Blogging begins turnaround for homeless woman

It may have a fairy tale ending -- a story of perseverance and second chances that's playing out live on the public stage of online networking.

Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles

But 24-year-old Brianna Karp's story started as a nightmare.

In a rocky economy, Karp was laid off from her Irvine, California, job as an executive assistant in July 2008.

She got by for a while on temp jobs and unemployment benefits. But when her savings dried up, she was no longer able to afford her rent.

The only answer she saw then was a trailer she'd inherited from her father -- a man she barely knew who had recently committed suicide.

"I was left with a truck and this camper, which I was going to sell but coincidentally this happened to me," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I have this.' "

Karp, who writes that she is also estranged from her mother, ended up camped in a Los Angeles-area Walmart parking lot.

CNN.com

Digital contacts will keep an eye on your vital signs

Forget about 20/20.

"Perfect" vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world "augmented reality." Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.

CNN.com

Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech

If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s biography?

The New York Times

A new Turing test

IF A computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.

More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-’em-up computer game.

Economist.com

Cell Phone Radiation: Top 10 Best and Worst

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, thinks you should know. To make things easy, this week the group released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones according to the radiation levels they emit.

Questions regarding health risks associated with cell phone radiation have persisted for years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stated that scientific evidence does not indicate negative health outcomes from exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phones.

But the Environmental Working Group disagrees.

ABC News

Ground Control with Major Tom: Technoreliants in the hands of a fickle god

I am not an alarmist, but the recent Google outage, and my personal experience with AT&T's poor service for the iPhone has got this Modular Man to thinking. Or, pondering what I preach, at least.

There have been several articles lately raising a skeptical eyebrow about the future of cloud computing, where you "do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question". I would like to take it to a more base level, and talk to the whole of cyberspace, or whatever we are calling it nowadays. We are at the whim of infrastructures not in our own hands. We don't truly own the land, we play in the space. When Google went down, my emails were gone to me. I have no backup of these threads back and forth (I guess I should start doing that...). The prophets of technology constantly cry for the future of the one omnipotent structure of data, making things faster and less cluttered, smaller and fashionable.
But what they fail to point out, just like with all other utopian ideals, is that the dream must rest upon some one, or something's shoulders, and inevitably, that someone or something is faulty.
It is true that in the days of yore, the connection of communication rested on the likes of the backs of the Pony Express. The horse could get shot out from under the rider, the letter may get waterlogged or burned by careless hands.

But is cyberspace anymore reliable?

It is very convenient, and I am reliant upon it, but I believe it would behoove us all to remember the ephemeral quality of the new age. It would take a house fire to destroy my whole library, but just the flick of a glitch to destroy my life in the cloud. My iPhone, my computer, they mean nothing in a digital black out. It is when we fail to realize these certainties that we take what we have for granted, and it is when we take things for granted that we lose sight of humanity in the cloud around us.

Extra, Extra: Major Tom to bore you with personal insights!

I have decided in foolish earnestness to try and post my own column of the modern malaise every other week or so, entitled "Ground Control with Major Tom". I will be posting personal articles based on transience and so forth. I have done this every now and again, but I would like to give it a more formalized process, hence the name. I will list it as a label for easy use. Look for one such post today.

That is all,



The author.

Transience

• Main Entry: ¹tran·sient
• Pronunciation: \-sh(ē-)ənt, -zē-ənt, -sē-; -zhənt, -jənt\
• Etymology: Latin transeunt-, transiens, present participle of transire to cross, pass by, from trans- + ire to go — more at issue
• Date: 1599

1 a : passing especially quickly into and out of existence : transitory <transient beauty> b : passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn <transient visitors>
2 : affecting something or producing results beyond itself

Stop Google Books: World literature is not just another dataset

The world is being digitized at a furious rate. Indeed, we are at an “inflection point,” Thompson says, after which the world will be fundamentally different. In the U.S., we have a long history of handing public resources over to private monopolists. Think railroads. Think mining. Think television. Think FCC spectrum auctions.

ZD Net

Is digital nomad living going mainstream?

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? "Telecommute" from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go "mainstream"?

ComputerWorld