Skyway Recommended Reading September 23rd to 29th
This week: Popular Science Shuts off Comments and Ignites Debate; Tips to preserve Battery Life with iOS7; NSA Gathers Citizens’ Social Connection Data; 4G Cars on the Horizon
Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think about things we do (internet trends, internet privacy, internet censorship, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…
Popular Science | Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments
Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former,diminishing our ability to do the latter. Read More…
The Guardian | Popular Science kills comments – while YouTube tries to fix them
Popular Science says comments harm debate, while YouTube begins integration with Google+ to bring friends and ‘popular personalities’ to greater visibility – and hide random racist and homophobic remarks. Read More…
Medium | Why the Comment Crisis is Good for Readers
The lowly comment section has recently been the recipient of a great deal of scrutiny, with multiple sites working to revitalize the form. Kinja proposes to refashion comments into Tumblr-esque snippets that can be applied in a variety of ways across the platform. Sites likeKotaku, Medium and experimental history journal The Appendix are experimenting with annotation-like comments appended to elements of the text. While continuing to locate comments at the bottom of the page, others are looking for ways to innovate on moderation, like Polygon’s volunteer corps of guideline enforcers. The conclusion to which all these efforts inevitably lead is that a single format will no longer serve for the multiple contexts where comments once made sense. That’s illustrated nowhere so starkly as in the different paths Gawker and PopSci are currently charting. Read More…
Gizmodo | 11 Tips to Keep iOS 7 From Destroying Your Battery Life
While your iPhone’s new operating system comes with plenty of advantages, iOS 7’s not without its drawbacks. Battery life just ain’t quite what you’d want it to be, but we’ve got some tips to squeeze the most out of that sucker and stay juiced all day long. Many of iOS 7’s fancy new features are handy if you need/want them. If you don’t, they’re just eating away at that precious battery life behind the scenes, and give you exactly zero help for your trouble. So shut ’em down. Read More…
NY Times | N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials. Read More…
GigaOm | 4G cars are coming, but we won’t have much choice in how we connect them
Soon we’ll be able to connect our cars directly to the mobile internet just like our smartphones, but unlike your smartphone your new car is going to be linked to a specific carrier. Read More…