeezed, the Florida legislature last year passed a bill allowing its biggest research universities to charge what it calls "differential tuition," which is not covered by the state's Bright Futures scholarships. The incredibly generous scholarship program, funded by the Florida lottery, offers awards covering between 75% and 100% of an in-state public education to about 40% of Florida's high school graduates. (Yep, that's right. Now pick your jaw up and keep reading.) This means any increase in fees and tuition gobbles up more lottery revenues. This is part of the reason why, for the first time since Bright Futures was implemented in 1997, students entering five of Florida's public colleges this fall will be charged a different amount than the base tuition set by the state. For example, at the University of Central Florida, the largest in the state's system, Bright Futures students this year have to pay 3% more — roughly $250 — to help bridge the school's $11 million budget shortfall.

"Students are going to have to come up with more funding," admits the program's administrator, Theresa Antworth, noting that Bright Futures disbursements have grown substantially over the years — from $70 million in the program's first year to $347 million in the 2006-07 year, the most recent data available. But Antworth declines to speculate on whether the idea of differential tuition is a good one. "Those are the decisions that our lawmakers make," she says.

With no state politician likely to campaign on a platform of dramatically increasing school tuitions, fees will continue to fill in the gaps. And as high oil prices continue to drive up the cost of energy and transportation — to name just two big-ticket items in any university budget — students are advised to read their bills carefully. And don't forget to factor in the F-word. (To see the evolution of the college dorm room click here.)

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