A school district in Delaware recently proposed a rule that would require teachers to unfriend students, a district in Maine is banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops, and now the New York City Department of Education will now monitor teachers' interactions with students on professional social networking services. Teachers were warned not to expect any privacy and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts. This makes me wonder if now workplaces and universities will require employees to loosen their privacy settings on their accounts.

Along with Zork, here are a few other interactive fiction games. I played Lost Pig for a while.

Apparently people in China claim that their phones smell like fruit when charging. According to the article, the smell might come from the organic solvents used in the manufacturing process that heat up when charged. One Apple China rep advised iPhone owners not to inhale too hard.

Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of the year, almost matching its entire 2010 lobbying budget of $5.2 million. In comparison, Apple spent $500,000 and Microsoft spent $1.79 million during the same quarter. If Google maintains this pace, it will outspend the entire tobacco industry ($17 million) and the combined spending of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup ($18 million).

Microsoft combined the functions of two of their cloud storage services--SkyDrive (storage) and Mesh (file synchronization and remote access)--to create what they consider a superior alternative to Dropbox, Apple's iCloud, and Google's apps storage.

My coworker sent this to me a while ago to see my reaction. This comic responds to the user's movements on the page. If you're jumpy, you've been warned!

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

This article addresses whether or not learning new programming languages is worth the time and energy. According to the article, learning new languages (1) expands your ability to use several different approaches to solve problems, (2) might teach you techniques that carry over to old languages, (3) exposes you to new communities, (4) provides additional marketable skills, and (5) stimulates your mind. At the end, one user stipulates that he only learns a language when it "has enough maturity, has a good developer base, and offers significantly different outcomes from the others I know."

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.

This article examines how Red Hat transitioned from free open source software to a system they sell through a subscription with updates, patches, and bug fixes. Red Hat still provides free code, though; a community project called Fedora provides "a testing ground for the enterprise features delivered to Red Hat's paying customers," allowing both the company and the users to benefit from collaboration. This article shows the balance of sustainability between free and paid access. It also echoes Kenneth Goldman's claims in Uncreative Writing because the CEO says, "If you believe in the concept of modular innovation where a lot of different people add to works that came before them, patents clearly slow that down."

Google is offering a Chromebook and cash prizes totaling $1 million for anyone who can hack its Chrome browser at the CanSecWest security conference next week: $40,000 for "partial Chrome exploit" and $60,000 for "full Chrome exploit." This event illustrates a concept from this week's readings: community collaboration can increase a service's effectiveness and bolster a company's success. The Google Chrome Security Team even stated that the contest provides "a big learning opportunity" and ultimately enables them to better protect users by revealing bugs and providing information about hacking techniques.

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.

This RSA adaptation of Evgeny Morozov's 2009 talk illustrates (and examines) the concept of "cyber-utopianism": the theory that the internet "plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics." Morozov discusses whether or not the internet predominately empowers or censors citizens by facilitating activism and allowing individuals to disseminate information more effectively.

This title made me think, "Duh," but apparently 8% of survey participants thought that posting photos or videos of other people without consent should be illegal. One person said the issue "should be regarded the same as it is for printed materials." Another person pointed out that it's actually illegal to record people without their permission, but that photos/video taken in a public setting tend to fall under public domain. I usually create a private folder and then let the people in the photos review them and consent to my publishing them first. What do you think?

Red Hat, the world's largest, most successful open source software company and one I'd like to work for in the very near future, submitted this blog post last month about SOPA and PIPA. It explains how such bills could devastate online collaboration, innovation, and the sharing of ideas and technology.

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.