Wrapping Up, Heading Out (Temporarily!)

What a week! Between iPhone 3G in San Francisco and the Webby Awards here in New York there was a lot going on. (By the way, Stephen Colbert's five-word acceptance speech managed to be both funny and reflect the current narcissism often associated with the Web and social networking: "Me, me, me, me, me.")

I also attended a press conference this week put together by Space Adventures, which has been sending private citizens to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for several years now. Other than announcing that the company has booked its own mission to the ISS (as in not just piggybacking on the Russians), it also revealed that Google co-founder Sergei Brin has submitted a $5 million deposit to reserve a seat on an upcoming journey. (Sure, it costs $35 million in total, but I think Brin will somehow find a way to scrape together the remaining $30 million or so.)

This week I also interviewed Avi Rubin, a noted computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, about his project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to improve electronic voting. The group is called ACCURATE or A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections. Rubin and his colleagues' main goal is to ensure voting machines are verifiable, and you can listen to the interview as part of this week's SciEye radio feed.

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