NetLingo: The Blog - Improve Your Internet IQ

Hi Hen? Purging Gender from the Language

2012-05-28T02:23:00.000-07:00

Can an entire society become gender-neutral? Sweden wants to try. The country that brought us 16 months of paid parental leave and mandatory pay equality between the sexes has embarked on a crusade to abolish gender roles.

According to Megan Levy in The Age, Toy catalogs now feature photos of boys pushing doll carriages and girls playing with cars. State-run preschools have been instructed to avoid referring to children as girls or boys, and many of them have hired “gender pedagogues” who “help staff identify language and behavior that risk reinforcing stereotypes.” That task was made easier a few months ago, when a children’s book author pioneered a new pronoun, hen, as an alternative to the words han and hon for “he” and “she.” Kivi & Monsterhund tells the story of a child named Kivi, of indeterminate gender, who wants a dog for “hen’s” birthday. The book sparked a lively discussion on social-media sites, and now hen has been added to the national online encyclopedia.

It’s ironic that this is happening now, said Carin Stenstrom in Skanska Dagbladet (Skane, Sweden), when Swedish children live in a world “with much greater emphasis on gender difference” than there was in their parents’ or grandparents’ youth. When I was growing up in the postwar decades, the prevailing ideal was that clothes should be practical and easy to clean. Pastel shades were out, even for dresses, and forget about ruffles or bows. “As a mother, I followed the same ideals.” My sons and daughter wore the same rompers and overalls, and had the same home-cut hairstyle. For a while in the ’60s and ’70s, parents were tossing around mixed-gender names like May-Bjorn and Karl-Astrid. But nowadays, girls dress head to toe in flouncy pink and boys look like mini lumberjacks.

Not everyone is thrilled with the attempt to erase those sex differences, said Carl Erland Andersson in Goteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg, Sweden). Jan Guillou, one of our best-known authors, said in a recent interview that proponents of hen were “feminist activists who want to destroy our language.” But that’s an overreaction. The word hen certainly “sounds a bit pompous,” and it will add another layer of blandness to the language if it catches on. But that’s a big if. Language is an evolving tool that grows organically. No commandment from on high can suddenly change the way we speak and write; we have to adopt new words on our own.

Still, if any country can erase sex differences from language, it’s Sweden, said Thomas Steinfeld in the Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). The Swedes already tinkered with Swedish once in the name of equality, and it was a great success. In the late 1960s, state institutions abolished the use of Ni, the formal version of “you” that corresponds to the French vous or German Sie. The formal pronoun was seen as hierarchical, and Sweden was—and is—all about leveling the playing field. Yet can changing the way Swedes speak really change Swedish society? Here in Germany, we’ve gone from calling people of other ethnic backgrounds “foreigners” to calling them “immigrants” and, now, the politically correct “people of migrant origin.” The change in terms has not bettered their lot one iota.

- As seen in The Week
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Ugh, 1 in 5 Macs have malware!

2012-05-21T01:34:00.000-07:00

In a challenge to the prevailing belief that Apple computers are immune to the sort of cyberattacks that plague Windows-based machines, research firm Sophos has released a study claiming that 1 in 5 Macs has malware.

According to Todd Wasserman of Mashable, the report, released in April 2012, is based on a "100,000-strong snapshot" of the millions of Macs that downloaded Sophos's free Mac antivirus software. The study found that 20 percent of Macs were carrying one or more instances of Windows malware.

Such malware doesn't cause symptoms unless the Mac owners run Windows on their machines, but it can be spread to others.

However, this doesn't appear to be solely a Windows-based problem. The report also found that 2.7 percent of Macs were infected with Mac OS malware. The majority of such Mac OS malware is composed of fake antivirus attacks, like the recent Flashback botnet. Mac owners can contract such malware by downloading e-mail attachments, visiting rogue websites and unknowingly installing it via their USB drive.

To avoid downloading such malware, Sophos recommends running an antivirus program and keeping it up to date, exercising caution about which links you click on, keeping software patches current and keeping an eye out for e-mail-based scams.

- As seen on Mashable
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Is the Digital World Killing Creativity?

2012-05-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

Sure, you can use that smart phone to create an emotionally stirring Instagram of the waffles you had for brunch in mere seconds. But that same device can also serve as a ball and chain for the working world: emails constantly arrive, even during off hours; LinkedIn requests buzz after networking events; and has that important new contact followed you on Twitter yet?

According to Sam Laird of Mashable.com, while our current age of digital disruption has opened a cornucopia of new casual creative endeavors, the networked generation’s ability to multitask — and the constant need for instantaneous action — may also be hindering creativity.

Consider this: In a recent global study, three-quarters of respondents said their creative potential is being stifled. More than 60% of American said their education systems squelch creativity, and a majority of total respondents said pressure at work hurts creativity. Yet 80% of respondents worldwide said allowing creativity to flourish is critical to economic growth.

Those numbers come from a recent survey of 5,000 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan. The study was commissioned by software giant Adobe, and its results were announced Monday.

Given that Adobe just released the latest version of its wildly popular Creative Suite line of products including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, it’s no surprise the company would play up the need for a more hospitable climate for experimentation. But the study’s findings do indicate that people worldwide feel unfulfilled creatively. Check out this infographic for the full picture :-)

- As seen in Mashable
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Fun! 25 Awesome iPhone Tips and Tricks

2012-05-07T13:19:00.001-07:00

Whether you're a seasoned user or brand new to the iPhone world, chances are you're probably not using your smart phone to its fullest. Don't worry, you're not alone, as these pocket-sized computers boast many hundreds of features buried in the operating system.

And so here is Marc Saltzman of Digital Crave who shares a number of favorite iPhone tips and tricks, some of which you may know already. Hopefully there's a good number of ones you aren't aware of yet. Most of these following 25 suggestions will work with all versions of the iPhone, but be sure to have the latest software installed (iOS 5.1).

OK, here we go:

1) Take a photo with your headphone cord: Now that you can use the volume up or down buttons to snap a photo, steady your hand while framing up the photo and when you're ready to take the picture, press the button on the cord so it won't shake the iPhone. Voila!

2) Dry out a wet iPhone: You're not the first one to drop an iPhone in a toiler or sink. If this happens, don't turn it on as you can damage the smartphone by short-circuiting it. Lightly towel dry the phone. Don't use a hairdryer on the phone as it can further push moisture into areas that aren't wet. Submerge the iPhone in a bowl or Ziploc bag of uncooked white rice and leave it overnight. If you have it, try using a desiccant packet you might find with a new pair of shoes or leather purse.

3) Dismiss suggested words: If you're typing an email or note and the virtual keyboard is suggesting the correct spelling of the word — and you don't want to accept it — you don't need to tap the tiny "X" at the end of the word in question. Simply tap anywhere on the screen to close the suggestion box.

4) Take photos faster: Even if your iPhone is locked you can double-tap on the Home button and you'll see a camera icon you can tap to open the camera immediately. Now you can use the volume up button to snap the photo, too. You can also use the volume up on the headphone cord to take a photo (if you want to) and pinch the screen to zoom instead of using the slider bar.

5) Use location-based reminders: You probably know Siri can be used to set a reminder, like saying "Siri, remind me to call mom at 4pm today." But did you know you can set location-based reminders on your iPhone 4S? Say "Remind me to call mom when I leave here" or "Remind me to call mom when I get home" and you'll be notified accordingly. Nice!

6) Get word definitions: Apple has recently added a built-in dictionary and you can access it in most apps that let you select a word. Simply press and hold on a word — such as in an email, reminder, iBooks, and so on — and you'll see a pop-up option for "Define." We need to get NetLingo bundled in there :-)

7) Revive a frozen iPhone: If your smartphone freezes on you and pressing the Sleep/Wake button on top of the device doesn't do anything, don't panic. Instead, press and hold the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time. You'll be prompted to swipe the "Slide to Power Off" tab. This so-called "hard reset" resuscitates the frozen iPhone. You'll first need to wait through a full shut down and restart.

8) Get more done in less time: You can create shortcuts to words and phrases you use a lot, such as Northern California Association for Employment in Education. In Settings, go to General, then Keyboard, and select Add New Shortcut. Now you can add new words or phrases and assign shortcuts to them (such as "NCAEE," in the above example, and it'll type out the full word each time.

9) See a 6-day weather forecast: If you're one of the many weather junkies out there, you probably know you can swipe down the iOS device's screen and you'll see the Notifications center. Weather will be at the top, but did you know you can swipe to the left or right and you'll toggle between current conditions and a 6-day forecast? Plus, jump to the Weather app by tapping anywhere on the weather bar inside Notifications screen.

10) Select URL domains faster: When typing a website address in Safari, you don't have to type the ".com." For example, you can type "yahoo" in the URL box to get to yahoo.com. On a related note, you can press and hold down the .com button and you'll see a list of alternatives to choose, such as .net, .org and .edu.

11) Make your own ringtone: Don't settle with the ringtones provided by Apple and you need not pay your carrier for more of them. As the name suggests, the free Ringtone Maker app lets you take a clip from your favorite songs and make ringtones out of them in seconds.

12) Feel and see when people call: Apple has added a number of accessibility features to iOS 5, specifically designed to assist those with hearing, vision, mobility and other disabilities. For example, those who are hearing impaired might opt to have the LED flash when a call comes in. If you're seeing impaired, you could set a unique vibration pattern for different people in your Contacts, so you know who's calling.

13) Find your lost iPhone: As long as you sign up in advance, the free Find My iPhone app will help you locate your device on a map (on your computer or other iOS device). You can display a message or initiate a loud ring (in case it's under the cushions), or remotely lock or wipe its data.

14) Save photos in Safari: You're surfing the web in Safari and stumble upon a photo you'd like to save. Simply press and hold on a photo when on a website and you'll be prompted with a menu asked if you'd like to "Save Image." Once the photo is saved, you can view it offline, email it or set it as wallpaper.

15) Take an iPhone screen grab: On a related note, if you want to take a screenshot of a website or application, press down on the Home button and tap the Sleep button. You'll hear the camera click, see a white flash and the screenshot will be saved to your Camera Roll.

16) Get new sounds: It's been a long time coming, but Apple has added the ability to select custom tones for incoming text messages, new emails, voicemails, tweets, calendar alerts, reminders and more. You can select something you like from within the Sounds menu. You'll also notice you can scroll to the top of this list of sounds and you'll see a "Buy More Tones" option, which takes you to iTunes.

17) Zip to the top of the page: In Mail, Safari, Contacts and other apps, simply tap the status bar at the top of the screen — the area that displays time, battery and cell bars — to jump back to the top quickly.

18) Prolong your battery: Speaking of the battery, here's how to squeeze more life out of your iPhone between charges. Turn down the brightness of your screen, turn off wireless radios you don't use (such as GPS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) and reduce the number of apps with info you have "pushed" to your phone. Also, make sure you lock it before putting in your pocket, purse or backpack or else it could turn on and drain the battery.

19) Spread out the keyboard for easier typing: Here's a tip for iPad users: If you like typing while holding the tablet, rather than stretch your fingers or thumbs for those middle letters like G, H, Y or B, you can drag the keyboard to each side of the screen to separate it into two, allowing you to easily type while holding it.

20) Learn some gestures: Close any app ridiculously fast by putting your four fingers and thumb stretched on the screen and pinch inwards. Sweet! You can also magnify what's on your iPhone screen with a three-finger tap. You'll first need to go to Settings, General, Accessibility, and select the various gestures options here.

21) Create an "app" out of a website you visit often: To add a website to your Home screen, just visit the webpage in Safari and at the top of the screen, tap the Go To icon and select "Add to Home Screen."

22) Create a music playlist on the fly: You no longer need a computer to create a playlist. In the Music app, tap Playlists, then select Add Playlist and give it a name ("Marc's Workout Mix"). Now, tap any song (or video) to add it to the playlist. You can add individual songs, entire albums, or all songs by a particular artist.

23) Don't waste your day deleting messages individually: You can delete unwanted emails en masse rather than deleting one at a time. In your Inbox, simply click the Edit button and check off the emails you want to delete with your finger and then choose Delete.

24) Keep track of your texting limits: If you don't have the best texting plan and don't want to unnecessarily pay to send more texts than you need, here's a tip to turn on the character count in the Messages app. Enable this in the Settings>Message option to keep an eye on your word count. Usually, your one text becomes two after 160 characters.

25) Mirror your iPhone with your TV: If you own an Apple TV, you can instantly and wirelessly share exactly what's on your iPhone 4S or second- and third-generation iPad with your HDTV, connected to an Apple TV — such as games, apps or videos. Simply double-tap the Home button, swipe all the way to the right and select AirPlay Mirroring.

- As seen on Digital Crave
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Evolve or Die: How Words Make It In this World

2012-04-30T03:47:00.000-07:00

Whether a word lives or dies depends on laws of natural selection much like those that shape the fate of living species, a new study shows. Researchers analyzed more than 5 million books, written over the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and Hebrew, that had been scanned into Google’s vast database.

They found that while the English language is still growing at a rate of about 8,500 words per year, the birth rate of new words is slowing—and the death rate increasing. Newly coined words tend to achieve widespread circulation faster than they used to, because they are more likely to describe major innovations such as “Twitter” and “iPod.”

Meanwhile, in the “inherently competitive, evolutionary environment” of languages, dying terms are losing a Darwinian battle against more popular “synonyms, variant spellings, and related words,” study author Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University physicist, tells The Wall Street Journal. The catchier term “X-ray,” for instance, put its synonym “roentgenogram” out of business; “persistency” has been choked off by “persistence.” Once a word is born, Tenenbaum found, it has between 30 and 50 years to either take hold or disappear.

- As seen in The Week
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Why Google Will Abandon Android

2012-04-23T05:48:00.000-07:00

According to Charlie Kindel, at cek.log, Google will abandon Android. Keep in mind this article is the opinion of the author. Google has not actually decided to abandon Android (yet). Why will Google abandon Android? In short order, Google will launch their tablet. And in doing so they will start down the path of abandoning Android. Here's what he means...

The Google tablet will be called the “Google Play”. Brand is as much a part of the end-to-end experience as the user interface, device, OS, apps, and services. Google will distance itself from the Android brand; instead they will invest heavily in the Play brand. Fragmentation of Android will accelerate.

As he explained in his article on how to think about Android fragmentation, fragmentation is not the end of android, but means Google has lost control of Android. Google has lost control of both the Android platform and the Android brand.

Google is desperate to compete in the phone and tablet spaces (not to mention social networking). Android is a perfectly suitable technical platform to build on, but as a brand it is atrocious. In that article he suggested one of the tactics Google will try to use to regain control of Android would be to “Invest in the Nexus brand”.

Nexus is Google’s pure play. The idea is a phone with a more rigidly defined user experience, more consistent hardware, the latest OS with a consistent upgrade policy, a single marketplace, and consistent (Google-endorsed) services. Charlie loves this strategy from an end-user’s perspective. Nexus phones will sell fairly well. But the numbers will pale in comparison to the non-Nexus phones sold. But Nexus will only be “fairly” successful because it is counter to what the carriers want and every dollar Google spends on advertising it incents the device manufactures and carriers to spend more on advertising their differentiated products. Nexus actually worsens fragmentation along most axes by introducing yet another “Android model” into the mix.

Charlie no longer believes Google will invest in the Nexus brand (at least for tablets). Instead he's betting the Google tablet will be called the “Google Play”. This makes perfect sense given Google’s recent rebranding of the Android Marketplace and consolidation of apps, music, books, and movies into a unified Google Play.

Moving forward, Google will invest heavily in the Play brand. To effectively create new brand you have to mute your usage of other brands in the same space. At the most, any further use of the term “Android” in consumer marketing and branding will be relegated to “ingredient brand” status (“Certs with Retsin!”). Google will start distancing itself from the Android brand completely.

Why?

Because Android has become an ill-defined mess of a brand that Google does not control. If Google wants to create a phenomenal end-to-end user experience that has a chance of competing with the iPad juggernaut in the tablet space they need to control all aspects of the experience. If they are smart (and Charlie thinks they are) they will recognize that brand is as much a part of the end-to-end experience as the user interface, device, OS, apps, and services.

Remember how much power the mobile operators and device manufacturers/OEMs are in the mobile space? For the same reasons Windows Phone 7 struggles, so do Google’s Nexus branded phones. But tablets are not phones and the power of the MOs and OEMs is muted in the tablet space. A tightly controlled user experience, device, OS, and services model built around the Google Play brand can be successful even in the face of MOs and OEMs.

He predicts Google will go so far as to push the Play brand over Android even with developers. They’ve already started this with marketplace submission and you can bet there will be a new, more stringent, app certification program under the Google Play moniker in an attempt to raise the quality of apps for the new Google Play tablet. Watch for Google Play specific APIs and services as well.

Don’t believe, for one second, Google building it’s own tablet and getting behind a cohesive brand strategy will reduce Android fragmentation. It won’t. It will accelerate fragmentation across all axes. Google knows this; which is all the more reason they will abandon the Android brand and focus on something they can control.

The tablet space is going to be hugely entertaining in the next 6-9 months as Google makes this transition, other Android-based tablet makers continue what they are doing, the iPad continues to sell like gangbusters, and we see how successful Microsoft is with Windows 8 ARM based tablets.

As seen here: http://ceklog.kindel.com
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Will the iPad kill the PC?

2012-04-16T03:53:00.000-07:00

Even if the desktop doesn't disappear, “its glory time is over.” Your personal computer is headed for the recycling bin, said Dan Farber in CNET.com. With the unveiling of Apple’s latest iPad last month, it’s clear that tablets will soon replace the “desktops and clunky laptops that were the face of computing for decades.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who called the iPad the “poster child for the post-PC world,” said that the company sold 15.4 million of the devices in just the last quarter of 2011, more than the number of PCs sold during the same period by any one of the leading manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Dell. And as competition among tablet makers heats up, computer sales will stay flat or slide, said Patrick May and John Boudreau in the San Jose Mercury News. Nearly 120 million tablets are expected to be sold worldwide this year, and Apple, which already commands more than half of the market, is expected to remain top dog. “Essentially anything we once thought of as pen-and-paper activities can now be supplemented by a tablet,” says technology analyst Gene Munster.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, said John Naughton in the London Observer. Tablets may be flying off the shelves, but consumers, not businesses, are buying them. Many companies are simply not about to make “radical changes in their IT infrastructures” in the current economic climate. And while I love my iPad, it’s basically useless for a great number of tasks. I suppose you could “write a book, edit a movie, or build a big spreadsheet” on it, but it would be a bit like digging in the garden “with a teaspoon.” I was just finishing my obituary of the PC, said Daniel Nye Griffiths in Forbes.com, when I looked down and noticed…my keyboard—“with a wire coming out of the back.” You can be sure that the “vast majority of the technology journalists” trumpeting the post-PC era are doing so on, ahem, a PC.

You’re missing the point, said Kit Eaton in FastCompany.com. The PC isn’t going to disappear—millions of pocket calculators are still sold each year—but “its glory time is over.” There’s “nowhere really novel” for the laptop or desktop to go. It doesn’t matter that an iPad’s uses don’t neatly sync with those of a traditional computer, because over time, “new ways of using tablets will replace the old ways of using PCs.” These are exciting days. “We’re right at the beginning of the tablet computing era, with bigger and better things yet to come.”

- As seen in The Week
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Project Glass: Google's 'terribly cool' augmented-reality glasses

2012-04-09T02:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine having directions and calendar reminders beamed directly in front of your eyeballs. Google's Star Trek-inspired frames promise to do just that!

Google's sci-fi plan to transform a pair of glasses into a wearable personal computer has long threatened to become a reality. On Wednesday, the rumors were confirmed, and the initiative was finally revealed as "Project Glass." The search giant's Star Trek-inspired, augmented-reality specs — which promise to beam data from Google's vast trove of information right in front of your eyes — are slimmer and sleeker than initial reports indicated. According to a demo video (watch the video here!), wearers, apparently through vocal commands alone, can send instant messages, look up directions, snap photos (and share them with Google+ circles), add events to calendars, and video chat with friends. You can't buy these specs yet, says Nick Bilton at The New York Times. "Google, however, will be testing them in public very soon."

The reaction: We all know Google is cool, says Ami Efrati at The Wall Street Journal, but Project Glass also reflects newly reinstated CEO Larry Page's goal of narrowing "the company's overall focus around a few core initiatives, including search, mobile, and social networking." Perhaps, says Dan Frommer at SplatF. Still, I'm not sure this wearable technology would really catch on. "Between the added bulk, looking ridiculous, and the inevitable cost, it's on the road to becoming the Segway of optics." Are you kidding? asks Chris Velazco at TechCrunch. This technology is "terribly, terribly cool stuff" — at least if the final headset lives up to the simulation in Google's demo.

- As seen in The Week
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News from the Online Dating Front

2012-04-02T01:51:00.000-07:00

One in five couples now reports having met on the Web. Are they any more likely to be compatible than couples who came together in traditional ways? Based on his analysis of 400 studies of dating sites and their methods for matching people, University of Rochester psychologist Harry Reis says no.

“There is no reason to believe that online dating improves romantic outcomes,” he tells Time.com. Matchmaking sites like Match.com promise to analyze user data to increase everyone’s odds of finding their “soul mates.’’ But Reis and his colleagues found that Internet dating actually makes long-term bonding less likely.

Scrolling through hundreds of profiles encourages people to compare dozens of prospective dates to one another, like consumer purchases, as opposed to considering them as individual human beings and potential life partners.

Online profiles also tend to link people based on superficial qualities—whether they like scuba-diving or romantic movies, for instance—that end up being poor predictors of lasting relationships. How couples communicate and how they cope with external stresses they face, such as job loss or illness, have far more impact on compatibility. You can’t look at an online profile “and know what it’s like to interact with someone,” says Reis. “Picking a partner is not the same as buying a pair of pants.” (That's like something I've always said, it's like shopping for shoes.)

But one in five couples are finding love online. Hey, as Dolly Parton so aptly says "I think everyone should be free to love who they want, there's not enough love in this world, so find love where you can. And if you find it, consider yourself lucky."

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Online Advertising Trends in 2012... Seriously? Lame.

2012-03-26T01:42:00.001-07:00

Can I just state that I hate how the online advertising industry is so fragmented. I'm not alone, even the online advertising experts and the digital marketing gurus can't agree. In fact they aren't even clear where their industry is headed. What's an online publisher to do? My two cents: Join OpenX.

I'm shocked that not one of the thought leaders I researched even mentions OpenX. Granted many of these predictions came from our colleagues in the U.K., and because I received my Masters degree from the LSE, I can say they still appear to be behind the times. The only other viewpoints I could fine are from U.S. visionaries but honestly, they're full of blah, blah, blah too and that's because they all advocate the same thing: their own products. And don't even get me started on the conferences and non-profit member associations and organizations who aren't contributing anything to this field. As my Dad would say, give me a break. Yet even so, according to Forbes and eMarketer, spending on online ads will pass that of combined newspaper and magazine advertising for the first time this year.

If you're an online advertiser or marketer or publisher, tell me after reading through some of the above links, do you agree with any of these trend predictions? I think the Wall Street Journal title sums it up for me: *&%@#!

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Give Public Internet a Chance

2012-03-19T02:03:00.001-07:00

Municipalities are being thwarted by a growing number of state laws, pushed by powerful telecom interests, that make launching public networks all but impossible, said Susan P. Crawford at Bloomberg.com.

They’re at it again. Just as big utilities once tried to stymie efforts to electrify rural America, large telecom companies today are out to block cities across the country from building public networks for affordable high-speed Internet. A century ago, most rural communities were either ignored or gouged by major electricity providers. These communities fought for the right to form their own electric utilities, recognizing that “cheap, plentiful electricity was essential to economic development.”

Today, 2,000 municipalities provide their own power, and many cities want to do the same with high-speed fiber-optic service, which only 8 percent of Americans have at home. But they’re being thwarted by a growing number of state laws, pushed by powerful telecom interests, that make launching public networks all but impossible. Major private providers like AT&T and Verizon don’t want any competition, yet they have “ceased the expansion of next-generation fiber installations” across the country. “Congress needs to intervene” to pre-empt misguided state laws that are preventing citizens from making “their own choices about their communications networks.”

- As seen in The Week
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Pinterest - For the Love of Pictures

2012-03-12T03:15:00.000-07:00

Have you checked out Pinterest yet? Pinterest is a website where people post cool pictures inside specialized pages (called Pinboards) on a variety of categories. Pinterest is all about creating a category like "cool houses" and filling it with relevant images. It's a simple formula, but it works. Unlike other blogging tools like Tumblr, Pinterest is more of a posting board for ideas to inspire others. Pinterest has amassed ten million users in just nine months. Want to get in on the fun?

Here are 10 easy steps on how to get started on Pinterest:

1. First you'll need a Pinterest invite. Either go to Pinterest.com and request one (which could take a while) or find a friend who has one (they need to click on the "Invite Friends" button).

2. Sign in or sign in using Facebook or Twitter (because then Pinterest shows friends who are already using it... it helps you get started fast).

3) Pick some topics you like so Pinterest can get you started following some cool people.

4) Then create some boards, or categories of stuff you want to post pictures about.

5) Drag the "Pin It" button to your bookmarks bar, that way when you see a picture you like online, you can click your "Pin It" button and it will appear on your Pinterest homepage.

6) On your Pinterest homepage, you'll find posts from everyone you follow, plus a notifications feed.

7) Now that you've set up your Pinterest account, the first thing to do is re-pin somebody else's cool picture (a re-pin is just like a retweet or reblog).

8) Pick which of your boards you want to pin the image to, enter a description, and click Pin It. Your Pin shows up on your Pinterest homepage (and you can click on any picture to enlarge it or "like" it).

9) If you want to upload a picture from your computer, click the Add button on Pinterest, then click Upload. If you clicked "Create A Board," you can even make "shared" boards so you and friends can post to it simultaneously. Pick the "+ Contributors" button, add some friends' email addresses who you want to participate, then click Create Board.

10) And of course there's more to explore on Pinterest, such as videos, adding friends' boards, and changing your notification preferences.

Now that you're up and running, here are 10 Pinterest 'Pinboards' worth following:

1) Gorgeous and exotic flora and fauna - http://pinterest.com/maia_mcdonald/nature/

2) Cool tree houses - http://pinterest.com/alanaaliff/tree-houses/

3) Fancy cars, jets, and boats - http://pinterest.com/joewood1/rides/

4) Space is for truly inspiring architecture - http://pinterest.com/singamatic/space/

5) Drool worthy food - http://pinterest.com/ClosetCooking/drool-worthy-food/

6) Graphic design - http://pinterest.com/linn_maria/design/

7) Eclectic mix of fashionable menswear and accessories - http://pinterest.com/9sharp/9sharp/

8) Incredible animal pictures - http://pinterest.com/adechong/animals/

9) Weddings - http://pinterest.com/bridalmusings/wedding-inspiration/

10) And of course, cats - http://pinterest.com/natashafoote/kittens/

Enjoy!

- As seen in Business Insider
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How to Manage Google's New Privacy Policy Changes

2012-03-02T13:44:00.001-08:00

A big change to Google's privacy policy has now taken affect, meaning it's now up to YOU to decide how much information you want collected by the search giant. Last Thursday, March 1, 2012, Google's much-discussed new privacy policy went into effect.

To say that the change has stirred concern on the Web would be an understatement. Public officials and Web watchdogs in the United States and elsewhere have expressed fears that it will mean less privacy for users of the Web giant's multitude of products, from search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Maps to smart phones powered by the Android operating system.

Google points out that the products won't be collecting any more data about users than they were before. And, in fairness, the company has gone out of its way to prominently announce the product across all of its platforms for weeks.

The major change is that, instead of profiling users separately on each of its sites and products, Google will now pull all of that information together into one single profile, similar to what's found on Google's dashboard page.

The result encapsulates perhaps the most basic conundrum of the modern Web. More information means better service (and potentially, more targeted advertisements). But that service (in this case more accurate search results, more interesting ads and new features that work across multiple sites) requires you to give up some of your privacy in return.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz has called it "a somewhat brutal choice."

Google, not surprisingly, takes a different tack: The payoff for the company collecting your data is cool new services. For example, they could push cooking videos to you on YouTube if you'd been looking for recipes through Google search, privacy director Alma Whitten wrote in an editorial for the Sacramento Bee.

"We just want to use the information you already trust us with to make your experience better," she wrote. "If you don't think information sharing will improve your experience, you don't need to sign in to use services like Search, Maps and YouTube.

"If you are signed in, you can use our many privacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history, control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the Web 'incognito' using Chrome." Last Wednesday was the last day for people to tweak those Google settings before the new policy begins, although they can change them afterward as well.

Here are a few tips on how to keep your data a little more private on some of Google's most popular features.

1. Don't sign in - This is the easiest and most effective tip. Many of Google's services -- most notably search, YouTube and Maps -- don't require you to sign in to use them. If you're not logged in, via Gmail or Google+, for example, Google doesn't know who you are and can't add data to your profile. But to take a little more direct action ...

2. Removing your Google search history - Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled this step-by-step guide to deleting and disabling your Web History, which includes the searches you've done and sites you've visited.

It's pretty quick and easy:
-- Sign in to your Google account
-- Go to www.google.com/history
-- Click "Remove all Web History"
-- Click "OK"

As the EFF notes, deleting your history will not prevent Google from using the information internally. But it will limit the amount of time that it's fully accessible. After 18 months, the data will become anonymous again and won't be used as part of your profile. The EFF also compiled these six tips to protect your search privacy.

3. Clearing your YouTube history - Similarly, users may want to remove their history on YouTube. That's also pretty quick and easy.
-- Sign in on Google's main page
-- Click on "YouTube" in the toolbar at the top of the page
-- On the right of the page, click your user name and select "Video Manager"
-- Click "History" on the left of the page and then "Clear Viewing History"
-- Refresh the page and then click "Pause Viewing History"
-- You can clear your searches on YouTube by going back and choosing "Clear Search History" and doing the same steps.

4. Clearing your browsing history on Google Chrome-- Click on the "wrench" icon at the far right of your toolbar
-- Select "Tools"
-- Select "Clear browsing data"
-- In the dialogue box that appears, click the "clear browsing data" box (there are other options you may want to use as well)
-- Select "Beginning of Time" to clear your entire browsing history
-- Click "clear browsing history"

5. Gmail Chat - When you start a chat with someone, you can make the conversation "off the record." Off-the-record chats will not be stored in your chat history or the history of the person with whom you're talking. All chats with that person will remain off the record until you change the status. To go off the record:
-- Click the "Actions" link at the top right of the chat window
-- Scroll down to "Go off the record." Both you and your chat partner will see that the chat has been taken off the record.

6. What are Google's other products? Obviously, anything with "Google" in its name counts. But the Web giant owns other products that might not be so obvious to some folks.
-- Gmail. Yes, the "G" is for Google.
-- YouTube. Google bought the Web's leading video site in 2006
-- Picasa. The online photo sharing site became Google's in 2004
-- Blogger. The blog publishing tool has been Google's since 2003.
-- FeedBurner. A management tool for bloggers and managing RSS feeds. Google bought it in 2007.
-- Orkut. Google's original social-networking site isn't big in the U.S. But it's one of the most popular sites in India and Brazil.
-- Android. Yes, you probably know this. But just for the record, Google owns the most popular smartphone operating system.

So what do the analysts think? Is Google's new privacy policy evil? The search giant has begun sharing your personal data across almost all of its services — a violation, critics say, of Google's "don't be evil" ethos. Under Google's controversial new privacy policy, YouTube, Gmail, and nearly 60 other Google services will share your personal data.

Google is changing its privacy policies to allow the sharing of a user's data across 60 of its web services, including Gmail, YouTube, and personalized search (but not Google Wallet, Google Books, or the Chrome browser). For example, says Brent Rose at Gizmodo, "if you searched for 'Furbies' on Google's homepage (for some freaky reason) and then later went to YouTube, you might see Furbies videos pop up. That's new. Previously, data was compartmentalized between applications." Privacy advocates and many tech commentators aren't happy, especially because there's no way to opt out of the cross-Google data sharing. Does this change violate Google's "don't be evil" philosophy?

Yes. Google is turning evil: Google claims that this change better serves its users, but really, but I think it's really all about selling more targeted ads, says Mat Honan at Gizmodo. Come March 1, "things you could do in relative anonymity today will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number," and everything else you put in Google's hands. I'm "calling this evil" because Google is violating the core promise of respecting its users — a promise that Google used to "get us all under its feel-good tent."

Maybe, but c'mon, people are overreacting: This "Internet freakout" mostly shows that "no one actually reads privacy policies," says Kashmir Hill at Forbes. We have all given Google permission to share our information among Google services since 2005. The only change is that now it will actually use all that stuff it knows about you to, say, recommend YouTube videos. "When Google starts bundling everything it knows about its users and selling that to insurance companies, background check companies, and the Department of Homeland Security, that's when I'll trot out the 'evil label.'" For now, "kudos to them for being so explicit" about their privacy tweaks.

No, the real issue is Google's ambitions, of course Google isn't evil, says Adam Pash at Lifehacker. "But it's never been harder to take their famous 'Don't be evil' motto seriously." Google started out wanting to give us the web, then get out of the way. Now it "wants to grab every piece of the internet you use," trying for "world domination" like Facebook or, more damningly, 1990s-era AOL. That's not the Google we came to love, and it's "a fantastic bummer" for anyone who likes a free, innovative web.

In the meantime, Google is accused of secret tracking.

Google has been “bypassing privacy settings” to track the Web habits of people using Apple’s Safari browser, said Jennifer Valentino-DeVries in The Wall Street Journal. The Internet giant placed small tracking files, called cookies, on phones and computers of users who didn’t want to be tracked. Google says it has halted the practice, but Microsoft charged that Google also circumvented privacy controls on the Internet Explorer browser. Three congressmen have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google is violating its recent privacy settlement.

And in Europe, the new Google policy breaks the law.

Data-protection agencies ini Europe have concluded that Google's new privacy policy is in breach of European law. France's data-protection watchdog, the CNIL, has also cast doubt on the legality of the policy and informed Google that it would lead a Europe-wide investigation. Google said in January that it was simplifying its privacy policy, consolidating 60 guidelines into a single one that will apply to all its services. - Reuters

- As seen in The Week
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Google is Hiring and Paying Big Bucks

2012-02-28T11:59:00.004-08:00

Google will pay you $1 Million if you can hack its Web browser.

According to Forbes, Chrome has entered an international hacking contest called Pwn2Own (see also: pwn) for the past three years and has been left untouched, while other brand name browsers like Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell victim to hacker cyberattacks. So why the huge cash prize? Google explains that it's asking for a detailed report of how the hacker was able to exploit the browser (which is not an official condition of the contest). That information will go into making future releases of Chrome even safer. "Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing," write Chrome security engineers Chris Evans and Justin Schuh. It all goes down next week as part of the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

Google is also hiring engineers to design and test the self-driving cars it's been working on.

According to LinkedIn, the following listings were posted within the last two weeks of February, 2012:

Automotive System Test Engineer. The job listing doesn't have much detail, but requires experience in the automotive industry.
System Test Engineer, Special Projects. This is apparently all about designing safety systems. From the listing: "As a System Test Engineer, you will design and execute test plans and procedures for automotive active safety systems. You will also be responsible for performing technical performance analyses of a variety of electronic and mechanical systems under test and writing detailed test and defect reports that summarize the test results."
Industrial Designer, Special Projects. This person will be working on automotive applications. We suppose it could mean navigation apps for Android, or something like that, but the "Special Projects" listing makes it sound like it's part of Sergey Brin's group. Brin is known to be overseeing the cars project. From the posting: "As an Industrial Designer focused on automotive applications, you will be working across a broad range of influence levels and within an interdisciplinary team with hardware, software, and user experience experts."

Last fall, we heard that the self-driving cars team had about 50 engineers and was working with major car companies. Several folks in Silicon Valley have seen the self-driving cars on the highway throughout February 2012. Google has also posted a couple job listings for "augmented reality" experts, and Wired speculates those jobs are for the glasses it's building (see: AR headset 8-)

- As seen in Business Insider
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Online Dangers for Children - New Report Exposes the Top 10 Myths of Internet Safety

2012-02-22T01:21:00.000-08:00

Researchers published a list of the top 10 myths about Internet safety for children to show how many peoples' knowledge of online dangers are out of date. Among common mistakes is the belief that putting a PC in the family living room will help keep young people away from risky behavior.

In fact, say the team from EU Kids Online, children find it so easy to go online at a friend's house or on a smartphone that this advice is out of date. Parents are better advised to talk to their children about their Internet habits or join them in some online activity.

Another common myth highlighted in the study is that children know more than adults about the digital world – in fact only just over one in three youngsters are sure that they know more than their parents.

The top 10 list is published as part of the final report of EU Kids Online – a research project based at the London School of Economics and Political Science which surveyed 25,000 children and their parents across Europe to understand where the true online risks and opportunities lie. Funded by the European Commission's Safer Internet Program, the project aims to give policy makers the best possible advice on how to educate and protect against risks such as bullying, pornographic or inappropriate content and making contacts with unsuitable people in the real world.

The report makes a series of recommendations to governments, industry, children, parents and teachers which range from a call for more user-friendly parental controls and online safety features to ensuring children also lead a rich life away from the computer.

Professor Sonia Livingstone, who headed the project, said: "Most people have concerns about the Internet and the effects it can have on a new digital generation of children. But are they concerned about the right things?

'Our study showed that in general they are not. Often their view of how children behave online is out of date and needs updating – that's why we included the list of Top 10 myths in our report. For example, while parents worry more about 'stranger danger', children find cyberbullying the most upsetting risk. Also, it's interesting to note that the parents who are most worried have children who encounter no more risks than children of parents who aren't worried.

"Often people also don't appreciate that the digital world brings both risks and opportunities for young people, or that risk isn't automatically a bad thing as it may give children a chance to learn how to cope and become resilient. It's only by understanding and balancing these things that we'll be able to give children the practical help they need to get the best from the Internet and other online activity.

"The work our team of researchers has done offers governments, parents and teachers the most comprehensive insight yet into how to help."

The Top 10 Myths about Children's Online Risks

1. Digital natives know it all.
Only 36% of 9-16-year-olds say it is very true that they know more about the Internet than their parents. This myth obscures children's needs to develop digital skills.

2. Everyone is creating their own content.
The study showed that only one in five children had recently used a file-sharing site or created an avatar, half that number wrote a blog. Most children use the Internet for ready-made content.

3. Under 13s can't use social networking sites.
Although many sites (including Facebook) say that users must be aged at least 13, the survey shows that age limits don't work – 38% of 9-12-year-olds have a social networking profile. Some argue age limits should be scrapped to allow greater honesty and protective action.

4. Everyone watches porn online.
One in seven children saw sexual images online in the past year. Even allowing for under-reporting, this myth has been partly created by media hype.

5. Bullies are baddies.
The study shows that 60% who bully (online or offline) have themselves been bullied. Bullies and victims are often the same people.

6. People you meet on the Internet are strangers.
Most online contacts are people children know face-to-face; 9% met offline people they'd first contacted online – most didn't go alone and only 1% had a bad experience.

7. Offline risks migrate online.
This is not necessarily true. While children who lead risky offline lives are more likely to expose themselves to danger online, it cannot be assumed that those who are low-risk offline are protected while online.

8. Putting the PC in the living room will help.
Children find it so easy to go online at a friend's house or on a smartphone that this advice is out of date. Parents are better advised to talk to their children about their Internet habits or join them in some online activity.

9. Teaching digital skills reduces online risk.
Actually the more digital skills a child has, the more risks they are likely to encounter as they broaden their online experience. What more skills can do is reduce the potential harm that risks can bring.

10. Children can get around safety software.
In fact, fewer than one in three 11-16 year-olds say they can change filter preferences. And most say their parents' actions to limit their Internet activity is helpful.

- For a copy of the full report and further information about EU Kids Online visit their site at www.eukidsonline.net
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Facebook's "Like" Button, bet you didn't know...

2012-02-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

It's just a little, clickable icon. But Facebook's "Like" button, with its omnipresent "thumbs up" symbol, has made the company billions of dollars. The story of the button's creation can be traced to a core group of Facebook veterans.

Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth posted his version of the button's history on Quora.com in 2010. Bosworth writes that he and a small group of co-workers worked on the project, codenamed “Props.” They debated other ideas including plus/minus signs and star ratings. According to Bosworth’s post, the Like button was originally going to be called the "Awesome" button. Apparently, founder Mark Zuckerberg put the kibosh on that idea.

The idea for the Like button began in 2007, according to Bosworth. There has been some debate over the years over whether Facebook copied the "Like" name from rival site FriendFeed. According to Bosworth, Facebook was working on the concept months before Friendfeed pushed out its own "Like" feature. Facebook unleashed the Like button in February 2009.

Whatever the timing, the success of the button can't be overstated. Rapper Eminem is the most "liked" person on Facebook. As of press time, the Detroit native had more than 52.5 million "likes." Others in his rarefied air include Lady Gaga (47.5 million), Rihanna (50.8 million), and Katy Perry (39 million).

The button itself is clicked millions of times every hour. Facebook doesn't publicly release stats on just how popular the button is, but back in 2010 (which, we admit, is an eon in Web years), 7.6 million pages were "liked" every 20 minutes, according to independent blog Business and Facebook.

According to Facebook's recent S1 IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the site's users "generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011." Break those numbers down, and it comes out to 112,500,000 Likes and Comments ever hour or about 1,875,000 every minute or, to break it down even further, around 31,250 Likes and Comments every second.

Now we're just waiting for the "Love" button!

As seen in Yahoo! Finance
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How to Get the NetLingo Blog Emailed Straight to Your Inbox

2012-02-08T01:51:00.000-08:00

I've received emails from people asking how to subscribe to the NetLingo blog. My answer is that it is really easy to get the NetLingo blog delivered straight to your inbox! The NetLingo blog email delivery is powered by Google, so here's what you do:

Go to this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/netlingoblog

In the top right box, click on the link that says "Get NetLingo: The Blog - Improve Your Internet IQ delivered by email" (it's the second link from the bottom inside the box).

This will open a small window by Feedburner where you enter your email address: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=netlingoblog

Once you enter your email address (and the code to prove you're not a spambot) then click the button that says "Complete Subscription Request." You will then receive a verification message in your inbox where you must click on a link in order to activate your subscription.

And that's it :-) It takes less than 1 minute!

To view past blogs, just bookmark: http://netlingo.blogspot.com or join our fan page on Facebook: http://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/NetLingo/54388005468

Cheers,
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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:-)

Facebook's IPO, yes it's a big deal!

2012-02-01T13:07:00.001-08:00

Facebook is widely expected to file for its IPO this week, with an actual offering date some time in May. It will be one of the biggest public offerings of any company in history -- Facebook plans to raise up to $10 billion at a $100 billion valuation.

But the fact that Facebook is so widely used makes it a hugely symbolic event as well. Normal people who otherwise would never care about a tech company hitting the public markets are going to be paying attention to this one.

In coming years, the Facebook IPO will probably stand out as a once-per-decade event in the tech industry, alongside these other biggies:

* Apple's IPO in 1980 kicked off the personal computer era.
Apple's IPO kicked off the personal computing era, but the company blew its early lead. IBM launched its PC a little later, but it really took Microsoft to open the PC market to dozens of low-cost clones, crystalize the vision -- a computer on every desk and in every home -- and figure out that software, more than hardware, would drive adoption.

* Netscape's IPO in 1995 launched the Internet era.
Before Netscape, the Internet was a tool for academics and nerds. Six months after Netscape went public, the phrase "dot-com" started showing up in TV commercials, and dozens of eventual Internet giants -- from Yahoo to Amazon -- followed. Netscape eventually got crushed by Microsoft's decision to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows (as well as by its own missteps), but the dot-com era was no doubt the Netscape era.

* The iPhone launch in 2007 began the mobile era.
Palm, RIM, Microsoft and a few other companies had built combination phone-computers before 2007, but Apple took the concept and pushed it into the mainstream, with a lot of help from Google's fast-following Android and all its hardware partners. In a short five years, Microsoft has lost its monopoly on Internet-connected clients, everybody has an "app store," and (as William Gibson once pointed out), the silhouetted figure of a person checking a smartphone has replaced the cigarette smoker as the most common scene on a city street.

* The Facebook IPO will kick off the social era.

In each case, these companies did not just launch products. They launched platforms on which thousands or millions of others could make their own businesses, and in the process changed what people did with technology. Facebook is doing the same thing with social. The importance of Facebook's IPO is not about Facebook the product, where people go to share pictures of their kids or their high scores on Farmville.

The importance is Facebook the platform, which allows developers to build social experiences into everything they create, regardless of the computing device that users have in front of them. Whether it's a desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, even a dumb phone, Facebook is building a platform that will let you share what you do.

There will of course be competing platforms -- Google is trying with Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own spins, and companies like Box and Jive and Yammer might end up carving out the "Facebook for the enterprise" niche. But five years ago, a lot of people scoffed at the idea that mainstream computer users would want to share everything they did online. Now, the idea is taken for granted.

In another five years, we'll barely remember a time when it was HARD to share what you're doing, watching, hearing, or thinking with thousands of other people in real time.

(Oh and by the way, Google's IPO was a huge event, but it didn't kick off a new era in computing -- nobody else has a search business but Google, and the rise of Web apps and cloud computing, while significant, had its roots in the dot-com era and was driven forward as much by enterprise companies like Salesforce as it was by Google.)

-As seen in Business Insider
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Escaping Online in 2011

2012-01-25T01:24:00.000-08:00

The sputtering economy in 2011 left us feeling fed up and disengaged, but at least we could escape online. So how exactly did we enjoy ourselves? In the last of a series of summing up 2011, this blog reveals how more and more, we find pleasure online.

On any given day, 58% go online for no other reason than to have fun or pass the time (Pew Research Center), and 37% turn to the Internet to help diagnose their illnesses (Marist Poll).

65% visit social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but 7% have gotten in trouble at school or work, and 7% think they’ve lost a potential job, because of a comment or picture they shared online (Harris Interactive). Nonetheless, 27% of men and 23% of women say they have been photographed nude, and 16% have used their cellphones for “sexting”—sending naked photos or erotic messages to a partner.

The fun and games aren’t limited to partners, however: 31% of men and 26% of women admit to contacting an ex via Facebook or email. In a world where everyone is connected, trust doesn’t come easily: 41% of men and 47% of women have suspected their partners of cheating (Playboy/Harris Interactive).

- As seen in The Week
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The 4 Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011

2012-01-19T02:43:00.000-08:00

From neutrinos to new planets, a look at some of the most important scientific discoveries in 2011.

1. Upending the laws of physics
Researchers at the CERN laboratory in Geneva announced in September that they'd clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. That finding directly contradicts Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, which holds that nothing can outrun light. If neutrinos can, they could arrive at a destination before they even left, opening the prospect of time travel. Or could it be that neutrinos move through an undiscovered fifth dimension, separate from the three dimensions of space and one of time that we know about? Those ideas are so shocking that even the CERN team "wanted to find a mistake" in their data, says team leader Antonio Ereditato. But they didn't. And so far, further testing has failed to dismiss the finding, says theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler, as "a doorway into something fundamental and deep we don't know about nature."

2. Reasons to listen to your gut
Bacteria in our intestines may play a major role in the health of our minds and bodies. German researchers have discovered that just as each human being has a specific blood type, each of us also has one of three separate families of bacteria residing in our guts. A person's "enterotype" likely establishes itself in infancy and appears to affect everything from how well food is digested to how drugs are absorbed. The discovery of the three distinct gut ecosystems "was a surprise, and it's good news," says researcher Peer Bork. The finding could help physicians diagnose and treat serious digestive disorders, and also help explain why the effects of medicines and nutrients vary widely from person to person. Further studies have shown that ingesting a bacteria species found in certain yogurts and cheeses calms stressed-out mice — pointing to the prospect of treating psychiatric disorders with microbes instead of drugs.

3. Closing in on alien life
A galaxy-wide search for Earth-like planets has returned a startling number of candidates. Using NASA's Kepler space telescope, astronomers this year announced they'd spotted 2,326 new worlds and counting. Ten of those planets are close in size to our own and orbit their suns in the "habitable zone," where temperatures could be balmy enough to support liquid water — and potentially life. The best contender yet, Kepler-22b, looks to be a hospitable 72 degrees and circles a star very similar to our sun. The data pouring in from the spacecraft, launched in March 2009, are "game-changing," says Kepler principal investigator William Borucki. "It's just a tremendous amount of new knowledge." Already, other researchers are scanning the most promising Kepler finds for signs of alien life.

4. A new weapon against aging
The fountain of youth might one day flow within our own cells. Scientists working with mice have discovered that if they remove a special kind of cell that promotes aging, a host of age-related conditions disappear: The genetically modified rodents didn't develop cataracts, their skin didn't wrinkle, and they maintained high levels of energy throughout their lives. The so-called senescent cells have lost the ability to divide, and as they build up in aging tissue, they release toxins that destroy robust neighboring cells. Scientists devised a way of killing off those senescent cells, and the procedure "suggests therapies that might work in real patients," says Norman E. Sharpless, an expert on aging. If purging the cells works in people as it does in mice, the treatment could ward off a host of age-related diseases, from cancer to dementia, and keep us vigorous longer.

- As seen in The Week
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Websites Go Dark Today Over Piracy Bills

2012-01-18T07:23:00.001-08:00

Need to look something up (other than an Internet term)? You won't find it on Wikipedia--for today anyway.

The popular online encyclopedia plans to black out its English-language pages for 24 hours starting today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. Popular sites Reddit, Boing Boing and others are also set to go dark today, January 18, 2012.

The two bills which are making the rounds through Congress, would grant the government the power to shut down website with content that infringes on copyright laws. Opponents content that the bills would cut too deeply into freedom of speech.

The point is the bills are so over-broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC.

Twitter, however, won't be joint the protest. CEO Dick Costolo tweeted his view Monday that "closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

- As seen in The Wall St. Journal

The 3 Worst Tech Predictions of 2011

2012-01-11T02:02:00.000-08:00

When it comes to digital prognostications, some guesses actually stick — but not in these cases. What would we do without the rumor mill? Whether it's a proclamation from a business analyst with "insider" know-how or a whisper strung along by anonymous sources, for every correct tech prediction at least a dozen misguided ones are left out in the cold. Here, a look back at the year's most flat-out wrong guesses — just in case you've forgotten:

1. The "ultra sexy" iPhone 5
Remember how the latest iPhone was supposed to be an "ultra sexy" redesign with a "radical new case design"? In the pre-Siri era back in April, the website formerly known as This Is My Next published a sneak-peek mock-up illustrating a much thinner iPhone, featuring a larger screen and a rounded teardrop-shape profile, "based on information from a variety of sources," as editor in chief Joshua Topolsky put it. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and other sources were hinting heavily that a separate "cheaper iPhone" would debut alongside the iPhone 5. Instead, the spunky Siri-equipped iPhone 4S — an attention-getting upgrade, but not a new incarnation — arrived alone.

2. Amazon will never make a tablet
When rumors of a sub-$300 Amazon tablet began swirling back in August, several writers scoffed at the idea of an iPad challenger. Just "another round of tech headlines so clearly penned by Apple-hating geeks, who will do and say and write anything in the hopes of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy," declared Timmy Falcon at Beatweek Magazine. How, asked the Los Angeles Times, could an unconfirmed tablet "prompt such an optimistic, multimillion-sales forecast?" Fast-forward to November, when Amazon released its Kindle Fire touchscreen tablet, priced at $200, and shipped an estimated 5 million units in less than a month.

3. Facebook's Netflix impersonation
Back in September, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to announce some "massive" changes to his 800-million strong social network, the biggest of which was a new type of profile dubbed Timeline. In the days leading up to Zuckerberg's announcement, several bloggers predicted he would also unveil Facebook's version of a comprehensive "movie rental service" a la Netflix — yet "another effort to make Facebook's website 'stickier.'" Despite the hype, the feature hasn't seen the light of day. At least not yet.

- As seen in The Week
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Is Apple losing its 'cool factor'?

2012-01-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

One critic says the mighty Apple will lose its "cool factor" in 2012, as sexy new Android smartphones steal the spotlight.

A new year never fails to bring a flood of predictions from eager crystal-ball gazers. Tech analysts are no exception. Investor's Business Daily's Brian Deagon forecasts that 2012 will be the year that "Apple will lose its cool factor," as new gadgets like the latest Samsung Galaxy smartphones prove to be more exciting than the iPhone. Will Apple really fall from the pedestal of trendiness that it's long occupied?

Yes. Apple is on the way out: Sure, Apple "redefined markets and defined cool" with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad," says Deagon. But now what? "The iPhone is boxy, flat and feeling stale," and "the Samsung Galaxy smartphone seems cooler." As smartphone and tablets become cheaper and more widely adopted, Apple will be overshadowed by the many Android options. Plus, Apple is pinning its hopes on getting into the TV market, but that will be "a tough nut to crack," especially given that Samsung is already dominant in that industry.

Not quite: Sure, iPhones might not be as eye-popping as some Android phones, but "Apple is not going to lose its cool… for a long time," says Dan Rowinski at ReadWriteWeb. The company has "legions of developers" coming up with cool apps for its gadgets, and that's a big advantage. It also has the best marketing around. While it's true that the iPad and iPhone are both due for some big updates, it's "pretty safe to say that Apple will continue being just as cool in 2012 as it has been in previous years."

In fact, Apple has a promising year ahead: Apple won't be on top forever, but it's doubtful that 2012 will be a bad year for the company, says Zach Epstein at BGR. Apple is set to launch a totally redesigned iPhone and "a Siri-fueled HDTV" in the new year — no small feats. Given that the same analyst that predicted Apple would lose its cool also forecast that "Twitter will totter" (huh?) and "BlackBerry will go the way of Palm" (duh), his opinions shouldn't be taken too seriously. What do you think?

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What We Googled in 2011... really?

2011-12-30T03:07:00.000-08:00

In a short video and an extensive data site, Google Zeitgeist takes us back... and shames us with what we have searched for in 2011. This year we searched Google for answers about Rebecca Black, Steve Jobs, Google+, and the nonexistent iPhone 5.

The video: In December 2011, Google released its annual list of "the searches that compose the year's Zeitgeist — the spirit of the time." Google compiles its Zeitgeist reports by scouring billions of Google searches around the world and identifying the fastest-rising queries. You can delve deep into the data at its Zeitgeist 2011 website, and/or just watch its year-in-review video of top search topics (view it below). Topping the search list of world-captivating things: Rebecca Black, famous for a much-mocked music video. Next on the Top 10 list are Google+, deceased Jackass star Ryan Dunn, acquitted murder suspect Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, the nonexistent iPhone 5, Adele, Fukushima I Plant, Steve Jobs, and the iPad2.

The reaction: Holy cow, "if this is the spirit of our time, then we are living in a sad time," says Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. What we apparently think "mattered" doesn't get any better if you dig through Zeitgeist a little deeper: Planking? "Tom Brady Haircut"? Google is showing us that we're, collectively, "awful people." Hey, "it was a weird year," says Jon Mitchell in ReadWriteWeb. Yes, the Arab Spring, the death of Osama bin Laden, and lots of other weighty things are more important than Adele, but with so many "grim and tumultuous events" in 2011, maybe we can be excused for our "mostly frivolous" googling. I'm in the "shame on humanity" camp, says Nitasha Tiku in BetaBeat. But Google's video retrospective is "actually quite moving," if you can ignore "the hideous Coldplay soundtrack — and that thing about Rebecca Black." Watch the video here...

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Let’s Talk Tech: News in Review - Dec, 2011

2011-12-24T04:12:00.000-08:00

What a month in tech it’s been! Here are some of the top stories…

Tech News Stories of the Month

Occupy Everything on the Web
There's a "digital land grab underway” thanks to Occupy Wall Steer, said Suzanne Woolley in Bloomberg Businessweek, Internet domain registrar Go Daddy.com has sold 5,200 domain names with “Occupy” in them from September to early Novemeber, compared with 80 from January throught August.” People have snatch up everything from Occupy Boston to Occupy KStreet. There are sites dedicated to White House hopefuls (Occupy Herman Cain) the holidays (Occupy Hanukkah), and various locales (Occupy The Sea, Occupy the Universe), There’s Occupy This and Occupy That, Occupy You and Occupy and Occupy Me. Jordan Fainberg wants people in Occupy Bethesda in a conventional sense: by buying one of the Bethsesda, MA, houses the real estate agent has listed on ihns site. “It’s getting a bunch of hits.”

Privacy Dies with a Whimper
It may sound Orwellian, but GPS tracking is just the next step in the rapid erosion of privacy that followed 9/11, said Jonathan Turley at The Washington Post. How much privacy should Americans expect? asked Jonathan Turley. The answer to that question may determine whether the government will soon have the right to track you 24 hours a day, without a warrant. Under current law, the government needs a warrant to conduct any kind of surveillance that intrudes on a citizen’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” But in a new case before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration last week argued that police should not be required to get a warrant to affix a GPS tracker to your car, to see if you’re involved in crimes; when driving, you really can’t expect any privacy, can you? It may sound Orwellian, but GPS tracking is just the next step in the rapid erosion of privacy that followed 9/11. Out of its fear of terrorism, the public has accepted airport pat-downs, surveillance of phone calls and emails, and constant monitoring by TV cameras in public places and offices. In this brave new world, we think Big Brother makes us safer. So don’t be surprised when privacy disappears altogether. “The problem is not with the government but with us.” Marking that shot “friends only” won’t prevent an online buddy from copying the picture and distributing it, said Farhad Manjoo at Slate.com. “Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that Facebook has reformed,” said Farhad Manjoo. After a series of privacy violations and a Federal Trade Commission investigation, the social-media boss last week admitted that his site had “made a bunch of mistakes,” and he promised to give users greater control over how they share information. But Facebook’s privacy issues are as much our fault as Zuckerberg’s. Too many users seem to believe they can control who gets to see the private thoughts and photos they post to a site with 800 million users throughout the world. Facebook was designed to be “one of the most intrusive technologies ever built,” a vehicle for sharing personal information. Upload a photo of your drunken antics, and it’s on the Internet, stored on dozens of servers around the world. Marking that shot “friends only” won’t prevent an online buddy from copying the picture and distributing it. So next time you’re wondering about whether you should post something on Facebook, remember this simple rule: “The only sure way to keep something private on Facebook is not to post it to Facebook.”

Just 4.74 Degrees of Separation
Popular wisdom says that only “six degrees of separation” stand between you and anyone else. Now, a new Facebook study says we’re getting more closely linked than that. University of Milan researchers analyzed the “friend” links among Facebook’s 721 million members. On average, only 4.74 hops from friend to friend were needed to bring any two members together, as opposed to 5.28 three years ago. That means “when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend,” Facebook says. The data highlight how useful social-networking sites can be to researchers studying the behavior of extremely large groups of people. But the new networks created by social media may not be as strong as friendships made the old-fashioned way. Facebook, Cornell computer scientist Jon Kleinberg tells The New York Times, allows us to be “close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us, or have anything in common with us.” What Teens Don’t Know about Google Other studies have also shown that students really don’t bother trying to assess the credibility of information found online, said Clive Thompson at Wired.com. Young people are supposedly our most Web-literate citizens, said Clive Thompson. “But just how savvy are they?” Not very: They simply swallow whatever they find on Google. To study kids’ online-search skills, scientific researchers asked a group of students to look up answers to a series of questions. Not surprisingly, the kids relied on Web pages at the top of Google’s results list. When researchers switched the order of results, most students were easily tricked, and relied on the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Other studies have also shown that students really don’t bother trying to assess the credibility of information found online. Is an “article” a disguised advertisement? Was that profile of Martin Luther King Jr. actually posted by white supremacists? The average high school and college student is unable to discern the hidden agendas. This naivete is largely the fault of schools, which rarely teach critical thinking. And mastering “crap detection 101” isn’t easy; you need to be savvy about the world and how it works. Ultimately, a broad-based education is the only “true key to effective search.”

Here’s One Way New Terms are Created…
Union officials are not just complaining about “normal outsourcing”—their beef is with “Asianization,” said Chris Berg at the Sydney Morning Herald. The union dispute that grounded the entire Qantas fleet for two days last month has a nasty racial component, said Chris Berg. Union members are furious that Qantas is considering locating some of its operations abroad. But they’re not just complaining about “normal outsourcing”—their beef is with “Asianization.” That’s a clear “dog whistle” to racists. Google the term, and you’re buried in pages offering “manic claims about the Yellow Peril and warning about our national suicide.” This is no accident. Protectionism in Australia has often been linked to xenophobia. The “White Australia” immigration policy of the first half of the 20th century was led by a union movement that wanted to squelch labor competition. It explicitly encouraged employers to fire “colored” workers and replace them with white union members. Use of the term “Asianization” should have brought a chorus of outraged denunciation from our pro-multicultural, liberal media—and it would have, if a conservative had uttered it. But because it was a union leader calling for protection of Australian jobs, we didn’t hear a peep. So let me say it: “Warnings that Qantas will be ‘Asianized’ are ugly, xenophobic, and just plain wrong.”

Censorship, no matter where you are, is Never a Good Thing
Pakistan is having a bad month, and to top it all off, they've notified phone companies it would ban 1,109 "obscene" English words from text messages, including "quickie," "condom," "flatulence," and "periord." Really? I wondered what Siri will do! Who’s Siri, see next update…

Siri: Artificial Intelligence Becomes more Human
Apple’s voice-activated “virtual assistant” for the new iPhone 4S can talk in clear, conversational English. She can text your kids with words you dictate aloud. She can book you an appointment online. She knows precisely where you are, and can find the nearest Chinese restaurant, call a cab for you, and tell you what the traffic will be like on the way. Her name is Siri, said Brandon Griggs in CNN.com, and she’s Apple’s voice-activated “virtual assistant” for the new iPhone 4S. Simply by speaking to your phone, you can tell Siri to perform any number of tasks—and she can talk back, in clear, conversational English. Not incidentally, this dutiful assistant has a female name and “distinctly female” voice. Does that mean Apple is relying on—and reinforcing—gender stereotypes? It’s a fair question, said Rebecca J. Rosen in TheAtlantic.com. Like most disembodied computer voices, Siri evokes the pleasantly compliant and submissive female assistant, as she goes about “classic personal secretary tasks.” Chauvinists might enjoy the idea of having a female secretary in their pocket, said Michael Agger in Slate.com. But Siri is no doormat. Apple wisely has given Siri a tart and witty personality. Curse at her, and she’ll tut: “Now, now.” Ask her to “talk dirty,” and she’ll say, “Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel.” Call her a bitch, and she will make you feel ridiculous: “Why do you hate me?” she’ll say. “I don’t even exist.” As a result, she comes across less as a sexy secretary than as a “second-grade teacher,” quick with a sarcastic response but also “willing to patiently explain.” It makes Siri so life-like, you almost forget that “the intelligence we’re dealing with is artificial.” That’s the plan, said Jon Stokes in Wired.com. Siri is a “cloud” application, meaning that Apple’s developers can update her “canned responses” in real time based on user inquiries. Over time, she’ll be able to draw on the questions of tens of millions of users and the responses by hundreds of Apple employees. As she gets smarter and smarter, you’ll be able to talk with Siri in a way that is almost indistinguishable from “intelligent conversation.” Hello, future, said Alexis Madrigal in TheAtlantic.com. Humans have always dreamed of creating a “talking automaton” that speaks “in the natural language that defines being human.” Siri is a big step in that direction. As she listens and learns from us, and helps organize our lives, she will transform “how we interact with our computers.”

Health Scare of the Month: Does Wi-Fi damage sperm?
An experiment by researchers in Argentina suggests that radiation from a Wi-Fi–enabled laptop may be strong enough to cause cell damage in sperm. If you’re worried about infertility, don’t try to Google the term with a computer on your lap, says the London Telegraph. A new experiment suggests that radiation from a single Wi-Fi–enabled laptop may be strong enough to cause cell damage in sperm. Argentine researchers took samples of ejaculated semen and left them directly under a computer—simulating holding a laptop directly above male genitals. Within just four hours, 25 percent of the sperm stopped swimming, and 9 percent showed signs of DNA damage. A control group of sperm stored at the same temperature, but away from a computer, showed much less degradation. Researcher Conrado Avendano says his team suspects that electromagnetic radiation in wireless devices “positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality.” Scientists who specialize in fertility, however, say that sperm isolated outside the body are more vulnerable, and that further research is needed.

In Business Moves of the Month

War Video Game Sets Sales Record
The video game Modern Warfare 3 has set a sales record for the entertainment industry by grossing $775 million in global sales during its first five days on the market. The game, which retails for about $60, sold 6.5 million copies in North America and the United Kingdom on its first day alone.

Spotlight on Reid Hoffman
If you are a budding Internet entrepreneur, there’s really only one man you need to see for money, advice, and connections, said Evelyn M. Rusli in The New York Times. That’s Reid Hoffman, “the startup whisperer of Silicon Valley.” The co-founder of business-networking site LinkedIn, Hoffman is considered “something of a Yoda” in the social-media universe. “He’s the first stop for every hot deal,” says tech investor David Siminoff. A “nerd’s nerd” who likes to wax philosophical about the future of technology, Hoffman got his first job at age 12 when he “thrust a manual, marked with his suggestions in red ink,” into the hands of a fantasy-game developer. It was the beginning of his fascination with the way multiplayer games, and later social networks, come together. Hoffman “created the original social network, a dating service called SocialNet, in 1997,” said Nicole Perlroth in Forbes.com. It flopped, but Hoffman learned from his mistakes and has helped “create nearly every significant social network since.” He’s also moonlighted as a tech investor for more than a decade, seeding early money in companies like Facebook, Zynga, and Flickr. Today he has a second full-time job, at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, where he invests in the “next generation of promising tech startups.”

Spotlight on Drew Houston
Drew Houston, the CEO of digital-storage service Dropbox, didn’t merely refuse to sell his company to the famously determined Steve Jobs in 2009, said Victoria Barret in Forbes. He refused Jobs’s nine-figure offer. Even then, Houston knew he had one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched companies, and it’s only gotten better in the two years since. Dropbox, which gives people access to their files from any device, has had a “stunning ascent.” Its users have tripled in the last year, to 50 million, with “another joining every second.” Revenue is projected to hit $240 million this year even though 19 out of 20 users pay nothing. Little wonder, then, that the company recently became a verb (“Dropbox me”) and landed $250 million in venture funding to expand. Houston, 28, came up with the idea for Dropbox when he forgot to bring a USB stick on a long bus trip, said Jennifer Saba in Reuters.com. He is determined to stay independent and isn’t concerned about competition from Apple’s iCloud. “We were not the first or the 10th or the 100th company to have this idea,” says Houston. But “if it were easy to build, someone would have built it already.”

Tech: Yelp Hopes to Raise $100 million in IPO
Yelp, the website of user reviews of businesses and restaurants, wants to become “the latest unprofitable Internet company to go public,” said Douglas MacMillan in Bloomberg.com. The San Francisco–based company, founded in 2004, has filed for an initial public offering next year that could raise as much as $100 million. The announcement seems timed to build on the success of online coupon site Groupon, whose IPO last month generated $700 million despite the company’s lack of profits. “Investors are open to taking bets on companies that are generating losses” right now, said IPO analyst Tom Taulli.

Crowdfunding your Start-Up
“Need start-up capital—and fast?” asked Sarah E. Needleman in The Wall Street Journal. An increasing number of start-up entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.com and IndieGoGo.com, which allow contributors to pledge money to developing businesses. The funds are gifts, not loans, and the campaigns must be completed in a set time frame and reach preset goals; otherwise funds won’t be released or the sites will take a bigger commission. But many campaigns bear fruit, says Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo.com. For the best results, he says, “have a good pitch, be proactive, and find an audience that cares.”

And In Tech Gossip…
Charlie Sheen: A Tweet meant for Justin Bieber went to Sheen's 5.5 million followers instead. Charlie Sheen could use a Twitter tutorial, said the London Daily Mail. The actor, 46, was overwhelmed by phone calls and text messages last week after he tried to send a private Twitter message to Justin Bieber, but instead tweeted it to his 5.5 million followers. “310-954-7277 Call me bro. C,” wrote Sheen. “Charlie’s phone immediately went into meltdown,” said a friend. “It was ringing wildly, and he got 1,800 text messages in minutes.” Sheen later changed his number.

- As seen in The Week
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