Sunday, December 29, 2013

It would move the cost of storage from the NSA budget to the far less efficient individual carriers. I can see this appealing to politicians who seems to believe that “If a thing is worth doing, we should do it as inefficiently as possible.”
Phone companies say 'no way' to storing phone data for NSA
… Major phone companies argue that being required to store metadata for an extended period of time for the NSA would be costly, time consuming, and risky, according to a report from The Washington Post on Saturday.


It's not a crazy as it sounds. Think of “HealthBook” as very similar to FaceBook, but without the bad privacy decisions. Business opportunity?
We’d all be better off with our health records on Facebook
A Facebook user’s timeline provides both a snapshot of who that user is and a historical record of the user’s activity on Facebook. My Facebook timeline is about me, and fittingly, I control it. It’s also one, single profile. Anyone I allow to view my timeline views my timeline—they don’t each create their own copies of it.
… In medical records: The “about” section would be a snapshot of the patient’s health and background. It should include the patient’s age, gender, smoking status, height, weight, address, phone number, and emergency contact information; the patient’s primary care provider; and insurance information. This section would include a summary list of the patient’s current diagnoses and medications, as well as family history. And importantly, both the doctor and the patient would be able to add details.

(Related) On the other hand...
Facebook Is ‘Dead and Buried’ to Teens, and That’s Just Fine for Facebook
Anthropologist Daniel Miller has been studying British teens, and he has a dire message for Facebook: The social network is “dead and buried” to Britain’s 16-to-18-year-olds because they’re “embarrassed even to be associated with it.”
In a recent article for academic clearinghouse The Conversation, Miller shares preliminary findings from a 15-month ethnographic study of social media in eight countries, and explains that Facebook is “so uncool” to teens because their parents and other family members are using it to keep tabs on them.
You just can’t be young and free if you know your parents can access your every indiscretion,” Miller writes. “Young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool anymore.”


This is interesting. Take an old document and translate it to use new technology.
Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 28, 2013
Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas’s nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.”


Could explain why students fail my math classes...
New research suggests that people even solve math problems differently if their political ideology is at stake
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 28, 2013
“Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don’t realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs. The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their “numeracy,” that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a “new cream for treating skin rashes.” But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of “a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.”


Easier than a garage sale?
– is the fastest, most efficient way to list items to online marketplaces like eBay. It simplifies and demystifies the process of listing items, and can be used on any smartphone, tablet, or desktop. WorldLister intuitively guides you step-by-step and generates a complete, attractive listing.


Might be a useful tool for my Website students!
– is a tool to take existing HTML webpages off the web, extract the main content, and turn it into Markdown so you can store it as plain text. Whether you keep your notes in raw Markdown, or render them into HTML or Rich Text for another organizer, Marky will give you clean markup and easy-to-edit notes.


I'm not sure my students would be interested in “games from ancient history.”
Hundreds of Classic Console Games Can Now Be Played Online, Free
Thanks to the good people at the Internet Archive, classic console video games like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Asteroids, Dig Dug, and Pac Man are now fully playable online. The games, released as the Internet Archive Console Living Room, are also available for free downloads. They don't have sound yet, but the archive promises to get that up and running soon. And even though the collection isn't complete at this point, the archive promises to expand it "in the coming months." Because the archive has versions of each game available in an browser-based emulator, you can jump right in to the game of your choice without downloading any specialized software.
… For instance: the archive contains ET: The Extra Terrestrial, a game so bad that someone made a documentary about its failure. On the other hand, there's always Frogger, which is still excellent.
Some of the games even come with the original manual, which if nothing else, gives a good glimpse at the conceptual imagination behind the very sparse graphics game designers had to work with at the time.


For my Criminal Justice students...
Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting Reports


There's an App for that!
Top Apps
The Recapp

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