• But first, bye bye absurd abortion laws!

• The Inauguration killed the Internets! No mere series of tubes can withstand the pressure of this seminal moment in history.

• “BarackBerry,” “ObamaBerry”—call it what you will, we still can’t get over the fact that he’s the first president ever to use e-mail while in office.

• An economist explains why all those hospital procedures cost what they do.

• The trees are dying! The trees are dying!

• OMG! We’re in the White House! Blogging, presidential style.

• No, Virginia, there’s no such thing as truly clean coal.

Sure, there’ll be some people who actually attend the event in person—around 2 million brave souls have packed into the Mall in frigid temperatures, with questionable bathroom status (for comparison, around 400,000 showed up for Bush’s first inauguration). But for the rest of the world that didn’t make it to D.C. for the party, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of real-time coverage and information all over the airwaves. For those who still watch TV, you can see Obama take the reins on any cable or broadcast news station, or watch live feeds online from CNN, MSNBC, and just about every other news source. Then there are the liveblogs and Twitters, ot to mention Facebook statuses which, according to CNN (which has partnered with Facebook to offer simultaneous Web viewing and status-updating), are being updated at around 2,000 updates per minute, and 3,000 comments per minute. Not to mention the conversation rampaging among the 4 million fans on Obama’s official Facebook page.

Text messaging the event is rampant as well, to the point where the CEO of EzTexting.com Shane Neman issued a press release saying he believes millions of text messages will be lost, on the level of New Year’s Eve.

So there you have it—500 different ways to find out what’s going on in D.C. And if you miss all of it, not to worry—the replays will show up on YouTube momentarily.

• “Scientific and legal integrity” to return to the EPA. And not a moment too soon.

• A ruckus brews over cookies at the White House—and we don’t mean the kind with sugar and sprinkles.

• Facebook graduates from a civil litigation tool to a crime-fighting tool.

• Recession? What recession? Pass the console.

• And not to spoil the pre-inaugural lovefest with bad news or anything, but that little salmonella outbreak has caused 2 more deaths, bringing the total to 5 dead and over 400 sickened.

Funded by the E.U. and developed in Spain, the Sea Horse will, according to Russia Today:

enable police forces in the partaking countries to distinguish any illegal activities, namely illegal immigration and drug trafficking, by a single high-speed communications and data network. A coordination centre has been set up in Gran Canaria’s capital Las Palmas where officials receive information about immigration flows and suspicious ships sent from the individual surveillance stations established in coastline cities such as Praia in Cape Verde and Dakar in Senegal.  Police will then be able to plot charts and prepare the interception of illegal vessels.

While this sort of satellite technology is far from unique, this is the first time it’s been applied to chasing down immigrants. And while the European press seems to think this is excellent news, it’s worth asking: Is all the funding that went into building and running this program (1.8 million euros and counting) really the best investment? Sure,  drug trafficking enforcement is one thing. But the costs of running such an operation may not outweigh the benefits. And that’s without considering the fact that many of these would-be immigrants are fleeing genocides, civil wars, and countless other atrocities.

Related:
RB: The Latest in Illegal Immigrants’ Woes: People-Sniffing Robots

Ruthlessly modernize: Examine the technology used within the federal system and determine what is outdated, redundant and inadequate, then keep what works and expel what doesn’t. Examine procurement polices and demand they are in line with best practices. The results of this endeavor alone will save the federal government massive amounts of money…

Create openness of information: This will serve two important functions, namely allowing people to see what the government is doing, thus fostering accountability born of transparency, and also providing access to data that will inevitably inspire and support innovation and collaboration within the private sector. In this realm, the old adage from the free software movement of “release early, release often” is quite helpful…

Create a single government-wide wiki: A wiki is a Web site that gives users the ability to edit and keep track of those edits historically. The most famous wiki, of course, is Wikipedia. But today, effective large enterprises are implementing wikis internally to allow their employees to rapidly share knowledge and disseminate information; they’ve realized that the time and dissemination efficiencies thereby achieved are substantial.

And, of course, there’s the most important technological task of all: managing the president’s Blackberry.

Related:
RB: The Internet Reveals Obama’s First “Broken Campaign Promise”
RB: Obama Blogs? President-Elect Launches Web Site, Embraces Internet
RB: Politicians v. Technology: Obama, McCain Battle the Internet

Considering that Jagdeo’s phony profile attracted around 170 supporters before it was pulled, and that the page contained no mocking comments, revealing personal information, or doctored photos (the tenets of celebrity impersonations on the Internet), Jagdeo might have even taken the impersonation as a compliment—imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all.

But not so.

Instead, the Guyanan leader issued a “terse statement pointing out that he is not, and never has been, a member of Facebook, or any other social networking site,” and then instructed the police to start an investigation. Meaning that some teenager with a laptop is currently looking for the quickest flight out of Georgetown.

The Internet and politics are now fully intertwined, likely permanently, and it’s borderline naive to think that pranks and unauthorized impersonations of political leaders won’t occur. Which leads us to the “Can’t Beat ‘Em So Join ‘Em” strategy embraced by Obama (and Shaquille O’Neal, and around 10,000 other bold-face names): If phonies are pretending to be you on Facebook (or Twitter, etc.), create a real profile that outs them as phonies.

Your other option? Setting up 24-hour watch on a giant medium that is created and read by billions worldwide—and wasting police time tracking down kids with Internet connections.

Related:
RB: Obama Would Win Easily…If the Election Were a Web Poll
RB: Obama Blogs? President-Elect Launches Web Site, Embraces Internet

Image: Flickr/libraryman

• Where have we seen this before? A President’s Guide to Science, in video form.

• A holy union of incentives and science: A car key that disables cell phones when the car is in use.

• Will the hordes of laid-off techies be driven to crime?

• All this carbon offsetting and greening is nice and all, but the elephant in the room is still coal.

• Any chemists want to weigh in on what type of drugs can be manufactured at home?

• When Madoff strikes, no sustainable food business is safe.

• And finally, the perfect Christmas medley: electronics meets art meets taut consumerist criticism.

We’re all for the continued intersection of law and technology, but this is getting a little nuts: A court in Australia has ruled that a lawyer can serve legally binding documents to a couple via Facebook.

Lawyer Mark McCormack tried several times through home visits and email to serve process on a man and a woman who had defaulted on their home loan. Eventually, he looked up their profiles on Facebook, and sent them the lien notice as an attachment via the social networking site.

Granted, by the time McCormack got the documents approved by the court, the couple’s profiles had been removed from public view. Still, the ruling, coming out of no less than the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court, effectively sets precedent for the practice of using Facebook as a binding legal tool. If that trend heads across the ocean, Lord help us all.

Related:
RB: Charged With a Crime? Better Check Your Facebook Pictures
RB: Obama Would Win Easily…If the Election Were a Web Poll
RB: How Down With Technology Are Each of the Candidates?

Most people peruse blogs at the office, meaning that if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you weren’t a victim of Bloody November, in which around 500,000 jobs were systematically purged from the U.S. workforce—many of them from the tech sector. But one industry that’s been hiring in droves, reports the Boston Globe, is defense contractors, particularly those focused on the latest in war technology.

The cluster of defense companies based in New England is expected to weather the downturn reasonably well, because of their tech focus:

[R]ather than building entire jets, ships, tanks, or ground installations, many of the region’s defense firms develop the electronics, combat, and communications systems they use…

Area contractors, for instance, work on electronic eavesdropping, signal processing for radar systems, and equipment used to integrate intelligence from different sources, technologies critical to helping the US military and allies battle terrorists in multiple countries.

Not that we’re suggesting qualified applicant shouldn’t jump at a well- (or any-) paying gig, but it’s worth asking: Is this really the place we want to be re-channeling our tech talent?

There’s also the question of stability: These firms must know their clock is ticking, and that once Obama takes office, there’s about a 99.99% chance the defense budget will be machete-slashed and the Bush waterfall of cash for military spending will be over. Which calls into question just how stable these—or any—jobs are in the long term.

Related:
RB: Are Scientists to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?
RB: Forget Al-Qaeda; Apparently It’s the Aliens We Need to Worry About

It’s always interesting when technology and religion/culture collide like Mac trucks. The BBC reports that Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community, is now live in Beta, and will officially launch in 2009.

The site, aimed at “Muslims in Western nations,” is based on the standard virtual world model popularized by The Sims and the eponymous Second Life. Each player gets an avatar that can be fitted with a number of inventory and wardrobe options including hijabs. Avatars can earn and spend currency, though the creators haven’t set up any of the money-making systems pervasive in Second Life. Each avatar multiple “meters” governing its “happiness, fitness, knowledge and spirituality that change when the character carries out tasks in the social world.”

Mohamed El-Fatatry, the founder of the parent site, Muxlim.com, stresses that the focus of the site is not religion itself—of the 26 different content categories on the site, only one is religion. Rather, the focus is on creating a space for Muslim culture in the virtual realm:

“We are not a religious site, we are a site that is focused on the lifestyle… This is for anyone who is remotely interested in the Muslim culture and the Muslim lifestyle.”

The English-only virtual world is equipped with a beach bar, arena, and shopping areas, and each user is given a private room to decorate. As for content, it’s no bacchanalian Second Life: Any content portraying violence, drugs, sexual references or profanity can be flagged by users and quickly removed.

Related:
RB: People Are Racist in the Virtual World, Too

It looks like the U.S. military’s fears about Twitter being a tool for terrorists may not be so far off base. The Washington Post reports that the attackers who wreaked havoc in Mumbai last week used Blackberries, GPS navigators, CDs full of high-res satellite images, and “multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track” to carry out their siege. They also spoke to each other using satellite phones and kept tabs on their fellow terrorists by watching live TV reports in the hotel rooms they occupied.

The use of technology was so sophisticated and extensive that one security expert in New Delhi told the Post,

“The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks had it not been for technology. They were not sailors, but they were able to use sophisticated GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from Karachi [in Pakistan] to Mumbai.”

Meanwhile, civilians were making full use of available resources as well. Throughout the attack, the blogosphere, and particularly sites like Flickr and Twitter, was packed with extensive realtime coverage and updates from onlookers, residents, and potential victims trapped in hotels. And of course, afterwards, those affected were able to use the Web to share stories and vent emotions about what had happened.

But while civilians were able to put their communications devices to good use and reach each other, the Indian Security Forces were technologically outmatched. When an elite special forces unit arrived at the two hotels where hostages were located, it was unequipped with night-vision goggles or thermal-imaging capability, and the soldiers lacked even floor layouts of the hotel.

One question is whether Google may get some flack in the wake of this display of “terrorism in the digital age.” Officials in numerous countries (including ours) have expressed concern over the detail Google Earth images reveal about military sites. While the site is open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, it can’t be denied that it presents a useful tool for those looking to plan an attack like this.

Related:
RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?
RB: Caught in a National Disaster? Twitter May Save Your Life.
RB: Want to Send Your Representative a Message? Use Twitter!

Ever since their inception and hasty popularity rise, Second Life and its virtual cohorts have been a fascinating fishbowl into human nature. With their near-limitless possibilities for meeting, dating, battling, selling to, and influencing strangers, these cyber-worlds are perfect for studying the ways we behave and interact—both the beautiful and the ugly. And there’s been plenty of the latter to go around, from rape to infidelity to theft—in other words, all the same cruelty, discourtesy, and immorality that goes on in real life, only in a smaller, more publicly track-able format.

As such, it should be no surprise that the prejudices that play out in regular society—such as, oh, say, racism—also manifest in virtual worlds. In a new paper published online in Social Influence, Northwestern University professor Wendi Gardner and grad student Paul Eastwick found that avatars with darker skin in the virtual world There.com (a close cousin to Second Life) were less likely to have a basic request granted by another avatar.

The researchers had 416 participants/avatars make 2 back-to-back requests of another avatar. The first was to teleport to 50 virtual locations and allow the requester to take a screenshot at each one (a royal pain in the cyber-rear). The second, more reasonable request was to travel to a single beach and let the asker take a screenshot.

For those requesting avatars that were white, 20 percent more people said yes to the second request. For African American-looking avatars, the increase was only 8 percent. What does this mean? As Sharon Begley of Newsweek put it:

[B]ack in the real world, decades of psychology studies have shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars, apparently, the answer is, not so much.

So much for the end of racism.

How does President-Elect Obama love technology? Let us count the ways. Among the features the incoming administration is adding to its much-anticipated technology ramp-up is a video version of the weekly Democratic address. From now on, the president-elect will record the address on video, then his staff will upload it to none other than YouTube, as well as Obama’s Web site (for the first video, go here).

And fear not, technophiles—there’s more. From the Washington Post:

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Of course, not all of this techno-political bonanza is 100 percent original: The current administration’s Web site “offers RSS feeds, podcasts and videos of press briefings,” while the “site’s Ask the White House page has featured regular online chats dating back to 2003.” Granted, it’s pretty safe to assume online video clips of Bush didn’t garner quite the same enthusiasm.

Related:
RB: Obama Blogs? President-Elect Launches Web Site, Embraces Internet
RB: Politicians v. Technology: Obama, McCain Battle the Internet
RB: Obama Changes His View (Or, at Least, His Web Site) On Technology

Remember when the military announced it was cutting off troops’ access to YouTube, MySpace, and other video-uploading sites because of bandwidth and “security” problems—i.e. they were worried about videos like this getting uploaded and watched around the world? Well, now it seems they’ve reconsidered that decision—sort of.

Now, the military is launching its own user-generated site, called “TroopTube” (insert joke here). While registration is required, it allows members of the armed forces, along with their families, to gain a password and start uploading content. The site can also be accessed by civilian Defense Department employees and “supporters,” whatever that means.

So given the restricted access to the site, will troops be free to upload anything they like?

Hardly. According to the AP, “a Pentagon employee screens each [upload] for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.” Which takes care of any questions about whether or not any of those cell phone videos from combat zones will ever make it onto the site.

On the technology end, TroopTube might even have something to teach its juggernaut predecessor:

[T]he [creator]’s real forte is making sure searches on the site turn up the best video results. Delve’s system turns a video’s sound into a text transcript. It pares unimportant words like “this” and “that,” then compares what’s left against a massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages.

The result: Even if speech recognition software trips on the one word someone is searching for, there’s a good chance [the site] can still deliver relevant results.

Though if it really wants to surpass YouTube, all TroopTube needs to do is make a profit.

Related:
RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?
RB: Whales Battle U.S. Military…and (Probably) Lose
RB: How Green Is My Army?

Image: iStockPhoto

After running the most technology-dominated presidential campaign in history, it’s only logical that Obama would keep the trend going into his new administration. And by all accounts, he has every intention of doing so: The Washington Post reports that the president-elect and his transition team are gearing up (pun fully intended) to “create the first truly ‘wired’ presidency.”

So far the major cyber-moves include consolidating the list of over 10 million supporter e-mail addresses gathered during the campaign, planning the transition of Obama’s 95-person “new media” campaign staff into an expanded White House operation, and biggest and flashiest of all, the launch of the president-to-be’s official Web site, change.gov. It’s self-billed as “your source for the latest news, events and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama administration,” and so far it contains a forum to share your election day stories, a newsfeed, and lo and behold, a blog! Take that, anti-blogites—if it’s good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for us.

So is this the era of the blogger-president? Can we expect Web cams in the Oval Office and Twitters from cabinet meetings?

Probably not, but the reality may not be so far off. At least according to Andrew Raseij, founder of TechPresident.com, who told CNN: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Barack Obama starts doing a weekly YouTube video and also fireside chats for the 21st century by allowing people to filter up questions to him that he might answer.”

Sounds great! Now all YouTube (and every other media outlet) needs to do is figure out how to monetize it all.

Related:
RB: Obama Would Win Easily…If the Election Were a Web Poll
RB: How Down With Technology Are Each of the Candidates?
RB: Obama Changes His View (Or, at Least, His Web Site) On Technology