Blog Feed

Psychological Profile Based on Tweets

Katy Pearce — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:02:30 -0700

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods, Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of his or her tweets compared to a baseline score based on over 1.5 million random tweets.

RID is a text analysis tool of 3,000+ words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis tool that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of emotion and self-reference words.

One Laptop Per Child: Vision Versus Reality

Katy Pearce — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:07:47 -0700

Our UC neighbors at Irvine have published a study reviewing the One Laptop Per Child program (
Wikipedia) that gives a $100 PC to children in developing countries. The program received $20 million in startup investments and got a lot of attention. It was projected that 150 million laptops would be shipped annually, but so far only a few hundred thousand have been distributed over the past 2 years.

Decision Making Sites

Katy Pearce — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:40:34 -0700

A number of new sites have launched recently to help people make decisions.

LetSimonDecide is geared toward young adults to aid life goal setting and decision making skills. There are a number of personality "quizzes" to help make decisions and goals.

Seniors Joining Social Network Sites

Katy Pearce — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:08:53 -0700

The age digital divide is one of the lasting digital divides in the United States, as older people have the lowest adoption rate and levels of use.

The NYT writes about older American adults, especially those that live alone, using social network sites to keep in touch with family and friends.

Will social networking sites be a driving force in bringing seniors online?

Happy Birthday Tetris!

Katy Pearce — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:25:17 -0700

CITS turns 10 this year, but even older is Tetris, turning 25 this week!

Tetris is available on almost every gaming platform and has sold over 70 million copies around the world.

News coverage here

Scholars haven't ignored this popular game.

China Blocks Access to Many Websites

Katy Pearce — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:12:18 -0700

In possible preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China has begun to block many sites likeTwitter, Flickr, Blogger and YouTube.

Congratulations Monica Bulger, our first Technology and Society Emphasis Graduate

Katy Pearce — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:23:45 -0700

Congratulations to Monica Bulger, CITS's first Technology and Society Emphasis graduate.

Monica's dissertation "Online Literacy & the Trouble with Information" with committee members are: Richard Mayer [Chair], Miriam Metzger, Kevin Almeroth, and Jane Conoley.

How Google Books Works

Katy Pearce — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:50:27 -0700

Google Books with over 7 million scanned books is an amazing resource and an exciting project. It is not without controversy though. The recent settlement about the copyright and intellectual property issues surrounding the scanning of the books still does not resolve the debate. For more on the legal implication, check out this summary blog post.

GMail now automatically translates

Katy Pearce — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:23:11 -0700

Google announced a new feature for GMail that allows users to automatically translate emails into English and any other supported language (41 supported languages, or 98% of current Internet users).

NPR Backstory

Katy Pearce — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:12:10 -0700

NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter account feed that provides links to old news stories that might be relevant to current events. It uses NPR's API (That's application programming interface (API), a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications - Wikipedia).