(Via Lifehacker)

Donate a phone is a way to get rid of that old cell phone and do good:

The Mile Wall is a business project of Travis Smith, college student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. Travis aims to build the internet’s longest page. The page will stretch for 1 mile ( 1.6 km ) horizontally and be made entirely of public posted material. It will be the first, or at least one of the first, pages to go entirely horizontal for such an incredible distance.

The web site is fun to look at and introduces a new way of advertising. Permanent space on this virtual wall starts at 1 dollar for a square inch. If If it makes it the whole way Travis plans to submit it to the Guinness Book of World Records as the internet’s longest page.

(Via Masternewmedia):

So goes one line in a front page article in the online Washington Post this morning . Some facts reported: The number of adults telling someone they miss or love them by text message is 60% in in the US and 70% in Germany. Phone subscribers admitting to breaking up using text messaging: 13% of Italians and 12% of Chinese. The theme of the report is ”soaring” text messaging as a new sort of communication. Here is some of the flavor: About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago, according to CTIA, the wireless industry's trade group. After Hurricane Katrina knocked out or overloaded communications systems, one of the only ways to reach lost relatives and friends was through text messaging, which transmits in sturdy little bursts of data that can often make it through even when voice lines are snarled.

"There is something different about communications that are mediated by a piece of technology; it is easier to talk about difficult subjects, and that is both good and bad," said Amanda Lenhart, senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, who has interviewed many teenagers about how they use technology. "You don't see the person's upper lip tremble. You don't hear their voice quiver. You don't get those external, non-textual cues," so delicate subjects might be easier to broach, if also sometimes easier to misunderstand, she said.

The InteliGrid European project intends to suit the needs of complex industries, such as aerospace, shipbuilding or construction, where a large number of partners need to collaborate to solve a single problem. One of the requirements for this grid project is 'data comprehension.' In other words, the computers on the grid must learn to 'know' what data 'means.'

Links: short version, long version

Posted at Howard's request:

Human social networks as viewed through
other eyes.

Garage Cinema research at the University of California Berkeley is working with metadata from mobile media to fundamentally change and improve the user experience. The project description states: The opportunity is to create software solutions for cameraphones that can address long standing challenges in consumer media creation, sharing, management, and reuse in a fundamentally new way. We can do this by leveraging the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture and use (when, where, and by whom media is captured, shared, and used) to infer media content, context, and community and thereby help automate media annotation, retrieval, sharing, and reuse. As a result of this approach, we believe we will solve a fundamental problem in consumer adoption of mobile media services: the need to have content-based access to the media consumers capture on their mobile devices. A look through this and other projects on this Garage Cinema page can cause future awe.

This article reports that "all mobile phone users in China will next year be required to register their identities in a move that has raised privacy and bureaucratic concerns, state press said Wednesday.From January 1,China's 200 million users of pre-paid mobile phones will have to identify themselves when ordering a new card, Xinhua news agency reported Chinese Information and Industry Minister Wang Xudong as saying.Currently, only mobile phone users on ongoing plans who pay after making calls are required to register their identity. Wang said the new identification rules were part of efforts to combat mobile phone-related crimes and the fast-rising scourge of junk text messages, according to Xinhua.Sources within the information ministry said over 10,000 mobile phones had already been shut down this year for sending fraudulent, harassing or erotic text messages."

China moves to identify all mobile phone users

Wired's Joshua Davis writes about the technology behind 'Stanley' the winning robot at DARPA's Grand Challenge
"...This is a watershed moment - much more so than Deep Blue versus Kasparov," says Justin Rattner, Intel's R&D; director. "Deep Blue was just processing power. It didn't think. Stanley thinks. We've moved away from rule-based thinking in artificial intelligence. The new paradigm is based on probabilities. It's based on statistical analysis of patterns. It is a better reflection of how our minds work..."

The Korea Times says "this year’s telecom market was dominated by digital convergence,the high-tech buzzword on everyone’s lips over the past 12 months.Video-on-the-go services,dubbed digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) as a cross between telecom and broadcasting,commercially debuted in May.The government also wrapped up a two-year stalemate for WiBro by issuing two licenses for the homegrown portable Internet that will bring landline access speed to a wireless terminal,in January.The nation’s major telecom operators also started a pilot run of the broadband convergence network (BcN) project in the latter part of this year.The BcN is an ultimate network aimed at igniting the convergence big bang in the future because it integrates traditionally separated telecom,Internet and broadcasting pipelines,seamlessly switching over to a wired or wireless connection."The article also points out that "more than 38 million of the country’s total 48 million population are subscribed to mobile telephony services and the number of landline phone users is stuck at about 22 million,"while,"the number of high-speed Internet clients,another wireline growth phase, also hit the saturation mark with roughly 12 million of 15.5 million households are hooked up to the always-on connection."

Convergence Big Bang Hits 2005 Telecom Market

(Via Scripting News)

* Baum, L. Frank. The Road to Oz
* Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess
* Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
* Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent
* Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol
* Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground
* Irving, Washington. Old Christmas
* James, Henry. An International Episode
* London, Jack. Call of the Wild
* Nesbit, E. Five Children and It
* Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
* Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island
* Wodehouse, P.G. Psmith in the City

There is a lot of discussion going on in the "blogosphere" about the Structured Blogging.

The idea behind Strucutred Blogging is to make a set of standards for RSS and blog software. Here is an article describing this:

Joe Reger has also injected the idea, based upon his "datablogging" concepts, that:

Josh Bokardo calls this the "Del.icio.us Lesson". This seems to be a natural extension of Danah Boyd's ideas about "glocalization". This is also very much in line with the "WebAssistant Telecommunity" approach as well.

The basic idea being that data gathering and contextualization tools start focus on the individual personal level, and that meta-data can then be aggregated from all of these individuals.

This is very close to the aggregation ideas that Surowiecki talked about in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Aggregating knowledge, data, information, etc., from diverse group of individuals, who are working mostly seperately.

"Datamining" ourselves "democratizies" tools that were previously cost prohibitive for most people. They can also make it easier for many more people to contribute more effectively to a general "knowledge commons". The idea of creating databases about different aspects of ourselves has actually been around for a while. Part of the core of Catherine Austin Fitts' Solari concepts is the creation of public community databases that make hidden information and knowldge about a locale explicit and transparent. This allows people to create indexes to track the health and status of all sorts of factors that directly affect them, and their communities.

However, there is of course the issue of privacy when revealing personal info. There is also the emerging issue of defaulting to forms "Cybernetic Decision-making" as a way to deal with information overload as we create more and more digitized streams of data about our world. Eventually, we'll have to find new ways to work together to manage all of this information.

This morning New York City’s WCBS radio is carrying a story that you will be able to watch the ball drop in Times Square as the New Year arrives. picturephoning.com confirms the story and adds details. We learn in the blog post that New York City is offering a free feed of the celebration in Times Square, available for the first time this year for mobile phones. In addition to live coverage from eight cameras as 2005 ends and 2006 begins, a behind the scenes B-roll documentary will be available on December 29.

Except for the picturephoning.com phone-centric blog (and its subscriber-only source), I could find no other website that mentioned the use of the feed on mobile phones. The official announcement of the satellite feed does not mention mobile media. The Times Square Alliance which provides the feed states: This clean, uninterrupted feed will be provided free of charge to media organizations around the world on a non-exclusive basis solely for their use in creating television programming relating to the event. WCBS radio and the blogger are thinking mobile media suppliers as well as television. It is an interesting insight into the 2005 still traditional mood in media that it has not yet made the move to thinking mobile. That is likely to change in 2006.

China Daily reports that "the number of mobile phone subscribers in China reached a record 388 million at the end of November,said the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) on Monday.This is an increase of 53.3 million over the end of last year.The number of new mobile phone subscribers in China grew by an average 4.84 million per month in the first 11 months of the year,said the ministry in a press release.At the end of November,there were 29.1 mobile phones for every 100 Chinese.Along with the increase in mobile phone subscribers, short message volume climbed 40.1 percent year-on-year.More than 274.3 billion text messages were sent in the first 11 months,said the ministry."

Mobile phone subscribers hit 388 mln in Nov.

Recent advances in display technology, data processing and software have lead to spectacular improvements of military simulations. Military designers are looking at all kinds of technology improvements, but this overview is focused on specific advances in display technology.

Links: short version, long version

What kinds of toys do new technologies enable? Short-range radio-based information sharing has unleashed... plush toys based on codependency. The Needies solicit and reward human contact, then turn ugly when they detect human attention to their compatriots.
"Dannie's getting touched!" whines Mossie. "Oh, filthy."

"Shut up, Mossie," Dannie snaps back.
(via Slashdot)

This article in China Daily says "a look at the top Internet searches in China for the year proves that the country's 103 million Internet users just want to have fun.Top 10 keyword searches on Baidu.com in 2005
1. MP3
2. "Super Girl" (Chao Ji Nu Sheng), the televised singing competition similar to "American Idol" was widely watched across the country
3. "Fairy Tale," a pop song by a Malaysian singer
4. QQ, the most popular online chatting software
5. Li Yuchun, the winner of "Super Girl"
6. "Dae Jang Geum" or "Jewel in the Palace," a South Korean TV series
7. "The Myth," a movie starring Jackie Chan
8. "San Jiang," an educational program for members of the Chinese Communist Party
9. "Kill the God," an Internet novel
10. O2jam or Jing Yuetuan, an online music game.
Further the article looks at hot topics in the Internet industry in China."China published a guideline on news Websites in September to better regulate the sector and prevent false or distorted information from spreading online. Meanwhile, it also urged Websites to register for tightened regulation.For example,Intel China's Website was blocked last week due to a delay in registering.The online diary is the most welcomed Web 2.0 application.Big names like Sina, MSN, Blogcn, Hexun and Tianya have launched services in the country.By the end of November, a total of 36.82 million blog Websites have been established.Another 16 million have written blogs,meaning every blogger has 2.3 blog Websites on average, according to Baidu."

Online surfers continue a big search for fun

(Via boingboing)

Reuters reports that Korean citizens will receive SMS notification of legal indictments. Strangely, this is described as an opt-in service. If I suspected that I was going to be indicted, I don't know whether "sign up for SMS indictment service" would be that high on my to-do list:

South Koreans may look at their mobile phones with some trepidation in the new year because prosecutors will start telling people they have been indicted via text messages, an official said Monday.

The indictments by text messages are not intended to take people by surprise. "People will receive a text message of a legal notice only after they apply for the service," he said.

Richard Jones of Soft Machines presents his six challenges for MNT:
"..Trying to be constructive, I’ve tried, as far as possible, to formulate the issues as concrete research questions that could begin to be addressed now. Ideally, we would be seeing experimental work - this field has been dominated by simulation for too long. But theory and simulation does have its place; one has to recognise the limitations of the simulation methods being used and to validate the simulations against reality whenever possible...What’s needed now is a systematic and scientific use of these and other methods, moderated by frequent reality checks, to answer some well-posed questions..."

BioRoot.org provides laboratories with accounts that they control through which they can make it known that they have excess reagents available that other labs can put to use. This free service of a non-profit organization seeks to save time, increase efficiency, and eliminate waste among labs where transient personnel, isolated locations, and disorganization can be costly to progress as well as budgets.

The service networks projects, reagents, batches, and people using principles from information and biological sciences: BioRoot is smart!: The BioReagent LIMS is being designed and built by molecular biologists and computer scientists. Its principle developer has worked for over 13 years on the bench as a technician, graduate student, and postdoctoral fellow studying mammalian cell biology, yeast genetics, protein biochemistry, and bioinformatics. via World Changing