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Christine Peterson, VP of the Foresight Institute, coined the term “open source” in the late 1990s. She now proposes that this concept of peer-based collaboration and sharing can be applied to another emerging technology – sensors.   See Also h+ Magazine Current Issue Search (and Destroy) Engines Not So Quiet on the Cyber Front Hacking The Economy “The intent of the project is to take advantage of advances in sensing to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties,” says Peterson in a recent press release. h+ Magazine spoke with Ms. Peterson about this open-source style project, known as the Open Source Sensing initiative.

After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it—an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32. Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.

The Web of Knowledge now comprises 700 million cited references from 23,000 journals published since 1804. It's used by 20 million researchers in nearly 100 countries. Anyone—scientist, dean, lab director—can sort the entries and tell someone's fortune. Nothing approaches it for breadth and longevity. Though the Journal Impact Factor has competitors, it remains the gold standard. "You may not like the database, but it has not been replaced," Garfield says.

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com. But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy.

I found this quote from Wayne Booth, said when he was president of the MLA: "When we fail to test our scholarship, by making its most important results accessible to non-specialists, we also lose our capacity to address, and thus recreate in each generation, the literate public who can understand its stake in what we do."

Certainly, there is a powerful new force developing here. Citizens who previously had little voice in public are using cheap Web tools to tell the world about the drama that has unfolded since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's presidential election. The government succeeded last week in exerting control over Internet use and text-messaging, but Twitter has proven nearly impossible to block. The most common search topic on Twitter for days has been "#iranelection" -- the "hashtag" for discussions about Iran -- and international media outlets are relying on information and images disseminated by ordinary citizens via Twitter feeds. Yet for all its promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet do not represent the end of politics as we know it -- and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering is going to force Iranian leaders to change course, as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, made clear during Friday prayers with his stern rebuke of the protesters. In Iran, as elsewhere, true revolution can only happen offline.

Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities

Web 2.0 tools have critically elevated the social networking activity and skills of individuals. Not only are young people highly active in social networks, but older individuals are also showing a huge increase in their use of these tools. The attraction of older age groups is, of course, social connection and community building among professional and casual peers and friends. The following graph of a Pew Internet study shows the various age groups and the increase of use

Classrooms Go High-Tech to Engage Students

Hands-free legislation leads people to believe that it’s safe (or at least safer) to drive while talking on a cell phone with the aid of a hands-free device, reports Governing. Well, it’s not. Governing points to a 2006 study that found no difference between drivers talking on hand-held phones and those talking on hands-free devices—as soon as people started talking, they became more likely to rear end another car than a legally drunk driver. More recently, researchers found that simply talking on a phone cuts the brain activity devoted to driving nearly 40 percent.

The SoMo experience begins with tools like GPS that can identify where we are and where we are going in real time. GPS is further enhanced through the marking of actual physical locations -- geotagging. Geotagging can include everything from "soundprints" to video markers, and the tagging of locally relevant reviews and news. GeoGraffiti, for example, allows mobile phone users to record a message tied to a specific place that is later retrievable by anyone who finds themselves near the same location. Geotaggers can leave a virtual "Kilgore was here" tag at any place, freezing in time and making publicly available their location-specific activities, interactions and thoughts. Mobile social networking is also coming on strong with applications like Foursquare and Britekite. Mobile phone users can discover each other, both friends and strangers, via profiles they make available at a particular location. Such applications are good for networking on the fly and immediately finding out if your friends are nearby at a given time.