What I’m Reading

Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

02.09.12

Dangerous tweets: Arrested, fined in 140 characters or less

What I'm Reading

In 2010, South Yorkshire police showed up at the workplace of 26-year old Paul Chambers and arrested him. His crime: posting a frustrated joke to Twitter after his girlfriend’s flight was delayed due to snow at the local airport.

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

This was perhaps unfortunately phrased, but was it “menacing”? Even police didn’t think so. As Chambers’s lawyer describes the chain of events leading to his arrest:

[The tweet] was not sent to the airport, and when it was found in a search some days later it was graded as “non-credible” by the airport security manager. However, the process in place meant that it was referred to the airport police, who did nothing, and then to South Yorkshire police, who arrested Paul at his workplace for a suspected “bomb hoax.” The police in turn realised after interview that it was intended as no more than a joke; but they had to refer it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision.

The CPS agreed that it was not a bomb hoax offence, but they decided it was in the public interest to prosecute Paul under section 127. This seems the first time… that this offence had been used in respect of an internet communication.

Chambers was fined £400 plus costs (now over £3,000). But he has appealed the case, which was heard in London this week, and the ruling will set precedent as the first time an appellate court has considered this sort of issue related to social media.

The UK isn’t the only government not sure how to handle tweets. Two weeks ago, British tabloid The Sun interviewed a man and woman who had been sent back home after long flights to California, where Homeland Security agents pointed to a recent tweet from the man saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

If it all seems a bit over the top—what person actually out to “destroy America” would write such a thing publicly, on Twitter, and in English?—it could be far worse if you live in Saudi Arabia.

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02.09.12

New bill would make open access to federal research mandatory

What I'm Reading

For the last several years, research funded by the National Institutes of Health has been subject to its public access policy, which ensures that resulting research publications are made open access within a year of their publication. For almost as long, some members of Congress have been trying to overturn that policy, which some publishers fear will cut into their revenues. The latest attempt, the Research Works Act, was introduced in January, and would allow any publisher to keep papers in its journals from being made open access.

Today, some members of Congress have introduced a bill that would not only support the NIH policy, but expand it. The Federal Research Public Access Act is being introduced in both the House and Senate, with a bipartisan group of sponsors in each body. The act would significantly shorten the waiting period between publication in a subscription journal and the point where a paper is made open access, dropping it from a year to six months. It would also expand the scope of the policy, applying it to any federal agency with a budget of $100 million or more.

The bill argues that “the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world.” To that end, each agency will be required to ensure that publication doesn’t interfere with their right to reproduce the paper, and create a online public repository that will house the works once they become open access. Preliminary data, such as lab notes and meeting presentations, are specifically excluded from this requirement.

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02.09.12

[STUDY] 61% of Social Media Users Feel So Close To You

What I'm Reading

Sometimes little things like a sweet comment on Facebook or a Twitter friend calling your tweet a “favorite” can really make a social networker bee’s day.

A new study from Pew finds that for the most part, adults are kind to each other on social media sites. In fact, 85% of adults say that most of the people they come across on social media are rather kind; only 5% say that people are “mostly unkind,” which would imply rude or mean. An additional 5% say that it’s all situational. On the whole, adults have positive experiences on social networking sites. A total 68% of SNS users had an experience that “made them feel good about themselves,” 61% said something on social networks “made them feel closer to another person.” Of the generous and helpful variety, 39% of users said they saw acts of generosity and 36% said they see other user behaving in generous and helpful ways.

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Not everything is peaches and cream, though.

There are some social media users who don’t feel so happy-go-lucky. Not everyone experiences kind, helpful behavior on social networking sites. That would be about 18% of users; another 5% claim to never see any generosity or helpfulness at all.

Sometimes interactions on social networking sites have negative outcomes. Of the people surveyed by Pew, 26% of adults experienced negative outcomes. Of that percentage, 15% said bad experiences ended friendships, 12% resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation, 11% said those interactions caused family-related problems, 3% got into a physical fight with someone based on an interaction, and 3% got into trouble at work. About 13% of adult SNS users say that someone else acted rudely toward them in the past year.

Unless you live in a world that resembles the movie Young Adult, you probably don’t think of yourself as an adolescent. On social networking sites, adults tend to be more positive and less negative than teenagers; 41% of SNS-using teens had at least one bad experiences versus 26% of SNS-using adults.

Dear White Guys, Please Read This

Pew points out that non-white people, women, parents and millennials are more likely to see content that offends them. Of that group, 42% of black SNS users and 33% of Hispanic SNS users frequently saw language, images or humor that they found offensive compared to 22% of white SNS users. Taking a look at this in terms of age, 34% of millennials (ages 18-34) found some material offensive, compared with only 17% of Gen-X users (ages 35-46). The survey doesn’t even give the tiny percentage of Baby Boomers who felt offended by material on SNS sites. Additionally, 29% of women were offended versus 22% of men, and 29% of parents with small children found offensive material versus 24% of nonparents.

Who Did Pew Survey?

Pew surveyed 2,260 adults ages 18-and-up over the period of July 25-August 26, 2011. Of the people surveyed, 1,047 were SNS and Twitter users. The margin of error is plus-or-minus three percentage points. A total 64% of adults surveyed used social networking sites. 87% had a profile on Facebook, 14% on MySpace, 11% on Twitter, 10% on LinkedIn and 13% on other social networking sites.

Images courtesy Shutterstock.

Do your friends on social networks make you feel good about yourself? Share your experiences in the comments.

Discuss

02.09.12

Apple Is Now Worth More Than Google And Microsoft Combined (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG)

What I'm Reading

Apple’s stock is hitting new highs during today’s trading. It’s currently at $494.

That makes its market cap ($460 billion) greater than Google ($198 billion) and Microsoft ($257 billion) combined.

The crazy thing is that Apple is just getting started. It could sell a ton of iPhones, iPads, and even TVs this year. Don’t be shocked if it’s a $1 trillion company some day.

From Google Finance:

mcaps

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The death of Firefox

What I'm Reading

It doesn’t look good for Firefox: Almost every month for the last three years, Firefox has lost ground to Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. For most of 2009 the trend was fairly straight as it fended off Chrome and nibbled away at IE, but between 2010 and today Firefox has lost a third of its market share, from a worldwide peak of around 30% down to 20%.

You can look at this two ways. First, the total number of people on the internet is growing, so while Firefox’s share has decreased, the total number of people using Firefox is increasing. The other point of view is that Firefox, whether you like it or not, is declining in popularity.

I love the Fox as much as the next bearded geek, but the numbers just don’t lie: Chrome is breathlessly decimating Firefox’s userbase at a breakneck rate. It took Firefox more than four years to prise 20% of the market from Internet Explorer; Chrome did it in almost half that, and is fast approaching 30% in just over three years. Internet Explorer’s graph is a little harder to interpret, but it looks like it might have finally turned the corner and stopped hemorrhaging market share.

Compounding Firefox’s losses is the stark reality that it’s unlikely to make any gains. Google has obviously spent a lot of money advertising Chrome, but there’s no way that ads brought it nearly 30% of the web’s two billion surfers. People are migrating to Chrome because of word of mouth: Geeks and power users picked it up first, and they’ve been installing it on the computers of friends and family ever since. Microsoft, too, is using a dollar bill tourniquet, and when Windows 8 tablets roll around with IE10 as the default browser, you can be sure that its market share will climb. Mozilla is adding some exciting new features to Firefox, and Firefox for Android is an interesting enterprise, but I don’t foresee anything that will turn the tide.

But is that really a problem? The entire reason that Firefox was such a success is that it appealed to the geeks and power users who weren’t happy with Internet Explorer 6′s 95% share of the market. Microsoft effectively put the dampers on web innovation for five years. Firefox was conceived with one purpose in mind: To revitalize the web.

In that regard, it has succeeded. The web, with three browsers vying for supremacy, has never been more exciting. Within a few short years of launching, Firefox had shown the world what CSS and a gutsy JavaScript engine were capable of. Firefox triggered the HTML5 revolution. It is because of Firefox that Metro-style Windows 8 apps can be written in JavaScript. And ironically enough, it is because of Firefox that Chrome was created.

If you used Chrome in 2008 and 9, you will remember that almost all of its early adopters were disaffected Firefox users who had grown tired of an ever-increasing memory footprint and sluggish interface. Chrome had almost zero features when it first arrived, but it didn’t matter: When the only two choices were a slow Internet Explorer or a bloated Firefox, Chrome was exactly what the people (and the internet!) needed. Mozilla has spent the last year trying to trim the fat, but it hasn’t caused an upswell of users to return to the motherland. Much in the same way that Firefox cannibalized Internet Explorer, Chrome capitalized on just a single feature — speed — and has been riding the wave ever since.

Despite its ridiculous rate of growth, though, Chrome will eventually reach a zenith. The Big Three all have enough gravitas to ensure that no one browser has the power to monopolizingly choke the web. Even if a browser does get a little too big for its britches, Mozilla will always be there to knock some sense into the community — and, if need be, do the grassroots thing all over again.

What will happen now, assuming Microsoft and Google continue to barrage each other with their full arsenal of cannon, is that Firefox will gradually fade into a position of feared, revered veterancy — kind of like an aging grandfather who sits on a rocking chair in the middle of the World Wide Web with a loaded shotgun. It might even get to the stage where Firefox has to occasionally loose some crazy feature onto the web, just to remind everyone that it’s still alive. Eventually, if Microsoft really is serious about open web technologies and Google does no evil, Firefox might even die.

But, having completed everything you set out to do in life, is death really that awful?

[Image credit: Mike Smail]