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February 07, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Dots and Dashes Make Way for Dot Com

On Jan. 27, Western Union transmitted its last telegram. While most considered the 162-year-old dots-and-dashes technology quaint, it easily leads the list as the communication medium that had the most dramatic impact on society.

The Internet, the printing press and radio all changed culture in important ways; but they all grew out of previous communication forms. The electromagnetic telegraph was fundamentally different from anything that came before. Once telegraph wires came to town, the community was connected to the world. Messages from across the nation, and eventually around the world, could be sent and received almost instantly. The results of elections, military battles and the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk were known within hours, rather than weeks.

February 07, 2006 | Dean Froslie: iPods: Beyond Entertainment

The stethoscope is a timeless tool in the medical profession.

But according to a Time magazine article, today’s medical students are often less competent and comfortable with stethoscopes. Instead, they increasingly opt for expensive, high-tech tests to diagnose conditions that could be detected by careful listening through a stethoscope.

A Temple University doctor may have a solution. Time reports that Dr. Michael Barrett, in an American Journal of Medicine study, “concluded that medical students improved their stethoscope skills dramatically if they listened to certain digitally recorded soundtracks that mimic the distinctive vibrations produced by various valve problems and other cardiac conditions.”

Barrett created a recording of stethoscope sounds heard when a patient has an abnormal heart. Students downloaded the recording to an iPod and listened for two hours. The results were impressive: After listening to the iPod recording, students could correctly identify 80% of the sounds (up from 30% without the recording).

February 06, 2006 | Greg Ness: Super Growth Spurt

Blogs

There is a new report that has just been released. Technorati, the blog search engine, now keeps tab on over 27 million blogs. There are 60 times as many blogs as there were three years ago. At the present rate of growth, they will double every 5.5 months.

Most of these blogs are not written by professional writers or journalists. Only a few of these will gather a large audience. But, when there are 75,000 new blogs added each and every day (about one per second), they will have an effect on how and where people spend their time online. It is now estimated 25 percent of the Web content output daily is consumer-generated media (CGM) with blogs playing a major role. This is long past a fad and well into a major trend reshaping our information society.

iTunes

Apple’s online iTunes store growth has soared 241 percent in the last year. It had over 20 million unique visitors in December.

February 03, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Politicians Attempt to Spin Wikipedia Listings

The Internet should present a variety of opinions… unless those opinions make you look bad or your opponents look good.

That’s been the approach of some in Congress who have recently been caught editing Wikipedia listings with a heavy hand.

Last week, the Lowell (Mass.) Sun reported that Rep. Marty Meehan’s (D-Mass.) staff admitted altering his listing to remove unflattering information, including a broken term-limit promise and his accumulation of $4.8 million in campaign funding, a figure far beyond that of any other House member.

February 01, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Yahoo Takes Heat for Human Rights Violations

While many would argue that opening up business relationships in China has lead to greater freedoms, it’s also put businesses in a position to impact human rights issues.

As noted in an earlier blog, a few U.S. companies have been criticized for helping totalitarian governments censor the information and sites that users can access. Now, Yahoo has come under fire from Amnesty International for identifying a Chinese journalist who had disclosed a Communist Party directive instructing the media to downplay the June 4 anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre.

January 27, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: New Economy Less About Immediate Gratification Than We Thought

John Hagel’s Edge Perspectives blog provides some interesting insights into globalization and the impact of the Internet on the global economy.

Among the problems he identifies in several posts is the tendency of companies to focus on short-term savings from suppliers, thereby creating an ongoing adversarial relationship that doesn’t ultimately serve either party well. Hagel suggests that a better solution is to cultivate long-term supplier relationships that can lead to better responsiveness and greater flexibility. He identifies this as one of the major problems that has placed U.S.-based automakers behind the competition.

January 25, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Governmental Censorship Derails Internet Promise

The borderless Internet may have been the goal, but government interference into the free flow of information has put serious restrictions on the liberating effect that might have had on culture and society. The Open Net Initiative, sponsored by the University of Toronto, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, is focusing its research on what individual governments are doing to control information flow, and the impact this has had on politics, human rights, state sovereignty and law.

January 20, 2006 | Greg Ness: Some Powerful Numbers…

The information below is from a cogent PowerPoint presentation that Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley recently presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. It underscores the tremendous changes and rate of change that is happening with new media, technology and related fields of study. The complete presentation is here.

Some of the interesting facts in her presentation:

-  In 1995 North America made up 66 percent of Internet users. By 2005, that number had dropped to 23 percent.

- Asia/Pacific now makes up the largest share of the Internet market at 36 percent. China has more Internet users under the age of 30 than anywhere else.

- There were 7.6 billion global searches on Google last year…up 74 percent over the previous year.

- There are 40 million users who have a personalized My Yahoo! page.

- The market cap of Google+Yahoo!+eBay+Yahoo! Japan was $2 billion prior to their 2000 IPOs. As of 11/11/05 their combined market cap was $262 billion.

January 17, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Scientists "Backing Up" Grain Varieties

The facility would make the villain from a James Bond film envious — a concrete bunker with blast-proof doors carved out of a mountain on an island off the coast of Norway. Inside, the permafrost will provide a cool environment for storage of every known variety of crop seed.

The goal of the seed repository — construction is slated to begin next year — will be to ensure that a global disaster would not wipe out essential crop species. Currently, there are about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but many are located in politically or environmentally unstable areas.

January 16, 2006 | Greg Ness: Millions vs. Billions

The United States will soon pass a major milestone. Sometime later this year, the population of our country will reach 300 million people.

It took us 125 years as a country to get to 100 million people, reaching that number around 1914. It was in 1967, about 53 years later, that we passed 200 million. And now just 39 later, we will be hitting the 300 million mark. Experts predict it will only take about 30 more years to swell our population to 400 million. These facts seem impressive when you consider our country’s ever-shortening cycle to add the next 100 million people.

However, I couldn’t help compare our country’s population growth to some recent astonishing statistics I read about worldwide Internet growth. Based on figures from Internet World Stats, the Internet first surpassed 100 million users in 1998. By the year 2000, there were 300 million users, and by 2003, there were 600 million users. Recently, the Internet surpassed one billion users and it is adding a million new users worldwide about every four days. Most of those new users are not from the U.S., and most of those new users don’t speak English.

January 16, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Copyright Battles Heat Up Abroad

Copyright law is a dinosaur; or maybe, calling it a BetaMax would be more appropriate. Like the ill-fated video tape format,  intellectual property law had its place in history, but it simply doesn’t work with current technology anymore. Recent battles over implementation of copyright laws in France and Canada illustrate the need to rethink issues of content ownership.

January 13, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be

By the 1980s, we were supposed to travel by jet-pack while robot housekeepers cooked our meals. At least that’s the high-tech view of the future that science fiction writers presented in the 1950s. Today, the future isn’t such a distant vision: it’s happening in our lifetimes.

The Lemelson-MIT Program, which celebrates innovation and inventors, recently polled high school students on their view of the future. Virtually all of them predicted dramatic technological advancements during their lifetimes and most felt comfortable dealing with those rapid changes.