Google yesterday launched a “person finder” for Japan, to help people looking for relatives and loved ones who may be lost in a communications outage or in physical danger, due to the earthquake and tsunami. Facebook also has a disaster relief service at facebook.com/DisasterRelief. There is also a surge in information on Twitter at hash-tags like #tsunami or #sendai or Fukushima.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now looking at ways to use legislation that grants the power to regulate traditional phone networks in order to establish a regulatory paradigm of ‘net neutrality’, meaning internet service providers (ISP) who provide connectivity cannot block or slow traffic to some sites while privileging traffic to others. Bandwidth itself is an important limiting factor in the physical environment, and so efforts to expand bandwidth may be crucial to making real net neutrality work.

Legally, it would be difficult for the United States Congress to pass any law that undermines net neutrality, because under the current legal infrastructure, such online access discrimination is illegal, and the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly warns that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” Each of those rights would be abridged if a law overriding the current net neutral standard were enacted.

But for bandwidth to be expanded, hardware needs to be put in place, all legal nuance aside. So bandwidth multipliers could be the optimal way forward. This would entail a complex array of advanced technological enhancements to existing networks, to allow all wires, cables and transmitters to maximize the bandwidth usage at any given time, without impeding the access of any one household or location to the broader network. If such a smart-connective network could be built, it would require perhaps unprecedented collaboration from ISPs.

To achieve genuine bandwidth multiplier effects, that could benefit remote or underprivileged communities, businesses, and low-budget organizations and publishers, we would need to see the following:

1. More open sharing of traffic flows and traffic-flow data between ISPs;
2. A regulatory framework that allows for this kind of information sharing, but prevents collusion and price-fixing;
3. Technological advances that optimize data flow, minimize energy seepage, and cross-relay traffic across distinct types of network (cable, wire, fiber-optic, wavelength);
4. More powerful, adaptive, remote-hosting servers;
5. A more secure, more easily manipulated cloud-computing environment;
6. Microprocessors able to calculate likely processing time and likely bandwidth time, then compress and decompress files at ‘invisible’ speed, to optimize bandwidth usage.

It is likely that the kind of advances needed to achieve genuine expansion of bandwidth to remote locations will have to do with spontaneous wireless hotspot placement, and physical technical innovations that allow for such solutions, but practice and software can do much of the work to get us started.

Share your ideas here about how best to increase bandwidth and reduce the likelihood of a campaign against comprehensive network neutrality…

• Join our discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

With the digital medium putting down roots and expanding its reach into more and more aspects of everyday life, the risk of identity theft is increasingly of concern and increasingly hard to keep pace with, prevent and reverse. There are deep worries —expressed by every expert from privacy advocates, to civil rights lawyers to Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates— that the use of biometric markers for real-world identification will lead to an irreversibility problem and radical incentivization for identity thieves and fraudsters.

Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).

Share the best practices and legal remedies for preventing identity theft, whether by digital means or wireless harvesting, or in the physical realm of paper, plastic and voice. What laws give consumers leverage in reversing fraudulent charges? What pending legislation will do the most to help protect the sanctity of individual identity? How can we leverage consumer technologies to protect against the most aggressive, innovative attackers? What can the credit scoring universe do to assist and protect consumers?

• Join or follow our discussion now, on the Hot Spring Network

In what could be a landmark ruling, a federal court has blocked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from imposing a network neutrality constraint on internet service providers who own the network they administer. There are serious issues of Constitutionality involved in the ruling, and net neutrality advocates say any move away from absolute neutrality would be a violation of the First Amendment protection of press freedom, and possibly of the freedom to assemble.

According to the Huffington Post:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “network neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.

Supporters of network neutrality, including the FCC chairman, have argued that the policy is necessary to prevent broadband providers from favoring or discriminating against certain Web sites and online services, such as Internet phone programs or software that runs in a Web browser. Advocates contend there is precedent: Nondiscrimination rules have traditionally applied to so-called “common carrier” networks that serve the public, from roads and highways to electrical grids and telephone lines.

It is not yet clear whether the ruling will mean that Comcast or other ISPs could in fact create stratified internet service, with tiered download speeds and/or priority bandwidth for paying content providers, but the ruling does suggest the FCC will not be able to intervene to stop such activity, if a provider does so.

At risk is the right of access of internet end-users to the content they seek, and of content creators to be able to capitalize on the global information-distribution platform of the world wide web.

Apple’s new tablet computer has finally been unveiled, after years of speculation. The iPad will function as a genuine cross-over between the realm of the iPhone and the laptop computer, in a format smaller than a laptop screen, similar to a netbook, and designed to optimize the experience of reading online or working with files and e-publications. It will be able to run over 140,000 of the apps already made for iPhone and iPod Touch, with a whole new class of iPad-optimized apps to come. Perhaps most important of all, it will retail for a starting price of only $499.

Many had expected it would retail for as much as or even more than $1,000, and be designed to compete as a top-flight laptop computer product. But Apple appears to have taken the view that it is really more appropriate as a competitor to less advanced Netbook computers and single-purpose e-reading devices, like Amazon’s Kindle products. At $499, the iPad will use a brand new A4 Apple-made internal processor, designed to streamline processing and prolong battery life, and use the most advanced multitouch screen on the consumer market.

The keyboard is entirely virtual, sliding into position at the base of the screen when needed, in vertical or horizontal mode. In horizontal mode, the keyboard is reported to be nearly as wide as a full laptop keyboard, making the touchscreen work environment far more user-friendly. It will also have an innovative mail client, which will list mails to the left of a viewing window when in horizontal mode and allow for single mail viewing when vertical, again to optimize the ease of use.

The iBooks app will allow for a graphically rich e-reading experience and easy organization of electronic books. There is some hope the device may include an app that will allow e-reading users to organize all of their e-books from different services in one central library, but coordinating this with direct competitors such as Amazon may be asking too much. A multi-touch picture-browing feature allows users to sort through stacks of photos without opening whole albums, achieving something closer to that 3-dimensional content interface that will someday revolutionize ultra-thin touch computing platforms.

• Join our discussion on The Hot Spring Network

OpenSalon :: The Apple tablet should be an intensely user-friendly device that achieves a paradigm shift in the way we deal with information. That sounds big, but Apple is well-equipped to do this, even by just making a few key upgrades to what it has already made possible with its laptops and touch-sensitive handhelds.

I want the Apple tablet to:

1. store, manage and work with my files (graphic, text and media) more easily;
2. store, manage and play all of my music, with fewer clicks;
3. store and manage a library of content-rich e-publications, including newspaper and magazine subscriptions, automatically downloaded, at no extra cost, if I choose;
4. access and manage all of my online communications platforms;
5. instantly post content to an array of online networking platforms, simply by selecting and clicking;
6. find out the latest information on crisis situations and contribute ideas, research or cash, as quickly as possible, to reputable organizations (iTunes can help with this, or maybe a kind of iTunes-Safari mash-up);
7. manipulate digital files as if they were three-dimensional objects, by the way I interact with the touch-screen;
8. have a camera and allow me to voice conference (across platforms);
9. perform basic wireless internet functions, like GPS, with no need for subscription to any service;
10. be 100% free of any obligation to subscribe to any particular wireless service;
11. have an option to use a desktop environment like the traditional Mac OS X or the more streamlined iPhone homescreen;
12. introduce online back-up (for re-download) for all content purchased through iTunes — at Apple’s iTunes store, in my account;
13. allow me to arrange simultaneously visible workspaces into two columns, three columns or four corners, that fill the screen and allow me to multitask (or multi-chat) effectively;
14. include a tool/widget that allows me to measure not only the tablet’s energy consumption and carbon-efficiency, but to compare options in other activities/services for being greener while saving money, too;
15. be no bigger than the dimensions of a standard “marble” school notebook, and no heavier;
16. have at least 250 GB of hard-drive storage standard;
17. cost no more than twice what the Amazon Kindle costs (they are not direct competitors, but this is a good price measure)…

I can think of a hundred other things I want the Apple tablet to do, and it will probably do most of them, but these above are the key features of a user-friendly, multi-touch, full-computing tablet, revolutionary enough to give the tablet that special qualification of paradigm-shift communications and IT device that really gives the end-user greater flexibility and greater control of information.

• Join our discussion on the Hot Spring Network

It is a serious question whether distance learning holds virtues that are ignored due to a prejudice that holds that physical presence of the instructor is necessary for learning. Clearly, in some cases, this is entirely untrue, and there may be an over-emphasis in some circles on the idea of physical presence as the metaphysical prerequisite to consider that learning is occurring. However, it is not clear that physical presence and phonocentrism —emphasis on the spoken word as the more effective mode of instruction— amount to the same “fixation”, when it comes to the question of how best to communicate knowledge.

Certainly, there is a different constellation of sensory, psychological and intellectual responses involved in the experience of an actual professor, standing in front of or seated around a table with a group of students, speaking and interacting with them, than is involved in strictly textual distance learning modules. The nature of experience is defined by what limits, or channels, it: face-to-face communication has certain limitations, while peer-to-peer online networks have others.

We are all familiar by now, I assume, with the communicative limitations of chat, sms and email, where plain text in an abstract, electronic setting, requiring a “send” command, and a line-by-line read-out and response, often out of sync with human intent, due to typing and reaction time, can lead to misunderstandings, taking offense, and miscues which all but undermine the possibility of real communication. The absence of physical cues about mood and reaction time is a real obstacle to intuitive electronic communication.

That, ultimately, is a question of 1) how intuitive is a given individual’s grasp of communication via such media, and 2) how well do two or more individuals understand each other, so as to be able to properly read the cues buried in the dense array of structural limitations that comprise these highly “efficient” modes of communication.

Whether we take a Derridean approach or not, we can acknowledge that there is more presence in a face-to-face human interaction in physical space than there is in the “encounter” with text in the abstract, and that quality of “absence” is intensified when our encounter with such text occurs at a time when the person who created or delivered that text is not also online.

So, is it easier to learn by way of face-to-face interactions with one’s professor? Or is distance learning superior, in some unique ways? I think the answer here is to some degree a matter of common sense: it depends on the specifics of the case. Professors can be conduits for illumination, if they are attuned to their students, eloquent, talented and hard-working, but they can also be an obstacle, if certain deep character flaws interfere, or if a student doesn’t do well with that professor’s style of instruction.

Distance learning is mainly a technological fix: it helps close geographical distances and open up available free time that might not otherwise be devoted to study or to instruction. The opening of The question of whether online distance learning can result in a more “intense” learning experience, a more “direct” transfer of knowledge —conceptual or experiential— or more intuitive communication, is a matter of individual cases.

If we start from these premises, we can begin to address the many interferences between the potential virtues of distance learning and the “metaphysics of presence”. If the experiential and perceptual aspects of face-to-face communication, which allow for learning through more intuitive channels to accompany textual learning, can be introduced into any online teaching scenario, the online instruction will be enhanced.

Is this a technological problem? Or a sociological one? Are people who gravitate toward distance learning actively seeking fundamentally different types of instruction than people who feel a personal need for an infusion of physical presence to accompany the introduction of new spaces of knowledge into their way of conceiving the world?

Jim Shimabukuro comments at Ideagora that:

When done right [...] online class discussions can be far more dynamic than F2F. There are many explanations. Here are some that stand out for me: Everyone . . .
(1) can participate — not just the most verbally aggressive,
(2) has the opportunity to carefully review and consider all the posts in the thread,
(3) has as much time as she/he needs to compose and revise thoughts before publishing them,
(4) is free to decide when and how often to participate,
(5) has the option to PM (send private messages to) individuals to expand the parameters of the discussion, and
(6) has the WWW at her fingertips to instantly access a world of info to inform her posts.

For the most part, online discussion fora do have these virtues, depending on the quality of their design and the permissiveness of the course structure. But to properly address the points of interference between the virtues of distance learning and the weight of the metaphysics of presence, it is vital to ask in every case if each of the six points listed above is always a virtue or if there are ways in which the physical demands of presence are conducive to sharper wits and more intuitive grasp of new complexities, in subtle but important ways.

All of these themes are interrelated in ways that determine how information flows between people, in any given case, and lead necessarily to the question of how the strictly online distance-learning scenario and the traditional physical classroom scenario might interact: for instance, many classroom-taught courses now include online components that go beyond email and professors’ websites, up to and including chat rooms, discussion groups and more.

There could also be crossover wherein the online classroom generates study groups that meet or which bring together competing ideas from competing disciplines, to enrich —and hopefully not confuse— both the teaching and learning experience. Some universities have online communities for certain courses, where students and faculty only meet for scheduled cultural events, discussions or interdisciplinary learning opportunities.

The new shape of web-based communication and networking allows for ever more effective collection, transfer and discussion of complex and far-reaching information. This means classroom-taught courses are ever more able to benefit from integration of web-based discussion mechanisms, and the convergence of physical and virtual space is the main issue, not whether face to face or peer to peer is superior.

• For more information, or to join the debate, visit innovate-ideagora.ning.com

Continuing our series on the evolutions that can be expected over the coming decade, we look at new directions in particle physics, media technologies that are enabling not only greater freedom, but a new communicative paradigm which will, in part, help steer us to the great discoveries of this moment in history, and a vital new understanding of global economic patterns, which will revolutionize the way governments around the world plan for domestic spending and trade policy.

Particle Physics

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN —Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—, outside of Geneva near the French-Swiss border, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the most complex machine ever created, and designed to smash subatomic particles together at rates of speed high enough to mimic the kind of physics that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, from which our universe is believed to have emerged.

The big game is the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to lend mass to all other particles, and which possibly exists only briefly for this purpose. The Higgs boson, also popularly known as the “God particle”, for its capacity to generate mass for other particles, has never been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be powerful enough to actually generate, and record information about the behavior of, the elusive Higgs boson.

This breakthrough would confirm vital aspects of the cosmological model of supersymmetry and bring together, for the first time in the history of human science, a comprehensive model of the known universe. Another elusive gap in the standard model —which integrates Einstein’s theory of relativity with the advanced discoveries of quantum physics— that could be tested and demonstrated by the LHC, is quantum gravity.

In December, the LHC achieved a world record for high-energy particle acceleration, reaching 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). That threshold moves the LHC closer than any other experiment in human history to being able to reproduce and observe conditions similar to those that would have existed nano-seconds after the Big Bang, when key elements of the physical dynamics of our universe were brought into being and set in motion.

It is also believed the Higgs boson gives rise to dark matter, the theoretical substance, which contains the majority of the mass in the universe and which is clustered around galaxies. Discovering the physics of that process and possibly observing the early physics of the birth of star systems, galaxies and star-forming regions, could help to reorganize our understanding of matter, energy and the universe itself, in ways as yet unprecedented in the history of science.

Media Freedom & Decentralization

The coming decade is already poised to see major breakthroughs in low-energy, high-capacity integrated communications technologies. The complex computational technology that goes into encrypting, sending, decrypting and storing, digitized messages, including text, voice, imagery and video, is increasingly light-weight, efficient and inexpensive. Handheld phones are increasingly powerful and integrated into the world wide web. Some now use remote IP connections to provide voice services.

Social networking is the new standard for high-intensity information exchange online, with global conversations building up around issues of major controversy. The post-election demonstrations in Iran this past summer were one example, where information was shared and testimony published and proliferated around the world, despite extreme measures used to curtail open communications within the nation itself. The Copenhagen Conference on climate policy gave rise to the most extensive global policy debate ever seen, from the government level through the grassroots.

Even as economic policy and environmental science drive a more global view of human activity, the rapid expansion of dispersed information-sharing technologies and the world wide web are helping to create a climate in which a decentralized grassroots conversation emerges around any issue of major import, stripping political leaders of centralized power and requiring them to respond to more diverse views from a more informed public.

The key paradigm-shift involved in the decentralized information-freedom revolution is the decentralized aspect of it. Individuals can join a wide array of networks, for varying purposes, in order to build up and maintain significant relationships in their personal and professional lives. Deprivation of resources within borders can be alleviated through those relationships, and vital information about political leadership, public controversies or events, can be delivered from sources outside the country who also have sources within the country.

Global Consumer Protection

The financial crisis of 2008 occurred at a uniquely pivotal moment in economic history. As the failings of the “globalization” process reached critical mass —a severe widening of the gap between rich and poor, the undermining of labor rights across the world, and perilous lack of transparency and provenance for tracking money flows—, massive systemic manipulations in the financial world were revealed, as trillions of dollars in reported “wealth” evaporated almost overnight.

An integrated global fabric of economic activity and banking relations meant the freeze in lending in the US and other wealthy nations would serve as a contagion of economic stagnation in poorer nations. A global response was needed, and in April, Pres. Obama succeeded in persuading the G20 nations to agree to a global financial rescue process. The IMF would create a $500 billion fund, with $100 billion put up by the United States, over several years, to ensure malfeasance or a risky economic climate would not lead to a contagion of banking collapses around the world.

That agreement was one of the most important economic achievements of 2009, because it allowed two important things to happen: 1) there would be a means of rescuing banking systems on the verge of collapse, around the world, to prevent a deepening of the global financial crisis; and 2) nations that have never had solid records of financial transparency would be incentivized to sign up to a new regime of banking transparency and financial ethics, further shoring up the global financial system against potential abuses.

Issues related to the security of fresh water resources, the human food supply and climate stability, have led to a significant increase in overall international economic negotiation. The virtues of pragmatic shared-interest negotiations have become apparent, and economic incentivization is now part of many crisis-level negotiations. The crisis regarding Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, involves a triangular proposal that would allow Iran’s enrichment process to involve both Russia and France, providing economic benefits to all three nations, but denying Tehran the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

Job creation is increasingly dependent on global flows of financial and natural resources. China’s enormous consumption of mineral resources has built up its economic clout, and lowered the cost of its massive nationwide industrialization and construction process, but it has also deprived other nations, as well as multinational conglomerate corporations, of the ability to do business in a dependable way trading certain mineral resources, like copper and iron ore.

China is consuming cropland in Africa, in an effort to provide for the basic sustenance of its people, and world grain reserves are being depleted in line with the depletion of fossil aquifers around the planet. These patterns of global economic impact are more than just wave trends; they are part of a new way of negotiating for the sustained prosperity of local populations. The state of California, for instance, the world’s 5th largest economy, negotiates parallel agreements, not waiting for the US to make trade deals to help shore up the California economy.

But consumer protection is the missing component that has made globalization a less flexible process, too heavily oriented toward guaranteed windfalls for big investors. The 2008 global financial crisis, rooted in financial abuses, a property-price inflation bubble and the credit markets, made clear this shortcoming of global economic policy. Transparency is one of the responses, but global consumer protection is another.

It is now likely that over the next decade, negotiations to provide for consumer protection across borders, and to ensure consumers have the ability to distinguish between businesses that negotiate fairly with workers and those that use sweatshops and abusive labor conditions to pad their profits. Improvements to global economic ethics will come from enhanced consumer protection guarantees and a more global awareness of economic activity.

Conclusion

These are just nine fronts on which major paradigm-shifts are either already underway or are likely to occur in the coming decade. The details of each of these nine areas of focus provide extensive room for overlap, and touch on literally thousands of other details of personal quality of life, political and economic stability and human potential.

One of the most critical, and perhaps underreported, aspects of the social networking revolution, is the technological capability of spontaneous alliances of thoughtful individuals to locate information, fashion reports and instigate a culture of vigilance, on virtually any issue, at any time.

There are major political and economic implications tied to this trend, and local and international institutions and governments of nation states, will have to think ahead about how to integrate genuine ethical protections into the fast-changing environment of global policy. New media connectivity and decentralized civic infrastructure have allowed for a kind of de-formalization of policy-shaping events and communications between local communities and world leaders.

There is a “bubbling-up” effect that takes place, where large numbers of people can quickly band together to act as conscience to the broader world and exert pressure on leaders; international development and crisis negotiations will take this into account, as part of a new‘transactional’ cosmology, in which leadership is always under scrutiny and the facts of human life do actually matter.

2nd Decade of the 21st Century: What’s in Store?

1. Denuclearization, Green Tech & Cooperation
2. Gender Equality, Food Security & Counter-extremism
3. Particle Physics, Media Freedom & Global Economics

Apple is reportedly poised to introduce a brand-new device that has the potential to revolutionize not only mobile computing and communication, but also design, workflow and publishing. We’ve written before about the prospective Apple tablet and its capabilities, but as rumor and reporting converge to give us a better picture, we can be a little more certain of the landmark moment in the evolution of computing and communications the device will achieve.

Most importantly, the Apple tablet, with a multi-touch, navigationally enabled touchscreen, like the iPhone, will be the most advanced, most cohesive, most detailed and productive setting in which consumers will be given the ability to physically manipulate digital files. For some, this means only a very advanced graphic-user interface, but for others, it means a fundamental shift in the way we process and organize computable data, a merging of the physical and the virtual.

The Apple tablet will not be as productively amorphous as Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense device, which literally pours computable and searchable data out into the physical world, but we can say that the tablet moment will be one that moves our control of digital data in that direction. The device will pool media, computing, communications, in the way full-size computers do, but in an interface that is more fluid, allowing both more freedom and a more complex and intense human-data relationship in everyday settings.

As reported by CNN Money:

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

In a sense, the goal is to craft a device that combines the convenience and ease of use of an iPhone, an Amazon Kindle and a laptop computer, with the rich media environment one expects from a digital television, only smaller in size. Not properly pocket-sized, it is not a stretch to imagine the Apple tablet wearing a book-style leather cover like the Kindle can, in order to give it easy protection and easy access for the on-the-go browser-reader-music-listening-workflow-managing everyman.

Slash Gear is reporting that Apple registered the domain name islate.com in 2007, a possible indication it will be calling its tablet computer by that name. The iSlate is also rumored to be a revolution in “the way we interact with new media: websites, video, music, magazines, newspaper, and books that are all moving to digital format”.

The Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog lists the following as key specs of the coming Apple tablet:

• Apple has settled on a 10.1-inch multi-touch display using the iPhone’s LTPS LCD technology, not the considerably more expensive OLED technology suggested in earlier reports.
• Apple has been approaching U.S. book publishers with what Reiner describes as “a very attractive proposal” for distributing their content: an App Store-type 30/70 split (30% for Apple) with no exclusivity requirement. [See UPDATE below.]
• According to Reiner, publishers are disgruntled by Amazon’s (AMZN) terms, which force exclusivity, disallow advertising and demand a “wolfish cut” of revenue. The typical Kindle/publisher split, he says, is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Amazon gets exclusivity.
• Apple’s tablet would make ebooks more attractive for the education market by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.

Yair Reiner, of Oppenheimer, predicts Apple will be able to sell 1 million to 1.5 million units per quarter at an average sale price of $1,000. A lower price would likely mean higher sales, and a more rapid proliferation of the potential paradigm shift through the consumer computing market, including business and university settings.

MG Siegler, writing for TechCrunch, explains:

It’s not a computer with a mess of peripherals and/or physical buttons. If a media and web-centric computer were being designed today with no thought to what the computing norms of the past were, it would be a tablet.

It also points to the future of interacting with computers. The mouse and keyboard will one day die and everything will be touch and gesture-based. We’ll be living in a future with Minority Report, Star Trek, and Avatar interactive technology. To many of us, few things are more exciting. To others, that concept is foreign and as such, scary. Regardless, it will happen and the tablet computer is the latest, and perhaps most important step in a line of technology taking us there.

Apple is clearly not only planning to be on the cutting edge, but is plotting out the cutting edge, where standard consumer market products for mobile computing meet the future of an entirely different kind of human-data interface. Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense gets much closer to the Minority Report computing model Siegler cites, but Apple is providing the rich design environment needed to make touch computing truly intuitive and user-friendly.

Its success will likely hinge on whether its market is limited by a binding contract with a mobile communications provider like AT&T. This is fundamental, because while iPhone is a phone, and requires phone service, the iSlate is supposed to be a true computing device, combining some of the best features of the iPhone with the scalability and workflow-relevance of the standard laptop. Requiring people to buy into monthly contracts in order to user a new laptop is a serious drawback, and likely means Apple is busy finding ways to guarantee a level of mobile wireless web access without exclusivity.

The Amazon Kindle 2 is ideally sized for one-handed reading. In this category, it beats the traditional book, because it’s single pane is more ergonomic for the purpose of reading with one hand and seeing the text clearly at a consistent angle, than struggling to balance a side-bound traditional book.

In this sense, it is comfortable for holding, but anyone could argue that the traditional book is more rewarding from a sensory perspective, with flipping pages, constant subtle movements that stimulate the eye and hold the reader’s attention, near zero glare and good and reliable contrast.

Comparing the Kindle 2 to the Kindle DX, however, brings a new set of metrics into the discussion. The Kindle 2 has a much smaller screen, which makes it less paper-like and more like a digital device. On its own, with no case or cover, the Kindle 2 is, from this reviewer’s point of view, the most comfortable digital text reading experience I have had.

If the text is too small, you can simply enlarge it, up to something comparable to 24-point Times New Roman (on a Mac laptop). I also find the navigation tools, the keyboard and 5-way navigator button, along with the home, prev page and next page, menu and back buttons, are more flush with the device than on the larger DX, giving it a more subtle, less prone to accidental pressing, kind of feel.

The qwerty keyboard is also ideally sized for two-thumb typing, for most adults’ hands. This makes searching and note-taking far more efficient and enjoyable than on the DX, which really doesn’t lend itself to thumb-only typing, because the keyboard is flatter, wider and gathered near the bottom of the device, which, being larger than the Kindle 2 is also more top-heavy if held near the bottom for typing purposes.

For me, the Kindle 2 is optimal, in terms of e-paper readers as currently produced. It is the right weight, the right size, and it can accompany me and a single thin blank book, without intruding too much into my space. It makes it possible to do a lot of research and a lot of for-pleasure reading without carrying around a lot of weight. This is good for reasons of both logistics and physical health. Remember, ergonomics is not just for comfort, it’s for sustained physical health: the super-light weight makes carrying one’s reading material much less physically taxing, and even the weight difference between the Kindle 2 and the DX matters.

The DX is designed to handle larger-format publications, like textbooks, which may have images and tables and graphics worked into the text. Its larger-format display is useful for this, but the device still suffers the significant disadvantage as compared with paper of its being unable to deliver vivid color. Amazon is right to be considering a foray into more expansive layout environments, like newsprint, magazines and textbooks, but in the age of the iPhone, one is tempted to say the Kindle family of devices needs a more malleable touch-based interface that would allow for actually showing fixed-layout files in their native proportions.

The Kindle 2 is more convenient and comfortable, but the DX gives the reader room to breathe, a little more of the sense of being immersed in the text environment, which enhance the level of engagement. That makes it more like a content-rich magazine or a top-flight printed newspaper.

Both Kindles also have the virtue of being something special to the publishing industry: a way to allow for sales and royalties, in part from impulse buys, and a return to the idea that text well-wrought is meant to exist for its own sake, not as “content value-added” for a multimedia undertaking. This common trait is perhaps their most important contribution to the eReader marketplace. But both devices also need to figure out how to marshal the attraction of free web browsing and free downloads into a mechanism for producing book sales that keep the ePaper platform at the leading edge of the digital content transition.

For someone who does a lot of reading in all media, including online reference and quality newspapers, journals and magazines, I like both devices for the way they facilitate the instant updating of such materials, right to my bedside, kitchen or cafe table-top. It’s also useful to be able to take notes and underline as I read, to go back later and piece together my research and my own ideas about it.

But I’m using an iPod Touch to not only read and do research, but also to do more complex word processing, edit and archive email correspondence, and amass an extensive library of free classics. I can buy from the Kindle Store and read here or on a Kindle registered to my account. I find the versatility of the touch environment conducive to efficiency. But sensory overload is a worry, and certainly a constant distraction from reading text.

For ease of use, comfort and portability, I’d rate the Kindle 2 more of a success than the Kindle DX. Fox text-only, or even single-image plus text, the Kindle 2 is also more comfortable. But one has to recognize the functional benefits of the larger display for certain types of documents. Amazon’s people will need to do better with producing a comfortable viewing environment for PDF documents, let the device be more deferential to the layout and styling of publishers. But, the DX will truly come into its own of and when Amazon is able to deploy a touch-enabled color e-paper display.

Google Voice, an ingenious use of web-based voice communications service, allows users to combine a range of phone numbers under one standard, permanent Google phone number. Any linked phone number can be removed or replaced, and the service is free. All domestic calls inside the US are free, and sms is free. The service even converts voicemail to readable transcripts in an online inbox.

This last feature could mark a shift in the way voice communications interact with the Internet broadly. If indeed Google does achieve something of a paradigm shift by offering not only voice-to-text, and the ability to concentrate a range of numbers in one convenient inbox, but way for voice and text to interact comfortably, voice communication could take an increasingly important role in online activity, even where text and work-output is the aim.

The real potential for Google Voice will depend on every individual’s use of the technology, naturally, but it may also depend on how well Google integrates such services into its Wave platform. Google Wave is a bold reinvention of online messaging and word processing, merging the two into a real-time viral-capable content propagation platform.

Even unfinished works can serve as content in the Wave universe, and that means the potential wikification of all sorts of documents and reports that are currently held to the finish-before-publish model established by print publishing over the millennia. Where Aristotle’s ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ has remained identical, except for the relatively modest alterations introduced by translation, for thousands of years, this century’s great ethical philosopher might ‘initiate’ a work optimally designed to evolve in a wave application, evolving with the consciousness of it’s readers.

The free phone-service paradigm is gaining ground, as new mobile carriers offer “unlimited everything” flat-rate plans, Skype takes over online voice conferencing, and the iPhone has allowed entry for Skype functionality. But there has been stiff opposition from the traditional telecom sector, including major mobile carriers like Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, who say they cannot maintain their networks (in the case of Verizon) or access to networks (in the case of T-Mobile) for lower prices.

The proliferation, however, of low-cost pay-as-you-go services and flat-rate plans like Boost Mobile’s $50 monthly unlimited plan (with no contract) is changing the game. Google Voice is perhaps the most visible, most direct “piggyback” challenge to traditional phone-service billing, and offers an important clue as to how the convergence of voice and web communications might move forward: a constructive convergence of voice and text, data-transfer and direct person-to-person communication.

Adding Google’s Talk and Video Talk services to a combined overall service could make Google the world leader in piggyback telecommunications services, allowing the web giant to drive pricing standards for mobile communications and help end-users to liberate their personal and textual communications from the constraints imposed by standard telecom pricing models.

An attractive woman, 34-ish, drives a compact station-wagon, late model, over a still-cobblestone side street in the center of Madrid. She advances slowly, toward a red light, and talks on her cell phone. She seems equally concentrated on both activities. Driving an automobile is a potentially dangerous activity, in which one’s own life or the lives of others may be at risk, while a casual conversation is not so much that. Yet she seemed to give equal weight, her body, her manner, seemed to give equal weight to both activities.

Blackberry and Facebook come to mind: email in your pocket and the recorded, manifest social network. Microtechnology and software, combining to give us a boom in communications, are driving us to distraction with the lust to shore up and broaden our social networks. There may be something about this behavior that is inherently tied to how we, as human beings, socialize, and survive.

We are a social, talkative species. We rely on invisible social networks to shape our built environment, to feed us, to give us meaning. Most of us do not take part in the designing or building of roads, bridges, railways, skyscrapers, megafarms, or vehicles of any kind. And most of the people who do possess only a portion of the total knowledge required to successfully achieve such constructions. Most of us do not know how food or energy gets to the places where we consume it, and few of those who play a role know much more than those who don’t about the rest of the process. No individual can make a modern city bus, withut help of some kind, much less an airplane or an ocean-liner.

We expect the built environment to be what it is, at least in the way it appeared when we first learned of it, and we are indignant if it falls into decay. Population is booming and it is all the rage to recite the unproven adage, “Life is all about networking”, or its less helpful cousin, “It’s who ya know”.

So maybe it’s no wonder that the need to be “connected” is also going through a groundswell. We are connective; it’s a fundamental part of normal human functioning to form social bonds beyond the immediate nucleus of our world. We cooperate in systems of language, currency, study or government, in the learning and repetition of cultural constants and assumptions. We need to form a connective tissue of knowledge and expression, and we need to feel that across a broader fabric there are reliable nodes of interest and personal knowledge, were we can be heard, expected, wanted and understood.

And so, the new media incite us to the opportunity (read: temptation, or compulsion) to test, affirm and expand these social fabrics, which however dispersed they may be, give us our “sense of identity”, a kind of proof of constancy, or our identity as such, insofar as such a thing is possible.

An article in the New Scientist magazine, from 24 March 2007, entitled “Future recall: your mind can slip through time”, explored the labors and meaning of what we call ‘memory’. A series of studies had found that the human brain actually seems to have a default setting whose principle preoccupation is time travel, or rather the projection of experience across one’s awareness of time and the stuff of the world. Remembering, and also envisioning the future.

The apparent novelty in this approach to exploring how the mind works is the focus on re-running and re-casting, on a nearly constant basis, the contents of memory, experience and dreaming, in order to form a more or less reliable projection of what to expect in times approaching, how much joy or sorrow, how much danger, boredom or adventure. Dreams are also apparently an integral part of this process, helping to make unexpected connections and to sort through jumbled information abou lived (or desired) experience.

Turning constantly to the newly ubiquitous modes of communication makes sense, evolutionarily, in this light. Our species has evolved an intellectual capacity for surveying and comprehending abstract landscapes, in which we can conceive of, understand and keep track of vast social fabrics, and this is what we aim to do when we seek, at constant intervals, to acquire the latest possible information about the make-up and tenor of our social networks.

The phenomenon of “re-tweeting”, reposting and linking back to items already posted on the real-time updated short-message feed site Twitter, has allowed for the emergence of what sometimes turns into a global roundtable discussion, made up of short, sometimes superfluous, sometimes provocative ideas, and in many cases links to surprising but potentially effective online sources that spread a message or expand and deepen awareness of an issue.

The system is “democratic” in that there is no requirement that content be either serious or pop puff-pastry… sometimes the issue is war and peace, human rights and elections, green innovation, tax policy, or emergency response, and others it’s celebrity profiles or the aimless and globally irresonant banter of reality TV personalities. But that same aimless catch-all quality can make for quick tracking of politicians’ remarks and positions, or just links to useful but otherwise hard to find headlines.

The key feature of the RTRT (retweet roundtable) effect is the fostering of communication. True, too short a message limit makes for usually facile hyperbole, not particularly conducive to establishing communicative links, but the rapid-fire twittering chatter-sphere is an upsurge of communicative activity generally. And that is meaningful, both for information gathering and for sharing ideas and points of view.

In the heat of debate, especially debate fanning out over a broader population, ideas flame up and flame out. And in many cases, what’s left are stronger, more viable ideas, less susceptible to bias or narrow interests. Also in communicative intensification —i.e. idea sharing, brainstorming, linked research and debate—, we can see the productive emergence of bridge memes, like RT (retweet) and RT (roundtable), and even RT (route, as in how to get from A to B, or better still from A to Q and back to A, without falling prey to pitfalls and sand-traps).

Memes are irreducible snippets of meaning, independent of their executors and which serve mainly to perpetuate the presence of their underlying meaning —like gestures or words, or phrases unique to a given language— and which generate new meaning by their interaction and proliferation. Bridge memes are identical in appearance or seem to be, but in that resemblance allow for the convergence of distinct concepts with entirely separate realms of meaning attached.

The re-tweet does enable a kind of global roundtable to develop, in which anyone can talk to anyone, without directly messaging, and in which a single piece of information can gather an improbable amount of attention, simply by being RT’d, repeated, copied, reiterated, by one and then another person, each with his or her own unique reasons for passing the message along, filtering it or morphing it.

We then have to ask whether the re-tweet is the new model for public discourse. I tend to favor long essays, long personal letters, and a certain amount of immersion, reading and learning that allow the mind to form new matrices around ideas, not just tweet and chirp and chip away at them. But the short-form quick-burst message system is linking people around the world into one buzzing chatty web, in which ideas and politics, entertainment and emotion, struggle and celebration, all mix together to hint at, to point toward, to approximate, the human story.

From there, we can link people known and unknown to us, cherished and problematic, rival or reasonable, to whole new worlds of text and information that provide a chance at knowing more than we knew before. Long essays can be part of that. And short poems. Foreign languages can work their way in. And translations. Spontaneous or well-versed. A blending of alphabets. A blending of interests. A blending of disparate worlds that want to know and understand each other, but haven’t had the chance to talk things out.

The RTRT, the global roundtable of the linked and underscored, insinuating and energetic, short message, the colloquium of spontaneous tribes in a web-work of communities, can form new grammars, new rules of the road, new signposts, new semiotics. The facile can be a vehicle for the profound, and the profound can integrate itself into the technologically simple.

It’s all about the network… who you link to, who’s linking to you, what your messages are trying to accomplish. The locus from which one unknown personality informs thousands of others about the dealings of a teen pop star might, on a random day, when inspiration strikes, serve as a way to rapidly propagate an item of serious human or political interest, an emergency, a humanitarian crisis, a declaration of moral indignation.

The trivial can assume a social role, building up the communicative ability to inform when the time comes to put aside the trivial and take notice. And in the meantime, people who feel a need to find like-minded souls to share an interest in the trivial, can do so, ever fascinated, ever acquiring more information, useless or not, enriching or not, ever expanding their underlying project: that of communicating… that someone is out there…

Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer, likely to run a version of Mac OS X and to merge the touchscreen stylings of the iPhone and iPod Touch with the full functionality of the MacBook line, is expected to be aimed at revolutionizing the way print media deliver text to readers. If true, the device would again put Apple at the cutting edge of a field where Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and others, are trying to set the standards for e-book distribution and licensing.

After a summer of hullaballoo and expectation, and the hopes that the device would be introduced along with the new iPods at a September event, it now looks like the Apple tablet will be introduced sometime in early 2010. Reports suggest Steve Jobs has “reset” the tablet project multiple times, out of concern the projects presented were not offering consumers a distinct enough field of uses to warrant an entirely new field of computing and device manufacture.

Now, Gizmodo reports it has confirmed that Apple has initiated negotiations with major print publishers, including not only McGraw-Hill —a major publisher of educational materials—, but also The New York Times and others, with the aim of securing content distribution rights and format collaboration to deliver textual content to readers via iTunes.

Such a system would allow publications to secure subscription payments from readers who want a full-access pass to content that more closely resembles a printed page than the way web pages work now. McGraw-Hill and Oberlin Press are said to be working with Apple to make textbooks available through iTunes, with the aim of allowing them to be published and viewed on the touchscreen tablet device.

The new Apple device would allow for full-color digital publishing, unlike the Amazon Kindle, which uses a grayscale eInk e-paper display. E-paper may be evolving, and it should eventually be capable of rich color displays, but at present, Amazon insists the grayscale look is meant to mimic the simple black-and-white pages of paperback novels and newsprint.

Textbooks are an important area of market innovation for the touchscreen tablet project. As Gizmodo notes:

The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars, and resold by local stores without any kickbacks to publishers. A DRM’d one-time-use book would not only be attractive because publishers would earn more money, but electronic text books would be able to be sold for a fraction of the cost, cutting out book stores and creating a landslide marketshare shift by means of that huge price differential. (If that device were a tablet, the savings on books could pay for the device, and save students a lot of back pain.)

There is also a feeling that the touchscreen tablet might be something like Apple’s way of proposing a head-on rival for the burgeoning “netbooks”, micro-laptops that are cheap, small, lightweight, and focused on using web-based services and applications. It’s an important move to make, because while MacBooks sales are strong, Apple has had to reduce the cost of its cheapest MacBook already by $100 to $150, in order to keep its market share among students.

Steve Jobs has said netbooks are “junk”, and while some have proposed that the iPhone is really Apple’s response to that market, it has the drawback of requiring an AT&T monthly contract and not really being a strong word-processing platform. There are hopes, however, that the tablet might be cheap enough, maybe $500 or $600 at the high end, to undercut the appeal of the much less technologically advanced netbooks.

Jobs has been particularly demanding that a device with as much potential to revolutionize user interface standards not turn into another Newton, the Palm-like device that came just a little before its time. AppleInsider reports:

It seems like a long time coming. Nearly two years have passed since AppleInsiderexclusively reported in September of 2007 that Apple’s next big product initiative would be a modern day reincarnation of its beloved-but-defunct Newton MessagePad. And it’s believed the device had been slowly evolving as an R&D project for at least a year prior.

The 10-inch, 3G-enabled tablet, akin to a jumbo iPod touch, is the latest brainchild of chief executive Steve Jobs. That distinction, as insiders will tell you, carries its share of baggage. Under the critical eye of Jobs, contours must be precise, each pixel of the interface has to match a particular vision, and there can be no fault — no matter how slight — or it’s back to the drawing board.

The Apple tablet will be a vital step forward in the evolution of edgeless electronic reading devices, because right now, there is no e-reading device that is equipped with a fully functional graphic-user interface (GUI) or laptop-style operating system. A touchscreen tablet computer that runs an advanced full-service version of Mac OS X will push the envelope of digital media manipulation, and allow Apple to take the lead in setting standards for the next generation of on-screen “print” content.

DVR is an increasingly popular consumer-oriented technology which simultaneously liberates viewers from strict TV viewing schedules and also imposes new constraints on recording freedoms (including sharing). DVR is a concession by content providers, advertisers and infrastructure (connectivity) providers, to the advantages of digital technology, and to the common individual demand for more freedom to control when information (content) is accessed. And the technology is framing a new logistics of consumer access and corporate control.

When DVR allows one to rewind only that which is being viewed (because the program in question was not pre-recorded), then cuts off the rewind and saved material if the channel is switched, deliberately or accidentally, the viewer experiences this feature of DVR technology as punitive. The viewer is punished for not correctly interfacing with the efficiency-oriented technology, which is provided by entities that prefer the programming be viewed in the allotted time-slot and not recorded or viewed later.

This type of control flies in the face of what consumers expect to get from such digitally enhanced technologies. There are competing views on the salient function of digital content delivery: that it is designed to liberate content, and thus the end-user’s access to informatioon, or to control it, and thus dictate or pre-determine the end-user’s freedom of access.

Even now, late as they are catching on, ebooks are being treated by some as a means by which to charge per chapter, per page, per word, or even per viewing “session”. Major multinational corporations, like Google, are digitizing massive amounts of text, from throughout history, in the hopes of being able to build a business model around access to digital text. Google wants to deliver a free service, but it wants to profit from that service as well, likely by advertising or by commercial tie-ins — online books sales and the like.

Microsoft was beginning to initiate its approach to digitized text, ebooks, and digital text-reading devices, before the year 2000, and its plans counted on being able to “own” or “control”, with full licensing rights, 90% of all text ever produced throughout history, within 50 years. It foresaw a world in which hot new content might be worth hundreds of dollars, or where one would pay a penny per word, or pay a unit-cost every time a given portion of text was called up and accessed.

Google’s digitalization plans and licensing agreements may preclude that dystopian world of wholly owned and controlled textual content… or it may help bring it into being. So, there is an effort to prevent Google’s gaining too vast an influence over textual content. The web, we know, operates on the principle that content is free, and netizens are passionate and quick to form flash protest movements, beyond borders, when such freedoms are threatened.

But the tension between access and control is not going away. The Associated Press (AP) —which exists in part to foster the free flow of reliable information around the world, to counter repressive environments of censorship, public or private, and to make sure reporters doing that work have a viable means of professional empowerment, that they are rewarded— has declared it will charge for content to the extreme of banning unpaid quoting.

The policy will likely find its way into the federal court system in the United States, as copyright laws allow for the use of information from news sources, once the information is published. The rule of thumb in digital publishing has normally been that if words are quoted for informational purposes, the quote is justifiable, so long as the original source is cited. In most cases, digital publishers and reporters go as far as to link back to the original source.

The AP has been criticized by freedom of information advocates for hypocrisy. Its online business has grown exponentially through viral quotes and linking, but it now demands that no one, anywhere on earth, not even for educational purposes, quote five or more words without paying the AP for the right to do so.

The problem of protecting the earning rights of AP reporters is understandable. The news organization has to be able to profit from publishing its material, which is harder to do if whole stories are quoted and reposted free of charge. But the AP’s response to this problem might pose the most serious threat to the free flow of information seen since the Internet went global.

The problem with such attempts to clamp down on and control the user’s access to information is that, although digital technology enables such efforts, the overarching trend, and the real purpose of digital technology, is to liberate content and grant increased access to the end-user.

Digital text should not be harder to pick up and put down, free of punitive charges and pop-up ads (including “display ads”) than would be printed text… any such blockages run counter to the liberational logic of digital technology.

Similarly, digital video might be constrained by ads that block access to viewing, but should move ever more in the direction of the freedom of return access afforded by the printed word or printed still images. The problem facing digital content providers, then, is how to secure a revenue stream in connection with allowing that enhanced access to information, the way newspaper and book publishers do.

This is not a small problem, but the quality of the answer will determine the resilience of any digital content enterprise and the level of freedom of access enjoyed by the end-user broadly, across the landscape of digital publishing. Is there an ethical obligation not to set back the progress toward increased freedom of access? Maybe. But failure to participate in that logic of liberation will set back a business’ prospects over the long term.

Apple’s product-announcement conference on Wednesday had long fueled speculation they would be announcing a new 10-inch touchscreen tablet computer and possibly announcing a deal to bring the Beatles catalog to iTunes. Neither of those two big splashes happened, but they did announce new iPods with photo and video camera functions.

The new iPod Nano may now be the world’s smallest, most efficient, video camera. Aggressive new pricing schemes for the popular music devices also shows a substantial commitment to capturing and keeping dominant market share in the digital music business, both on the music and on the player side.

According to Brand Republic:

The company revealed that as a whole, it has sold more than 220m iPods and now commands 73.8% of the market compared to Microsoft’s 1.1%.

Apple also lowered the prices of existing iPods and introduced a new 32GB and 64GB iPod Touch that promises to run faster than previous models.

It is, perhaps, fair to say, however, that the most enthusiastic crowd response came when Steve Jobs himself took the stage. Jobs had been losing weight at a worrying pace last year, and had kept his health condition quiet. There had been real concern he might not return to the helm of the company he co-founded, so the audience was thrilled to see him on stage again.

As Rolling Stone reported:

Before the event even began, the audience gave a standing ovation to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently received a liver transplant. Jobs has been out of action for some time, and speculation over whether he’d speak at the conference was almost as furious as rumors there would be an announcement pertaining to the Beatles’ catalog coming to iTunes.

Rolling Stone, for its part, found the iTunes LP feature to be the most exciting product innovation announced.

TheHotSpring.com :: Is the very thing we demand of our computers the thing that will make them intolerant of our humanity, if and when they awaken to an artificial intelligence? One of the fundamental problems in achieving a state of computational agility and independence that would allow us to say a synthetic entity has acquired ‘artificial intelligence’ is the problem of autonomy. If we give real autonomy to artificially intelligent machines, can we trust them to cooperate with us, in the ways we, as human beings prefer?

This is an ethical question as well as a practical one. There are real ethical risks inherent in creating devices, or even independently mobile entities, that use their own store of learned intelligence and independent decision-making to interact with or make decisions that affect the conditions of human life. Consigning human well-being or liberties to a system that privileges artificial intelligence for the sake of expediency of one kind or another might reduce the range of free choice available to human individuals.

The real question implies a double ethical bind: on the one hand, is it fair for human beings to create artificially intelligent beings intended solely to serve human needs, on the other, is it reckless to create artificially intelligent beings that might not respect or have room for human emotional reality? The question involves innovations that seem almost totally improbable, almost science fiction, but which are not impossible or even unlikely to come to pass.

The inventor, scientist and entrepreneur, Ray Kurzweil —who has developed many of the intelligent machines that have filtered into the fabric of today’s technological universe (including flatbed scanners, voice recognition, and text-to-speech services)—, writes of the coming “age of spiritual machines”, which he calls “an inexorable emergence”.

He foresees that the most advanced computers will achieve “the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by around the year 2020″ (ASM 3). Because neural networks, computers designed to mimic human neurological circuitry and pattern retention, need to be reverse engineered from organs that have evolved over millions of years, artificial intelligence is necessarily less flexible, less agile, less “supple” than human intelligence.

It is widely thought among cognitive scientists that when artificial intelligence reaches not only the same level of complex circuitry, but the same level of simultaneous processing power, sensory awareness and mental agility, as the human brain, that emotional responses will emerge. At this point, the ethical questions regarding the “experience” of artificially intelligent beings come into play.

If such an event is in fact an “inexorable emergence”, then we have to also consider the correlative ethical question: how much ethical consideration can we expect from such entities as regarding human experience? Human beings waffle, we meditate, we take pains to make better choices, not just logical choices.

We answer an often imperceptible but ever-present ethical call, a summons demanding that we recognize the rights of the other. We are sometimes weak, and give in to temptation, but that is part of having individual liberties. We may pay a price for those mistakes, but they are ours to make. If we don’t have that liberty, if we don’t have the room to maneuver, intellectually, then we are not fully human: this is part of the modern ethic and fundamental to democracy.

What seems like a strictly philosophical, or even science-fiction-based question —Will artificial intelligence recognize and understand our human way of thinking and choosing, or will we be discounted by a system increasingly oriented toward logical data processing?— really does now need to be asked. Can we, for instance, put off the advent of self-reflective artificial intelligence, until we are sure to have programmed in emotional or at least human-deferential responses?

Ultimately, we cannot decide these points each on their own. We have to filter the entire scope of artificial intelligence research through the ethical and moral prism which asks: will it be good for people? will it respect human liberty? will human well-being be improved by this technology? Will the weak among us benefit, or be cast aside in an ever more technically-oriented built environment?

Amazon’s Kindle family of e-book readers has changed the game on e-books and e-book distribution, by making an intuitive, easy to use e-paper reader into a mass-market publishing platform. Books are now sold on many websites as “Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle”, referencing the format of the book’s publication in varying editions. Now, a hacker has put a variation of Linux on a Kindle 2, raising the question as to what Amazon might do to enhance the device’s range of operative capabilities.

Other e-book readers using e-paper displays are now on the market, and Sony has created a touch-enabled e-paper display, in collaboration with e-Ink, the same firm that produces Amazon’s Kindle monitors. But the Kindle, in part due to the book-publishing focus of its designers and marketers —the device is meant to be as much like reading a book (meaning you don’t search Google on the same page, just because someone whispered something in your ear while you were reading)—, is the paradigm marker.

There is a clear vested interest in not turning the Kindle into a mobile computing platform, because that would make free reading widely available and possibly further undermine Amazon’s sales of hard-copy text, something the Kindle is meant to counter. But Sony’s Reader devices will now make available community library texts and Google Books free copies, and Apple’s iPhone and anticipated touchscreen tablet will put pressure on Amazon to make the Kindle more dynamic and web-ready.

With a hacker successfully running Ubuntu Linux on a Kindle 2, there is an experimental precedent that could lead to new product directions for the Kindle family of devices. Amazon is already experimenting with a very rudimentary web browser, best for text-only viewing, which could benefit from significant optimization in terms of processing power and speed, as well as coordination with web-site and coding designers to make more websites instantly and comfortably text-only.

Privileging text is something the Kindle is designed to do, but making its relationship with non-Kindle media more dynamic, so that the text-first platform Amazon is aiming for can capitalize on the power of the information age. Not aiming for at least that level of interactivity seems, at this point, a bad choice for Amazon.

One blog commenter called the Ubuntu hack for the Kindle “Probably the lowest power netbook in the world”. The comment is telling, because it points out a very important fact of the Kindle paradigm: the e-paper monitor, because it does not require backlighting to operate, only needs power to change what it displays, not to display content, and consumers are aware of this benefit, because it both reduces energy consumption and extends battery life.

E-paper is fundamentally different from LCD and plasma monitors, far less energy intensive, and has its own appeal for a wide range of consumers and industry interests. Creating a fully functional e-paper netbook or handheld computer could be a major breakthrough not only for the device’s producer, but for the direction of publishing and communications technologies.

There is interest, for instance, in using low-energy e-paper to redirect processing power and achieve dramatically higher processing speeds for major computing and web functions (at least where video is not part of the function). Amazon may be ideally positioned to test the ability of e-paper devices to function across computational and web-communications platforms for most communicative functions.

On Wednesday, 9 September, Apple will be hosting an iTunes-centered event, to announce new features, including possibly upgraded or more dynamic iPod models. Rumors that the event could also include the much-anticipated Apple tablet computer may be premature. The San Francisco Chronicle reports the tablet may be more likely to debut at the beginning of 2010.

There is speculation there will be a tie-in with Beatles projects to be released on the 9th, including the ‘Rock Band: The Beatles’ video game and a remastered Beatles catalog CD to be released by EMI. The Beatles’ music has not been available through iTunes, and some believe an agreement may have been reached that would allow Apple to bring the Beatles music to their service for the first time.

Apple is, in fact, gearing up to implement some serious innovations to the iTunes music platform, including a social networking function and the ‘Cocktail’ service, which would allow for far richer and more dynamic coordination of sound-recordings, visual artwork, videos and liner notes. The Cocktail project has been reported as being closely linked to the plans for a full-size tablet touchscreen computer.

ChannelWeb is reporting:

Apple is expected to unveil several new products, including new iPod Touch and Nano models that feature video recording and a camera, respectively; a new version of Apple iTunes that ties in social networking functions; and a new Apple TV model that ties into an iTunes subscription model.

There is speculation Apple will be announcing iPods that have full camera functionality, and can more closely mimic some of the iPhone’s most prized features, excluding only the voice-calling feature. The iPhone is due to be open to other 3G networks come 2010, so Apple may be less wary of allowing its other devices to behave like the iPhone, which has until now been on exclusive contract with AT&T.

Apple’s iPhone App Store is reported to be bringing in $200 million per month, roughly $2.4 billion per year. Such soaring earnings reflect that high value users place on the App Store system and its ability to deliver targeted-use software “widgets” that do one thing well. But doing just one thing is far from the goal of the App Store.

The iPhone is, clearly, a vehicle for the very profitable App Store, but perhaps more importantly, the App Store is a platform that makes the iPhone a vehicle for speedy arrival at the hyper-convergence paradigm. Banking, news-gathering and reading, instant-messaging, voice communications, e-mail, television, music, instant remote payment, weather and travel planning are just some of the everyday services commonly used on the device.

With the advent of the Amazon Kindle store app or the Sony Reader Library, Google Books, specialized New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters apps, the iPhone is also becoming a central element in users’ text-reading activities, both for business and for pleasure.

Add to that camera and video features, and the iPhone is THE leading hyper-convergent platform, immensely empowered by the open development standards for the apps themselves, which allows for a vast proliferation of not only content but programs and end-user capabilities.

Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system, which is designed to capitalize on the growing 3G mobile web market, also allows for compensated downloads, but is estimated to bring in only about $5 million per month, with a possible expansion to $60 million as market share expands. Added competition in the mobile phone service app market broadly means hyper-convergence has all but arrived, and the mobile web is now taking shape, day by day.

The multi-billion-dollar value consumers have assigned to the App Store system means something like it will be deciding how hyper-convergence shapes our everyday experience of the world. Perhaps a yet more democratized version of the App Store could be the gateway to the full arrival of the hyper-convergence paradigm and the requirement that we be able to navigate it from one central, personal, flexible, and fully secure, portable platform.

• Join or view this discussion on The Hot Spring Network

Like the Amazon Kindle family of e-readers, the Sony Reader Touch Edition uses an e-Ink e-paper display. But it’s interface works like a touchscreen. The advance is a major improvement for the standards of design in e-paper e-book readers. The touchscreen standard may be the most significant challenge Sony has put forth for the Amazon Kindle readers, none of which uses a touchscreen interface.

The Kindle readers have been the iconic popular leader of the transition from paper to e-paper for the consumer bookselling market. The Kindle DX is the first widely available large-format e-reader that is optimized for more comfortable reading of text-books and news publications, where imagery is more important in connection with text. Sony’s Daily Edition is also a large-format e-paper reader that is aimed at the daily-update newspaper and weekly magazine market.

The advent of touchscreen technology for e-paper is a serious challenge to the paradigm of static non-lit, non-motive e-paper. The Touch Edition’s main problem is that contrast is reported to be lower than with non-touch e-Ink displays and there is added glare, due to a side-lighting feature that is atypical of e-paper standards.

The use of touchscreen for e-paper may need careful consideration. There remains the fundamental goal of low energy consumption, static non-backlit display, and paper-mimicking features. In this light, the only features that would make sense for touch-enabled interface would be highlighting or underlining, dictionary look-up, page-flipping and basic menu navigation.

• Join or view this discussion on The Hot Spring Network

The Internet Archive is joining with major internet-related firms, such as Yahoo and Amazon, to fight Google’s settlement with the Authors’ Guild, allowing Google Books to publish copyright-protected materials online, if they are out of print, and to compensate authors according to the sales generated by the display of the copyrighted text (possibly 70% going to publishers or copyright holders, including a cut of ad revenues). The Coalition plans to fight the legal settlement on anti-trust grounds.

According to CNET:

Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo are joining with a few library associations to oppose the settlement, Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The coalition, which is expected to be announced in a couple of weeks, will be co-led by antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, Brantley said.

The settlement treated authors as a class in a class action suit to prevent the unauthorized use of their material by Google, and was reached by the Authors’ Guild. It should be the case that only those authors represented by the Guild —some 8,000— are part of the pertinent class, but publishers and some Google competitors argue the settlement flies in the face of copyright law and gives Google far too much control over textual content online.

Google has also reached settlement with the Association of American Publishers, and would take 30% royalties from any revenues generated by its Google Books search site. Some authors view the process as a threat to their own control of their material, while the Authors’ Guild and the AAP view the settlement as an opportunity to make sure they 1) set a precedent for payment and 2) expand the basic revenue stream they can access via online media.

TG Daily reports:

Hundreds of writers, the National Writers Union, libraries and a group of professors from the University of California have already expressed concern over the deal, mainly in terms of the freedom Google would have to set prices and fears over whether Google would protect the privacy of users.

According to Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, Google’s intent is nothing less than to dominate or replace the entire library system in the US. “If this deal goes ahead, they’re making a real shot at being ‘the’ library and the only library”, he has told the BBC. The BBC reports that “Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.”

Meanwhile, the US Dept. of Justice has opened an investigation into the potential anti-trust issues the settlement could raise. Kahle warns that “The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways — all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach.” Opponents fear Google’s control of so much textual material will lead to a profit-driven standard for access to most books, sidelining the system of free libraries and tradeable hard-copies in print.

The coalition announcement comes at a crucial time: in April, a judge ruled that authors should have four more months to decide whether they wanted to opt out of the Google Books settlement with the Authors’ Guild. The deadline for that process is now approaching —4 September 2009—, and Google is preparing to take full advantage of its rights under the settlement. A final hearing on the fairness of the agreement is scheduled for 7 October, and it will likely be there that the coalition first brings serious weight to bear on the process.

• NOTE: Cafe Sentido’s publisher, Casavaria, has agreed, on a case by case basis, to permit Google Books to show a “limited preview” of books it currently has in print and which are available for purchase. These are promotional agreements, aimed at driving online sales of the print book itself, and are not the same sort of online publishing involved in the Authors’ Guild case.

Software giant Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling one of its flagship computer programs, Microsoft Word, in the US, within 60 days, after a federal judge found that a component within the application violates an XML patent held by another firm. The software engineering firm i4i, based in Toronto and boasting only 30 employees, secured a patent for a kind of customized XML in 1998, which it alleges Microsoft has included in Word since 2003, in violation of its patent protection.

Microsoft denies infringement and says it will appeal the ruling. The software giant has been ordered to pay $290 million in fines in relation to this patent issue, so far, and could face higher sanctions if it fails to cease all sale of Word in the US within 60 days. It is unclear what remedy would allow Microsoft to continue selling Word, if the ruling is upheld.

Microsoft will devote its massive legal resources to fighting the verdict and getting a federal appeals court to issue a stay against the injunction barring sale of Word, while it seeks to win an appeal outright and establish its full ownership of the software applications that comprise the Word program. If it cannot secure a stay or win on appeal, Microsoft may face the need to spend huge amounts of money on back and future royalties to i4i or to buy the company outright in order to resolve the intellectual property conflict.

The chairman of i4i says the company is “very respectful of Microsoft, but when you’re in the right you have to persevere”. The firm’s software engineering operations may gain both publicity and revenue from the new visibility the case has generated, but it’s work with XML may create an entirely new revenue stream for i4i, if Microsoft agrees to pay royalties for the particular coding process in question.

Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, said “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid”. According to USA Today, Microsoft may be facing an uphill battle to stay the injunction:

… because back in 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court set forth four strict criteria for granting injunctions in patent cases, as part of the milestone case of eBay vs. MercExchange.

To convince Texas district court Judge Leonard Davis to issue the injunction, Toronto-based tech firm i4i had to produce evidence that Microsoft’s use of XML in Word caused irreparable injury; that money damages alone will not fix the injury; that there’s an imbalance of hardship between i4i and Microsoft; and that the injunction would not harm the public interest.

Microsoft will likely devote enormous resources to fighting the ruling, however, because a victory for i4i could be seen as a green light to small competitors to launch new lawsuits making similar allegations, where blurred lines between generic XML code, available to all, and proprietary improvements and uses for it mean infringement and royalties could be in play.

Jude Ndambuki is a native Kenyan chemistry teacher in New York, who has been collecting, refurbishing and shipping used, discarded and donated computers, to Kenyan schools in order to help protect the environment, reduce the chemical contamination of landfill sites and spur technological educational resource availability for young Kenyans. He is celebrated by CNN [video] as one of its do-gooder “heroes”, an example of someone helping to improve the lot of others.

Ndambuki’s project, called Help Kenya, is even more environmentally friendly and educational than it would seem, by keeping used computers out of landfills. Schools that receive the computers plant 100 trees for every computer they receive, helping to green the local environment and foster expanded environmental consciousness among young people and in the surrounding communities.

Help us formulate creative ways to perform a similar service for other communities, or to capitalize on the re-use plus planting paradigm for charitable exchange giving…

• Join the discussion or share your ideas on The Hot Spring Network

Rights policies and copyright laws have always been controversial, providing legal “ownership” over information (text, mechanical processes, ingredient formulae) to individuals or organizations, despite that information being of use to others. They are designed to provide a commercial value to the production of new types of information (creative new directions in language usage, technical inventions, medical research and innovation), but they can also impede the free flow of information where it is most needed.

The “fair use” doctrine was brought into copyright law as a response to this problem. Where the use of copyrighted material is of inherent value to society, it need not be considered an infringement of the commercial rights or interests of the copyright holder: these uses tend to related to educational uses of fragments of text, informational reproductions of copyright-protected materials that either provide context or background for a review or report relating to that content or a field discussed by it.

But digital technologies, which allow the easy, speedy reproduction of huge amounts of copyrighted material (whole books, detailed technical documents, musical recordings and feature films), have raised entirely new ethical questions about fair use and strict licensing policies. “Viral” marketing and content distribution has helped organizations large and small spread their message and their commercial reach across a global network of content-seekers, but has also threatened to erode the royalty-generating potential of some content.

Now, we face unprecedented challenges to the right of people everywhere to access information intended for public consumption. Repressive governments are building state-of-the-art censorship , tracking and filtering mechanisms (the ‘Great Firewall of China’, for example), and internet service providers (ISP) are seeking to establish profit-dr… that limit users’ access to certain websites or content-producers.

And efforts by media giants to control the distribution and use of content through strict licensing policies, some of which propose or implement by-the-word fee schedules, now threaten to undermine the very concept of a free and independent press whose job description includes speeding reliable information to the public without legal or technical impediments, wherever possible.

How can major content providers, including trade guilds and press cooperatives like the Associated Press or the AFP, protect their revenue stream and funding portfolio, without actively countering the free flow of information among free people?

• Join the discussion on The Hot Spring Network

TheHotSpring.com :: The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.

One of the first things to praise about it is its efficient wireless download process. At no charge to the user, Kindle DX allows for wireless connection to the Kindle Store and immediate wireless download, from any location, without requiring any connection-login or wifi network. In fact, Amazon registers the device for the end user before sending it out, so it can be opened and used, straight out of the box, literally within seconds.

Its black-and-white e-paper monitor allows for extremely efficient battery usage. It need not be put to sleep or turned off, as the device uses no energy to show what is on the screen, only to change what is shown, navigate or download. Battery life can be prolonged dramatically by turning off the wireless connection, which is only needed to browse the Kindle Store, and download updates or new purchases.

Kindle’s screen is in some ways a blend of the e-paper concept and a traditional monitor, which means that in low light, it appears darker and is harder to see than the average printed page. E-paper works on the principle that the surface of a page reflects light, so no backlighting is necessary. The black text on white background should imitate this effect, but with the e-paper surface inset behind a plastic cover, there is a reduction in the reflective ability of the surface of the device.

The Vizplex screen, by E Ink, a company founded by e-paper researchers from MIT, is a matrix array of bistable microspheres, which can show black or white, or combine to give shades of gray. The microspheres react to encrypted electronic pulses that cause their visible surface to produce black or “white coloring”, which is really more like a very dark charcoal gray against a very light greenish gray. The effect is similar to the contrast of standard newsprint, more than to the higher quality paper of a bound book.

This effect may actually be designed to reduce glare or to protect the e-paper surface, but one could imagine a less light-absorbing plastic barrier, which would allow for better contrast. But in most settings, the contrast is excellent for comfortable reading, and the Kindle DX does, in fact, seem to “get out of the way”, allowing for direct engagement between reader and text, one of the stated goals for the Kindle’s being an improvement over most on-screen reading experiences.

One of the most comfortable, and useful, things about the Kindle DX, from this reviewer’s point of view, is news reading. Every morning, the most recent editions of the newspapers and magazines one has subscribed to are waiting to be read. One can shuffle through the content of major publications, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, or Salon. Blogs are also available, and they are updated multiple times per hour, so that any new content will appear on the same day it was posted to the blog online.

There is also a peppering of international media sources, so one can read the news in French or Spanish. The Shanghai Daily is also available, but it’s China news in English. I find it rewarding to get a look at the French daily Le Monde, which due to time-zone considerations, tends to publish 12 hours before the list-date, so I have a window onto international political news the day before it would otherwise reach us here.

Plus, it’s helpful for language skills to cross-compare vocabulary used in US political reporting and French-language reporting on the same issues. Buying foreign newspapers in the US can be a costly adventure and often produces only a pared-down version of the full publication. The Kindle allows instant pre-newsstand access to the original content.

The benefit the Kindle DX offers is not about browsing the web or searching for the latest information on a given subject; it’s about ease of reading and portability for a digital library, possibly thousands of titles and millions of pages, which can range from newsprint to literary fiction, summer romance to your favorite magazine. It’s about finding a comfortable way to make huge amounts of information highly portable.

Text is displayed simply, in something like the traditional black ink on white paper format, with indented paragraphs and justified margins. Devotion to the idea of mimicking the printed page is evident, and the streamlined text-intensive format, with few graphical enhancements is a welcome “cleaning up” of periodicals and websites that are increasingly noisy and given to complicated graphic-intensive layouts, kinetic Flash advertisements and other bells and whistles.

Personally, I would like to see more formatting options: for instance, a two-column re-format option that might give the Kindle text palette something of a magazine or newspaper-like feel, if the reader prefers it. It would also address the ages-old typesetting problem of making sure the horizontal line is not so long the eye loses its place on the return to the left margin. This could be done with very light-weight code that simply fits two columns into the same template where we presently see one.

A slightly wider screen or the choice of smaller text sizes, by the user, might be instrumental to making this function workable. On rotation, in landscape view, a three-column option might be nice as well. This kind of layout flexibility should be workable, because the Kindle format is uniform and privileges text over other media.

I also think there is need for a more dynamic index-page layout. For instance, when I open the New York Times Kindle Edition, I enter a “front page” which is in fact the opening to one article only. To see what else is included on the front page, I have to click to the right to navigate to the next article and then the next. (Each article shows at the foot of the page what the title of the next article is, but for periodicals, a list of headlines is hard to find — blogs do have them).

To locate the list of headlines in any given section of a newspaper, you have to click the 5-way navigation button when the option “view sections list” is highlighted at the foot of the page. Then, to the right of each section, there is a number, which is underscored with a dotted line. Clicking that number will reveal a list of headlines, like an rss feed. Clicking the section title will take you to the chosen first article, after which you must navigate to the right or go back to the sections list.

There is no clear reason I can think of why a Kindle Edition of any publication would not benefit from an itemized table of contents or index page. Since articles are already separated out and navigable by one-click navigation, there should be no significant modification to the way a Kindle Edition works to simply add an index page that provides a broad-view map of the publication’s contents.

Some users may at first be frustrated by the lack of browser-like menus and options. But the Kindle is designed to be mechanical, like a book. To highlight the text-on-paper reader-content relationship, the Kindle emphasizes the virtues of e-paper over the versatility of a laptop-style graphic-user-interface (GUI).

Menus are simple, static page-view lists, which one navigates by scrolling up or down the list, using the 5-way navigation button nested between the “MENU” and “BACK” buttons. Since the e-paper surface is not touch-sensitive, more dynamic page-flipping and graphic-intensive navigation options are not available. Also, there’s the low-energy logic of e-paper: those graphic-intensive touchscreen features require computing power, which means electric power, which means lower-battery life and more energy consumption.

To say we must compare the Amazon Kindle DX, or Kindle 2, to work being done by Apple, involving touchscreen devices, wireless download, online sale of electronic media, and the like, is to some extent unfair. The comparison is not really between rival products, but between possibly rival parallel technologies.

The touchscreen magic of the iPhone and iPod Touch have revolutionized gadgetry and our expectations about the intensity of focus on end-user interactive priorities, but they are based on a very different set of assumptions than the Kindle’s e-paper technology. The iPhone and iPod Touch are fully intended to be intensely diversified multimedia platforms, on which literally tens of thousands of services (“apps”) can be implemented.

The Amazon Kindle DX and Kindle 2 are, on the other hand, intended to be single-medium delivery vehicles, which do something like bring the vastness of a bookstore beyond any bricks-and-mortar inventory, to within 60 seconds of you, wherever you are. Apple’s products can mimic this effect, and there is a Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but despite similarities, the two technologies remain distinct, and even parallel to one another, addressing different aesthetic and practical concerns.

I am tempted to frame the discussion as one rooted in a kind of ideal, looming up over the horizon: a large-format touch-sensitive full-color non-backlit edgeless e-paper device, which could take on any number of tempting, experimental or prevailing morphologies. Neither the Kindle nor the iPhone-type Apple devices meet this description, but both provide clues about what comes next.

The Kindle is a noble experiment, especially given the still highly experimental phase in which advanced e-paper finds itself, and due to its commitment to the text-on-paper experience, which more or less forces Amazon into a black-and-white world. The new Kindle devices enjoy 16 shades of gray, instead of just 4, but some users complain this has reduced contrast, which, by the way, cannot be adjusted.

It has to be said, the softer light radiating from the Kindle (entirely ambient light reflected on the static surface) is softer on the eyes than a backlit screen, which projects a constant stream of its own light directly onto the retina. If I look at the Kindle and my computer monitor side by side, my eyes want to get text from the Kindle, while my mind is curious about the color and definition afforded by a brilliant, gloss-front Mac laptop monitor.

What holds me back from really considering the Kindle a work companion, however, is the degree to which it limits my ability tocontribute. A laptop allows me to do all the typing and editing I may feel is appropriate. The Kindle is slower for typing and really only permits typing for search and for adding footnotes.

The footnote capacity is brilliant, it helps one feel like there is something like margin-scribbling going on —and each note goes into the My Clippings file, its own Kindle book on the main page— but I am compelled to rely on a paper notebook or a computer to do any real writing. I think it’s actually not a terrible inconvenience that the Kindle does not allow for more hands-on editing or file-creation. It keeps the focus on reading text, and compiling a substantial library, which can soar into the thousands of documents, if one pleases.

That’s no small feat in today’s world of acquired attention deficits and chronic compulsive surfing of options we never really explore. Oddly, the Kindle might do just what E Ink and Amazon’s developers say they want to do with e-paper: salvage the kind of prolonged attention and imaginative reading that we used to derive from books, the most important and enduring communicative medium in history.

When I get near the end of a page, I want to turn to the next and keep reading, if the content is good. Scrolling down the page on a web browser often does not induce —or permit— this effect. Scrolling is distracting: it requires hand-eye coordination and re-orients the brain’s motion-processing faculties. Turning a printed page or clicking the Kindle’s NEXT PAGE button don’t; they’re almost automatic reflexes, which allow the mind to keep “reading” —to stay in that mindset— while the page turns.

Apple has a great contribution to resolving this problem as well… on its devices, the Kindle reader actually flips pages out of the way, with a flick of the finger. This is essentially as convenient as a single click, executed by exerting just the slightest pressure with the thumb, but may involve more motor-skills and conscious brain involvement; it will also be necessary far more often, because the iPhone’s screen is less than 1/4 that of the Kindle DX.

So: in summary, the Kindle DX is a beautiful device; it accompanies the user admirably; it offers tempting interludes of enjoyable ergonomic reading; it stimulates the mind and responds to the user’s sudden urges to read this or that title not currently at hand. Its graphic quality achieves the stated goals, but is limited by the limitations of the current state of the art of commercially viable (cost-wise) e-paper technologies.

For reading text-books whose assets include full-color images, diagrams and detailed small-print tables and graphics, it will struggle. But the platform is ready to evolve with the e-paper technology, and it is not unreasonable to expect a full-color e-paper device within a year or two, if the right advances are made quickly enough.

If you need a touchscreen computer-like device, this is not your device. If you need something that acts like a book, but is electronic, lightweight, able to handle huge numbers of titles, and convenient to use, this is for you. Cost may be an issue, however: the Kindle DX currently retails for $489 and the Kindle 2 for $299. You have to pay for content, but you’ll get a better deal on that content than any paper version of the same publications.

As far as a work-tool: uploading PDF documents is simple, aided by a dedicated email address that automatically converts the PDF and sends it to the device wirelessly. But there is a cost of $0.15 for doing this, and the pages cannot be zoomed or resized, so small type or lightly colored type can be hard to make out.

The PDF documents cannot be so easily worked with as the Kindle Edition books and news publications. Underlining and footnoting does not work effectively, if at all, and so while reading and reviewing them, if properly sized, can be comfortable and convenient (you can store hundreds, or even thousands of them, on the Kindle), you need to take down your notes elsewhere.

I’m hoping for full-color non-backlit e-paper to arrive on the market before long —two years seems like a conservative bet—, and when that comes, look for e-paper and touchscreens to start converging. The technological problems inherent in achieving this are complicated, but the rewards could be immense for Amazon, for Apple, for readers, for publishers, for the news business, for all of us who use media or read printed pages or want more fluid access to global information.

My Kindle DX is a loaner, delivered by Amazon for me to review for this publication, and I add this final note, because it allows me to say that, whatever tweaks and improvements I would want to see made, as attendant technologies evolve, I will miss my Kindle DX the morning after I send it back. I will miss its convenience, its helpful way of delivering whole publications to me every day, keeping me informed, keeping me curious, keeping me reading whenever I can.

Related stories:

• Apple Projected to Release 10-inch Touchscreen Tablet, September 2009
• Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines
• Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs
• Edgeless Letter-sized ePaper Reader (concept)
• What Obstacles Are there to an e-Paper Touchscreen Interface?
• Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

TheHotSpring.com :: The Financial Times is the latest publication to weigh in on mounting expectations that Apple will release a touchscreen tablet computer this fall. There are rumors the computer maker is hoping to counter the rise of cheap netbooks with something lower-cost than their standard Macs and with a larger screen based on the model of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The news could mean a breakthrough in personal computing standards and even portability of the workplace.

For now, the focus seems to be on content delivery and entertainment: namely music and reading. There are rumors of new deals with record labels, booksellers and possibly one or more wireless carriers. The Boy Genius Report says “Apple is allegedly going to team up with Verizon to release an Internet tablet that will be subsidized by the carrier”. The idea would be that the Apple tablet would work like a big iPhone, with wireless download via Verizon.

What is not clear is whether signing up for an account would be a requirement of purchasing the device, or just an option. Requiring that buyers sign up for a Verizon account could hurt product sales, as the device will be bulkier than an iPhone and might be seen by consumers more as a web-surfing device, a computer for other purposes, than as a giant iPod.

According to today’s Financial Times:

The device is expected to be launched alongside new content deals, including some aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project. The touch-sensitive computer will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to the web, and to Apple’s online stores for software and entertainment.

It looks like the device could be set up to compete in nearly all media: it will play music and is said to have a new focus on large-format album artwork, possibly a way to make the music listening experience more interactive and tempt consumers to buy whole albums again. The Financial Times reports that “Recording industry executives” relayed the information that Apple has such a strategy in place for an upcoming release.

A parallel FT story cites “four people familiar with the situation” as indicating that Apple is working on a special project designed to achieve this goal, carrying the development codename “Cocktail”. The project also aims to enhance the variable interactivity of the interface, allowing users to access songs from the album artwork booklets themselves, without having to mechanically access and search through iTunes.

The booklets would include not only images and text, but also the album itself, the music, and videoclips, possibly some accessible only this format. But the device would also cross over into web surfing, video playback, word-processing and e-books. With high resolution and intense contrast, the device could pose a serious threat to Amazon’s Kindle devices, which have grayish e-paper screens.

There is admittedly a different purpose to building a backlit high-resolution tablet computer and an e-paper device designed to show text on a blank background. Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos says he wants the Kindle to “disappear” when readers get immersed in text, as happens with a book, something backlit monitors are ill-equipped to do, because the light emitted strains the eyes.

But a touchscreen Apple tablet with a 10-inch visual interface would mark a potential revolutionary moment in e-reading, film and TV, music marketing and web surfing. If lightweight or easily propped up, and with a standard qwerty keyboard, it could also make email and business communications more portable, as the format would be far more suited to formal writing than a small phone or Blackberry device.

The device may also revolutionize the way the publishing industry and the software industry work. As Wired reports:

Apple is already prepared to blow Amazon and other e-book makers out of the water with one key weapon: iTunes. Having served more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has flipped the music industry on its head. It also turned mobile software into a lucrative industry, as proven by the booming success of the iPhone’s App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, and making books as easy to download as music and iPhone apps is the logical next step.

A one-stop instant download multimedia library, with music, video, books, software, and other services, could pressure Amazon and other content retailers in unforeseen ways. The iTunes music store changed the way music, and music videos, were sold. It is breaking into film and TV, and the App Store is already into the billions. Making books available in the same easy way, competing directly with Amazon’s Kindle Store wireless download standard, could be a landmark moment in the evolution of content distribution.

Again, according to Wired:

For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy.

This may put publishers in the business of wireless distribution far more quickly and on a wider scale than Amazon has been able to do. Because iTunes operates across millions of devices already, potentially billions, and means the right royalty agreement could make Apple into a leading bookseller, altering the entire calculus of the marketplace.

News and discussions on edgeless e-paper devices:

• Amazon Kindle DX: Beautiful, Focused, Comfortable, Imperfect, Inspired & Worth ‘Reading’
• Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines
• Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs
• Edgeless Letter-sized ePaper Reader (concept)
• What Obstacles Are there to an e-Paper Touchscreen Interface?
• Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

From other sources:

• Financial Times Confirms Apple Tablet for September
• Analyst Predicts Apple Will Unleash Touchscreen Tablet Next Year
• Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives
• Apple COO Reveals Plans for Touch Tablet — Kinda
• Rumor: $800 Apple Tablet Coming in October
• Rumor: 10-Inch Apple Tablet Landing in Early 2010

Access to the internet must be a basic human right, across the globe, for a number of reasons. First of all, legitimate, transparent democratic processes of government require in today’s world that information flow freely and that citizens be empowered to share information and to find information, according to their choices and their needs.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effect that enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress and among federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

TheHotSpring.com :: The New Scientist magazine is reporting on an intriguing and brazen new Pentagon program that would create living “OrthopterNets”, communication networks made of insects implanted with special technologies to modulate their wingbeats. Crickets, cicadas and katydids, all use their wings to generate sounds, the patterns of which communicate information to others of their kind. The Pentagon wants to use this natural communications network to prompt the insects to emit specific sounds in the presence of specific chemicals.

The result would be cyborg insects, living insects with technology integrated into their physical composition. The technology could have broad application, including “sniffing” applications in the search for toxins, concealed chemical or biological agents, hazmat detection, and even the search for survivors from natural disasters. A number of factors impede the timely locating of survivors buried in rubble after earthquakes or other major disasters.

Ben Epstein of OpCoast, who reportedly developed the idea after hearing insects modifying their sound in relation to each other’s calls, said researchers “could do this by adjusting the muscle tension or some other parameter that affects the sound-producing movements. The insect itself might not even notice the modulation”.

According to The New Scientist:

As well as a biochemical sensor and a device for modulating the wing muscles, the electronics package would contain an acoustic sensor designed to respond to the altered calls of other insects. This should ensure the “alarm” signal is passed quickly across the network and is ultimately picked up by ground-based transceivers.

OrthopterNets could vastly expand the information gathering and chemical detection capabilities of authorities seeking to solve pressing security problems, like chemical and bio-agent detection at major ports or the search for survivors buried under significant amounts of wreckage after a disaster. They might also mean a more conservative option for such tasks than self-replicating nano-bots, which many fear could escape human control.

In fact, OrthopterNets offer an important and instructive test for nano-technology, in that the engineering of such miniaturized circuits may benefit from the smallest-scale engineering available to human science. Using such decentralized, spontaneous communications systems to effectively restructure and optimize information search and extraction capabilities means a landmark moment in the development of hyper-convergent communications technologies.

The overlap between planned communications networking technologies and decentralized, organic and geologic patterns is a new frontier in communications and information technology, with the cyborg sniffer insects possibly marking only the first step in that direction. Artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicts the human species will adopt cyborg capabilities to vastly enhance both survival-oriented and social functions, in the not-too-distant future.

The release of cyborg crickets into a disaster area could help authorities and rescue teams create real-time, evolving chemical maps, to detect no only the possible location of survivors, but of hazardous releases possibly caused by the disaster and even —where underlying materials are known— of unstable or shifting debris. Military uses might include minefield mapping and the location of weapons stores or mountain hideouts.

The New Scientist also reported last year that cyborg insects might be used as “discreet spies”. For instance:

THE next time a moth alights on your window sill, watch what you say. Sure, it may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy – one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement. Be warned, flesh-and-blood bugs may soon live up to their name.

That article also notes that researchers have developed cyborg remote-control capabilities for “rats, pigeons and even sharks”. The technologies could be used for eavesdropping and other covert detection tasks. The first cyborg rat, achieved by researchers in 2002, was directed with a combination of contact and reward stimuli to specialized regions of its brain, then “freed” to use its own sniffing instincts to detect the presence of explosives in a targeted location.

As Iran’s presidential election has morphed into a massive international spectacle, with opposition protesters demanding justice and a full accounting of how votes were tallied, the regime has used every technological advantage at its disposal to obstruct online communications and mobile phone traffic. The government now has a wealth of powerful technologies, from western firms, it can use to spy, block communications, and even alter messages before they are delivered.

Attempts to ban the use of sms and online messaging sites like Twitter have been circumvented, incrementally, and by fits and starts, by an increasingly tech-savvy youthful electorate. And the use of proxy servers has allowed an evolving system of cat-and-mouse blocking and re-opening of channels to global web portals like Twitter and YouTube. This has allowed opposition supporters and ordinary Iranians to ‘broadcast’ anecdotal reporting to the world, ramping up pressure on the government to levels not seen since 1979.

[ad#cafsen-intext]

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that:

… in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

Ben Roome, a spokesman for the Siemens-Nokia joint venture (Nokia Siemens Networks), reportedly said “If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them”. But Roome also said the Nokia Siemens project does not provide internet intercept capability that would aid the Iranian government in censoring or propagandizing their population.

The WSJ report suggested that Iran’s leadership may only have begun to fully apply the technology’s monitoring and control capabilities in efforts to obstruct opposition activities leading up to or following the election. It is unclear whether or not the NSN technology is being used to intercept and examine specific online messages or whether it might be used, as the venture’s spokesman suggested, to intercept or listen in on local telephone communications.

• Iran’s Guardian Council Finds Ballots Cast Exceeded Number of Voters in 50 Cities
• Pres. Obama’s Statement on Iran (transcript)
• Larijani Says Majority Suspect Election Fraud; Rafsanjani Relative Detained
• Iran Says ‘Terrorists’ Caused Saturday Clashes; New Evidence of State Violence (UPDATED)
• Update on State Violence Against Demonstrators in Iran (video)
• Reports of Shots Fired at Iranian Demonstrators (video, links & updates)
• Khamene’i Demands End to Protests, Says Disputed Results Will Stand
• Open Letter from Iranian Academics to UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon
• UN Rights Chief Warns Iran not to Use Violence
• Iranian Dissident Leader Detained in Hospital ICU, Jailed without Charge
• Massive Opposition Rally in Tehran Mourns Slain Demonstrators (video)
• Iran Government Targets Press as More Demonstrations Planned (video)
• Rafsanjani Calls for Emergency Meeting of Assembly of Experts
• Pro-Mousavi Demonstrations & Iranians’ Constitutional Rights (video)
• Iran Opposition Movement Forces Khamenei to Investigate
• Iran Crackdown: Is it Tacit Admission Vote was Rigged?
• Iran Declares Ahmedinejad Winner, Results Widely Questioned as Fraudulent
• Rivals Ahmedinejad & Mousavi Both Declare Victory in Iran Election
• Iranian Polls Kept Open Several Hours Longer than Planned
• Iran Votes, with Popular Reformist Challenging Hardline Ahmedinejad