An Opinion piece in COMPUTERWORLD by Paul Lamb compares the uptake on One Laptop Per Child devices with the massive adoption of mobile phones. The title “One BlackBerry Per Child” summarizes the message:

The folks at One Laptop Per Child deserve a lot of credit for raising awareness around the global digital divide. Their stylish green laptop, along with the accompanying goal of putting 21st-century technology in the hands of children in developing countries, has captured the imaginations of people, companies and governments worldwide.

But the nearly half-million orders received from developing countries thus far for the so-called $100 laptop suggests that this effort to supply the developing world with affordable PCs may be too late.

That’s because the developing world has been swept up in the mobile voice revolution, which has far outpaced the spread of desktop and laptop computers. Global mobile phone users number nearly 3 billion, and 1.3 billion of those users are able to access the Internet using their handheld devices. That compares with roughly 1.1 billion desktop users with Web access worldwide. . . .

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Symbiano-TeK, where it comes to us from Egypt. See the ancient oarmen pulling the best mobile blogging of the week through the current of the Net. Included is my post SmartMobs post on Eric Klopfer’s new book on m-learning: Augmented Learning.

The Long Now Foundation is hosting yet another incredible Seminar About Long-Term Thinking [SALT] with Iqbal Quadir, in which he will discuss how technology empowers the poorest.

“Iqbal Quadir is the legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Currently Quadir heads the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT and is building Emergence BioEnergy Inc., a project to develop electricity for the rural poor, using such devices as a fuel cell that runs on anaerobic bacteria. Linking new technology with the boundless resourcefulness of the poor drives innovation in surprising directions at surprising speed to surprising effect.”

Location: Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco,
Time: 7pm, WEDNESDAY, May 21.
The talk starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a donation is certainly welcome, not required).

Networks are used to represent the structure of complex systems, including the Internet or social networks, but often these descriptions are biased or incomplete. Now, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it’s possible to extract automatically the hierarchical structure of networks. The researchers say their results ’suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.’ They also think that their algorithms can be applied to almost every kind of networks, from biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) to communities in social networks. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

In Fall, 2007, James Fishkin’s Center for Deliberative Democracy and Jim Lehrer’s Newshour program brought together 300 American citizens to talk about citizenship and democracy in the 21st century. A documentary, By The People, was broadcast on PBS stations in January, 2008. I was invited to address this assembly. I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere — the realm of citizen discourse that undergirds healthy democracy. The video, the first of two parts, was made available by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions.

TXTING COSTS R $£&+%$*&!

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope! [...] “The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”
Source: University of Leicester news release, May 12, 2008

Mobile phones more important than wallets

More than one-third of workers would choose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop or digital music player if they had to leave the house for 24 hours and could take only one item, a new survey has found. The survey, conducted by market research firm IDC and sponsored by Nortel Networks Corp, found that while more than 38 percent of the 2,367 people polled chose their mobile phones, less than 30 percent chose their wallets first.
Source: Reuters, May 13, 2008

The Hydra Versus Dragon Coding Competition

N-BRAIN, Inc., whose motto is “n minds are better than n-1,” will start on June 23, 2008 a coding competion online. CEO John A. De Goes asked me to write about this contest. “This competition is unique in that it’s designed primarily as a spectator event — spectators get to watch the coding sessions (which will be narrated by industry veterans), and vote for their favorite teams, Reality TV-style. It’s also the first competition to embrace collaboration: instead of developer against developer, it’s team against team.”
If you’re fluent in Java and want to win some of the $7,000 offered to the winners, please register.
Source: N-BRAIN, Inc., May 2008

Phone-wallets still years away

The new technology which enables small payments from mobile phones by just flashing the handset is likely to reach masses only around 2012, when one phone from five sold will be equipped with the technology. Consumers will be able to use a phone as a wallet or as an access card simply by waving it over a wireless reader — and in some cases punching a PIN number into the phone — similar to how travelers in Tokyo and London access public transport.
Source: Tarmo Virki, Reuters, May 15, 2008

Mobile-phone microscopes: Doctor on call

A research team led by Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many of today’s mobile phones into a microscope. Called a CellScope, it can show individual white and red blood cells, which means that with the correct stain it can be used to identify the parasite that causes malaria. Moreover, by transmitting an image directly over the mobile network, the CellScope could greatly help with the remote diagnosis and monitoring of many illnesses.
Source: The Economist, May 15, 2008

Academic argues software needs to learn manners

Has software ever angered You? Has it made you reboot your machine or made you so upset you had to leave your desk altogether and go and grab a coffee? If you answered yes to any of the above questions you are not alone. Many computer users feel at war with their software, says Auckland’s Massey University senior lecturer Brian Whitworth. Such users are constantly removing things they didn’t want added, resetting changes they didn’t want changed, closing windows they didn’t want opened and blocking emails they didn’t want to receive.
Source: Ulrika Hedquist, Computerworld New Zealand, May 14, 2008

How Did That Chain Letter Get To My Inbox?

Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others–or terrible misfortune if it isn’t. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question — how do these messages reach so many people so quickly? New research into these forwarded missives by Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University and David Liben-Nowell of Carleton College suggests a surprising explanation.
Source: US National Science Foundation (NSF) news release, May 16, 2008

Recently, Farhad Manjoo* tackled the sobering yet serious account of Lori Drew, the “MySpace Mom” who was indicted for the”cyberbullying” and “cyberbaiting” of the late Megan Meier.

“In 2006, according to law enforcement officials, Lori Drew, a 49-year-old mother in O’Fallon, Mo., created a fake MySpace account under the name Josh Evans, whom she cooked up as a 16-year-old boy new to town. Prosecutors say Drew used the phony profile to set up an online relationship with Megan Meier, a 13-year-old classmate of Drew’s daughter. And then, to viciously dump Meier.” (Source.)

Ultimately the “dumping” of Megan Meier was too much for her to bare and she chose the path of suicide to quell her personal pain. (Our sympathies go out to the Meier family.)

The purpose of this entry is to bring to light the potential social impact this indictment could make on our societies. Farhad Manjoo poignantly points out that “the MySpace mom’s prosecution threatens us all“.
According to Manjoo:

“In breaking the contract with MySpace, prosecutors say Drew is
criminally responsible. She can go to jail, in other words, for failing
to heed the legal terms of a Web site she clicked on. [...]

If prosecutors were given wide freedoms to charge folks who violated such things, there wouldn’t be enough jails on the planet to house us hoodlums.”

Read the article to inform yourself of the issues presented here and to judge for yourself if this indictment is really a threat to all of us.

*Salon staff writer covering technology and tech culture.

Augmented Learning by Eric Klopfer, from The MIT Press is at the vanguard of arguments that mobile learning will have roles where it is preferred in education’s future. M-learning has moved - not without some agony - from rejection by education, to suspicion, through accusations that it is too distracting for the classroom, to some increasing enthusiasm at the bleeding edges. For the believers in m-learning, this sketch from the publisher of Klopfer’s book rings happy tones in their ears:

Klopfer begins by exploring the past and present of education, educational technology, “edutainment,” and mobile games, and then offers a series of case studies of mobile educational games that have been developed and implemented in recent years. These games–either participatory (which require interaction with other players) or augmented reality (which augment the real world with virtual information)–can be produced at lower cost than PC or full-size console games. They use social dynamics and real-world contexts to enhance game play, can be integrated into the natural flow of instruction more easily than their big-screen counterparts, and can create compelling educational and engaging environments for learners. They are especially well-suited for helping learners at every level develop twenty-first century skills–including the ability to tackle complex problems and acquire information in “just-in-time” fashion. All of this, Klopfer argues, puts mobile learning games in a unique and powerful position within educational technology.

Wii Fit is scheduled to be released in North America by Nintendo next week. In a report called O.K., Avatar, Work With Me, the New York Times describes the video game’s entry into the personal exercise field. The writer, Seth Schiesels sounds like he is pre-sold - and I can understand why. Schiesel includes these good vibes from anticipating a trainer who is an avatar:

Exercising with Wii Fit is like having a Bob Harper or a Denise Austin who talks back — gently cajoling you through exercises, praising, nudging, even reminding you to eat a banana once in a while. It also lets you see how you stack up against friends or family members; each user creates a cartoony avatar called a “Mii.” . . .

Believe me, I could use some help. As a video game journalist, I live in a world where Buffalo wings, potato chips and jalapeño poppers are considered food groups. The closest I get to serious exercise is flopping around at concerts like a lumpy, overeducated flounder. . . .