"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." --Woody Allen

"Everyone that is doing well, and the greatest pattern of Web 2.0, is creating value by sharing control" --Ross Mayfield, SocialText

The future of the web is being debated at Reboot 9.0, a leading European grassroots technology and design conference in Copenhagen.

The 500 web developers, entrepreneurs, and designers that have descended on a leafy suburb of the Danish capital have been contributing to a growing trend in technology conferences by effectively collaborating together to produce the conference itself.

Reboot was one of the first events of its type to try and adapt open source software themes such as collaboration and openness to the complex task of organising a conference.

Addressing the young laptop-toting audience Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the 29-year-old web developer who has been producing the event since it began in 1998, insisted in his opening that "it's not us that makes [Reboot] great, its you".

Now nine years on, a large number of public gatherings of new media developers tend to self organise events in this way, such as Bar Camp and Unconference.

It is what Russell Davies, the London advertising blogger behind June's Interesting07, calls an "enthusiast generated" event.

This year's conference theme is Human? with many speakers grappling with such deep philosophical queries as what it means to be human. One session was called Humanism 101.

Understanding human behaviour and how to adapt those behaviours to technology and the web rather than the reverse is rare for technology devotees...

What does it take to be the owner of your own learning path, so that you can reach your goals?
And if we can say something useful about that learning path, does that give us the means to pro-actively shape the social software tools that give us the affordances we need?
Empowering people to be in control of their own lives is we think the single most important thing to reach for.
With social software tools more people than ever are able to share their thoughts and work, and interact with others.
A lot of that development however is technology driven. It is a side-effect of existing changes.

But now we are at a stage that we can turn that around, and start thinking about social software tools in terms of the affordances empowered indviduals really need.

Learning is a continuous activity and primary source of empowerment. Being able to control your own learning path is therefore an important issue. What does it take to own your learning path? That is what we would like to explore in this conversation.

How to know what to learn?
How to know when to learn it?
How to know how to learn it?
How to know when you've learned it?
How to seek out the 'right' social and physical environment to help and allow you to learn?

Working these questions out in more detail will create, we think, a model that allows us to identify the skills and tools individuals need to own their own learning paths. That in turn allows us to look at the landscape of available tools, and start telling the tool smiths where to go next.

'Ambient Intimacy' is a term I coined recently to describe an ancient effect which has come to the fore with the use of technologies such as Flickr and Twitter. Evan Williams of Obvious (creators of Twitter) recently used this term at the International Conference of Weblogs & Social Media to explain the value that Twitter offers it's users.

My current definition: "Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight."

Let's review the history of Ambient Intimacy from non-digital forms, through some interesting research on the use of mobile phones by teenagers in Japan to a reflection of how current technologies support ambient intimacy and what this means for us as technology users and designers.

At its highest resolution of 25 centimeters per pixel, the HiRISE camera can see the detailed shape of the slightly scalloped edge of a hole on the flank of Mars' Arsia Mons (left), but no amount of image enhancement (right) can bring out any further details inside the hole. That means that the walls of the cave are overhanging -- the cave is larger below the ground than the entrance we can see at the surface -- and that it is very deep. Mars' dusty atmosphere produces enough scattered light that "skylight" would illuminate the floor of a shallow cavern well enough for HiRISE to detect it.

The hope for the HiRISE images was that we could see some details from inside the hole. But as you can see by the highly stretched version at right, there is absolutely nothing visible inside that hole. It's black black black black black. HiRISE is a very sensitive instrument, and Mars' dusty atmosphere scatters quite a bit of light around, so there is certainly light entering that cave hole and bouncing around the interior. But it seems that the cave is so big and so deep that almost none of the light that enters the cave comes out. It's deep, and it's big; the hole that we see really is just a skylight on a big subterranean room. How big? We'll never know for sure without visiting it, but I expect that Cushing and his coauthors and the HiRISE team will be crunching the numbers on the illumination conditions and the sensitivity of the camera to put a lower limit on how deep that cave must be for HiRISE to be able to see nothing at all inside it.

Think about that. All these orbiters at Mars, and most of them are just seeing the surface and atmosphere. To be sure, there are two instruments up there -- MARSIS on Mars Express and SHARAD on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter -- that are probing the shape of the subsurface with ground-penetrating radar. But neither of those instruments have the resolution necessary to tell us what the inside of this cave looks like. It might as well be in the greatest depths of space. Here there be dragons. What's down there? Are there stalactites and stalagmites and crystals, or is it just a vast open room or tunnel?

The proposed 68-mile tunnel would be the longest in the world. It would also be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk -- the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India -- through extreme northeastern Russia, in waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there routinely hit minus 94 F. (Map)

By comparison, the undersea tunnel that is now the world's longest -- the Chunnel, linking Britain and France -- is only 30 miles long.

That raises the prospect of some tantalizingly exotic routes -- train riders could catch the London-Moscow-Washington express, conference organizers suggested.

Lobbyists claimed the project is guaranteed to turn a profit after 30 years. As crews construct the road and rail link, they said, the workers would also build oil and gas pipelines and lay electricity and fiber-optic cables. Trains would whisk cargos at up to 60 mph 260 feet beneath the seabed.

Eventually, 3 percent of the world's cargo could move along the route, organizers hope

• Hardware (Mechanical) diagrams
• Schematics & Circuit diagrams
• Parts list
• Layout diagrams
• Core/Firmware
• Software/API
• Projects

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."

I’m reading a great book called “Influence: Science and Practice” by Robert B. Cialdini. It’s full of research and anecdotes about how to influence people. It’s a real eye-opener.

One of the most potent forms of persuasion has to do with people’s innate need to be consistent. Studies show that people will ignore logic and information to be consistent. (In other words, we are moist robots.) According to the research, humans are hardwired for consistency over reason. You already knew that: People don’t switch political parties or religions easily. What you didn’t know is how quickly and easily a manipulator can lock someone into a position.

For example, researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic. Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time. The people in these experiments weren’t exposed to new information before writing their contrived opinions. All they did was sit down and write an opinion they didn’t actually have, and months later it became their actual opinion. The experiment worked whether the volunteers were writing the pro or the con position on the random topic.

Most of the truly stupid things done in this world have to do with this consistency principle. For example, once you define yourself as a loyal citizen of Elbonia, you do whatever the King of Elbonia tells you to do, no matter how stupid that is. And your mind invents reasons as to why dying is a perfectly good life strategy.

Denmark is now regarded as the world leader in technological advancement, with its Nordic neighbours Sweden, Finland and Norway claiming second, fourth and 10th place respectively.

"Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services," said Irene Mia, senior economist at World Economic Forum.

The Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in history, landed at LAX (Los Angeles airport) on March 19 2007. This eight-story-tall (80 feet from bottom to the top of the tail), 1.2-million-pound jet- “Airbus 380”, more than 239 feet long, which can carry 555 passengers and has a 261-foot wingspan, was making its inaugural test flight from the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France. It carried only 22 crew members, but was full of added instrumentation for the test flight.
An identical A380 (this had about 550 passengers aboard and tested all boarding/flying procedures) landed in New York within minutes of the Los Angeles touchdown. A 380 has two decks.
End of 2007: Singapore Airlines becomes the first carrier to put the A 380 in the air with paying passengers, with about 480 ticket holders; Summer 2009: Lufthansa begin flying the plane with about 549 passengers.
The European made Airbus A 380 produces half the noise of a Boeing 747, mostly because of its state-of-the-art Rolls Royce engine. Its designed to have more than 850 seats in the future if necessary.