Hey! It's New Jersey. “Hate the
ex-boyfriend” isn't the same as “hate the gay guy.” (“Hate
the cop ex-boyfriend” is really really not the same)
Woman
accused of creating false Facebook page in ex-boyfriend’s name gets
probation
Peggy Wright reports:
A 41-year-old
woman was admitted today into a special probation program and agreed
to undergo a psychological evaluation to resolve a charge of creating
a scathing Facebook profile in the name of a Parsippany police
detective.
Without admitting
to the charge of identity theft, Dana Thornton, formerly of
Belleville, was accepted by Superior Court Judge David Ironson into
Morris County’s Pre-Trial Intervention program for first-time
offenders.
Thornton will be
supervised on probation for 12 months. She must perform 50 hours of
community service and submit to a psychological evaluation and follow
any recommendations for counseling.
I can’t help but compare this case to
the Dharun Ravi case. Both this woman and Ravi were first-time
offenders. Both engaged in online conduct that could have made
people feel embarrassed or harassed – or that could have harmed
reputations.
One – the older one, who should
presumably know better – gets probation. The younger one risks a
10-year prison term because his motivation wasn’t revenge for a
personal break-up but presumably bias.
Does this seem equitable to you?
Well, that clears things up...
How
Much Is Your Data Worth? Mmm, Somewhere Between Half a Cent and
$1,200
… For buyers, user data is dirt
cheap. User profiles -- slices of our digital selves -- are sold in
large chunks, i .e. at least 10,000 in a batch. On the high end,
they go for $0.005 per profile, according to advertising-industry
sources.
… Facebook and Google make roughly
$5
and
$20
per user, respectively. Without your data in one form or
another, their advertising would be mostly worthless, so perhaps your
data is worth something in that range.
But let's not forget the rest of the
Internet advertising ecosystem either, which
the
Internet Advertising Bureau says supported $300 billion in
economic activity last year. That's more than $1,200 per Internet
user and much of the online advertising industry's success is
predicated on the use of this kind of targeting data.
The Never-Ending Story.
"Google
has once again stood up in court for the rights of users and services
online, this time defending Hotfile from copyright infringement
accusations. [Quoting the article]: 'Google takes a sort of
hard-line approach via the DMCA, telling the court that however
the MPAA may try to mislead them, Hotfile
is in fact protected under safe harbor provisions. And
furthermore, Google suggests that the MPAA's approach is contrary
to the language in and precedents surrounding the DMCA. The onus
is on copyright holders to alert a service to the nature and location
of an infringement, and the service's responsibility is to alert the
user if possible and remove the material within a reasonable period
of time'"
Also sure to be amusing...
"Word from
Ars Technica is that OnLive, a service provided that seems to totally
flout Microsoft licensing and offers iPad users a Microsoft
Desktop for free (or a beefier one for $5) isn't being sued by
Microsoft as this
blog quotes: 'We are actively engaged with OnLive with the hope
of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario.' The people who
are angry include Guise Bule, CEO of tuCloud.
He accuses Microsoft of playing favorites with OnLive — whose CEO
is a former Microsoft executive — while regularly auditing license
compliance for companies like tuCloud that provide legitimate virtual
desktop services. Bule is so mad that he says he is forming an
entirely new company called DesktopsOnDemand to provide a service
identical to OnLive's, complete with licensing violations, and dare
Microsoft to take him to court. Bule hopes to force
Microsoft into lifting restrictions on virtual desktop licensing
that he says inhibit growth in the virtual desktop industry, and seem
to apply to everyone except OnLive."
One of the restrictions applied to
licensed remote desktop providers is that each user must have his own
dedicated machine (pretty onerous in the days of 16+ core servers
costing a mere grand or two).
How do news stories differ depending on
the media? Winston Churchill wrote long, opinionated articles for
“The Times.” It seems that news got shorter (if more colorful),
then had to be “entertaining,” and now can simply be “Peyton
Manning is a Bronco! Click here for more.”
March 19, 2012
Pew
Research Center - State of the News Media 2012
"In 2011, the digital revolution
entered a new era. The age of mobile, in which people are connected
to the web wherever they are, arrived in earnest. More than four in
ten American adults now own a smartphone. One in five owns a tablet.
New cars are manufactured with internet built in. With more
mobility comes deeper immersion into social networking. For news,
the new era brings mixed blessings. New research released in this
report,
The
State of the News Media 2012, finds that mobile devices are
adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of
traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form
journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for
instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are
taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news
throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their
laps. At the same time,
a more fundamental challenge
that we identified in this report last year has intensified — the
extent to which technology intermediaries now control the future of
news. Two trends in the last year overlap and reinforce
the sense that the gap between the news and technology industries is
widening. First, the explosion of new mobile platforms and social
media channels represents another layer of technology with which news
organizations must keep pace. Second, in the last year a small
number of technology giants began rapidly moving to consolidate their
power by becoming makers of “everything” in our digital lives.
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and a few others are maneuvering to
make the hardware people use, the operating systems that run those
devices, the browsers on which people navigate, the e-mail services
on which they communicate, the social networks on which they share
and the web platforms on which they shop and play. And all of this
will provide these companies with detailed personal data about each
consumer."
(Related?) Is communication just
communication? Are emoticons an adequate substitute for “tone of
voice?” (Do today's teens even recognize tone of voice?)
March 19, 2012
Pew:
Teens, Smartphones & Texting
Teens,
Smartphones & Texting - "Texting volume is up while the
frequency of voice calling is down. About one in four teens say they
own smartphones." Amanda Lenhart Senior Research Specialist, Pew
Internet Project
"Teens are fervent
communicators. Straddling childhood and adulthood, they communicate
frequently with a variety of important people in their lives:
friends and peers, parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, and a myriad
of other adults and institutions. This report examines the tools
teens use to communicate, with a particular focus on mobile devices,
and then places the use of those tools in the broader context of how
teens choose to communicate with people in their lives. The volume
of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day
in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user. In
addition, smartphones are gaining teenage users. Some 23% of all
those ages 12-17 say they have a smartphone and ownership is highest
among older teens: 31% of those ages 14-17 have a smartphone,
compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13."
Perspective (Some would say the
government is a drag on the economy)
Internet
accounts for 4.7% of U.S. economy
The Internet contributes more to the
American economy than the entire federal government, according to a
new study by the Boston Consulting Group.
The Internet accounted for $684
billion, or 4.7% of all U.S. economic activity in 2010, Boston
Consulting Group found. By way of comparison, the federal
government, contributed $625 billion, or 4.3%, to the nation's
output.
Some of my students don't have room for
more ink, but I can see temporary (but long term) tats with the logo
of your phone company being the hip new fashion accessory.
Nokia
Files Patent for Haptic Feedback Tattoo
… Discovered by
Unwired
View, Nokia’s
Haptic
Communication patent describes an electronic device, probably
your smartphone, that generates a magnetic field that stimulates
ferromagnetic ink that’s been stamped, tattooed, or taped to skin.
The ink’s reaction creates perceivable stimuli that responds to
digital content on the smartphone.
Translation: Notifications on a
smartphone will trigger a vibration in the magnetic ink attached to
your body. A text could trigger a specific vibration pattern, while
a voicemail could trigger another.
An Infographic for my student Geek Dads
(and Geek Moms)
Tech-savvy
dads: We're geeks and proud of it
According to a survey sponsored by
Cisco Home Networking
Business (who knew Cisco was in the business of geek dads?),
these self-proclaimed nerds are eager to pass on their high-tech
knowledge to their sons and daughters. And get this: instead of
retreating to their rooms and slamming their doors in that special
way only angst-ridden teens can, the kids are into it, giving both
parties an opportunity to spend more time together.
For my “geeks who write?”
(Interesting that the Amazon “Used” price is more than the “New”
price...)
"The Chicago Manual
of Style (CMS), now in its 16th edition, is the de facto
style guide for American writers. It deals with aspects of editorial
practice, grammar, usage, document preparation and more. It's just
one of many style guides for writers. The Microsoft
Manual of Style, just released in its 4th edition,
attempts to do for the technical writers what
the CMS has done for journalists and other writers."
Sometimes you want a tool that is “just
like X, but isn't X” fortunately there are probably hundreds of
them – unfortunately they are not always easy to find.
If you are looking for a free
alternative to Google Docs for your group document editing needs,
Substance is a great option for you. The web-based writer is much
like Microsoft Word, only a little simpler. It’s easy to use and
navigate for users of all levels. Best of all, because it is open
source, it’s one hundred percent free!
You can invite an unlimited number of
other users to edit the document with you. Users can subscribe to a
document to be alerted whenever a change is made. This way, you will
always be in the loop with what your collaborators are doing to the
document. If you are working with a large document, they will have a
convenient table of contents feature.
People still use paper? How Egyptian!
Believe it or not, some people still
print documents to physical pieces of paper. Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software takes those printed documents and converts
them right back into machine-readable text.
Google Docs
Google Docs has
integrated OCR support.
FreeOCR
FreeOCR
is a simple, easy-to-use frontend for the open-source Tesseract OCR
engine, originally developed by HP Labs.
Cuneiform OpenOCR
Cognitive
Technologies developed Cuneiform as a commercial OCR solution, but
eventually released it as freeware. Cuneiform OpenOCR has an
unpolished interface, but there’s an excellent OCR engine
underneath.
The
download
page is in Russian — scroll down and click the “
english
version” setup link to download and install Cuneiform.
I might create a “Math bundle” and
a “Computer Security bundle” and so forth.
Bundlenut
is a simple service for organizing a set of links and sharing them
with others. To use the service just visit Bundlenut and start
entering the links that you want to include in your bundle.
You
can include comments about each of the links. When you
have added all of links that you want to include in your bundle,
Bundlenut will assign a unique url to your bundle. Anyone with
access to that url will be able to see all of your links and comments
about those links.
You can use the service with or without
registering. The advantage of registration is that you can go back
and modify your bundle whenever you would like to.
Applications
for Education
Bundlenut
could be a useful service to use when you want students to read and
evaluate a specific set of online resources like primary source
documents.
I like #4
Today I had the privilege to
participate in Discovery's Beyond the Textbook forum. One of my
take-aways from the day's conversation is that
most
of the technologies that we want to use to make textbooks interactive
and meaningful for students already exist, we just need to
organize and utilize them in a way that makes sense for teachers and
students. I've combined that take-away with a recent request from a
reader to delineate some ways that teachers can use
Wikispaces
to create this list of ideas for using wikis in classrooms. Please
feel free to add your suggestions, with links if possible, in the
comments below (please note, I'll be on planes for the next 18 hours
so there will be a delay between your comment submission and its
appearance on the blog).
1. As a digital
portfolio of student-created videos.
2. As a place for
students to share notes on each unit of study in your courses.
3. As an
alternative to textbooks. Work with colleagues in your school or
department to create a multimedia reference site for your students.
Include YouTube videos that use the "
choose
your own adventure" model to allow students to pursue areas
of interest.
4. As an
alternative to textbooks. Have students create reference pages for
units of study in your course. When you do this students become
responsible to each other for creating accurate and meaningful
content that they can refer to when it comes time for assessment.
5. As a place to
track, document, and manage on-going community projects. In my
district every student is required to complete a community service
project before graduation. As a homeroom or "common block"
advisor teachers are supposed to help their students take the
necessary steps to document that work. By creating a homeroom wiki
you create a place where students can make weekly updates about what
they have done to complete their projects.
(Related) Even the tweets are
interesting.
I've spent the day with a group of
educators invited to Discovery HQ
in Silver Springs, Maryland to participate in a forum titled "Beyond
the Textbook." As with a number
of the events
I've attended recently, I've opted to storify
the notes, Tweets, and blog posts (and I should add here that these
don't just come from the participants at the event but from those
that participated in the discussions via the Web.
Quick! What's another word for
Thesaurus?
Graph
Words is a neat little site that provides webs of related words.
If you're like me and you tend to use the word "awesome" a
lot and want to mix it up, type "awesome" into Graph Words
to see a web of alternative word choices. Click on any word in the
web to generate a new web of more related words. Give it a try with
this web
based on the word "awful."
Your webs can
be downloaded as a PNG image.
