Obama’s Wheels

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Eat your hearts out, petrolheads! Inside story here.

According to Gizmodo, Obama’s Cadillac has several high tech features, including

• It can withstand rocket impacts and it’s perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks.

• Petrol tank: Can withstand a direct hit thanks to a special foam and armor-plating.

• Bodywork: made of dual hardness steel, aluminum, titanium, and ceramics to “break up posible projectiles”.

• Tyres: Kevlar-reinforced with steel rims underneath so it can run away no matter what.

• Accessories include: Night vision cameras, pump-action shotguns, tear gas cannons.

• Comes with bottles of blood compatible with the President’s blood.

Helpful cutaway diagram here.

Eight miles per gallon, since you ask. No data on emissions from 6.5 litre diesel engine. Top speed 60mph. Zero to 60 in, er, 15 seconds. This is one the Top Gear headbangers won’t be reviewing.

The ‘first Facebook arrest’?

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From The Register.

A failed safe-cracker has been cuffed after New Zealand police posted CCTV images of an attempted burglary on Facebook.

CCTV cameras captured the hour-plus attempts of a man who attempted to prise open a safe at the Frankton Arms Tavern in the early hours of Monday morning. The man broke in through the ceiling of the bar before dismally failing to smash open the safe using only an angle grinder and a crowbar. It was hot work and the suspect foolishly took off the balaclava he was wearing, before he spotted the camera.

He fled soon afterwards, leaving an estimated NZ$20,000 ($11,040) of weekend takings still safely locked in the safe. Local police posted images of the blagger on a crime-fighting page on Facebook, prompting a witness to come forward to name a suspect.

Images of the break-in were also published through news websites and in newspapers but it was Facebook that did the business. Local police are describing the case as their ‘first Facebook arrest’.

The Aga Saga

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Terrific polemic by George Monbiot.

It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class. Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters with the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it’s their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Agas use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.

So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn’t one. I’ve lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Agas – which starts here – will divide rich greens down the middle.

Hmmm… This is tricky. Some of my best friends have Agas. Indeed, I had one myself once. And I don’t know anyone who has a patio heater. Oh dear…

Googling vs. boiling: the story continues

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Excellent round-up by Kevin Anderson in the Guardian.

The tech community has also been quick to point out Google's green efforts, and tech commentator Jeremy Wagstaff highlights a possible conflict of interest for Wissner-Gross. Articles mention that Wissner-Gross has set up CO2stats.com. Wagstaff says that neither the article in the Times (nor another article at BBC News) explain:

…the website—and Wissner-Gross–directly benefits from this kind of research. C02Stats offers clients plans, ranging from $5 a month to $100, to calculate their websites total energy consumption, make it more energy efficient, and then neutralizes their carbon footprint by buying renewable energy from wind and solar farms.

Now, it’s pretty typical for news organisations to cover stories like this, and it’s a clever bit of PR. However, not to explain the business model of Wissner-Gross’s website, help put the figures in context and provide motivation for the publication of the figures. Many have asked about the figures methology, and CO2stats.com provides an outline of its method:

“CO2Stats software continuously scans your website so that it can monitor your site’s energy usage each time someone visits your site. CO2Stats is very smart, and is able to capture a large amount of data about your site’s total energy consumption. For example, it can tell what make and model of computer your visitor is using, what its electrical consumption is, and even what types of fossil fuels are being burned in order to power that computer. Likewise, it is able to detect how much and what type of energy your server is using, and even how much and what type of energy is being used to power the networks that are connecting your visitors’ computers with your servers.

That raises a question. Is Google responsible for the ineffiency of some computers that people are using to conduct their search?

The Inner History of Devices

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Interesting MIT World lecture by Sherry Turkle.

Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices — the third in a trilogy — Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”

Digital Sharecropping Exhibition

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Here’s a conference that deserves to bomb.

User-generated content is a rapidly developing revolution in media. ‘Average Joe’ internet users now wield power over online content, and new business models are emerging in response to this shift. UGCX is the first conference and expo organized to bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in various fields to examine how these worlds collide and what the future holds. This new mediabistro.com event will unlock the knowledge businesses and non-profits need to respond to this shift.

UGCX is part trade show, and part educational conference program. Conference program sessions will be loaded with successful case studies and business models in four tracks: social content, photography, video & gaming, and music. Our trade show floor will feature all the relevant vendors you need to connect with to gain new resources and tools to stay ahead of the social media curve.

Because face-to-face interaction will never be beat as a means of relationship building, we are stocking our 2-day event full of networking opportunities, so you can be sure to leave with lasting connections to help you create, use, and profit from user-generated content.

Needless to say — as Dave Winer pointed out — there’s not a single ‘user’ visible anywhere in the scores of companies the organisers claim are planning to attend.

How about a competition to think of the best slogan for this nauseating event? ‘Milk The Suckers’ is my entry. But ‘One Born Every Minute’ is also a possibility.

49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats

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49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats. I particularly like these:

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% – percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 – number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years.