EMAC6300

I have been researching activity trackers for awhile and happened upon this one last week after seeing so many coming new ones coming out of CES. It seems to be different than many of the other ones I have seen and just wanted to share.

I am starting to think it is just me, but these types of wearables freak me out. I understand the health benefits and many of its pros, but I don't want anything monitoring my body all the time. Like those smart contacts, again I can see where they would really help someone, but I would be freaked out having a computer chip on my eye.

I totally see what you're saying Katy. I am not a fan of wearing contacts, so that would be a problem for me, but if it monitord my glucose levels and only I and my healthcare provider were the one's who could view the data I would be ok with it. The activity tracker/wristband thing isn't something I'd even want to wear all the time, just when I'm working out. But yah, not sure I'd want to be "Monitored" all the time! :)

Collection of social media research highlights of 2013.

How reporting and reverse engineering could build a bet to understand the code that influences us

Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods: We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions. Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns. The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos. Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.

Here's Scalzi's other blog post about the "Straight White Male" it is also mentioned in the article I mentioned in my earlier post. They are both very compelling.

I was searching for this blog post because it is mentioned in our reading, Nakamura, "Queer female of color: The highest difficulty setting there is? Gaming rhetoric as gender capital." I found it on my FB feed a while back, and remembered it and had to share. My friend posted it, and there were such comments like "it's so sad and true," and "I cried," etc. It did get a lot of hits and went viral, I'd say at least on FB. :)

A useful graphic

A Q&A with the Pam Grossman, Getty's director of visual trends, on the visual images of women in the media

What some may call the ultimate vanity project, a new generation of beauty bloggers are using social-media success for entrepreneurship.

As an EMAC graduate student and veteran journalist, this piece was very intriguing.

A little middle-of-the-semester pickmeup for your tired brains.

Smartphones are going against one of the long-held rules in portable electronics, that smaller is better. Year by year, computers, storage devices and music players have shed size and weight. And for decades, it has been happening with cellphones, too.

The intersection of science and communications, with some improv. Actor Alan Alda wants to help train scientists to communicate to a wider audience.

Mosaic, a new science site that's affixing a Creative Commons license to its long-form writings

What kind of stories can artists, designers and writers tell when teamed up with data scientists and coders?

Looky who I found...Ms. Ito herself! I'm totally using this for my paper!