How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit - Yoni Appelbaum T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet. lisaquinn565.wordpress A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. These stories have two things in common. Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. This time, the class decided not to create false Wikipedia entries. That was where things went awry.
OMG This Exists: Inhalable Alcohol Gives An Instant Buzz Humans have been inventing weird (and often unsavory) ways to get themselves embarrassingly drunk for centuries. But the makers of Wahh, a new inhalable alcohol mist, say their product is designed to do just the opposite. Wahh is the invention of David Edwards, the Harvard professor whose inhalable caffeine and smokable chocolate have appeared on this site before. About $26 will buy you a Wahh canister, which contains around 25 “puffs” of vaporized alcohol. The science behind the vaporizer is pretty simple. “Everyone has an occasional need of light-headedness, distraction, and another place,” says Starck, but we tend to use alcohol as a “social placebo.” The duo say that Wahh is mostly meant for use on food (there’s a spicey flavor called Demon), but the canisters will undoubtedly be popular for the “buzz” they produce. According to their website, Wahh will appear in design stores in the U.S. sometime this summer.
Micro-contos, a renovação da linguagem (+livro Insólito, de Paulo Fodra) Hoje irei falar sobre algo de que gosto muito: os micro-contos. Até por causa da admiração que tenho pela obra do autor português Gonçalo Tavares, principalmente por sua série o Bairro, o pessoal que acompanha o blog já deve ter notado que gosto muito de contos curtos, bem trabalhados formalmente e surpreendentes, irônicos ou reflexivos. Por isso, decidi falar um pouco sobre esse assunto, inspirado pelo lançamento do livro Insólito, do escritor Paulo Fodra (@paulofodra), que ocorreu alguns dias atrás. Mas, antes de continuar, falarei um pouco mais sobre o livro do escritor Paulo Fodra (veja o site oficial do autor aqui) - inclusive, tentarei entrar em contato com ele para ver se ele me envia mais alguns dos micro-contos, assim posso dividir com vocês, leitores. “Pegou um dos cacos de seu coração partido e degolou a infeliz. Enfim, achei muito interessante a idéia deste livro do Paulo Fodra - e devo lembrar que nem todos os contos, segundo ele, são tão pequenos.
How we ship GitHub for Windows National - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - It's Not Just Porn: Why Ultra-Orthodox Jews Fear the Internet At Citi Field Stadium this Sunday, 50,000 religious men gathered to discuss the dangers of the Web. An organizer explains why the digital era is so challenging for the people of the book. Attendees at Sunday's rally used binoculars to watch rabbis deliver sermons about the Internet. There's a reason ultra-Orthodox Jews wear long black coats, even in summertime: They've been resisting modernity since the Enlightenment era. That was the topic that drew more than 50,000 ultra-Orthodox men to the Mets' Citi Field Stadium on Sunday. According to organizer Eytan Kobre, the attendees had more than pornography on their minds. For some rabbis, the solution is simple: Religious Jews should boycott the Internet. At Sunday's rally, a long list of rabbis weighed in on the problem. None of this seems to bother Kobre. Have you seen our recent Atlantic cover story "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" Yes, I've seen it, though I must admit to not buying a hard copy. That's surprising. It's a huge issue.
Millennials Don't Think Like Their Parents. How Do You Design For Them? During this year’s Super Bowl, Chevy introduced their new Sonic by making it skydive, flip, and bungee jump to the theme of We Are Young. To say they were making a run at the youth market would be an understatement. But what is this new youth market, other than young? Chevy just calls us people ages 16 to 30, and by that count, there are 80 million of us in the U.S. alone right now that represent $1 trillion in buying power. The Sonic Superbowl ad “As you imagine, that’s a pretty big age range,” admits John McFarland. “The components of being young are pretty timeless. The more you consider McFarland’s take on generational identity, the more his arguments begin to make sense. “Especially when people started to first design products for the youth demographic, they were bold and over the top, designed to stand out, to scream ‘I’m an individual!’” Chevy’s current youth strategy has been to release a line of more affordable cars that includes the Spark, Cruze, and Sonic.
On Why It’s No Good to Try, You Must Do! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! With the passing away of hugely influential science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury I wanted to cobble together a quick post to discuss one of my favourite quotes of his: “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. Though the first part of the quote is hugely important, I’d like to take a closer look at the latter part (which relates to the first part anyway). I think there is merit in the idea of ‘trying something’ at the its basic level of meaning. At a deeper level, however, when we’re actually talking about physically doing a particular action, in a certain moment, to ‘try’ is sabotage. Trying, in its true sense, means that what you are doing is dependent on outcome. When you operate with this mindset when you undertake anything in life, you are hurting yourself, and possibly others too. This applies to so much in life.
INFOGRAPHIC: Mobile Marketing Trends in 2012 from Responsys Marketing / Mobile Globally, online businesses are scrambling to develop, implement and integrate some form of mobile strategy – and there’s plenty of variability across the board. Recently, Forrester‘s State of Retailing Online report highlighted the ongoing growth and importance of mobile devices both as a marketing channel and a profitable sales channel. The report provides insight into the various channels that companies are integrating into their overall marketing activity, the barriers that are preventing companies from driving effective cross-channel campaigns and the online advertising trends that will impact the future of display. However, because reading through the whole report isn’t for everyone, Responsys has produced the following infographic, which captures the salient mobile marketing information. Infographic: Mobile Marketing Trends 2012 by Responsys. Article by Campbell Phillips Campbell currently serves as Editor for Power Retail.
"You Get On The Internet And Pretty Soon You’re Drunk": The Orthodox At Citi Field While the ultra-Orthodox steadily streamed down the 7 train platform and onto the pavilion, a group of four teenagers sat around the big red New York Mets apple, waiting for their friends. This was last night, an hour or so before the Citi Field gates opened. Outside the stadium, a few hundred ultra-Orthodox Jewish men stood around, waiting for the masses to arrive to this rally about the dangers of the internet. “You get on the internet and pretty soon you’re drunk,” he said, as he mimicked a person wobbling back and forth. One of the boys took a call on his cellphone from a friend who'd just arrived by bus. “Well, now I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said the boy who stayed behind. We chatted for a bit, and he explained to me how the internet affects his mind. He had bought his iPod Touch from Walmart and recently sold it to a classmate, but still goes with friends who have iPods to sit outside apartment buildings to watch clips on Youtube. “I mean, it’s not practical.
What's America's Most Engaging Social Network? You'll Be Surprised Try to guess America's most engaging social network. Facebook? Wrong. Twitter? Wrong. Tagged users visited an average of 18 times each during March according to ComScore, second only to Facebook's average of 36 visits per vistor. Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng says he's happy about ComScore's March data, but that his company has been among America's most engaging social networks for about a year now. The longtime friends started Tagged in 2004, at the time angling it to be a Facebook-like social network for high schoolers. "We took a hard look and decided we weren't going to win," Tseng says. As opposed to sites like Facebook, where people primarily organize and maintain relationships established offline, Tagged functions mostly as a portal to meet new people online for romance or simply friendship. Tseng says Tagged's 10 million core monthly active users form an average of 100 million new connections per month.
Why It’s Ok to be Introverted, and an Interview with Writer Susan Cain If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! I’m someone who could be considered ‘in his head’ a great deal and definitely what one might call an ‘introvert‘. When Susan Cain’s book, ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking’, came along, I dove into it with some enthusiasm, possibly as a means to find some comfort in dealing with and understanding the ‘affliction’. Susan and her book have made great strides in spreading an understanding and a well-researched insight into this important area of what it is to be human. As the book shows, introversion is by no means an ‘affliction’ but a true blessing to those that possess the trait, and there is much we can learn about people through understanding it better. Susan, an introvert herself, spent many years researching for the book, and this shows, as the book is rich in citation, reference and concrete facts. This is a kind of civil rights mission for me.