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INTERNET PRIVACY is a murky, complicated issue full of conflicting interests, misinformation, innuendo and technology snafus.

Complicating matters further are criminals who break into Web sites, steal the information and use it for personal gain.

Advertising firms, who stand to gain as much as any from personal data collection, have absorbed the brunt of complaints from privacy critics

In March, Pandora hired local sales staff in St. Louis as part of its strategy to court local advertisers, and it’s had success out of the gate landing customers. Don Brown Chevrolet, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis University and Panera Bread Co. are just a few of the advertisers that have booked ads on Pandora so far this year.

It’s spent the past two years expanding its sales staff nationwide.

Its regional sales staff of 60 employees nationwide is growing, and Pandora plans on ultimately having an office in each of the top 50 radio markets.

But it took a long time for solar sails to go from concept to reality. The first successful demonstration of the propulsion system didn't come until 2010, when Japan's Ikaros probe deployed its 46-foot-wide (14 m) sail and became the first craft ever to cruise through space on the backs of photons.

The $27 million Sunjammer mission, which takes its name from the Arthur C. Clarke story, will use a sail built by California-based company L'Garde that measures 124 feet (38 m) on a side. The sail, made of an advanced material called Kapton, is just 5 microns (about 0.0002 inches) thick. It weighs less than 70 pounds (32 kilograms) and packs down to the size of a dishwasher, NASA officials have said.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang finished his four country tour of Africa, making stops in Ethiopia (including the African Union headquarters), Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya. China’s activities in Africa are increasingly gaining media attention around the world, particularly as speculation heats up about a competition for the continent between China and the U.S. (or even China and Japan).

Li promised to devote “more than half of its foreign aid to Africa,” with no conditions attached to the funding. Li pledged China’s friendship to Africa, and reiterated Chinese support for Africa playing a larger role in world politics as it continues to develop. Li also stressed that China “will never attach political conditions to its assistance to Africa and will never use its aid programs to interfere in the internal affairs of African countries,” a tacit criticism of Western countries who often refuse to provide funding to countries seen as human rights violators.

Li Keqiang also acknowledged in a speech that China-Africa relations have encountered some “growing pains,” a nod to tensions in some African countries over issues such as illegal Chinese mining operations and resentment against local Chinese traders. But Xinhua was quick to emphasize that these “growing pains” are “problems that inevitably occur during the development of relations” — meaning no one (especially not China) is to blame.

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.

Doctor X is a trained physician that works on harm reduction projects in real life but helps Silk Road users in his free time by providing answers to any of their questions—all for free. He started in June 2013, and received 600 questions and 5,000 visits after just three months. In an interview with Joseph Cox of Vice, Doctor X said: "Drug users need more...They need answers, and that's what I try to provide. People ask me about the real risks and adverse effects, drug combinations [illegal and prescriptive] and the use of drugs in persons suffering from different conditions, such as diabetes or neurological problems."

The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there's a level on which they share a common experience.

rites observes that the majority of YA novels about gay and lesbian teens "are very Foucaultian in their tendency to privilege the discourse of homosexuality over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality more rhetorically than physically" (102-03).

Star Trek is widely considered to be the first "modern" fandom, and the majority of studies of participatory media fandom begin their history with Trek fans. However, activities that could be called "fannish" go back much further, and include eighteenthcentury unauthorized sequels of works such as Gulliver's Travels, the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and the entire body of literary and folk "retellings." See Brewer, Pflieger, Derecho, and Stasi.

According to Francesca Coppa, the Internet enabled "an increasingly customizable fannish experience" (54). As a result, "[a]rguably, this may be fandom's postmodern moment, where the rules are 'there ain't no rules' and traditions are made to be broken" (57).

relationships between cultural spaces, the image-making practices of smartphone users and social media platforms.

In addition to targeted advertising, value is created by leveraging a continuous circulation of meaning and attention

Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity. Given its key role and the rate at which new approaches to understanding and examining presence are appearing, this chapter draws together current research on presence to provide an up to date overview of the most widely accepted approaches to its understanding and measurement.

most (74%) use social networks as a megaphone, announcing events and activities and sharing organization-centric info.

Nonprofits overwhelmingly (88%) said their most important communication tools were email and their websites, even though fully 97% of them are on Facebook. This may have to do with the fact that in their mind, the pinnacle of engagement is a donation (47%).

Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos

At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music.

Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits.