The Museum of Modern Art in New York will open up an exhibit about the art of connected devices, called Talk to Me, on Sunday. It’s got around 200 pieces that are anywhere from thought-provoking, to weird, to beautiful, to hilarious. (I posted some of the more sustainable-oriented ones here).

Flip through the slide show below to see pieces like a choking cell phone, a sneezing radio, the Avatar Machine, anonymous peer-to-peer sharing USB ports injected into walls, and an expressions dispatcher to help aid your emotions in the age of reliance on digital screens.

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","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/attenboroughdesigngroup2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Gesundheit Radio","caption":"Created by the imaginary Attenborough Design Group, the Gesundheit Radio sneezes periodically to loosen up dust from the system.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/attenboroughdesigngroup3.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"The Avatar Machine","caption":"A suit\/machine to connect the physical world and the virtual one. Become an Avatar in real life.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/avatarmachine1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"The Bird Box","caption":"The BirdBox is an iPhone application that chirps as an alarm and fits inside the box. A digital version of the cuckoo clock.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/birdbox1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Call Me Choke Me","caption":"The Call Me Choke Me device connects cell phones and a collar that tightens around a neck. It's supposed to symbolize being constantly contacted as being choked (both pain and erotic asphyxiation, according to the explanation).","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/callmechokeme1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Crowbot Jenny","caption":"Crowbot Jenny uses a crow robot to call and communicate with crows. The group worked with the crow intelligence specialists at the University of London and the University of Cambridge.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/crowbotjenny2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Dead Drops","caption":"Anonymous usb drives injected into walls, poles and buildings, where users can upload and download anything -- at their own risk.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/deaddrops.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Expressions Dispatcher","caption":"In the age of strictly digital communications, the Expressions Dispatcher can be used to communicate human emotions that have long languished behind screens. In this piece one person wears the emoticon helmet while another person changes the expression to emote the appropriate response.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/expressionsdispatcher4.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Expressions Dispatcher","caption":"In the age of strictly digital communications, the Expressions Dispatcher can be used to communicate human emotions that have long languished behind screens. In this piece one person wears the emoticon helmet while another person changes the expression to emote the appropriate response.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/expressiosdispatcher3.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"GlowCaps","caption":"Created by Vitality, GlowCaps communicate to the patient when to take their medicine.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/glowcaps1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Happylife","caption":"Happylife is a thermal imaging camera and sensor device that is supposed to be used in a home and which records biometric data, including detecting emotions and stress levels. The concept device is supposed to keep the peace.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/happylife3.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Happylife","caption":"Happylife is a thermal imaging camera and sensor device that is supposed to be used in a home and which records biometric data, including detecting emotions and stress levels. The concept device is supposed to keep the peace.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/happylife1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Hi - A Real Human Interface","caption":"This video shows a person in a box doing a computers work, like sorting emails.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/hiarealhumaninterface.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Hierarchy of Digital Distractions","caption":"It's a little blurry (sorry for poor pic) but the Hierarchy of Digital Distractions shows all the gadgets and web services that suck up the artists time compared to actual work done at the bottom.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/hierarchyofdigitaldistractions.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Kontrol iphone app","caption":"The Kontrol iPhone app enables users to create techno compositions by making triggers on a game screen. It's hard to explain, but its really fun to play with.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/kontrol1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Momo","caption":"The Momo is an navigation device that communicates with the user through motion, and uses GPS to help with directions. It weirdly rotates and gravitates toward a location. Its supposed to be a friendly guide in unfriendly places. ","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/momo2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Mr. Smilit","caption":"Now this is just creepy. Mr. Smilit mimics the noise of a child crying to distract kids from actual crying. Probably after they've just seen the terrifying face of Mr. Smilit.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/mrsmilit1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Out of the Box","caption":"A cell phone instruction manual that combines interactive mobile tech and a traditional hardbound book. ","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/outofthebox1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Devices for Mindless Communication","caption":"If you can't read the message it says: \"Yes sweetie, I'll call tonight.\" In the age of digital communications, machines will help us return to our, er, emotional side. ","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/personaladvisor.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"PhoneBook","caption":"The PhoneBook combines an iPhone inside a book and is able to interact with the pages. You can swap out the book pages, and change the app for a new book.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/phonebook2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Short","caption":"Short is robotic footwear that can be controlled by an iPhone app, yours or another persons, to raise and lower your stature. ","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/short2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"SMS Sling Shot","caption":"The SMS Sling Shot is one part cell\/sling shot and one part building facade. A user types in the SMS to the phone and launches it at the building to prompt an interaction with the wall.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/smsslingshot2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Square","caption":"Mobile payment company Square made it into the exhibit.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/square1.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"WiFi Dowsing Rod","caption":"The diving rod of the olden days has turned into a connected device that searches for the invisible wireless connections around us.","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/wifidowsingrod2.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];

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Mobile phones have helped close the gap between people, connecting friends, family and co-workers across wide distances. But the lines of communication don’t follow traditional state and city boundaries and instead reflect different social influences and relationships that are sometimes harder to understand.

But a new data and visualization project called the Connected States of America helps bring some focus into the way mobile phones facilitate communications and shows how conversations and text-messages bind areas and regions together, even ones that are far apart. Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research today have showed off their work, which takes anonymous aggregated AT&T mobile phone data and creates interactive maps illustrating where calls and text messages are placed and where they connect to.

Call connections for San Francisco County

The maps show what areas are likely to be in communication with each other and how some places, sometimes in the same state, remain separated. Metropolitan regions, even ones that spill over state lines, understandably facilitate a lot of communications among people in one area. But there is a lot of back and forth that emerges between states too. For instance, Alabama and Louisiana are sister states because of the cellular traffic between the two, while parts of Tennessee, like Chattanooga break away from the rest of Tennessee and join other neighboring states.

Looking at the map, you can see how mobile phone traffic occurs between the New York and San Francisco regions, which are very connected, but are not so related to Texas, another major population hub. Looking at SMS messages also yields slightly different results, emphasizing closer physical connections than phone calls, which can occur over wider distances. Here’s a look at a video about the project.

This is pretty cool, though some of this is intuitive. I know for instance that many parts of the country make calls to Los Angeles or New York, just because they’re such big places. But it’s interesting to see some of the less obvious connections. And it can have social implications that can help our government better understand how to reach out to people. The lesson is that while mobile phones can create instant communications across the entire country, they’re just tools in our hands and our use of them are guided by many of our existing social relationships, cultural backgrounds and affinities.

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Does the us government record phone calls or is that simply a fabrication? A number of people are convinced that government agencies are listening in to your calls, but if you think about the data, it doesn’t make much logic that an individual human being might be taking note of just about every word. What is much more likely is the fact that government authorities are capturing your speech and processing it for terms or phrases that appear to indicate suspicious activity, and of even more interest is the statistical analysis of phone calling tendencies – who you’re calling, how frequently, what habits you usually have and therefore what habits you’re violating!

Conspiracy theories are all around about what a government would even do with all these facts. We want to suppose we don’t reside in a police country in which thought-crime is a big issue, but possibly we do and we’re not even conscious of it. And you’re reading this article, I wonder if the government has deemed this as sensitive and can they be taking particular consideration in those people who’ve set aside time to read it? They might without doubt track that sort of thing, whoever “they” are.

If you could record telephone calls yourself, from any individual you liked, I wonder who you’d listen in on? And does one actually feel tempted to pay attention to things with regard to nosiness or possibly since you think it is essential to fight crime? I inquired my co-workers who they’d listen into and most of them mentioned plenty of celebrities in the news – people who are already worrying for every single word they are saying, I want to know why it is that many of us would like to listen to them a lot more than ever before?

One of my co-workers pondered on the creation of an unknown celeb where a TV corporation overseas could record phone calls of a random member of the public and in addition hide secret cameras and stick to them around. You could possibly develop a whole soap opera around this random unsuspicious member of the public and only people overseas will be aware of it. Definitely a scary concept though isn’t it! Maybe it’s already happening and it’s you that’s the foreign celebrity. Could be smart to wear something different tomorrow and smile a bit more often because all the tabloids and Television shows will be commenting on it.

Practically, to record telephone calls you can just cut right into a wire in the phone’s receiver and attach that to a line of a receiver. You can purchase kits which help you do this for just a modest amount of cash, but it looks quite clear when you’ve modified the receiver. This implies that those celebs who notice that a news paper has opted for record phone calls at their expense has been doing it as a result of more illicit ways. Generally all network centers use a call listening center, so all it requires is an unscrupulous member of staff having a particular desire for listening in to some particular calls. In most cases a fee of the proper amount would persuade someone to do the dastardly action. Sad but true.

British developer Tom Hume recently went to hear a talk by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar — who famously posited that most humans can only handle around 150 social relationships — discuss his views on our ultramodern ways of staying in touch.

The session, titled “How Many Friends Does One Person Need?”, took a look through our lives and established that Dunbar’s number appears in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places: in the military, in families and in business, for example. But aside from encouraging some fairly standard questions (does anyone really get value out of having 5,000 friends on Facebook?), it also prompted Hume to really examine what social services online are getting wrong.

As a result, he has outlined what he calls four “lies of social software:”  the set of assumptions almost every social service online makes, despite the fact that there is ample evidence that they’re wrong.

And they’re pretty bang on:

• Your friends are equally important
• Your friends are arranged into discrete groups
• You can manage hundreds of friends
• Friendship is reciprocal and equal

Almost every service offers you a way to make a connection with as many people as you want, and tools to help you categorize that connection into one of a few buckets. Many of us have started to adopt this way of managing our online friends, to try to eke some efficiency out of the system, but let’s be honest: Very few of us manage our lives in this way. We have siblings who are friends, and siblings who are not; we have co-workers we’d share intimate secrets with, and those we just can’t stand. We have friends who are closer to us than we want, and acquaintances who are further away than we’d like. In short, people are messy — and very few pieces of social software are able to reflect the complexity of real relationships.

When they do, they rarely get the credit they deserve. For example, I think one of Twitter’s great benefits was that it made the relationship between two users asymmetrical. I can follow anybody I like, but there is no real reason — besides a sort of social etiquette or the need for backchannel communication — for them to follow me back. That gives more power to celebrities and broadcasters, which can bring more new users in, and it also reduces the influence of spammers and makes the system more scaleable for different sorts of users. Your network can be pruned to be large, small, broadcast, narrowcast — precisely can choose who to follow without finding yourself overwhelmed.

Hume wonders whether, ultimately, we aren’t the ones holding things back:

Managing lists of friends is unpleasantly icky. I bet Google  or Facebook could take away much of the pain of creating these lists by analysing my flow of communications. I bet they could notice and prompt me to confirm changes (“you’re emailing Freda a lot at the moment — working late or is she a friend outside work nowadays?”). Perhaps the challenge is less technical and more how to present this to a privacy-concerned public;

Context-aware sociability is definitely possible. For all that people deride Google’s social efforts, for example, the company has shown with Gmail’s priority inbox feature that it can use our patterns of communication to determine what is actually important to us.

But I don’t think fear over our privacy is why we don’t let these companies in. In fact, we’ve been complicit in helping them erase privacy in many senses. Instead, I wonder whether it’s just that the laws of social networking are simply based on what others have done before.

In many ways Facebook is not a great deal more advanced than it was when SixDegrees and LiveJournal helped set the standard: and it still, by and large, subscribes to these same mistakes about how human relationships work.

Is it something that will ever be fixed?

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There have been 3 times in life when folks have told me that I am extremely controlling. This isn’t something that is good to hear. Every time I have heard this I have become very defensive and angry, but upon personal reflection I realize that the observations were correct. This isn’t the greatest feeling, yet I was glad that I have people who care enough about me to point out my mistakes to me. The only way we’re able to grow and change is when we realize what we are actually doing wrong.

My latest episode of being extremely controlling involved my eighteen year old kid. He was searching for motorcycles for sale. I wanted him to take a look at used cars, but no. He isn’t into used cars, because motorbikes are much more attractive compared with used cars. He had been saving his money from a part time job for 2 years. He had talked about having a bike since he was 10 years old. I have always been concerned about this since I know that there are many people who get seriously hurt and killed in accidents every year.

Just a few weeks prior to his birthday he was taking a look at newspaper ads for motorbikes for sale. I went into my full litany about why this actually was not a good idea. We ended up having an argument and both of us said things that we regretted. I informed him that he won’t own a motorcycle while still living at home so he actually threatened to move out and things just escalated. I was feeling terrible and was losing sleep. I didn’t want to back down from my decision.

One of my co-workers who is also a great buddy informed me that I was trying to protect and control my son and in the process was losing him. She pointed out that he was very responsible. He had held the same job for 2 years and maintained good grades in school. He was responsible in driving the family car and he was not at all a risk taker. She pointed out that when he was 18 he would be an adult and I needed to give up trying to control his life.

She was right. It was really difficult to hear and admit, but what she was saying was absolutely true. I called my husband and asked him if he knew which of the motorbikes for sale our son was interested in. I suggested we help him purchase it as a gesture that I would support his choice to have a motorcycle and trusted that he would be safe with it. We informed our son that night that we’d help him buy the motorcycle as his birthday gift. I apologized to him. This is one thing that I have discovered has helped in my relationship with our kids, the ability to admit being mistaken and apologizing when I am.