About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
February 03 2012
Tweet Us Not Into Temptaton. OK, Just This Once.
Oh! Oh God, I spent the last 8 hours on Facebook!!
When you text thousands of people seven times a day for a week, and ask them whether they have felt temptation recently, what do you get? A giant database of thousands of tiny vices and people’s own admissions—some true, some likely edited for the sake of vanity—of whether they caved.
According to researchers who recently performed just such a study, people’s biggest willpower failures related to checking things like Twitter or email. People were more able to control sexual urges or the desire to spend money than they were the desire to check social media (though we note that it may take two people contemporaneously caving for certain sexual urges to be considered indulged). Though the paper isn’t available online yet for us to check on this, the researchers told The Guardian that the number of times people were tempted by cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol was surprisingly low, and that the desire to check social media was much more frequently reported. The fact that media temptation came up so frequently, and was so often indulged, may be because unlike smoking, drinking, or spending gobs ...
May 02 2011
Man Accidentally Live-Tweets Osama bin Laden Raid (No, It Wasn’t “The Rock”)
IT consultant Sohaib Athar was just “taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad when he described, in 140 characters or less, a helicopter hovering overhead and a “huge window shaking bang”—accidentally live-tweeting the U.S. raid that ended a decade-long manhunt and killed Osama bin Laden.
It’s clear from Athar’s tweets (@ReallyVirtual) that he had no idea what was going down—as evidenced by his reference to the “abbottabad helicopter/UFO“—but the unusual presence of helicopters and Taliban disclaimer suggested to him that whatever was happening, it “must be a complicated situation.” UFO, not so much; situation, definitely.
Nor was Athar the only one to discuss the raid on Twitter before President Obama’s announcement last night. Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff, tweeted several hours later: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson seems to have been among the first to know, as well. Around the same time as Urbahn, Johnson tweeted: “Just got word that will shock the world – Land of the free…home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN ...
February 17 2011
Japan Wants to Send a Tweeting Companion-Bot to the Space Station
It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.
It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.
The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.
And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.
Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...
December 29 2010
NJ Mayor Is a Tweeting, Snow-Shoveling Blizzard Hero
While many East Coast residents were snowed in or stranded far from home after this Boxing Day’s blizzard, one man was on a mission.
Reaching out through his Twitter account (where he has more than a million followers), Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker rallied his troops of plows and shovelers to the places they were needed most. A few examples from TIME’s article on Booker’s heroic efforts:
“Just doug [sic] a car out on Springfield Ave and broke the cardinal rule: ‘Lift with your Knees!!’ I think I left part of my back back there,” he reported in one message. One person let Booker know, via Twitter, that the snowy streets were preventing his sister from buying diapers. About an hour later, Booker was at the sister’s door, diapers in hand.
His city of Newark, known mostly by outsiders for its airport, was hit with over two feet of snow on the night of December 26th. The blizzard, the first of its kind this winter, took down most of the East Coast. Many areas are still recovering from the mess, and many travelers are still stranded.
But if you were snowed in in Newark, you were in luck. Booker (who tweets at @CoryBooker) made the rounds digging out cars, sleeping little, and helping out by personally responding to both questions and calls for help from his Twitter followers. Booker isn’t afraid to go out there and do the dirty work himself, he told TIME:
“This is one of those times you’re just pushing,” Booker told TIME while riding around Newark early Tuesday evening, anxiously awaiting a Twitter response from a Newark resident who said her 82-year-old grandmother was shut in by snow. A few minutes earlier, Booker, who played football at Stanford, helped dig out a New Jersey transit bus. “It’s an endurance test.”
Don’t you wish your mayor would bring you diapers, or plow your street so you could go to work today (OK, maybe not that last one)?
Related Content:
Discoblog: Say Nyet to Snow! Moscow Mayor Plans to Engineer the Weather
Discoblog: Who Says Being Snowed in Is No Fun? There’s Always Online Adultery
80beats: Science via Twitter: Post-Earthquake Tweets Can Provide Seismic Data
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Snow
DISCOVER: 5 Questions: 3 Great Uses of Twitter, According to Cofounder Jack Dorsey
Image: Flickr/sarahheiman
November 03 2010
Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to
Sick of chasing down climate denialists himself, Nigel Leck put his programming skills to use for him. He created the Twitter bot @AI_AGW, who also goes by the name “Turing Test.”
Every five minutes the bot searches Twitter for tweets relating to climate change denialism, and automatically responds to the posters using a database of hundreds of rebuttals, which include links to information and videos. Christopher Mims at Technology Review talked to Leck about the project:
The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.
Some of @AI_AGW’s debates have gone on for hours or days, with the recipient not knowing they are talking to a bot, even though its handle says AI and it includes a link to the Wikipedia page on the Turing test. The program is smart enough to run through a list of responses, which is especially helpful when debating with people who keep throwing the same arguments at you time after time. Leck has seen all different kinds of responses to the bot, but most fall into two categories, he told Mims:
“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.” The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.
One downside of the bot is its inability to detect sarcasm, a distinctly human ability. Some of the tweets the bot is responding to today are from people who can’t believe that their new representatives don’t believe in climate change and people sarcastically complaining about the cold with the ubiquitous tweet “Global warming my ass!”
When this happens, Leck tries to apologize to the poster and add them to the program’s “whitelist” so they don’t get a response tweet again. The bot also has a learning algorithm, so it can gradually be trained to tell the difference between sarcastic tweeters and true deniers. The next step: Leck would like to enable the bot to learn new arguments from other climate debates that constantly zing around on Twitter.
Related content:
80beats: Follow the “Truthy” Tweets to Find Twitter’s Political Spammers
80beats: “Interplanetary Internet” Will Soon Bring Twitter to the ISS
80beats: Hackers Infect Twitterverse With Worm Using Old, Known Bug
Bad Astronomy: Two posts about denialism, climate change and otherwise
The Intersection: Kind Of Like A Lot Of Climate Change Skeptics, Evolution Denialists, And The AntiVax Movement
Image: Twitter/@AI_AGW
October 29 2010
Everest Gets 3G Coverage; Avalanche of Tweets & Status Updates to Follow
Ncell, a subsidiary of the Swedish telecom company TeliaSonera, has installed a 3G data network in a Nepalese town that should reach the summit of Mount Everest. This high up, high-tech improvement will allow summit-ers to communicate with friends, family, and organizers from the top of the world.
A phone base station was set up near the town of Gorakshep at 17,000 feet above sea level, and the signal should reach to the peak about 12,000 feet above that, telecom officials said–but it hasn’t been tested yet. The service should be fast enough to allow adventurers to make video calls and surf the Internet from their phones.
Lars Nyberg, CEO of TeliaSonera, told the Associated Foreign Press how excited they were to take the mountain into the wireless internet age:
“This is a great milestone for mobile communications as the 3G high speed internet will bring faster, more affordable telecommunication services from the world’s tallest mountain,” said Lars Nyberg.
The service is definitely an upgrade from the voice-only network set up in 2007 by China Mobile on the Chinese side of the mountain, and the erratic coverage of satellite phones. Who wouldn’t want to update their Facebook status to “chilling at the summit of Mount Everest” or “check-in” there? Now we can all wait with bated breath to see who gets the first Mayorship.
An Irish mountain climber named Gavin Bate was aiming to send the first tweet from the summit in 2009, but because of the weather conditions couldn’t reach the summit. Perhaps as people start to use the data network Everest will get better reviews on Google Maps; right now it’s at 2.5 stars.
But apparently the mountain committee had other ideas of how to use the connection–at least that’s what Ang Tshering Sherpa told the Associated Foreign Press:
“The erratic and expensive satellite connection that many times does not work for days will be replaced with this service, making it possible for all climbers to keep in touch with their organisers and family,” said Ang Tshering Sherpa, a member of the International Mountain Protection Commission. “This will also be helpful, possibly, when there is an accident or an expedition mishap,” he added.
Related content:
Discoblog: Would You Give Up Sex for Internet Access?
80beats: EXTREME SCIENCE: Doctors Drop Their Pants on Everest for a Blood Oxygen Test
80beats: Why Climbers Die on Everest: It’s Not the Avalanches (or the Yeti)
80beats: “Interplanetary Internet” Will Soon Bring Twitter to the ISS
DISCOVER: How Much Does The Internet Weigh?
Reality Base: “PopeTube” Launches, Brings New Holiness to Internet
Image: Flickr/stevehicks
September 21 2010
It Has 3,700 Facebook Friends, 1,800 Twitter Followers, & It’s a Tree
This 100-year-old tree wants to tell you about its day.
The tree, an English-speaking Belgian, shares pictures, videos, audio, and comments about it’s day to day life with the world via its website, twitter feed, and Facebook page. But don’t try to Facebook friend it right now—the tree is already over its friend limit.
The tree’s also outfitted with special sensors that detect the CO2, soot and ozone levels and also acts as a weather station, detecting local rainfall and temperature fluctuations. All of this information is transmitted to software which translates it into status updates like these examples on io9:
They analyze what the tree sees and senses, then translate that into updates like “Won’t be doing too much photosynthesis in this cloudy weather,” and “This ozone concentration makes it difficult to do my job.” It also advises people to ride their bikes on days with air pollution.
The information gathered by the tree’s sensors can also be used by researchers. Check out the making of the social-media tree video for more information on what went into the creation of this arboreal social media master.
Though the tree has to deal with the ups and downs of climate change, it is still pretty chipper as based on his social media slogan:
Hello! I’m a tree, and this is my feed. I’ll be online all day to keep you posted on how I feel.
Related content:
Bad Astronomy: Archiving NASA’s social media
Bad Astronomy: Social media diseases
Discover Magazine: Talking Plants
Image: The talking tree’s Facebook Page
August 03 2010
Proof That We Live in the Future: Tweets From a Robot Astronaut
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been tweeting from space for six months now, making that Twitter phenomenon officially old and busted. So what’s the new hotness? Tweets from an ISS-bound robot astronaut.
Robonaut 2 is currently cooling its heels at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, awaiting its scheduled trip to the International Space Station on November 1st. Once on board the ISS, the two-armed humanoid bot will help out astronauts with their duties; it expects to be particularly useful on tasks that are “too dangerous or boring for astronauts.” But it will also find time to tweet.
Already, Robonaut 2 has addressed some pressing questions via Twitter with answers like these:
“Robots are non-gender by design. I’m an it.”
“No, no relation to Hal. Don’t know if I’d want to admit to having him on my family tree if I was. Def. don’t condone his actions”
Fans can get much more information from the first robot astronaut during its “twitterview” tomorrow. Send a question marked #4R2 and Robonaut will begin answering them at 10 am CST.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Astronauts in Space Finally Enter the Intertubes
80beats: A New Crew Member for the Space Station: The “Robonaut 2″
80beats: Robonaut 2: Coming Soon to Space Stations and Assembly Lines Near You
80beats: Japanese Consortium: We’ll Send a Humanoid Robot to Walk on the Moon
Image: flickr / NASARobonaut
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
