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.