Questões de Inglês

    In a presentation I’ve been making that has been put together by my colleague Gaurav Mishra, one of the slides talks about the people era we find ourselves in today. When we go online, we no longer interact with information, we interact with other people. So, we aren’t going online to visit websites today, we go online to visit people. That’s a big difference. But that isn’t Facebook’s big impact.
    I believe that the notion of privacy is one of the cornerstones of any social system. All the laws that we write, all the systems of behavior that we see all boil down to a society’s understanding of what’s private and what’s not. If you think about it, privacy is not just two states, it is a continuum — from that which we think of as completely private, our deepest, darkest thoughts that we wouldn’t dream of sharing with anyone, to that which is entirely public, our gender is, for the most part, instantly identifiable.
    In the last ten years, our notions of privacy have changed. For an entire generation, photographs are no longer private. They are to be shared widely, and be easily accessible to others at a time convenient to the viewer, not the person in the photograph.
    I could go on with other aspects of our lives, but the central thought is this: all the conflict we see around the internet boils down to an argument about privacy. Facebook’s big impact is that it is, more often than not, defining what’s private and what isn’t. And that right there is why people ask what’s next.
    As a species, human beings have never been comfortable with centralized authorities controlling privacy. We are also fundamentally opposed to “others” gaining access to information about ourselves that we think of as private. As far as I know, all social systems that have had centralized repositories of information, and have allowed “others” access to information about private citizens have failed, or have been replaced.
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(Adapted from: http://narendranag.com/2011/06/whatcomesafterfacebook/)

    But we’re already asking what’s next … After all, before Facebook became large, MySpace was huge. I have wondered why we’re asking this question. After all, Google’s bigger than Facebook and has had an equally profound impact on us. But, people at dinner parties aren’t asking what comes after Google. I don’t get asked about the next big search engine at every conference I speak at.
    After some thought I’m willing to argue that Google and Facebook are very different in terms of the impact they’re having. Google has democratized information. In earlier times, vast amounts of money have been made by people who knew something before the rest of the world. Today, in an era where the phrase, “information is power” has become a cliche, Google has done more than any other service to give people access to information. Think about it, text searches, image searches, maps, news …
    Facebook’s impact is altogether different. Eben Moglen puts it best: we have lost our anonymity online. Every service preceding Facebook (myspace et all) have been leading up to this one point: each of us now has a permanent, online, identity.

WHAT COMES AFTER FACEBOOK
By Naren on June 18, 2011

    “What comes after Facebook?” This is a question that’s being asked very frequently nowadays — and by people who, a few years ago, were struggling with email.
    I know people who still ask for their emails to be presented to them as printouts, who insist on writing in longhand (as in pen and paper) and then asking someone to “type the damn thing in.” But the fact that they are asking the question means that it’s time for an answer.
    For a very large number of us today (nearly 700 million), Facebook has become an integral part of our lives. Facebook has had a profound impact on society. Many of us are in touch with old friends. We keep track of each others lives and don’t feel like complete strangers when we meet. We share aspects of our lives as well, and enjoy it when people appreciate our photographs. On a larger scale, Facebook has been given credit for political revolutions, for social and cultural movements. Facebook captures the zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century. I will always refer to the last ten years as the Facebook years.
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WHAT COMES AFTER FACEBOOK
By Naren on June 18, 2011

    “What comes after Facebook?” This is a question that’s being asked very frequently nowadays — and by people who, a few years ago, were struggling with email.
    I know people who still ask for their emails to be presented to them as printouts, who insist on writing in longhand (as in pen and paper) and then asking someone to “type the damn thing in.” But the fact that they are asking the question means that it’s time for an answer.
    For a very large number of us today (nearly 700 million), Facebook has become an integral part of our lives. Facebook has had a profound impact on society. Many of us are in touch with old friends. We keep track of each others lives and don’t feel like complete strangers when we meet. We share aspects of our lives as well, and enjoy it when people appreciate our photographs. On a larger scale, Facebook has been given credit for political revolutions, for social and cultural movements. Facebook captures the zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century. I will always refer to the last ten years as the Facebook years.
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Throwing the book at borrowers

Posted on January 6, 2012.

Overdue books are certainly a nuisance for librarians. But for one library in Charlton, Mass., a borrower's delinquency was grounds for a criminal inquiry. When two children's books were several months overdue, the library complained to the cops. Sgt. Dan Dowd stopped by the home of Shannon Benoit, and Benoit's 5 year-old daughter, ____ had borrowed the books, burst into tears and asked if she was going to jail. "Apparently, overdue library books are a misdemeanor, "says Katherine Stone at Babble, "so get those overdue books in before it's too late!"

Fonte; www.theweek.com

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Memory loss can begin from age 45, scientists say

By Sarah Boseley

As all those of middle age who have ever fumbled for a name to fit a face will believe, the brain begins to lose sharpness of memory and powers of reasoning and understanding not from 60 as previously thought, but from as early as 45, scientists say.

Their evidence comes from a large study of more than 7,000 civil servants aged between 45 and 70. The 5,000 men and 2,000 women agreed to undergo verbal and written tests on three occasions over a 10-year period for what is called the Whitehall II study.

A deterioration in the memory and thinking powers of the oldest volunteers might be expected, but in fact the researchers, led by Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London in the UK, found that the brains of even the youngest were already on the slide. Over the decade, there was a 3.6% decline in the mental reasoning of men and of women aged 45 to 49. The process appeared to have speeded up in the older age groups. Men aged 65 to 70 have a decline of 9.6% while women fared a little better, at 7.4%.

It matters, say the scientists, because those whose brains appear to deteriorate fastest may be more likely to develop dementia in later life – and because if there is any chance of slowing tha process, those at highest risk may need to be detected and treated at an early stage, before Alzheimer's or another form of dementia becomes apparent.

Fonte: http://www.guardian.co.uk (Texto adaptado)