University of Missouri professor Ming Leu is testing the use of the Nintendo Wii’s remotes – Wiimotes – to streamline the aerospace manufacturing process.

Leu is using the Wiimote to record an assembly process to improve employee training, shorten cycle time, reduce injuries and improve global communication between plants.

The benefits of the Wii are its cheap price, wireless communication and the fact that its signal covers a long range.

Leu also hopes to use the Wiimote’s camera to capture the movements of factory workers.

“The Wiimotes allow us to easily capture motion in the assembly process wirelessly,” says Leu. “We can track that motion, analyze the processes and make improvements based on the data generated through the motion-capture.”

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Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos.

Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks.

“Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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The recent attacks on Google have brought increased attention to cybersecurity. Now a new report (PDF) from political scientists at the University of Cincinnati says that defense is ultimately in our hands as citizens.

In what has undertones of the Cold War and the Patriot Act – but also indicates the new levels of engagement, both private and in terms of national security – that we might ultimately have as citizens in an age where privacy decreases and corporate, governmental and individual vulnerabilities increase.

The report’s authors, Richard Harknett and James Stever, say that while discussions of cybersecurity coordination frequently occur between governmental agencies and businesses, a crucial third element, the public, is not brought into the discussion.

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As we’ve written before, using a phone while driving has been deemed to be as dangerous – if not more – than driving drunk. (We’ve also recently learned that things are doubly bad, as a new study claims that driving reduces your ability to talk on the phone, too, but that’s outside the scope of this article.)

That idea that using a phone while driving is incredibly dangerous has become accepted as true and is the force behind states’ efforts to ban the practice. But those bans might not be effective in reducing traffic accidents at all.

A new study by the National Institute for Highway Safety claims that banning the use of phones while driving actually has no effect on accident rates.

“The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute, which undertook the study.

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Looking back I shouldn’t be surprised.

I was reading Kim-Mai Cutler’s VentureBeat article on how Twitter is aiding medical efforts in Haiti when I got to the point of the story where they named the guy who put the whole thing together: Josh Nesbit, founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic. With a just a Twitter message, Nesbit ended up creating a “makeshift version of 911″ in the earthquake-ravage nation.

Josh spoke at Atelier last year. What he had done up to that point was very impressive; what he has done since then exhausts superlatives.

Nesbit spearheaded relief efforts with a simple Twitter message. Here’s Cutler’s description of how the efforts started:

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January 28 is Data Privacy Day in North America and Europe. The day was created to bring attention to online privacy.

“Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information,” according to The Privacy Projects, a non-profit think tank dedicated to privacy and data protection.

Back when people first began using the Web, there was a lot of public concern about safety. Remember the early days of e-commerce, when putting a credit card number out there in cyberspace was something you hesitated to do? Going back even further, were the initial passwords you used (Prodigy or AOL logins, first email account) more complex than the new ones you use today?

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Research by the Naval Department of Research indicates that video games can help make better soldiers and, in general, make people smarter.

“We have discovered that video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players,” said Ray Perez, a program officer at the ONR’s warfighter performance department.

“Our concern is developing training technologies and training methods to improve performance on the battlefield,” said Perez, who holds a PhD in educational psychology.

Perez says that gamers have “fluid intelligence,” an ability to adapt, meet and solve new problems without prior knowledge or experience and develop new tactics and counter-tactics. This type of intelligence is vital for soldiers who need to react to new situations on the ground and develop their tactics accordingly.

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Fifty-seven percent of workers polled by IDC use social media at least once weekly for business purposes.

Generally, the tools are being used to acquire knowledge and ask questions of the community.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed use consumer social tools instead of corporate-sponsored social tools because of their ease of use, familiarity due to personal use and low cost.

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Over 4.6 million students took online courses in fall 2008, a 17 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report from the Sloan Consortium with research undertaken by Babson.

This increase is more than 10 times the growth of the entire higher education population, which increased only 1.2 percent during that period.

“Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies,” said Frank Mayadas, special advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funded the study.

“We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance,” Mayadas said.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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