4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recently launched free phone service from Google through Gmail. Undercutting Skype and other VoIP services (not to mention landlines), Google is letting people call from their computer to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for free, and charging low international rates. What's in it for Google? I spoke to tech pundit and Computerworld contributor Mitch Wagner to learn more.

Check it out:

bareaudio82710.mp3

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Listen to my entire interview with Mitch Wagner:

wagner full.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Call Phones from Gmail at Google

Six Things Google's Free Phone Service Can't Do at NY Times

Gmail call feature a ringing success, a million times over at Christian Science Monitor

How to make calls using Gmail at CNET

Google reportedly adding voice calling to Gmail at Computerworld

Gmail Voice Is About Future Search, Not Free Calls at Gizmodo

Gmail's now in the phone biz. Trouble for carriers down the road? at Sprint Connection blog

Google continues the assault on the price of a phone call at Washington Post

Google adds free phone calls to Gmail, wow at Seattle Times

Google Voice phone booths Dr. Who might love at News.com

Google introduces Gmail-linked phone service at SF Chronicle

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think the future of the landline will be:

What's the future of the landline telephone?Market Research

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

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By Scilla Alecci

Steven Sande at TUAW reports [en] on the reasons that induced the Japan Sumo Association to distribute iPads to the “big-fingered sumo-wrestlers”. He says the aim is to make the internal communication process smoother after the scandals that hit the association [en] recently.

By the time you read this, these words will have been edited, proofed, turned into ones and zeroes, spellchecked again.  And quite possibly in the process have become quite readable.  Unlike many of my other missives, written in passion and the haste to get them out of my system, which I e’d into the world without a second thought.  Only a sigh of relief, to be rid of them.

But this time I am writing with pen to paper, and though it is rather a foreign process, it is allowing me to vent once again, and thus, retain my sanity, even while living full-time in my home.  

In New Orleans.

Did I mention that I am writing by the light of a solitary lamp powered by the gasoline-fueled electrical generator outside?  A device which also allows both my neighbor’s and my own refrigerator to keep working?

Yes.  

The generator is noisy, but it does allow me the comfort of knowing that my freezer and refrigerator full of food will not spoil immediately.  These days, we have to stock up with large quantities of foodstuffs when we make the long trek cross-town to the distant supermarket.  It is quite an expedition, and not taken lightly.

Today’s was your standard start to a Saturday morning in New Orleans.  Get up, turn on the lights, and discover that there are none.  Along with no heat.  These power interruptions are such a regular occurrence that I no longer take the trouble to set electric clocks, in the house or my office.  I consequently live in a neo-modern world, each room of which is festooned with sets of blinking numbers.

Luckily this morning I still have my backup coffee-maker, an old Cajun four-piece four-cup French-drip pot which I have lovingly possessed for over thirty years.  I haul it down, boil water – gas stoves are a necessity here – and head out to find a newspaper.

Who knows, Bush may have been here again.

But as I approach the front door I hear a siren, then another.  And another, and another.  It was only yesterday that the venerable Coliseum Theatre burned to the ground, aided by high winds and low water pressure.  Even with helicopters working in tandem, hauling eight-hundred-gallon bags of water from the river to dump on the fire, the theatre burned and disappeared from the earth quickly and finally.  Another bit of our soul gone.

So when I open the door to my home and walk into a wall of smoke and an audio cascade of even more approaching sirens, I become more than a touch uneasy.

There sound to be dozens of fire engines approaching closely, and as the smoke clears in a breeze, I see that there are.  Dozens.  I see them wheeling into the neighborhood, one-by-one, roaring up at the end of my street, dropping into a rubber-burning screaming halt just two blocks north.

Less than a minute later, the deafening thud of approaching helicopters makes me duck.  They are flying really low, less than a hundred feet up, and they are carrying the same bags I’d heard were used at the Coliseum.  Each of the aircraft is hauling a large round orange sack, suspended from its bellies at the end of a long tether.  A spray of water is blowing from the upper mouth of each bag as they move into position, again just to the north of me, and prepare to drop their water.
There is most certainly a fire.  Nearby.

I throw on an old warm-up jacket, hop on my bike, and sprint up the street, which is rapidly filling with people in their pajamas and robes.  Two blocks away, just above Rampart street, people are stumbling into the mouth of a rock-strewn driveway on the eastern side of the street.  There is a large open space in the center of the block and it is directly behind the fires, which are now coming from the upper stories and roofs of at least three buildings.  The row of century-old shotgun houses face Mandeville street, the next parallel street east, but the rear of the burning houses intrude well into the block very near Marigny street.  My street.

Luckily, for me at least, the wind is coming strongly out of the north-northwest, and is blowing the flames straight down the block.  Unluckily for the rest of the houses on that side of the street.  The fire is literally leaping from wall to wall.  I can see flames blowing horizontally from the upper windows of one house like a blowtorch, directly into the shattered windows of the next, and then out the other side of the second house.
There must now be at least a hundred firefighters on the scene, and more arriving by the minute.  They do not look like actors in a movie.  They look like tired old men, just awakened from sleep.  Which is exactly what they are.

I spot half a dozen of them standing precariously on the roof of one house, fully equipped with oxygen bottles and grappling gear, hacking at the side of the adjoining building, flames just a few feet away and coming closer every time the wind slackens.  I lose sight of the firemen as another eight hundred gallons of water falls directly on them from the sky.

“These guys really are heroes,” is all I can think.  Yeah, I know.  But, Christ, just look at those guys!  

People all around me are standing about in clusters with their mouths open, watching the firefighters risk their lives for someone else’s property.  We start into conscious life only occasionally, each time to simultaneously point at yet another burst or explosion.  I can see the faces around me.  Neighbors, all wondering if this fire in a gale wind can be stopped before it jumps the next street south and moves into that block.  And on into mine.

Thinking this, I pedal one block in that direction, where the fire is headed.  The firemen from three trucks have formed their vehicles into a line down the street, directly in the path of the fire.  They have of course thought of the same possibility that I imagined.  The smoke is blowing directly in their faces, and the heat is already so intense that I have to stay half a block away and watch them stand there, feet set and hoses in hand.  Knowing that they have only the small amount of water stored in their trucks with which to stop the flames.

They can see by the water’s short arc on the giant crane hose to the north that there is barely enough pressure to maintain that stream.  So there is definitely not enough for all these pumper trucks to tap into the neighborhood fire hydrants.  

It is that way all over the City.  Thus the choppers have been brought into use.  These men know that, if the five hundred gallons they each have is not enough to stop the fire’s advance, they will have to evacuate quickly, very quickly.   The drivers are in fact already in place in each truck, waiting.

The helicopters are now in a rhythm, dropping a load of water every ninety seconds.  I know this because the gentleman standing next to me is timing them.  They are remarkable.  We are all in awe of the pilots, getting so close to the fires, and we now see them so frequently that we have come to note their individual characteristics.  The red and blue chopper gets much much closer to the flames before dumping, but even so, the orange flyer is more accurate, in spite of the rising wind.
One of the bystanders says he heard that the fire was started in the storm-ruined furniture store on the corner, by squatters.  Once out of control the wind took it to the house immediately behind it, then the next.  And the next.  By the time I get near enough to see for myself, the fire is consuming its seventh building.  Only two are left between it and the fireline at the street.

That is when the tanker trucks arrive, three at a time.

The pumper drivers scramble to hook up to the new tanks and begin to spray, into the wind.  And finally, this additional water coming from the south begins to slow the fire’s progress.

And then it is out.  The fire is out.  We are left staring at three-quarters of a block filled with charred blackened totems.  

The houses in this neighborhood are either made entirely of old-cut cypress or of stucco set on cypress beams.  Cypress wood is wonderfully resistant to water.  And equally susceptible to fire.
The owner of the last house to burn, a gorgeous two-story Greek Revival mansion, had just completed hurricane restoration on his home last week.

The water here now has no pressure and lots of smell.  It stinks with chlorine.  Friends have told me that you can bleach clothes clean by leaving them overnight in a tub of tap water.  Drinking it is not an option, though I have found that a kettle of water boiled and left standing for a few hours becomes a great deal less offensive.

As I ride my bike home, one of my neighbors yells out to me:  “If you think this is bad, wait until the boils get here.”  I laugh and smile and wave as I pass, but I am confused thinking of it as a water reference, and don’t get the joke until I am almost home.

You see, day before yesterday a pair of tornadoes ripped through town, one heavily damaging the airport, and another running top to bottom through Lakeview, completely destroying the very few houses that had survived the flooding caused by the 17th Street Canal breach.  Then yesterday, with the wind and dropping water pressure, the fires started.  Today there is no electricity, and the phones only receive, and we can’t call out.

Boils and a plague of locusts cannot be far behind.

A person could get depressed.

They do.  Our suicide rate is skyrocketing.  During one single week in October, eight doctors, unknown to one another, took their own lives.  They could not stand the memory of what they had seen along with maintaining themselves in a malfunctioning and defective environment.  
This place we call home on a daily basis.

Months have passed now, but the quality of life here has actually begun to slide downward again.  A few weeks ago the US president said he saw people here “with a spring in their step again”.  I wonder if he can have really left his airplane.

That said, my electricity just came on.  I guess I will go shut down the generator, power up the computer and process these words.

Process these words about New Orleans.

By Scilla Alecci

By Flickr id xioubin low. CC license.

But this announcement hasn't surprised many Japanese people who had been expecting it to happen sooner or later.
The buzz that media created about Japan being beaten by its Asian neighbor has made many bloggers raise their eyebrows and say: so what?

Ampontan, for instance, warns that China becoming the second largest economy in the world is nothing but a bubble that will eventually burst.

Yesterday, the English-language print media was filled with stories declaring that China’s economy had at last grown to become the second-largest in the world, surpassing that of Japan. One newspaper said it had “seized” second place (as if economies can seize anything), while another reported that it had captured the “second-place crown”.
Perhaps they should be forgiven, for it’s obvious they know not what they do. Many people, more often on the left than not, view the dynamics of national economies as a zero-sum contest–as if they were spectators at a baseball, football, or hockey game. The economists remind us that the potential for win-win is always there, but few people listen.[…]
As Gordon Chang points out in Forbes [en], the Chinese property market has become the 500-lb bubble in the middle of the room. When it pops–and you know it will–investors will take a bath so large the media will be inundated with water sports stories 24/7.

Japan emerged as economic superpower in 1968, when it became the second largest economy in the world, surpassing West Germany.
The “economic miracle” as defined by some scholars [en] was caused by multiple factors including postwar reforms and a high level of industrialization fostered by ‘keiretsu’ [en], a partnership of Government and private industry.
Nowadays Japan, with a population which is only one tenth of greater China's population, has a public debt to GDP ratio of about 200% and a mere 0.1% economic growth rate.

Takaojisan thinks it’s natural that the Chinese GDP passes Japan's as the population is bigger. But he also shares with Ampontan the opinion that the story that China is going to be the largest economy in the near future may go up in smoke.

単純に考え、日本の１０倍の人口がいるから日本の１０倍の購買力があるなどはあり得ず、結局は一部の富裕層が買いあさっているに過ぎない。中国のGDPは、個人消費ではなく、行き場のない金が向かっている投資によるところが大きい。そして、その投資がはじければ、中国の巨大な経済は一夜にして水泡に帰するのだ。なにしろ、経済の実体となりうる個人消費がきわめて限られ、インフラが整備されず、国民生活を支える有形無形の社会サービスがまったく形成されていないからだ。
つまり中国の投資バブルがはじけた場合の崩壊はすさまじいと言える。まさに、実体のない経済が雲散霧消するのだ。[…]　
　しかし、いずれ日本を経済規模で抜いたとしても、べつにそれがどうと言うことではないのだ。

In addition to the figures that prove China’s economy being greater than the Japanese, experts forecast [en] that this growing power will eventually pass also the US by 2030, becoming then the largest economy in the whole world.

Blogger aen_ukon99 wonders what are the factors considered by the experts when examining a country's economic performance.

それに中国に生産拠点を移した多くの外国企業の生産はカウントされていないのかな？
そして安い労働力の供給元だった中国がこの頃自殺者やストなどで目覚め始めて多くの企業はインドやアフリカに移りつつあるって中国にとっては結構痛い話じゃ無いのかな。

More positive thinkers, like Bos, have taken the news as a reason to look ahead and help their country to utilize those values and strengths that made of it a world power in just a few decades.

まあ、いつか来る順位変動なので仕方がない。
これ以上落ちないように努力と行動と思考と知能を生かしていきたいものだ・・・・・。

By Portnoy Zheng

Famous comic blogger and Japanese culture observer JaeJae teaches us how to tell the difference[zht] between Yukata and Kimono, the two similar Japanese traditional garments.

By Andy Yee

Thomas Crampton puts together an infographic to explain some of China’s Social Media equivalents.

By Lee Yoo Eun

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter left North Korea with a detained U.S. citizen AIjalon Mahli Gomes today South Korea's Joongang reported, quoting North Korea's state media KCNA (Korean Central News Agency).