Here’s an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink):  In homelessness and with many other social problems, a small number of people account for a huge proportion of cases, representing a massive cost to the whole system. ‘Solving homelessness’ may involve giving those few people free apartments and keeping them out of expensive last resort services.

“Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

“… It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.”

The New Yorker: Fact.

Freeconference.com offers free teleconferences of up to 100 people, but callers must pay for the long distance charges to a US number.

RealWorld Systems currently uses two tollfree phone services: Kall8 for our fax number – $2/month plus 7c/minute for faxes delivered as pdf files to any email address – and tollfreelive for our ‘virtual office’ phone system. The Virtual Office service has an auto attendant with multiple ‘follow-me’ numbers that will call any phone number in the US and Canada, and that can be changed instantly on the web. For $30/month we get 500 tollfree minutes, and each additional minute is 7.8c (all dollars are U.S.). The per-minute cost includes both legs of the tollfree call; for example, a Toronto caller phones the number and is connected to a switch in California; then the call goes back to Toronto. Clearly this service makes more financial sense for organizations that make a lot of long distance calls.

Kall8 offers cheap teleconferencing for all of its phone numbers; and both Kall8 and tollfreelive have all kinds of other useful features. For example, in tollfreelive I set up temporary extensions to clients and team members for current projects. Long distance charges to other countries are cheaper than most calling cards, so I create extensions for colleagues in Europe and Qatar. I can even set passwords on the extensions to prevent others from making unauthorized long distance calls.

A fascinating interview by Robin Good with Lance Cottrell, President and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer:

There are a lot of reasons why people would want to be concerned about their privacy online. I mean, people are unaware of just how much information is being gathered about them on a continuing basis.

So that when you’re going out to websites, almost every website you’re going to is gathering personal information about you, logging your activities, which pages you look at. Advertising networks can track you across thousands of different websites at a time. But even things like resume websites will actually take your personal information and resell it.

Anonymous Surfing: What The Benefits And Issues Of Making Yourself Invisible Online? - Robin Good's Latest News.

The business version of the Anonymizer service allows internet users to pretend to be from other countries or locations, either to disguise their identities or to see what users in those locations see. (For example, Al Jazeera streams different content to readers in the Middle East.) This would be useful for agencies working in international development or human rights. The consumer version just protects your privacy and prevents data theft from wireless networks.

There is another type of internet privacy that the Anonymizer does not protect – privacy from people who have access to the same computer. This is a serious issue for those who are threatened with domestic violence.

A New England woman planned to escape her violent husband. She secretly found a new home for herself and her 2 daughters and she sent an email to a friend asking for help moving. She thought she had deleted the email, though it sat in her email program's "deleted mail folder". Her husband found the email, learned that she was planning to flee for safety, and he killed her. From Safety on the Internet: An educational module of the Harvard Law School

Here are some more tips for protecting privacy from threatening family members, or even co-workers who use the same computer:

American Bar Asociation Commission on Domestic Violence

 

Many people with disabilities would benefit from small, powerful mobile computers with long battery life. Blind users could be guided with GPS mapping software that gave spoken directions. Deaf users could communicate through voice recognition programs; speakers would talk into a microphone and their speech would be translated into written text. PDAs are not powerful enough to drive the necessary software (so far), but full computers use up batteries too quickly for mobile use.

Until now, only Xybernaut has consistently delivered wearable Windows computers. Their computers are optimized for rough outdoor use by tradespeople and children, so they are rugged but with limited processor speed.

The DualCor cPC  has just been announced, and looks promising. From the press release: “The DualCore cPC is the only all-in-one, wireless “handtop” (handheld-desktop) computer that combines the power of a desktop PC, the instant-on convenience of a PDA and the always-connected functionality of a cell phone. Measuring just 6.5” x 3.3” x 1.2”, the DualCor cPC offers unprecedented battery life for enterprise computing, Internet access, e-mail and talk time.” DualCor Technologies, Inc. :: Press Releases.

The Dualcor is coming out in spring 2006 for approximately $1500 US, and should be powerful enough to drive the latest voice recognition programs.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog on security:

Here are the side-by-side search results for "tiananmen" on google.com and google.cn.

Schneier on Security: Google.cn Censorship.

UPDATE on Feb 6: The above link on Schneier's site leads to two identical pages now. I suspect that Google is reading my location from my IP address and not streaming the google.cn results anymore. See this posting on anonymous internet surfing for more on how that works.

Steve Krause compares two music recommendation services – Pandora and Last.fm:

Both services allow you to specify a favorite artist, based on which you immediately receive an Internet audio stream of similar music. When I tell people that this is possible—that you can have a personalized streaming radio station—most are astonished. So let's start by saying that what these and similar services do is cool. How Pandora and Last.fm do it is an interesting compare-and-contrast.

Steve Krause : Blog: Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders.