As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
Scientifically Accurate 'My Little Pony' Is Everypony's Nightmare
Everypony knows about the magical powers possessed by the four-legged residents of Equestria in “My Little Pony.” But what if those magical little ponies weren’t so magical?
Animation Domination High-Def has the answer with a video titled “Scientifically Accurate My Little Pony,” and it covers everything from pony poop to pony penis.
Check it out in the clip above, and prepare to have your childhood shattered.
The clip is part of ADHD’s ongoing “Scientifically Accurate” series which includes a terrifying take on “Pinky And The Brain” and a totally bizarre version of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
(h/t Kotaku)
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10 Totally Rad Retro Looks For Today's Technology
Enormous mobile phones, Atari and VCRs were all considered on trend or even high tech when they were first introduced to consumers. Today they’re things we all have a good laugh about. They may even cause a sense of nostalgia to bubble within us. For better or worse, trends and designs from previous eras always manage to resurface, like the Volkswagen Beetle, bellbottoms and vinyl. Even as technology speeds forward, today’s innovators frequently find ways to nod to those who came before them.
We’re jumping into our DeLorean with Energizer® EcoAdvanced™ and taking a look back at designs for modern tech that look oddly familiar.
1. ’80s Brick Phone Cell Phone Case
We think the present-day Zack Morris and Gordon Gekko would rock this phone case. It’s completely impractical, but let’s be honest: The old brick phone has become a modern-day meme of which we can’t get enough.
2. The Oregon Trail
Remember the days of racing to finish your math assignment first so you could the desktop in the back of the classroom and play this old-school gem? Well, the developers at Gameloft have given this computer-lab classic a new look. This mobile app version — available on both iOS and Android devices — has restored many favorite features (read: hunting and dysentery) and added some new ones (fishing and panning for gold).
3. Polaroid Socialmatic
Now you can bring back shaking it like a Polaroid picture (warning: apparently Polaroid actually advises against shaking your photos). The company has combined the success of Instagram with its popular instant print cameras. The camera prints and uses Wi-Fi and Android services to allow users to share images on social media directly from the camera.
4. Nikon DF DSLR
Nikon takes us back to a time before cameras featured touchscreens and an array of buttons. The new design features retro dials and a metal frame inspired by the look of older 35mm shooters.
5. Ion Cassette Adapter with Bluetooth
Remember that van you used to drive in high school that only had a tape deck, and you had a cassette adapter plugged into your Discman? The cassette adapter is back but instead of the arduous chord, this new model uses Bluetooth to play music from your handheld device.
6. Gramophone for the iPhone
For the Victorian era fan, there is now a Gramophone speaker for your iPhone. No electricity is required, and unfortunately its not compatible with the iPhone 6 or 6 plus.
7. Jensen JTA-420 turntable
Like a Rubix cube, his suitcase style record player is more complicated than it looks. This turntable actually converts your LPs into digital copies.
8. Crosley 24-inch Retro HDTV
LED HDTV flat-screen TV in a throwback look.
9. iCade Arcade Cabinet
For those who downloaded the Pac-Man app looking for but feel like they need a more authentic experience. Just slide in your ipad and let the 8-bit perfection satisfy to your inner 10-year-old.
10. Native Union POP Phone Handset
We miss having a phone that can rest comfortably between cheek and shoulder. And cords, remember cords?
Energizer® EcoAdvanced™ is the world’s first AA battery made with 4% recycled batteries and is their longest-lasting alkaline battery.
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Meet the Entrepreneur Who's Designing Her Company as a Work of Art
Renowned 20th century inventor and designer Buckminster Fuller once famously said: “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Evoking the same sentiment, iconic pop artist Andy Warhol once declared, “Business is the most fascinating kind of art.”
In today’s modern entrepreneurial ecosystem where a number of over-worked, hyper-functioning people don’t take time to smell the roses, viewing one’s business as a work of art may be the answer to visionary commitment. This approach is what keeps Bethany Kolby, CEO of the London-based creator of educational DIY kits, Technology Will Save Us (TWSU), happily on point.
A former designer, Kolby started (TWSU) in her living room two years ago. Since then, the company has gained global appeal. To date, TWSU has sold 28,000 kits in 34 countries. Each kit is designed to encourage kids to make, play, code and invent with technology.
What’s the team’s secret sauce? Building the ideas for each kit around popular hobbies including music, gardening, cycling and gaming. This cross-pollination aligns with TWSU’s ways of infusing balance and passion into the entire TWSU experience. From company culture to design and execution, it’s the impetus for expansion.
The Art Of Humanity
“Starting a business is one of the most creative things I have ever done,” says Kolby.
Designing and creating the products and experiences for our customers is only the beginning. We are shaping and creating the foundations for a future to thrive in our business. We’re developing rituals we as a team use to stay focused, be inspired and live full lives.
This involves balancing data with intuition, emergence with structure, and aesthetics with experience. This creative process feels like art making to me.
Part of this artistic flow is complimented by the company’s focus on human-centered design when conceiving and producing products. The TWSU team designs kits with and for young people and families. In doing this they typically follow two types of design. One of these is iterative user-centered design, which includes users in the design of existing kits and experiences. The intention is to constantly create more delightful, successful and fulfilling making experiences for consumers. Another common design method of TWSU comes into play when the company works with existing and new users to understand bigger, “everyday” themes around making, as well as everyday life activities to inform new kit development.
The STEAM Renaissance
Promoting STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) skills through hands-on educational activities and modern invention has been steadily proliferating the edtech space for the last four years. In 2011, the electronic module making company LittleBits launched with a 10-piece kit allowing anyone to prototype, build and innovate with electronics. Today, the company features more than five kits, including a Synth Kit for music and a Smart Home Kit for tapping into the ubiquitous Internet of Things, as well as 67 interoperable modules with products sold in 70 countries.
The toy company Goldieblox launched in 2012 to develop early interest in engineering and problem solving among girls. From action figures to games to construction kits, GoldieBlox products combine storytelling and mechanical projects aimed to empower girls to create.
While TWSU promotes STEAM, it differs from both of the aforementioned businesses in that it provides gadgets that young people can make and code themselves.
The Power Of Intentional Design
“When developing the DIY Gamer Kit, we were funded by NESTA, Mozilla and Nominet Trust to gather insights from 300 hundred young people in nine regions around the UK,” says Kolby.
We spoke to them about what skills they had, what skills they wanted to learn, what they were making in school, and what were their passions and hobbies. We knew that young people enjoyed playing games, but what came out was their passion for making games, so we wanted to create a product that allowed them to not only design and code their own games, but also build the console you could play it on.
Throughout this process, TWSU revisited the origins of gaming to find an archetype that would inform the gaming kit’s design. Kolby says the desirability and design intention of the kits are as important as the functionality and learning outcomes.
“We want to design gadgets that feel less homogenous than other consumer technology, but are iconic and functional so they can live in your life alongside your iPhone and laptop,” shares Kolby. “We intentionally design kits to be elegant, gender neutral, and accessible to the everyday person.”
At the core of TWSU is the quest to get to the heart of what it means to be human and and mindful of nurturing one’s creative powers. And there’s nothing more human than art, or in Kolby’s case, building a company.
This post was originally published on The Toolbox, an initiative connecting developers and activists to facilitate solutions focused on human-centered design.
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VIDEO: Technology brings Golem to life
The new stage show Golem goes hi-tech to tell an unsettling tale about technology
VIDEO: Drawing a true Victorian superhero
Ada Lovelace, arguably the first computer programmer, is being brought to life in a graphic novel.
The tech that rocks the cradle
The tech that rocks the cradle
(VIDEO) Better Video, Audio Coming to MPEG-DASH: Microsoft's Sodagar
LAS VEGAS — The next-generation format for video compression has grown fast over the last couple of years, with adoption from names including Google’s YouTube, Microsoft’s Azure, Adobe Primetime and Akamai.
Support for live ad insertion, digital rights management and the HEVC standard was added recently, and European internet TV standard HbbTV just just moved up to version 2.0 on DASH. Iraj Sodagar, president and chairman of the 78-member DASH industry forum, says more is to come.
“Next year, we’re going to have UHD and HDR, higher resolutions, higher frame rate… and DRM is going to be improved … and more audio codecs, like MPEG-H audio or 3D audio codecs.”
Why should companies switch to MPEG-DASH? “They can reach more devices, more customers, at lower cost,” Sodagar says.
Instead of having different solutions from different companies … now different devices can work with different services. It enables companies to deploy video services over the top in a larger scale.
Sodagar is the Principal Multimedia Architect at Microsoft.
We interviewed Sodagar at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
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(VIDEO) Ooyala Embraces AdTech with Videoplaza Acquisition
LAS VEGAS — Now owned by Australia’s giant telco Telstra, with a “war chest” for acquisitions, video services company Ooyala has moved into the adtech sector with its acquisition of Videoplaza last year, explains Andrew Spaulding, Director of Sales Engineering at Ooyala in this interview with Beet.TV
We spoke with him about evolution of Ooyala.
We interviewed Spaulding at the Akamai booth at the NAB Show.
Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
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(VIDEO) Microsoft Unveils New Video Player, Encoding Solutions
LAS VEGAS — Microsoft has used the NAB Show to announce it is expanding its video services suite, including a new video player that speaks fluent HTML5 as well as other standards.
Azure Media Services is getting a new video player and transcoding that will take place in the cloud.
“(Azure Media Player) does automatic device detection and chooses the right player framework and streaming fallback… to Flash or Silverlight… to ensure that the content is reached across all the devices consumers carry,” Azure Media Services director Sudheer Sirivara tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“(Live Encoding Preview) enables a citizen journalist, for example, to broadcast a single camera feed from a phone in to the cloud… we do the transcoding in the cloud… and deliver using Azure Media Player.”
Azure Media Services is the brand Microsoft uses for its services covering live online broadcast, on-demand distribution, enterprise video and digital marketing video.
We interviewed Sirivara at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
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This Drone Video Of Dutch Flower Fields Will Give You The Touch Of Spring You Needed
There’s nothing better than a bouquet of spring flowers… unless you live near the tulip fields in Holland.
For a month and a half ever year, millions of brightly colored blooms turn the landscape into a panorama of color. The video above, shot with a DJI Inspire 1 drone, was captured above some epic flower fields in the Netherlands. The fields shown in the video lie near Lisse, home to the world’s second-largest flower garden.
The tulips, hyacinths, narcissi and daffodils are a highly trafficked tourist destination in spring months and are in bloom from the end of March until the second week of May. Road trippers can take a 25-mile drive through the countryside and see flower-sellers, public gardens and museums all along the highway, according to National Geographic.
Take a look at the stunning drone footage above, and check out other beautiful images of the flower fields below.
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How Facebook Stalking Leads Women To Objectify Their Own Bodies
Facebook stalking is real, people, and it has real effects on your body image. A new study has found that Facebook usage is positively correlated with a tendency to compare appearances with peers and engage in self-objectification (viewing your body as an object to be gazed upon). Both of these outcomes can lead to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.
Researchers in Australia surveyed 150 women between the ages of 17 and 25 to determine what types of media they were consuming and which ones made them feel bad about their own bodies. Unsurprisingly, participants spent roughly 2 hours a day on Facebook. During this time, they would compare their appearance to images of themselves, their close friends and peers (not celebrities or family members, for the most part).
Participants were also asked about their time on the Internet overall, as well as their television, music video and fashion magazine consumption patterns. The only media that led to body comparisons and self-objectification were Facebook and fashion magazines.
So why worry about Facebook when fashion mags are touting size zero celebrities and models as the beauty ideal? For one, magazine usage is on the decline while Facebook continues to take up an increasing amount of our screen time — over 10 million new photos are uploaded to Facebook every hour.
Plus, unlike magazines, Facebook allows users to click between photos of seemingly “perfect” peers and photos of themselves in an instant. Barring a new Facebook algorithm that alerts you when friends go up and down dress sizes, it couldn’t be easier to compare yourself to that friend of yours who’s mastered the strategic hand-on-hip pose.
Interestingly, the researchers argue that friends may make us feel worse about our own bodies simply because they’re not celebrities or models (well, probably). Most people agree that the stars in magazines are a sample of the population that are either super-human or airbrushed beyond the realm of reality. But binging on photos of a peer can be particularly detrimental to body image since, as the researchers stated, “their appearance might be perceived as attainable enough to serve as relevant targets of comparison but also unattainable enough to still influence how women evaluate their own appearance.”
Of course, these are all correlational findings. It’s impossible to tell from this research if Facebook scrolling is causing all of this self-objectification or if women who are prone to self-objectify simply spend more time on the social network.
Either way, it might be a good idea to temper your Facebook stalking habits if you’re feeling a little less-than-perfect. Or at the very least, go into it with the full knowledge of what clicking through hundreds of photos of a high school acquaintance’s honeymoon in Bali will likely do to you.
This study was published in Psychology of Women Quarterly.
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In Parts Of Africa, Cell Phones Are Everywhere And Landlines Barely Exist
Cell phones are bringing parts of Africa into the digital age, allowing some regions to bypass landline development altogether.
New surveys from the Pew Research Center show that the majority of people in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria and South Africa owned cell phones in 2014.
Though most people surveyed in those sub-Saharan countries still do not own smartphones, Pew says the widespread adoption of basic cell phones provides a “communication lifeline,” connecting people like never before.
According to Pew’s research, which surveyed about 1,000 people in each nation, 89 percent of people now own a smartphone or basic cell phone in South Africa and Nigeria, 83 percent in Senegal and Ghana, 82 percent in Kenya, 73 percent in Tanzania and 65 percent in Uganda.
Here’s a map showing the geographical spread of Pew’s data on cell phone use in these seven countries. Click the pins to see stats for each:
Pew notes huge increases since 2002, when only about 10 percent of people had cell phones in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Ghana. In South Africa, 33 percent owned cell phones in 2002.
In the United States, 89 percent of people currently own a cell phone, and 64 percent of them own a smartphone.
Most people surveyed — a median of 80 percent across all seven sub-Saharan African countries — said they use their phones to send text messages. Only about half take pictures or video with their phones, while 30 percent use them to make or receive payments, 21 percent get political news, 19 percent use them to access social networks, 17 percent use them to get health information and 14 percent use them to look for jobs.
Pew noted that Africans who understand at least some English were more likely to own a cell phone or smartphone.
As a point of comparison, practically none of the people surveyed have access to landline telephones in their home: Only 2 percent said they did. In the United States, 60 percent of people still have a working landline in their home, according to Pew. That basically lines up with a National Center for Health Statistics study from last year, which found that 41 percent of U.S. homes were “wireless only.”
Pew has studied cell phone use in Africa for years. It ran surveys in 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014, though data wasn’t consistently available for each country.
Jacob Poushter, a research associate at Pew, told The Huffington Post that a few factors go into selecting countries: The research group likes to have a geographical spread, meaning that countries aren’t clustered in one area; and they like to poll the same locations over the course of years to see how their data changes.
Based on the data in Pew’s previous studies, it’s clear that cell phone use has long been on the rise across sub-Saharan Africa. Even in 2012, CNN noted that more people in Africa had a cell phone than access to electricity. And last year, PBS explained how widespread cell phone use was encouraging entrepreneurship in countries like Kenya, where many people use phones to conduct business transactions.
Of course, while widespread communication could hardly be considered a bad thing, there’s another story about phones in Africa that shouldn’t go ignored: Many of the most important materials in phones and other electronics — gold, tin, tantalum and tungsten — come from mines in Congo. The rush to capitalize on these materials, worth trillions in total, spurred rebels to take control of the mines and perpetuate violence against men, women and children.
A report from 2014 indicated that many mines are no longer controlled by armed rebel groups, at least in part due to 2010 legislation in the U.S. requiring companies to be transparent about the source of their materials.
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Tulsa Man Smashes Roommate With Beer Bottle In iPhone Vs. Android Argument: Police
Stabbing a guy who doesn’t agree with your choice of smartphone doesn’t seem very smart.
Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, arrested a man who allegedly did that to his roommate early Friday morning, NewsOn6.com reports.
Officers said Elias Acevedo, 21, and his roommate, Jiaro Mendez, got “highly intoxicated” in the parking lot of the apartment complex where they lived. At some point, they began arguing over which cellphone, Android or Apple, was better.
During the argument, Acevedo allegedly struck Mendez in the back of the head with a beer bottle. He then left his roomie on the ground, The Smoking Gun reports.
Police were called to the scene after getting a report of a bleeding man stumbling around the area, according to KJRH. They found Mendez covered in blood, and he told them about the Apple Vs. Android argument with Acevedo.
Mendez’s car was found in the parking lot. Acevedo was found in the apartment he shared with the victim. He was covered in blood and had several lacerations on his body, according to a police report obtained by The Smoking Gun.
Both Mendez and Acevedo were taken to local hospitals and treated for non-life-threatening injuries, Tulsa World reports.
Acevedo was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon. Jail records also show he was being held for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the website reports.
KTUL asked police which phone Acevedo preferred, but received no response.
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The Incredible Jun: A Town that Runs on Social Media
We recently visited a small Spanish town that is using social media in a new way. Our research lab is studying the town to learn how these technologies might help communities around the world become more responsive to their citizens. This is a brief report on what we know so far.
For the last four years, a town in southern Spain has been conducting a remarkable experiment in civic life. Jun (pronounced “hoon”) has been using Twitter as its principal medium for citizen-government communication. Leading the effort is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, a passionate believer in the power of technology to solve problems and move society forward.
Since launching the initiative in 2011, Rodríguez Salas has been recruiting his 3,500 townspeople to not only join the social network but have their Twitter accounts locally verified at town hall. This extra step isn’t necessary to participate in the conversation – Twitter is open to anyone – but it helps town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents.
In the most basic scenario, a citizen who has a question, request or complaint tweets it to the mayor or one of his staff, who work to resolve the matter. For instance, in the sequence of tweets shown below (which we pulled from the 2014 Twitter data and translated into English), at 10:48 pm a citizen tells the mayor that a street lamp is out on Maestro Antonio Linares Street. Nine minutes later, the mayor replies that he’ll have the town electrician fix it the next day. The mayor’s tweet includes the Twitter handle of the electrician, who is automatically notified that he’s been mentioned and sees the exchange. That tweet is a public promise that the town will indeed take action, and to underline this it ends with the hashtag #JunGetsMoving. The next day, the electrician tweets a photo of the repaired fixture, thanking the citizen for his help and repeating the hashtag.
A citizen alerts the mayor to a broken street lamp. Two tweets later, it’s fixed.
Governments have been responding to citizens for centuries. But digital networks have made it possible to build much faster, more efficient feedback loops. Each of the participants in the above transaction wrote a single text of less than 140 characters, and in less than 24 hours the problem was solved.
There are numerous cases of public officials responding to tweets. U.S. Senator Cory Booker made headlines several times for doing so when he was mayor of Newark, New Jersey. For a big city U.S. mayor, this was considered unusual behavior and therefore newsworthy. In Jun, however, it has been systematically adopted as the way things get done every day. If Rodriguez Salas didn’t respond to an urgent citizen tweet, it would make headlines.
Because these communications occur on a public social platform, they can be seen by everyone in the community. This “mutual visibility” (sometimes called “mutual transparency”) serves as both a carrot and a stick. On one hand, the government’s performance comes under greater public scrutiny. If a broken streetlight isn’t fixed, everyone knows it and the slacking employee is more likely to be disciplined or, if it becomes a pattern, fired. That’s the stick.
But the good work done by public servants is also now visible to all and thus more likely to be recognized and rewarded. The carrots can be as small as a message being favorited or retweeted (the electrician received both), or as great as winning the esteem of one’s neighbors and new status in the community. The operator of the town’s street-sweeping machine, whose entertaining tweets have made him a local celebrity, told us that having his daily work seen and appreciated on the social platform has changed his life.
According to the mayor, this system is saving the town time and money. Tweeting is quicker than fielding and returning phone calls, which used to consume his day. He says these efficiencies have allowed him to reduce the police force from four employees to just one. Jun’s sole police officer told us he now receives 40 to 60 citizen tweets per day, ranging from the serious (there’s been a bad car accident) to the trivial (my neighbor is singing at all hours, please make him stop). He noted that being accessible to the public on a 24/7 social network has its downsides; to protect his family time, on arriving home in the evening he turns off his phone. But what if there’s an emergency, we asked. Answer: It’s a small town and everyone knows where he lives.
Jun citizens also use Twitter to voice their views on local issues. At town council meetings, which are streamed live on the web, those not physically present may participate by tweeting questions and comments, which appear on a screen in the council chamber.
Beyond government, the social network is broadly integrated into the town’s everyday life, used for a wide variety of tasks such as publicizing social and cultural events, booking medical appointments, following youth sports teams, and just keeping up with neighbors. The town employee who tweets the school lunch menu each weekday told us on that on weekends she enjoys sharing some of her family’s home life via tweets. One retiree who learned to use Twitter at a technology education center run by the town said the network has become his principal news source. “It’s just like a newspaper!” he enthused, noting that the mayor tweets so often about national and global events, he’s a one-man media outlet.
Jun essentially runs on Twitter, a groundbreaking use of social technology that, as far as we know, is unique. All over the world, digital technologies play a growing role in community management. In their book, The Responsive City, Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford write about “the emerging cadre of officials and civic activists who are using the new data tools to transform city government” in Boston, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. The New York City police department recently started using Twitter to connect with citizens. But Jun is the first community to use a social medium comprehensively for all civic communication. And it happened in an entirely home-grown way. For the first couple of years, Twitter the company was not even aware of the experiment.
Our academic research group at the MIT Media Lab, the Laboratory for Social Machines, was founded last fall with a generous grant from Twitter, and one of us has a work relationship with Twitter. But the company doesn’t select or shape our research projects, and our interest in Jun is ultimately not about one platform: It’s about the future of all social media and their potential to reshape how communities large and small work. For studying these questions, Jun is an ideal laboratory, small enough that you can get a holistic feel for the place in a couple of days, and large enough that over time, through data analysis and on-the-ground research, meaningful lessons can be extracted. That’s our hope, anyway.
Many of the Jun citizens we interviewed told us that the initiative has had a net positive effect on the town. “Twitter is a plus, it makes the town better,” one said. Another noted that “it’s an easy and fast way to connect” and that “people can build on each others’ comments.”
But it is not without its critics. One resident said he dislikes the way the mayor uses Twitter for self-promotion, and how town employees tend to parrot everything the boss says. The same person feels public servants shouldn’t use their accounts to tweet about personal matters (“I don’t care that they had paella for dinner.”) Last time Rodríguez Salas ran for reelection, his opponent urged citizens to vote “for a real mayor, not a virtual one.”
The mayor himself has a few problems with the system. He jokingly calls Twitter “the Society of the Minute” and says it has a way of making citizens more impatient with government. “In the real world, one in every 43 people has a problem with everything. On Twitter, it is one in 27″ – and they always expect an immediate response.
He notes that complicated public issues are difficult to discuss on Twitter because of its format. He also acknowledges that his ad hoc method for managing the incoming – checking his phone often and responding right away – could probably be improved. Somewhat miraculously, he’s been governing the town with Twitter and virtual duct-tape, and perhaps could use a data-driven dashboard that organizes it all.
For a clearer perspective, we have begun analyzing Jun’s Twitter data, along with other town records, from the beginning of the initiative to the present. Among the questions we’re seeking to answer: Is public engagement on the rise as result of the experiment, and is the demographic composition of the conversation changing? Do citizens vote and attend town meetings more than they did in the past? Are public issues solved more efficiently? Has the use of this tool simply amplified old ways of governing Jun, or has mutual visibility shifted it in some fundamental way, perhaps towards decentralization?
We don’t yet have the answers, but an initial mapping of the Twitter data has begun opening a new window on the town. In the screen shots below of a data explorer being developed by Martin Saveski, a graduate student at the Laboratory for Social Machines, each circle represents a Jun citizen or organization. The lines between the circles represent Twitter follower relationships. The larger the circle, the more “important” the position occupied by that person in the network (for this measure of Twitter importance – by no means the only meaningful kind of importance in the community – we used PageRank, Google’s original algorithm for ranking web pages). The four colors denote different sub-networks of people within Jun who are closely tied to each other by their Twitter activity. In each figure, the personal connections of one particular citizen (the white circle) are highlighted, and further details about that person are shown in the box to the right. The first shot focuses on the mayor, the second on the electrician.
A visualization of the mayor’s connections to the community (he’s the white circle). To the right, more details about his public Twitter activity. (Click to enlarge).
For electrician Miguel Espigares (the white circle), the picture is different, reflecting his work and unique role in the town. (Visualizations by Martin Saveski.)
Through such analyses, we hope to gain insights that will help Jun make its system more effective. Our longer-term goal is to determine if it can be replicated at scale in larger communities, perhaps even major cities.
One key question is the leading role played by the mayor, who has held office for the last eleven years and before that was deputy to his father. Throughout those years, Jun was a trailblazer in applying digital tools to democracy, including electronic voting and live-streamed town meetings.
Rodríguez Salas, with his relentless belief in innovation, spearheaded all these efforts. Even before the Twitter experiment, a Spanish newspaper called him “El Alcalde Digital” (The Digital Mayor) while a national TV report dubbed the town “El Increíble Jun” (The Incredible Jun). He convinced Junians to adopt a new flag with the town motto – ”Love” – spelled out in binary code. Between his personal and official mayoral accounts, he has about 350,000 Twitter followers – that’s 100 times the population of Jun, and about 100,000 more followers than New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has in his two verified accounts. This is not just any small-town mayor. He also has a warm personality and a common touch. As he walks down the street, a bunch of middle-school-aged boys run up to him shouting, “Mayor! Mayor!” and the first thing he does is make sure they’re on Twitter and he’s following them.
In short, the mayor has an unusual combination of tech sophistication and personal charisma. Is such a leader required for bringing government into the social age? Could the Jun system work in a metropolis with millions of citizens and a different kind of mayor? Rodríguez Salas thinks so and he has ideas about how.
José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, Mayor of Jun (photo by Álex Cámara)
For now, in conversation he returns often to his primary goal: making democracy more transparent and participatory. In his office, where the blue Twitter bird adorns the wall behind his desk (in the spot where a portrait of the Spanish king used to hang), he recently installed glass ceiling panels open to the sky to symbolize the new transparency. The citizens will soon have a chance to pass judgment on his work: In elections next month, they will decide whether to give him another term.
Meanwhile, we’ll be digging deeper into the data and sharing what we learn from one town’s surprising leap into the socio-political future. Stay tuned.
Deb Roy is associate professor at the MIT Media Lab where he directs the Laboratory for Social Machines, as well as Chief Media Scientist of Twitter. William Powers is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Social Machines and author of the New York Times bestseller Hamlet’s BlackBerry.
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What Your Facebook Use Reveals About Your Personality
Every day when Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind?” around 400 million people respond with a status message. While some people take the opportunity to share about their latest meal, other people post photos or inspirational messages. Over the past few years, researchers have discovered the way people choose to present themselves on Facebook speaks volumes about their personality and self-esteem.
Examining your behavior on social media could give you insight into your own personality, as well as how others perceive you. You may think you’re presenting yourself in a certain light only to discover other people view your behavior completely different.
Here are seven things our Facebook interactions reveal about people:
1. People with a lot of Facebook friends tend to have low self-esteem. A 2012 study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that people with low self-esteem who worried about their public perception had the most Facebook friends. The researchers concluded that self-conscious people compensate for low self-esteem by trying to appear popular on Facebook.
2. Extroverts update their status more often than introverts. Just like in real life, extroverts socialize more on social media, according to a 2014 study titled “Personality Traits and Self-Presentation at Facebook .” The study found that extroverts use the like button more often, upload more pictures, and update their status more frequently than introverts.
3. Conscientious people organize their photos carefully. Conscientious people are self-disciplined hard-workers who spend the least amount of time on Facebook. A 2014 study published in Computers in Human Behavior, reports that when conscientious people do use Facebook, they do so in a very organized manner. For example, they may create neat folders to help share their photos with friends and family in a methodical and convenient way.
4. Open people fill out their personal profiles most thoroughly. A 2010 study called, “Social Network Use and Personality,” discovered that open people–described as artistic, imaginative, and creative–use the most features on Facebook and are most likely to complete the personal information sections. They also tend to post more “wall messages” when communicating with specific friends.
5. Narcissists make deeper self-disclosures that contain self-promotional content. Narcissists–people with an inflated self-concept and a strong sense of uniqueness and superiority–seek attention and affirmation on Facebook. A 2014 study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that narcissists posted more frequently about themselves in an attempt to attract likes and comments that fuel their beliefs about self-importance. Other studies have found that narcissistic people love to post selfies and they share the ones where they think they look most attractive in hopes of gaining admiration.
6. Neurotic people post mostly photos. A 2014 study titled, “Capturing Personality from Facebook Photos and Photo-Related Activity,” found that highly neurotic people — those most prone to stress and anxiety — seek acceptance by publishing photos. Since neurotic people struggle with communication and social skills, researchers believe they use photos on Facebook as a means to express themselves. Also, photos are less controversial than comments — which could lead to a lot of anxiety as they wait for other people’s responses.
Neurotic people tend to have the most photos per album. Researchers believe this stems from their desire to present themselves positively. They may use photos to try and appear happier and to show they are able to keep up with their friends. Over time, however, the behavior of highly neurotic people tends to change. They’re likely to imitate their friends’ Facebook behavior in an attempt to seek acceptance and decrease feelings of loneliness.
7. Agreeable people are tagged in other people’s photos most often. A 2012 study titled, “Personality and Patterns of Facebook Usage,” found that the higher a person ranks in personality scales for agreeableness, the more likely that person will be tagged in Facebook photos posted by other people. Since agreeable people tend to behave warm and friendly and less competitive, it’s not surprising that their friends enjoy taking lighthearted pictures with them and sharing them on Facebook.
Although we may think we’re masking our insecurities or portraying ourselves in the most favorable light, our behavior on social media reveals more than we might think. It’s not just what we post on Facebook that reveals information about our personalities — it’s also what we don’t post that can be quite telling. It’s likely that our personality profiles will continue to play a major role in how advertisers market to us and how companies will choose to hire people in the future.
Amy Morin is a psychotherapist and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, a bestselling book that is being translated into more than 20 languages.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
I'm Buying a Wristable
Once again Apple has confounded the digibabblists, perplexed their competitors, baffled the analysts, and in general annoyed and irritated all the self-proclaimed digital-first… or is it mobile-first?… or perhaps our proclamation of the day should be wearable-first… experts, pundits and gurus.
And, once again, we approach a product and category as if ex nihilo we have created something new and unique and even godly, as “In the Beginning…”
My readers know that I am obsessed with learning from the past — mistakes, success, abject failure and even just plain no big deal can help us understand human behavior and motivation — and that nothing gets my dander up more than the notion of dismissing it all as irrelevant because digital or mobile or now wearable has created never-before-seen, never-before-experienced, never-before-imaginable dynamics.
Nonsense.
Not for now, but worth a quick mention — sharing is in our DNA. It’s why we love the applications that make it better and more efficient. Live events have always drawn huge crowds and they have always been the touchstone of interactivity (see: the Roman Colosseum). Amazon did not create shopping or the idea of cheap aggregation (read: the Amazon Manifesto and the Sears and Roebuck statement of purpose from the 1890s, and finally, I highly recommend studying the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934 to learn about the possibilities of the IoT). You will be amazed.
On to watches — my subject at hand — and my admiration for Apple.
In February of 2007, Apple took a 30-second spot (long-form video content, if you like, digibabble) on the live broadcast of the Academy Awards and launched the iPhone. If you don’t remember it or never saw it — or experienced it (I need to keep my cred) — you must. I have used it as a touchstone to understand Apple, but more so to ground me in better understanding the potential for our world.
Never do you see a product; not once do they tout the technology; not once do they whack you over the head with the “magic”. They don’t have to. They just told you that Apple was launching a Phone — an iPhone to be exact — and you conjured up way more enchantment in your imagination, knowing that it was Apple, than they ever could have by confusing you with digibabble.
Now on to the watch.
While the pundits pundit and the analysts analyze, and we see earnest hand-wringing over whether or not Apple will be successful, they continue to understand people and behavior and have not launched the iWatch or the iWearable or the iWrist or anything close. It’s the plain old Apple Watch — and all that comes with being a plain old Apple anything — and you can check out this piece by Matthew Sparkes, Deputy Head of Technology of The Telegraph.
I also recommend reading a piece from two years ago by Alexis McCrossen, author of Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, called “Why the iWatch Will Likely Fail”…”The history of wearable technology says that timepieces are better in pockets than on wrists.”
Frankly, history records the opposite in terms of pockets and wrists, and I do give credit for the small i’s as this is about the category and not Apple in specific and as I suggested. The i’s might just be the clue for why this is different.
Truth is I love watches as much as I love tech. In fact, the best watches are all about brilliant tech, and if you have ever studied a “complication” I’d amend and say beautiful tech.
In fact, I had an early “digital” watch circa 1976 or so before they became cheap and ubiquitous. They were expensive, clunky but were designed to compete with watch fashion — which by the way had not yet entered the renaissance it’s in today. It was cool. I watched it incessantly — both because the changing numbers were mesmerizing and also because it was hard to read the red readout.
And beautiful tech has always been the tip of