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Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
Follow Jon Gordon's daily technology blog.
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MAPLight.org mashes together two sets of public data: campaign contributions and votes on specific legislation. The idea is to demonstrate the direct connection between the money elected officials receive and how they vote.
Concerned that modern game play will be lost to history, the Library of Congress is funding a project that seeks to preserve virtual worlds and video games.
Guest: Andrew Phelps, director of game design and development at Rochester Institute of Technology
More people appear to be using browser add-ons that block all or most ads that appear on Web sites. They're installing programs like AdBlock Plus for the Firefox browser, or Ad Muncher for Internet Explorer.
Technology writer and blogger Nicholas Carr has been thinking about the ethical questions surrounding ad blocking.
Dr. Jay Parkinson, a 31-year-old general practitioner, is opening a solo practice today in which he plans to treat young, healthy, uninsured New Yorkers in person by house call and over e-mail, IM and video chat.
For a transcript of this interview, visit wavLength.
Both Google and IBM this week announced free products aimed squarely at dimishing Microsoft's dominant position in word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software.
Guest: Dwight Silverman
Miro is a free, open source program that lets users subscribe to 2,200 different video channels - from HBO Films to National Geographic . Unlike proprietary programs such as Windows Media player and Quicktime, Miro can handle just about every video format, and allows users to subscribe to video feeds so programs get downloaded in the background.
Miro has a political mission as well: to give individuals more control over the Internet video they watch.
By the middle of next year, all citizens of Burlington, Vermont will be able to connect to a new city-owned-and-operated fiber optic network that delivers Internet, television and telephone services.
Burlington provides a good example for other cities pondering how they can improve access to broadband, according to Christopher Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
The cell phone ring tone business is expanding, but consumer activists are renewing their criticism that the public is getting a raw deal.
Guest: Eliot Van Buskirk, Listening Post
The Internet emerged as a major channel in which to do business over the last 10 years or so. Will corporations be able to conquer alternate reality worlds like Second Life as well?
Business is exploring virtual worlds but has yet to develop sound strategies for making profits, according to a new report by the Conference Board.
A year ago, it seemed like most major U.S. cities were drawing up plans to build wireless Internet networks so more people could have get wherever they wanted. But the dream of blanketing American cities with Wi-fi now looks like it's in trouble.
High-profile projects in San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis have unraveled, while the same thing appears to be happening in Houston. Part of the problem is that Internet service provider Earthlink, which had been one of the chief evangelists in the movement to cover cities with Wi-fi, has decided it can no longer afford to foot the bill by itself as the company tries to bounce back from $46 million in losses during the first half of this year.
Esme Vos, founder of a Web site that tracks trends in the municipal wireless industry, says cities and companies are rethinking the models they're adopting.
It seems most Americans who've bothered to apply for rebates on tech products have a story to tell. The check was less than promised, or was late, or never arrived at all. But this story takes the cake.
The San Jose Mercury News reports a computer accessory company that offered rebates on products sold in a national retail chain recently tossed more than a thousand unopened rebate requests in the trash.
On Wikipedia, anyone can contribute to articles. Sometimes that means the online encyclopedia is unreliable. Now a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
Luca de Alfaro's software mines Wikipedia data to assign a reputation to people who edit articles. Suspect lines are higlighted in orange - the darker the shade, the more reason to be suspicious.
Mobile phone text messaging has spawned a lexicon of its own. Texting, along with instant messaging and emailing, has given us shorthand terms like "GR8" for "great," "LOL" for "laughing out loud," and "OMG" for "oh my god." These tools have also led to ever-shorter communiques.
How is this style of communication affecting the English language overall?
Skilled writers generally know how and when to use the less formal style of instant electronic communication, according to Florida State University's Kathleen Blake Yancey, incoming president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
