NASA Want You to Imagine

NASA is launching a contest that gives the public access to the space agency's earth-science data on the Open NASA Earth Exchange platform. The contest, hosted on Amazon Web Services, invites the public to imagine and build new uses for the vast amount of data. The contest begins on July 1 and ends November 15, 2014. If nothing else, you might want kids to look at the Virtual Labs on the site. There is a lot of talk about “Big Data,” but this is a chance to let kids see and work with this kind of data and maybe even enter the contest if they have a novel idea for how NASA can make use of some of the data to develop tools for monitoring climate change and finding solutions for climate resilience.

Even the Drug Companies are Monitoring Your Social Media

Switched drugs because they were too expensive or you didn’t like the side effects and told a friend or family member about it, or your doctor, on some kind of social media medium? Well, the big pharmaceutical companies are listening. They want to monitor perceptions about a product, shape ad campaigns, and gauge community receptivity. They are also using real-time healthcare databases using “de-identified” (meaning your name is not included) records to analyze diagnoses and switches in using drugs.

Police Need a Warrant to Search Your Cellphone Supreme Court Rules

The Supreme Court recently ruled that police must almost always obtain a warrant before searching mobile devices seized when arresting someone, extending constitutional privacy protections to the increasingly vast amounts of data Americans keep on smartphones, cellphones, and other hand-held digital technology. The ruling rejected law-enforcement arguments that cellphones fell under a long-standing exception to the warrant requirement that allows police to search the contents of suspects' pockets to make sure they don't carry weapons or destroy evidence. Privacy advocates are hailing the ruling as a bold signal that the court will protect constitutional privacy interests from the vast powers of modern technology.

Facebook Wants to Be Your Place for Real Time Topics

Twitter’s claim to fame has been that it is THE place to discuss world events in real time. But, Facebook is now challenging that claim in the battle to be the digital water cooler. Facebook has a new Public Content Solutions team that is hiring TV execs, acquiring startups that analyze real-time event chatter, and forming partnerships so that news outlets can display Facebook’s generated topic stream. For example, Facebook just announced that NBC’s The Today Show will show Facebook trending topics on a giant in-studio touch screen. The show’s hosts can tap and swipe the screen to show Facebook posts of people discussing the topics. The Discovery Channel will also use Facebook’s new Hashtag Counter to let fans of car-racing show, Street Outlaws, vote for their favorite teams by posting to Facebook with the corresponding hashtag. Along a similar line, video views on Facebook have doubled in the past six months, prompting Facebook to adjust its News Feed algorithm to serve more videos to people who watch them and fewer to those who ignore them. The way Facebook ranks videos created on its site has also changed to include viewing time, in addition to likes, comments, and shares. This is, of course, all part of Facebook’s move to be the ‘go to’ place for all things digital.

Supreme Court to Hear Facebook Free-Speech Case

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case regarding the free-speech rights of a man who was accused of posting threatening messages on Facebook. The man's lawyers argue that a law banning speech that would be deemed threatening by a reasonable person shouldn't apply to Facebook messages, which are intended for people who know the speaker personally, and thus, might be less likely to take off-color comments seriously. The case revolves around a man sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for posting violent online rants against his estranged wife, law enforcement officials, and former co-workers. Experts predict that there are going to be more of these kinds of cases as people feel that they can get away with more incendiary speech on the Internet, in tweets and in texts.

And Texting Wins!

A recent survey of high-school students finds that they text more often than they use other forms of social media, such as Facebook and YouTube. Data from 7,000 graduating high-school seniors show that 87% report texting daily, while 61% say they use Facebook daily. Results show that LinkedIn is getting the fewest visits by teens.

Girls and Coding: Closing the Gap

Google has announced a $50 million initiative to teach girls to code and help close the gender gap in engineering and computer science. Google’s move follows recent reports that only 17% of Google's technology employees are women. The Made With Code campaign will include partnerships with various organizations and companies to help link families with programs and mentors. Check out the projects on the site.

The New York State Court of Appeals Weighs in on Legality of Cyberbullying Policies

The New York State Court of Appeals is considering one of the first challenges to the Albany County’s legislature’s 2010 law that make cyberbullying a misdemeanor. The court case stems from an incident involving Marquan W. Mackey-Meggs, a student at Cohoes High School in Cohoes, N.Y., who was arrested in June of 2011 for creating a Facebook page entitled "Cohoes Flame" to which he posted photos of classmates with derogatory and sexual captions. The case sheds new light on the complexity of issues surrounding the cyberbullying debate, and the number of questions it raises—from what exactly defines cyberbullying, to what punitive measures are necessary to combat it, to where exactly the responsibility (and in some cases, the right) to discipline lies. This is just one of many such cases currently being considered.

Facebook Rolls Out Slingshot

Facebook, in response to the Snapchat app craze that allows users to send self-destructing photos to friends, has rolled out Slingshot, it’s own service to do the same thing. The new app aims to create a sense of community by encouraging users to send a photo or video to a group of friends. Its unique twist is that the recipients are required to share a visual moment of their own before they can see what was sent to them. As with Snapchat, savvy recipients can use their phones’ screenshot features to save the file, which opens up the possibility of cyberbullying, because images that are supposed to self-destruct don’t necessarily do that.

Your Personality Type – What Big Companies See When They Look At Your Internet Use

Ok, so many people understand that companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter look at the queries, observations, and updates we write on their services, then they try to figure out what ads might have the most persuasive effect on us. So now, there is a tool called Five that analyzes your Facebook postings (and even those of your friends) to help you understand what those big companies see in you (and them). Seems a bit like the personality quizzes you take in a magazine, but then again the data they have comes from your public persona. This is something to think about.