A Washington Post report today describes the preparations underway by the cellphone industry to meet the anticipated need of users, and do some new things. The article titled Inauguration Spotlights Cellphone Opportunities recaps the expected crush of calls and related challenges, and then adds:

AppTek of McLean is hoping many inauguration attendees will use its product that translates text messages into different languages. The company has licensed its technology to other online firms including TransClick.com, isec7.com and OnsetTechnology.com, and consumers can download the software to their BlackBerrys, PDAs and other smartphones.

“Everyone is going to want to speak to everyone else, regardless of the language,” said Mike Veronis, head of business development for AppTek.

AppTek is also working with DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s research lab, to develop handheld devices that can translate two-way conversations in real time. The device is intended for use by military and intelligence workers.

“Whatever starts to get funded by these government labs has the ultimate goal to become a mass-market product,” Veronis said. “That shows the government is moving that way.”

Both firms hope the mass text messages that helped fuel Obama’s campaign success will continue long after the inauguration.

“For the first time ever, more people are texting than making voice calls,” Titus said. “And the texting generation is the one Obama has been targeting.”

The notion that online social relationships should be dismissed as somehow “less real” than face-to-face relationships — or “real community,” whatever that means — is an old one. It’s a good question to ask, and all online information should be critically examined, including online relationships. But when people dismiss the possibility that for some people, the online world is not just real, but a lifeline, I think of Blaine Deatherage-Newsom. I still answer email from students, as I did more than a decade ago. In 1996, I was asked a few survey questions by a student who wanted to know if I would consider aborting a pregnancy if it could be determined in advance that the baby would have spina bifida. A few weeks later, when I heard back from Blaine about the results of his survey, I wrote “For Some, The Net Is a Lifeline” in a newspaper-syndicated column that I put online by myself.

A few weeks ago, twelve years after that column, I smiled to see this article about Blaine and Freegeek, the organization he supports and inspires. The text excerpt is written by Marie Deatherage, Blaine’s mother:

And of course last but not least there’s the meaning it has in my son Blaine’s life. As many of you know, Blaine was born with spina bifida and is paralyzed and lacks sensation below his armpits. This past summer, Blaine received an award for “Volunteer Extraordinaire” at Free Geek in recognition that for the past five years, every day Free Geek is open and he is not really really sick, Blaine has been getting himself up and ready to go in and help that amazing nonprofit organization. I get to see what it takes for Blaine to make his important contribution. What can I say? He’s my hero.

I’ve always know what Free Geek does for Blaine, but I was stunned to hear what he means to Free Geek. Recently some of his co-workers there shared some thoughts about what Blaine provides Free Geek. When I heard these things, my heart soared like a hawk. I wish every mother had the opportunity to hear people appreciate their son or daughter like this:

* “Recently my niece signed up to volunteer at Free Geek, opting to work her way through the Computer Build program to earn a free computer. My advice to her was, ‘Prepare to work independently, overcome great frustration, and when in doubt, stay close to Blaine.’”

* “Blaine’s tutelage was instrumental in my making it through the Build program at Free Geek (launching me into other areas of contribution), and I know he has provided similar assistance to hundreds, if not thousands of other volunteers there.”

* “Blaine is an amazingly knowledgable and patient instructor and coordinator of other volunteers. Despite his limited mobility, Blaine is able to help direct and answer questions of our volunteers, which in turn keep our organization running.”

* “Blaine is among the most valued members of the Free Geek community and of its volunteer labor force.”

* “Blaine helps teach others good work skills and reinforces the importance of showing up on time and doing your job with all you have, and he is always willing to learn more from others to share with his students.”

* “I have been very impressed with Blaine’s patient and consistently upbeat contributions as a volunteer with the Free Geek build program. He was extremely supportive and helpful to a young man from a Haitian refugee family who learned a lot from a series of afternoons with Blaine: about computers, people, tolerance and empathy from his supportive manner and patient instruction.”

* “He is a beloved member of our community. It’s impossible to work with Blaine without appreciating his cheer and warmth. I’ve never seen him get irritated, even in the most difficult times; His equanimity helps us all to maintain our own sanity. He’s an inspiring presence.”

Every year, John Brockman asks an interesting group of people to answer one question. This year, he asked about what we thought would be game-changing knowledge.

ANNOUNCING THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION - 2009

New tools equal new perceptions.

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.

Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.

Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.

—————–

THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION - 2009

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

—————–

More than 150 essays in response to this year’s question have been published on the EDGE website at the following URL:

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_index.html

—————–

And here is an excerpt of my answer: Social Media Literacy

Social media literacy is going to change many games in unforeseeable ways. Since the advent of the telegraph, the infrastructure for global, ubiquitous, broadband communication media have been laid down, and of course the great power of the Internet is the democracy of access—in a couple of decades, the number of users has grown from a thousand to a billion. But the next important breakthroughs won’t be in hardware or software but in know-how, just the most important after-effects of the printing press were not in improved printing technologies but in widespread literacy. The Gutenberg press itself was not enough. Mechanical printing had been invented in Korea and China centuries before the European invention. For a number of reasons, a market for print and the knowledge of how to use the alphabetic code for transmitting knowledge across time and space broke out of the scribal elite that had controlled it for millennia. From around 20,000 books written by hand in Gutenberg’s lifetime, the number of books grew to tens of millions within decades of the invention of moveable type. And the rapidly expanding literate population in Europe began to create science, democracy, and the foundations of the industrial revolution. Today, we´re seeing the beginnings of scientific, medical, political, and social revolutions, from the instant epidemiology that broke out online when SARS became known to the world, to the use of social media by political campaigns. But we´re only in the earliest years of social media literacy. Whether universal access to many-to-many media will lead to explosive scientific and social change depends more on know-how now than physical infrastructure….(more at Edge.org)

Spanish researchers have published a study about the potential future impact of robots on society. They think that the potentially widening gap between the first and third worlds will cause a technological imbalance over the next 12 years. One of the researchers said that ‘just as we depend upon mobile phones and cars in our daily lives today, the next 15 years will see mass hybridization between humans and robots.’ So they predict that robots will be around — and inside — us.
Read more: ZDNet, Primidi

Joi Ito, who first showed me a personal home page on the Web in 1994, has become an astonishing citizen of the Net, with his work on ICANN, Witness, and many other projects. More recently, Larry Lessig passed the leadership torch of Creative Commons to Joi.

A couple years ago, Joi and I had a conversation about creativity, and I encouraged him to tap his own, through any medium that appealed to him. I don’t know if that conversation was the proximate cause, but he started doing some extraordinary photography not long after that. When he noticed that many entries about living people in Wikipedia lacked photographs, he realized that his travels brought him into contact with many of those people, so he created the “freesouls” tag that indicated photographs that could be used for purposes like Wikipedia and other public goods. More recently, he has compiled some of the best of these pix into a book, Freesouls. A limited edition is on sale, benefitting Creative Commons.

It was my honor and privilege to write an essay for this book, “Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies.” Other essays are by Lawrence Liang, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao and Marko Ahtisaari.

Allvoices.com has set up a page called The Events in Gaza — to which you can contribute via your cellphone. The page provide a place for sharing experiences from the ground in Gaza. Erik Sundelof at Allvoices explains the goal of the project is “to open a dialogue about these events and what they mean to us as a global society.” Here is how you send text, images, and/or videos to the page:

For text via cellphones:
1) Start your text message (SMS) start your message with @2122268. Example: @2122268 These are tragic events.
2) For Israel, Palestine and Lebanon: send your SMS +45-609-910-280. (For Orange in Israel use +61-427-229-537)
3) For all other countries, you will find the right number for you to use at http://tinyurl.com/4ykfyo

To contribute images or videos via cellphones:
1) Start the subject line with @2122268
2) Send an email or MMS to mms@allvoices.com

(You can of course contribute via PC directly to the site.)

Zooborns.com is announcing today the birth of baby Arani to aardvark mom Raachael. The happy event is reported by the Detroit Zoo, one of dozens of zoos and aquariums around the world participating in ZooBorns.com.

ZooBorns.com brilliantly clusters the cuteness of baby animals with timely events (their births) to deliver authoritative knowledge about animal species — including their care and conservation. The zoo babies look great on a mobile browser too. Among what we learn from the Arani post, from the experts who mention that “This baby can only be described as hideously cute”:

The animal’s unusual appearance plays a part in its success as a forager. The ears point forward to enable it to listen for the sound of insects. The snout is long and filled with hair that acts as a filter, letting scents in and keeping dirt out. Strong limbs and spoon-shaped claws can tear though the sturdiest of termite mounds, allowing the aardvark to trap insects with its long, sticky tongue which can be up to 12 inches long.

New zoo baby posts appear almost daily. A favorite of mine is a mama meerkat leering upwards at a baby gorilla — here, right below the kangaroo.

RFID’s Security Problem

Are U.S. passport cards and new state driver’s licenses with RFID truly secure? Starting this summer, Americans will need passports to travel to Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and the Caribbean–unless they have passport cards or one of the enhanced driver’s licenses that the states of Washington and New York have begun to issue. Valid only for trips by land and sea, these new forms of identification are a convenient, inexpensive option for people who don’t need to travel by plane.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, January/February 2009

With text-messaging, government goes mobile

Going online from a personal computer to access government services has been commonplace in some countries for several years. Now, in Estonia, Singapore and many countries in between, many of those same services are available through your cellphone. In Singapore, text messages are used to pay parking tickets; in the Philippines, they are used to pay income taxes; and in part of India, people can receive a text message saying how much property tax they owe. [...] In China, cellphone users can text members of the National People’s Congress.
Source: Eric Sylvers, International Herald Tribune, December 21, 2008

Satnav device gets the shopping done fast

If the prospect of Christmas shopping in crowded malls fills you with dread, help could soon be at hand. Researchers have developed a hand-held device that maps out the fastest route for you to get all your shopping done - and tells you where to find the best bargains. The device, developed by Javier Bajo at the University of Salamanca in Spain, has been tested in the Tormes shopping mall in Salamanca, where it received a thumbs up from shoppers and store owners alike.
Source: New Scientist magazine, Issue 2687, Page 25, December 21, 2008

NSA patents a way to spot network snoops

The U.S. National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is tampering with network communication. The NSA’s software does this by measuring the amount of time the network takes to send different types of data from one computer to another and raising a red flag if something takes too long, according to the patent filing.
Source: Robert McMillan, IDG News Service, December 21, 2008

Cell phones using lens-free imaging promise to improve health monitoring

In the lab of UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan, a prototype cell phone has been constructed that is capable of monitoring the condition of HIV and malaria patients, as well as testing water quality in undeveloped areas or disaster sites. The innovative imaging technology was invented by Ozcan, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and has been miniaturized by researchers in his lab to the point that it can fit in standard cell phones.
Source: University of California at Los Angeles news release, December 22, 2008, 2008

Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.
Source: Pew Research Center, December 23, 2008

Cyber cafe offers address to homeless

In a country where an street address is key to getting a job, an Internet cafe near Tokyo is offering the unemployed and homeless more than just a virtual, email address. In addition to the usual Internet services, comic books and unlimited beverages offered by most Japanese Internet cafes, Cyber @ Cafe offers its residents long-term lodging and an official registered address. This simple service is vital for the 50 semi-permanent residents of the cafe, many of whom have taken refuge here after being laid off abruptly during the current recession.
Source: Chika Osaka, Reuters, December 25, 2008

DCortesi wrote up on Christmas day ‘08 ‘My First Follow’ a quick little thing that shows you who your first follow was on Twitter. Already this little creation is spread among twitterers like wildfire.

Damon Cortesi instructs:

“There are a couple notes:

You must be logged in to Twitter
It will only show who your first follow was if you are still following them”

Personally I found out via this tool that it was Tara Hunt & Chris Messina who inspired me in February/March 2007 to start twittering. The first person I followed on my gervis account was @missrogue

Finding out about this triggered me to check out what publications initially informed me about Twitter’s potential. The result of that check I twittered on gervis today.