A few days ago I stumbled over an interesting TED talk by Eli Pariser about the ever increasing personalization of the web, its search results, your facebook news feed, … Do you think that you still see the whole picture or are you already caught in your own filtered information bubble? (thx to Kingsley Idehen)
Short summary: Mac OS X’s default power management settings might wear your hard drive down unnecessarily. This post provides a lot of background information and how to change these settings. Continue reading
Reading the Wikimedia blog I stumbled over this interesting post. They mention a framework called Ushahidi (Swahili word for “testimony’) with its subproject SwitfRiver which can be used to track and verify the reliability of news concerning current trending topics, possibly helping editors of Wikipedia to enhance the quality.
Digging into I found out the framework is used for live mapping (collection, aggregation and visualization) of disaster and event related messages sent via all different kinds of transports (e.g., twitter, facebook, email, sms…). One example is the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Where it helped to coordinate all the s&r teams.
As I find it quite fascinating how much people who sit at home in their living rooms might be able to help others in a disaster region, I’d like to suggest this talk: