Tech Brief
Tech Brief is feeling sociable today... unlike some of the people we've been hearing about. Read the latest digital faux pas and meet Alan Turing's teddy - surely he is smarter than your average bear?
• Self-styled internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is planning to delete his Facebook profile live online today, . Calacanis decided to announce his intentions via JasonNation, a daily e-mail brief with over 23,000 subscribers.
However, the e-mail distribution list somehow turned into a "reply all" free-for-all to the increasing annoyance of everybody on the receiving end, including Mr Calacanis himself. a "newbie" for the error, which has now been resolved:
"wow.... this is not fun. i have so many bounces in my email I can't even diagnose the problem and it's 4am and the baby is awake... nice!"
• Speaking of Twitter, eagle-eyed Tim Ireland, AKA spotted that the UK's new culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, , essentially removing everything he wrote during the election campaign. :
"For those of you 'concerned' about deleted tweets was just 'new job, new tweets' rather than to hide anything!!"
Whatever you say, Mr Hunt.
• Singer M.I.A has scored a bit of an own goal by giving her new album a name that completely foxes the search engines. that the only letter Google recognizes from the cunningly titled "/\/\/\Y/\" (a combination of forward- and back-slashes) is the "Y"... leading to over 2 million results about a certain web directory and search engine. Hipster speculates whether this was M.I.A.'s intention all along:
"Maybe her new album is some sort of marketing gimmick for Yahoo."
• Codebreaker extraordinaire Alan Turing practised his lectures in front of a teddy bear called Porgy. The practice of working through your dilemmas with an inanimate object rather than boring your friends, family or colleagues is known by some as .
Fast forward to the 21st Century and , set up for him by :
"It's common in the computer industry, at least, to find that talking aloud your problem (even to a teddy) can help organize your thoughts. So, here's Porgy. If you've got a problem: talk to the teddy."
Tech Brief hopes that Porgy understands the privacy settings.
• Say goodbye to awkward meeting venues. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba :
"Select the arrangement you want from a graphical interface, and the tables will move to their new locations. The movement is monitored by an overhead camera with a fish-eye lens, and the software uses a trial-and-error approach to determine the best sequence of motion."
It was designed to save time, but who could resist playing around with the seating arrangements during a particularly boring meeting?
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