NETUCATION Blog

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  • Afghan Guys And Gals Meet Facebook To Facebook

    By Farangis Najibullah

    April 11, 2013

    High-school student Muhammad Akbar has never dated a girl in real life, but he’s got plenty of girlfriends on Facebook.With social and religious taboos restricting face-to-face contact between unrelated members of the opposite sex, Facebook’s popularity has skyrocketed as a virtual meeting place in Afghanistan.Akbar spends nearly an hour every evening in a packed Internet cafe near his home in Kabul’s Shah Shahid area to chat with his female “friends.” To pay for his online habit, which costs about 100 afghanis ($2) an hour, he has taken a part-time job as a garage assistant.”In Afghanistan, we don’t have disco clubs to meet with girls. It’s not allowed here to go on a date with girls, to meet and talk with them face to face,” Akbar says. “Marriage is the only way to have a relationship with a woman, but many people can’t easily afford to get married. Facebook has solved that problem for many.”

    Bright Spot

    Akbar says chatting with girls online has made life in the war-torn, poverty stricken country “a lot less frustrating.”

    While being seen chatting to an unrelated boy in public can tarnish a girl’s reputation, “with Facebook, there is no risk of being beaten up by your female friend’s relatives,” he reasons.

    Such advantages have fueled a sharp rise in new Facebook accounts.

    According to the Communication and Information Ministry, there are now more than 470,000 registered Facebook accounts in Afghanistan, compared to 6,000 in 2008.

    Some 2 million of Afghanistan’s 30 million people have access to the Internet, according to the ministry, mostly through Internet cafes and mobile phones.

    About two years ago, Ahmad Sipehr learned about Facebook when a classmate at a Kabul university helped him join the social network. The revelation prompted him to open up his own Internet cafe.

    “I would travel several kilometers to the nearest Internet cafe just to use Facebook,” Sipehr says. “Then I decided to open an Internet cafe myself. It was Facebook that prompted me to open this business.”

    The 21-year-old journalism student now runs one of the busiest Internet cafes in downtown Kabul. Sipehr frequently helps visitors open Facebook accounts for the first time, and before long they are regular customers.

    Click here to read the full article

    source:  rferl.org / Farangis Najibullah

  • Yahoo’s teen app millionaire

    London schoolboy Nick D’Aloisio, who’s just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30m. (Pic: Forbes.com)

    London – Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you’re out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who’s just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30m.

    The money is there, just waiting for clever new moves, said 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, who can point to a roster of early backers for his Summly app that includes Yoko Ono and Rupert Murdoch.

    “If you have a good idea, or you think there’s a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Monday.

    The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D’Aloisio, who is still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee, was not saying. But technology blog AllThingsD said Yahoo paid roughly $30m.

    D’Aloisio said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it.

    “I’m happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole process,” he said.

    D’Aloisio, who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

    He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

    He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

    Trimit was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters. It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250 000.

    Click here to read the full article

    source:  Fin24

     

  • Your Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn popularity may land you a job, cos look for well-connected people

    Your Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn popularity may land you a job

    MELBOURNE: Your popularity on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn may help you bag a job as companies are increasingly looking for well-connected and influential people, experts say.

    Digital experts say social media and recruitment now largely go hand in hand.

    While at the most basic level, companies check up on prospective employees to see if they make unsavoury postings online, they are also using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to find new employees – both by listing opportunities and by increasing the chatter between recruiters and the people looking for jobs, website stuff.co.nz reported.

    “Social media has become an essential part of any organisation’s recruitment strategy. It is easier to generate talent through social media. A lot easier than it was four or five years ago,” said Hays RecruitmentNew Zealand managing director Jason Walker.

    Walker said in a recent survey of 270 employers across New Zealand the company found that 64 per cent of employers used LinkedIn to find new employees, 50 per cent used Facebook and 10 per cent used Twitter.

    Of those looking for jobs 74 per cent use LinkedIn, 24 per cent used Facebook, and 7 per cent used Twitter, Fairfax NZ news reported.

    Tom Bates, the social influence director for digital strategists Contagion, said employers would look at a prospective employee’s social media presence to validate what the candidate was saying about their online profile.

    “If someone says that they are influential and they are not even on Twitter, or don’t use social media well, then they are not being authentic or honest,” Bates said.

    “When I am recruiting I look first and foremost on LinkedIn. I look at the experience people have, their connections, because it gives a really open, transparent, easy way to source relevant people,” Bates added.

    “I also look at all their other social media identities to get more of a sense of who they are, outside of the one-hour interview I may have with them. I look at their Facebook and Twitter and potentially Instagram and beyond to make sure there is a good cultural fit,” Bates said.

    source: The Economic Times

  • Why I Don’t Care What My Facebook Friends Like

    Facebook will launch a new messaging system aimed at enhancing its social media product to its 500 million users. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

    By now, we’ve all heard about Facebook’s Graph Search announcement. Does this mean I’ll finally be living in a utopian society where social media will guide my searches based on what my Facebook friends think about products? Will I finally be living a life of bliss when my online connections serve as my life compass?

    If my sarcasm is any indication of my personal view, my answer is no. Should I feel bad that I don’t care what 90 percent of Facebook friends think about stuff?

    The thought of online not being a true driver of recommendations isn’t just my wacky idea. According to Ed Keller, co-author of The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, 90 percent of real-world conversations about brands, products and services happen offline. This statistic indicates that true product recommendations require a dialogue and the ability to ask qualifying questions, such as “Why did you like that?” — not just a one-way endorsement of “Hey, I had a really good experience with this widget and you will too, because we’re Facebook friends!”

    Before you start thinking I don’t care about the rich data social media offers, I do. I do so much that I run a social media advertising agency called Rocket XL. At the risk of alienating clients like Unilever and PepsiCo, here’s a telling example of why companies should not rely on quantiative social data without the qualitative insight.

    Say I’m planning to download a movie from Vudu. My Facebook feed might tell me that “Chasing Mavericks” is the most popular new release among my friends. This must be something I have to see immediately, right? But if I were to speak to these friends face-to-face and ask them why they liked the movie, perhaps they’d reveal: “The hot blonde surfer chicks” or “Gerard Butler…hot.”

    In other words, they’d be happy to watch the movie on mute just for the eye candy, not because the movie is any good.

    Before I get accused of living offline in the last century, the area I think social product opinions can work very well is in the difficult art of selecting a gift for a friend, family member or colleague. If Facebook, or some other future algorithm, can tell me what’s popular with a friend and accurately suggest gift ideas, that’s brilliant because I’m clueless when it comes to giving gifts and I’ve yet to see a service truly succeed with social gifting recommendations. I can’t wait to see who cracks it first.

    Until then, I publicly apologize to all my online connections.  Just because we’re Facebook friends doesn’t mean that I care about your social media likes. It’s not you, it’s me.

    source: Forbes

  • Video Games Help Treat Kids With Chronic Pain

    Camille Bautista

    The Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., opened a new pain care complex on April 3, aiming to eliminate pain in young patients by using video games.

    Utilizing specially designed games combined with Microsoft’s Kinect technology, participants can improve their health without realizing they’re receiving treatment. The gamification places kids in an intergalactic world where they can paint, play and exercise, all while doctors analyze their range of motion.

    The program changes the way medical professionals address pain medicine, says Dr. Sarah Rebstock, clinical director and a leader in the initiative. It’s often difficult to understand pain, particularly in children, due to its subjective nature. Usually, doctors only have measurements on a scale of one to ten to use as reference, and patients are released with improved conditions but still suffer from discomfort.

    The video games serve as a distraction for the children but also target their bodies the same way a physical therapy session would. Not only can doctors monitor heart rate or motion, but based on the observations, they can change treatment and therapy in real-time to adjust to kids’ abilities.

    If a child can only stretch his or her shoulder a few inches during a game, the Kinect software will detect the motion in degrees and indicate a problem area. The gaming system is able to target and track 24 musculoskeletal points in the body.

    “Pain is one of the most underserved areas in medicine in general,” Rebstock tells Mashable. “Until now, it has been impossible to quantitatively measure and monitor chronic pain in children … This is one of the largest advancements in pain medicine in the last several years.”

    Most children with chronic pain undergo lengthy, expensive evaluations before receiving treatment, and one in four parents of patients have quit their job or reduced working hours to care for them. With the new technology, families will be able to save time and money, Rebstock says.

    Compared to therapy sessions in a gym, patients who used the video game had a better range of motion and reported greater distraction from pain. Data collected as a part of the initiative will be used to optimize care for individuals and also help evaluate the success of past treatments.

    What do you think of healthcare centers using video games for treatment? Let us know in the comments.

    Image courtesy of Children’s National Medical Center

    source: Mashable

  • When a Facebook Post Is a Cry for Help

    By LIZ HERON

    In today’s connected world, it is not uncommon for high school and college students to use Facebook as a place to pour out their feelings, sometimes in intensely personal updates. Some are predictable melodrama and fairly harmless cries for validation — but not all. Facebook posts can serve as early warning signs for adolescent depression or even suicide attempts, particularly when parents or friends notice a sudden departure from the writer’s usual tone.

    Jan Hoffman, reporting for The Times, found that psychologists, social scientists and adolescent medicine specialists are watching Facebook postings by teenagers for indications of depression — and to help learn how, when and if to intervene. Facebook started working with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2007, and in December, Facebook also began sending the distressed person a link to an online counselor. Research suggests that although between 30 percent and 40 percent of college students suffer a debilitating depressive episode each year, barely 10 percent seek counseling. Could college counselors, as Facebook friends, watch for those episodes, and offer help?

    While she was reporting on this subject, Ms. Hoffman and I posed a series of questions on Facebook to New York Times readers. We asked students whether they posted to Facebook when they were sad, and how their friends and family reacted. We also asked parents, educators and guidance counselors whether, and how, they responded to such dark postings. (Read some of the responses here, and below this post.)

    Do you, as an adult or student, post to Facebook when what you are feeling is closer to depression than connection? Have you responded to bleak posts from one of your children and been rebuffed? Should professors or even therapists ever “friend” a student or patient on Facebook — and if they do, should they use what they read there to reach out if they suspect they’re needed?

    Click here to read the full article

    source: Motherlode /  By LIZ HERON

  • Restaurant turns to Twitter to publicly shame customers who fail to keep reservations


    You might want to think again before failing to keep a restaurant reservation after one eatery decided enough was enough and began publicly shaming no-shows on Twitter.

    Noah Ellis, the managing partner at the Vietnamese restaurant Red Medicine, said those people who booked a table but then never honoured their reservation ‘ruin restaurants’.

    ‘The a******* who decide to no-show, or cancel 20 minutes before their reservation ruin restaurants for the people who make a reservation and do their best to honour it,’ he told Eater.com.

    ‘Either restaurants are forced to overbook and make the guests wait, or they do what we do, turn away guests for some prime-time slots because they’re booked, and then have empty tables.’

    To try and stop customers cancelling at the last minute or simply ignoring their reservation, Red Medicine’s Twitter account has begun posting the names of those who never show up.

    An initial post on March 24 declared: ‘All the nice guests who wonder why restaurants overbook and they sometimes have to wait for their res should thank people like those below,’ before publishing a list of names and bookings.

    Brian Rosman, a spokesperson for the Beverly Hills restaurant, told TODAY.com it had become a trend in Hollywood for assistants to book tables for their bosses at three or four different places and then either cancel all but one at the last minute or never shop up.

    ‘For a small restaurant like Red Medicine, even a couple of tables really affects them,’ he said.

    ‘People don’t realise that this causes real problems for a restaurant.’

    source: METRO

  • Facebook and the disintegration of the human

    Is Facebook a boon or cause for concern for the mental health industry?

    Facebook continues to develop new features and functionalities which further absorb the focus of its users [Reuters]

    According to a New York Times article by Jan Hoffman referencing a study of the Facebook profiles of 200 university students in the United States, approximately 30 percent of the students “posted updates that met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a symptom of depression, reporting feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness, insomnia or sleeping too much, and difficulty concentrating”. These findings are said to “echo research that suggests depression is increasingly common among college students”.

    Hoffman’s point is that Facebook can therefore serve as an “early warning system for timely intervention” by parents and therapists. The article ends with a quote from a mother in Ohio: “Facebook might be a pain in the neck to keep up with… But having that extra form of communication saves lives”.

    No mention is made of the obvious exacerbating influence of social networking sites when it comes to phenomena such as insomnia and concentration difficulty. Rather than promote Facebook as a life-saving tool, one could easily argue that such forums and other technological distractions in fact contribute to depressive trends.

    Click here to read the full article

    source:  Aljazeera / Belen Fernandez

  • Video game found to help the blind navigate buildings

    (Reuters) – A video game that uses a computer-generated layout of a building can help to prepare the blind to navigate the venue in real life by improving their spatial awareness, researchers said on Wednesday.

    The game, based in a building at a center for the blind in Newton, Massachusetts, uses audio cues to help blind players find hidden jewels and remove them from the building without being spotted by roving monsters.

    After competing in the game, researchers found the players were able to find their way around the building in real-life, suggesting video games could help blind people navigate places they frequent regularly.

    “It is a tool to build a map of a place you have never been to before,” said Dr Lotfi Merabet, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School, whose team developed the software used in the game.

    Merabet hopes the video game could be a first step in improving assisted technology for the blind, particularly teenagers who are very media and technology driven.

    The World Health Organization estimates there are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide.

    “It could be a whole new way to help blind people interact with this information and conceptualize space around them,” Merabet added in an interview.

    Merabet said the video game players were also better at finding alternate paths in the building than other blind people who had been taught the layout by walking through it.

    “The video game not only allows you to build a map in your mind, it allows you to interact with it mentally in a way that you wouldn’t be able to if you were taught explicitly (by walking through it,” Merabet explained.

    The researchers tested the game on congenitally blind people and those who had lost their sight. The players ranged in age from their teens to 45 years old.

    Merabet and his team, who wrote about the video game in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, want to include large-scale mapping in the next version of the game and to use tactile cues and items developed for the video game industry.

    But first he said they will have to demonstrate how long it takes to build the mental map, how complex they can make it, and the people best suited to learn this way.

    They do not see it as a replacement for how blind people learn but as a supplement to enhance a skill they need, and to build self confidence.

    “Somehow you become a better problem solver and you seem to somehow take in the information in a more robust fashion in this gaming scenario than if you sat down and we told you,” said Merabet.

    “Video games are not just for sighted people. Blind people can not only play them but interact with them and enjoy them, and they can also be used to do constructive things.”

    (Editing by Jackie Frank)

    source: Reuters

  • How to Stop New Trend in Cyber Bullying

    Gabriella Van Rij is an International activist and author she discusses the cyber bullying trend and gives advice to the victims, parents and school officials on beating the bullying epidemic and helping prevent future “bullicides.”

    Gabriella’s 3-Step Program to Halt Bullying:

    1. Become an Active Witness:

    “Children normally do not report incidents of bullying because they are paralyzed by humiliation and fear of retaliation if they snitch,” says Gabriella. “In my talks to classrooms, I urge both students and teachers to become ‘active witnesses,’ meaning that if they see something hurtful occur, they must immediately get involved and report it. Don’t leave it up to someone else to report and fix.”
    Parents and educators must also become actively involved and work together, as much too often they blame each other for inaction and shirk responsibility in addressing the bullying issue.

    2.  Learn the Signs:

    How do you know whether a child is being bullied? How do you know if a child is bullying others?
    “Although some find it hard to believe, the bully and the victim are mirror images of one another, who share the same fears and emotional insecurities,” says Gabriella.
    To recognize a child who bullies others, look out for occurrences of ‘acting out’ with aggressive behavior or comments, especially in public places or in the presence of other children. The bully’s behavior is based on fear and very low self-esteem. Every bully Gabriella’s interviewed acknowledged a major dysfunctional situation in their home.
    Gabriella says that a victim of bullying shares the same fear but acts out differently. In most cases, the victim has an unmistakably timid or frightened appearance, exhibits extreme anxiousness when going to school, seeks isolation, and often demonstrates signs of regressive behavior. Based on Gabriella’s research and experience, most victims also have dysfunctional families, as do bullies.

    3. Intervention:

    This step is where all parties (victim, bully, teacher, counselor) get together to end the denial and start talking about what’s actually been happening. Questions are asked to get both the victim and the bully to reveal their true, innermost feelings about the situation. A typical question to start the intervention might be, “Can you tell me what’s making you so sad?”
    Parents are not part of this process, as their presence would prevent the children from discussing any non-optimum situations at home which may be contributing to their behavior problems. At the end of the intervention, the children feel quite changed, as though an enormous weight has been lifted from their shoulders.
    “The thoughts and emotions of both victim and their abuser must be addressed to resolve the problem,” says Gabriella. “That is a new twist that allows for a lasting resolution.”

    www.gabriellavanrij.com

    source: indystyle.tv