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Vehicle telemetry: Calling all cars

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - Nov. 19 (Special Report) - One way or another, a quarter of the world’s new cars will be equipped with some form of remote monitoring and control system by 2016, predicts Egil Juliussen, an analyst with iSuppli, a Californian company that monitors technology trends. The result will be cars that are not only impossible to steal, but can also call the emergency services if the airbags go off in an accident, make themselves more comfortable to drive before their owners get in, and even admit an owner who has mislaid his keys. (Every month more than 60,000 OnStar subscribers ask for the doors of their cars to be unlocked remotely, because they have locked themselves out.)

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One month of Twitter hell

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:05:16 -0800

The Guardian - Nov. 16 - All November, Ian Martin will be following the BNP, led by Nick Griffin, on Twitter. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA WIRE Most Twitter users love the site for its friendly, like-minded sense of community. Ian Martin, writer and "swearing consultant" on

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Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Randall Stross - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - In a patent application, a new way to make consumers acknowledge a pop-up ad. “Some of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description. But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics. Filing a patent application, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an “enforcement routine” that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.

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Murdoch to remove News Corp's content from Google in months

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Telegraph - By Emma Barnett - Nov. 13 (News Report) - Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, is prepared to remove his company's content from Google's search index "within months" as the pay versus free content debate reaches crisis point.

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Murdoch to Hide News Corp Content from Google Within Months

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

mashable.com - By Stan Schroeder - Nov. 13 (Comment) - I just cannot imagine a world in which all of the big creators of news create a paywall around their content and then everyone decides that this content is so great they should pay for it instead of finding it elsewhere for free. The landscape of the news industry and the way news is disseminated has changed so much that sticking to the old business model and completely shutting off new possibilities won’t work. I might be wrong, though; I guess we’ll know soon enough.

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India eNews - Psychologists see images of brain's response to

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

indiaenews.com - By India eNews Staff - Nov. 12 (News Report) - For the first time psychologists were able to see exactly how the human brain responds to unexpected or traumatic events. The study could lead to procedures that could help identify people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Anti-Statism In America

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Nov. 11 (News Analysis) - Liberals and progressives have fared poorly in the face of this staunch anti-statist tradition, but there have still been periods when they have broken through and enacted major reforms--during Woodrow Wilson’s first term, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Lyndon Johnson’s first two years, and Richard Nixon’s first term. They succeeded for different reasons at different times, but several conditions recur.

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Technology | Worm attack bites at Apple iPhone

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Nov. 09 (News Report) - A self-propagating program that infects the Apple iPhone is discovered spreading amongst handsets in Australia.

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The Story of 'Operation Orchard': How Israel Destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:27:40 -0800

Der Spiegel - Nov. 04 -

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Out to lunch

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Nick Paumgarten - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - The week before last, two Northwest pilots overshot Minneapolis, their destination, by a hundred and fifty miles, apparently oblivious of their instruments and their internal clocks, as well as of a barrage of increasingly desperate radio calls from air-traffic control. Afterward, they explained that they’d logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed—not in FarmVille or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline’s new crew flight-scheduling procedure—that they’d essentially forgotten where they were and what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows—stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind—without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider’s auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it’s almost unimaginable.

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Judge OKs Challenge to Human Gene Patents

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Nov. 03 (News Report) - A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit can move forward against the Patent and Trademark Office and a research company awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast or ovarian cancer. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit

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Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Read/WriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

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Preparing for an IT Talent Squeeze

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

workforce.com - By Charlotte Huff - Oct. 21 (Special Report) - Information technology leaders shouldn’t be lulled by today’s sluggish hiring market into thinking IT employees won’t be on the move anytime soon. With the race to computerize the nation’s medical records poised to take off, that’s going to change, industry watchers say. The federal government’s tight time frame for computerization, along with a steep implementation curve, will require more bodies—soon, and in the thousands at least, they say. The federal stimulus bill, which earmarked $19 billion for incentives related to computerization at hospitals and physician practices, also included financial penalties beginning in 2015. Just 9 percent of hospitals use electronic records on even a limited basis, according to a recent study. Based in recent discussions with IT experts, the debate seems to be less about the likelihood of a hiring surge and more about how many jobs it will fuel and how soon that surge will happen.

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'Net Neutrality' Is Socialism, Not Freedom

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Examiner - By James G. Lakely - Oct. 20 (Opinion) - Advocates of imposing "network neutrality" say it's necessary to ensure a "free" and "open" Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that "control" technology. Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language -- and that's saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.

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We've Seen the Future, and It's Unmanned

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By Brian Mockenhaupt - Oct. 15 (Special Report) - Every so often in history, something profound happens that changes warfare forever. Next year, for the first time ever, the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, line-item proof that we are in a new age of fighting machines, in which war will be ever more abstract, ever more distant, and ruthlessly efficient.

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Our Misplaced Faith in High-Tech Medicine

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Health Care Blog - By Merrill Goozner - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - The public religiously believes there will be a technological fix for the hundreds of diseases that may hit us as our bodies degenerate, and tithes accordingly. Any effort to limit prices for what must be paid for new technologies is met with cries from industry that it will stifle innovation. The taxpayers provide the seed corn for new technology by investing nearly $30 billion a year in basic research through the National Institutes of Health and other government health-related programs (this year supplemented with $10 billion in stimulus act funds).

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Why Email No Longer Rules…

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Jessica E. Vascellaro - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Email no longer dominates communications. And this shift promises to rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

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Unboxed: To Do More With Less, Governments Go Digital

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steve Lohr - Oct. 11 (Special Report) - With money very tight, state and local officials hope to mine vast troves of government data for insights to streamline services and guide policy.

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Against Transparency

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Lawrence Lessig - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

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Smart grids: Clever, but unprincipled

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Oct. 08 (News Analysis) - The technology is not inherently frugal or green. It can be used to deliver not just clean renewable energy more efficiently, but also the grubby coal-fired sort. By reducing the need for expensive backup capacity, it may actually reduce the cost of electricity, and so encourage consumption. The very fact that utilities and their customers, tree-huggers and industrialists alike are all keen on it hints at the many different ends to which it can be turned.

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The Future of Health Care Is Social

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fast Company - By Jennifer Kilian, Barbara Pantuso - Oct. 06 (Special Report) - Too many of us are too busy to be healthy--not because we lack awareness. We know what we need to do. It's finding the time to do it that's the problem. In an age of 24/7 connectivity that requires our near-constant vigilance, time feels more pressed than ever. Yet, it may be that the very technology allowing us this around-the-clock connection can transform how we manage our health.

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The Evolution Of Technology In Schools

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Daniel Brusilovsky - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.

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Data-Mining Medical Records Could Predict Domestic Violence

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Frederik Joelving - Oct. 02 (Special Report) - To a busy emergency physician, a split lip or a case of poisoning is just one of those things they deal with. But to a computer mining the patient’s medical history, it could be the last diagnosis needed to decipher a pattern of domestic violence.

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Banish the Cyber-Bigots

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Gerson - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - The Internet could represent a flourishing of democracy. Instead it amplifies hate. The brutality of public debate on the Internet is due to one fact above all -- the option of anonymity

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Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Erica Naone - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust. A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

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