NetLingo Blog: Let's Talk Tech

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Source: BizBrain.org

Product You:

With free online services, you’re the product.

How Google Sells You:

Adwords provides a link between you and products
Top Cost-Per-Click’s for adwords:
1.) Insurance: top CPC of $54.91
24% of keywords
2.) Loans: top CPC of $44.28
12.8% of keywords
3.) Mortgage:top CPC of $47.12
9% of keywords
4.) Attorney: top CPC of $47.07
3.6% of keywords
5.) Credit: top CPC of $36.06
3.2% of keywords
6.) Lawyer: top CPC of $42.51
3% of keywords
7.) Donate: top CPC of $42.02
2.5% of keywords
8.) Degree: top CPC of $40.61
2.2% of keywords
9.) Hosting: top CPC of $31.91
2.2% of keywords
10.) Claim: top CPC of $45.51
1.4% of keywords
11.) Conference Call: top CPC of $42.05
.9% of keywords
12.) Trading: top CPC of $33.19
.8% of keywords
13.) Software: top CPC of $35.29
.8% of keywords
14.) Recovery: top CPC of $42.03
.7% of keywords
15.) Transfer: top CPC of $29.86
.6% of keywords
16.) Gas/Electricty: top CPC of $54.62
.6% of keywords
17.) Classes: top CPC of $35.04
.5% of keywords
18.) Rehab: top CPC of $33.59
.5% of keywords
19.) Treatment: top CPC of $37.18
.4% of keywords
20.) Cord Blood: top CPC of $27.8
.4% of keywords
Turns out you’re worth a lot:
96% of Google’s revenue comes from online ads
$38.6 billion[3]
More than Panama’s GDP, and the 31 poorest countries in the world combined.
Or a third of all advertising revenue online.[3]

How Twitter Sells You:

The average Twitter user follows 5 or more brands.[4]
With Twitter mobile users likely to follow 11 or more brands.
With $316.9 million in revenue
($269 million in ad revenue, 85% of total)
Mobile users are 53% likelier to recall seeing an ad on Twitter than the average Twitter user.
How do you use Twitter?
You use Twitter for entertainment: $.63 per user
You use Twitter in search of deals, clicking on ads:$3.16
(based on revenue/active users)
With Chinese ads leading the way:
[twitter users by location][5]
China: 35.5 million
India: 33 million
U.S.: 22.9 million
Brazil: 19.6 million
Mexico: 11.7 million
With 77% of monthly active users coming from outside the U.S.
(Even though the Chinese government has blocked Twitter!)
With Twitter earning $200,000 per promoted trend:
Such as :
[from March 2013][6]
(3/8) #TheNextBigThing (Samsung)
(3/9) #TheBible (History Channel)
(3/11) #FeedTheBeat(Taco Bell)
(3/13) #BurtWonderstone (Warner Brothers)
(3/14) #501s (Levi’s)
(3/15) #TheCallMovie(Sony Pictures)
(3/16) #3dollarsub(Subway)
(3/18) #BatesMotel(A&E)
(3/19) #TheHobbit(The Hobbit Movie)
(3/20) #HotNSpicy(McDonald’s)
(3/21) #BracketBusters(University of Pheonix)
(3/20) #NickyFlash(AT&T)
(3/23) #RallyCry(Capital One)
(3/25) #Blackberry10 (Blackberry)
(3/26) #ItsNotComplicated (AT&T)
(3/27) #NYIAS (Toyota)
(3/28) #TheHost(Twilight Movie)
(3/29) #GiJoeRealiation(movie)
(3/30) #OrphanBlack(BBC America)
(3/31) #TheWalkingDead(AMC)
Adding up to $5.2 million that month in the U.S. alone.[8]

How Facebook Sells You:

Facebook has the largest database of personal information ever compiled.
With 1 billion Facebook profiles, a vast number of engaged users in a social graph becomes a real asset.[11]
If Facebook users were citizens of Facebook nation.
Facebook would be the 3rd most populous country in the world
After China, and India.[9]
88% of Facebook’s revenue is from ads
But Facebook is losing out on the ad’s game:
With marketing referrals from Facebook dropping 20% in 2013.[10]
While Pinterest and Twitter jumped substantially.
But Facebook makes money as a payment provider.
Facebook Credits, used to purchase virtual goods (like Farmville) [10]
Were 18% of Q1 profit in 2012: or $200 million[10]
With marketing targeted by free services, and data mining companies.
Building profiles of internet and spending behavior, as well as interests.
Acxiom Corp. is a “database marketing” corporation
- 23,000 servers in Conway, Arkansas
- Holds 1,500 data points on 500 million online consumers worldwide
- Reviews 50 trillion data “transactions” yearly
- Consumer rankings
PersonicX
- Categorizes consumers into
- 70 clusters, and
- 21 life stages
- You aren’t a number, you’re a pithy phrase, such as:
- Early Parents
- First Digs
- Collegiate Crowd
- Young Workboots
- Rolling Stones
- Married Sophisticates
- Children First
- Career Building
- Spouses & Houses
- Outward Bound
- Truckin’ & Stylin’
- Home Cooking
- First Mortgage
- Resolute Renters
- Mobile Mixers
- Cartoons & Carpools
- Cluster 62 Kids & Rent
- Urban Scramble
- Pennywise Mortgagees
- Resilient Renters
- Shooting Stars
- Hard Chargers
- Dynamic Duos
- Savvy Singles
- Kids & Clout
- Tots & Toys
- Country Comfort
- Soccer & SUVs
- City Mixers
- Solo and Stable
- Modest Wages
- Rural Parents
- Metro Parents
- Rural Rovers
- Summit Estates
- Skyboxes & Suburbans
- Lavish Lifestyles
- Solid Single Parents
- Apple Pie Families
- Midtown Minivanners
- Farmland Families
- Country Single
- Fun & Games
- Mid Americana
- Metro Mix
- Urban Tenants
- Established Elite
- Corporate Clout
- Career-Centered Singles
- Country Ways
- Acred Couples
- Work & Causes
- Community Singles
- Humble Homes
- Downtown Dwellers
- Pennywise Proprietors
- The Great Outdoors
- Rural Retirement
- Still Truckin’
- Sitting Pretty
- Full Steaming
- Platinum Oldies
- Clubs & Causes
- Suburban Seniors
- Raisin’ Grandkids
- Devoted Duos
- Family Matters
- Rural Everlasting
- Thrifty Elders
- Timeless Elders
And Rubicon, a competitor:
Crafting ads that 97% of internet users deal with in a month.
The Internet offers an unparalleled opportunity to monitor and mold user experience, pulling you towards purchases. If a product is free, you’re probably the product.

Citations:

1. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2095210/How-Google-Makes-Its-Billions-The-20-Most-Expensive-AdWords-Keyword-Categories
2. http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2012/what-does-google-actually-make-money-from-goog1121.aspx
3. http://mashable.com/2013/08/28/online-ad-revenues/
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lili-balfour/how-much-are-you-worth-to-twitter_b_4099327.html
5. http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/05/01/the-worlds-most-active-twitter-country-hint-its-citizens-cant-use-twitter/
6. http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/promoted-trends-earnings_b39637
7. http://www.mastersinit.org/digital-afterlife/
8. http://www.technewsdaily.com/16515-facebook-personal-information.html
9. http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2012/06/dollars-and-cents-behind-facebook-apps-infographic
10. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-earnings-report-the-details-are-in-the-ads/2013/10/30/ee6280be-418a-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html
11. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-18/nine-things-you-should-know-about-facebooks-ipo

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I personally like the fact that “ephemerality and anonymity" are now the rage on the Internet. I've been preaching for years to monitor your digital footprint, let's hope that awareness goes mainstream. In the meantime, there's a new trend going on and a backlash against images of perfect lives...

Many parents feel it’s essential to snap up Twitter handles and Gmail accounts for their kids before someone grabs those names.

“Harper Estelle Wolfeld-Gosk has 6,282 Twitter followers,” said Joe Coscarelli in NYMag.com. “She’s 2 weeks old.” The infant daughter of Today show correspondent Jenna Wolfe is just one of thousands of kids who have Twitter accounts that are written in their voices but are “set up, maintained, and authored by parents.” Here’s a sample of little Harper’s tweets: “Pooped AND pee’d on Dr’s changing table. Everyone laughed.”

Why bother with such twaddle? Blame both “everyday parental pride” and “tech-savvy paranoia.” Many parents feel it’s essential to snap up Twitter handles and Gmail accounts for their kids before someone grabs those names. Once those accounts are established, parents can’t resist the temptation to put wisecracks in their kids’ mouths. Some critics are calling this “oversharenting’’—sharing too much information about kids online, said Eliana Dockterman in Time.com. One study found that 94 percent of parents post pictures of their kids on the Internet, with newborns uploaded to Facebook an average of 57.9 minutes after their birth.

You won’t find my daughter there, said Amy Webb in Slate.com. My husband and I have decided we will keep all photos of and references to her off the Internet until she’s mature enough to decide what to post. Exposing your child on social media poses huge issues for his or her “future self.” Do you really want photos of your 5-year-old in a bathing suit circulating permanently on the Internet? Do you want Google and Facebook to start compiling data about your kids before they can even crawl, to be shared with advertisers or intrusive government agencies or unknown searchers? “It’s inevitable that our daughter will become a public figure, because we’re all public figures in this new digital age.” But it should be her, not us, who decides what’s in that public identity.

So, parents, please spare us, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com. All these babies tweeting and posting supposedly amusing observations on Facebook really is a bit much. “It’s like we all woke up one day in a mass version of Look Who’s Talking.” Children are not meant to be a “witty accessory” to your own online life. Besides, said Caity Weaver in Gawker.com, making sure your kid has the right handle on a Facebook and Instagram account 20 years from now is laughably shortsighted. It’s likely to be as useful as 1990s parents stockpiling “CompuServe screen names and laser disc players.”

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"If these emoji are going to be the texting and Twitter standard, we think it'd be cool if they better reflected the diversity of the people using them" says Chris Gayomali. There are nine cat-face emotions, but not one black person.

Emojis have now fully embedded themselves into our digital vocabulary, showing up in everything from forgettable Katy Perry videos to comedians tapping rap lyrics into their iPhones. The sentiment behind emojis is nothing new, of course. It's why we started pairing colons with closed parentheses and cocking our heads to the side in the first place.

Now, should you find yourself in a situation in which words do not suffice, the iOS keyboard offers hundreds of emoji options for you to pick from. There are several pixelated yellow faces representing the full spectrum of boredom, for instance. There are at least 10 variations for hearts. There are emojis of gay couples holding hands, a smiling turd, demon masks, and a beaming cherub. There are white faces — both young and old — as well as tokenistic caricatures of what appear to be an Asian boy, an Indian man, and a family of Latinos.

What there aren't, however, are any emojis for black people. Not a single one.

It's an egregious omission, and one that's drawing the ire of a petition circulating on DoSomething.org, as Fast Company initially reported. The petition is calling for Apple to update its iOS keyboard to more accurately reflect the multitude of people who use it. It states:

Of the more than 800 emojis, the only two resembling people of color are a guy who looks vaguely Asian and another in a turban. There's a white boy, girl, man, woman, elderly man, elderly woman, blonde boy, blonde girl and, we're pretty sure, Princess Peach. But when it comes to faces outside of yellow smileys, there's a staggering lack of minority representation.

The conspicuous absence of black faces on the emoji keyboard is both "deeply troubling and probably racist," says Andy Holdeman at PolicyMic. The "easy answer" is that emojis were developed in Japan, where there aren't very many black people. But that's a cop out, argues Holdeman, considering there are also two different icons for camels. Yep. Camels.

Emoji was originally developed by Shigetaka Kurita, who engineered the expressive reaction faces many years ago, around the time Windows 95 first began taking off in Japan. In 2010, they were added to the Unicode Standard in other countries, including the United States.

Calls for a more diverse emoji palette have been building in volume for a few months now. Even Miley Cyrus — whose recent indiscretions appropriating ratchet culture haven't exactly endeared her to the black community — rallied behind the cause back in December.

Support for better icon representation has been building steadily. Back in February during Black History month, users took to Twitter, Instagram, and other digital formats to call for more emoji diversity.

A lack of representation in something as inconsequential as dumb faces we text to each other is a firm reminder that racism isn't always explicit; more often, racism rears its head by marginalizing cultural influence in small, stubbornly ugly ways. "If these Emoji are going to be the texting and Twitter standard," write the petition's authors, "we think it'd be cool if they better reflected the diversity of the people using them." You can sign it over at DoSomething.org.

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So long, "T--s and Glass" says Chris Gayomali, Google is keeping it clean.
Google is showing that it's willing to be uncharacteristically draconian in order to endear Glass to the general public. And now it's borrowing a page right out of Apple's porn-free playbook.

After adult app developer MiKandi debuted its "T--s & Glass" app — which allows the Glasserati to record, share, and rate pornography hands-free — Google snuck in and updated its developer policy to bar sexy-time apps from the headset completely:

We don't allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google accounts of those involved with the distribution.

Although the Google Play store says it prohibits pornography, the Android marketplace is still flooded with apps with titles like "Big Boobs nude - Videos" and "Tear sexy girl's clothes."

As for MiKandi, it's back to the drawing board. The company promises to find a workaround so the truly dedicated can still ogle naked people inside a tiny cube of clear plastic. "When we first picked up our device, we were very careful to comb through all of Google's terms, policies, and developers' agreement to make sure we were playing within their rules," Jennifer McEwen, co-founder of MiKandi, told ABC News. "That was important to us to play in Google's boundaries."

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What is biometrics? It is the science of identifying individuals by their unique biological characteristics. The best known and earliest example is fingerprints, used by ancient Babylonians as a signature and by police since the turn of the 20th century to identify criminals.

But in the last decade there has been a boom in more advanced biometric technology, allowing people to be identified, and sometimes remotely tracked, by their voices, the irises of their eyes, the geometry of their faces, and the way they walk.

The FBI is consolidating existing fingerprint records, mug shots, and other biometric data on more than 100 million Americans into a single $1.2 billion database. When it is completed, in 2014, police across the country will theoretically be able to instantly check a suspect against that vast and growing array of data.

Law-enforcement officials are enthusiastic about this growing power, while civil libertarians are aghast. "A society in which everyone's actions are tracked is not, in principle, free," said William Abernathy and Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It may be a livable society, but would not be our society."

How did the boom come about? The age of terrorism has created enormous interest in — and lowered resistance to — identifying and tracking individuals in a very precise way. "Biometrics represent what terrorists fear most: an increased likelihood of getting caught," said Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke.
Since 2002, the government has fingerprinted all foreign visitors to the U.S. at airports and borders, collecting approximately 300,000 prints per day. In Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces have gathered iris data from 5.5 million people, to identify suspected insurgents and prevent infiltration of military bases. Fueled by the growth of iris scans in particular, the global biometrics industry in 2013 has revenues of $10 billion — and is expected to double that in five years.

How do iris scans work? Every person has unique patterns within the colored part of his or her eye. A device scans your iris and compares it with photos of irises on record, identifying people with accuracy rates of 90 to 99 percent, depending on the conditions and system used. Iris scanners are now widely used on military bases, in federal agencies, and at border crossings and airports.

An improved iris scan version can remotely assess up to 50 people per minute, making it possible to scan crowds for known criminals or terrorists whose iris patterns are on file. Facial recognition technology, which identifies people through such geometric relationships as the distance between their eyes, has also come a long way. The technology is still only about 92 percent accurate, but "the error rate halves every two years," said facial recognition expert Jonathon Phillips.

What other biometrics are there? The U.S. military is already using radar that can detect the unique rhythm of a person's heartbeat from a distance, and even through walls. That technology is being developed for use in urban battlefields, but may one day become a law-enforcement tool.

A person's gait, too, is completely individual, and the technology to recognize it has advanced to the point where a person can be identified by hacking into the sensor that tracks the movement of the cellphone in his or her pocket. "Because it does not require any special devices, the gait biometrics of a subject can even be captured without him or her knowing," said Carnegie Mellon University biometrician Marios Savvides.

What are the privacy implications? Civil liberties groups warn that if these technologies are not restrained by law, they could be used in truly Orwellian ways. No laws currently limit data collection from biometric technology or the sharing of that data among federal agencies.

Law-enforcement officials can use driver's license photos to identify or hunt for suspects, for example; the government or private companies could collect a person's biometric data without his consent and use it to track his movements. "That has enormous implications, not just for security but also for American society," said Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Is there any turning back? Probably not, especially now that private companies are embracing biometrics.
Already, TD Bank and Barclays Bank are using voice recognition technology to verify account holders. In the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to start our cars with our fingerprints, use facial recognition or iris scans instead of passwords on smartphones and other electronic devices, and have doctors check our medical records by scanning our faces.

These uses of biometrics will provide convenience and efficiency, but at a steep price in privacy. Iris technology that reads our eye movements, for example, will be able to determine what we look at in stores — then use that data to create highly personalized advertising aimed at what we've displayed interest in. "For companies and governments," said the ACLU's Jay Stanley, "the incentives associated with biometrics all point the other way from privacy."

Here in the U.S., proposals to put biometric data on Social Security cards have faltered because of concern among civil libertarians and conservatives over government overreach. But in much of the developing world, the concept of personal privacy carries less legal and cultural weight, and there a biometric revolution is taking place, with some 160 massive data-gathering projects underway.

Until the 21st century, more than a third of people in developing countries were not registered in any way at birth, making it hard for them to open bank accounts, get government benefits, or vote. Biometric IDs could change that.

India is taking the fingerprints and iris scans of all 1.2 billion of its citizens. Nandan Nilekani, the founder of outsourcing firm Infosys and the project's leader, says being identified will allow India's largely anonymous masses to claim services to which they're entitled under the law, rather than being forced to bribe bureaucrats. "Unique identification is a means to empowerment," he said.

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Don't like this blog? Probably best to keep it to yourself, according to Keith Wagstaff. Someone is always wrong on the Internet. Don't let it get to you.

Facebook, blogs, Reddit, the comments section of a website — no corner of the Internet is free from online rants. But while venting online might feel cathartic, it could actually make you angrier in the long run, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

As any online journalist knows, there are certain people who seem to revel in anonymously venting their anger. But what beleaguered writers may not be aware of is that there are two kinds of venters, according to the study: Those who feel relaxed and calm after reading and writing online rants, and those who become sad and upset.

The study did not determine why certain people feel better after indulging in outrage, but it did find that those people eventually ended up angrier.

Not only that, but the people who felt compelled to share their rage through a series of tubes claimed that "they experienced frequent anger consequences, averaging almost one physical fight per month and more than two verbal fights per month."

So yes, your suspicions were correct, that person insulting you every day on your blog probably does have an anger management problem.

The study prompts the question: Is there any benefit to writing seething rants online?

Not really. This jibes with past studies on Internet "discourse."

"At the end of it you can't possibly feel like anybody heard you," Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, told Scientific American last year. "Having a strong emotional experience that doesn't resolve itself in any healthy way can't be a good thing."

In the end, seeking out a flesh-and-blood human being to hash out a political argument with will probably make you feel better than writing in all caps on the Internet.

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In case you weren't aware, Apple is a family company. Chris Gayomali informs us, Apple is keeping it clean.

The iPhone's autocorrect feature has certainly given the world its fair share of chuckles and book deals of questionable merit. But in less humorous news, it turns out that the iPhone refuses to preemptively fix a handful of so-called "sensitive" words, including "abortion," "rape," "murder," and more. A new experiment by The Daily Beast's NewsBeast Labs used a computer program to go through some 14,000 words that iOS 6, at factory settings, won't change if you make a slight spelling mistake:

In fact, previous iOS software, before spell check was introduced in April 2010, autocorrected many of the words the latest software won't. "Abortion," "rape,” "drunken," "arouse," "murder," "virginity," and others were accurately autocompleted under iOS 3.1.3.

Currently all new iOS devices ship with iOS 6, which includes spell check. Anyone who has upgraded their iOS since fall 2012 will have the latest iOS 6 software.

It's a bit strange, but it isn't entirely unexpected. Apple, which naturally refused to comment on the matter, is no stranger to pearl-clutching, as evidenced by its adamant insistence that the App Store remain PG-13.

Yet Apple's inability to comprehend that adults sometimes use adult language is oddly out of touch with reality. "My iPhone is not a dimwit. It seems to grasp and memorize names and phrases I use repeatedly. These may not have any significance to anyone beyond those who know me intimately," wrote CNET's Chris Matyszczyk in a 2012 column. "Yet somehow, it doesn't know s---."

That said, if you use a strange word not in Apple's standard dictionary enough (iOS 6 and up), it should save your dirty "slang, inside jokes, and abbreviations" in iCloud across your devices, according to Gizmodo. "S---head," for instance.

Head over to The Daily Beast for the full list of words your autocorrect doesn't recognize by default, which includes an eyebrow-raising array of Shakespearean gems and sailor-speak, such as "cuckold," "deflower," "marijuana," "pornography," and "prostitute."

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Almost everyone hates it. But state legislatures are having a tough time fighting it. "Is Anyone Up" may be gone, but there are plenty of other revenge porn websites lingering in the dark recesses of the Internet.

Before it was shut down in 2012, the website Is Anyone Up was the leading publisher of revenge porn, defined as cell-phone nudes (or sexts) submitted by scorned exes, embittered friends, and/or malicious hackers posted next to the subject's name, location, and social media information.

The resulting outrage directed at the site and its founder, Hunter Moore (whom Rolling Stone called "The Most Hated Man on the Internet"), made it look like bans on revenge porn would be an easy sell to lawmakers.

So far, it hasn't turned out that way. Only New Jersey has a law on the books specifically targeting revenge porn.

In 2013, California is looking to punish anyone who posts nude or partially nude images of subjects who had a "reasonable expectation of privacy," including when the photographer originally had the subject's consent. If the bill is passed (it was), it would make posting revenge porn a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,000 fine.

Considering no legislator wants to be considered "pro-revenge porn," it should sail through the legislature. However, that is what lawmakers in Florida and Missouri thought before similar legislation stalled last year.

So what's the problem?

The issue of who is responsible for the photos is a big stumbling block, writes Patt Morrison at the Los Angeles Times:

As with an actual paper-and-ink letter, does the recipient of the photo own the actual physical picture but not the content and therefore the right to reproduce it anywhere? Is the owner of the photo the person who took it or the person who appears in the photo? What if it’s one and the same, a "selfie"?

Revenge porn sites also have a lot of the protections enjoyed by sites like Facebook and Flickr. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, notes Somini Sengupta at The New York Times, third-party platforms are usually not liable for content generated by their users.

If prosecutors can't go after sites, they would have to go after users — who are often anonymous. If an image goes viral, that further complicates the issue of who is responsible for posting an illegal photo.

There are also First Amendment concerns, which have been raised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"Whenever you try and criminalize speech, you have to do so in the most narrowly tailored way possible," EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo tells KABC Los Angeles. He worries that Caifornia's bill "also criminalizes the victimless instances" — such as sites that host legal, consensual pornography.

Regardless of the legal complications, passing the bill sends a message to police and prosecutors, argues Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland. "It signals taking the issue seriously, that harms are serious enough to be criminalized," he tells the Times.
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Happy holidays and happy new year to all! It's time to change the world :)

Since they were developed over 40 years ago, mobile phones have become somewhat of a phenomenon, with more and more emphasis going into design, innovation and creativity. In fact, mobile phones have got so big that it is expected that they will outnumber human beings in 2014.

But apart from using phones to text, call and update your Facebook status, mobile phone devices are being developed in such a way to help improve the lives of thousands of people across the globe.
Here we take a look at how modern technology is being used by charities, health bodies and governments to reduce poverty and improve living conditions for people who need it most.

Vodafone and GSK
At the end of last year Vodafone announced that it was to develop a partnership with GSK and the charity Save the Children in order to improve the healthcare of children in Africa.

The partnership might sound like an unusual one; a children’s charity, a mobile phone operator and a healthcare company don’t usually mix, but this project was aimed at creating an innovative way to solve health issues in developing countries with the direct use of mobile phones.

It might also surprise you to learn that despite Africa being notorious for its high levels of poverty, over half of its inhabitants own a mobile phone of some sort. Experts have therefore concluded that this could be the best way to increase vaccination rates in children across the continent. The scheme will send a simple text message to parents in order to inform them about the availability of vaccines in their vicinity, as well as giving them an easy option of booking future appointments with healthcare professionals.

Although the results of the programme have not yet been revealed, if successful, the scheme, which was initiated in Mozambique, will be spread across the whole of Africa. The aim is for the number of children who receive a vaccination for a preventable condition double from 5% to 10% within the trial year.

Mobile phones and women
Using technology to improve the vaccination rate in Mozambique isn’t the first example of using mobile phones to improve health and living conditions within developing countries, either.

For instance, in Tanzania, a project has been launched to help improve the education and care of new mothers and their babies. The scheme is supported by the Tanzanian Ministry of Health, and aims to give expectant and new mothers vital information about pregnancy, labour and post natal care via a simple text messaging service.

Mobile Technology Programme- the Cherie Blair Foundation
There are also programmes run by several charities which aim to narrow the gender gap in developing countries through the use of mobile phones.

The Cherie Blair Foundation has discovered that women in Africa are 23% less likely to own a mobile phone in Africa, 24% in the Middle East and 37% in South Asia. The charity has therefore founded the Mobile Technology Programme which aims to support women all over the world who want to get into the formerly masculine world of business.

Various case studies show that given the correct technology and training, female entrepreneurs have been able to set up and expand their own businesses via direct access to mobile banking, suppliers and customers.

As a result, obtaining a mobile phone has reportedly helped 83% of women to increase their income, empowering thousands of women all over the globe.

Healthcare in the UK
And it’s not just in African countries where mobile phones are becoming vital in improving living and health conditions; in the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has developed a scheme whereby it sends a text message to patients in order to confirm appointments and test results.

This text messaging service also gives users advice and information about all health issues, including smoking, obesity and travel vaccinations.

The future for mobile phone programmes?
The above are just a handful of examples of how mobile phone technology can change the way that people live their lives, and I expect that the handheld devices which we all take for granted will only go on to be used more and more within social and political spheres in developing countries.

Many mobile phone manufacturers have latched onto the business potential of these emerging markets, launching cheap handsets such as the Huawei Ideos smartphone which is available for just $80. That said, feature phones are more widely used in developing countries, with handsets such as the Nokia 100- which has a lengthy battery life- being highly popular.

However, some critics have accused mobile manufacturers of exploiting people in these emerging markets, claiming that even these cheap handsets are unattainable for those who live on less than $2 a day.

So while programmes aimed to improve social conditions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East appear to have some success, is it really a long-term solution to help the poorest of people in these regions? At what point will keeping up with the latest technological innovations become less of an opportunity and more of a pressure on precious financial resources?

Written by Charlotte Kertrestel from Mobilephones.com.
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Shane Parrish bets you can't even finish reading this story without checking your email once. Yeah, he says, it's time to power down:

"I've been giving a lot of thought to my habits recently and how they affect me. One thing I've placed an increasingly watchful eye on is email.

Email seems pervasive in our lives. We check email on the bus, we check it in the bath. We check it first thing in the morning. We even check it midconversation, with the belief that no one will notice.

John Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Email that the average office worker "sends and receives two hundred emails a day."

Email makes us reactive, as we race to keep up with the never-ending onslaught.

In the past, only a few professions — doctors, plumbers perhaps, emergency service technicians, prime ministers — required this kind of state of being constantly on call. Now, almost all of us live this way. Everything must be attended to — and if it isn't, chances are another email will appear in a few hours asking if indeed the first message was received at all.

Working at the speed of email is like trying to gain a topographic understanding of our daily landscape from a speeding train — and the consequences for us as workers are profound. Interrupted every thirty seconds or so, our attention spans are fractured into a thousand tiny fragments. The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer. The email inbox turns our mental to-do list into a palimpsest — there's always something new and even more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day's priority. Incoming mail arrives on several different channels — via email, Facebook, Twitter, instant message — and in this era of backup we're sure that we should keep records of our participation in all these conversations. The result is that at the end of the day we have a few hundred or even a few thousand emails still sitting in our inbox.

Part of us likes all of the attention email gives us. It has been shown that email is addictive in many of the same ways slot machines are addictive — variable reinforcement.

Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explains: "This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful — an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip — and I get a reward." [The Tyranny of Email]

There are chemical reasons this happens that go well beyond our love of gossip. If we're doing something that pays out randomly, our brain releases dopamine when we get something good and our body learns that we need to keep going if we want a reward.

"Ironically," Freeman writes, "tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart." The consequences are disastrous.

Spending our days communicating through this medium, which by virtue of its sheer volume forces us to talk in short bursts, we are slowly eroding our ability to explain — in a careful, complex way — why it is so wrong for us and to complain, resist, or redesign our workdays so that they are manageable.
Life on the email treadmill

"If the medium is the message, what does that say about new survey results that found nearly 60 percent of respondents check their email when they're answering the call of nature." — Michelle Masterson

When you arrive at work and there are twenty emails in your inbox, the weight of that queue is clear: everyone is waiting for you.

So you clear and clear and clear, only to learn that the faster you reply, the faster the replies come boomeranging back to you — thanks, follow-ups, additional requests, and that one-line sinker, "How are you doing these days?" It shouldn't be such a burden to be asked your state of mind. In the workplace, however, where the sheer volume of correspondence can feel as if it has been designed on the high to enforce a kind of task-oriented tunnel vision, such a question is either a trapdoor or an escape hatch.
At the workplace it used to be hard to share things without a lot of friction. Now sharing is frictionless and free. CC'ing and forwarding to keep people "in the loop" has become a mixed blessing. Now everything is collaborative and if people are left off emails they literally feel left out.

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." — Herb Simon

We live in a culture in which doing everything all at once is admired and encouraged — have our spreadsheet open while we check email, chin on the phone into our shoulder, and accept notes from a passing office messenger. Our desk is Grand Central and we are the conductor, and it feels good. Why? If we're this busy, clearly we're needed; we have a purpose. We are essential. The internet and email have certainly created a "desire to be in the know, to not be left out, that ends up taking up a lot of our time" — at the expense of getting things done, said Mark Ellwood, the president of Pace Productivity, which studies how employees spend their time.

Of course we can't multitask the way technology leads us to believe we can. "Multitasking," Walter Kirn wrote in an essay called "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," messes with the brain in several ways:"

At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus — which stores and recalls information — to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction — but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

"In other words," writes Freeman in The Tyranny of Email, "a work climate that revolves around multitasking, and constant interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a care, basic facility: rote, mechanical tasks."

We like to think we are in control of our environment, that we act upon it and shape it to our needs. It works both ways, though; changes we make to the world can have unseen ramifications that impact our ability to live in it.

Attention means being present. Being present helps mindfullness. Thanks to an environment of constant stimulation the biggest challenge these days is maintaining focus.

"Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy," wrote Nicolas Carr in an essay entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Carr wrote an excellent book on the subject, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. If you don't have the time, or attention span, to read the book, you can watch the video.

Reading and other meditative tasks are best performed in what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a "state-of-flow," in which "our focus narrows, the world seems to drop away, and we become less conscious of ourselves and more deeply immersed in ideas and language and complex thoughts," Freeman writes.

Communication tools, however, seem to be working against this state.

In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes:

In today's world we have come to neglect the habit of writing because so many other media of communication have taken its place. Telephones and tape recorders, computers and fax machines are more efficient in conveying news. If the only point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along. In the past, educated persons used journals and personal correspondence to put their experiences into words, which allowed them to reflect on what had happened during the day. The prodigiously detailed letters so many Victorians wrote are an example of how people created patterns of order out of the mainly random events impinging on their consciousness. The kind of material we write in diaries and letters does not exist before it is written down.

It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets the ideas emerge in the first place.

In The Tyranny of Email, Freeman sums up the multitasking argument:

Multitasking may not be perfect, but it can push the brain to add new capacity; the problem, however, remains that the small gains in capacity are continuously, rapidly, outstripped by the speeding up and growing volume of incoming demand on our attention.
Why is it so hard to read these days?

In his essay on Google Carr writes:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Some of this is due to changes in the medium itself. Newspaper articles are shorter and catchier. Text has become bigger. We're becoming a PowerPoint culture. We need bullet points, short sentences, and fancy graphics. We skim rather than read. Online readers are "selfish, lazy, and ruthless," said Jakob Nielson, a usability engineer. If we don't get what we want, as soon as we want it, we move to the next site.

But all of this has a cost.

"What we are losing in this country, and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading," said Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "I would believe people who tell me that the internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests."

"If the research on multitasking is any guide," Freeman writes in the The Tyranny of Email, "and if several centuries of liberal arts education have proven anything, the ability to think clearly and critically and develop an argument comes from reading in a focused manner."

These skills are important because they enable employees to step back from an atmosphere of frenzy and make sense in a busy, nearly chaotic environment. If all companies want, though, is worker bees who will simply type till they drop and badger one another into a state of overload, a new generation of inveterate multitaskaholics might be just what they get. If that's the case, workplace productivity isn't the only thing that will suffer.
Freeman concludes his book by offering several tips you can do to take back control of your life and the mental space email is consuming.

1. Don't send

The most important thing you can do to improve the state of your inbox, free up your attention span, and break free of the tyranny of email is not to send an email. As most people now know, email only creates more email, so by stepping away from the messaging treadmill, even if for a moment every day, you instantly dial down the speed of the email messagopolis.

2. Don't check it first thing in the morning or late at night

Not checking your email first thing will also reinforce a boundary between your work and your private life, which is essential if you want to be fully present in either place. If you check your email before getting to work, you will probably begin to worry about work matters before you actually get there. Checking your e-mail first thing at home doesn't give you a jump on the workday; it just extends it. Sending email before and after office hours has a compounded effect, since it creates an environment in which workers are tacitly expected to check their email at the same time and squeeze more work out of their tired bodies.

3. Check it twice a day

Checking your email twice a day will … allow you to set the agenda for your day, which is essential if you want to stay on task and get things done in a climate of constant communication.

4. Keep a written to-do list and incorporate email into it

5. Give good email

6. Read the entire incoming email before replying

This seems like a pretty basic rule, but a great deal of email is generated by people replying without having properly read initial messages.

7. Don't debate complex or sensitive matters by email

8. If you have to work as a group by email, meet your correspondents face to face

9. Set up your desktop to do something else besides email

As much as you can, take control over your office space by setting aside part of your desk for work that isn't done on the computer. Imagine it as your thinking area, where you can read or take notes or doodle as you work out a problem.

10. Schedule media-free time
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