My new blog-a-day pledge has survived the first month. Although technically I didn’t post a blog yesterday, that is only because the brain buzz of being in the same room as Meg Ryan wouldn’t let me schedule that post, giving me two for that day. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still good with my goal.
However, at the end of a packed week filled with celebrity sightings and digital fluency games, I’m looking at a tight deadline to remain on track. Thus, you will be treated to links to all of the open tabs in my current session of Chrome. This serves two purposes: A blog post filled with some things of recent interest, and reclaiming my computer before a weekend of dissertation work.
Current Events
- Crowd Laughs When Congressman Is Asked: Who’s Going To Shoot Obama?—What happened and didn’t happen when Republican Rep. Paul Broun was asked this question at his townhall meeting.
- Homeless Man Daniel Morales Finds Daughter Through Twitter—The 58-year-old participant in the Underheard project (homeless Twitterers given prepaid cell phones) gets a call from his daughter.
- Researcher reports on animals’ reflective minds—To the question of whether non-human animals have metacognition, UB’s J. David Smith says the answer appears to be “yes.”
- The Wiki Strikes Again: German Official Drops “Dr” After Wiki Investigation—erman defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the “Dr” from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
- Salary Survey—Learn what members of Information Architecture and User Expereince community reported and see the trends in IA titles, salaries, and activities.
Relational Politics
- Study shows how metaphors shape the debate about crime fighting—Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a “beast” preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a “virus” infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.
- Political Voices: Political Engagement Through Text Sound Poetry (PDF)—a paper from Wesleyan researcher
Celeste Hutchins. - Even in a crowd, you remain unique, life scientists report—The size of the group strongly predicts the individual uniqueness in the animals’ voices: The bigger the group, the more unique each animal’s voice typically was and the easier it was to tell individuals apart.
- 10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media—Adages from moms and dads are applied to online common sense.
- Are we more — or less — moral than we think?—Emotions are key: Those facing the real dilemma were most emotional. Their emotions drove them to do the right thing and refrain from cheating.
Organizations
- Complexity theory for managers—After applying a metaphor of NP-Complete math problems to business: Teams led by good managers are competent and not micromanaged.
- ‘Telecoupling’ explains why it’s a small world, after all—Telecoupling is about connecting both human and natural systems across boundaries. Jack Liu said that telecoupling is a way to express one of the often-overwhelming consequences of globalization.
- US cities using tech to cull ideas from citizens—New York and cities around the country are trying to follow the example of private companies and use technology and the Internet to harness the wisdom of citizens and create virtual civic forums.
Technology
- The Story of Twitter—Jack Dorsey tells Stanford about how Twitter came out of his experience at Odeo.
- Finally, Sweet Sleep for MyBlogLog; Another Yahoo Service That Could Have Changed the World—Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th.
- New Baby Essentials: Domain Name, Twitter Account, YouTube Channel—Better to plan the baby’s name based on what domains are available. That’s why the service Babysquatter was, well, born. Using Babysquattter you can check out which names are available and even block the awful name your MIL wants by showing it as unavailable.
- bloom.io: Start-Up Proposes Visual Instruments for Social Data Expression—Conceptual thinker Ben Cerveny and visualization-guru Tom Carden, both from Stamen Design in their previous life, have just launched a new visualization venture, called bloom.
- Got an Old Computer? Jolicloud OS Can Now Make it a Zippy Cloud Machine—Jolicloud, the Operating System that primarily serves netbooks, today expanded its support to include computers as many as 10 years old. If you’ve got an old desktop computer with as little as 348MB of RAM, it could be fun and useful again.
There were more, but this is no longer a “quick little post.” Now searching Google for “Tabaholic.”