betajames

Even when Iggy Pop and the Stooges were finally admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, and Iggy turned up to collect his award in a black suit, he soon ripped his shirt off. "Why do I always take my shirt off?" He smiles, "Hey, I have worked with shirts. I worked with shirts for a period in the Seventies." He pauses meaningfully. "It's to get across." Another pause followed by a stare so intense it could blow an amp. "To get closer to you. It just gets across, like a lonely sax. It reaches in a way that works for me." It clearly also works for the crowd inside the Music Hall of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn: a group of hipsters complete with kooky glasses and shrink-to-fit jeans, plus celebrities and media folk, who either provide the human waves for Iggy's crowd surfing, or storm the stage – to the evident horror of health and safety officers.

It is difficult to quantify how many Facebookers are frustrated enough to hit the delete button and go searching for greener pastures. One measure is a Web site called QuitFacebookDay, which is calling for Facebook users to close their accounts en masse on May 31 and has attracted nearly 13,000 commitments so far. Another site, called FacebookProtest, which is asking disgruntled users to boycott the Web site on June 6 by not logging in, has drawn roughly 3,000 supporters. In addition, a group on Facebook created to protest recent changes has swelled to more than 2.2 million members.

Of the three social media platforms studied, news-oriented blogs share the most similarities with the mainstream press. Bloggers almost always link to legacy outlets for their information, and politics, government and foreign events garnered the greatest traction.

There are, however, also some clear differences. While the biggest topic areas overlap, there was considerable divergence in the specific news events that garnered attention. In less than one third of the weeks did the blogosphere and traditional press share the same top story.

Public intellectualism is only public when set in relief against the sordid, indulgent privatism of the liberal arts, which spends most of its collective time denigrating the general public for their false consciousness in the coffeeshop attached to the indie bookstore. Let's face it: thinking in public is orthogonal to scholarly life. The "public intellectual" is a contradiction in terms.

Researchers found that the more social platforms with which a person is engaged, the more willing he or she will be to seek the opinions of others through status messages and act on those messages.

“Although people share information with companies, organizations and others via mechanisms like polls, they are more trusting of those in their social network,” Jansen said. “Not only do people share information on social media sites, they act on information received. So, there are significant implications for a variety of areas, such as advertising and marketing.”

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It's important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

What we're really trying to figure out are the right tradeoffs.

A careful use of the site's privacy settings may provide some protection so that only your "friends" can see them. But failing to tick the right boxes may not only enable your "friends" (or enemies) to view, use, copy and tag your images, but may leave them open to picture researchers, reporters and picture editors as a first port of call to flesh out and illustrate national news stories.

The characters of Heavy Rain are not blank slates, or characters whose identities we fill in through our own decisions -- they aren't like Gordon Freeman or Commander Shepard. They're characters with existing histories and personalities. By granting us control over these characters, the player is forced into an awkward position of half-agency: their desires intermingle with our own, forcing us to either relinquish our own sense of control and relevance, or actively participate in a story populated by characters who make ridiculous and self-defeating decisions.

the sheer scope and scale of the managed data, and the widely varied sources of the data, make it potentially possible for some interesting connections to be made. Sure, much of it is claimed to be anonymized, but there’s not really any such thing as true anonymity.

What is to stop Google from connecting the dots to say “show me a list of people who have searched for ‘alternative medicine’ who have visited an out of country clinic, have a history of cancer, and have searched for ‘google jobs’ and ‘insurance plan’?“

My point is, if any government agency proposed tracking this level of data on individuals, there would be (should be) riots in the streets. At the very least, it would be a high profile election issue.

"Our surveys showed that while laptop computers can be a distraction, students of this generation feel that they are capable of productive multitasking," Samson said.

Through LectureTools, laptops serve as robust "clickers," providing drastically more interaction than the class polling that clicker-based student response systems offer.

LectureTools also allows students to take notes directly on lecture slides. Students can anonymously ask the instructor's aide a question through a chat window during class, and others can see these questions and answers. Students can also rate their own understanding of each slide, giving the professor valuable feedback.