You ARE The Product (by vlogbrothers).
The title of the video is a very important phrase. It’s true whenever you watch network television or a youtube video or use your Facebook account. It’s true more and more of the time. And this video raises some interesting points about how creators of content become complicit in selling out their audience and what that might mean. All around a pretty interesting little discussion.
Privacy icons similar to Creative Commons icons.
This is an idea that could be implemented very broadly for really any problems with consumers understanding their rights. It seems to me that companies would WANT to keep to some standards and communicate them to possible consumers. This kind of thing offers a way to do that. And imagine if similar iconograph systems could be used to show how much of your product was post-consumer, or what percentage of your profits go to charities, etc.
Photos of people living off the grid, making lives that don’t rely on anything but themselves. The photos are utterly fascinating, and I’d love to hear more of their stories.
Japanese “Lolita fashion” anime subculture in Mexico.
I always think it’s cool to see one culture appropriating the images of another culture in surprising ways. The other great example is the Japanese “greaser” subculture, a group of Japanese youth that dress and dance and do their hair like 50s greasers (or maybe parodies of 50s greasers).
Descriptive Camera prints out descriptions of pictures, not pictures themselves.
A really interesting use of Amazon’s mechanical turk platform.
396 years ago today, the world lost Shakespeare – these are some of the surprising things he left behind. Also see this list of modern phrases we owe to Shakespeare.
It’s kind of crazy to think about all of these things. My favorite is the starlings.
Project Glass: One day… (by Google).
Google’s commercials are always so good, because the technology seems to work so naturally with how people already live their lives. Like, this isn’t a commercial to persuade you to adopt a new way of life with a new technology, it’s to show you that the technology already anticipates how you live your life and will fit right in. It’s a real thing of beauty.
(THOUGH there is no ignoring the giant amount of privacy you give up when sharing ALL of this with google. But that’s just the normal complaint about Google.)
Facebook Asserts Trademark on Word ‘Book’ in New User Agreement | Threat Level | Wired.com.
What do people think of this? The biggest wrinkle I see here is that Facebook is alleging that “Book” is one of their trademarks in the terms of use, but they don’t actually have a registered trademark on that word or its various uses. I am also interested to see that 0.facebook.com has a registered trademark behind it…
Admittedly, I call men who are in my approximate age group (20-30) “boys”… and almost never “guys.”
There are countless words you can use to degrade a woman: bitch, slut, whore. The list goes on. But the word that does the most to set us back has nothing to do with outspokenness or sexual choices. It’s a word that’s used openly, in public, shamelessly, to our faces. In fact, it’s the word I—along with most young women I know—use to describe myself.
The worst word to call a woman is girl.
Girls are children. Girls are dependents. Girls can’t make their own decisions. And yet, when we talk about feminine achievement, we talk about girl power. Girls, according to Beyoncé, run the world. The character of Lisbeth Salander, self-sufficient though she may be, is a girl with a dragon tattoo. And, most importantly, in real life, among people I know and respect, female colleagues are “girls from work.” The women with whom we studied for advanced degrees are “girls from school.” A lot’s in a name; although we don’t mean to hurt each other, the word girl diminishes our maturity, our responsibility, our power. But what alternative do we have?
Even though my feminist heart hurts to admit it, woman is no good.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the word. It’s just that to advocate for the use of “woman” rather than “girl” is to ignore the practical truth. If all who identify as female were to go from girl to woman when they turned 18—or 21 or 13 or 16 or at menses or upon graduation or at some other arbitrary milestone—the scales of language would still be unbalanced. At least among English-speaking males, growing up is far more nuanced. A boy doesn’t just instantly become a man: he gets to be a guy.
Props to dorothy-snarker, who already does this. Also, I think some people are kind of already doing this with “lady.” Folks, is “lady” the new female “guy”? Does “gal” work? Discuss.
(via theatlantic)
I have been doing this for YEARS, and I get a lot of weird comments and weird looks. I perused a very large number of dictionaries, and this is the best I could come up with myself. I’m glad to see someone else noticed this colloquial gap and even chose the same word to fill it.
How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
This is great for so many reasons.
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