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This guest post by Richard Price (founder and CEO of Academia.edu) addresses a bill called "The Research Works Act" intended to "restrict public access to publicly-funded research." Price points out that over 5,500 academics have signed a boycott of Elsevier, the largest academic publisher and one of the main sponsors. Several companies in the journal industry, however, argue that they've historically supported themselves by charging for access to research papers and that the government's open access mandate threatens their industry's sustainability by encouraging research institutions to stop subscribing to the journals and just wait to get the research for free.

Moving closer to the Matrix? A Spanish research center called Barcelona Digital is coordinating a three-year initiative called the BrainAble project to develop technologies that will improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. By developing advanced brain-computer interface (BCI) systems, ambient intelligence (AmI), and virtual reality (VR), researchers enable users to operate a robot, interact in virtual environments, communicate more easily, and remotely control lighting, heating and other devices in their homes. Plus, this technology could also benefit the eldery and people in rehabilitation, as well as allow the remote monitoring of people with neurological disorders.

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a "We do not track or bubble you!" policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.) *I don't particularly care about my privacy (nothing to hide and honestly don't care whose watching), but I do care about the information being fed to me through search engines. I pride myself on doing all the research I can before supporting or criticizing a position. If google is simply feeding me what I want to hear, how do I know I have the full story? This seems like a particularly nefarious form of censorship--one that makes sense in an age of "truthiness" and pandering to ignorance. Bad google. No bubbles.

Well, they didn't have anyone nag the $1 million prize for a full compromise, but security analysts did find a few things to patch up anyways.

The McLuhan understanding of technology as an extension of ourselves immediately came to mind when I saw the first image here. Also, if this thing had camera capabilities (the ability to Skype, say) we could reasonably apply ideas of autoamputation.

McLuhan and Bogart would probably enjoy this article because it involves procedural rhetoric. It examines how "gamification strategies"--using games to change behavior in real life--can promote energy efficiency. Companies like SimpleEnergy are creating apps that let users track their energy usage, find ways to improve, and compete with friends and neighbors for spots on a leaderboard. Gamification succeeds because apparently social pressure can motivate people even more than monetary incentives, and these initiatives combine both types of incentives: An energy usage competition at the University of Hawaii led to some dorms cutting energy usage by up to 20 percent. This specific method also allows users to save money and conserve energy without "radical infrastructure changes" or the corruption and waste that often results from government subsidies to politically-connected "green" companies like Solyndra and possibly Sapphire Energy. In addition, the apps provide large-scale energy usage data that researchers can use to measure both change over time and the impact of energy usage on other variables.