I was busy researching truth in advertising (see next blog post) and came across this ad, thanks to MediaBistro – if you’ve followed the unfolding case of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich you’ll appreciate it. Even better: MediaBistro’s comment at the end of the blog post.

The real question is: is this a case of a salesman couched in governor’s clothing?

Ad image source: Gawker

There were some excellent speakers at Lift08 in early February in Geneva. We wrote about some of them in GenevaLunch (search for "Lift08") but all of them can be viewed on the Lift site. And some of them were so good that the 100,000 views bar has been reached, reports Lift organizer Laurent Haug, who got the figures last week from TSR, which filmed speakers and runs the mini-site.

Meanwhile, Lift is turning it attention to Asia, where it is organizing the first-ever LiftAsia conference in Seoul, South Korea, 4-5 September.

Kevin Warwick doesn’t look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he has spent three months of his life as a cyborg, bringing to mind the weird fictional world Schwarzenegger has put on cinema screens. Warwick is, however, a very serious scientist who tested implants to his central nervous system, in his arm, as part of a project to help develop artificial arms that could be moved by its "owner" using brain cells.

Warwick talked at the Lift08 conference in Geneva about his cyborg experience, but he had newer, less headline-grabbing news, that work is progressing on developing electronic implants that can be used to predict, in advance, Parkinson’s tremors and epileptic seizures. The idea is to initially help prevent these, but Warwick’s work at the University of Reading in the UK is also leading to a better understanding of how brain cells can be trained (not his words), to use a simplistic explanation, in order to get them to shift paths. The goal is to eventually reroute them to stave off the tremors and seizures.

We’ve promised to help get the word out: Lift08 is now full, with 700 people, and there will be no way of getting in at the door if you don’t have a ticket!

Another odd bit of news that doesn’t fit into the regular reporting comes from Lift08, the three-day conference in Geneva that opens Wednesday 6 February in Geneva. Laurent Haug, the conference organizer, played with some statistics, writing in his blog at the end of last week. The relative paucity of women at technology conferences is what sent him to look at the stats. It turns out 24% of those registered are women. A ways to go, as he says, but I was surprised there will be that many of us. The conference is more about the society of the future than technology per se, and if more women understood that it’s not about guys’ toys, they would probably sign up.

The number of countries: 30. That’s pretty good and will make for a rich mix of ideas.

And then the odd one: 18% of the people coming say they are male journalists and 6% say they are female journalists.

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[Update: I just found time for the coffee mentioned below and a good read, Le Temps's interview with the public relations man who introduced French President Sarkozy and his new wife Carla, plus sidebars on what a few women think of the story. It's the first article on the French couple that I've bothered to really read.]

This is one of those days when it’s a shame we don’t have time to just sit with a nice cup of coffee and peruse the news all day, because there are a lot of curious things going on out there.

For a start, Reuters has picked up Forbes list of the 10 most dangerous places to visit. Reuters takes the precaution of saying it doesn’t necessarily agree with the list, which makes me wonder if they had a heated discussion about this in the editor’s office. "Dangerous" is a relative word, and there will be people who say all of these are dangerous, but they might not be the same people: snowboarding, drinking and driving, waving a gun in a shopping centre, patrolling the streets in Baghdad. "Dangerous places" takes that relative bit and adds to it cultural perceptions that mean your dangerous place might be my playground and I see it as pretty safe.

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Things happen in China. They rarely happen the same way they seem to in the rest of the world. Hong Kong is having a real estate boom, with soaring prices, thanks to the US interest rate cut: think about that one. Can you say this of Chicago or Los Angeles or Liverpool?

Photo: L Bates. Northern China, beer festival 2007. Chances are good they all have cell phones.

Asian shares: the news today is that their prices are suddenly streaking up whereas the rest of the world stock markets, a bit brighter on Friday, are nevertheless still feeling bruised from recent batterings. China has invested in takeover target Rio Tinto, and Asian investors are feeling more confident about market values. Snow: the worst in 50 years, so that not even the astonishing numbers of Chinese government troops can get the roads cleared.

China will be increasingly in the news this year, of course, with the Beijing Summer Olympics coming up, but this Asian news bonanza would happen anyway. China’s numbers are such that a small change will often become newsworthy because it happens on such a large scale.

So do I believe the latest ground-swell of change reported by the New York Times, that the Chinese are getting fed up with their government’s Internet intervention, commonly known as the Great Firewall? Maybe, but I also wonder how much of this is Western wishful political thinking, along the lines of: Chinese rebel at personal privacy curbs, government power weakens, human rights established, etc.

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