Best & Worst Social Networks of 2012
Five Best
- This Is My Jam - Tumblr sans gifs/thinspo/softcore porn/tweens
- SoundCloud 2.0 - Twitter for music
- Quora - Wikipedia married an advice column
- Twitter - Twitter
- LinkedIn - The Fleetwood Mac/brussels sprouts of social networks
Runner Up: R2K
Five Worst
- Facebook - The WalMart of the Internet
- Instagram - The Internet version of some employees at Best Buy’s Geek Squad who make copies of your nudes that they find on your laptop and then blackmail you into giving them more or else they’ll send the originals to everyone you know
- Tumblr - The new MySpace 1.0
Runner Up: Google+
Top Shazam Tagged Songs of 2012
Does anything say so much about the times we live in as the fact that the word sharing has almost everything to do with personal information and almost nothing to do with personal wealth?
Of course, some will answer that we live in times when information is wealth. Generally these are people who have good teeth and drive nice cars. When they sit down to eat, which they do regularly and well, you can bet they’re not eating information.
To say the same thing in slightly different words: You and I belong to a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor is widening even as our personal privacy shrinks. It is the contention of this book that these two phenomena are connected, and connected in a number of ways.
To state just one of those ways: We tend to think of our right to privacy as a value that came about with the historical growth of the middle class. If, as current indices of income suggest, the middle class is vanishing, then it should come as no surprise if the privacy of all but a few people is vanishing with it.
from Privacy, by Garret Keizer
The Hierarchy of Innovation
Burn Note
“Burn Note enables you to communicate online as privately as a phone call or a spoken conversation. It does this by completely deleting all Burn Notes after they have been read and by using encryption end-to-end for security.
Unlike other online services where your communication is stored and traceable, Burn Notes leave no trace online or on your computer. Our service securely deletes the contents of Burn Notes from our servers and from the phones and computers that send and receive them.
All communication on Burn Note can be viewed only once. Burn Notes are destroyed immediately after they have been viewed by the recipient and completely extinguished from the Burn Note servers. Burn Notes are never stored in the recipient’s email and once read it is impossible for anyone to retrieve them.”
![”[Ronen Kadushin’s] Bearina IUD is a political product. It demonstrates the disruptive potential of 3D printed Open Designs to give free and global access to essential products, and circumvent industries (such as the Pharma industry) that aggressively defend their intellectual property to control the price and availability of their products. As an Open Design, the Bearina IUD promotes collaboration and free sharing of knowledge. Further developed by a networked community or in partnership with a forward looking pharma company, It is always available for experimenting with and improving, and could evolve into a functional IUD. The Bearina, with its bear head image, is visually friendly, to appeal, so to speak, to younger women. It is a conceptual product, a design fiction, and absolutely should not be used as an IUD. Nevertheless, it is designed according to dimensions, materials and shapes commonly found in IUDs.”
The exact mechanism of IUDs isn’t well understood (lol, let’s just throw some stuff up there and see what happens), but the presence of a device in the uterus prompts the release of white blood cells and prostaglandins, which are hostile to both sperm and eggs. The presence of copper increases their spermicidal effect, hence Kadushin’s design involving a holder for a copper-coated coin. Normal IUD’s usually run in the hundreds of dollars, but Kadushin’s prototype costs a mere €1.25.
(h/t)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lr55dtkUaZ1qz8j06o1_400.jpg)
”[Ronen Kadushin’s] Bearina IUD is a political product. It demonstrates the disruptive potential of 3D printed Open Designs to give free and global access to essential products, and circumvent industries (such as the Pharma industry) that aggressively defend their intellectual property to control the price and availability of their products. As an Open Design, the Bearina IUD promotes collaboration and free sharing of knowledge. Further developed by a networked community or in partnership with a forward looking pharma company, It is always available for experimenting with and improving, and could evolve into a functional IUD. The Bearina, with its bear head image, is visually friendly, to appeal, so to speak, to younger women. It is a conceptual product, a design fiction, and absolutely should not be used as an IUD. Nevertheless, it is designed according to dimensions, materials and shapes commonly found in IUDs.”
The exact mechanism of IUDs isn’t well understood (lol, let’s just throw some stuff up there and see what happens), but the presence of a device in the uterus prompts the release of white blood cells and prostaglandins, which are hostile to both sperm and eggs. The presence of copper increases their spermicidal effect, hence Kadushin’s design involving a holder for a copper-coated coin. Normal IUD’s usually run in the hundreds of dollars, but Kadushin’s prototype costs a mere €1.25.
(h/t)
“By scanning for patterns in all the tweets of a given user, Mitre’s program was able to guess the correct gender 75.8% of the time—a 20% improvement over the baseline. And even just by analyzing a single tweet of a user, it was right 65.9% of the time—an over 10% improvement over the baseline…Mitre found that given certain characters or combinations of characters, the computer could wisely bet on the gender of the tweeter. The mere fact of a tweet containing an exclamation mark or a smiley face meant that odds were a woman was tweeting, for instance. Of the most gender-skewed words, the majority were in the female category, while only a few were male, leading to this unintentionally hilarious figure”
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might recall the Social Regions of the United States according to our Facebook connections. The above map is a similar concept, showing what our state lines might look like if they were drawn based on who we communicate with most as determined by our cell phone calling data. The map based on SMS data is slightly different from the one based on actual phone calls, which I’d guess has to do with texting being a more strictly personal activity.
Using “bump technology” smokers can exchange virtual cigarettes for real ones
