In the hands of a preteenager, a cellphone can be a double-edged sword. It can give parents a sense of security because the child is never out of reach. But it can also cause anxiety because they do not know what else the child is doing with it – burning up the family’s minutes, perhaps.
The Firefly, a new phone from Firefly Mobile, is meant to help reduce such parental angst. Aimed at children age 8 to 12, it is a voice-only phone that gives parents control over how their child uses it.
Here’s an item about a new kind of power for laptops that combines a traditional lithium-ion battery with a methanol fuel cell. It sounds really cool! Created by IBM and Sanyo, they claim it lasts as long as most high-end laptop batteries (8 hours) but the potential for more is great.
I’m wondering about the environmental implications of this technology? Does anyone know much about methane as a fuel source?
Will these new laptops be smelly? (just kidding)
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life project has found that although Americans are getting more spam, they’re actually getting used to it and minding it less. I’m picturing a curve where as time increases, things bother people less. I wonder if we could call this a technology-annoyance diffusion curve or something. I think a similar statement and curve could exist in relation to use of Windows. People’s systems are crashing more these days but they seem to be used to it and not minding it.
Here is a story about the 40th anniversary of Moore’s law. We talked about Moore’s law in class and I think it’s interesting that this “law,” really now a proverb of sorts, is still so popular. I can’t think of any other similar saying that has gained such notoriety in the last 20 years.
This is the first time I ever heard of this. But maybe it’s not new to you…wave energy. Apparently it can capture more energy and is smaller and less expensive than wind or solar energy, and apparently it is less intrusive to marine habitats than even offshore wind farms! Is this true? Check out the article.
It would be another consideration as an alternative to coal…
This is from an earlier discussion (much earlier), and relates to sustainable transportation. The claim was that in India, women are being groped when they are walking alone, and no one questions it. The argument is to produce hybrid motorcycles so that women have more independence and freedom, and are not subject to this groping. The problem was that their saris were catching fire. The pro side was that the hybrid technology was sustainable.
I would say it is silly to justify technology for these reasons. You have to separate the components. (Sorry, divisions would work better in fixing this scenario, I think). Ok, so we have the problem of women being groped in public. Using transportation seems like you are fleeing from the problem. Does this solve the problem? In part, yes, because there is less opportunity for groping. We could have targeted the problem, and used a simple bottle of pepper spray to warn others not to touch us, and it would be less environmentally damaging than constructing a hybrid motorcycle (I think, although I’m not sure). Second, why motorcycles? Wouldn’t a bicycle work well too? And bicycles are more sustainable than motorcycles. And you don’t have to worry about saris catching fire on a bicycle.
Ok, so there does seem to be a market for efficient technology, according to a case where used hybrid Pirus’ are going for more than their list price when they first entered the market. There is a wait period of about 2 months for the car. It’s due to high gas prices, the study says.
For the story, clickhere
It is nice to see that people are readily switching over to this more environmentally friendly technology. But I’m still not convinced that cars are the right way to go if we are concerned about the environment…
Also, wouldn’t this call for some economic restructuring within the manufacturing industry, so that they can benefit from this too??? Then the government could put up some standards, such as only producing hybrid or electric cars in the future, and still benefit in the longrun (although it may be costly at first…) hmmm but maybe we could increase the gas tax by 1 cent and give the millions of $ generated to these companies to produce more environmentally-friendly designs, or something.
We have talked a fair bit about computers at work – i.e. ergonomics, “micro-breaks”, fast replacement rates, etc, etc.. Also about the shift to using computer technology for SO many things (museums, taxes, other data collection stuff, buying things, etc etc)… Anyway, we basically all agree that computers are becoming more and more popular for more and mroe things. One thing we haven’t talked much about, or at least only in passing, is computers in schools.
I was just chatting on msn with my 11 year old cousin. She was typing up her homework! this perked my intersted and I asked her a few more questions… turns out she is not only using computers to type up written homework assignments. Her class is currently working on a science project about “animals”; they work in the computer lab next to their classroom to make powerpoint presentations about animals, when the powerpoint is ready to go she will use it as an aide for her presentation to the rest of the class! The have to submit basically everything typed and have software that they use for math and music classes!
Is this not crazy!~?!?!? They are using computers not just for everything in the world, but everything in the elementary school world as well!
I just found an article in the globe and mail about the potential hazards to hospital patients in having computers in patient-care areas. Apparently, computer keyboards are great places for viruses (real life ones) to make homes. one hospital in toronto had to throw out all of their keyboards during one virus outbreak.. the viruses that hospitals are worried about are genearlly only found in hospitals but have the potential to be lethal. the study that was reported conclusively recommends increased handwashing after computer use in hospitals!! more work needs to be done to dertermine how much cleaning (i.e. germicides and such) keyboards can handle.
Here is the article
While this is no UN event, you guys should check out the following site: YC3. This conference is run by youth for youth and will be a chance for youth concerned about climate change to get together and generate action! There will be plenty of large group sessions, but also smaller workshops that will give participants the chance to come up with action plans for climate change awareness campaigns/events/etc in their communities. Notably, David Anderson (past minister of the Environment) and Elizabeth May (Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada) will be speaking and/or running workshops at the conference!
So while this conference will happen in British Columbia, in one building, this July – where everyone will be close enough to touc – there is still a huge amount of technology and computers being used in the logistics. For instance, the steering team is made up of members from many different locations in Canada – they have never all met or even talked on the phone… all steering committee meetings thus far have taken place with the help of MSN netmeeting! Email is very useful as well and the beautiful website is helping to attract delegates from different parts of the country and even different parts of the world! Go computers!
Check the site out! Maybe you or someone you know would want to participate!
Stand aside, Christo and Jeanne Claude! Consider this effort to save a glacier.
A Swiss ski resort worried about global warming’s ill effects on its future is taking matters into its own mittened hands. At the ski season’s end in May, the Andermatt resort will cover some 32,200 square feet of the Gurschen glacier with an insulating PVC foam in hopes of keeping its black diamonds from melting into bunny slopes. The foam, which costs some $84,000 and can be stored during winter for reuse, was constructed by Swiss technicians to protect the snow layer from heat, ultraviolet rays, and rain. The country’s glaciers have lost about a fifth of their surface area in the last 15 years, according to a Zurich University study linking the loss to global warming, and the ice field above Andermatt is retreating by about 16 feet a year, a resort spokesperson says. If the PVC-foam trial is successful, the resort plans to cover more of the glacier, and other resorts may also get in on the doggy-bagging technique. [emphasis added]
Also see the Telegraph article, Glacier goes under wraps .
World Wide Fund for Nature points out the irony in this approach, that
although the use of petroleum for PVC production is comparatively more moderate than in other types of plastic, PVC production implies the use of chlorine, with toxic by-products and dioxin emissions that represent a huge environmental and health hazard.
No Place to Hide is one of two new books reviewed in a NYTimes article on how little privacy we have in an information age of data mining and post 9-11 security. Some key grafs:
O’Harrow [the author of No Place to Hide] notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. ”Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,” O’Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, ”they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.”
…
The author devotes chapters to the techniques of commercial data gatherers and sellers like Acxiom, Seisint and the British-owned LexisNexis, not household names themselves, but boasting computers stuffed with the names and pictures of each member of the nation’s households as well as hundreds of millions of their credit cards. He quotes Ole Poulsen, chief technology officer of Seisint, on its digital identity system: ”We have created a unique identifier on everybody in the United States. Data that belongs together is already linked together.” Soon after 9/11, having seen the system that was to become the public-private surveillance engine called Matrix (in computer naming, life follows film art), Michael Mullaney, a counterterrorism official at the Justice Department, told O’Harrow: ”I sat down and said, ‘These guys have the computer that every American is afraid of.’ ”
The reviewer goes on to note that 10s of thousands of records from data miners have been stolen, likely by identity thieves. Yikes.
Canadians who think they’re immune need to remember that Air Canada shares passenger data from its US flights with the US and the majority of our buying patterns are captured by largely US companies and cross-referenced with census tract-specific patterns stored by Statistics Canada.
Read the first chapter of No Place to Hide.
Schoolhouse rock marketing?
Pete’s cat, Billy, demonstrating what cats do while you are at work…
As was mentioned in slashdot a few days ago, the maker of wordpress (the blogging software used for this blog) was hosting link spam, designed to artificially raise the ranking of websites in search engines by having hidden links to websites that regular users don’t see, but search engine crawlers do. Such practices contribute to the irritating occurance of clicking on links from Google that lead to ‘index’ pages that exist only to link to advertising and pop-up ads (which sadly have begun making an appearance in Firefox again). WordPress is an open source project, and the default configurations have links back to the wordpress.org website (the bottom of this page has it for example). Now all of those links pointing towards wordpress.org give wordpress more authority, which is then used for these somewhat nefarious purposes.
The general consensus was that it was a poor move, which has caused WordPress to be removed from Google’s, Yahoo’s, and MSN’s indices, and no doubt the maker of WordPress feels sufficiently bad about it that he will think twice before doing it again.
The question is, at what point must we examine our usage of tools, based on their source? In this case, the questionable behavior was quickly rectified. But what if the department of defence (or… Microsoft!) released open source tools. Should people have ethical qualms about using that code based on its source? What if it is released and then used for generally evil purposes? Or for a more general example, what about contributing to projects that are generally used to further causes I personally do not agree with? I generally try to buy non-evil products, should it be ok to use ‘free’ projects with evil associations?
In one of the Philip K. Dick short stories I read, the premise was that the sci-fi writers are in fact predicting the future, without even knowing it, and people from the future who had a problem, decided to travel back in time, to get the person from the past, to write more of the story, to determine the solution to the problem they were having, that the author had already correctly predicted.
It was kind of a funny idea, and the story is somewhat amusing. As we discussed today even if we discount the idea that people are actually seeing into the future, it may be that science fiction is inspiring people to try to create what they read or see in novels and on tv or in movies.
However, the most interesting futurist on the internet has to be John Titor. Someone sent me his site a few years ago, which details how he is a time traveler from the future, who has come back to our times to apparently make an internet site detailing the world’s demise over the next few years. Not to the credit of my friend who sent it to me, they seemed quite convinced. I have long since lost the initial website, but here is a summary page and the Wikipedia entry.
The internet can create some interesting myths, which would probably otherwise have a lot more difficulty spreading. Beyond John Titor, another category of links people send me ‘secretly’ are posts about the oil peak, which predicts massive oil shortages very soon, due to various factors.
When things develop enough, sometimes these websites create enough momentum they begin to look like legitimate information, and people start to buy it. I wonder how long it will be before we see a religion with its primary texts written electronically? If it could gain a foothold, it would certainly have the potential to spread very rapidly.
The Associated Press reports on a new Google feature that incorporates satellite maps.
Online search engine leader Google has unveiled a new feature that will enable its users to zoom in on homes and businesses using satellite images, an advance that may raise privacy concerns as well as intensify the competitive pressures on its rivals.
The actual site is here. I can see why people would be alarmed. You can zoom in really close.