"What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction. An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships."

"Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world. Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities. One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not. Their views are warped and often radical. While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views. Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.

When I was last in Korea, a close friend of mine told me he was thinking about sending his six-year old daughter to schools in the US. I was shocked. How could he think this way? He said he initially thought the idea ridiculous, but he changed his mind after talking with people he knew, people who are just as well-to-do as his family. Apparently, they are all thinking the same thing and this warped his common sense."

Ohmynews's influence was highlighted after an American military armored vehicle ran down and killed two South Korean schoolgirls last June.

While the accident attracted relatively little attention in the mainstream press initially, Ohmynews was aggressive in its coverage. The stories prompted one "citizen reporter" to call for protests.

The idea snowballed and South Korea experienced some of its largest anti-U.S. demonstrations in years and calls for a review of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance.

Mainstream newspapers later criticized Ohmynews, questioning whether it was ethical for a so-called reporter to incite demonstrations.

The fast rise in popularity of Ohmynews, and other online news services, is partly attributable to South Korea's high Internet use. About 70 percent of homes have high-speed broadband Internet access connections -- more than anywhere else in the world.

Paik Hak-soon, a political analyst at the Sejong Institute research center, said "the mainstream press still has the ear of the majority of the public. But things are changing."

"Twenty- and 30-year-olds are getting their news from the Internet," he said.

"Have you heard the word Chapatsu? It literally means 'brown hair'. These days, however, the word applies not only to brown-dyed hair but also to hair that has been dyed red, gold, or white. Chapatsu has been fashionable since around the early 1990s. Chapatsu people can be found all over Japan. In Japanese, this phenomenon is called 'heia karaa fuashon'. It is practiced by both males and females, young and old alike. For example, there are even chapatsu civil servants in their 30s or 40s.

In the fashion industry, it is said that a precedent can always be found for every so-called new fashion. In fact, hair-dyeing had been fashionable in Japan from the late 60s to early 70s in Japan, after which it faded away, so to speak. At that time, the Japanese economy was in a period of high growth. And the miniskirt was also very popular. There’s a saying, that the length of women's skirts changes in inverse proportion to the business cycle. In other words, the more prosperous the period, the shorter the skirts.

The Chapatsu fashion of today first began among high school boys. Around 1990, there were some Chapatsu high school boys who went up against the strict dress code of Japanese schools. They were called Furyo – bad boys. They were few in number. By the end of the 1990s, just as the furyo boys had done, girls also began to color their hair. The Chapatsu style has flourished in the past few years.

Actually, the Chapatsu phenomenon has grown so large that it may not be an understatement to say that Japanese who have un-dyed Kurokami, or 'black hair', are now in the minority. For instance, most Japanese would not be surprised to see a university professor walking around with shiny dyed hair.

This Chapatsu boom has been accompanied by other fashions, such as 'loose socks', puri-kura 'print-club' [Pretty Club??] - that is, miniature photo protrait seals -, as well as body piercing and platform shoes. Tattoos have also recently turned into a fad, although a more a secretive one."

Now, let’s briefly look back to the body image and consciousness that Japanese people have held in modern times. The fact that most Japanese lived semi-naked up to the early years of the Meiji Era was something reported by many western people who went to Japan at this time. As the critical eyes of Westerners were feared by the Meiji government, going about the streets exposed was forbidden by law from as early as 1871 (the 4th year of the Meiji Era). But the common people felt no shame at exposing their bodies and, in fact, most peasants, fishermen and artisans lived in such a semi-naked state for more than six months every year.

An American zoologist, Edward Morse, describes it in his book, Japan Day by Day, as follows: in the countryside, 'Clothing seems to be used only on state occasions' (Such scenes of everyday life remained up to the early 1960s). Thus, in turns and twists, a life of wearing clothes and shoes was not to become the norm among the lower strata of society until as late as the end of nineteenth century (the 30s of the Meiji Era). As nakedness was banned from public places, nakedness gradually became a source of shame in people's consciousness. From a cultural point of view, nakedness acquired a new meaning as the connection between it and sexuality grew. It is often said that in Japan nakedness had not always implied something erotic. Naked body parts denoted coquetry only when set in the context of there being a tension in the relationship between the naked and covered parts. Put another way, sexuality came to depend largely on the context. However, as the habit of wearing clothes spread, the covered body itself became the object of suppressed desire. Back when exposure of the body was the norm, the dependence of sexuality upon situational conditions was much stronger than it is in our time. As the situational dependence of sexual matters weakened, and representations of sex proliferated in everyday life, nudity itself became endowed with rhetorical expressiveness and came to appear even in the most unexpected situations. This is the state of the present consciousness concerning nakedness and the covered body in Japan. That is, nudity has acquired an overdetermined presence in Japanese society.

Thailand's Finance Minister Suchart Jaovisidha had to be rescued today from inside his expensive BMW limousine after the onboard computer crashed, leaving the vehicle immobilized.

Once the computer failed, neither the door locks, power windows nor air conditioning systems would function, leaving the Minister and his driver trapped inside the rapidly heating vehicle.

Despite the pair's best efforts, it took a full ten minutes before they were able to summon the attention of a nearby guard who freed the two men by smashing one of the vehicle's windows with a sledgehammer.

A report published in the Bangkok Post indicates that the vehicle was Mr Jaovisidha's own BMW 520 which was being used while his state-supplied Mercedes, was being repaired.

BMW's 7-series range uses a computer system called i-drive which has Microsoft's WindowsCE at its core.

It appears that Mr Jaovisidha narrowly missed being killed by the blue windscreen of death.

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The last six months have seen a new embryonic internet emerge into the light.
This new internet is more decentralised, structured, logically interconnected, people centred, and increasingly location aware

..maybe you have a newsreader that goes and gets rss feeds to save you trawling your favourite sites, maybe you have a blog which kicks out a structured rss feed and pings a blog search and analysis engine. Maybe you use one of the new selective blog search engines like feedster or blog link analysis engines like blogdex and technorati, or even a blog extended family tracker like blogstreet. Maybe you see the patterns emerging at a higher level. Blogs are now less interesting than the relations between them. Blogs are things to be aggregated, searched for patterns, ranked, indexed, analysed, those results being valuable to ordinary users as much as academics. What are bloggers tripping out on right now? Check blogdex. Feedster has a lag of about an hour, Google sometimes as much as a month. These tools are selective and they can become more so, answer questions like: what is this extended familly of bloggers tripping out about, what are my friends tripping out about?

All these new capabilities are emerging through distributed collectve tweaking.

The Law of Accelerating Returns is the acceleration of technology, and the evolutionary growth of the products of an evolutionary process. And this really goes back to the roots of biological evolution.

Evolution works through indirection. You create something and then work through that to create the next stage. And for that reason, the next stage is more powerful, and happens more quickly. And that has been accelerating ever since the dawn of evolution on this planet.

The first stage of evolution took billions of years. DNA was being created and that was very significant because it was like a little computer, and an information processing method to store the results of experiments, and to build up a knowledge base from which it could then launch experiments and codify the results.

The subsequent stages of evolution happened much more quickly. The Cambrian Explosion only took a few tens of millions of years to establish the body plan to evolve animals. And we see that evolution, like certain technologies, has become mature and stopped evolving. Evolution has concentrated on other issues, specifically higher cortical functions. And that happened much more quickly than the Cambrian Explosion. Humanoids evolved over many millions of years, and Homo sapiens over only hundreds of thousands of years. And there again, evolution used the products of its evolutionary processes, which was Homo sapiens, to create the next stage, which was human-directed technology, which really is a continuation of the cutting-edge of the evolutionary process on earth, for creating more intelligent systems.

In the first stage of human-directed technology, it took tens of thousands of years, which is what you would expect for the next stage via the wheel, or stone tools, and that kept accelerating, because when we had stone tools, we could use them to build the next stage. So a thousand years ago a paradigm shift only took a century, like the printing press. And now a paradigm shift, like the World Wide Web, is measured in only a few years’ time. The first computers were built with screwdrivers and were designed with pencil and paper, and today we use computers to create computers. A CAD designer will sit down and specify a few high-level parameters, and 12 different layers of automated designs will be done automatically. The most significant acceleration is in the paradigm shift rate itself, which I think of as the rate of technical progress. And all of these are actually not exponential, but double exponentials because not only does the process accelerate because of our evolution’s ability to use each stage of evolution to build the next stage, but also, as the process, as an area gets higher price performance, more resources get drawn into that capability.[..]

The whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then we’ll do it again in seven years. And because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, which is a thousand times greater than the 20th century, which was no slouch to change.

Trepia provides a new smartmobbing tool: access a location-based list of other nearby WiFi users. It's not available for Mac yet: please contact Trepia to ask them to accelerate Mac development.(Via Emergent Report)

On the surface, Trepia looks similar to a buddy list. While programs like ICQ and AIM will show you a static list of friends, Trepia shows you a list of people who are currently in your area -- people who you most likely didn't know before! You can check out their profile and picture and strike up a conversation, knowing that if you actually want to meet them, they are never more than a few minutes away.

How does it work behind the scenes? If two people are within range of the same Wi-Fi access point, they must be close to each other. Building on this idea, Trepia tracks the movement of people through access points, and then notifies you of other users who are in your area. Trepia is not limited by Wi-Fi's range because it even works when two people are not on the same access point, but the access points themselves are close to each other.

Something's buzzing online about weblog APIs. Someone posted a comparison between the Blogger and the MetaWeblog API on his weblog. Then Dave Winer is getting pretty riled up about Google's plans to develop a new version of Blogger API, which should better be based on the MetaWeblog API instead.

First things first, Diego Doval is correct when he says that a weblog API should provide access to all the functionality offered by the product (be that Blogger, Radio, or MovableType). Now, clearly the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API are quite different, even though the latter is actually based on the former. Comparing the two is pointless, because that is not really the issue. Having to deal with a variety of weblog APIs is a curse on the intrinsically open nature of weblogs themselves. One of the most interesting aspects of weblogs is the ability to not only to share information relatively quickly, but to make it widely accessible (Joi's Ivan story is a great illustration). While developing Kung-Log, I stumbled across so many differences between each weblog system's implementation of whatever Weblog API they endorsed. It's even worse. Weblog systems may differ in how they implement, for example, the Blogger API. pMachine's version of the Blogger API is, to phrase it mildly, ridiculous and clumsy. Only one weblog system has provided a nearly all-functional, self-explanatory, and straightforward implementation of a weblog API (there's a hint of subjectivity here, but still, the point remains). MovableType not only implements both the Blogger and the MetaWeblog, it provides a variety of extra API routines, that make client access to MovableType weblogs incredibly easy. An illustrative example is the getTrackbackPings method, which can be used to retrieve the list of TrackBack pings posted to a particular entry...

This article from SPACE.com about the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) is not science fiction. Rich Gray reports it is becoming a reality.

The IPN would form a backbone connecting a series of hubs on or around planets, ships, and at other points in space. These hubs would provide high-capacity, high-availability Internet traffic over distances that could stretch up to hundreds of millions of miles.

Gray adds that all the planets and satellites in our solar system have already Internet addresses and that NASA is already communicating with its earth-orbiting missions through its internal Deep Space Network. The rest of us will have to wait until at least 2005 when IPN-equipped satellites are launched

Check this column for more details.

"Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your “imminent liberation” anymore.

But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.

Besides asking for outrageous fares (you can’t blame them gas prices have gone up 10 times, if you can get it) but they start grumbling and mumbling and at a point they would say something like “well it wasn’t like the mess it is now when we had saddam”. This is usually my cue for going into rage-mode. We Iraqis seem to have very short memories, or we simply block the bad times out. I ask them how long it took for us to get the electricity back again after he last war? 2 years until things got to what they are now, after 2 months of war. I ask them how was the water? Bad. Gas for car? None existent. Work? Lots of sitting in street tea shops. And how did everything get back? Hussain Kamel used to literally beat and whip people to do the impossible task of rebuilding. Then the question that would shut them up, so, dear Mr. Taxi driver would you like to have your saddam back? Aren’t we just really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq? Or are we Iraqis just a bunch of impatient fools who do nothing better than grumble and whine? Patience, you have waited for 35 years for days like these so get to working instead of whining. End of conversation."

"Letitia me telephonic youngster ones third firemen. Wardens succumb bights timeouts. Donald’t letter youngstown everhart be talkie interconnects havoc oneness wagers in theorizes namesake of youth freely. Sommerfeld wheatland theresa bombast stables drowns or your healy theorists southward of macassar gunnery at theater endear of youthfully straightest youngster donates’t third abos yourselves 'immortally libertarian' anyplace."

Apple Service Tops Million First-Week Downloads. Apple Computer says its new digital music service, the iTunes Music Store, sold more than 1 million downloads in its first week, Billboard Bulletin reports. The figure roughly matches the download sales to date by all other digital music services combined, sources say.

What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions.

This article in Slate came out a few days ago and it sums up nicely what I always felt about the matrix after seeing the first film - in the matrix we can do anything. Since the late 1980's after probing in depth the potential of consciousness becoming software via nanotechnology and perhaps quantum computers, I have endeavored to visualize the future of reality enhanced by fully customized hyper-intelligent neurological circuits and synthaesthic hyper-sensory pathways. This potential is the primary theme of my book-in-progress. As this article points out Neo shows us the way:

"The real source of the fascination with The Matrix is that, despite all appearances, the movie is not a dystopia. Rather, it's a utopia, a geek paradise. The Matrix is a sci-fi John Hughes movie, in which a misfit learns that he's actually cool. (Think Harry Potter with guns.) At the software company where Keanu Reeves works, his boss might as well be the principal castigating Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club when he says: "You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special. That somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken." Of course, we learn that the oppressive Figure of Authority is the one who is mistaken. But instead of going to the prom, Keanu gets to pack heat, learn kung fu, wear a black trench coat and sunglasses, and, to top it off, he gets a hot, ass-kicking girlfriend who sports fetish wear. What kind of dystopia is this?"

Madan Kataria writes: In March, 1995, I thought of writing an article on 'Laughter - the best medicine' for 'My Doctor' a health magazine that I edited. When I found a large amount of scientific literature on the benefits of laughter on the human mind and body, I was amazed that very few people laugh and smile in Mumbai. I was very impressed by American journalist Norman Cousins' book 'Anatomy of an Illness' in which he described how he laughed his way out of incurable disease of the spine - Ankylosing Spondylitis. I also read about the research work done by Dr. Lee S. Berk from Loma Linda University, California, who showed how mirthful laughter reduced the stress hormone levels in the body and the effects of laughter on the immune system. Early morning at 4 a.m. on 13th March 1995, I was walking up and down in my living room and suddenly an idea flashed into my mind: If laughter is so good why not start a laughter club? Then I decided not to publish the article, but instead I went to a public park at Lokhandwala Complex, Andheri, in Mumbai and spoke to people about starting a Laughter Club. The remarkable thing about this idea was that I conceived it at 4 a.m. in the morning and within 3 hours a plan was put into action.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- An Israeli policeman responding to neighbors' complaints about a rowdy all-female party received an unexpected welcome at the door when revellers mistook him for a stripper and began to take off his clothes and stroke him. "The women had ordered a stripper dressed as a police officer," national police spokesman Gil Kleiman said on Monday. The policeman showed the women his badge but they thought it was part of the act.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- A masked and caped do-gooder has been sweeping through an English town, performing good deeds and scattering terrified bad guys, a local newspaper reported on Friday.

The Kent and Sussex Courier said it had received letters from "stunned residents" of the town of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, who saw the man in a brown mask and cape scare off hooligans and return a woman's dropped purse.

"To my great surprise," the paper quoted 21-year-old psychology student Ellen Neville as saying, "a masked man wearing a brown cape rushed past me to assist a woman who was having a bother with a group of youths.

"He swept in, broke up the commotion and ran off, leaving myself and the woman in a state of shock," she said.

A man wrote to say he was being chased by some youths when the hero appeared and "shocked the gang so much they ran off."

Another woman wrote to say the crusader had tapped her on her shoulder to return her purse.

"If only there were more people around with this kind-hearted spirit," she said.

An experiment is under way in Paris that aims to turn the city into one huge Wi-Fi hot spot, making it what could be the first large wireless city in the world.

A dozen Wi-Fi antennas have been set up outside subway stations along a major north-south bus route, providing Internet access to anyone near them who has a laptop computer or personal desk assistant equipped to receive the signals.

The access is free until June 30 but will require paid subscriptions afterward.

If all goes as planned, the private partners building the system expect to make a decision before the end of the year to install at least two antennas, and possibly three, outside each of Paris's 372 Metro stations and to link them through an existing fiber optics network in the subway tunnels.

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.

One simple equation can generate a vast diversity of natural shapes, a Belgian biologist has discovered. The Superformula, as its creator Johan Gielis has christened it, produces everything from simple triangles and pentagons, to stars, spirals and petals. ... The Superformula is a modified version of the equation for a circle1. Changing one term in the formula varies the proportions of the shape - moving from a round circle to a long and skinny ellipse. Changing another varies the axes of symmetry - shifting from a circle to triangle, square, pentagon and so on. Varying both proportion and symmetry together produces shapes with any number of sides, regular and irregular. It can also produce three-dimensional structures, and non-biological shapes such as snowflakes and crystals. "It's a new way of describing nature," says Gielis.

A Swedish firm has invented a new type of material that is half chalk, half plastic. The mixture makes lightweight packaging with an extra twist: When burned, it neutralizes the acid fumes generated by waste incinerators.

"It’s beautiful", said Per Gustafsson, managing director of Ecolean. The firm’s chalk packaging, developed from scratch in 1996, weighs on average half as much as the paper/plastic mix used in milk and juice cartons. Better still, the chalk -- a natural mineral -- can neutralize acidic soil or the fumes from incinerators when burned as waste.