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Language and Writing
As Facebook continues to solidify its role as the world’s top social networking site, eMarketer estimates that more than half of internet users in the US were logging on to the site at least monthly as of the end of 2010. This year, eMarketer forecasts, 132.5 million US web users will use the site.
Facebook Reaches Majority of US Web Users - eMarketer
humor
5 Ways Facebook Will Impact E-commerce
Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce , a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide.
Network World - New computer forensic tools will make it possible to recover more data from corrupted hard drives so long as the missing filles haven't been overwritten.
New forensic tools to advance data recovery - Computerworld
Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.
Does Facebook Really Want a Semantic Web?
Valentine’s Day importance
(This might look a little different for men and women.) Long before any relationship begins, Valentine's Day is just another Hallmark holiday to take your money, but then that special someone starts to come into the picture, and Valentine's Day transforms into opportunity. He or she could be the one.
Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain - Laura Miller - Salon.c
“The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” is Carr’s new, book-length version of the Atlantic piece. It expands on the points he made in 2008, but it addresses some of the responses he got, as well. In addition to the usual moronic japes (“This article is too long!” — can anyone really be witless enough to believe that joke is clever?), commenters, bloggers and pundits asked if Carr wasn’t confusing the medium with how people choose to use it.
The Myth of Mercury Retrograde - Mark Husson - Heal Your Life
Feared, disparaged, and despised, the Mercury Retrograde is rapidly becoming the most maligned phenomenon in popular astrology. Without justification, this event stands among infamous superstitions such as stepping on cracks, breaking mirrors, and opening umbrellas indoors.
Study: Google scrambling our perception of science reality - Sci
A Google search page, courtesy of the leading search engine firm. Google search suggestions have shifted public perceptions about nanotechnology away from science to health worries, finds a science communications study. Search engine reliance on popularity rather than accuracy to steer people to information likely distorts society's view of science, politics and elsewhere, suggest the study authors. "The first thing a lot of people turn to for information is Google, and that's great because there is more information out there than ever," says communications expert Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a co-author of the new Materials Today journal study . "But Google is shaping the reality we experience in the suggestions it makes, pointing us away from the most accurate information and towards the most popular." In the study, Scheufele and colleagues collected Google keyword search information for nanotechnology from October 2008 to September 2009.
M ichael Sorkin, an architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. Zukin’s Naked City does make forays into the white-hot center of hipness, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, and to rapidly gentrifying Harlem. But the bulk of her book, and all of Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan , is confined to fine-grained observations of the streets and neighborhoods within roughly 20 blocks of their apartments in Greenwich Village—that is, west to the Village’s Meatpacking District and new Gold Coast along West Street, east to the fringes of Alphabet City, north to Union Square, and south to SoHo and Tribeca.
Gentrification and Its Discontents - Magazine - The Atlantic
It took me a while to really make sense of Twitter. For the longest time, it was (to me) the stomping ground of 14-year-olds and Ashton Kutcher, each issuing a minute-by-minute feed of their lives. Around the time Twitter arrived, however, I had just had a breakthrough on YouTube's enormous popularity - it was only after watching a dozen different videos of the Super Mario Brothers theme song performed a dozen different ways that I finally got it: I may not care about cats playing the keyboard or wedding parties dancing down the aisle, but somebody does, and without a distribution system for people to broadcast whatever their hearts felt like, I never would have had my life improved by that kid with the beatboxing flute or the one with the double guitar .
Language Log » Mapping the Demographics of American English with
Like so many of the city’s legendary nightspots, the Lion disappeared, replaced by a series of other restaurants on the ground floor of a brownstone on Ninth Street. It reopened last week, as a tavern and restaurant whose owners have labored to restore the spirit of its early-1960s heyday. But this Lion has come roaring back to a crowded den, joining a pride of reincarnated restaurants clustered in the West Village, each taking a different era of its history for inspiration, from Minetta Tavern (1930s) to the Waverly Inn (1950s and ’60s).
In Village Restaurants, the Spirit of Old New York - NYTimes.com
Male foetuses appear more sensitive to stress than female ones The stress caused by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center may have led to an increase in miscarriages of male foetuses, US researchers say. A study in BMC Public Health found 12% more male babies were lost in September 2001 after the 20th week of pregnancy than in a "normal" September.
BBC News - 9/11 link to rise in male foetal death rate, study sa
The old economy demanded a flurry of hard work, obsessive focus, and a charrette before launch. Launches were expensive and rare, and managers and co-workers would push to get everything just right before hitting the big red button to announce, ship and launch. The attention demanded by this scarcity raised the game, overcame fear and pushed things from one level to another. A big reason for the push is to ameliorate risk. Launching is risky business, and one way to diminish that risk in a world of scarcity and market noise is to go big.