As some of you know, I’m a huge turtle fan. I just came across this video that should explain why one might become a turtle fan. Although the ones I had when I was little weren’t of this variety, they were this size. Too cute for words.
That bit was hard to miss, but I hadn’t noticed the refusal of the handshake. Ouch.
The folks who brought you Frozen Grand Central now bring you Human Mirror. These ideas are great and they do a good job with them. Fun stuff!
If you have some time to kill or need to introduce someone to Internet memes then take a look at this timeline. [Link no longer works.] Zoom in for some of the less visible videos. Any of your favorites missing?
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t last long. A commenter notes that the page is no longer accessible. Here is a screenshot. Use of Dipity for this was interesting since showing all this on a time line adds something to the list.
Usually, when I get invitations for talks or interviews with the press, the focus is my research. Last week, however, in an interesting twist, I got an email from the host of a Canadian radio show asking me to chat with her about my experiences with taking pictures of cheese labels.:) I was amused and was happy to talk. The interview is available here.
I’m glad Spark contacted me, because I didn’t know about the show, but am now happy to have it in my RSS feed reader. Spark taught me about speedcabling, something I’ll have to try in my lab one of these days.
As a mini-update for those not following me on Twitter (most of you, I presume), right now I’m on my way to the University of Minnesota to speak in the seminar series of their Institute for Advanced Study about my research. It’s a campus-wide talk with people expected in the audience from all sorts of departments, which should be fun. It’ll also be nice to catch up with some prominent sociology bloggers.
Neat idea, very helpful video.
Thanks to Blog on the Side for the pointer.
This video was posted on YouTube just yesterday and has already been watched over 150,000 times.* There’s also a site for a ringtone.
It’s impossible to know at this point how such viral campaigns might influence outcomes, but it’s certainly interesting to watch how people are taking advantage of new tools to disseminate material of this sort. It would be a stretch to suggest anyone can do this easily since this video is filled with celebrities, which likely helped it get coverage on ABC yesterday [source]. Nonetheless, having it available online certainly helps in spreading it widely. I’d be curious to know how most people linking to it found it, but many don’t seem to be pointing to sources, which makes this difficult to decipher.
[*] Note that YouTube’s numbers are confusing as depending on when I click on the link I either get around 153,000 or 84,000 views.
[thanks to Discourse.net]
I suspect most have already seen the famous episode of the Miss Teen USA South Carolina contestant’s answer to a geography-related question . (By the way, amazing performance by the host holding the microphone. Could you keep a straight face through that?)
This one seems a bit less well known (if you can say that about a clip that’s been watched 4 million times on YouTube):
The host here is much less impressive (note his commentary in general, and pronunciation of a certain country name in particular). The little boy looks adorable though.
There’s more along similar lines, for example this Family Feud episode.
I promise not to make this a blog that just reposts all Comedy Central videos, but this one is very timely and also funny so here you go, from Stephen Colbert:
I doubt you have to be a Sex and The City fan to appreciate this clip from The Daily Show called “Is American Ready for a Woman President?”, but if you are a SATC fan you are absolutely guaranteed to LOL.
Chris Uggen posted this video a few days ago:
I added a link to it on my daily links list where Liz Losh saw it and then included it in a blog post “Just Say Know” discussing all sorts of parody videos and sites related to drug use including the artist-created fictional drug Web site Havidol, and this video:
These are some great parodies. Work in the field of health communication looks at the effects of health campaigns, but tends to focus on serious ones. I wonder what type of work may be going on in the domain of parody viral videos online for similar purposes.
I use Yahoo! Music for most of my music-listening at work. I like the service and at $60 for two years (they had a special when I signed up, the regular now is $72/year) it’s a great deal. [UPDATE: Corrected cost, I had remembered incorrectly.]
The system allows you to customize various stations by giving it feedback about what songs and artists you like. It’s a helpful feature, for the most part. But I think services like this might want to tweak the system so certain songs are kept off playlists at certain times of the year. I am not suggesting that they should be banned, of course, but perhaps not streamed unless sought out actively by the user.
I may like Boney M, but I really have absolutely no interest in listening to a Christmas song from them in the middle of May.
This reminds me of the dance club I used to go to in Budapest when I was in high school. One of the most popular Jive songs at the club was Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree . It was very bizarre to listen to it over and over again in June.
Cool Web site: Visual Acoustics.
Careful, the site resizes your browser, which has always been annoying, but is especially annoying in the age of browser tabs. You can get your window back in its original size, the site still works just fine.
[thanks]
There was a link to this video in my links list the other day, but it’s worth a separate post. I don’t know anything about the Dutch show “Kinderen voor Kinderen”, but it seems like it could be fairly mainstream and have a sizeable audience. I also don’t know what, if any, reactions the Two Fathers video received, but it’s a good example of how you can socialize kids to be inclusive and understanding of diverse family arrangements. It’s interesting (and sad) to ponder how differently people would react in various places.
Here are some interesting video finds:
Also, as proof that YouTube has grown up, I am now receiving spam through it:
Since the sender’s ID wasn’t created until five days before sending this note and the account has no bookmarked or submitted videos, it’s a safe bet (beyond the content of the message) that its sole function is to generate spam. (I have purposefully removed the URL the user is trying to advertise from the above image.)
Click here for something cool.
in three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.
the dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line
[thanks]
Via Jim Gibbon I’ve discovered GapMinder. Wow! It’s a wonderful visualization tool for data. The focus is on world development statistics from the UN. The tool is incredibly user-friendly and let’s you play around with what variables you want to see, what you want highlighted in color, whether you want to log the data, what year you want to display, and whether you want to animate the time progression (oh, and how quickly).
I’ve made an example available on YouTube. (I used Gapminder to create the visualization and Hypercam to capture it.)
Here is some context for that particular graph. My first interests in research on Internet and social inequality concerned the unequal global diffusion of the medium. I wrote my senior thesis in college on this topic and then pursued it further – and thankfully in a more sophisticated manner – in graduate school. So this is a topic that has been of interest to me for a while and it’s great to be able to play with some visual representations of the data.
So what you have on the video graph is a look at Internet diffusion by income (logged) from 1990-2004. I picked color coding by income category, which is somewhat superfluous given that the horizontal access already has that information, but I thought it added a little something. (For example, to summarize the puzzle of my 1999 paper – the first to run more than bivariate analyses on these data -, it focused on explaining why all the red dots are so widely dispersed on the graph despite all representing rich long-term democratic countries.)
Thanks to the tool’s flexibility, you can change it so that the color coding signifies geographical region and could then tell immediately that what continent you are on – an argument some people in the literature tried to make – has little to do with the level of Internet diffusion.
Imagine the possibilities of all this in, say, classroom presentations. Jim links to a great presentation using this tool. (Although I disagree with the presenter’s conclusion at the end about the leveling of differences regarding Internet diffusion.)
I recommend checking out the tool on your own for maximum appreciation of its capabilities.
Wow, the past few days were incredibly busy with lots of fun activities. Instead of writing lengthy descriptions, I offer you batches of photos if you’re curious.
First, my friend Olivia was graduating (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude and prize for her thesis in history) and celebrations (e.g. Phi Beta Kappa ceremony) started already early last week. See photos.
Second, my dance club, Chicago Dance, was hosting the annual Chicago’s Crystal Ball ballroom and Latin dance competition. Given everything else, I only made it to part of it, but even those few hours were super fun! See photos plus a video. No, there are no pictures of me dancing since I don’t compete. Granted, I did dance one cha-cha.. in front of hundreds of people.. wearing sandals. Hah.
How does the popularity of Facebook compare to MySpace among a diverse group of college students? What types of blogs are students most likely to read? How many have ever visited Instapundit or Daily Kos?
As mentioned earlier, last month I gave a talk at the Beyond Broadcast conference hosted at Harvard Law School. The conference folks have now made the presentations available in both audio and video format. You can listen to or watch my talk misleadingly titled “Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online”. (The title is misleading, because the talk is not about Facebook or even social-networking sites more generally speaking. Rather, it’s about what young people do online and how it differs by type of background.) I have put the presentation slides online in case you are curious to see the specifics (those are hard to follow on the video and there wasn’t enough time for me to mention stats in the presentation).
I should note that these are all still preliminary findings as I need to do more data cleaning and there’s tons more to do on the analysis front. But I don’t anticipate major changes in the findings presented given the size of the sample.
If you prefer text over these various other options I will be writing up the findings this summer and will post a link once it’s done. But if you can’t wait to find out the answers to the above questions then I recommend clicking on one of the above links. (All this information is toward the end of the presentation.)
Okay, fine, I won’t make it that difficult. The quick answers to the above questions are (again, for this group of college students):
1. Facebook is more popular (Facebook 78%, MySpace 51%)
2. Political blogs are the least popular type of blogs (from among the ones asked, which included personal journals, arts/culture/music, technology, sports)
3. 1% have ever visited each
There’s lots more info in the presentation.
Recall that many of you took a survey back in January here on CT about your use of various sites and services. I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you a summary of the responses and that is forthcoming as I analyze the college student Internet use data. I thought reporting the former may be more interesting in the context of the latter thus the delay.
I wanted to send my parents something nice the other day (just because) and ended up playing around with One True Media. I wouldn’t spend too much time coming up with something elaborate as they hold your material hostage to a large extent, but it’s worth a try.
So here’s a little trip down memory lane.. a few images of my brother and me from a few decades ago.