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“Imagine you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you want to be able to diagnose malaria,” says Daniel Fletcher, holding up what looks like a cellphone sprouting a kaleidoscope. All you have to do is aim the phone at a patient’s wan-looking skin or a drop of blood squeezed onto a microscope slide, he explains. Then you point, click, and hit “send.” The digital image zips to an off-site lab, where a technician scans it for signs of disease and e-mails back an initial diagnosis—all in less than 10 minutes. “In developing countries, patients wouldn’t have to go to a clinic,” he says. “You could make a diagnosis right in the field.” Although many impoverished patients lack access to clinics, 80 percent of the world’s population lives near a cellphone tower.

With mobile devices like this, home health aides could start to provide diagnostic services, and they could also take pictures over time to show doctors whether a patient is getting better. We’ve got an opportunity to leapfrog some of the costs of health care.”—

The TELEPORT environment is designed to overcome disadvantages of desktop videoconferencing and to establish life-like conference sessions that bring people together as if face-to-face. The system consists of a real room with one wall entirely covered b a display surface. Onto that surface a virtual extension of the real room is projected. As the local participant moves, his location is tracked ­ thus allowing the synthetic scene to be rendered with the correct perspective.

If I was someone who gave lots of talks at ed-tech conferences about "Web 2.0" and such, I'd definitely add a piece about the success of FiveThirtyEight.com. Since over three and a half million people visited the site last month (beating out established blogs like Talking Points Memo, for example), there is a pretty good chance you've already seen it.

xamines the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks.

"Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter,"

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.