Bruce Schneier says have your cake and eat it too. As Armchair Anarchist pointed out in a recent post, paper is a mature voting technology. I countered in the comments that electronic voting machines have a lot going for them (although they’re not perfect). Schneier suggests in a column for Forbes that you get the best of both worlds by using machines to generate paper ballots.

The trend-watchers predict that mobile phones will become a major computing platform over the next decade or so, equalling or superceding the current capabilities of desk- and lap-tops. If that is the case, social networking will almost certainly be a driving force behind the change – and ‘loopt’ is just the sort of application to do it. ‘Loopt’ is a location-based mobile social mapping service, using geotagging capabilities to keep the user informed of the locations of people in their network relative to their own. You’ll never have to ‘just miss’ someone again – unless you really want to, of course.

Technology has ways of empowering those who would have been considered furthest from its reach a few decades ago. Case in point are tribes of Amazonian Indians who are defending their homelands from the encroachment of logging outfits and rogue miners, by using GPS devices and Google Earth to accurately map the extent of their reservations – which in turn helps them preserve their unique knowledge of the bio-diverse ecosystem that surrounds them.

Futurismic’s regular columnist Jamais Cascio recently gave a talk at the International Association for Public Participation conference in Montreal, Canada, and has now made the transcript and slides available to the general public on his blog. In it he discusses the rise of a new participatory global culture which is “technology-enabled, not technology-focused”, covering topics such as open source, sousveillance and the advantages of networks over hierarchies. Go and read why he believes that these phenomena could empower real progress in our civilisation.

It appears to be a foregone conclusion that we’ll be building more nuclear reactors over the next few decades. However, while they are considered to be ecologically sound they may run into problems of economics in the near future – uranium is a rare substance to start with, and it’s not getting any cheaper. A potential solution to this problem (and others) is the Molten Salt Reactor concept – as the name implies, it would use molten salt as a coolant for the reaction chamber, and could use the safer and more abundant element thorium as a fuel.