Droid Sans

Here's a story about the design of the default font for Google's Android.

C-SPAN's hub for the debates

I received an email yesterday letting me know about how C-SPAN will cover the debates Web 2.0 style:

I remember reading a post of yours a few weeks ago about the Web 2.0-friendly hub C-SPAN had launched for the two party conventions. I don't know if you've heard about it yet, but C-SPAN just announced the other day that they're going to launch a similar hub for the presidential debates; they're going to be following Twitter tags and monitoring blog posts that cover the debates. Here's the clip where they announced the new launch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwM3aikjdi8

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

I do. Unlike the conventions, the debates I will probably watch live. But I'll also want to see what people are saying and tweeting about them, and I do like C-SPAN's approach of bringing these all together.

Network advanced copies arrived today

My advance copies of my new book Network arrived today (well, probably yesterday, but I didn't check my box yesterday). I'm happy to say that they look beautiful and that I am really excited to get this book out there.

Amazon is still showing the book as "pre-order," but I expect that will change soon.

Even in the US, we send more text messages than we make phone calls

That's what this story on texting points out. Among other things, it indicates that literacy is taking new shapes. As I've been saying over the last couple of years, these new shapes have been understudied and need to become more of a focus. And I mean by actual empirical researchers, not just people who grumble about MySpace supplanting great literature.

The Neanderthals died because they never quite figured out how to divide labor across large social groups?

That's one possible reason, according to this National Geographic article.

Cheap mobile phones for practical deployment of lifesaving technologies

Popular Science has a short article on how Dean Kamen (of Segway fame) is partnering with Nokia on an innovation challenge. Kamen's stake is to improve bottom-up organization in developing companies so that they can more easily deploy lifesaving technologies: water purifiers and generators. From the article:

Each purifier and generator provides enough power and water for a village; but, with one million villages in India alone, deployment is a challenge. In the past, Kamen has worked with multinational companies to launch his inventions, but the top-down approach of a big company doesn't mesh well with the million-village scale of this project.

The developing world has a high number of cell phones per capita -- the counterpoint to having very little in the way of landlines -- and the idea is that software running on Nokia's platform could be used to network and control a village's small-scale power and water supply.