http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/07/certificate
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New mobile photo apps such as Instagram, Picplz and Path represent the next generation of photo sharing — where high ... Read more
Cartoon: Conspicuous Me
READWRITEWEB | DECEMBER 5, 2010
http://pulsene.ws/rZn4
I can directly thank two people for today's cartoon. One is Deb Ng, who tweeted this a few days ago: If I were to propose a ... Read more
Pew Internet has released a report finding that income is the strongest predictor of whether, how often, and in what ways ...
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http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2010-11-17-hyundaiipad17_ST_N.htm
View the video then vote for Amy!
I really dig this video from the AT&T Simplify Your Life video contest - check it out. It could win the $20,000 Grand Prize!
You can see the video here: http://tinyurl.com/2e323rq
![]() | NET225S Writing for Electronic Media - Translation |
NET225S Writing for Electronic Media
Translation
Several events occurred to inspire this lesson in writing for electronic media. First, one day last week I had two messages in my In Box that made me pause:
One email alerted me to a comment on one of my blogs from a person in Russia (.ru) and the comment was posted in Cyrillic. The other email is from a student whose first language is Japanese, and in the “From” field, the name is rendered in Kanji.
A few days later, I encountered an article in my newsreader that claims that 70 percent of the world’s internet users do not speak English.
Now, what was really interesting is that the above-mentioned Russian comment wasn’t lost to me. With barely a thought, I copied the text from the email, opened Google Translate, pasted in the text, and read the result. And this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Really, though, a tremendous amount of clever programming and computing power is behind this seemingly mundane act. (Google Translate, Babelfish.com and other translation services can translate entire websites - just paste the URL into the translate box.)
First, the program must recognize the alphabet, then the language, then the words, then the meaning, and render that into an entirely different language. It made sense. Here is the translation:
Excellent article! Many thanks to the author for interesting material. Good luck in development! :)
Machine translation (as opposed to human translation) has made great strides in the last few years, as processing power has increased, translation tables have been populated, and artificial intelligence models try to tease out contextual clues. Fluent and instantaneous machine translation has been a staple of science fiction for over a century, and we are now very close to its realization, both from language to language and mode to mode (text to speech or speech to text). There has even been experimentation of voice in language A to text in language B!
Machine translation breaks down when we use idioms - words that seem to have one definition but are used in a different way in conversation. Humans are pretty good at understanding idioms, but machines are terrible at it.
When we use idioms and metaphors to communicate, and a non-native speaker (or machine) tries to translate, it can sometimes sound like a Star Trek episode. For example, we commonly use the phrase “That’s big of you” when we mean someone is being generous (or sometimes we mean it sarcastically when they are not, but that’s a different problem!). Translating that phrase to Latvian, for instance, results in:
Tas ir liels jums
It is a word-for-word translation. But if we translate it right back to English, we get something else:
It's great for you
Uh, oh. “Big” became “great” and “of” became “for.” So let’s say we are in a business deal with a Latvian partner, and she makes an offer that is to our advantage. We reply “That’s big of you,” to indicate that we think she is being generous. However, on the other end, it sounds like we are saying, “That’s great for you!” meaning we think it is in HER favor. That could be taken as an insult, and the entire deal could collapse.
So, what can be done to avoid such miscommunication? Let’s try the translation again, this time being more precise with our language:
Original phrase: You are very generous
English to Latvian: Jūs esat ļoti atsaucīgs
Latvian to English: You're very generous
The more precise and non-idiomatic English phrase avoids the mis-translation seen in the earlier example.
The activity for you, then, is to identify five or so idiomatic or metaphorical phrases that you are prone to using. (Review your email archives for one source.) Enter them into a translation site and translate them into several languages, then back to English. See how they change, then try to re-write the original text to remove the idiom or metaphor and use direct language, and run them through the same translators to see whether you have succeeded. Post your phrases, translations, back-translations, revisions and re-translations to your blog site.
![]() | NET225 S Writing for Electronic Media - Brevity |
NET225S Writing for Electronic Media
Brevity
One of the interesting consequences of the rise of social media - Facebook and Twitter, in particular - is the prevalence of the “micro-blog,” or a web posting that is extremely abbreviated.
Twitter’s post limit is 140 characters. Not words - characters! Including spaces and punctuation. Here’s what you can say in 140 characters:
How do you explain Twitter to someone who doesn't follow Twitter? Tweets are trail markers, saying "go this way to find interesting stuff."
Actually, that’s 139. The input field on Twitter’s web page counts them down for you.
What happens if you want to say more? One option is to use a blog+autopost option, such as Posterous. Here’s a longer post, as it appears on Twitter:
Springsteen lost and found: The Promise http://post.ly/198QF
That is actually just the title and a shortened URL link to the full blog post at http://edisonnet.posterous.com/springsteen-lost-and-found-the-promise. The URL itself is 69 characters - fully half of the allowed character count for a tweet (what an entry on Twitter is called). Posterous, in addition to posting the entry to blogs, Facebook, etc., will create a shortened URL to save character counts.
There are a number of URL shortening services, Bit.ly being perhaps the most popular. These work by building a simple table, using a uniquely generated string of letters and numbers and associating that string with a full URL. When someone clicks on (or enters) the shortened Bit.ly address, the site forwards the page request to the actual URL.
Another place characters count is in Facebook ads. Facebook ads are fairly inobtrusive, as web-based ads go. They appear on pages as relevant content, based on either the content of the posts or on information in the user’s profile settings. Here are two ads that appeared on one of my pages recently:
The disc golf ad appears because I am a member of the Edison Disc Golf fan page. The other is because I graduated from high school in 1977. Your ads will differ based on your preferences and settings. If you notice, just above the Disc Golf Superstore heading, there’s a link to “Create an Ad.” If you want to see something cool and magical happen, paste in a URL of your website (your blog URL is OK) and click the “Suggest an Ad” button. Facebook reads the content of the site and puts in a title, some body text and even a graphic!
Note that you have 25 characters for a headline, and 135 for the body text. Edit your title and body text to get a message to a prospective audience. Facebook will show you a preview of what it looks like:
The next step is to target your ads (you can still do all this without committing to a purchase). Try different keywords and demographics to see how that affects your potential audience.
If you are interested in how Facebook ad pricing works, click Continue. Otherwise, post a screen capture of your ads (try a few) and some information about your demographic selections to your blog. Specifically address how your ad copy targets the people you identified in your demographic selections.
Then try to recreate the ad in a Twitter entry, including a shortened URL to point people to your web address.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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It is common knowledge among internet security professionals, and many savvy users, that the most popular websites - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. - are especially vulnerable because they do not force secure sessions. Basically what happens is that your initial login is encrypted, but then a session certificate ("cookie") is sent, often through unencrypted web space. If you are connecting to the service through an open, unsecured WiFi network, its like shouting your ATM PIN number across the cafeteria.
To demonstrate how easily this information can be snagged from the air, Eric Butler developed a "demonstration" application called "Firesheep." The Firefox plug-in takes only a minute or so to download and install, and then you are a hacker. No pesky terminal code or anything to worry about.
I have installed Firesheep on my desktop computer, which normally does not use WiFi, and I will be capturing my own accounts. Otherwise, what I am about to do technically violates the terms of service of about every service I am using. Be it known, though, that I am capturing only my own account data, and only for demonstration purposes.
Here is what Firesheep looks like when installed:
[cid:0A882D1A-7975-43D5-A110-E0463E7B80A8@edisonohio.edu]
Now, I am going to connect my iPad to the same unsecured WiFi network ("Open Edison") and connect to my Facebook account using the Safari Mobile web browser (more about this in a minute). Here goes....
Pop. Almost instantly my account name and service appears. It even shows my profile picture.
[cid:B83C05DD-D116-45EB-96F5-166A75A99BE8@edisonohio.edu]
If I double-click the entry in the Firesheep pane, I am instantly logged into Facebook using those credentials. From there I have complete account access.
Logging into other services adds them to the Firesheep pane:
[cid:B15C94BF-A8E3-4FED-ABBF-56D5510A5B16@edisonohio.edu]
And presumably they will stay there as long as I want them. There is no warning from any of the services that my account has been "hacked," because as far as they know, I am the owner of the accounts and nothing is amiss.
Now, interestingly, a few experiments show that logging onto those same services on the same unsecured network, but using an iPad app rather than the generic web browser, hides the account session cookie from Firesheep. For example, if I use the "Facebook app" Firesheep detects the account, because it is just a web app and launches the Safari Mobile browser. But connecting to my Facebook stream through Flipboard hides the session from Firesheep. And on a secured WiFi network (basically one that you have to log into) Firesheep is unable to detect the account cookies.
I'm not sharing this to turn you all into hackers. I'm doing it to make you think about how and where you use your online accounts. While Firesheep comes preloaded with scripts for detecting about a dozen of the most popular web services, "developers" can write their own (again, presumably to test the security of their own services, but then who knows?).
For more about Firesheep and a discussion about implications of web security go to Eric Butler's website http://codebutler.com/firesheep. >
At the end of tonight's session, one of the participants came up to chat. She smiled and said thank you. Then she said she was born in '18. She had lost her husband of 65 years in June, and she is trying to get out and do more things. And seeing that I wasn't getting it, she said, "college was never an option for me. I was born in Sioux City, and had to go west to find work. I'm grateful for this opportunity to experience what college might have been like for me."
Wow! Let's do it again! Soon.
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Don't know how "true" it is. Don't care. True enough. Immediate. Familiar and strange.
Proves nerds can be both jerks and successful. And money is not always the driving force. Sometimes it is a byproduct.
Install is simple, and FaceTime integrates with your Address Book contacts to make calling easy.
Of course, the first person I called was... ME!
[cid:A9F1F6A1-6CB2-4C86-AFCB-1DA5CBE37A5C@edisonohio.edu]
The significance of course is that the desktop for Mac client effectively quadruples the number of FaceTime-ready devices, as all iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Airs, etc. running Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.4 or later) potential clients.
More Posterous email tips.
I was about to recommend a brand new collaboration between Elton John and Leon Russell, "The Union," released Oct 19 2010 on the Mercury label, and then, at lunch, on Pandora up pops an 8-minute burning blues guitar live performance of "Real Bad Way" by Atlanta songwriter-bluesman Tinsley Ellis.
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This post originally appeared on My Life Scoop, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about using social media and ...
Coming soon to every answer to the question "What does the Internet look like?"
http://www.nisod.org/student_essay/
Submission Deadline |
November 8, 2010 |
Essay Topic |
Describe your most rewarding learning experience with a faculty, staff, or administrator at your college. |
$3,000+ in Prizes |
Click here for a list of additional prizes |
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"There are more writing opportunities than ever, but they require skills that Strunk and White never dreamed of. This course will teach you how to Photoshop images to create a narrative, edit a 20-second YouTube video, compress your thoughts into 140 characters (or clarify them into a PowerPoint presentation that won’t put your audience to sleep), write a wiki entry that encourages other people to edit and adapt it, and ensure your work goes viral, turning readers into vectors for your ideas."
Developer_World posts an excellent tutorial for making your website mobile-friendly.
If you're not thinking about a mobile audience yet, bookmark this article - you will be eventually!
Now the British government is taking up their cause. Next month, officials are sitting down with advertisers, fashion editors and health experts to discuss how to curb the practice of airbrushing and promote body confidence among girls and women. If the campaigners get their way, fashion ads and magazines in Britain may soon have to label retouched photos to warn people that the perfect bodies they see are but digital fantasies.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of maximizing your site’s chances of appearing at or near the top of searches in services such as Google. While no single strategy can guarantee best results, there are a few things you can do when writing copy for your site to improve your search results.
Please read the Mashable article to get an appreciation for how intricate this process can be. Then, on the blog site you set up for this class, create a new entry. In that new entry, write a brief description of one of the following topics for a hypothetical website (you may need to do some research, and if you want to choose your own topic, please clear it with me first via email):
- Your site is a review site of the week’s best new independent music;
- Your site is to help publicize a Farmer’s Market/Food Co-Op in your community;
- Your site is for collectors of antique bicycles
- Your site promotes a “green” lifestyle
Write an appropriate blog title with keywords. Include keywords in your entry’s tags. Write about 3-4 paragraphs (approximate) using appropriate keywords in the text.
When you have completed your entry, post it to your blog, and create a second entry. In the second entry, explain how you determined what SEO keywords you would emphasize. Test your keywords by searching for them in Google and link to the top three search results. Do your keywords seem to be directing searchers to the appropriate topic? If not, why not?
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http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
The display of interactive elements and how they draw you into the video are stunning - and frankly a bit spooky. It's processor intensive, so use your best hardware and broadband, but definitely try it for yourself.
Roger Ebert raises the bar on film criticism and the blog publishing form in a stunningly beautiful and insightful review of Werner Herzog's documentary 3D film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" from the Toronto International Film Festival.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/09/shadows_on_the_walls_of_our_ca.html
Ebert draws from his vast knowledge of film craft to weave a story of filmmaking, human origins, and why art matters.