Get out your awesome-nerdy-tech hat and strap it on securely: Robin Sloan, a San Francisco-based writer (and web worker), is using Google ads to select a name for the lead character in his forthcoming detective novel—a cool and fitting experiment for a book funded through Kickstarter.

“I’m trying to craft a central character with some of that same iconic strangeness that makes Sherlock Holmes so appealing,” Sloan writes on RobinSloan.com. “There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sherlock Holmes. It leaves an indelible mark on the brain.”

Sloan spent $40 to take out a series of Google AdWords spots—those little ads that pop up next to any search based on keywords. Each ad included a different potential name and the same blurb, like this: Julie Hanus. She’s the Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. robinsloan.com.

A ranking emerged based on the number of clicks each ad received out of the number of pages it appeared upon. His original idea came in at a .21 percent click-through rate, Sloan writes, while a name he’d been most fond of netted a paltry .07 percent.

Sloan admits the exercise was “mostly an excuse to try a new tool,” but he’s also got his eye on the possibilities. “I mean, imagine—this is the sci-fi extrapolation—imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it,” he writes.

“Five minutes later, ding—the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: ‘I stumbled here,’ ‘this variation works better,’ ‘this line rings false.’ ”

Bonus item: Check out my write up of Kerry Skemp’s You’re Talking a Lot but You’re Not Saying Anything for more intriguing thoughts on the future of online feedback-and-commenting.

(Thanks, Booklorn.)

Source: RobinSloan.com

Imagine a contact lens that could connect you to the internet, providing information about what you see in a format invisible to other people. Or a contact lens, powered by radio frequencies or solar power, that could monitor cholesterol or glucose levels for diabetics. Babak A. Parviz, writing for IEEE Spectrum, is already working on the technology, and has successfully tested early versions on live rabbits. Parviz envisions the contact lens turning into a platform like an iPhone, where developers create new applications and inventions to improve the human eye.

Source: IEEE Spectrum 

These are hard times for libertarians. Free-market solutions to the current financial crisis sound as credible as homeopathic solutions to the swine flu, and Barack Obama continues to ride high in the polls on his activist-government platforms. Their increasing marginalization has many libertarians rethinking the basic underpinnings of their philosophies. Writing for the Cato Institute, the libertarian stalwart think tank, Peter Thiel explains a fundamental shift in ideology. For example, Thiel writes, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The great hope for libertarians, according to Thiel, lies not in politics, but in escaping politics through technology. He offers a metaphor: “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” He urges libertarians to harness the power of the internet and other emerging technologies to spread freedom, outside of the political realms of governments and voters.

(Thanks, Marginal Revolution.)

Source: Cato Institute

People shouldn’t count on the emerging green economy to pull the world out of recession, Matthew E. Kahn writes for Foreign Policy. The recession is about the bursting housing bubbles, overleveraged banking sectors, and other problems that won’t be solved with solar panels. Cap-and-trade systems and renewable energy sources are important for environmental reasons, but Kahn cold throws water on the green technology as economic panacea ideal. “Anti-carbon regulations will simultaneously create and destroy jobs,” Kahn writes, but “a little creative destruction will likely be a good thing.”

1. Write a letter: Writer Jonathan Hiskes wrote one letter a day for each of the 40 days of Lent. “I sent letters in the real mail,” he writes in the Spring 2009 issue of Geez (article not available online), “because there’s just nothing exceptional about email.” He wrote old roommates, old teachers, and an ex-girlfriend. He wrote to his family too. “I tried to find a nugget worth sharing with someone every day,” he writes. His hope was that the letters “would both solicit responses and prod me to pay more attention to the world around me.” He was successful on both fronts.

2. One month off: “I turn my computer on too often. For work, for pleasure, just because,” writes Geez editor Will Braun, also in the Spring 2009 issue. “I check my email too often. Even though I am generally disappointed both if there is new mail (more shit to do) or not (need to go back to what I was trying to distract myself from).” Braun hatched a plan: he'd go one month without using the computer at all on Sundays and Tuesdays; he wouldn’t use the internet when he wasn’t at work; he would not visit any news sites; and he would not use Google: “that almighty gateway to info-overload.” He fell off the wagon straight away, but he hopped right back on. Ultimately, the experiment was a success. “It was a good month,” he writes. “I was more present to my son, my wife, my work and the world … I spent a bit more time in the lovely, conflicted, eternal present.”

3. Forced deprivation: “I bet I am not alone in my near frantic desire to be released—for very brief periods, always with an escape hatch—from the tyranny of my own wandering attention,” writes Rebecca Traister in Salon. “I may not have known it, but for some time, I have wanted something forceful, computerized and beyond the realms of my own self-determination to come and muffle the beeping, buzzing, ringing, flashing distractions of our technological age so I can get some goddamn work done.” Her solution? She downloaded Freedom. This is not some abstract notion, it’s a program. “Freedom will disable the networking, only on a Mac computer, for periods of anywhere from one minute to eight hours. No Web sites, no e-mail, no instant messaging, no online shopping, no Facebook, no Twitter, no iTunes store, no streaming anything. Once it is turned on, as it hilariously claims, ‘Freedom enforces freedom.’”

Sources: Geez, Salon 

In November the Oprah show introduced millions of viewers to Time magazine's "Invention of the Year", the 23andMe DNA test kit. This direct-to-consumer test promises buyers that, with one easy spit into a tube, they can unlock the mysteries of their genetic history by mailing saliva to be matched against 23andMe's DNA databases. 

DNA tests aren't the gold standard of accuracy and truth, though, as Sue Friedman, founder of the nonprofit Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowerment (FORCE), illuminates in a special issue of GeneWatch. Potential problems include the invisible hand of biotech companies involved in unregulated marketing of these tests to consumers, as well as the possibility of incorrect interpretation without the benefit of expert analysis. 

Consumers need to understand that a DNA test is not a silver bullet for health forecasting, and the companies that sell these tests need to comprehend the responsibilities inherent in their business. As Friedman states, "people are making real-life, real-moment decisions based on test results."

Make bills itself as the magazine for “technology on your time,” and its blog spotlights all manner of DIY tech projects. But the site’s eye for creative, unusual work, and its tone—cheeky, accessible, and infinitely curious—makes it one of my favorite web destinations for art. The blog presents pieces with the exploratory ethos of a science fair, reveling in the geeky pragmatics of process and construction. Here's a sampling of projects that Make has covered recently:

Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener built a voice knitting machine that translates vocal frequencies into knitted patterns:

Robert Wechler's public art relies on the natural curve in a line of shopping carts:

Chris O’Shea and Cinimod Studio’s kinetic light installation “Beacon” interacts with visitors as they move through a gallery space:

When television broadcasting goes all-digital in February, a range of old TV frequencies known as “white space” will be up for grabs, and technology pioneers like Google’s Larry Page have been lobbying the FCC to dedicate that spectrum to free internet and other public communication.

But the National Association of Broadcasters, mobile phone companies, and other entities who stand to profit from private, pay-based communication have been fighting white space liberation.

Until last week, that is, when the FCC ruled to open white space to unlicensed use (pdf), scoring a huge victory for Page’s camp. This essentially means that online communication will be faster and available to more people, especially rural and low-income users. It will also likely result in cheaper offerings from internet, cable, and cell phone service providers as competition in those markets intensifies.

Jeff Jarvis outlines these and other benefits of public white space at his blog BuzzMachine. (“Note this historic moment,” he writes. “I’m praising the FCC.”) He argues that the internet is no longer a merely a privilege, but a right: “Access to the internet—and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business—should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.”

Jarvis also does a good job of explaining white space and its benefits in non-wonky terms, focusing on the ways it will benefit education, government, and society at large.

Image courtesy of rvaphotodude, licensed by Creative Commons.

Every new communication method is marked by the technology's first message sent. Colin Barras at the New Scientist rounded up the first messages broadcast with various devices, including the 8,500-year-old Chinese tortoise shells (“woman … eye … window”), Samuel Morse’s “a patient waiter is no loser” telegram in 1838, and “Merry Christmas,” the first text message in 1992.

New Scientist invites readers to submit their predictions for the next communications revolution: “What will be the next communication medium to change the world? And what would your first, historic message be?” One submission will be chosen to win a six-month subscription to the magazine.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my submissions:

1) A banner towed by an airplane bearing a message in LOL speak: “Oh hai! Im up in ur airspace, decorating ur sky!”
2) Subliminal messages embedded in presidential debates: “Attention Joe the Plumber: You are being exploited as a talking point.”
3) Hundred-mile-high lettering etched into the moon’s surface with dynamite: “I Am Writing On the Moon with Dynamite.”

Image by Bill Bradford, licensed by Creative Commons.

Going for a long drive and want to listen to some classic literature? Before you shell out serious money to buy an audiobook from iTunes or Amazon, check out LibriVox, the completely free, user-driven audiobook library.

At LibriVox, volunteers can upload recordings of themselves reading books aloud, as long as the literature is in the public domain. So you won’t find the latest New York Times bestseller, but if you need Shakespeare, the U.S. Constitution, or (gulp) Ulysses, you can take your chances with the site’s amateur voice talent. 

Or, if you notice a gap in LibriVox’s extensive catalog, you can fill it yourself. Check out the guidelines for recording, clear your throat, and get started.

Image by suchitra prints, licensed by Creative Commons.

What begins as a snarky takedown of cell phone culture evolves into a meditation on love in Jonathan Franzen’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from Technology Review (free registration required). Moving from a discussion of the technological developments that have shaped the past decade—most notably, the cell phone—to a careful consideration of the various ways people say, “I love you,” Franzen begins to wonder whether the person bellowing those three magic words into their cell phone in the checkout lane at the grocery store might not be honoring the sentiment’s spirit.

Having garnered plenty of acclaim for his 2001 novel The Corrections—and plenty of scorn after turning down Oprah’s book club invitation—Franzen has since evolved into a prolific writer of nonfiction, navigating his personal essays through moving, humorous territory in two collections, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” is no different, winding from stand-up comedy-style observations on the annoyances of cell phones to 9/11, then taking an unexpected turn into his parents’ marriage and a funny passage where a teenaged Franzen does everything in his power to avoid having to explicity reciprocate his mother’s affection:

The one thing that was vital was never, ever to say “I love you” or “I love you, Mom.” The least painful alternative was a muttered, essentially inaudible “Love you.” But “I love you, too,” if pronounced rapidly enough and with enough emphasis on the “too,” which implied rote responsiveness, could carry me through many an awkward moment. ... She also never told me that saying “I love you” was simply something she enjoyed doing because her heart was full of feeling, and that I shouldn’t feel I had to say “I love you” in return every time. And so, to this day, when I’m assaulted by the shouting of “I love you” into a cell phone, I hear coercion.

It’s this blend of the personal and the universal that draws me to Franzen’s essays. His observations on technological annoyances are astute and just this side of cantankerous, but he injects his arguments with enough personal matter to remind us of his—and by extension, our—humanity.

Image by Ed Yourdon, licensed by Creative Commons.

Teens at Morning Star Church in O’Fallon, Missouri, don’t get scolded by their parents for texting during services. In fact, it’s encouraged. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Morning Star has incorporated texting into its Sunday sermon, a trend some churches are embracing to engage younger followers. Morning Star worshipers are able to text questions to the church’s cell phone, where they are received by a church employee and routed to the Reverend’s laptop. On a recent Sunday, some of the texted questions included, “When we are in heaven, will we be able to touch our relatives still on Earth?” and “I'm wondering (and this will sound awful) about people I don't care to bump into in heaven. Will strained relationships here be awkward there, too?” Fourteen-year-old Maddie Howard told the Post-Dispatch, “You don't want to admit your sins to the rest of the church, but this way you can still ask something important.”

(Thanks, Articles of Faith.)

 Image by  Alton , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Society may be moving toward a more liberated view of love, but people increasingly are shackling themselves with rigid rules and systems when finding partners, Jean Hannah Edelstein writes in the Guardian. Online daters apply “scientific” formulas to their profiles in an effort to home in on the partner of their dreams, often neglecting more frustrating, unscientific, but endlessly fascinating pursuits like “pointless flirting.” 

This methodological approach to love is reinforced, according to Edelstein, by the steady stream of studies designed to illuminate a scientific order to human relationships. After dating a man who looked eerily like her father, Edelstein writes that she was “absolved from responsibility for it” by a recent study suggesting that women are often attracted to men who look like their fathers. Freud may have written about that very idea years ago, but the new findings, reported by the Guardian, are being cited as further evidence of “sexual imprinting,” where sexual attraction in humans is determined early in childhood.

New studies are also pointing to a kind of genetic pre-determinism on love. The New Scientist reports that gene coding could “help to determine whether men are serial commitment-phobes or devoted husbands.” The researchers found that the more copies of a section of the gene RS3 334 that a man has, the less likely he is to remain monogamous. Having pinpointed the genetics of relationships, the team is now trying to test for gene coding in altruism and jealousy.

And even beyond the pages of Cosmo, new studies about how to attract potential mates are released nearly every slow news day. The British newspaper Telegraph has determined that a rollercoaster is the best place for a first date, since the excitement will cause people to release the hormone phenyl ethyl-amine, which is also released when a person first sees someone he or she is attracted to. And the BBC News reports that the simple act of saying “I love you” has the ability to make people more attractive.

The question for Edelstein is: What effect do studies like these have on our relationships? The findings could make dating more efficient, Edelstein writes, saving people time so they could “redirect it towards less sexy, but important undertakings, like recycling and exercise.” People could even sign on to Genepartner.com, a website designed to pair people off based on their genes. But what do people lose? By eliminating potential mates who are blonde, brunette, short, tall, strong, or weak, people cut themselves off from a huge portion of the dating pool, one of whom may be able to surprise them. That’s not a theory. That’s simple statistics.

Image by  Steven Orr , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

The Democratic National Convention holds the honor of being the first presidential convention featuring  Twitter, the microblogging site launched in 2006. Many prominent journalists, bloggers, and tech-savvy people are using Twitter to share their thoughts in fewer than 141 characters. Here are some of the more interesting observations, or “tweets,” on the Democratic National Convention that have been published so far. If you see any others, be sure to share them in the comments.

Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
“Riot police everywhere. My first perk: a smoothie from Google.”

Jay Rosen, PressThink, journalism professor at NYU
“Do family melodrama better than the networks do family melodrama and you can defuse the pundit's impulse to disrupt party messaging.”

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
“I need to spend more time re why this time and convention is so important”

Ana Marie Cox, Time
“Landed. Apparently bunking with Obama Girl. Probably the closest I'll get to the Obama entourage all week. But the view will be good.”

Slate
“Delegates dancing—catastrophic”

Mark Ambinder, the Atlantic
“Trojan, the condom manufacturer, has set up shop near the press mags. They're handing out condoms”

Micah Sifry, the Personal Democracy Forum
“Romney v Biden debate would pit great hair against great hair plugs.”

Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign manager
“Roaming convention floor looking for a story - not sure there are any. Obama delegate trackers have gotten a lot of HRC Delegates to switch”

The American Prospect
“teddy sounds good! also, he pledges to live at least till january, and we at tap mean to hold his feet to the fire on that.”

Jane Hamshire, Firedoglake
"McCain may name VP on Thu. My early call that he'll steal Dem convention bounce by naming Lieberman on track"

Spencer Ackerman, Firedoglake
“word from inside the pepsi center press room: NO ALCOHOL! Coverage sure to be negative”

Lindsay Beyerstein, Freelance investigative reporter
“I just got back from the 'free speech zone' at 7th and Auraria. How depressing.”

Matt Cooper, Portfolio magazine
“At the benediction, the minister is praying for teacher pay hikes! That's a father who knows his congregation.”

Ben Smith, the Politico
“949 Frontier to Denver: so far, many tattoos, no political types”

The Uptake
Quotes ollypriesmeyer, "Have you ever been arrested at one of these things? Trust me not as exciting as one might think once they load you up."

Rachel Sklar, the Huffington Post
“Leslie Sanchez says Republicans don't tweet. Hmmm.”

Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine
“I am sad to see bloggers coopted into giving these political publicity fests. Why join the mob? It's already too big.”

Image by  Steve Bott , licensed under  Creative Commons .

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

A new camera being developed by the University of Washington gives doctors a clear look at patients’ insides, and the ability to fine tune the view. The camera is so small, ScienCentral News reports that patients can literally swallow it like a pill. Earlier models of internal cameras were often as large as an adult index finger, requiring that patients be sedated before usage. The new system employs a fiber optic wire as small as a human hair. Researchers believe the technology could make medical procedures less invasive, and could lead to easier screening for diseases such as lung cancer. In fact, the system is so small that Eric Seibel, one of the technology’s developers, conducted an interview about the innovation with one of the cameras down his throat.

You can watch that video below.

The radioactive cooling pools in the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine are actually hotbeds of life for fungi. According to Cosmos magazine, this newly discovered fungi is believed to be feeding on the toxic radiation that pollutes the area. Nuclear chemist Ekaterina Dadachova believes the organisms may hold secrets to new food sources for astronauts or crops for food-starved regions. 

This discovery wouldn’t likely surprise to Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. In a talk for the TED conference (video available below), Stamets laid out his vision of how the fungi could fight disease, change the way people think about pesticides, clean up oil spills, and even help solve the energy crisis. Stamets suggests that humans should join together with mushrooms, helping them grow, and harnessing their surprising power to help, quite literally, save the world.

Image by alfonsobenayas, licensed under Creative Commons.

For years, big, expensive converted minivans have been the norm in transportation for wheelchair users. Environmental responsibility hasn't always been the biggest priority. Luckily, a Hungarian company called Rehab Ltd. has developed the Kenguru, an electric car designed specifically for the disabled. 

The vehicle has no side doors; instead the driver rolls in through a rear hatchback and over an automatically lowering ramp. The car is 85 inches long and 61 inches wide and has a range of about 35 miles at a top speed of 25 miles per hour.

Unfortunately, the vehicle hasn’t made it stateside yet, but it’s getting closer. Kenguru UK in England is launching this summer, and the company plans expansion to the U.S. in the near future, according to Green Car Journal. 

Image courtesy of kengurucars.com.

The idea of flushing human waste down the toilet, mixing it with water from the laundry, the shower, and the sink, and then trying to treat the whole effluent sludge using expensive, energy-intensive industrial plants is “totally insane” according to Arno Rosemarin, research and communications manager at the Stockholm Environment Institute, quoted in the Boston Globe. There are plenty of other options that people and governments can pursue for more sane and sustainable sanitation.

A global movement is afoot to harness the “neglected treasure” of human waste, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes for the Boston Globe. Low-flush toilets, waterless urinals, and composting toilets are just the starting points. Tuhus-Dubrow also writes about “vacuum toilets”—like the ones found on airplanes—bathrooms designed to give nutrients to plants, and toilets designed to separate urine, feces, and greywater. A number of barriers, including psychological ones, are preventing this kind of technology from being implemented, but any one would be preferable to the “flush and forget” system currently in place.

For the car-deprived among us (like me), Google Maps was once a frustrating application. Getting directions involved being directed down highways and making rough time estimations based on how long a trip would take in a car. As if they knew what I was thinking (and maybe they do...) Google has begun offering walking directions on Google Maps. Now I know that it would take approximately 17 days for me to walk from Minneapolis to Manhattan. Maybe now I can stop agonizing over the best route on the way to the office every morning.

(Thanks, Gizmodo.)

The internet seems to have the ability to turn regular people into sniveling children. Maybe that’s why “Baby’s First Internet” works so well. The nursery rhyme by Kevin Fanning combined with the delightful illustrations by Kean Soo create one of the funniest parodies of internet culture I’ve seen in a while. 

Here’s a sample page:

(Thanks, Kottke.)

“Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet,” satirist Andy Borowitz joked on his website. In an effort to pull the headlines away from Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East, Borowitz wrote that McCain, surrounded by reporters, visited “Weather.com and Yahoo! Answers, where he inquired as to the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.” Borowitz did not mention any plans of visiting, as Sen. McCain once said, “a Google.”

As online technology becomes increasingly prevalent and sophisticated, a common meme has emerged that the Internet is a democratizing force, spreading knowledge to previously under-informed segments of the global population, and giving a voice to the disenfranchised. Meanwhile, hysterical television personalities warn us that the Internet is a debauched hellscape rife with sex offenders and invasions of privacy.

Writing for AlterNet, Annalee Newitz says, nuts to all that.

Three Internet falsehoods that refuse to die, according to Newitz, are 1) it’s free; 2) it knows no boundaries; and 3) it’s dangerous. Her refutations of the first two myths are particularly important because they address problems of limited online access by low-income populations and those living under censorship.

Read the piece to learn why these myths are untrue but so very persistent. Then, perhaps Newitz can determine once and for all whether the Internet is actually rotting our brains.

In light of US Cellular’s new policy of email-free Fridays, reported by NPR, the tech/productivity blog Lifehacker asked its readers if they could forego email for one day each week. Since the site’s readers are undoubtedly among the most connected people on the planet, most of the answers in the comments section fall somewhere between “Only with great difficulty,” to “No. I am addicted.” These individual accounts square nicely with societal trends: the past decade has seen Internet addiction emerge as an acknowledged problem, with the establishment of recovery programs and treatment centers. 

I’m pretty sure I’m not an addict (then again, denial is one symptom of addiction … ) but I do know that going email-free for a whole day would be a struggle. Email and other online communication has a way of flooding my waking hours until I’m unable to sit still with a book or magazine—or even another live human being—for more than a few minutes before wondering if I have any new messages.

Testimonials from self-described email addicts are available on the tech website ClickZ, including some suggestions for breaking the habit. Not surprisingly, the first step is getting the hell away from your computer and, if you have an email-enabled cellphone or PDA, leaving it behind while you go somewhere else—ideally, into the great outdoors. That's easier said than done, and only the half the battle: the other half is managing to enjoy this email-free time without obsessing over the news, assignments, requests, and social communication piling up in your absence.

Image by  Al Abut , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

When inspiration strikes, there’s not always a computer around to record the ideas. Like cocktail napkin sketches, or ideas written on the back of a person’s hand, the website Deeplinking has compiled a few pen-on-paper prototypes of ideas that became websites.

The photo at left, for example, was the original design for the micro-blogging site Twitter, then called Stat.us. The current design of Utne.com, in fact, was once little more than chicken scratches on a torn piece of paper. For a more in-depth and active example, Deeplinking also provides an impressive, moving paper prototype in the YouTube link below.

Image by jack dorsey, licensed under Creative Commons.

Talking stuffed animals may be cute on the outside, but creepy robotic hearts often lurk beneath their fuzzy exteriors. Matt Kirkland dissected a number of stuffed toy robots and found out what they were made of. The results are quite revealing.

Images by Matt Kirkland

(Thanks, Kottke.)

How revolutionary are the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle? Not very, according to Annalee Newitz at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She cites an engineering principle called the singularity, “the moment when the technology and culture of the present evolve to the point that they would be incomprehensible to people from the past.” The concept could encompass what the late, great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called the moment when a “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The test for singularity is to imagine explaining a technology to someone 100 years ago—a feat that would be fairly easy, Newitz argues, with the iPhone, the Kindle, or even the Phoenix Mars Lander. All are impressive innovations, but hardly incomprehensible to a citizen of the world in 1908.

So what would blow an early-20th-century mind, in much the same way that a man in the 1700s would be boggled by airplanes? Most likely, internet-based technologies like social-networking sites and viral video, which have fundamentally changed the ways we interact with others, would do the trick. This makes sense, since I often find it difficult to explain the relevance of Facebook or Obama Girl even to myself, much less a hypothetical person 100 years in the past.

Image by  Eli Duke , licensed by  Creative Commons .

Digital technology has advanced to the point where anyone can doctor a photograph. Sometimes it takes a technical expert to tell the difference between a real photo and a fake one. One such expert, Hany Farid writes for the Scientific American about some of the best examples of photo doctoring in the digital age. He also gives some telltale signs of fake photographs, suggesting that sleuths focus on the eyes, the light sources, and the pixels.

Some Photoshop doctoring jobs don’t need an expert to be exposed as a fake. The blog Photoshop Disasters has become a time-wasting favorite on the internet, chronicling some of the worst photo doctoring in the media, including errant limbs, one-legged models, and other human oddities. There are even a few egregious errors from fairly reputable sources. My favorite (seen left) is from Sports Illustrated, where someone seems to have cut off a man’s head. The question is: How did they miss that?

With Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites experiencing unprecedented popularity, gamers have started tapping into the power of social networks. "Social networking is a game in and of itself," explained Jennifer Pahlka, co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. One example reported by BBC News is Mytopia.com, a site that lets users play Soduku, hearts, backgammon, and other games over MySpace and Facebook. Mytopia.com co-creator Guy Ben-Artzi says that playing these games over social networking sites with friends makes gaming more meaningful.

Expanding the definition of social networking, Gamelayers, currently being developed, is experimenting with turning the entire web into a gaming platform. Dubbed a PMOG (passively multiplayer online game), Technology Review reports that players download a tool bar onto their browsers, allowing them to participate in an online scavenger hunt through the web. Participants can leave gifts and popups, and send instant messages with other participants as they search the web on themed missions. As an example, Gamelyayers’ CEO says that Warner Brothers could create a Batman-themed mission to promote the new superhero movie.

If promoting the new Hollywood blockbuster doesn’t fit your idea of “meaningful,” researchers at the University of Washington have created a game that could eventually lead to a cure for HIV, according to ScienceDaily. The game Foldit creates a competition out of protein folding, a process of shaping biological building blocks that plays a crucial role in the human immune system. “There are too many possibilities [of protein shapes] for the computer to go through every possible one,” said David Baker, one of the game’s creators. Instead of relying on the computer, the game invites people to tap their intuition and come up with creative solutions for protein shapes. The goal, according to Baker, is “to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.”

I’ve been spending far too much time lately on the website Big Think. The site has a mass of videos with smart people ruminating on important questions. Politicos like Ted Kennedy and Dennis Ross mull over questions of education and foreign affairs, while Deepak Chopra and Steven Pinker ponder the meaning of humanity’s existence. It’s is a marvel of modern communication, like a YouTube for smart people.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke, considers what this mass of communication means to the people in the video you can see below. 

—Bennett Gordon

Finally, a social networking site aimed at the cranky old-school reporters who were forever bitching about “those Internets,” until they realized they were on the verge of losing their jobs to a bunch of 20-somethings with Facebook accounts who are willing to work for a Jimmy John’s sandwich and a free Internet connection. Ryan Sholin, of blogosphere renown, took pity on them and created Wired Journalists.com to help them learn about The Google. And judging from the turnout on the message board, it’s working. Onward, crusty journalists!

—Morgan Winters

Image by monoglot, licensed under Creative Commons.

They’re the best of times, the worst of times. It’s Dawson’s Creek meets Waiting For Godot set in a high school lunchroom with all the melodrama of Days of Our Lives and all the pathos of a war-zone. It’s the horror of being 15.

The Australian newspaper The Age has put together a multimedia report on what life is like during this “pivotal age, on threshold of adulthood, but not quite there yet.”

The report takes a look at three big issues: sex, alcohol and technology. (Apparently the internet has edged out rock ‘n’ roll in the good old trifecta.) Not too surprisingly, 15-year-olds are drinking, some are having sex, and they’re basing a lot of their identities on a mashup of social networking websites, e-mail, and text messaging.

More gripping are the video interviews with actual 15-year-olds. In these visceral clips, young people struggle with how to express themselves on important issues—not as children but, for the first time, as adults. As they describe the world they live in (one of parties made tipsy with sugary alcoholic concoctions and surreptitious make-out sessions), it’s evident they’re trying to figure out who they are, where they stand, and what they’re going to do about things. All the burgeoning responsibilities of adulthood.

—Brendan Mackie

Lawmakers and scientists met in Washington on Wednesday to discuss how to bring more women into science, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports (subscription required). Women are woefully underrepresented in so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and some people have suggested that setting up an NCAA-style governing body for collegiate academics could help level the playing field.

Less than 5 percent of full professors in physics are female, according to Myron Campbell, chair of the physics department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And that could be considered a violation of Title IX, the 1972 law that sought to ensure equal distribution of federal academic funds for both men and women. While most people think of Title IX as a mandate to give more money to women’s soccer and field hockey teams, the law applies to educational programs, too.

“The original intent of Title IX was to ensure equal educational opportunity for both sexes,” said Gretchen Ritter, director of the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, quoted in Inside Higher Ed. “Yet, relatively little has been done outside of the arena of athletics to make that mandate meaningful.” –Bennett Gordon

(Thanks to Science Progress for the tip.)