Safe Transactions with Infected PCs

Your computer has been breached by malicious hackers: it’s completely loaded with malware and spyware. You’re about to get online, connect to a financial institution, and make some transactions. Is there anything, at this point, that can keep your identity off the black market? SiteTrust, a tool released today by Waltham, MA, data-security company Verdasys, aims to protect users from fraud, even when their computers have been compromised.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, September 15, 2008

Turning Social Networks Against Users

Ever since Facebook opened its doors to third-party applications a year and a half ago, millions of users have employed miniature applications to play games, share movie and song recommendations, and even “zombie-bite” their friends. But as the popularity of third-party applications has grown, computer-security researchers have also begun worrying about ways that social-networking applications could be misused. The same thing that makes social networking such an effective way to distribute applications — deep access to a user’s networks of friends and acquaintances — could perhaps make it an ideal way to distribute malicious code.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, September 15, 2008

WSJ.com to get social-networking makeover

The newspaper site is expected to launch “Journal Community” on Tuesday to allow paying subscribers to comment on individual stories, create discussion groups on specific topics, and ask one another for advice, according to a report Sunday by the Associated Press. Like social networks Facebook or MySpace, the community will allow subscribers to create personal profiles. But instead of missives on favorite movies and music, these profiles will feature subscribers’ their real names, job details, and interests, according to the report.
Source: Steven Musil, CNET’s Digital Media, September 14, 2008

A quarter million teachers to get free wikis

A San Francisco wiki services provider has just finished a multiyear project under which it gave teachers all over the world 100,000 free wikis. And now, it is doubling up and getting set to give away another quarter million. The company, Wikispaces, decided in 2006 that it would make helping teachers use the collaborative software to further cooperation between students, both in their own schools and with schools in other cities and countries, a cornerstone of its business.
Source: Daniel Terdiman, CNET’s Gaming and Culture, September 15, 2008

Political attitudes are predicted by physiological traits

Rice University’s John Alford, associate professor of political science, and his colleagues studied a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs. Those individuals with “measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War,” the authors wrote.
Source: Rice University news release, September 18, 2008

User-generated science

Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate.
Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. Such discussions, the internet-era equivalent of the journal club, have hitherto been strewn across the web, making them hard to find, navigate and follow. The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online.
Source: The Economist, September 18, 2008

According to UK and U.S. researchers, it should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air. This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 unmanned ships to cool the Earth even if the level of carbon dioxide doubled. These 300-tonne ships ‘would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US$2.65 to 5.3 billion total cost for the ships only. Even if this project has its merits, who will finance it? The scientists don’t answer this question. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

(Thank you, Garsett)

BBC reports on “Kashmir’s Cameraphone Chroniclers:”

Minutes after 35-year-old Javed Amir Mir was shot in the head by security forces in Srinagar, capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, a young boy recorded his death on his mobile phone camera.

The shaky and grainy clip shows a blood splattered face lying on the road. You can hear the wailing women and the screaming men in the background

Across the city, 25-year-old Imran Ahmed Wani’s death was also recorded on mobile phones by friends rushing him to hospital after he was shot during a demonstration.

Cross media storytelling, vibrant and fast moving technological and creative developments in cities across Africa and the new plans that Google has for the region: these are a few of the things that will be discussed in the Surprising Africa special, a full day Special on Picnic 08 on Friday September 26. Picnic interviewed Ethan Zuckerman about this work and the role of new media.

Africans’ creative uses of technology not only counter negative stereotypes of the continent, they also hint at its receptiveness to simple, efficient everyday innovations. “Individual citizens empowered with technology can be a very powerful force for transparency,” says Zuckerman in this great interview.

Zimbabweans made news around the world this year when they used phones to monitor the violence-wracked elections.

The Western media have also reported on another mobile phone-driven transformation in Africa: mobile banking. In most countries, people can now make purchases and transfer money using a menu on their phones. Gone are the days of moving cash via eight-hour bus trips and expensive courier services, which the majority of Africans, unable to get traditional bank accounts, used to be stuck with. The savings in money and time are enormous.

In February this year, a man was convicted of murder partly on evidence relating to his texting style.

[by way of Stuart Houghton's Pocketpicks]

After David Hodgson killed his girlfriend - nineteen year old Jenny Nicholl - he attempted to make it seem as though she was still alive by sending text messages from her phone. At trial, a team from the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University were able to show that the messages more closely resembled Hodgson’s own style of SMS usage.

“A linguistic analysis showed that text messages sent from her phone were unlikely to have been written by her but, rather, were more likely to have been written by Hodgson,” said Aston Uni’s Tim Grant.

The PICNIC Green Challenge preliminary jury selected from among 235 entrants, all of whom sent in detailed plans for inventions that would combat climate change. One finalist is from Switzerland; the other three are from the United States. The PICNIC Green Challenge is the international creative competition of the Dutch Postcode Lottery and the cross-media event PICNIC. (news & weblog)

Four bright ideas that can make a difference
Jochen Mundinger of Switzerland has developed a software tool for travelling in an eco-friendly, efficient way, door to door. Capra J’neva Devi of the United States has invented easy-to-use consumer solar panels. Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, an inventor team from the United States, offer sustainable ecological alternatives to conventional synthetic building materials. And another duo, Peter Yeadon and Martina Decker of the United States, has created an intelligent shading system for windows and glass facades.

The inventors will present their ideas to the final jury in the Deciding Round on the morning of Thursday 25 September. At the Award Ceremony that evening, the jury will announce the winner and award the €500,000 prize, made available by the Dutch Postcode Lottery. The finals will take place during PICNIC’08 at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.

PICNIC is Amsterdam’s leading annual international event, highlighting creativity and innovation, particularly in media, entertainment and technology. PICNIC brings together and disseminates the ideas and knowledge of the world’s best creators and innovators.

PICNIC ‘08 will be held in the Westergasfabriek (factory) in Amsterdam from September 24 to 26, 2008. (programme) PICNIC focuses on bringing together inspiring, creative and innovative individuals. The PICNIC audience includes creatives, artists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, lawyers, format developers, agencies, cross media content production creatives, advertisers, programmers, investor, writers, filmmakers, journalists, and technology-and service-providers from around the world.

Smartmobs is invited to the party and will be represented on Thursday September 25 to keep you posted !

Denmark will be hosting during 10-11 November a research seminar entitled “Digital media, civic engagement and political mobilization in repressive regimes.” Organizers: The Institute for Society and Globalization (RUC) in cooperation with the Research School for International Development Studies (RUC) and the Danish Institute for Human Rights (IMR/DIIS). Theme related papers are expected and welcomed.

The goal of the seminar is to share, promote, and facilitate academic research in the field of digital media and public sphere in repressive regimes. There’s a double direction of the studies: the way the public sphere uses digital media to promote political and civil activism inside repressive regimes and the way repressive regimes use digital media to influence, control or censor the public sphere.

Three areas are of interest to the seminar: (a) methodological issues — data from the studies will add up to clearing the place of Internet activism among the social sciences, such as in relation to public sphere and social movement theory; (b) the conventional Eurocentric thinking about the public sphere will be challenged by analyzing new concepts, approaches, and understandings of the public sphere in relation to digital media in repressive regimes; (c) as a practical side of the seminar, there will be an emphasis on the mobilization for political change through digital networked technologies.

On September 7, in Santiago Chile, I interviewed Luis Ramirez and Paloma Baytelman about "the penguin revolution" – Chilean schoolchildren used social media to organize widespread protests against underfunded public schools. Here is that brief video interview.

The cloud is becoming a place where small schools — even individual classes or assignments — can do their educating in the connective digital ecology. Educators early on thought of top-down, systemwide ways for wiring schools and managing digital edu stuff. At the Web 2.0 Expo I found an example of a method that works in the opposite way. What I found works for projects other schools, of course, but I have been looking for how Web 2.0 can impact teaching and learning, and here is a powerful way:

The Morph AppCloud is a fully managed environment — monitored, backed up, updated, etc. — within the cloud where apps can, for example, service a single school project. Costs are tiny, in the range up from $30 a month. Projects are, Morph explains: “Highly Customizable. Easily customize your platform components according to your business needs with a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies setup.”

The Morph folks have a morph eXchange website with a growing list of free applications that can run for users in the cloud. An example of these that could be excellent for classes that require reports from students is a self-publishing app. A user can create a book of any length and in doing so be supported by features such as indexing, table of contents, etc. An individual teacher/class can use this app directly and cheaply — yet be state-of-the-art, doing education in the cloud.

Yeeyan translates my 2005 TED talk video on “Way New Collaboration” into Chinese:

Howard Rheingold是《智慧的乌合之众》(Smart Mobs)一书的作者，以下是他在2005年的TED大会上发表的一个演讲的汉译稿。演讲者指出，以往被认为是铁律的“生存竞争”，“适者生存”等话语如今正在退到边缘，而群体合作的兴起，则为人类实现新财富的创造带来了全新的理念与可能。他还指出我们对于这种行为的研究还仅仅出于起步阶段，呼唤不同学科领域的人能走到一道，共同研究这一话题，因为它必将为我们带来好处。