  We show that Shipley's "detection functor" for symmetric spectra generalizes
to motivic symmetric spectra. As an application, we construct motivic strict
ring spectra representing morphic cohomology, semi-topological $K$-theory, and
semi-topological cobordism for complex varieties. As a further application to
semi-topological cobordism, we show that it is related to semi-topological
$K$-theory via a Conner-Floyd type isomorphism and that after inverting a lift
of the Friedlander-Mazur $s$-element in morphic cohomology, semi-topological
cobordism becomes isomorphic to periodic complex cobordism.
