We’ve got some really thought-provoking stories in the podcast this week. We start with an extended version (that’s why we love the podcast…no time constraints!) with Kathleen McLaughlin, a China-based reporter for the online outfit Global Post. Kathleen’s been working on a series of stories tracking where some of the goodies that make your high-tech gadgets are sourced. In this interview, she talks about a factory she found where employees are suffering health problems because a solvent called hexane, which is used in the making of those groovy touch screens we all know and love. Here are some relevant links for that story:

• Global Post: Kathleen McLaughlin’s series “Silicon Sweatshops”
• Photo Gallery: Silicon Sweatshops
• The World: Lead recycling in Senegal
• The World’s Technology Podcast

Also, we once again sample some of the BBC’s SuperPower series on the Internet. The BBC’s Chris Vallance explores all sides of the argument surrounding the Wikileaks website, and delves into the world of online activism, or “hacktivism” as some call it.

And we end with a series of four short opinion pieces on the future of the global Internet. You can find out more about all four of the contributors here.

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As you know by know, we’re co-produced by the BBC World Service. Every once in a while, Auntie Beeb (or the MotherShip, as I like to call her) goes all out with a special series of reports and interviews on one topic. This time around, luckily for me and you, it’s the Internet. The BBC is calling it SuperPower: Exploring the Extraordinary Power of the Internet. One of the more interesting segments from this week’s SuperPower offerings forms the highlight of WTP 281. At right are the Kims from South Korea, one of the most wired and connected countries on earth. Sometimes, as you’ll hear in the podcast, that reliance on the Internet can lead to problems such as child neglect, and cyber-bullying. The BBC somehow convinced them to try to live without the internet for one week. Listen in to the podcast to see how it goes. You can see some video here.

While the Kims were trying to live without the Internet, Moses Mamman Maisuari (l) and Nicholas Madaki, two farmers in the small Nigerian town of Gitana, were given mobile phones that, for the first time, got them online. Listen in to the podcast to find out how they got on. You can read more about their experiences here. My favorite moment is when Nicholas tells the BBC that yes, it’s great to be connected to the Internet…but that sometimes he can hardly get a signal, and that at other times he has to pay someone locally to charge his cell phone battery. That helps keep it all in perspective…

Also in this episode, we look at how online match-making is booming India, and we hear about the relaxation of some US Treasury Department rules that would make it possible for US tech companies to export online communications services to places such as Iran, Cuba and Sudan.

Remember, you can always follow us on Facebook or Twitter. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and RSS.

The music this week is brought to you by Dave Asma and Spunkshine.

And here is the PechaKucha link I promise you right at the end of the podcast.

If you’ve followed the Tech Podcast for a while now, you know that we tend to take more of a “sideways glance” at tech stories, instead of hitting them straight on. We just figure it might make tech news a bit more interesting, and human. This week’s episode is full of these little tilted glimpses. First up, I have to say that I really enjoy stepping back in time and getting a bit of tech history into the podcast. This week, we feature an interview with Stephan Paternot, who rose, fell and then lived through the bursting of the “dot com” bubble a decade ago with his website, theglobe.com, which is now regarded, in hindsight, as one of “the first social media sites.” You can see what’s left of the site here. You can see what Paternot’s up to now by listening in, and by clicking here.

Here are some more links of interest from this week’s show:

• Links for Alex Gallafent’s story on Online Cross-Cultural Training
• More on those body scanners
• Link to the Israeli Security Academy
• More on that voice recognition story

Remember, help us out by telling five of your friends (or enemies) about the Tech Podcast. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you like what you hear, be sure to share and tweet the ‘cast to your heart’s content.

You can take a survey about the tech podcast here. Thanks for your time!

Sure, there are lots of hard-hitting tech stories we could lead with in this week’s Technology Podcast. But when you have a listener-generated item on kid-sized humanoid robots playing soccer, I think it’s pretty clear how you’re going to kick-off (oooh, sorry) the show. Listener Tam Eastley at the Free University of Berlin told her friend Stefan Otte to email me about FUmanoids, a team at the university that is working on robotic soccer players. Currently ranked second in the world to the Darmstadt Dribblers, FUmanoids are looking ahead to RoboCup 2010 in Singapore. We get Stefan on Skype to chat about how these pint-sized players work in teams to try to score goals, etc. My favorite quote, “People mostly kind-of like to watch the robots fall down.” And based on the video below, there’s plenty of that. However, to give credit where credit is due, think about how far robotics have come in the last five years alone, let alone the last 25 years. I think what the robots are doing in the video is pretty amazing. The goal of RoboCup, by the way, is to field a robotic team that can beat human players by the year 2050.

Here are some other links from the show that may be of interest:

• Google bosses convicted in Italy
• Google faces European competition inquiry
• Latvian ‘Robin Hood’ hacker leaks bank details to TV
• British Library warns UK web heritage ‘could be lost.’

Remember, you can check out our travel podcast, which this week features a cool segment on Google Maps and Russian Railways joint project to create a virtual Trans-Siberian Railway. As I also mentioned, my colleague Rhitu Chatterjee has a podcast segment, and is running a World Science Forum, on the psychology of suicide bombers.

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This week, we tackle a thorny issue: the use of robots on the battlefield. Now, you already know that drones are flying over Afghanistan, and robots are disarming IEDs in Iraq. But what about sending robots into the field to do actual combat? What is they were armed? How could you program them to make life-and-death decisions? All interesting questions that we try to get a handle on in WTP 278. Because time is short, here are some relevant links you might be looking for:

• More on Robowarriors from the BBC
• Ronald Arkin’s homepage
• Newspaperclub in the UK
• Pecha Kucha for Haiti

Help us out by taking the survey about your use of The World Technology Podcast.

We’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t forget to sample our Talking Travel podcast with Lonely Planet

We’d like to know where else, in the universe of technology podcasts, you can find an episode that includes Swedish high-tech skiing treadmills, a soccer ball that stores enough energy during play to power an LED light (pictured), a reporter who “embeds” with some tekkies who want to keep information flowing into and out of Iran, and a WTP listener who is running…wait for it…a global project designed to crowdsource design ideas for rebuilding Haiti. I mean, seriously. We’ve got all of this in this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast. Before I give you the links for the episode, let me just take a minute and ask you to spread the word about the podcast. Tell your friends, or enemies. Tweet us, share us on Facebook, and/or blog about us. We need you to help the podcast grow, to help us reach new audiences. We know we’re an acquired taste — tell your friends to nibble a little bit. Who knows? They might even get hooked on us.

Anyway. Here are some relevant links from episode 277:

• Blog: Sweden’s skiers see high-tech training advantage
• Video: Swedish high-tech skiing treadmill
• Pictures: Using RTK GNSS to measure the cross-country course in Whistler
• sOccket homepage
• Jim Witkin’s NYT blog post on the sOccket
• More on Austin Heap
• Mark Dytham, Astrid Klein and Pecha Kucha for Haiti

OK, so here’s also a link to the new Talking Travel podcast with Lonely Planet that I mentioned at the top of the show.

We’re on Twitter and Facebook. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.

We’ve got another great mix of stories this week on the tech podcast. Let’s start…at the end. The final segment this week features an interview with Dr. Catroina Harrison at the University of Leeds in Britain. She and her colleagues have been carrying out some interesting research into Internet addiction and depression. The basic finding is this: “People who spend a lot of time browsing the net are more likely to show depressive symptoms. Researchers found striking evidence that some users have developed a compulsive internet habit, whereby they replace real-life social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. The results suggest that this type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health.” Interesting, yes. But just as interesting, Dr. Harrison told me, is trying to figure out how to measure “Internet addiction” in the first place. And then there’s the real chicken-and-egg question — is it that depressed people feel compelled to go online more often, or that people who are online tend to end up more depressed? Harrison is currently devising a study that would run over a number of years that might get at an answer to that question.

We also return to Haiti in this episode, with a peek inside the Crisis Camps that have been held in cities across the globe every weekend since the earthquake hit. I went up to Montreal to check out one such gathering. Here are some links:

• Crisis Commons Haiti
• Crisis Camp wiki
• Blog: Can Haiti Leapfrog?

We also have a great story that takes you to the intersection of design and technology. It’s about a footbridge across the Nile River in Ethiopia. Here are the pictures I promised you in the podcast, and here’s a link to Bridges to Prosperity. Below is the video:

Another great story about design and technology follows. This one is about pint glasses in Britain.

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Now, you know that I am not immune to a shiny new tech gadget. However, the sheer amount of…well, see, I was going to write coverage, but most of it hasn’t been coverage, it’s been pure speculation…regarding Apple’s iPad has brought out the mischievous skeptic in me. So, on the week of the big launch, WTP decided to do…absolutely nothing. You’ve got a million other places to read the opinions for and against, and you know where to find the tech specs. I haven’t held one, I haven’t taken it for a test drive, and so I withhold judgment until I do. There. Now, let’s move on.

Instead, we’re going to reach far back into the past to hear about a piece of technology that truly did revolutionize life. Here you see the first known photograph of a moving image produced by Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird’s “televisor,” the forerunner to the television. The highlight of this week’s podcast is a wonderful trip down technology’s memory lane, as we take stock of the impacts that television has had on us all. It includes an interview with Baird’s grandson!!

Here are some other links that may be of interest from WTP 275:

• Pictures from Komla Dumor’s reporting trip to Gitata in Nigeria
• Video: Nick Higham assesses Finland’s broadband roll-out
• More on mobile 3D TV

Also, I mentioned at the top of the podcast that I’m also hosting Talking Travel, a podcast that takes you to those fascinating places where travel and the news intersect. Along for the ride is Lonely Planet (you may have heard of their guide books?). In episode five, for example, we had a great talk about Haiti.

Don’t forget, my colleague Rhitu Chatterjee’s got a great World Science Forum discussion going right now. You can ask Charles Darwin’s great great grandson some questions about his famous relative. Click here to join the discussion.

The music this week was provided by Dave Asma, aka Spunkshine. Check out the funkalicious new album, Brotherhood of Good Explosions.

Remember, we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

You can subscribe to the tech podcast via RSS and iTunes.

Another busy week at the tech desk. We lead off the podcast with two items on Haiti. The first is on efforts to create good, interactive maps of the country. Here are relevant links:

• Haiti: Open Street Map
• Ushahidi’s Haiti page
• FrontlineSMS
• Gaia GPS iPhone app for Haiti

Then, we spoke with Professor Leysia Palen of the University of Colorado at Boulder about Project EPIC’s “Tweak the Tweet” campaign. Here’s a short video:

We then had a report from Cyrus Farivar on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Internet freedom speech. You can read the full text of the speech here, or watch the video from the speech here.

Following that, we dug a bit deeper into Google’s recent announcement that it might leave China. We feature two interviews, one with Rebecca McKinnon, and another with blogger Isaac Mao.

And we return to Haiti to finish the podcast. Amid all the coverage we’re doing about the efforts to get telecommunications up and running, it pays to remember the power of the good old-fashioned wireless: the radio. Our short segment is on SignalFM in Port-au-Prince.

As you might imagine, the show has been preoccupied this week with the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. I was asked to look into a few different tech angles. The results are a couple of segments that I’ve included in this week’s podcast. First, anchor Jeb Sharp and I talk about the central importance of getting telecommunications back up and running, both for aid groups and for locals. We talk about Telecoms without Borders, a group of emergency first responders who go in and establish satellite communications links to allow aid workers to access email, phone service, etc. The group also established call centers that enable locals to make a free phone call to anyone, anywhere in the world. You can read more about them in my post here. We also talk about the online mapping platform Ushahidi. You can check out the work going on surrounding the Haiti relief efforts here. The show also asked me to look into how US aid groups, notably the American Red Cross, are making donations via text message a central part of their fundraising campaigns for Haiti relief. Here are some relevant links:

• More on the Red Cross text campaign
• Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti text campaign
• Mobile Active’s list of text campaigns

We spend the other half of the show talking about Google’s announcement that, following cyber-attacks on Chinese human rights activists using Google, they will stop censoring their search engine in China, and may pull out of the country all together. Here are some relevant links:

• More coverage from the BBC
• Google’s official statement
• Have Your Say: Should Google pull out of China?

Also, for some different takes on what’s going on, you can try here, here, and here. Please post more links in the comments below!

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Happy New Year everyone. The Tech Podcast is back, with bagpipes. The track is Bagpipes From Baghdad, by none other than rapper Eminem. The centerpiece for WTP 272 is a lengthy interview with Tavneet Suri from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She and William Jack of Georgetown University have authored an interesting paper on M-PESA, a mobile money transfer platform that is catching on in parts of East Africa and beyond. Suri and Jack look specifically at M-PESA’s uptake in Kenya. Get the official scoop on M-PESA here. They’re not the only academics, by the way, who are interested in this topic. Also in this episode, we listen in to two reports that look at the intersection of technology and politics in Iran. Both of them are by Cyrus Farivar, who has been blogging about events in Iran for some time now. By the way, here is Shafaf, the tool that Cyrus mentions which employs a platform you’ve heard about here on the Tech Podcast before, Ushahidi.

We’ve also got an interesting little story about how some 30 million German credit and debit cards are suffering from a glitch in their embedded chips. Folks are calling it a Y2K10 bug! Read more about it here and here.

And we end with an item on one of the most popular video games going right now: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Seems that some Russians aren’t too happy about the way they’re portrayed in the game. Not that it stops them from playing it, of course…Here’s some background on the kerfluffle.

Remember, we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Props to The World’s Patrick Cox for the audio nod to the low tech wonder that is “grit.” I hope you Brits appreciate it.

PHOTO: Max Tomasinelli

• Wall Street Journal Drone Story
• Evgeny Morozov’s article in Prospect magazine
• United Naitons Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Report
• MIT’s SENSEable City Copenhagen Wheel Project

And…a video of the Copenhagen Wheel Project

This week’s music provided by Cut Chemist. The track is called Metrorail Thru Space.

This week’s podcast kicks off with an extended version of an interview from the radio show. Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, is just back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Noah got a close-up look at the drones that are currently flying over the region. On the radio, this interview only gets about four and half minutes, but here in the podcast, we can run a longer version that will hopefully satisfy a few more of your burning questions over who is controlling the drones, and how they’re being controlled.

From airspace, we go a bit higher. We hear about the roll-out of SpaceShipTwo, the craft that Virgin Galactic hopes will one day carry tourists (well heeled tourists, mind you) into space. You can see a BBC video tour of the spacecraft here. We follow that up with a great story about a new telescope that NASA is preparing to launch. It’s called, and you’ll love this, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. And we’ll end our journey in space, well, here on Earth. Japanese brewer Saporro has announced that next month, it will offer up “Space Barley” beer. Yep — the barley seeds that eventually grew and went into the beer once spent five months on the International Space Station. You can watch a BBC report on the launch of the intergalactic brew here. We decide to take a less scientific approach, speaking with Lisa Morrison, “The Beer Goddess.”

And we end with some audio that I just had to play for you. It’s Oscar Pistorius, the South African athlete known as the Blade Runner. Pistorius is a double amputee who runs on carbon-fiber blades, and he wants to compete in the Olympic Games in 2012. Sometime this weekend, the BBC program The Interview will feature a much lengthier interview with Pistorius. I’m really looking forward to listening to that. Oscar Pistorius’s website is here. Check out this video:

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See this man? He may be responsible for some of the thousands of spam emails that have hit your inbox over the years. His name is Shane Atkinson, and he lives in New Zealand. He and his brother Lance, along with some help from Texan Jody Smith and some distributors in India, were supposedly the masterminds behind a bunch of websites touting, ahem, “herbal enhancements.” Officials say that at their peak, this crew may have accounted for as much as one-third of all the world’s junk email. Two years ago, the BBC’s Simon Cox tracked down Shane. We talked to him at length about that in WTP 177.

Little did Simon know that he was about to become part of the story. In this week’s podcast, we’ll check in with Simon again, and hear about how Shane, Lance and Jody are faring these days. Read more on that here.

It’s all part of our special podcast on spam and cybercrime. We also have our yearly cybercrime round-up with Graham Cluley of the British anti-virus firm Sophos, and we’ll check in with Susan Brenner, a law professor who says the only way to secure ourselves online is to take a whole new approach to protection. Look out: it will require you to take personal responsibility for your online security!

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If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know I have a soft spot for the late Douglas Adams’ monumentally satisfying Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I love it in pretty much all of its forms (OK, I’m partial to the radio version…for slightly obvious reasons), and I love all of the characters (OK…I’m partial to Marvin the Paranoid Android, again for slightly obvious reasons). Like many fans, I have been waiting anxiously to see if another author would be given the chance to write Book Six of the Now Completely Unaptly Named Trilogy. Well, folks, it has been done. Irish author Eoin Colfer (who you might know from the Artemis Fowl series) got the nod a while back, and the new book is out. It’s called And Another Thing…, and on this week’s podcast Colfer talks about Adams, technology, and the popular cult that is H2G2.

We’ve also got the amazing tale of William Kamkwamba, who at the age of 14 built a windmill…by himself…from scratch. WTP first heard of Kamkwamba three years ago via Afrigadget. Now, he’s the co-author of a new book called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. He’s a great interview, as you can tell from this video of his appearance on The Daily Show.

Rounding out WTP this week, we have an interview with Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN, the California non-profit that ensures that when you type our web address into your browser, you end up here, and not at some Russian porn site. Beckstrom was in Egypt to represent ICANN at the Internet Governance Forum, a UN-sponsored annual shindig designed to provide a space for “multi-stakeholder discussion” about various aspects of global online life.

Last, but certainly not least, is a report from the Czech Republic on the company that makes plastic explosive Semtex. The company’s name is…and we’re not making this up…Explosia.

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