How We Know by Freeman Dyson The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick Pantheon, 526 pp., $29.95 James Gleick’s first chapter has the title “Drums That Talk.” It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example. The example is a drum language used in a part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the human language is Kele. Sadly, the drum language was only understood and recorded by a single European before it started to disappear. Carrington understood how the structure of the Kele language made drum language possible. In 1954 a visitor from the United States came to Carrington’s mission school. The story of the drum language illustrates the central dogma of information theory. Another example illustrating the central dogma is the French optical telegraph. The distance between neighbors was about seven miles. Unlike the drum language, which was based on spoken language, the optical telegraph was based on written French.
Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics Connect with Faceook, sign in for free, and get unique, personalized information anad analysis on your social data-computed by Wolfram|Alpha Clustering of your friends What are the groups of friends that make up your network? How do these groups relate to each other? Where in the world are your friends? Where do your friends live? Your network's global reach Who lives farthest from you? How popular are your friends? How many friends do your friends have? What do you talk about on Facebook? The bigger the word, the more often it's used in your conversations. When do you use Facebook? When are you most active? Where are your friends at in life? Do your friends' ages reflect what kinds of relationships they're in? Explore the structure of your friend network How do your friends connect you to your other friends? Who plays the special roles in your network? How are your friends tied together? Your most popular photos What is your most liked photo? Get a new perspective on your friends
Kari Henley: Are Facebook Friends "Real" Friends? Well, I have to say one thing - HuffPost readers rock! This is one spirited group and thanks to everyone who joined in on the lively debate about "Facebook and Kids" last week. Clearly there is a lot of energy, pent up emotion, generational gaps and strong opinions regarding the "tipping point" of Facebook and other social networking sites. I stumbled into a much bigger lion's den than I imagined! Today I'd like to explore why social networking in general has touched a collective nerve. Yet, this prism has many sides. "But do you really consider these relative strangers to be your 'friends?"' So, what gives? Let's look at Wikipedia's definition of Friendship: Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. How about the definition of community? The experience of loneliness is a widespread societal wound. Maybe someday this will all blow over when we learn how to become telepathic. As always, I love to hear your comments and thoughts.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Stephen Marche Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Also see: Live Chat With Stephen Marche The author will be online at 3 p.m.
Online Citizenship Most people are good citizens in the offline world. They are kind to others, they obey laws and want their community to be a better place. But these days many of us are also citizens of the online world. Stewart is a good guy. But when Stewart goes online, he seems to become a different person. He often writes provocative comments on blogs and video websites without contributing anything valuable. Recently a friend recognized his online name on a few comments and gave him a call. Stewart was speechless - he never meant to hurt anybody. But that all changed. Now he sees that citizenship means giving people the same respect he does in the real world, even when he disagrees with them.
CompuServe CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its acronym CIS) was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates. Since the purchase of CompuServe's Information Services Division by AOL, it has operated as an online service provider and an Internet service provider. The original CompuServe Information Service, later rebranded as CompuServe Classic, was shut down July 1, 2009. The newer version of the service, CompuServe 2000, continues to operate. History[edit] Founding[edit] CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. Concurrently, the company recruited executives who shifted the focus from offering time-sharing services, in which customers wrote their own applications, to one that was focused on packaged applications. Technology[edit] CIS[edit]
Prodigy (online service) Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features. Initially, subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of POTS or X.25 dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modems. The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe, which started in 1979 and used a command line interface. By 1990 it was the second-largest online service provider, with 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe's 600,000.[1] Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York until 2000, when they moved to Austin, Texas. The service was presented using a graphical user interface.
AOL AOL Inc. (previously known as America Online, written as AOL and styled as "Aol." but commonly pronounced as an initialism) is an American multinational mass media corporation based in New York City that develops, grows, and invests in brands and web sites.[4] The company's business spans digital distribution of content, products, and services, which it offers to consumers, publishers, and advertisers. Founded in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services, an online services company by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video Corporation, AOL has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or to set up international versions of its services.[5] AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York[6][7] but has many offices in cities throughout North America. Its global offices include Bangalore, India; Dreieich, Germany; Dublin, Ireland; London, United Kingdom; and Tel Aviv, Israel. History[edit] 1980s: foundations[edit] 1990s: a new internet age[edit]
Google Wave: why we didn’t use it With Google pulling the plug on the development of Wave, its meant-to-be-revolutionary communications protocol, Ars staffers pondered Wave's collapse. The ideas in Wave were undeniably cool, the vision was ambitious, and Google backed it. So why did no one use it? We looked to our own experiences of using Wave for clues as to what went wrong, and we found plenty. Jon Stokes, Deputy Editor When Google Wave was first announced, I was instantly struck by a use for it: role-playing games. I wrote an article on the results of my Wave RPG quest, then I quit using Wave while I waited for Google to improve it. Wave's primary interface sin was that it crammed a multiple-window-based desktop metaphor into a single browser window. Still, Wave held promise, and I kept coming back. My last and most successful attempt at this was a Wave that I started called "The BH6 Club," the idea being that old-school hardware site editors would hang out and talk hardware. Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer
An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia. In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply curled up and died. This is the company that famously turned down a $30m buyout offer from Google in 2003. (Friendster has since been rebranded as a social gaming platform and still enjoys some success in south east Asia.) The question, of course, is what went wrong. They say that when the costs–the time and effort–associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then the conditions are ripe for a general exodus. Of course, communities that are vulnerable in this way don’t automatically fail.
Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest Into The World's Greatest Shopfront? For a guy running such a beautiful website, Ben Silbermann looks like hell: He has prominent bags under tired, watery eyes; his shoulders hang heavy; his shirt is wrinkled; and his dark hair is uncombed. When he speaks--with the open-vowel inflections of his Iowa upbringing--his voice is so slight that it often gets lost beneath the din of other conversations. When he moves, it is with the economy of a marathon runner trying to conserve every last bit of energy on the eve of a big race. "I’m tired," says the 30-year-old CEO of Pinterest, the social scrapbook that’s the hottest website on the planet, as he prepares to shovel down a bowl of noodles a few feet away from his desk. Silbermann leaves for the office at 7 a.m. most mornings and works nonstop until dinner. His only respite, if you can call it that, comes in the predawn hours when he takes his newborn son, Max, into his arms and fires up his laptop to check email. Pinterest gets none of that. This too is by design.
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook About Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60. However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). This blog post by Kurt Opsahl at the the EFF gives a brief timeline of Facebook's Terms of Service changes through April of 2010. Let me be clear about something: I like Facebook. Data The data for this chart was derived from my interpretation of the Facebook Terms of Service over the years, along with my personal memories of the default privacy settings for different classes of personal data. I welcome data corrections, so please leave a comment below if you have better numbers to share. Types of Personal Data Facebook's classification system for personal data has changed significantly over the years. Audiences Implementation I built this sketch using Processing.js. About me