Social Networking/Web 2.0

Txting makes u stupid

Yeah, you knew that already. How else to explain the zombies who text while driving or randomly jaywalking in traffic, AGNWE*? But now there’s a reason: they have a tiny vocabulary. Textisms Or so says says University of Calgary linguistics researcher Joan Lee, who interviewed texters in research for her master’s thesis. Texting is associated [...]

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Blackout

“Better the government shut down than Wikipedia go on strike. That would be like part of my mind going on strike. Just give them [Wikipedia] whatever they want — we don’t even need to hear what it is.” — Ray Kurzweil

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Social networks, surveillance, and terrorism

“We are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve,” claims militant digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen, Betabeat reports. “And all of that data [...]

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How to learn things automatically

OK, this one’s right out of The Matrix and The Manchurian Candidate. Imagine watching a computer screen while lying down in a brain imaging machine and automatically learning how to play the guitar or lay up hoops like Shaq O’Neal, or even how to recuperate from a disease — without any conscious knowledge. Researchers at [...]

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The Internet, peer-reviewed

It could be one of the most important innovations on the Internet since the browser. Imagine an open-source, crowd-sourced, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web. In other words, a way to cut through the babble and restore some sanity and trust. That’s the idea behind Hypothes.is. It will work as an overlay on [...]

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How your memories can be twisted under social pressure

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these “planted” responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% [...]

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Eyez without a Facebook — live video lifelogging!

This just in from Aussie HIVE45 vidcaster Nathan Waters: “Someone is finally making *normal-looking* tech recording glasses! I have no affiliation with this product, but I would absolutely love if you added it to the news section to encourage more pledges for their Kickstarter funding. Here’s the link: Eyez by ZionEyez HD Video Recording Glasses [...]

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Robots invent spoken language, join Facebook

OK, I just made up the Facebook part, but IEEE Spectrum reported Tuesday on two robots that communicate linguistically like humans and invent new words. Spooky. They’re called “Lingodroids” (reminds me of Stephen King’s even spookier The Langoliers, which were robotic monsters dealing with a “time rip”). Researchers at the University of Queensland and Queensland [...]

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book review | Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In 1938, existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote “Hell is other people.” Sartre may never have cobbled together his existential philosophy that viewed human individuals as utterly alone — alienated, atomized beings in a vast meaningless universe — if he had grown up playing with social robots and holding others at a discreet psychological distance [...]

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Video conferencing with cardboard cutouts and random images on the walls

Hey, here’s an idea: How about creating an avatar by copying a face from a photo and pasting it onto a randomly generated avatar? Then a video conferencing service could put your brand new (or old) face, along with those of your friends, into one of several rooms, where you could all chat by voice. [...]

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