ucsb

For better or worse, our personal computers serve many purposes. For those of us that write for a living, using our PCs to write on while also running many applications which are fun (and/or distracting) can be very challenging.

Yelp is a popular site for reviewing businesses and services. But after one customer of a chiropractor has been threatened with a lawsuit, will users be less inclined to put up reviews? The article also points out that the chiropractor himself may now be a target of discrimination by individuals that disagree with the lawsuit. The reviewer has created a website to generate funds for his defense.

In Barbara Herr Harthorn's lecture, she discussed her recent study of perceptions of nanotechnologies in the United States and United Kingdom.

A major difficulty for the research teams was the low level of knowledge of nanotechnologies in both countries. As such, the teams decided upon an innovative methodology to triangulate results. "Deliberative forums" were conducted. These forums integrate reasoning with deliberation and interpretation. A workshop was designed to promote self-activated learning.

Social network sites are of great interest to researchers. Usage statistics are quite difficult to find, as these sites grow so quickly. Additionally, the difficulty in measuring "use" include defining heavy versus light use as well as determining real profiles versus fake profiles and multiple profiles.

A mashup, according to Wikipedia is "a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work." Every year DJ Earworm creates a mashup of the top popular songs of the year and makes it available via MP3 file.