Have cell phone can blather

Second stage (and thus first change) is literacy. The approx 6-7 year old learns to read. And goes to school and discovers friends not selected by the parents or not out of the back yard of the home. New friends, new influences. Now things like brand competitiveness starts to emerge, I want Levis brand jeans, not the ones mother had suggested, etc.. But most importantly for readers of our blog, any digital media will not be powerfully (probably fully) able to be used. Yes, we have lots of videogames and basic computer programmes for even younger kids but after they learn to read, they can go Google and discover the digital world for themselves. If for some reason you don't have the PC and connection for them at home, soon they will find a best friend who has a PC and broadband in their room and suddenly spend a lot of time visiting that friend.

The above and a ton more cellphone aphorisms, can be found here. Tomi T. Ahonen is a "five-time bestselling author and consultant on digital convergence and mobile telecoms", who is based in Hong Kong. Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on high tech and convergence.

Thankfully not on life.

Stress, control and conspiracy theories

Or why the Da Vinci Code sold so well in an era of war on terror, perhaps?

The researchers say that their experiments, which also tested people’s tendency to detect conspiracies and see superstitious lessons in stories, help explain why conspiracy theories and superstitions flourish when people are feeling out of control. Previous researchers have reported, for instance, that first-year business-school students are more prone to imagine conspiracies than are second-year students, and that deep-sea fishermen have more elaborate rituals and superstitions than ones who fish in more predictable conditions near shore.

From the NYT, there's a great visual experiment as well. It is something to do with the images above.

Palinography

The revelation that Sarah Palin maintained two separate Yahoo Mail accounts - both of which have now been deleted - is raising new questions over how much official government business she was conducting with non-logged, private mail services. Palin has come under fire for withholding more than a thousand e-mails from recent public records requests. The New York Times reports that Palin's staff had actually looked into whether using the Yahoo Mail accounts "could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records."

New Twists and Turns in Palin E-Mail Hack, from PC World's blog.

...writing's on the wall

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

These are the stories we tell around the campfires, that sort of thing? Maybe there's not so much of it these days.

"Once you get to things like avoiding ladders and cats crossing the road, it's clear that culture and modern life have had an influence on many of these things," says Foster.

"My guess would be that in modern life, the general tendency to believe in things where we don't have scientific evidence is less beneficial than it used to be," he adds.

Hmm.

I wonder whether AOL.com is like “The CBS Evening News” — an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling.

Asks the NYT.

Privacy, what privacy?

Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person's movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of her steps taken, her calories burned, and even the quality of her sleep. Data is wirelessly uploaded to the Web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends.

Fitbit here


Story from Technology Review.

Esthesis 2

Books are such an echo chamber.

Jeff Jarvis and the new new.

When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.

Is 2008 a return to the heady days of 1994?