Eideard

Looking for a last-minute baby sitter? Want to let your neighbors know about a break-in? Wondering whether anyone else received an unexpectedly high water bill?

A number of people are logging on to private neighborhood websites to ask questions like these, get advice and share information through an electronic version of the backyard fence.

A company called Nextdoor, which offers a free online platform that enables people to create social networks for their own neighborhoods has launched.

Today, more than 800 neighborhoods in 43 states plus the District of Columbia have set up local websites where they can communicate one-on-one, as well as with the people nearby. There are five Nextdoor websites here in New Mexico, including three for Santa Fe neighborhoods: Los Milagros, Sol y Lomas and Talaya Hill.

Each website includes a neighborhood map, member postings, a directory of residents (including brief profiles), links to resources and reports of interest, and photographs of community events…

Access to each Nextdoor website is password-protected, and only verified residents can become members, log on and post messages. No one else has access to the content, so that people can safely share information on neighborhood topics…

Neighbors log on to the site, using their own user ID and password, to read postings, but they can also elect to receive posts instantly via email…

There are currently no advertisements on the websites, but the revenue model calls for eventually working with local businesses to provide special offers to website members — Groupon meets Facebook — according to Nextdoor spokeswoman Whitney Swindells.

It all sounds useful, practical and positive.

Hermit that I am, I probably would remain mostly as unresponsive to dialogue in the neighborhood as I am at the blogs I contribute to. But, I can think of the few times that my curiosity while out and about – spotting someone I thought might be a gangster preparing to burglarize or vandalize someone – would be useful to everyone in the neighborhood. After I called the Sheriff.

Global technology giant Atos, which plans to stop using email internally by 2014, says it is already seeing the benefits of the initiative.

Atos, a French firm with 80,000 employees around the world, first announced the plan — described by some critics as “stupid” and by others as “ingenious” — in February.

The company said an internal review found that on average, employees spend 15 to 20 hours a week on email, and only 15 per cent of the emails are actually useful. It also found that younger workers barely used email, relying more on social media, said Holger Kormann, general manager of Atos Canada, which has 250 employees.

The company is currently in the early stages of creating awareness of the initiative and introducing replacement tools such as instant messaging, video conferencing, Facebook, and collaboration software such as Live Meeting, Kormann told CBC’s The Current…

Already, he said, instant messaging has proven to be more effective for time-sensitive communications, and Kormann has reduced his own email load by 20 per cent.

Over time, the initiative will help balance people’s personal and professional time, he said, as people are no longer contacted while they are away from the office…

William Powers…said Atos isn’t the first company to consider phasing out email. “Other companies including Intel the chip-maker have been doing experiments of this kind for a decade or more,” he said. “In fact, the tech companies have always been leading the way in rethinking the very tools that they make.”

And after “a decade or more” they’ve added additional services and do a better job of filtering email.

Thanks, Cinaedh

Woman jumps into the arms of firefighters during London riots

Britain is considering disrupting online social networking such as Blackberry Messenger and Twitter during civil unrest, Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday, a move widely condemned as repressive when used by other countries…

Police and politicians have said online social networks, in particular Research in Motion’s popular Blackberry Messager (BBM), were used by rioters and looters to coordinate during four days of disorder across England this week.

“We are working with police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality,” Cameron told parliament during an emergency session prompted by the riots.

Many of the rioters favored Canadian firm RIM’s BBM over Twitter and other social media because its messages are encrypted and private…

Online social media was also widely used by members of the British public in recent days to help others avoid troublespots and to coordinate a clean up after the rioting had ended.

Open social media isn’t the problem. If the police and government were competent, messaging in non-encrypted networks would be another information source. Accurate or otherwise.

Problems with encrypted transmission are a horse of another color. Then, you also have to add Skype to the mix of considerations – since it is encrypted communications.

Researchers have set a new record for the rate of data transfer using a single laser: 26 terabits per second. At those speeds, the contents of nearly 1,000 high-definition DVDs could be sent down an optical fibre in a second.

The trick is to use what is known as a “fast Fourier transform” to unpick more than 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, each encoded with its own string of information…

While the earliest optical fibre technologies encoded a string of data as “wiggles” within a single colour of light sent down a fibre, newer approaches have used a number of tricks to increase data rates.

Among them is what is known as “orthogonal frequency division multiplexing”, which uses a number of lasers to encode different strings of data on different colours of light, all sent through the fibre together. At the receiving end, another set of laser oscillators can be used to pick up these light signals, reversing the process.

While the total data rate possible using such schemes is limited only by the number of lasers available, there are costs, says Wolfgang Freude…

Professor Freude and his colleagues have worked out how to create high data rates using just one laser with exceedingly short pulses. Within these pulses are a number of discrete colours of light in what is known as a “frequency comb”.

When these pulses are sent into an optical fibre, the different colours can mix together and create 325 different colours in total, each of which can be encoded with its own data stream…

At the receiving end, traditional methods to separate the different colours will not work. In the current experiment, the team sent their signals down 50km of optical fibre and then implemented what is known as an optical fast Fourier transform to unpick the data streams…

Professor Freude said that the current design outperforms earlier approaches simply by moving all the time delays further apart, and that it is a technology that could be integrated onto a silicon chip – making it a better candidate for scaling up to commercial use.

He concedes that the idea is a complex one, but is convinced that it will come into its own as the demand for ever-higher data rates drives innovation.

The next stage will be pilot operations to better establish costs and ease. The nicest part of the process as suggested by Professor Freude is that existing optical cables can handle the traffic. The question is getting new and affordable hardware functioning at either end of the path.

Thanks, Wok3

Istanbul is renown as the place where east meets west, the only city in the world to straddle Europe and Asia. But it may soon lose this unique status if the Turkish government goes ahead with a plan to divide it in two.

The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor, has announced what he described as a “wild project” to split the city into European and Asian sides to make it easier to govern. “We will build two new cities in Istanbul due to high population,” Erdogan said, announcing his party’s manifesto for June elections.. “One on the European side and one on the Anatolian side.”

Istanbul’s official population is soon expected to reach 17 million, with thousands more unregistered people living in the city.

Tahire Erman, an urban planning expert at Ankara’s Bilkent University, said this caused significant problems for authorities: “[Istanbul] is already overgrown, and there are already many problems in the provision of infrastructure and municipal services to the city.”

Should the plan go ahead, the two cities would be well connected by transport links promised by the ruling party, including a third bridge over the Bosphorus, the strait that divides the European and Anatolian sides of the city, and two tube tunnels for cars and rail transport under the water. Two bridges and frequent ferries already connect the two sides of the city…

Plans have been announced to build a new financial district in Atasehir, a booming district on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, as part of a government pledge to increase Turkey’s global stature by 2023, the centennial anniversary of the Turkish republic.

The politicians in power think it’s a wonderful idea. The politicians out of power think it’s a silly idea. The concept does make sense. If anyone had their brains switched on after World War Two, the same might have been done with London, Tokyo or Los Angeles.

“No – you can’t have a white one!”

U.S. paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division recently took part in a field exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they experimented with a tool not normally used by the armed forces – a smartphone. And no, they weren’t playing Farmville. Instead, they were using custom phones running custom apps, to coordinate the swarming of a mock village and the capture of a high-value target. Judging by how the exercise went, smartphones could soon be showing up on battlefields everywhere.

The phones were ruggedized Android-based prototypes developed specifically for the project. They were plugged into the soldiers’ tactical radios, combining the capabilities of both technologies. Running on the phones were two apps – Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, and Tactical Ground Reporting, or TIGR Mobile.

JBC-P displays a map of the battlefield, using GPS to indicate the locations of friendly forces, enemies, and landscape hazards in real time. TIGR allows soldiers to send photos back and forth, and swap historical information relevant to the operation…

Given that troops presumably wouldn’t want to be thwarted by coverage limitations, the phones communicated using the WIN-T secure terrestrial network provided by the soldiers’ HMS Manpack and Rifleman radios. The network allowed troops to share information with one another in the field, and with the battalion tactical operations center. WIN-T also links up to a secure satellite connection, to keep the higher-ups at headquarters in the loop.

Of course, the U.S. Army is confident that no one else in the world can match our tech know-how. Couldn’t possibly hack into battlefield cellphones and use the information against our troops.

We need a new generation of Navajo code-talkers.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

India’s former telecommunications minister has been arrested by detectives investigating suspected corruption in the government auction of 2G mobile phone licences.

Andimuthu Raja was forced to resign as India’s telecommunications minister in November following allegations that corruption in the allocation of phone licences had cost Indian taxpayers more than £22 billion in lost revenues.

Public anger erupted over the issue in the same month when secretly taped telephone conversations of one of India’s top public relations figures revealed she had campaigned for Mr Raja’s appointment as telecommunications minister while working as a lobbyist for one of the main beneficiaries of the 2G auction.

Protests on the issue and demands for a full inquiry into the affair by India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party brought the country’s parliament to a standstill in its last session.

Mr Raja was still being questioned by detectives from the Central Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday night while two of his former civil servants were also arrested…

He denied the charges and said he had followed the same system set in place by the previous BJP-led government. He also said his decision to sell licences cheaply had been a key factor in the rapid increase in the number of Indians using mobile telephones. India today has 730 million mobile phone subscribers — more than those who have access to a toilet.

I’ll leave the jokes about mobile-phones and toilets to folks running for office in India.

Though it’s tempting.

“Look what I just got from Intel!”

Pope Benedict gave a qualified blessing to social networking Monday, praising its potential but warning that online friendships are no substitute for real human contact.

Amazing insight, dude – for someone who defines women, gay folks, members of most other religions and atheists all as inferior beings.

The 83-year-old pontiff, who does not have his own Facebook account, set out his views in a message with a weighty title that would easily fit into a tweet: “Truth, proclamation and authenticity of life in the digital age.”

He said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered “a great opportunity,” but warned of the risks of depersonalization, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones…

The vast horizons of new media “urgently demand a serious reflection on the significance of communication in the digital age,” he said.

What part of communications matches the weight of “pronouncements” inside the corporate Catholic Church?

The pope did not mention any specific social networking site or application by name, but sprinkled his message with terms such as “sharing,” “friends,” and “profiles.”

Not a whole boatload of difference from the agitprop Madison Avenue crap ranging from my favorite laugher – renaming the War Department – to reactionary demagogues still trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare after decades and calling the process “reform”.

CalHealth, an Irvine, CA company, has developed a computer mouse with a slide-out sphygmomanometer. The MDMouse is completely powered via its USB connection, and communicates with software installed on the computer to save regular readings for later analysis.

Though initially it seems as a silly product idea [who would say that?], it may effectively increase testing compliance in people who spend a lot of time in front of the computer reading Medgadget. A company spokesman tells us that MDMouse should be coming to market sometime in the next few months…

The application software installed on the user’s PC then utilizes the digital data to create a display of the individual’s blood pressure readings and pulse rate. The software also provides additional functions including recording the data and graphically plotting data over a number of parameters such as three day averages. Communication of the data is also handled by the application software, including sending emails to medical personnel or archiving data.

They’ll find you dead before your monitor. Your cold, dead, fingers clutching your mouse.

Forensic investigator on the scene

The private life of an MI6 officer who was murdered at his home close to the UK’s foreign intelligence service headquarters is being investigated by Scotland Yard detectives. The body of Gareth Williams was stuffed in a holdall and dumped in his bath.

Williams is believed to have been killed two weeks ago. His body was badly decomposed when his two-bedroom, top floor flat in Pimlico, central London, was searched by police after colleagues raised the alarm. A postmortem examination found that he had not been stabbed, as had been reported earlier, but the cause of death has yet to be established. Further tests, including analysis of his blood for evidence of drugs and alcohol, will now take place.

When police entered his flat they found Williams’s body, a mobile phone and several sim cards laid out in a ritual manner.

The 31-year-old was on secondment to MI6 HQ from the government’s eavesdropping and communications security centre GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He is believed to have been advising MI6 on secret communication techniques. Many technical staff at Cheltenham spend time advising MI6 and MI5…

Officers from Scotland Yard’s homicide and serious crime command are leading the inquiry, which sources said pointed to the fact that Williams’s intelligence work was not believed to be linked to his death. “National security” seemed to be the least likely of any issues connected with the death, said a Whitehall official…

His former landlady, Jenny Elliott, 71, said he had lived in a flat in her house near Cheltenham for 10 years. He told her he worked at the Foreign Office.

She said he had been due to move back into her house in 10 days after spending a year in London. “He came to live with me in a flat on the side of my house when he started to work at the Foreign Office. He was with me for about 10½ years and then he moved out a year ago. He was due to come back to me on 3 September…

“This awful thing is happening and Gareth was a lovely man, very well-mannered and very likeable. He was very clever and had been to Cambridge and had a very important job at the Foreign Office. Although he didn’t belong to me, I was quite proud of him. It’s like losing one of my own children…

I could remark about American media not knowing the difference between MI5 and MI6; but, the average American doesn’t know the differences between our own FBI, the CIA and NSA.

So, I’ll just watch and read. No doubt, investigative minds will be turned to this mystery.