Safecity Crowdsources India’s Sexual Assault Incidents To Highlight Danger Zones. Four Indians are exposing India’s sexual harassment hotspots via Safecity, a website for victims to anonymously report when and where they were abused. The founders hope that it could be the first step to address the cultural stigma of reporting assaults. Social entrepreneurs Alsa D’Silva, Saloni Malhotra, Surya Velamuri, and Aditya Kapoor also launched a campaign to map 100 unsafe spots in the country’s two biggest cities — where a fatal gang-rape alerted the world to the dangers women may face travelling around the subcontinent’s most populated cities.
The team created the website for women to report any type of violation, including men who take their pictures, indecent exposure, and rape. They were prompted to take action by infamous events last December, when six men travelling on a bus abducted and raped a 23-year old physiotherapy intern, who ultimately died from injuries sustained during the attack. The crowdsourced approach has achieved mixed results in other countries. Disentangling the influence of attachment anxiety and attachment security in consumer formation of attachments to brands - Proksch - 2013 - Journal of Consumer Behaviour. It is nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice: Country-of-origin's perceived warmth in product failures - Xu - 2013 - Journal of Consumer Behaviour. ‘If it makes you feel good it must be right’: Embodiment strategies for healthy eating and risk management - Kristensen - 2013 - Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
Engineer can’t get decent dinner reservations, creates Urbanspoon-dominating bot. It's not uncommon for new San Francisco Bay Area restaurants to spring up and take both the neighborhood and nation by storm (see Mission Chinese Food). But State Bird Provisions (SBP) in the Fillmore district lived this ascent in hyper speed. Despite only opening in 2012, the small plate virtuosos earned distinctions like Bon Appetit's Restaurant of the Year 2012, the James Beard Foundation's Best New Restaurant 2013, and a place in Zagat's 10 Hottest Restaurants in the World.
Needless to say, it's hard to just walk up and get a table, even midweek. SBP easily made the SanFranciscoWaits Tumblr. Diogo Mónica, a security engineer at Square, knows this pain as well as anyone. He was a fan from the start, calling SBP "nothing short of spectacular. " But as the restaurant's profile grew, its online reservations portal kept returning the same message: "No reservations are currently available.
Rather than getting discouraged, Mónica went to his developer tool kit. New Zealand Man is 3D-Printing a Fully-Functional 1961 Aston Martin Replica. New Zealander Ivan Sentch is 3D printing an entire 1961 Aston Martin DB4 replica! Using a CAD rendering from TurboSquid, which he modified to suit his design goals, Sentch has so far produced 2,500 fiberglass molds and four four-inch sections that he has mounted on a wooden frame and glued into place. He spent about $2,000 on plastics for the 3D printing, and now plans to build a mold for a fiberglass exterior shell. There are only 1,200 existing models of the 1961 Aston Martin DB4 in the world, each costing between several hundred thousand to $1 million on the auction circuit.
Because of its limited availability, software engineers can’t get a hold of detailed designs, which eventually forced Sentch to crib a CAD rendering from TurboSquid to get his car built. It may not look like it, but Sentch has been using the 3D printing technology only since last December. So far he’s spent about $2,000 on the 3D printing material and still plans to create the exterior shell out of fiberglass.
Review: Exo, A Cricket-Based Protein Bar That Won’t Destroy Your Productivity. My sweet tooth is the enemy of productivity: sugary snacks are a one way ticket to midday brain fog and squishy love handles. As TechCrunch’s resident healthnut, I regularly get pitched by food startups claiming to solve the workplace snacking problem, but their “healthy” alternatives invariably raise my blood sugar like a Snickers bar fried in Pepsi. Last night, I’m happy to say, I tried a new protein bar that was sufficiently tasty, didn’t raise my blood sugar, and was packed with raw healthy ingredients.
There’s just one catch: it’s made from pulverized crickets (video below). The admirably bold Exo team wants to bring crickets to the American diet, and has successfully raised $20,000 on Kickstarter in just 3 days to build a factory that churns out bug-based snacks. “Exo will introduce to the West one of the most nutritious and sustainable protein sources in the world: insects,” declares their Kickstarter page. New Publication: "Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate"
July 25, 2013 The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the release of a new publication from the Media Cloud project, Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate, authored by Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling. In this paper, we use a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States that was designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations. Our study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.
About Media Cloud. Government Surveillance: A Question Wording Experiment. Court Approval a Big Factor in Public Support Overview In the wake of leaked information about the government’s telephone and digital surveillance programs last month, public opinion surveys reported a wide range of reactions. For example, a Pew Research Center/Washington Post survey conducted immediately after the revelations found broad support for the program, while a Gallup survey conducted just days later found more disapproval than approval.
These, along with a number of other surveys during that period, all made an effort to describe the program as accurately and neutrally as possible, yet different question wording clearly produced different responses. To better understand how the manner in which the government’s surveillance program is described affects public evaluations, the Pew Research Center conducted a question wording experiment in a national telephone survey fielded between July 11 and 21, 2013 among 2,002 adults. The Higher Education Bubble Begins To Burst. The Higher Education Bubble Begins To Burst Check out this New York Times article on the beginning of the bursting of the higher education bubble.
In the 2012-2013 school year enrollment in for-profit and community colleges dropped. Now enrollment in 4 year non-profit colleges has begun dropping too. A Wall Street Journal article makes similar points. Some colleges will close. Others will shrink. The prestige racket will claim fewer victims. The number of kids turning 18 has begun to contract. I expect to a substantial shift toward online learning in order to save costs, speed up education, and get far greater convenience. The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) will let most students watch higher quality lectures than they can watch at which ever university they attend.
Smokers Are Addicted To The Branding Of Their Cigarettes. As much as the connection between cigarettes and irreverent cool has been hammered into our collective psyche, it turns out it can quickly be outdone: One year after a law passed in 2012 mandating that home-grown tobacco be packaged plainly with huge health warnings, researchers have found that smokers of the plain cigarettes are more likely to perceive the experience as less satisfying than those who smoke the branded kind. In 2012, Australia became the first country to demand that its domestic cigarettes be placed in plain, brown packaging, with gruesome health warnings taking up 75% of the box. Before the law was enforced, some cigarette companies experimented with slight alterations. One company, called British American Tobacco Australia, printed the line, "It’s what’s inside that counts," on the lid, much to the ire of the Australian government. Researchers at the Centre also looked at how smokers viewed the government’s heavy-handed attempt to influence their habit.
Social Media Overload – How Much Information Do We Process Each Day? [INFOGRAPHIC] Give me your cell phone, iPod, camera and $350. Introducing The Twitter Hotel. You would think people who go to themed hotels are the types who want to escape email and texting and feel like they’ve been transported to a new world – like sleeping underwater in the Florida Keys, curling up in an igloo in Austria, or sitting for a chocolate portrait in a chocolate bedroom. But if you’re a Tweetaholic whose idea of paradise is a place where no one will judge you, then you may want to check into a new Twitter-themed hotel. (LIST: We, the Tweeple: Why Twitter Inspires So Many New Words) Sol Wave House (@SolWaveHouse) – which opened a year ago on the Magaluf Beach of Majorca, one of Spain’s Mediterranean Islands – has launched a virtual community called #SocialWave that guests can use to share pictures and flirt, the hotel’s social media director Marco Fantón tells TIME.
He sees the community as a fun and interactive extension of what guests are already doing on their vacations — showing off their trip using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. 1 of 5. Using a Smartphone’s Eyes and Ears to Log Your Every Move. Many of us already record the places we go and things we do by using our smartphone to diligently snap photos and videos, and to update social-media accounts. A company called ARO is building technology that automatically collects a more comprehensive, automatic record of your life.
ARO is behind an app called Saga that automatically records every place that a person goes. Now ARO’s engineers are testing ways to use the barometer, cameras, and microphones in a device, along with its location sensors, to figure out what someone is up to and where. That approach should debut in the Saga app in late summer or early fall. The current version of Saga, available for Apple and Android phones, automatically logs the places a person visits; it can also collect data on daily activity from other services, including the exercise-tracking apps FitBit and RunKeeper, and can pull in updates from social-media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The Life Of The Connected Commuter [INFOGRAPHIC] Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa? | Joanna Blythman. Not long ago, quinoa was just an obscure Peruvian grain you could only buy in wholefood shops.
We struggled to pronounce it (it's keen-wa, not qui-no-a), yet it was feted by food lovers as a novel addition to the familiar ranks of couscous and rice. Dieticians clucked over quinoa approvingly because it ticked the low-fat box and fitted in with government healthy eating advice to "base your meals on starchy foods". Adventurous eaters liked its slightly bitter taste and the little white curls that formed around the grains. Vegans embraced quinoa as a credibly nutritious substitute for meat. Unusual among grains, quinoa has a high protein content (between 14%-18%), and it contains all those pesky, yet essential, amino acids needed for good health that can prove so elusive to vegetarians who prefer not to pop food supplements. Sales took off. But there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder.
In this respect, omnivores have it easy.