I meant to comment earlier on this Fast Company article featuring Duncan Watts(author of “Six Degrees”) disputing the role that Influentials play in driving innovation:

He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Valdis Krebs goes on to point out that it is not necessarily the most highly connected individuals who are the most influential. Rather, in order for influence to spread, a large number of people within a network cluster need to adopt an idea, rather than one powerful one.
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Last week I discussed how mobile phones were being used by people in developing economies. Here is a link to a discussion of another study done on the same topic, in this case in Kerala, India:

… the power the middleman holds over the fishermen due to the monopoly on price information has lessened somewhat. The free flow of information ensures the fishermen get the opportunity to drive a harder bargain than before.

Which sort of circles back to whether or not fishermen or other commodity producers have access to the same information via radio or similar communications technology.
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Looking at this graphic from a recent BBC poll asking whether or not people think economic globalization is moving too fast or not fast enough, I noticed that traditionally wealthy nations like Canada, USA in many cases seem to think that it is moving too fast, while newly industrializing economies such as Turkey, Mexico and the Philippines feel that globalization is not moving fast enough.

There may or may no be a solid correlation, but that is what jumped out at me on casual inspection(and it is actually addressed in the report, as well). Can we infer then that these countries have bought into globalization because they feel that they have more to gain from economic interconnectedness? That would be a pretty stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom that these countries oppose globalization as being exploitative and against their interests.

Really great post on how Google gets its imagery for Google Earth. I was surprised to find out that some of it is taken by airplanes and balloons with cameras.

More cell phones, better grain prices. This is a fairly important aspect of how mobile technology enables producers in developing countries to get a better deal for their products. And it makes perfect sense. I have also heard about this in relation to fish, and other commodities. In some, the fishermen in that case can check if the price is high enough to warrant them going out that day and potentially avoid lost productivity.

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Data security is a hot topic in privacy circles. We have already accepted that corporations and other big institutions collect data about us. But do they keep it safe? Not always. Brad Edelman, a privacy researcher at the Harvard Business School shows a glaring vulnerability in Sears’ data protection scheme:

Sears offers no security whatsoever to prevent a ManageMyHome user from retrieving another person’s purchase history by entering that person’s name, phone number, and address.

Which is not OK. They have since fixed it, but the incident does highlight issues regarding the ways that companies do protect the large amounts of data that they collect from you. Granted, Sears has been scrimping on IT, but what is to say that this is not the case elsewhere? Last June, Privacy International rated Google as bottom-ranked in terms of data protection and privacy, which myself and others found surprising. And some found outrageous.

So is this really a big deal?
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Last week I remarked on fingerprint identification of fliers. Today, I found something related in the announcement of a biometric e-Passport in Brunei:

Compared to the existing passport, the e-passport has an embedded 72-kilobyte chip and several security features. This complies with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) which makes it more difficult to duplicate. The chip itself will contain the owner’s facial and fingerprint images.

The assumption being that the biometric data will provide an accurate unique identifier for each individual, and naturally one of the issues to arise from such a system is the actual data security of the stored fingerprint and facial imagery. Add to that assurances that the staff on the ground are capably trained to interpret this data.

One of the main issues seems to be the desire to ensure that passports are indeed genuine. I wonder how biometric data will serve that goal better than any other random machine-generated identifier.

Not that rethinking free trade is anything new - economists and social scientists have always found a variety of different angles from which to examine the issues linked to free trade.

What will be different now is that we will be hearing more about this rethinking in the news, Businessweek’s article “Economists Rethink Free Trade” marking a sort of turning point in current thought:

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We’re not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can’t explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. “Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade,” says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago.”

While I do understand how free trade does provide benefits in the aggregate by leveraging the power of comparative advantage, the economic models we use do not necessarily capture the nuance of the real world.
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Google just released a “social graph” API(I call them social networks, or sociograms, but OK) which returns XFN and FOAF data as a JSON object(sorry for all the acronyms) so that you can produce social graphs of various relationships on the web. I have yet to try it, but will probably poke around with it this weekend.

I would be curious to learn how much XFN data exists on the Web by default. I know that Wordpress uses it by default when you create links to other sites, but I am not sure how well supported it is otherwise. Same deal for FOAF - I have not really heard much news from that end for quite a while.
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While we are on the topic of travel security, I would like to present to you TSA’s newly released blog: Evolution of Security. It’s mission is:

to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process.

Judging from the comments, many of them rather vitriolic, it seems that a number of people have taken them up on the offer of dialogue.

In turn, TSA has vowed to respond to each concern in kind. So get your digs in now - it might pay off later.