Pope’s message goes hi-tech in Australia

Pope Benedict XVI took a new hi-tech road to spreading his message Tuesday, sending a mobile phone text to pilgrims attending World Youth Day celebrations in Australia, organisers said. “Young friend, God and his people expect much from u because u have within you the Fathers supreme gift: the Spirit of Jesus - BXVI,” read the first of the daily texts.
Source: AFP, July 14, 2008

For teens, the future is mobile

Marketers convened here this week to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It’s all about the mobile phone. Advertisers are clamoring to reach teens in digital environments because that’s where they’re spending much of their time–either online, with cell phones or playing video games. What’s more, teens wield an estimated $200 billion annually in discretionary spending.
Source: Stefanie Olsen, CNET’s Digital Media blog, July 15, 2008

Opening Up Microblogging

The first open-source challenge to the pioneering microblogging site Twitter launched earlier this month. Identi.ca, built using open-source software Laconica, was started by the Montreal-based company Control Yourself. The site is getting attention from microbloggers who hope that Identi.ca will improve upon Twitter, which has been plagued by problems.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, July 17, 2008

Cyber-capos: How cybercriminals mirror the mafia and businesses

Cybercrime, the harvesting and sale of credit card and other data for online fraud and theft, is a “shadow economy” that mimics the real business world in its practices and the mafia in its structure, according to a new report from security firm Finjan. “The current cybercrime organizations bear an uncanny resemblance to organized crime organizations such as ‘La Cosa Nostra,’” concludes Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center’s Web Security Trends Report for the second-quarter of 2008.
Source: Elinor Mills, CNET’s Security blog, July 16, 2008

US sees first airliner flight with laser defences

US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trials of laser missile-dazzler defences on airliners have passed another milestone, with armaments maker BAE Systems announcing that its “JetEye” gear has made its first scheduled passenger flight. The JetEye-equipped plane, a Boeing 767 operated by American Airlines, made a routine trip from New York to Los Angeles.
Two further American 767s will also be equipped with JetEye for the trial, which is designed to find out the effects of the gear on airline operations and finances. The planes will fly with the new equipment until 2009.
Source: Lewis Page, The Register, July 17, 2008

Smart clothes revolutionize attire

Imagine an outfit that fits perfectly and eliminates the worry of sweat stains and body odor. Oh, and it plays your favorite music. It’s an idea that’s not far off in the future. New fabrics are being developed that can regulate body temperature, conduct electricity, play music, fight bacteria and odor, repel insects, soothe dry skin and have the capacity to custom shape themselves for your body. These new “smart fabrics” have medical and military purposes as well.
Source: Jessica Franklin, The Auburn Plainsman, Auburn University, Alabama, July 17, 2008

iTunes allows radiologists to save, sort and search personal learning files

iTunes has the ability to manage and organize PDF files just as easy as music files, allowing radiologists to better organize their personal files of articles and images, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Renji Hospital and Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.
Source: American Roentgen Ray Society news release, July 18, 2008

A book with 90,000 authors

Among the unlikelier announcements made at Wikipedia’s conference in Alexandria, Egypt, was the bold claim on Friday that the online encyclopedia was about to make history in print publishing: creating the book with the most credited individual authors ever — about 90,000.
Source: Noam Cohen, The New York Times, July 19, 2008

On Mashable (twitterer/blogger) Steven Hodson argues that ‘Twitter is Not a Micro-Blogging Tool’. In Steven’s view Twitter “is no different than another service that we have had for a very long time on the Web and it’s called Internet Messenger or Gtalk or any number of messenger type services“.

This qualification is partly confirmed by Scott Hanselman’s musing explaining why he hasn’t used Instant Messaging for anything significant in months. Read in ‘Twitter and The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging’ what elements make Twitter special.

What’s your opinion about ‘Twitter as micro-blogging’ tool? Are you (like Steven) ‘insulted that Twitter is even considered to be in the same field as blogs or even micro-blogs’??

In the UK, 19-26 July is Save Our Butterflies Week. The positive impact for the little insects that will result from the promotion through the Internet of this focus week is something very new in the relationship of us humans with other species. The homepage of Save Our Butterflies Week links to a cluster of resources for human pro-butterfly activity and information about the creatures. It is also a strong call to action to save the butterflies, complete with specific instructions on several ways to help. By blogging this description of the project, I am likely to inform someone who will go to the page and end up saving some butterflies. In assessing the smart mob principles that are changing the real world, conservation websites should be included as important players.

Choconancy pointed us to this ‘Digiactive introduction to Facebook Activism’ by Dan Schultz Lead Researcher of DigiActive ‘A world of digital activists’.

The social basis of activism explains why Facebook, an increasingly popular social networking site, is a natural companion for tech-savvy organizers. Because of the site’s massive user base and its free tools, Facebook is almost too attractive to pass up. However, the site has its flaws and is not a guarantee of organizing success. This guide is written to provide some insights into what works, what does not work, and how best to use Facebook to advance your movement.

From 24 to 26 September 2008, thousands of creative minds from all over the world will come together in Amsterdam for the third PICNIC.

The main theme of PICNIC’08 is Collaborative Creativity in its many guises. We will look at new and connected forms of intelligence and creativity, from the fields of entertainment, science, the arts and business.

Here is a programme by day overview of the conference. Also keep an eye on this weblog for the latest news about PICNIC

Matt Jones and David Frohlich of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) developed a StoryBank for sharing stories across the digital divide…

(via Vodafone receiver)

The basic research objectives involved are:

1. To explore the value of novel forms of audiovisual stories for sharing local information in a development context. This includes the use of the system or content by remote developer communities as well as local originating ones.
2. To identify ways of indexing, storing, retrieving and presenting story content that match the needs of different kinds of users from the originating community and beyond.
3. To develop encoding and delivery mechanisms for story content that are device-scalable and allow multi-platform capture and playback.

There seems to be a lot of potential in the use of mobile phones for ‘communication for development’
ICARDA KSinR Project uses mobile phones for knowledge sharing. Nadia Manning-Thomas posted on the KS Blog about a Pilot Project run by The International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas

[by way of Christian Kreutz on Del.icio.us]

Additionally the conference organizers uploaded small story clips onto mobile phones of farmers present and showed them how to send these to other farmers with mobile phones. This was done to stimulate some knowledge sharing and a sort of farmer-to-farmer extension system to help facilitate the spread of useful ideas, techniques and knowledge around agricultural activities, specifically plant breeding.

For the second year, the granddaddy of golf tournaments is excluding the usually ubiquitous symbol of the new tech times. Is this insufferable stuffiness or a leadership move toward being smart about keeping the mob focused on the golf they came to see? I think the latter is true. At least a couple of great golfers agree:

“It’s much better,” said Sergio Garcia during last year’s event. “I haven’t heard one phone out there. It’s definitely an improvement.”

Tiger Woods echoed Garcia’s comments at Carnoustie, calling the ban “fantastic”, and adding that the regular disruptions caused by spectators’ mobiles at Hoylake in 2006 had disappeared.

An interesting question for sporting events, and schools, is how to keep the mobiles from interfering when they are a problem for what is going on without collecting the devices at the gate. Maybe mobiles will be equipped with a “don’t bother anybody” mode in the future.

A UK consortium is developing a new in-car navigation system to beat traffic jams. The ‘Congestion Avoidance Dynamic Routing Engine’ (CADRE) uses artificial intelligence to inform drivers of the best routes to take before they reach a jam — 5 to 10 miles away from the congestion point. The system is able to interpret live traffic information shared between vehicles equipped with a special GPS device. This system should be available commercially by 2010. The researchers think that this system could be extended to ferries, trains and even planes allowing travelers ‘to check different departure times to estimate the best time to travel.’ I think they’re going too far on this last point. A vast majority of people is much more concerned by a flight price than with its duration. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

I have been asked to give a brief address when I am awarded the “Doctor of Technology” degree Wednesday, at De Montfort University. Here’s what I am planning:

Brief remarks by Howard Rheingold at De Montfort University, July, 2008

I’ll give you the advice part at the very beginning. Then you can decide for yourselves how much attention to devote to the rest of my very short remarks. My advice is this: Pay attention to irrelevant details and follow intriguing but useless connections.

This is the most valuable advice I can offer from my own experience for anyone out to make their way in the worlds of 21st century technology.

“paying attention to irrelevant details,” is a phrase that has stuck in my mind for decades, since I read it in a research paper about brain functioning.

Neuroscientists use a probe called an “evoked potential” that they can pick up from a surface electrode on the scalp. Immediately after flashing a light at a person, that person’s nerve cells output patterns that look like little squiggles on a graph or a display. Some scientists, funded by the U.S. Air Force, claimed that one of those squiggles, which they named “P-300 waves,” is a reliable indicator of attention: You can use eye-tracking to detect whether somebody is looking at something, but that won’t tell you if they are actually paying attention to what their eyes are aimed at. However, these scientists offered a series of tests that indicated that the P-300 was present when someone was looking at something and paying attention, but absent when they weren’t paying attention. The Air Force wasn’t funding this research out of altruism. They were interested in the difference between novice pilots and expert pilots paid attention to all the data that was coming at them from the windshield and dashboard. So they used P-300 on novices and experts and concluded that novices focus their attention on the fundamental dials and indicators, whereas the experts spend far more time “paying attention to irrelevant details.”

As for those intriguing but useless connections: I’ll have to tell you that I was as skeptical as anyone who wasn’t already an electrical engineer when personal computers came around. I just couldn’t see any use for them in my business, which at the time the first PCs became available was the business of putting words on paper. Then I learned that some people not far from me in San Francisco were using computers to write and edit without having to erase and retype. The library led me to a 1977 article in Scientific American by Alan Kay, about “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer,” and it had a picture of one of those computers you could use to edit texts. So I found my way to the place Alan Kay was working when he wrote that article, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. They discouraged interested non-employees from using their experimental personal computers just to write magazine articles more efficiently. So I talked them into hiring me to write for them. That’s when I found myself surrounded by all sorts of intriguing but useless connections – useless, that is, because they weren’t directly connected to the kind of writing that Xerox was paying me to do. But I followed my curiosity and began investigating where this idea came from in the first place – the idea that computers could be used to amplify thinking and communication, not just for scientific calculation and business data processing. Over the past twenty years, I’ve written four books about the technologies that evolved from those first PCs at Xerox PARC – Tools for Thought in 1985, Virtual Reality in 1991, The Virtual Community in 1994, and Smart Mobs in 2008. I never set out to specialize in writing about digital technology and society, but while pursuing the possibility of a writing machine, I ended up paying attention to irrelevant details and following intriguing but useless connections.

It probably wouldn’t be responsible for me to counsel you to spend ALL your time on tasks and questions wholly unrelated to what you are supposed to be doing on your job, but once in a while, let yourself go where those hunches take you.