Computerese

infoneer-pulse: A Texas University’s Mind-Boggling Database Of...

postmodernista — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:33:39 -0400

A Texas University’s Mind-Boggling Database Of Teens’ Daily Text Messages, Emails, and IMs Over Four Years

Underwood somehow got the project approved by the IRB, received a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hooked up with Ceryx and Global Relay — companies that help financial companies capture employee communication per SEC rules — and got over 175 of her 281 participants to sign up for the Digital Panopticon. (Some students dropped out because they preferred iPhones to Blackberries, says Underwood.) The kids and their parents have to sign “detailed consent forms” yearly. There are 81 girls and 94 boys; 23% of them are African-American, 50% are Caucasian, and 15% are Hispanic. Nearly half come from families that make less that $75K per year. Other than paying participants $50 for lab visits, the only financial compensation is the phone and its associated plan, which comes out to a little over $600 per person.

The kids are now high school seniors; the capture of their digital communications over the past four years provides an intimate look at their private lives. There have been countless studies about how kids use technology, but this detailed collection is the first of its kind.

Previous studies have involved looking at teens’ social networking pages, blogs, and chat rooms — all publicly available. “No previous published research has provided adolescents with cell phones or smart phones and recorded the content of their electronic communication,” write the researchers in a recent paper. “The only previous study that measured the content of text messaging required college students to write down all text messages for a 24-hr period in a diary.”

Not as good, obviously.

» via Forbes

Employees, you may now speak (more) freely on social media

postmodernista — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:15:08 -0400

Employees, you may now speak (more) freely on social media: continuum: The National Labor Relations...

Photo

postmodernista — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:16:34 -0400

nevver: Kittens Texting Okay, sure. Why not?

postmodernista — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:18:03 -0400

nevver:

Kittens Texting

Okay, sure. Why not?

teachingliteracy: Lego MacBook Keyboard Sticker Decals on Etsy

postmodernista — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:46:20 -0400

teachingliteracy:

Lego MacBook Keyboard Sticker Decals

on Etsy

9gag: Upgrading ram memory

postmodernista — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:30:06 -0400

9gag:

Upgrading ram memory

mudwerks: (via The Most Irritating Software in the World :...

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:32:22 -0400

mudwerks:

(via The Most Irritating Software in the World : reddit AdviceAnimals)

nevver: Ablogalypse

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:30:38 -0400

nevver:

Ablogalypse

thedailywhat: From the Archives: Way back in 1982, when Atari...

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:55:30 -0400

thedailywhat:

From the Archives: Way back in 1982, when Atari was just past its prime, a man named Bob Stein, who worked at Encyclopedia Britannica as well as Atari, worked with Alan Kay and Disney animator Glenn Keane on a series of illustrations showing off Stein’s idea for an “Intelligent Encyclopedia” that could tell its user about earthquakes, stocks, and history.

Their drawings look eerily similar to the first laptops, and the bones of the encyclopedia eventually manifested as Wikipedia two decades later. “The most interesting thing for me today about these images is that although we foresaw that people would be accessing information wirelessly (notice the little antenna on the device in the tide pool image,” Stein said, “we completely missed the most important aspect of the network — that it was going to connect people to other people.”

[shortformblog]

9gag: The Good Old Days

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:17:00 -0400

9gag:

The Good Old Days

The Guardian: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:48:11 -0400

The Guardian: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin: guardian: The...

seltzerlizard: When my browser (Firefox 11) can’t load a page,...

postmodernista — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:46:16 -0400

seltzerlizard:

When my browser (Firefox 11) can’t load a page, I see this on the far right of my screen. I was curious about the origin of the graphic, so I Googled it.

Apparently, nobody in the entire world has ever mentioned it on the internet.

Does anyone know what this is?

It’s the Lizard of Doom.

thedailyfeed: Welcome to the Silicon Beach — a stretch of 10...

postmodernista — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:01:57 -0400

thedailyfeed:

Welcome to the Silicon Beach — a stretch of 10 blocks along the Pacific Ocean and home to one of the highest concentrations of tech companies and startups anywhere outside Silicon Valley or Alley.

“There’s a Wild West boomtown thing going on here right now,” said Michael Dubin, 33, who launched Dollar Shave Club last month with a YouTube video that’s been viewed more than 4 million times. “L.A. is a place where you can think big. I couldn’t imagine any place I’d rather be.”

From this pressure cooker of ideas and venture capital, a new kind of Hollywood star is emerging — the 21st-century tech star. Known more for digital innovation than acting talent, these entrepreneurs are poised to become the darlings of Tinseltown.

Photo by Joe Kohen for The Daily

"Just as early modern roads were first maintained and run privately, so today are our early digital..."

postmodernista — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:17:49 -0400

“Just as early modern roads were first maintained and run privately, so today are our early...

9gag: Skype Calls

postmodernista — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:16:42 -0400

9gag:

Skype Calls

jchiappa: Facinating article… The big take-away here is that...

postmodernista — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:25:21 -0400

jchiappa:

Facinating article… The big take-away here is that our younger generation seems more geared toward an app-centric, pay based content model as opposed to searching for other (free) options on the web. Younger web users are also not reading critically, like their adult counter parts. One can speculate that despite the amount of free course-ware becoming available, there will be a huge industry for people who will be able to organize and strip down information and then repackage it into app form for future students…

infoneer-pulse:

Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search

While adult Internet users are increasingly “search dominant,” kids navigate the web using bookmarks, remembering their favorite sites, and accessing paid subscription content and games. That’s one of the findings from a new qualitative usability study on how children use the web by human-computer interaction researcher Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group. His report makes it seem as if kids have more of an app mentality than a search mentality when compared to adults.

Nielsen had completed a similar study in 2001, so his results are particularly interesting in the context of what children were doing nine years ago. Back then, he contended that kids were not as proficient as using the web as was widely assumed. Now, he argues that kids as young as six are highly proficient, and kids as young as nine are as proficient as adults. (Three-to-six-year-olds, which Nielsen and collaborator Raluca Budiu studied for the first time this year, are increasingly web-savvy but hindered by their inability to read.) And many kids are adopting the habits of long-time Internet users — for instance, skimming pages and skipping instructions just like adults, rather than reading them carefully as they did nine years ago.

» via GigaOM

Photo

postmodernista — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:00:05 -0400

alrightinnit: Yelp is your embarrassing dad.

postmodernista — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:10:13 -0400

alrightinnit:

Yelp is your embarrassing dad.

textsfromhillary: Source: Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy Original image by Diana Walker for Time.

postmodernista — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:47:26 -0400

textsfromhillary: Source: Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy Original image by Diana Walker for Time.

theweekmagazine: Could Facebook actually improve Instagram?...

postmodernista — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:34:59 -0400

theweekmagazine:

Could Facebook actually improve Instagram? That’s Chris Taylor at Mashable’s theory. Consider Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. The search giant left the video service to do its own thing, “only this time with access to piles of Google cash.” If Facebook does likewise, as Zuckerberg is promising, the Instagram you already love will only get better.