Tag Archives: tech

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Before the Internet, my parents were privy to most of my world. They saw whom I interacted with, where I was, what I was doing. Being preadolescent, I spent most of my time with them anyway. I had no desire to befriend four to eight strangers and talk to them daily, for hours, in passive secrecy from my parents.

After the Internet, my parents were privy to much less and would only rarely, and with decreasing frequency, ask about what they no longer knew. “What did you do on the Internet today?” was not a question I remember being asked. If my parents, squinting over my shoulder, saw Esperath Wraithling on the screen, they didn’t see the dark elf wizard I saw, they saw two meaningless words. If they looked at me — whether I was immersed in GemStone III, on a message board, or in a chat room — I appeared to be sitting in a chair, doing almost nothing.

Far from doing almost nothing, I was socializing in and exploring the metaphysical room that had been quietly connected to millions of houses. The shared, boundless room of the Internet seemed normal, even mundane, in the mid-1990s. I didn’t have another childhood for comparison. Only in retrospect — and increasingly, as my memory of a pre-Internet existence became tinier and more conspicuous, like something that glints — does it seem weird and mysterious, almost alien.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/when-i-moved-online.html?ref=todayspaper

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When it comes to sadness and disgust, Rui and co found very little correlation between users. Sadness and disgust do not easily spread through the network in this way. They found a higher correlation among users who tweeted joyful messages.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.

That has significant implications. Not least of these is that anger is more likely to spread quickly and broadly across a network.

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– http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/

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In 1917, a freshman paper was on average only 162 words long and the majority were simple “personal narratives.” By 1986, the length of papers more than doubled, averaging 422 words. By 2006, they were more than six times longer, clocking in at 1,038 words – and they were substantially more complex, with the majority consisting of a “researched argument or report,” with the student taking a point of view and marshalling evidence to support it.

“Student writers today are tackling the kinds of issues that require inquiry and investigation as well as reflection,” Prof. Lunsford concluded.

Why this astonishing uptick in quality and sophistication? It undoubtedly reflects rising educational standards, and the better availability of information in a digital age. But there has also been an explosion in composition.

It used to be that students did comparatively little writing out of school; even if you were in university, there was little call for it, and few vehicles to showcase your writing. But now, as Prof. Lunsford’s research has found, 40 per cent of all writing is done outside the classroom – it’s “life writing,” stuff students do socially, or just for fun. And it includes everything from penning TV recaps to long e-mail conversations to arguments on discussion boards.

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– http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/how-new-digital-tools-are-making-kids-smarter/article14321886/?page=all

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Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know.

However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)

The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data.

But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.

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– http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/the-unexpected-result-of-fingerprint-authentication-that-you-cant-take-the-fifth

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