Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,700 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Apparently, that really is the case.

You are probably no stranger by now to the fact that the 800-million-strong (you included) social networking site Facebook has already implemented several major revamps to its layout- such as the Lists, the News Feed construct, improved interlaced photo schemes and the now-official-and-ever-controversial Ticker with a real-time secondary News Feed.

Results so far: an all-time record-high pile of complaints from Internet users all over the globe, ranting about those changes from blogs (such as mine) to SNS accounts, with the majority of the complaints done in- you’ve guessed it- Facebook. All of those concerns primarily range from privacy concerns to plain annoyance about the idea of granting the Stalker ability on the Ticker.

But then, ever since the creation of Facebook’s News Feed in 2006, which was one of the major deviations it possessed from the then-leading networking titans Friendster and MySpace, FB users have been virtually complaining with such consistency on every major redevelopment done on Zuckerberg’s virtual brainchild. If seen at a greater scale, it was as if a micro-culture of ranting ‘against the new’ has already been developed through the years, with its level peaking on the latest attempt.

By comparison, these new Facebook elements and alterations are obviously inspired by those of other networking platforms (to name a few, Real-time News Feed and Subscriptions from Twitter’s Home Page and the Lists based from Google+ Circles) in a subtle try to integrate more functionality into their sported features. Reasons could possibly range from simple striving for continuous improvement to quietly ensuring that their number-one spot would not easily taken by any rising rivals in any of the near-to-distant futures.

On a personal note, what Facebook has done has both its merits and demerits. Looking at the down sides, it is notable to mention that people still desire a little bit of personal space even in a virtual realm intended for social purposes. By implementing a second News Feed that displays virtually everything everyone posts, this privacy has been apparently violated, causing much of the yippity-yap among users, even to the extent of switching into the then unchanged-yet English (UK) variant. Unless developers intend to foster the stalker and the exhibitionist within every user by using this Ticker News Feed as more than just an excess communication tool, it is simply unnecessary as one News Feed is simply enough to do the job. Conversely, if it is their intention to encourage such traits, well, enough said.

Subscriptions, moreover, renders the purposes of Like Pages redundant and somehow downplays the role of the concept of virtual friends, as it enables users to receive updates from other people even if they’re not friends.

The major thing against Facebook’s recent changes is the online culture it slowly fodders. No matter how one hates the new side News Feed, the user would always wound up looking at it every time a new update comes in, ultimately making us curious about what other people from the other portions of the social universe could possibly be talking about in a particular thread or across a number of threads. .

Cheating- the great, inescapable art that students would be forced to get exposed to in the expanse of their 18+ years in school.

To say that one has never cheated even in its simplest and mildest of forms has become a lie, as practically every student, at some time in their lives, has been enticed to do the dirty act even at the risk of losing life and limb (in a manner of speaking… but then, considering expulsion, it seems pretty much literally true).

But personally, even in a school where students rampantly utilize OTs (old TESTaments), formula photo snapshots and the sort, I seriously don’t really have the nerve to do the act even at times when it is apparently unavoidable. Sa takot bang mahuli ng prof. But then, hey, we all end up doing it one way or the other.

But as one radio host once put it in a form of a warning, “If you’re taking up anything like Liberal Arts, Asian Studies, HRM or the sort, go ahead; it wouldn’t hurt anyone if you cheat your way through countless terms you wouldn’t probably recall in actual work. But if you’re taking up Accounting, Medicine or Engineering- especially Engineering- don’t even flirt with the idea of cheating. Soon enough when you’re working, should something go wrong, you’ll end up killing somebody.”

Pointing fingers, laziness and lack of time management and priority settings are primarily the top reasons as to why members of the studentry wound up being desperate trying to meet that passing mark as whatever cost. Let’s face it; attempting to go cramming with all those formulas and concepts and forcing them through our thick craniums is not going to be that efficient. But then, we are more than aware how quickly our minds reach a viable saturation point. And we know with what stuff we make it saturated, anyway.

Down the line, I think we’d all agree that if one was already taken the subject at heart, there’s no need to cheat. And making that high score with the knowledge that there was no dark deed dealt upon it would simply be an awesome self-accomplishment.

But even so, as the title goes, one way or another, we all have tried cheating.

—

I came across this fascinating way to cheat on exams in school (posted below). Check out this new method. I suggest you don’t use Coca-Cola; try bottled water instead. Apparently I don’t think the teacher will allow letting you put your bottle of soda on the desk–but water, you can always say you need it for medical purposes.

But then, personally, whoever did accomplish this went through so much trouble for a few formulas.

Rock on!

Note:

I’m not promoting the idea of cheating. I’m just trying to share and point out the creative heights that people would seriously take in preparation of the act.

Good times.

from Zeit Online - Tell-all telephone

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet.

Anything too much is bad.

Their solution: cut it. Make it 140 characters apiece.

And that, dear folks, is the essence of Twitter. And Twitter is only but one of the hundreds of microblogging sites that exists as of this moment. Not really a challenger of the traditional blogging (such as this one) but an entirely different field, in my view.

Imagine that one: you have the liberty to post anything you’d like and as many as you like under one condition: that you only have a short, limited space to work with for each post you make. And right now, millions of identities- from celebrities to churches to companies to average Netizens – are using this kind of blogging simply because it’s a convenient way to connect with other people. And by that, I mean really convenient; a far cry from the old snail mail.

Microblogging has revolutionized the industry in a lot of ways. For one, because of its aggregate size, posts are easily sent into a large audience in seconds, thus paving the way for real-time news dissemination. It could also be used as a communication medium within organizations (which eventually leads to improved social and emotional welfare of the workforce units using such a tool) or even just between friends in a similar way that online conversations via chat provides.

On the other hand, think about it this way.

Take Twitter, for example. Virtually 90% of all tweets comes from a mere 10% of its users (talk about your Pareto Principle). And they are either quotes or minutiae.

I’m not going to leave myself out; more often than I usually like to think of, I do post stuff that people would possibly care about. Nevertheless, because micro-blogging (or in this case, “tweeting”) is so convenient to do, everybody just does that. And that includes people who share really random stuff from what they had for breakfast to what song they’ve been currently listening to.

Obviously, it’s something that’s essentially pointless in itself, making an online personal bulletin-diary that everyone could read (provided that they would even think of doing so). Because when one looks at those stuff, why would ask sooner or later [granted that you're not really stalking at your crush (love is too strong a word) or what-not], why would I care about these?

Now, I did mention about stalking. There’s a matter of violation of privacy in this particular case, which people have obviously put down while they broadcast their lives to the world as much as they want to. Micro-blogging means that you’re talking nobody and to everybody. A form of catharsis, if you like to put it that way. But perhaps, it could be for a lack of attention or the absence of someone to share stuff about. But I’m neither a psychologist nor an anthropologist (though I’d like to be one); just how I think of it.

Another thing is that it could turn out to be a fodder of narcissism and exhibitionism. Celebrities sharing a few tidbits of their lives is tolerable; now people who like to know some of that. But what about average people doing the same stuff- even crossing the line between simple sharing to overt detailing?

Bite-size yippity-yap. Is this the type of thing you’d like communication to evolve into?

Perhaps, I’ll stop here and you could watch this one instead:

Again, from the great Information is Beautiful Website.

Putting stuff into perspective how Wikipedia finally managed to get its fund-raising drive going, here’s an overview how they did it on the daily basis.

A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive “superstorm” that could flood a quarter of the state’s homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake.

It sounds like the plot of an apocalyptic action movie, but scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey warned federal and state emergency officials that California’s geological history shows such “superstorms” have happened in the past, and should be added to the long list of natural disasters to worry about in the Golden State.

The threat of a cataclysmic California storm has been dormant for the past 150 years. Geological Survey director Marcia K. McNutt told the New York Times that a 300-mile stretch of the Central Valley was inundated from 1861-62. The floods were so bad that the state capital had to be moved to San Francisco, and Governor Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat to his own inauguration, the report notes. Even larger storms happened in past centuries, over the dates 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605, according to geological evidence.

The risk is gathering momentum now, scientists say, due to rising temperatures in the atmosphere, which has generally made weather patterns more volatile.

The scientists built a model that showed a storm could last for more than 40 days and dump 10 feet of water on the state. The storm would be goaded on by an “atmospheric river” that would move water “at the same rate as 50 Mississippis discharging water into the Gulf of Mexico,” according to the AP. Winds could reach 125 miles per hour, and landslides could compound the damage, the report notes.

Such a superstorm is hypothetical but not improbable, climate researchers warn. “We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes,” Geological Survey scientist Lucy Jones said in a press release.

Federal and state emergency management officials convened a conference about emergency preparations for possible superstorms last week

But then, one doesn’t have to be an architect, interior design or a specialist for the built environment to understand the importance of designing structures that would be maintained without compromising the existence of nature and all other vital systems.

And this project you’re seeing right now is no utopic dream. It’s Tianjin, China ten years from now… and it’s already on its way for this extreme makeover.

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Co., Ltd (SSTEC) will be developing the first eco-business park of its kind in China. Now, the Tianjin Eco-City is a landmark bilateral project between China and Singapore (as the corporation’s name readily implies), which will be located in the Binhai New Area, the focal point for the acceleration of growth in the Bohai Rim, China’s powerhouse for business, science, technology and culture in the 21st century.

The Eco-City will occupy approximately 30 hectares of land and is expected to be the base for global eco-businesses in Tianjin and serve Northern China’s growing need for clean technologies and sustainable urban solutions. It will employ several energy-saving technologies such as solar and wind power, even rainwater collection and recycling.

Moreover, it will be readily divided into several sectors: the Solarscape that will serve as the main hub of the entire Eco-City for civic events, the Urbanscape (the commercial center of the city that will have sky bridges that will eliminate the need for cars), the Earthscape (the residential portion that will employ stepped architecture to provide maximum public and green space) and the Windscape corridor that will sport the Eco-City’s advanced light rail transit.

What a wonderful world.