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I’m planning to participate in the Future of Technologies Conference in Leicester this Thursday, organized by my friends at De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies. Leicester itself has been undergoing interesting changes, from a classically industrial textile-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, from an entirely white city to a multiethnic population with no racial majority. Linz undertook a similar change from a steel center to a digital arts center, although the ethnic changes are not parallel. Linz and local media companies were smart enough to support Ars Electronica. I hope The Future of Technologies conference will be followed by others in which IOCT and the city work together to bring minds together with new ideas —...
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When cars communicate with each other about the traffic they are enduring, their drivers may be steered away from traffic jams. A Wall Street Journal article on the topic is titled Fighting Traffic Jams with Data: Researchers Develop Ways for Cars to ‘Talk’ to Each Other and Send Warnings. The report describes some details of the drive toward smart mobbing cars to avoid jams, and begins: A symphony of light-emitting diodes, smartphones, global positioning systems and mobile sensors may soon work together to help drivers avoid traffic jams. Researchers from different universities are working on ways for cars to better communicate with each other and relay crucial driver information such as traffic speed, weather and road...
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Obama’s social networking was the real revolution Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social-networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then the Republicans. As a result, when he arrives at the White House, Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern.
Source: David Carr,...
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(Thanks, Megan!) Several times a day, with increasing frequency and accuracy, one of the people who follows my personal account on Twitter — someone I’ve never heard from before — sends me a specific URL to check out. I check it out. Yes, indeed: this is something I need to know. Within the last couple hours I got one about blogging and the public sphere, and another one about teaching and learning. I try to reciprocate, but not necessarily as a direct quid pro quo — if I see something that someone I follow probably ought to know about, I send a link. A diffuse kind of ad-hoc educational institution emerges from the twittersphere in...
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Success in life and as a citizen increasingly depends not so much on access to devices as access to knowledge — knowledge of the skills necessary to use widely available technology to achieve one’s ends as an individual and a citizen. In other words: literacy. This video is only three minutes long, but it gets the point across nicely:
      
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There is a detailed story today in Pajamas Media that reports on various aspects of technology used in the US Presidential election. Starting with some background from 2004, the report analyzes the use by both major parties of new media and social networking. There was activism on both sides in numerous aspects of the campaigns: Just as the left winning the students doesnât translate into superior student activism, winning the technologists doesnât translate into superior technology. Between students and technologists, the left has a much more technologically-savvy community and has clearly dominated high-tech activism. Where the right has translated technology into traditional low-tech forms like call sheets and targeted scripts, they have been...
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I’m heartwarmed to write about GoodGuide, a startup I’ve been observing since it was in stealth mode, which has a team of dedicated individuals I dearly admire (hi Eric, Dara) and took the top prize at the Web 2.0 Summitâs Launch Pad last week. GoodGuide is a gargantuan database of information about the environmental, health, and social implications of products and companies. Its purpose is to help users align their consumer behavior with their values, “shifting the balance of information and power in the marketplace” and enabling what could be referred to as consumer governance. To date, the team’s focus has been on core capabilities, such as partnerships with data providers and the methodology...
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Some clever computer scientists at UC San Diego (UCSD) have developed a software that can perform key duplication with just a picture of the key — taken from up to 200 feet. One of the researchers said ‘we built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret.’ He added that on sites like Flickr, you can find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. Apparently, some people are blurring ‘numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos on-line,’ but not their keys. This software project is quite interesting, but don’t be too afraid. I don’t think that many of you put a photo...
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Google has been making headlines recently with its new Online Flu Tracker which, as the Fox News story says today, “will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.” The new Flu Trends page at Google describes how the tracker works, and includes this explanation: Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using...
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Social-media has a tremendous potential in helping positively re-shape our societies. One clear sign of this potential is in the creative application of “Web 2.0″ social media into the realm of public services, such as firefighting. Bryan Humphrey, a fireman of the of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) is a champion of Web 2.0 within firefighting. Bryan is quoted in an WIRED article saying that: “short of motorized fire apparatuses, this [Web 2.0] technology is the best thing that’s happened to our department in 122 years,” Humphrey says. “It holds more potential to save lives than any other civic tool.” Take the time to read the WIRED article and reflect on how the efforts of people like...
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