That is my jam!

If only knitting happened this fast.

CG knitting!

Link.

posted by annie @ 7:47 PM 0 comments

Hot Tech Stories.

My tech stories of the day: electronic voting, college online applications, and RSS feeds.

1. The New York Times has an article about the security flaws in the Diebold AccuVote system, which has led the pack as an alternative to paper ballots. Turns out the key to its memory card is generic (the kind used for office furniture, minibars, etc.), and even if you don't have one of those keys you can pick the lock in 10 seconds...so one could swap it out with one that has code to alter the votes. And how were these flaws exposed? By the academic community. Diebold took the "we don't want to expose our system to scrutiny" stance and basically poo-pooed the notion that anyone in the political world would be shifty enough to physically tamper with the system (yeah right). In 2003 researchers found the code for the AccuVote system on one of Diebold's public servers, and the only reason for these latest pick-the-lock findings (plus code that will swing the votes toward a desired candidate) is that Princeton obtained an AccuVote system from a third party. So instead of going on the defense, as Diebold has done, why not work with academia to try to fix problems? I'm sure they'd be able to find a school or two that would jump at the chance to hack into this system, figure out its flaws, and come up with solutions for better security.

2. Wired is reporting on states helping kids and parents out in the college search. They ultimately want to provide information about the colleges and universities in their respective states and streamline the online application process so it takes less work to apply to multiple colleges. Some good stats from the article:

North Carolina's cfnc.org, which launched in 2000, has been credited with helping increase the state's college-enrollment rate from 57 percent to 68 percent of high school graduates.

North Carolina, which spends about $1 million a year to maintain its site, has 1.3 million students and families registered for accounts. After the first year, the site had just 14,000 registered.

Kentucky launched its "Go Higher Kentucky" campaign in 2000, part of which is gohigherky.com, the state's college website. Since then, the number of high school students going on to college has grown from 55 percent to 62 percent.

CSU now only prints 100,000 applications, compared with the several million before the website. Close to 98 percent of the 500,000 applications received are through the site, he said.

This mainly pertains to the state college system, but I think it's a good indication of how much of this process, from school applications to job applications, has migrated to the Internet. When one is filling out the same information over and over again in applications, it only makes sense to automate the process. I think that of the seven schools I applied to for undergrad six years ago, I applied electronically to the University of Richmond and Wake Forest. Wake Forest had to ask for a hard copy because they lost my electronic submission. My two grad school applications were electronic. The article also points out how this trend is growing in the South, where states are trying to revive their traditionally agriculturally-based economies.

"It speaks to a change in economics, moving from agrarian or manufacturing to knowledge based," Dietz said. "Those high-paying agricultural and manufacturing jobs just don't exist any more."

3. And finally, a good explanation of RSS ("the Oprah way").

posted by annie @ 1:03 PM 0 comments

60 Seconds.

AdRants points to the blog Ironic Sans, which is filled with a bunch of cool ideas (e.g. pre-pixelated shirts for reality TV, the iZod) and videos by some dude. The video set 60 Seconds is pretty sweet. My favorites are 60 Seconds in the Life of Rafa Nadal's Shadow, 60 Seconds in the Life of a Staircase (or "60 Seconds in the Life of a Guy in a Sweater Vest"), and 60 Seconds in the Life of Escalators.






I also have to mention that the guy likes Jowlers and decided to formalize some jowling. Rawk.

posted by annie @ 9:54 PM 0 comments

The dupefication of online fan bases.

It's been a busy week in the outing of social networking phenoms.

Brody Ruckus, of the infamous "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome" Facebook group, is fake.

Turns out "Brody" and the girls he posted pictures of are models. And the "Ruckus" may ring a bell if you go to Georgia Tech - the masterminds of Ruckus Music (GT's new partner for downloading music) created Brody and the group. Facebook deleted the group and removed the account because it violated the TOS. It's pretty interesting on the heels of the announcement that they're going to open up Facebook to the public. How many Brody Ruckuses will there be in the future that they can't track down? I wonder if they'll have the manpower to monitor these things.

lonelygirl15, the innocent homeschooled girl who became one of the most popular people on YouTube, is fake.

The girl who plays "Bree" is an aspiring actress from New Zealand. Someone uncovered her cached MySpace page and a set of pictures being not so lonely. A lot of people have been claiming for a while that it wasn't real, mainly because of the great editing, the implausibility of Bree's parents letting her friend Daniel hang out in her room all the time, and the domain lonelygirl15 being registered a month before her first video was posted on YouTube. There seems to be a mixture of backlash ("I'm never watching again since you're fake"), disbelief ("the girl in the pictures obviously isn't Bree"), and continued loyalty to lonelygirl ("this is way more entertaining than any show on TV right now"). The creators and actors did an interview with MTV, and the backdrop had the Revver logo, so it seems as if they'll be migrating from YouTube to their own site (lonelygirl15.com) and profiting off of video views. We'll see if this migration is successful - since the YouTube community, video responses and all, was what made the story so successful in the first place.

posted by annie @ 4:40 PM 0 comments

The shit's about to hit the fan.

Facebook is about to open up to everyone. EVERYONE. People without .edu addresses will be able to join geographic networks. What a move by Facebook...while it's still recovering from the news feed backlash. Seems like Zucks has his priorities out of whack.

Time to abandon your geographic networks, ladies and gents.

Link.

posted by annie @ 8:45 PM 0 comments

Take ALL the hard work out of stalking!

Okay, I'll be the first to admit I was kind of stoked to see Facebook's news feed. Because I'm pretty much a stalker. It is information overload though and the profile page looks pretty crowded now..although I do like how you can collapse sections. I can understand why people are pissed about the privacy issueAnd I'm sure that soon you'll be able to turn it off, change your settings, etc. And here comes my rant...


You're kidding me, right? Let's put a sponsored link to a conglomorate news website smack dab in the middle of social network feed.

posted by annie @ 7:12 PM 0 comments