Don't worry, Apple is the sober driver tonight.

A few days ago, some scientists in Germany unveiled a car, called MadeInGermany (MIG). It's like any other car, except for the sensory camera on the roof. Oh, and the fact that it can drive itself.

At the call of a smart phone, these cars can use GPS to find their owners or potential taxi fares, drive to them, and navigate their own way to the person's home.

These cars apparently have the potential to reduce traffic in Berlin to one-fifth of what it is now, because the cars will be able to plan their journeys to pick up several users headed in the same direction.

Back in the day cars that could drive themselves were cool and mischevious like Brum, or murderous and terrifying like Christine but now it seems to be a reality, who knows what to think. Its great in a way, because the main cause of car crashes is human error, but also very worrying because it puts corporations like Apple and Google in direct control of a pretty significant part of daily life.

I wonder if, like the taxi drivers in Bali who take their fares to stores owned by their family, these cars will casually drive you home via Apple outlets, or stop at a store and refuse to drive until you buy it a personalised Apple license plate.

Ok, probably not.

But if these cars are hooked up to our smart phones, the technology to alert them to favourite eateries, stores and facebook friends as it drives you past is definitely there. New media and technology interacting in ways like this definitely has potential, and the ability to take control from some humans while driving (I'm looking at you, grandad) may turn out to be very good for road safety.

Also, the techno nerd within is kind of excited to one day be able to issue my car instructions like KIT on Knight Rider. Come on, how cool would that be?

Zombification by technology

Technology turns people in to zombies. All uni students love sleep, but how many of us actually get enough? what with our busy social lives, jobs and studies people struggle to get enough shuteye nowadays. Insomnia is an ever increasing problem amongst the youth of today, how many times have you lain in bed late at night, restless, struggling to sleep and then find youself on your laptop? It is important for us as youths to get as much sleep as possible because when we enter the workforce for real sleep will be at a premium anyways and our obsession with social networking sites is setting us up with bad habits! Since we are the what they call "digital natives" the issue of sleep deprivation is more important for us than generations before since our relationship with technology is more commited than any other relationships. So here are some helpful tips to get you to sleep instead of getting on facebook:

1. Exercise! exercise is good way to burn off all the unused energy stored in your body, you dont need to do much go for a walk or something at the very least the fresh air will actually be good for you. You never sleep as well as when you are tired.

2. Read (a book). This is also a good way to stimulate your mind and get that sucker to do some work. Nothing beats the aestheic of reading from a book, stories are constructed specifically to entertain and inform the reader. So forget Mary's latest status and read a book. Worst comes to worst the book will be so boring you'll fall asleep anyways. Its a win/win situation!

3. Turn off your laptop when youre done with it. Laptops can go days on end without actually being turned off. Im pretty sure for some of you the last time yours was actually off was when you forgot to charge it. Leaving you laptop on at all times encourges people to believe they have unfinished business with their laptops which is disturbing all on its own.

4. If your insomnia means you are getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night then you need to distance yourself from your personal techs. Keep your cellphone, iPod and laptop out of your room when you go to bed,this will be a little harder to achieve at first this might seem a little extreme but it is a useful habit to have.

As much as we'd like to believe technology and humans have not (yet) evolved to be the perfect cyborg being. If you can seperate yourself from technology during the evening, your social life will not suffer. Dont turn in to a zombie, distance yourself from technology it will be there when you wake up!

Ethical Issues around mobile privacy

From Lookout, a mobile privacy "watchblog" some alarming privacy statistics for mobile applications:

• 29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone

• Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%)

• 47% of free Android apps include third party code, while that number is 23% on iPhone * third party code enables custom ads to be served and/or analytic behaviour tracking.

A user's location, call history and personal contact list is highly sensitive data, as opposed to web cookies stored in your browser. It's only bound to increase drastically over time. Here are a few "topics" to consider:

1. What implications does this have for mobile phone users? How about for advertisers and mobile providers?
2. Does this affect your opinion of favorite iPhone or Android apps -- in particular free ones? Should mobile app developers take it upon themselves to help reverse this trend?
3. How can we as users of this technology stop this violation of privacy? Through government, our purchasing decisions, or both?

Religion of Apple + iPhone

Excellent piece about the "Religion of Apple" and the 'Jesus' mysticism associated w/the iPhone.

Note: You'll need to be logged in @the Uni (or the library proxy) to access this to save and/or print

Marketing prof Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State study the parallels between Apple's fanbase and the followers of religion, assembling a framework for Apple's mystical mythology. They believe the entire Apple brand is based on four key myths. Heidi Campbell, a scholar at Texas A&M aggregated their work for a recent article

"How the iPhone became divine"

Here are Campbell's four key "myths" about Apple:

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

Abstract: This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans and bloggers, news media and even corporate advertising.