And there are many other Facebookers whose names are being bandied about for top administration posts: Jason Furman, a senior economic adviser during the campaign (his profile picture is a snapshot of his baby girl); Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s head speechwriter, who has almost 600 Facebook friends; and Reggie Love, the President-elect’s personal aide, who is friends with Harold and Kumar’s Kal Penn!

You may think that its post-9/11 policies are out of date, but the State Department’s venture into the digital world is nothing to scoff at. Its year-old “DipNote” blog has 2 million viewers, and top spokesman Sean McCormack has just gone YouTube in the diplomat’s bid to bring State into the 21st century. “It gives a face and voice to the department,” he tells Whispers. Going online wasn’t easy, of course. It took two years to update the press room and website, but now, McCormack’s ideas are in demand from other departments and even foreign governments looking to beef up their online presence. One discovery: The blog and his YouTube press conferences attract different audiences. The blog, done by midlevel experts on a bunch of issues, is big with older viewers. His YouTube meets, where people E-mail their questions for him to answer, lures a younger and quizzical crowd. -Via Washington Whispers

I think this innumeration phenomenon is quite widespread, even outside of the business journalism world. Our economic discourse has increasing become devoid of numbers, instead riddled with narratives (Joe the Plumber anyone?). What’s real is hard to find.

The Forbes guy I heard on the radio referred to an chain email going around that reflected innumeracy in our society. Here’s his blog post about it.

Just for fun, here’s my post translated via  google translator:

像一些其他谁已经公布，我一定救我酒精有关的资料，我组的介绍星期三。但是我非常有兴趣听听的读/图书组将出席。

就个人而言，我一直认为在我有限的阅读能力由我的知识，只有一种语言。我认为，在未来，我们也许能够更好的翻译准确的书面材料不熟悉的语言给我们。

Here’s a humorous article from 2000 about machine translation’s past and future.

Obama is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to organize and turn out these young voters, many of whom got con-nected to his campaign through social-networking sites such as Facebook.

Now he has to turn them out—make them do something in real space as opposed to digital space. Pollsters do not have accurate “turnout models” for this new cadre of voters. Obama has registered millions; how many will actually vote remains to be seen.

In the spirit of making this blog reflect my interests, I’m adding a new series: TechTalk…

Nanotechnology is of particular interest to me. I’m always telling my friends and family (and anyone else who will listen) about nanotechnology and the coming changes it may bring. Anticipating nanotechnology is crucial the basic building blocks of matter and life occur at the nanolevel. Chemistry, genetics, biological processes, and the current frontier of electronics all occur on the nanolevel. Understanding how these processes work and, more importantly, being able to reliably manipulate events at this level in order to get specific outcomes, opens up the possibility of significant new advances in a wide variety of fields, but of special interest to me: electronics and medicine.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for electronic paper. It’s much more than just an electronic book, however. I came across the Nokia Morph (check out a video here, http://www.nokia.com/A4879144) a while back and was totally amazed. I highly recommend checking out this concept phone under development by Nokia and the Cambridge Nanoscience Center. Likewise, the exhibit at MoMa that featured the Morph is a trove of fascinating future(s) research. The exhibit is now over, but the online exhibit still links to the works. Through this exhibit, I found the digital artist Jonathan Harris, who’s work is pretty amazing. Try www.wefeelfine.org for a great example.

But not just for the awesome gadgets that nanotech is inevitably going to produce, I’m anticipating the revolution that nanotech will bring medicine. If we can inject nanoscopic machines into our blood stream to root out disease and infection, we are on the brink of solving many, many health problems like HIV/AIDS and cancer. Obviously, there are large implications for such a paradigm shift such as overpopulation and abuse of technology for malevolent purposes, but overall, I’m looking forward to and hoping that nanotechnology fulfills its promise.