"Do me a favor. The next time there is a marvelous, change-the-world invention that will increase efficiency, extend our reach, and give us new effectiveness, keep the news to yourself."
—Sue O’Brien, editorial page editor, the Denver Post, writing about the dot-com crash.

"I do think there is a future for e-books. But there is no present for e-books."
—Gersh Kuntzman, author

FRIENDLY SKIES?

Chances are slim any of us will die in a plane crash—or, as they say in life-insurance circles, "experience full loss equivalency." If you are wondering just how slim those odds are, you can always visit AmIGoingDown.com (www.amigoingdown.com). The Web site crunches details such as the airline you intend to fly, your destination, your month of travel, and the aircraft you will be flying. It then provides "personalized mortality statistics."

Say you are flying United Airlines from Denver to Bangkok in October on a Boeing 777. The chances of dying—presumably in a crash and not from, say, food poisoning or boredom—are one in 4,113,752. Maybe a little too precise a figure, but you get the idea.

CALLING ALL TRUANTS

The 1,400 students attending Singapore’s Yishun Town Secondary School must be thinking twice about playing hookey after the principal installed a Short Message Services (SMS) system to alert parents when their kids don’t show up for class. First thing in the morning, teachers enter the names of absent students into a database, and parents who have signed up for the effort are automatically notified by SMS messages sent to their cellphones. Mom and Dad can message back an excuse for the kid’s absence or simply say they don’t know where the child is.

CELLPHONE CHRONICLES

Dutch police have come up with a novel way to deter cellphone thieves from reselling the devices. When someone reports a stolen handset, the police add the mobile phone’s international Mobile Equipment Identity number, which can’t be changed, to a mailing list. Using Short Message Services (SMS), a message is sent to that phone every three minutes, stating: "This handset was nicked; buying or selling it is a crime."

A 16-year-old girl in Brest, France, has asked authorities to press forgery charges against her father after he allegedly reneged on a promise to pay for her mobile phone. Stunned by the size of the first month’s bill, Dad supposedly signed his daughter’s name so he could cancel the contract.

Croatian elementary schools have banned mobile phones after pupils as young as eight years old were caught using SMS to cheat during math exams. One teacher in Zagreb says: "I caught two girls actually phoning their parents...to ask for the right formulas, and when I confiscated the mobile phones, the parents came straight to school and complained that I was stealing private property."

Cellphone users concentrate better, even when they aren’t using their phones, according to researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (www.polyu.edu.hk). In a test of their attention spans, teenagers who owned mobile phones scored higher than kids who didn’t. Researchers aren’t sure whether the phones themselves account for the gap. One theory is that mobile users may just be better multitaskers.

DESK JOBBED

A Treasury Department report found rampant abuse of the Internet and e-mail at the Internal Revenue Service (www.irs.gov), where employees trade stocks, visit chat rooms, track down sports scores, gamble, and download pornography on government time. The report calculated that the abuses add up to 238 employees a year doing nothing but going online for personal reasons.

Responding to the report, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) thundered: "Are taxpayers sitting on hold while IRS employees are surfing the Internet instead of answering the phone?"

Our question: How smart are government employees who are so candid about their lousy work habits?

CHATTERBOXES

In the future, saying that "I’ll have my secretary set something up with your secretary" may well be replaced by, "I’ll have my machine talk to your machine." So says Paul Saffo, who co-founded the Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org), a think tank and consulting firm, and who was recently named one of 100 "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum.

Saffo says our computers are generating so much data that we can no longer afford to slow them down by having humans reacting to all the information. So, rather than expecting to have the future shaped by radical improvements in how humans communicate, he expects the real breakthroughs to come from finding ways to have computers talk more and more with each other, with less and less help from people. Among other results, he expects machines to take over more of our repetitive, quotidian tasks—paying bills, telling us when our cars’ tires should be replaced, cooking food to the right degree of doneness.

He elaborates in an interview with Context Senior Writer Bob Diddlebock.

CONTEXT: How useful do you think today’s computers are?

PAUL SAFFO: They’re not doing very much, relatively speaking. We go from anticipation to anticipation, and not satisfaction to satisfaction.

The big shift will come when we make our machines and networks aware of the physical world around us. We’re poised on the edge of starting to build eyes, ears, and other sensory organs for those computers and networks, and we’re inviting them to observe the physical world for us.

The payoff will come when machines talk to other machines on people’s behalf. We’ll try to make those computers do everything.

CONTEXT: Where is the Internet going?

SAFFO: The Internet will be reshaped over the next two to three years.

We will see new classes of computing devices that we’ll use in places other than our laps or desks. Wireless will play an important role because it delivers the Internet to where we actually live, work, and play—not just to our desks. Wireless means that the Internet is everywhere.

Broadband [communication over high-speed lines via, for instance, a cable modem] will let the machines in our houses—and more and more mobile devices—be constantly connected to the Internet. The network will always be leaking data to us.

CONTEXT: Do these constant connections raise any privacy issues for you?

SAFFO: Americans may wring their hands about privacy, but they will happily sacrifice the most intimate details of their lives for just about any cheap bauble you offer them. Going to a supermarket and joining a frequent-buyer program? For a small discount, you’re trading away your privacy about what you buy.

That said, I don’t think that we really have lost a lot of privacy. The biggest issue is that privacy ceases to be a right and instead becomes a product.

The good news is we will still have privacy. The bad news is we will have to pay for it.

CONTEXT: What would cause consumers to take privacy more seriously?

SAFFO: There’s a possibility that we will have the privacy equivalent of Three Mile Island. Perhaps there will be something that affects the ability of someone’s children to get into the school of their choice, or deprives people of health insurance, or causes a significant financial problem. Then everybody might suddenly say, "Wait a second! We’ve got ourselves a real big problem."