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Mirna Shaban

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted - 1 views

  • Much of the organization and mobilization occurred through the Internet, particularly on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. But social media also played a vital role as a democratic model. Its inclusive space indirectly taught lessons in democracy to a wide sector of Egyptian youth that was not necessarily politically inclined. When the right moment arrived, they were ready to join the revolt.
  • What happened in January 2011 in Egypt did not start in January 2011. It began at least ten years earlier, and it’s not over yet
  • The main catalyst for the January 25 revolution was the Internet, so it may be accurate to describe this as an Internet-based revolution. Not that the Internet was the only factor involved, or that Internet users were the only ones protesting. But the Internet was the tool that showed every dissident voice in Egypt that he or she is not alone, and is indeed joined by at least hundreds of thousands who seek change.
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  • Facebook did not go to Tahrir Square. The people did. Twitter did not go to Al-Qaied Ibrahim Square. The people did.
  • More than one-third of Egypt’s population of eighty million remains illiterate, and just 25 percent of Egyptians use the Internet. However, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in organizing, motivating, and directing these crowds as to where to go and what to do. Egypt’s revolution was created as an event on Facebook eleven days in advance. People clicked “I’m attending.” Certainly, this was a people’s revolution, yet one based on and accelerated in many ways by the Internet. What happened in Tahrir and every square in Egypt was the accumulation of years and years of activism, including Internet activism. Social media prepared Egyptians for the revolution and enabled them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came.
  • The Internet, by definition, is a democratic medium, at least in the sense that anyone with Internet access is a potential publisher of information.
  • The mere presence of the Internet as a source of information helps open up a freer space for public debate, and makes it much more difficult for governments to censor information.
  • Internet activism started in Egypt with the appearance of Web 2.0 technology in the country around 2003
  • Blogging was the first valuable brainchild of Web 2.0 technologies.
  • The phenomenon exploded in the Arab world, with Egyptian bloggers pioneering and leading the scene. Blogger numbers in the region approached half a million by the beginning of 2009, the great majority of them coming from Egypt.
  • Political blogging in particular became more popular, as users felt that they could remain anonymous if they so wished
  • Nevertheless, most Egyptian political bloggers choose to blog under their real names, which frequently got them in trouble with the regime. The state security crackdown on bloggers was testimony to their potential impact.
  • Undoubtedly, blogging created a space for the voiceless in Egypt.
  • It was the first time individuals felt they could make themselves heard. That in itself was important, whether or not the content was political, and whether or not anyone was reading the blogs. The phenomenon created a venting space for people who had long gone unheard.
  • Early on, Alaa Abdel Fattah and Manal Hassan were awarded the Special Award from Reporters Without Borders in the international Deutsche Welle’s 2005 Weblog Awards (Best of Blogs) contest, where their blog was cited as an instrumental information source for the country’s human rights and democratic reform movement. The husband-and-wife team had created one of Egypt’s earliest blogs, “Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket,” where they documented their off-line activism and posted credible information on protests and political movements, election monitoring and rigging, and police brutality.
  • Another award-winning blogger was Wael Abbas. He received several honors, including the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award of the International Center for Journalists for “raising the standards of media excellence” in his country. This was the first time that a blogger, rather than a traditional journalist, won the prestigious journalism award, a testament to the important work such bloggers were doing. In the same year, CNN named Abbas Middle East Person of the Year. He has been instrumental in bringing to light videos of police brutality in Egypt, a topic that was taboo before he and other bloggers ventured into it. As a result of these efforts, the Egyptian government at one point brought three police officers to justice on charges of police brutality for the first time in Egypt’s history; they were convicted and sentenced to three years in jail.
  • As blogging was becoming a phenomenon in Egypt, some political movements started having a strong on-line presence, and taking to the streets based on their on-line organization. The most important was probably the Kefaya movement, whose formal name is The Egyptian Movement for Change. The movement was established in 2004 by a coalition of political forces, and became better known by its Arabic slogan. The word kefaya is Arabic for ‘enough,’ and as the name implies, the movement called for an end to the decades-old Mubarak regime, and for guarantees that his son would not succeed him as president. Kefaya was instrumental in taking people to the streets, thus bridging the gap between the on-line and the off-line worlds. Many of its supporters were bloggers, and many of the street protesters started blogging. So, increasingly, reports on the demonstrations found their way into blogs and were provided media coverage even when the traditional media ignored them or were afraid to cover them. One result was that many more Egyptians gained the courage to write blogs that openly criticized the authoritarian system and crossed the ‘red line’ of challenging their president.
  • nternet applications such as the video-sharing platform YouTube, which appeared in 2005, took blogging to a higher level.
  • hey were also capable of videotaping street protests and uploading the clips on YouTube. Watching people chanting “Down with Hosni Mubarak” in the mid-2000s was a totally new, riveting experience, which led many other brave Egyptians to join these demonstrations. Internet activists and blogger stars such as Wael Abbas, Alaa Abdel Fattah, Manal Hassan, Hossam El-Hamalawy, Malek Mostafa, and others uploaded hundreds of videos of police brutality, election rigging, and different violations of human and civic rights.
  • media, the platforms that allow for wider user discussions and user-generated content such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter
  • he next important development came with the introduction of what is typically known as social
  • The structure of social media taught Egyptians that space exists that you can call your own, your space, where you can speak your mind. To many in the West, this is probably no big deal. There are countless venues where they can express their opinions relatively freely. But for people in Egypt, and in the Arab world in general, this was a new phenomenon, and one I believe to be of profound importance.
  • horizontal communication.’ Before social networks, Egyptian youth were accustomed to being talked at, rather than talked to or spoken with. Communication was mostly vertical, coming from the regime down to everyone else
  • Authoritarian patterns of communication do not allow for much horizontal interaction. But social networks do, and eventually their existence on the Internet taught Egyptian youths a few lessons in democratic communication, even if the essence of the conversations carried out was not necessarily political in nature.
  • The bulk of those that I believe were affected by these lessons in democratic expression were clusters of the population that were not previously politically oriented. These form a good sector of those who took to the streets on January 25, and were joined by millions who held their ground in Tahrir Square and in every square in Egypt until Mubarak was toppled. The majority of these millions, including myself, were people who had never participated in a demonstration before. They were not political activists before January 25, but they saw or heard the call for action, and it touched a nerve as they found safety in numbers
  • another function that social networks served: making you realize that you’re not alone.
  • Perhaps the first time Egyptians learned about the power of social networks was on April 6, 2008. Workers in the Egyptian city of Al-Mahalla Al-Kobra planned a demonstration to demand higher wages. Esraa Abdel Fattah, an activist then twenty eight years old, felt for the workers and wanted to help them. She formed a group on Facebook and called it ‘April 6 Strike’ to rally support for the workers.
  • he knew it was too much to ask people to join in the protest, so she simply asked them to participate in spirit by staying home that day, not going to work, and not engaging in any monetary transactions such as buying or selling. The group was brought to the attention of the traditional media and was featured on one of Egypt’s popular talk shows, thus getting more exposure. What ensued surpassed all expectations. To Abdel Fattah’s own surprise (and everyone else’s), the Facebook group immediately attracted some seventy three thousand members. Many of these, and others who got the message through traditional media, decided to stay home in solidarity with the workers. Others were encouraged to stay home by a bad sandstorm that swept across parts of Egypt that day, and yet others stayed home for fear of the strong police presence on the streets.
  • The overall outcome made political activists realize that social networks could be a vital tool in generating support for a political cause, and in encouraging people to join a call for action.
  • The April 6 event was meaningful because it provided a sense that people were actually willing to take an action, to do something beyond clicking a mouse
  • three months before the January 25 revolution, Malcolm Gladwell argued in a much-discussed article in The New Yorker under the title “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted” that social media can’t provide what social change has always required. He said that social media is good when you’re asking people for small-scale, low-risk action, but not for anything more. “Facebook activism succeeds,” he wrote, “not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.” He explained that this is because high-risk activism is a “strong-tie phenomenon,” meaning that those who carry out such acts of activism have to personally know each other well and develop strong personal ties before they would risk their lives for each other or for a common cause. Since Facebook and Twitter provide mostly “weak-tie” connections, since users typically have a strong off-line social tie with only a small percentage of their ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ these social networks were therefore not capable of motivating people for a high-risk cause. He therefore concluded that a social network “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”
  • nowing that you are in the company of many who share your utter belief in the same cause. That is something that social networks delivered
  • ne of the Facebook pages that played a major role in this regard was the Khaled Said page. Khaled Said was a young Egyptian who was brutally beaten to death by police informants outside an Internet café in Alexandria in June 2010. He had an innocent face that everyone could identify with. He could be anyone, and anyone could’ve been him. The Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said” appeared shortly thereafter. It started asking its members, whose numbers increased steadily, to go out on silent standing protests in black shirts with their back to the streets. The demonstrations started in Alexandria and soon spread to every governorate in Egypt. Numbers increased with every protest. More and more people gained a little more courage and tasted the freedom of dissent.
  • One of the main advantages of the Khaled Said page was how well organized the events were. Protesters were provided with exact times and locations, and given exact instructions on what to wear, what to do, as well as who to contact in the case of any problems with security forces.
  • t was the Khaled Said page that eventually posted the ‘event’ for a massive demonstration on January 25, Egypt’s Police Day.
  • The administrators usually polled their users, asking them to vote for their place or time of preference for the next protest. The responses would be in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, and the administrators would read them all, and give a breakdown, with exact numbers and percentages, of the votes.
  • The January 25 demonstration was motivated and aided by an important intervening variable, the revolt in Tunisia. When Tunisian protesters succeeded in ousting President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, Egyptians felt that toppling a dictator through demonstrations was finally possible.
  • he Khaled Said page, which by then had about six hundred thousand followers, demonstrated its strong ability to organize. They listed all the major squares in every Egyptian governorate where they expected people to gather, and again gave specific instructions on what to wear, what to take with you, and who to contact in times of trouble. They then alerted the users that the listed venues for demonstration would change at midnight on January 24 to give police forces a lesser chance of mobilizing against them the next day. On the morning of January 25, there were close to half a million people who had clicked “I’m attending” the revolution. Today, the Khaled Said page has more than 1.7 million users, by far more than any other Egyptian Facebook page.
  • nd indeed that was what happened. We witnessed another key moment illustrating the power of the interaction between social media, traditional media, and interpersonal communication. Newspapers, broadcasters, and on-line outlets had been discussing the potential ‘Facebook demonstration’ for a few days prior to January 25. As groups of demonstrators marched through the streets enroute to main squares chanting “Ya ahalina endamo lina,” (“Friends and family, come join us”), people watching from their balconies and windows heeded the calls and enabled the protests to snowball to unprecedented numbers. People were galvanized by the sight. The core activists, who attended every demonstration for years, were suddenly seeing new faces on January 25, mostly mobilized by the Internet. They came by the thousands, and then by the hundreds of thousands, numbers larger than anyone had expected.
  • Twitter played an important though slightly different role. Crucial messages relayed in short bursts of one hundred and forty characters or less made protesters ‘cut to the chase.’ Most activists tweeted events live rather than posting them on Facebook. Twitter was mainly used to let people know what was happening on the ground, and alert them to any potential danger. It usually was ahead of Facebook in such efforts. Twitter also enabled activists to keep an eye on each other. Some managed to tweet ‘arrested’ or ‘taken by police’ before their mobile phones were confiscated. Those words were incredibly important in determining what happened to them and in trying to help them. Most activists are, to this day, in the habit of tweeting their whereabouts constantly, even before they go to sleep, because they know that fellow activists worry if they disappear from the Twittersphere.
  • When the Egyptian regime belatedly realized on January 25 how dangerous social networks could be to its survival, the first thing it did was block Twitter. Internet censorship is a ridiculously ineffective strategy, though. Users were tech-savvy enough to find their way onto proxy servers within minutes, and to post on Facebook how to gain access to Twitter and how to remain on Facebook if the regime blocks it, which indeed happened later. The government felt it didn’t have any other option but to block all Internet access in the country for five days starting January 27 (as well as mobile telephone communications for one day). By then it was too late. People had already found their way to Tahrir and nearly every square in Egypt. Ironically, some were partly motivated by the Internet and communication blockage to take to the streets to find out what was happening and be part of it. And they were joined by workers’ movements in many governorates that expanded the protester numbers into the millions. The major squares of Egypt were full of people of every age, gender, religion, creed, and socio-economic status
  • Gladwell, it turned out, was wrong. These people didn’t know each other personally, but the “weak” personal ties had not proved a barrier to high-risk activism. Egyptians discovered the strong tie of belonging to the common cause of ousting a dictator
  • ocial network users were not the only ones revolting, and social networks were not the only reason or motivation for revolt. However, the role that social media have played over the years in indirectly preparing sectors of Egyptian youths for this moment, and in enabling them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came, cannot be understated.  It can also be said that the role of social networks in Egypt has hardly ended. The revolution is not yet complete. 
marikejp

What draws us to Facebook? - 0 views

  • It can boost our self-esteem, satisfy our need for connectedness and self-promotion, and help us maintain offline relationships.
  • The sociable, the lonely and the narcissistic among us may turn to Facebook to satisfy different needs.
  • site's appeal into two areas: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Facebook, Hofmann says, satisfies both of those basic needs.
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  • Paradoxically, the researchers found that spending a lot of time on Facebook correlated with both high levels of feeling connected to other people and with high levels of disconnection.
  • "It's almost like an addiction that doesn't solve the thing that you're trying to cope with."
  • People who are lonely and disconnected spend time on Facebook to cope with their loneliness. But people who aren't lonely also spend time on Facebook, and for them the site helps maintain social connections, leading them to spend even more time there.
  • the students who felt particularly lonely and disconnected after their time away from Facebook reported sharply increased use of the site when they were allowed back on — presumably because the loneliness was motivating them to spend more time there.
  • we gain some psychological benefit even from passively viewing our own profiles.
  • students who were asked to look at their own Facebook page for just three minutes showed a boost in self-esteem
  • reinforces the version of ourselves who we want to be and can have a positive effect on our self-esteem.
  • people who updated their Facebook status frequently, tagged themselves often in photos and had many Facebook friends — including people whom they didn't know in real life — scored higher on a narcissistic personality inventory than people who used the site more judiciously.
  • can be useful because it can allow people to access information that they wouldn't otherwise know — such as a new job opportunity or a news story they might have missed.
  • "The concept is here to stay, because it is driven by human needs,"
anonymous

Creating Time: students, technologies and temporal practices in higher education - E-Le... - 1 views

  • The data suggest that for these students the dimension of time is in complex, dynamic and contingent interplay with a range of networked devices and shifting material domains and practices, which are mobilised for textual engagement and production. It will argue that student entanglements with devices and digitally mediated texts serve to pause, distribute, elongate and render simultaneous the temporal nature of their practices in emergent 'temporal practices' in complex relationships of co-agency with devices and technologies. It will conclude that a typological analysis is inadequate to understanding these complex, emergent engagements.
  •  
    "Creating Time: students, technologies and temporal practices in higher education LESLEY GOURLAY, Department of Culture, Communication and Media, Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom pages 141-153 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2014.11.2.141"
kimah6

This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don't Believe Robots Will Eat All ... - 4 views

  • This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …
    • kimah6
       
      Benefits of robotics technology. Author in support of technology advancement.
  • First: Focus on increasing access to education and skill development, which itself will increasingly be delivered via technology. Second: Let markets work ( this means voluntary contracts and free trade) so that capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs. Third: Create and sustain a vigorous social safety net so that people are not stranded and unable to provide for their families. The loop closes as rapid technological productivity improvement and resulting economic growth make it easy to pay for the safety net.
  • There is a consequence to a growing robot workforce. Everything gets really cheap.
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  • Therefore, with rare exceptions, there won’t be states where robots eat jobs and products get more expensive. They almost always get cheaper.
  •  
    One of the most interesting topics in modern times is the "robots eat all the jobs" thesis. It boils down to this: Computers can increasingly substitute for human labor, thus displacing jobs and creating unemployment. Your job, and every job, goes to a machine.
normonique

Only time will tell if humanity, technology become inseparable | The Oswegonian - 0 views

  • Sure, things like Facebook and Twitter allow everyone to keep in touch with just about anyone they’ve ever met, but at the same time, it restricts that communication. Something is definitely lost when one jumps between talking to someone face-to-face and simply posting a 400-character message on their Facebook wall. It can feel like people are not communicating with each other anymore; it is more like we are communicating at one another.
    • normonique
       
      -This site most accurately relate to my question of 'In the future will technology and comunication be inseparable?' -The article make's a good point at 'it is more like we are communicating 'at' one another rather than with. 
  • "But then there is another element to this issue that people don’t realize: humans have been interacting with technology since the dawn of time. One definition of technology states that it is the sum of the ways in which a social group provides itself with the material objects of civilization.
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  • not a new
  • maybe people have reached a breaking point where humanity and individuality have been completely consumed by technology.
  • No one knows what the future will hold.
    • normonique
       
      Ok, so the passage does not answer my question of communication and technology being inseparable in the future but it does lead way to some interesting information of, technology not being 'new' just advancing over time.
  • When people completely forget about humanity, and only care about logic and primary directives, then one could say that humanity has been surrendered.
  •  
    The article is a great source of information regarding my question of 'if communication and technology will be inseparable in the future' 
jurasovaib

Rømer's determination of the speed of light - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Order of magnitude[edit] Rømer starts with an order of magnitude demonstration that the speed of light must be so great that it takes much less than one second to travel a distance equal to Earth's diameter. The point L on the diagram represents the second quadrature of Jupiter, when the angle between Jupiter and the Sun (as seen from Earth) is 90°.[note 6] Rømer assumes that an observer could see an emergence of Io at the second quadrature (L), and also the emergence which occurs after one orbit of Io around Jupiter (when the Earth is taken to be at point K, the diagram not being to scale), that is 42½ hours later. During those 42½ hours, the Earth has moved further away from Jupiter by the distance LK: this, according to Rømer, is 210 times the Earth's diameter.[note 7] If light travelled at a speed of one Earth-diameter per second, it would take 3½ minutes to travel the distance LK. And if the period of Io's orbit around Jupiter were taken as the time difference between the emergence at L and the emergence at K, the value would be 3½ minutes longer than the true value. Rømer then applies the same logic to observations around the first quadrature (point G), when Earth is moving towards Jupiter. The time difference between an immersion seen from point F and the next immersion seen from point G should be 3½ minutes shorter than the true orbital period of Io. Hence, there should be a difference of about 7 minutes between the periods of Io measured at the first quadrature and those measured at the second quadrature. In practice, no difference is observed at all, from which Rømer concludes that the speed of light must be very much greater than one Earth-diameter per second.[5]
  • However Rømer also realised that any effect of the finite speed of light would add up over a long series of observations, and it is this cumulative effect that he announced to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. The effect can be illustrated with Rømer's observations from spring 1672. Jupiter was in opposition on 2 March 1672: the first observations of emergences were on 7 March (at 07:58:25) and 14 March (at 09:52:30). Between the two observations, Io had completed four orbits of Jupiter, giving an orbital period of 42 hours 28 minutes 31¼ seconds. The last emergence observed in the series was on 29 April (at 10:30:06). By this time, Io had completed thirty orbits around Jupiter since 7 March: the apparent orbital period is 42 hours 29 minutes 3 seconds. The difference seems minute – 32 seconds – but it meant that the emergence on 29 April was occurring a quarter-hour after it would have been predicted. The only alternative explanation was that the observations on 7 and 14 March were wrong by two minutes.
George Neff

Even Non-Nerds Should Care That Netflix Broke Up With Developers - Megan Garber - The A... - 0 views

  • Big, though, because the closure makes Netflix the latest of the big tech companies and services to have restricted their APIs. Twitter has done it. So has Amazon. So has Google.
  • APIs are enablers of remix culture, essentially. And what they mix is structured data.
  • Because of all that, APIs have been seen, traditionally, as symbolic and practical.
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  • Netflix, according to its blog post on the API closure, is incorporating the products it likes into its service. It's abandoning the others.
  • That may be because Netflix deals with licensed content, as opposed to user-generated information.
Mirna Shaban

Tunisia: How Mohammed Bouazizi Sparked a Revolution - TIME - 0 views

  • Bouazizi was like the hundreds of desperate, downtrodden young men in hardscrabble Sidi Bouzid.
  • arned an income from selling vegetables, work that he'd had for seven years.
  • But on Dec. 17 his livelihood was threatened when a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart and its goods. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but it would be the last. Not satisfied with accepting the 10-dinar fine that Bouazizi tried to pay ($7, the equivalent of a good day's earnings), the policewoman allegedly slapped the scrawny young man, spat in his face and insulted his dead father.
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  • Humiliated and dejected, Bouazizi, the breadwinner for his family of eight, went to the provincial headquarters, hoping to complain to local municipality officials, but they refused to see him. At 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after the confrontation with the policewoman and without telling his family, Bouazizi returned to the elegant double-storey white building with arched azure shutters, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire. He did not die right away but lingered in the hospital till Jan. 4. There was so much outrage over his ordeal that even President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator, visited Bouazizi on Dec. 28 to try to blunt the anger. But the outcry could not be suppressed and, on Jan. 14, just 10 days after Bouazizi died, Ben Ali's 23-year rule of Tunisia was over.
  • Just as the young woman Neda Agha-Soltan became a symbol of Iran's green movement after she was shot while watching a demonstration two years ago, Bouazizi has become a popular symbol among Arabs. He is being emulated as well. There have been almost a dozen copycat self-immolations in several Arab capitals including Cairo and Algiers.
  • Jaber Hajlawi, an unemployed 22-year-old lawyer and one of Bouazizi's neighbors, leaned against the graffitied wall as he lit a cigarette. "We were silent before but Mohammed showed us that we must react," he says.
  • The demand echoes across town. About 300 feet away from the spot where Bouazizi set himself alight, young men in the hundreds gather every day, eager to express their views to anyone who pulls out a notebook. They have erected handwritten banners near portraits of Bouazizi. "We are all prepared to sacrifice our blood for the people," reads one.
Virinchi Tadikonda

Future of Human Space Exploration Could See Humans on Mars, Alien Planets - 0 views

  • Closer to home, private industries like Mars One seek to establish a permanent settlement on the Red Planet. At the Smithsonian Magazine's "The Future is Here Festival" in Washington, D.C. this month, former astronaut Mae Jemison and NASA engineer Adam Steltzner spoke optimistically about the future of manned space exploration
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      The way that planet Earth and our Solar System is operating is that the sun expands everyday, and planets revolving around the sun. The sun will eventually grow and expand with the future being sucking in all the planets, killing all life. Future expansion of other planets is necessary. 
  • Although the idea that bacteria — and life — could hitch a ride on traveling rocks to spread life to other planets is not new, Steltzner suggested a deliberate program that sounds more like science fiction than science fact. Such bacteria could carry our genome and the instructions to reassemble it after landing on a planet (and, one assumes, after the planet has been terraformed to support such life). Steltzner described the process as "printing human beings organically over time."
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      Life in other planets is not at all impossible. There are many scientific methods to start life, the only question is how to do it, and will the life survive? 
  • In addition to curiosity-motivated exploration, Steltzner pointed out that as long as humans remain on a single planet, we are at risk of extinction when disaster strikes. "Our real estate portfolio suffers from a concentration of risk," he said.
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      An important note is that we have limited resources on planet Earth. Once those resources are extinct, there must be exploration elsewhere from either Space, or deep in the unexplored regions of the oceans. 
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  • "Technology didn't slow us down getting to the moon," Steltzner said. "Technology won't slow us down getting to Mars."
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      The problem with this technology is that all the information that was used for getting to the moon was lost. The old computers got replaced and the people who worked to get astronauts to the moon retired. The key this time around is to not lose the information. In Kennedy's presidency, it took a long time to get all the components together. Now that technology is more advanced, it should take less time to get to the moon, and should be a straight shot to Mars. 
  • Mars may be one of the closest planets humans want to colonize, but it certainly isn't the only one. Mae Jemison described the 100-Year Starship project to an interested audience. Funded by NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the 100-Year Starship project aims to develop the tools and technology necessary to build and fly a spaceship to another planetary system within the next 100 years. The program isn't necessarily concerned with building the ship itself as much as it seeks to foster innovation and enthusiasm for interstellar travel.
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      The method of transportation is going to be very difficult. The researching that is in progress and takes a while to accomplish, obviously. Maybe this is NASA's plan to not release to the public yet? 
  • Though many people object to funding the space program when there are humanitarian needs that have to be met on Earth, Jemison points out that such exploration often leads to innovation and unexpected technology that make an impact on Earth-based programs. "I believe that pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow will create a better world today," she said.
    • Virinchi Tadikonda
       
      The original space launches did not revolve around trying to put up satellites, rather to explore space. Since then, satellites have been launched, telescopes have also been put up. Who knows what other technological aspects can be added once funding is no longer cut and innovation is big again?
George Neff

Your Brain While Watching Orange Is the New Black - Shape Magazine - 0 views

  • Like a perfectly addictive drug, almost every aspect of the television viewing experience grabs and holds your brain’s attention, which explains why it’s so tough to stop watching after just one (or three) episodes of Orange is the New Black.
  • Characters run or shout or shoot accompanied by sound effects and music. No two moments are quite alike. To your brain, this kind of continuously morphing sensory stimulation is pretty much impossible to ignore, explains Robert F. Potter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Communication Research at Indiana University.
  • “Our brains are hardwired to automatically pay attention to anything that’s new in our environment, at least for a brief period of time,” he explains. And it’s not just humans; all animals evolved this way in order to spot potential threats, food sources, or reproductive opportunities, Potter says.
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  • “This also explains how you can sit in front of the TV and binge for hours and hours at a time and not feel a loss of entertainment,” he says. “You brain doesn’t have much time to grow bored.”
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Studies show that, by this point, most of your brain activity has shifted from the left hemisphere to the right, or from the areas involved with logical thought to those involved with emotion. There has also been a release of natural, relaxing opiates called endorphins, research indicates.
  • You’re noodle isn’t really analyzing or picking apart the data it’s receiving. It’s basically just absorbing. Potter calls this “automatic attention.” He says, “The television is just washing over you and your brain is marinating in the changes of sensory stimuli.”
  • At the same time, the content of your television show is lighting up your brain’s approach and avoid systems, Potter says. Put simply, your brain is pre-programmed for both attraction and disgust, and both grab and hold your attention in similar ways. Characters you hate keep you engaged just as much (and sometimes more) than characters you love.
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Like any addictive drug, cutting off your supply triggers a sudden drop in the release of those feel-good brain chemicals, which can leave you with a sense of sadness and a lack of energy, research shows. Experiments from the 1970s found that asking people to give up TV for a month actually triggered depression and the sense that the participants had “lost a friend.”
George Neff

American Time Use Survey Summary - 0 views

  • On an average day, nearly everyone age 15 and over (95 percent) engaged in some sort of leisure activity, such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.9 hours) than did women (5.2 hours). (See table 1.)
  • Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time (2.8 hours per day), accounting for more than half of leisure time, on average, for those age 15 and over. Socializing, such as visiting with friends or attending or hosting social events, was the next most common leisure activity, accounting for 43 minutes per day. (See table 1.)
abdulrahmanabdo

How the NSA's Domestic Spying Program Works | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • When the NSA’s spying program was first exposed by the New York Times in 2005, President Bush admitted to a small aspect of the program—what the administration labeled the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”—in which the NSA monitored, without warrants, the communications of between 500-1000 people inside the US with suspected connections to Al Qaeda.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
       
      The first time the NSA's spying programs where first exposed and what was chosen to be revealed by the Bush administration.
  • But other aspects of the Program were aimed not just at targeted individuals, but perhaps millions of innocent Americans never suspected of a crime.
  • A person familiar with the matter told USA Today that the agency's goal was "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders. All of this was done without a warrant or any judicial oversight.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
       
      The main reason why some Americans are upset by the NSA's recent actions. It was a breach in the balance of power that much of American government is run by, for now hundreds of years.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
       
      The intelligence gathering power of the NSA.
  • First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”
    • abdulrahmanabdo
       
      How the intensive intelligence gathering began for the NSA.
  • It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
       
      How intelligence gathering works for the NSA.
  • In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’
  •  
    The NSA's Domestic Spying Program and how it works.
wstrahan

Spotify, YouTube, Streaming Services Are Killing Digital Downloads | TIME.com - 0 views

  • Now, with a deluge of  music streaming services letting fans listen to songs for free, the digital download may be going the way of the CD and the cassette tape before it.
  • U.S. digital track sales decreased for the first time ever in 2013, dropping from 1.34 billion to 1.26 billion, according to Nielsen SoundScan. CD sales also continued their ongoing decline, dropping 14 percent to 165 million. Digital album sales were stable, staying at 118 million sold last year. Meanwhile the number of songs streamed through services like Spotify, YouTube and Rhapsody increased 32 percent to 118.1 billion.
  • Spotify just arrived on U.S. shores in the summer of 2011, but it has become a lightning rod for controversy thanks to a chorus of artists who decry that paying musicians a fraction of a cent per listen is unfair.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Digital downloads were a logical continuation of the business model that generated fat profits for record labels in the heyday of physical music stores. In some cases, with no manufacturing or distribution costs involved, a hit digital album could actually be more lucrative than a physical CD.
  • However, the music industry’s core problem—that lots of fans just don’t want to pay for music—remains an issue. Most people use the free, ad-supported version of Spotify, and the company recently expanded its free offering to mobile devices. The most popular platform for listening to music among young people is YouTube, which is almost entirely free.
  • U.S. digital track sales decreased for the first time ever in 2013, dropping from 1.34
zhaowv

Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com - 0 views

  •  
    What it takes to be a professional gamer.
kahn_artist

Technology's Toll - Impatience and Forgetfulness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality.
  • Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.
  •  
    Discusses the internet's role in decreased focus. Suggests people go off the grid for a while, decrease time online. I find this to be a foolish suggestion...come on. People aren't (maybe even can't?) going to do that. This may, however, add to a counterargument I could address in my paper?
andhearsonars

Curators of databases: circulating images, managing attention and making value on socia... - 0 views

  • relationships between cultural spaces, the image-making practices of smartphone users and social media platforms.
  • curatorial
  • In addition to targeted advertising, value is created by leveraging a continuous circulation of meaning and attention
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • They are a significant site in the development of a mode of media driven not only by ideological or representational forms of control, but also by the effort to manage participation and social space in order to harness and modulate an ongoing circulation of meaning, attention and data.
  • monitor and respond
  • This activity involves the affective labour of structuring image-based relationships between people, places and practices
  • persuade them with specific messages
  • On the social and mobile web, images are more than just representations of people, events and places. They also capture attention, and generate data and networks. An image is a device that holds in place a network of associations and affects in time and place, that can be tracked and responded to.
  • structuring feeling
  • In this article, I propose that conceptualising how value is made on social media involves examining how the analytic capacities of platforms are interrelated with the flows of images created by smartphone users within material cultural spaces.
  • Hashtags, tags, likes, comments and shares are 'manual' devices users employ to position images within a larger flow. Algorithms are 'automated' devices that determine how images circulate within a network based on a set of rules.
  • Users often know that posting certain kinds of content at certain times or places will attain more or less interaction from peers in their network. Efforts users make to position content--for instance, by tagging or liking an image--create data that algorithms use to manage the circulation of content in general by recognising patterns of interaction over time.
braxtondn

Why Selfies Matter | TIME.com - 0 views

  • self-portraits are an extension of their self-absorption, while others view it as nothing more than an outlet for self-expression,
    • braxtondn
       
      Some may view the idea of a "selfie" as a form of expressing themselves, while others view it as just another trend. Either way, its an idea that has adapted to society.
  • As tweens and teens try to form their identity, selfies serve as a way to test how they look, and therefore feel, in certain outfits, make-up, poses and places. And because they live in a digital world, self-portraits provide a way of participating and affiliating with that world.
    • braxtondn
       
      By participating in posting "selfies" , it is giving people permission for others to comment and voice their opinions about the picture
  • they are simply reflections of their self-exploration and nothing more. “Self captured images allow young adults and teens to express their mood states and share important experiences,”
    • braxtondn
       
      The saying " a picture is worth a thousand words" applies to the idea of a selfie. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • With Facebook becoming a prominent resource in young people’s’ therapy sessions, they could provide a useful jumping off point for addressing a teen’s or young adult’s self-perceptions.
    • braxtondn
       
      The comments and interactions online can be either positive or negative. It just depends on what is being posted
  • “Psychologically speaking, there may be some benefit to participating in sharing selfies because this practice is interwoven in our social culture and is a way to interact socially with others.”
    • braxtondn
       
      This helps support my idea that posting selfies can help boost a person's self-image.
  • selfies could be a way for therapists to break the ice and start a dialogue about what the teen was feeling when the self-portrait was taken, or why he snapped the picture in the first place
  • the material that children and adolescents view online — selfies included — can be influential in molding their sense of self.
  • y the most
braxtondn

Instagram and self-esteem: Why the photo-sharing network is even more depressing than F... - 0 views

  • t’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness and even depression
  • Even the positive effects of Facebook can be double-edged: Viewing your profile can increase your self-esteem, but it also lowers your ability to ace a serial subtraction task.
  • A closer look at Facebook studies also supports an untested but tantalizing hypothesis: that, despite all the evidence, Facebook is actually not the greatest underminer at the social-media cocktail party (that you probably weren’t invited to, but you saw the pictures and it looked incredible). Facebook is not the frenemy with the most heads. That title, in fact, goes to Instagram
    • braxtondn
       
      The wording of this paragraph is interesting. I was curious as to where she was going with this
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • he three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group
  • “I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,”
    • braxtondn
       
      The new use of Facebook/ social medias in general
  • Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror
  • “A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”
  • “If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.
    • braxtondn
       
      THis is extremely intereting and true. I, personally, find myself doing this. BUt the idea couldn't haven been any better stated.
  • “You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”
    • braxtondn
       
      Everybody wants to upload a picture that they thick will get them the most likes and comments. People like the attention
  • Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.
    • braxtondn
       
      The difference between Facebook and Instagram
  •  
    It’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness...
  •  
    It’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness...
jurasovaib

Speed of light - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact because the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time.[1]
  • The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Rømer (see Rømer's determination of the speed of light).[83][84] From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, he concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value.[105]
  • Beginning in the 1880s several experiments were performed to try to detect this motion, the most famous of which is the experiment performed by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887.[128] The detected motion was always less than the observational error. Modern experiments indicate that the two-way speed of light is isotropic (the same in every direction) to within 6 nanometres per second.[129]
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In 1972, using the laser interferometer method and the new definitions, a group at NBS in Boulder, Colorado determined the speed of light in vacuum to be c = 299792456.2±1.1 m/s. This was 100 times less uncertain than the previously accepted value. The remaining uncertainty was mainly related to the definition of the metre.[Note 8][104] As similar experiments found comparable results for c, the 15th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) in 1975 recommended using the value 299792458 m/s for the speed of light.[136]
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