A report in Wired Campus by Jeffrey R. Young says that Students Watch Lecture Videos in Fast Forward. He writes that:

Some professors report that when their students are reviewing class materials, the students speed up online recordings of lectures and zip through hour-long presentations in as little as 30 minutes. Sure, their professors sound like chipmunks. But the students say they can absorb the information faster than the professors deliver it.

The Wired Campus story includes comments from several educators who have observed the sped up lecture listening. To do the speed-up makes a lot of sense if it is not the first time a student is listening to a lecture — but that is doubtfully the case most of the time. Is there a bigger principle here? Would it increase efficiency for voice mail to be able to speed up the messages as you listen? Will talk in the smart mobby world become fast as well as cheap?

Whilst the economy may be in systemic melt-down the world of mobile blogging continues to go from strength to strength. The mobile carnivalists invite you to beat the gloom with this week’s round up of the blogosphere’s best mobile reportage at Carnival of the Mobilists 145 touching down at mjelly - whoop whoop!

This 145th edition online this week, includes SmartMobs in its reviews, in this posting:

Smartmobs has expanded its coverage into loads of interesting areas adjacent to mobile and we’re including a post from it this week that’s a little bit different to provide a bit of a break from mobile-focused stuff - a vlog from the legendary Howard Rheingold on Vernacular Video.

D-Day for RFID-based transit card systems

Want to ride the subway for free without having to jump the turnstiles? Well, as of Monday, you’ll be able to do that by making a fake transit card. A scientific paper detailing the security flaws in the Mifare Classic wireless smart card chip used in transit systems around the world is being published by the Radboud University Nijmegen. And a researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin has published a full implementation of the algorithm.
Source: Elinor Mills, CNET’s Security blog, October 6, 2008

Boston University partners in NSF challenge to create wireless network using visible light

Boston University’s College of Engineering is a partner launching a major program, under a National Science Foundation grant, to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves. Researchers expect to piggyback data communications capabilities on low-power light emitting diodes, or LEDs, to create “Smart Lighting” that would be faster and more secure than current network technology.
“Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires,” said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little.
Source: Boston University news release, October 6, 2008

Increased Retail Security with Smart Items

It is not uncommon for a few boxes of valuable goods to disappear from palettes on the way to retail outlets. That is why Fraunhofer IIS is working on a new technical platform to safeguard such items. This involves using wireless ad-hoc sensor networks to create logistical information systems that allow them to be tracked along the entire distribution chain. Fraunhofer IIS is showing the VitOL project, a technological platform for the realization of logistical information systems based on sensor networks at French European Union Presidency Conference in Nice, France.
Source: Fraunhofer IIS news release, October 6, 2008

Peer-to-peer networking takes internet out of the equation

When people working on a project get together with their laptops and PDAs, they share information via the internet and a client server. But new software developed by European researchers allows independent, ad hoc, secure networking anywhere.
Source: ICT Results, October 3, 2008

How Much Security Do You Expect From Your Pacemaker?

A University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher who earlier this year showed that an implantable heart defibrillator is vulnerable to hacking has received a three-year, $449,000 National Science Foundation grant to improve future security in implanted cardiac devices without compromising safety and effectiveness. Kevin E. Fu, assistant professor of computer science, is designing and testing zero-power technology and low-power cryptographic protocols for implantable medical devices for the two-part study.
Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst news release, October 3, 2008

In Defense of Piracy

Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up.
Copyright law must be changed. Here are just five changes that would make a world of difference:

• Deregulate amateur remix
  


• Deregulate “the copy”
  


• Simplify
  


• Restore efficiency
  


• Decriminalize Gen-X
  

I attended a conference on “Online Giving Marketplaces” at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper.com are doing in the commercial peer to peer loan space. One site among many worth checking out is ModestNeeds, which gives grants of up to $5,000 to average folks - for things like paying off overdue bills and rent, etc. In these challenging economic times it’s the kind of thing that is truly needed.

One of the sessions was titled “Online Giving Markets: Niche or Revolution”. Even though the session didn’t frame the online giving trend as revolutionary (at this point less than 1% of giving is done online), personally I think they are on to something BIG. And organizations like Social Actions get that and are pushing the envelope. Here’s an attempt to explain where things could and perhaps should be headed, from a ComputerWorld piece…

It’s quite a weekend ‘Freedom Not Fear 2008′ calls 11. October 2008 for an international action day in as many European capital cities as possible and elsewhere around the world to demonstrate against what they label as ‘the total retention of telecommunication data and other instruments of surveillance‘.

Also this collectiv action was spotted via Twitter. It was received from Paris by way of Smartmobs friend Hellekin O. Wolf.

Via Twitter Alper points to the Free Culture Conference today by Students for Free Culture and Free Culture Berkeley. In the Netherlands in the Hague a sortlike event takes place.

Free Culture is a movement focused on creativity and innovation, communication and free expression, public access to knowledge and civil liberties. Students for Free Culture at Berkeley is hosting the Free Culture 2008 Conference over Columbus Day weekend.

Place: October 11-12, 2008 Chevron Auditorium, International House 2299 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley CA. There is a Conference Wiki

October 11 is National Coming Out Day. Promoting a voice to text messaging service speech technology company SpinVox(R) assumes that “people won’t just be taking their gay pride to the streets — they will be taking it to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and countless other social networks. And for a growing number of them, it will mean using their cellphones to broadcast their pride online and out loud.”
SpinVox suggests five ways to express gay pride via social networking and explains how their voice to text service works. Mashable lists over 20 sites for Coming Out support.

The chaos on Capitol Hill these days includes breakdowns related to the public electronic mobbings of their Washington representatives. Although the fellow in charge says not all the crashes are related to the current crisis, more energy efficient servers are needed to handle electronic relations between politicians and their increasing input from the public. Politico reports today:

House e-mail accounts have been down since Thursday night, frustrating congressional aides on both sides of the aisle.

The shutdown, which also affects BlackBerrys, was the result of an overloaded circuit breaker at one of the data centers that processes e-mail and other Internet services, meaning it was an electrical problem and not related to an overflow of outside e-mail traffic, according to a letter from Chief Administrative Office Daniel P. Beard.

The system suffered a massive slowdown last week after the House defeated an initial version of the bailout bill, sending financial markets into a tailspin and prompting frustrated constituents to flood servers and phone lines.

“This recent outage has nothing to do with the slowdowns experienced with House.gov, which have been attributed to an enormous flow of emails from constituents surrounding the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” Beard wrote members and aides on Friday.

Computer engineers with the CAO’s office have worked “around the clock to resolve this issue,” Beard wrote. “The outage is anticipated to be repaired some time today.”

In addition, these engineers are working to fortify the current system with new equipment to boost the power supply in an effort to prevent future shutdowns, but Beard argues the system is currently overburdened by increased demands for bandwidth. He plans to recommend infrastructure improvements in the coming months to prevent future outages.

“Initial analysis of the situation confirms what systems engineers have suspected for some time: more energy efficient servers are needed within the House’s computing infrastructure,” Beard wrote. “By reducing the amount of energy the House’s computing currently demands, and by creating electrical backup systems, I am confident we will greatly diminish outages like this from happening again.”

My newest vlog post is about vernacular video in culture and education. 6 1/2 minutes