2010 to 2011 Timeline

In 2010 Katy Börner, 

Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and Biocomplexity Institute, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, Leader of the Information Visualization Lab, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands,

published Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT Press. This spectacular full color oblong folio book with an historical orientation represented one of the most original and certainly one of the most beautiful scholarly works ever published in the history of science. It grew out of an exhibit, Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, a ten year exhibition program that went public in 2005. This exhibit, which pulled together the work of numerous collaborators, was

"meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It has two components: the physical part supports the close inspection of high quality reproductions of maps for display at conferences and education centers; the online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of how these maps work. The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014."

In 2010 American intellectual historians Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton issued Cartographies of Time through the Princeton Architectural Press in New York. A fully illustrated history of graphic visualization of time and timelines from circa 400 CE to the present, this beautifully designed and produced work is an authoritative contribution to the history of information graphics with respect to time. In writing this work the authors drew attention to an aspect of historical writing that is generally undervalued by historians:

"Another reason for the gap in our historical and theoretical understanding of timelines is the relatively low status that we generally grant to chronology as a kind of study. Though we use chronologies all the time, and could not do without them, we typically see them as only distillations of complex historical narratives and ideas. Chronologies work, and—as far as most people are concerned—that's enough. But, as we will show in this book, it wasn't always so; from the classical period to the Renaissance in Europe, chronology was among the most revered of scholarly pursuits. Indeed, in some respects, it held a status higher than the study of history itself. While history dealt in stories, chronology dealt in facts. Moreover, the facts of chronology had significant implications outside of the academic study of history. For Christians, getting chronology right was the key to many practical matters such as knowing when to cleebrate Easter and weightly ones such as knowing when the Apocalypse was nigh.

"Yet, as historian Hayden White has argued, despite the clear cultural importance of chronology, it has been difficult to induce Western historians to think of it as anything more than a rudimentary form of historiography. The traditional account of the birth of modern historical thinking traces a path from the enumerated (but not yet narrated) medieval date lists called annals, through the narrated (but not yet narrative) accounts called chronicles, to fully narrative forms of historiography that emerge with modernity itself. According to this account, for something to qualify as historiography, it is not enough that it 'deal in real, rather than merely imaginery, events; and it is not enough that [it represent] events in its order of discourse according to the chronological framework in which they originally occurred. The events must be...revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence. Long thought of as 'mere sequences,' in our histories of history, chronologies have usually been left out.

"But, as White argues, there is nothing 'mere' in the problem of assembiing coherent chronologies nor their visual analogues. Like their modern successors, traditional chronographic forms performed both rote historical work and heavy conceptual lifting. They assembled, selected, and organized diverse bits of historical information in the form of dated lists. And the chronologies of a given period may tell us as much about its visions of past and future as do its historical narratives" (Rosenberg & Grafon p. 11).

"To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data‐archiving policy. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals. For example, the policy of The American Naturalist will state:  

"This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, especially for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species.  

"This policy will be introduced approximately a year from now, after a period when authors are encouraged to voluntarily place their data in a public archive. Data that have an established standard repository, such as DNA sequences, should continue to be archived in the appropriate repository, such as GenBank. For more idiosyncratic data, the data can be placed in a more flexible digital data library such as the National Science Foundation–sponsored Dryad archive at http://datadryad.org"  (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/650340, accessed 01-22-2010).

Supported by DARPA and Google, Tom M. Mitchell and his team at Carnegie Mellon University initiated the Never-Ending Language Learning System, or NELL, in an effort to develop a method for machines to teach themselves semantics, or the meaning of language.

"Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/05compute.html?_r=1&hpw). 

"NELL has been in continuous operation since January 2010. For the first 6 months it was allowed to run without human supervision, learning to extract instances of a few hundred categories and relations, resulting in a knowledge base containing approximately a third of a million extracted instances of these categories and relations. At that point, it had improved substantially its ability to read three quarters of these categories and relations (with precision in the range 90% to 99%), but it had become inaccurate in extracting instances of the remaining fourth of the ontology (many had precisions in the range 25% to 60%).  

"The estimated precision of the beliefs it had added to its knowledge base at that point was 71%. We are still trying to understand what causes it to become increasingly competent at reading some types of information, but less accurate over time for others. Beginning in June, 2010, we began periodic review sessions every few weeks in which we would spend about 5 minutes scanning each category and relation. During this 5 minutes, we determined whether NELL was learning to read it fairly correctly, and in case not, we labeled the most blatant errors in the knowledge base. NELL now uses this human feedback in its ongoing training process, along with its own self-labeled examples. In July, a spot test showed the average precision of the knowledge base was approximately 87% over all categories and relations. We continue to add new categories and relations to the ontology over time, as NELL continues learning to populate its growing knowledge base" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/overview, accessed 10-06-2010).

Barry Collins, news, features, and online editor of PCPro wrote in PCPro.co.uk "Whatever Happened to Second Life?"

"Three years ago, I underwent one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life – and I barely even left the office.  

"I spent a week virtually living and breathing inside Second Life: the massively multiplayer online world that contains everything from lottery games to libraries, penthouses to pubs, skyscrapers to surrogacy clinics.

"Oh, and an awful lot of virtual sex.  

"Back then, the world and his dog were falling over themselves to “be a part of it”. Rock stars were queuing up to play virtual gigs, Microsoft and IBM were setting up elaborate pixellated offices to host staff training seminars, Reuters even despatched a correspondent to report back on the latest in-world developments.

"At its peak, the Second Life economy had more money swilling about than several third-world countries. It had even produced its own millionaire, Anshe Chung, who made a very real fortune from buying and selling property that existed only on Second Life servers.  

"Three years on, and the hype has been extinguished. Second Life has seen its status as the web wonderchild supplanted by Facebook and Twitter. The newspapers have forgotten about it, the Reuters correspondent has long since cleared his virtual desk, and you can walk confidently around tech trade shows without a ponytailed “Web 2.0 Consultant” offering to put your company on the Second Life map for the price of a company car.  "

"But what has happened to Second Life? Have the hundreds of thousands of registered players logged off and found a real life? Has the Second Life economy collapsed? And what’s become of the extroverts, entrepreneurs and evangelists I encountered on my first visit? There’s only one way to find out. I’m going back in."

"Has Second Life become a digital ghost town? Not according to its makers, Linden Labs. 'In total, users around the world have spent more than one billion hours in Second Life,' the company claimed in September 

"And it isn’t just using that big figure to distract attention from a slowing interest in the online world: 'user hours grew 33% year-on-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,' Linden insists."

"A little research soon reveals why Second Life seems a lot quieter than the numbers suggest. In June, the company opened Zindra – Second Life’s 'adult continent', a huge plot of the virtual universe dedicated to content rated as 'mature', 'adult' or even 'PG'.  

"Given that sex and gambling accounted for the majority of the 'most popular places' when I first visited, it was suddenly apparent why I was as lonely as a cloud in the parts of the Second Life universe that wouldn’t upset the clergy.  

"So why did Linden establish its very own red-light district? It seems the company decided it was time to clean up its act. In 2008, a management shake-up saw founder and CEO Philip Rosedale move into the role of chairman; his replacement was Mark Kingdon, a man who spent 12 years as a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers – about as far from Linden’s 'anything goes' culture as you could possibly get."

"Kingdon apparently realised that companies such as IBM (which has more than 50 in-game properties) and Microsoft don’t want their reputations sullied by being part of a virtual world where XXX DANA’S NAUGHTY PLAYHOUSE XXX is the star attraction.

"So instead of bulldozing the sex shops and brothels, Linden decided to relocate them to their own dedicated island. Now Big Blue and the blue-movie theatres can both comfortably entertain their clients, and never the twain shall meet.

"Other vices were quashed a little less amicably. In 2007, Linden caused enormous upset after shutting down casinos and other in-world gambling dens overnight, following an FBI investigation into whether the site was breaking the US ban on online gambling. People who’d invested enormous amounts of time and hard cash into developing their own casinos found they’d literally been wiped off the map, without compensation" (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life/1, accessed 01-27-2010).

On January 5, 2010 Apple announced that more than three billion apps were downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.  

" 'Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,' said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. 'The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon ' " (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html, accessed 01-05-2010).

On January 9, 2010 Artificial intelligence engineer Douglas Hines of TrueCompanion.com introduced Roxxxy at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

" 'She doesn't vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else,' said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"Lifelike dolls, artificial sex organs and sex-chat phone lines have been keeping the lonely company for decades. But Roxxxy takes virtual companionship to a new level. Powered by a computer under her soft silicone ;skin,; she employs voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software to answer questions and carry on conversations. She even comes loaded with five distinct 'personalities,' from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy, that can be programmed to suit customers' preferences.

" 'There's a tremendous need for this kind of product,' said Hines, a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer. Roxxxy won't be available for delivery for several months, but Hines is taking pre-orders through his Web site, TrueCompanion.com, where thousands of men have signed up. 'They're like, 'I can't wait to meet her,' ' Hines said. 'It's almost like the anticipation of a first date.' Women have inquired about ordering a sex robot, too. Hines says a female sex therapist even contacted him about buying one for her patients.

"Roxxxy has been like catnip to talk-show hosts since her debut at AEE, the largest porn-industry convention in the country. In a recent monologue, Jay Leno expressed amazement that a sex robot could carry on lifelike conversations and express realistic emotions. 'Luckily, guys,' he joked, 'there's a button that turns that off.' Curious conventioneers packed Hines' AEE booth last month in Las Vegas, asking questions and stroking Roxxxy's skin as she sat on a couch in a black negligee.

" 'Roxxxy generated a lot of buzz at AEE,' said Grace Lee, spokeswoman for the porn-industry convention. 'The prevailing sentiment of everyone I talked to about Roxxxy is 'version 1.0,' but people were fascinated by the concept, and it caused them to rethink the possibilities of 'sex toys.' '

"Hines, a self-professed happily married man from Lincoln Park, New Jersey, says he spent more than three years developing the robot after trying to find a marketable application for his artificial-intelligence technology. Roxxxy's body is made from hypoallergenic silicone -- the kind of stuff in prosthetic limbs -- molded over a rigid skeleton. She cannot move on her own but can be contorted into almost any natural position. To create her shape, a female model spent a week posing for a series of molds. The robot runs on a self-contained battery that lasts about three hours on one charge, Hines says. Customers can recharge Roxxxy with an electrical cord that plugs into her back.

"A motor in her chest pumps heated air through a tube that winds through the robot's body, which Hines says keeps her warm to the touch. Roxxxy also has sensors in her hands and genital areas -- yes, she is anatomically correct -- that will trigger vocal responses from her when touched. She even shudders to simulate orgasm. When someone speaks to Roxxxy, her computer converts the words to text and then uses pattern-recognition software to match them against a database containing hundreds of appropriate responses. The robot then answers aloud -- her prerecorded "voice" is supplied by an unnamed radio host -- through a loudspeaker hidden under her wig.

" 'Everything you say to her is processed. It's very near real time, almost without delay,' Hines said of the dynamics of human-Roxxxy conversation. 'To make it as realistic as possible, she has different dialogue at different times. She talks in her sleep. She even snores.' (The snoring feature can be turned off, he says.) Roxxxy understands and speaks only English for now, but Hines' True Companion company is developing Japanese and Spanish versions. For an extra fee, he'll also record customizable dialogue and phrases for each client, which means Roxxxy could talk to you about NASCAR, say, or the intricacies of politics in the Middle East" (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/01/sex.robot/, accessed 02-06-2010).

After the disastrous earthquake in Haiti you could send aid money by text message on your cell phone, and $10 was put on your cell phone bill. In the case of the Red Cross you could "send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999", or you could donate by phone or by credit card on the Red Cross website, or through social networking sites.

The first LG Mobile Worldcup SMS texting championship took place in New York.

“ 'When others watch me texting, they think I’m not that fast and they can do better,' said Mr. Bae, 17, a high school dropout who dyes his hair a light chestnut color and is studying to be an opera singer.'So far, I’ve never lost a match.'

"In the New York competition he typed six characters a second. 'If I can think faster I can type faster,' he said.

"The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/world/asia/28seoul.html, accessed 01-28-2010).

"Exploit code for the zero-day hole in Internet Explorer linked to the China-based attacks on Google and other companies has been released on the Internet, Microsoft and McAfee warned on Friday.

"Meanwhile, the German federal security agency issued a statement on Friday urging its citizens to use an alternative browser to IE until a patch arrives.  

" 'We still only see limited targeted attacks affecting Internet Explorer 6,' Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager lead at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a statement. 'While newer versions of Internet Explorer are affected by this vulnerability, mitigations exist that make exploitation much more difficult.'

"McAfee researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed that it has been published on at least one Web site, the company's Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz wrote in his blog. 'The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week,' he said.

" 'The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability,' Kurtz wrote. 'The now-public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit.' Microsoft issued a warning on Thursday about the new hole and said it was working on a patch. The vulnerability affects IE 6, 7 and 8 on all the modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, according to Microsoft's advisory. Microsoft said IE 6 was the browser version being used on the computers that were targeted in the attacks. Google disclosed the attacks targeting it and other U.S. companies on Tuesday and said the attacks originated in China. Human rights activists who use Gmail also were targeted, Google said.

"The company said it discovered the attacks in mid-December and while it did not specifically implicate the Chinese government, it says that as a result of the incidents, it may withdraw from doing business in China. Sources familiar with the attack code say the attacks are similar to previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were linked to the Chinese government or proxies operating for the government. Source code was stolen from some of the more than 30 Silicon Valley companies targeted in the attack, sources said. Adobe has confirmed that it was targeted by an attack, and sources have said Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical also were targets.

"McAfee says references in the IE-related attack code it analyzed indicate that the attackers called the operation 'Aurora' and that the attack was extremely sophisticated" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10436083-245.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

Steve Jobs of Apple introduced the iPad, one-half inch thick, with a 9.7 inch, high resolution color touchscreen (multi-touch) diagonal display, powered by a 1-gigahertz Apple A4 chip and 16 to 64 gigabytes of flash storage, weighing 1.5 pounds and capable of running all iPhone applications, except presumably, the phone. The battery life was supposed to be 10 hours, and the device was supposed to hold a charge for 1 month in standby. The price started at $499.00.

"The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, 'it has no reason for being.'" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/live-blogging-the-apple-product-announcement/?hp, accessed 01-27-2010).

Link to iPad on Apple website: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Biosocial anthropologist Diane Harley, director of the Higher Education in the Digital Age (HEDA) project at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley and colleagues published Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.

"Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work can be found at the Future of Scholarly Communication’s project website. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions to closely examine scholarly needs and values in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

"The report is divided into eight chapters and can be read in its entirety online (733 pages) or can be downloaded in a PDF file, as can any individual chapter" (http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc, accessed 02-12-2010).

Canadian graduate student at Duke University Julia Gaffield discovered in the British National archives the only known copy of the declaration of independence for Haiti, an 8-page pamphlet headed Liberté ou La Mort. 

Prior to Gaffield's discovery no copy of this document was known.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics at YouTube, interviewed President Barack Obama on YouTube's, CitizenTube.com:

"The President responded to your questions in a live YouTube interview at the White House on Monday, February 1st.

"You submitted over 11,000 questions and cast over 667,000 votes after the President's State of the Union address last week. We collected the top questions, ensuring we covered a range of issues, minimized duplicate questions, and included both video and text submissions" (http://www.youtube.com/user/citizentube#p/c/EB843ABAF59735FD, accessed 02-02-2010).

This was the first time that a sitting president was interviewed by social media rather than broadcast news media.

On the sixth anniversary of the founding of Facebook on February 4, 2010 Mark Zuckerberg announced that it had 400,000,000 users:

"Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.  

"Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.  

"For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises. 

"Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.  

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.  

"After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you" (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=287542162130, accessed 02-10-2010).

Macmillan announced that it was introducing new software called DynamicBooks, which would let college professors curate e-books for their own courses. They could add paragraphs, bring in extra sources, links, and updates—without having to consult with the original author.

According to the New York Times, students will be able to purchase the books at their local university stores, as well as dynamicbooks.com and through CourseSmart, an e-textbook seller. The company is also working with Apple so students can access the books on the iPad. In August, they will offer 100 titles.

"The modifiable e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional print textbooks. “Psychology,” for example, which has a list price of $134.29 (available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $122.73), will sell for $48.76 in the DynamicBooks version. Macmillan is also offering print-on-demand versions of the customized books, which will be priced closer to traditional textbooks.  

"Fritz Foy, senior vice president for digital content at Macmillan, said the company expected e-book sales to replace the sales of used books. Part of the reason publishers charge high prices for traditional textbooks is that students usually resell them in the used market for several years before a new edition is released. DynamicBooks, Mr. Foy said, will be “semester and classroom specific,” and the lower price, he said, should attract students who might otherwise look for used or even pirated editions" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html?scp=1&sq=publishing%2002/22/2010&st=cse, accessed 02-23-2010).

The web auction site ComicConnect.com in New York sold the first edition of the first Superman comic book, Action Comics #1, for $1,000,000.

"ComicConnect.com, one of the industry’s leading online auction/consignment sites, just sold an extremely rare, top-condition copy of the world’s most coveted comic book for exactly $1,000,000. That figure is more than three times higher than the prior record-holder, also set by ComicConnect.com.

"That comic book, of course, is Action Comics #1, which marked the debut of Superman in 1938 and promptly changed the course of pop culture forever.

" 'This particular copy has been in a private collection for more than 15 years, and it’s likely to disappear again once it’s been turned over to its new owner. However, ComicConnect.com will allow the media to view it briefly in its New York City showroom (873 Broadway, Suite 201, 212-895-3999). The showroom is also home to ComicConnect.com’s affiliate, Metropolis Collectibles (metropoliscomics.com), the largest vintage comic book dealer in the world.

" 'It’s the Holy Grail of comic books,' says founder Stephen Fishler, one of the leading experts on collectible comics.

“ 'Before Action Comics #1, there was no such thing as a superhero or a man who could fly,' notes Fishler, who created the 10-point grading scale which today is used universally to evaluate the condition of comic books.

“ 'It’s the single most important event in comic book history,' adds ComicConnect.com co-owner and COO, Vincent Zurzolo.

"Only about 100 copies Action Comics #1 remain in existence, and of those 100, only two have received a grading of 8.0 (Very Fine) or higher. This particular book is one of them, making it among the rarest of the rare.

"Up until now, the record-holder was another Action Comics #1, this one with a grading of 6.0. It sold on ComicConnect.com for $317,200 in 2009.

"According to the Overstreet Price Guide to Comic Books—the industry bible—Action Comics #1 is indisputably the highest-valued comic book of all time. In second place is Detective Comics #27, which marked the first appearance of Batman in 1939. An Action Comics #1 graded 8.0 or higher is priced about 25% higher than a comparable Detective Comics #27" (http://www.comicconnect.com/, accessed 02-25-2010).

A joint study of the Wikipedia contributor population by the United Nations University and the Maastricht Economical and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) suggested that Wikipedians were over 85% male and in their mid-20s.

At the CeBit exhibition in Hannover, Germany, Christoph Guger of Guger Technologies (g.tech) of Graz, Austria, offered intendiX, "the world's first personal Brain Computer Interface speller" for sale at the retail price of €9000.

"The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email" (http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/07/intendix-the-brain-computer-interface-goes-commercial-video/, accessed 03-16-2010).

♦You can watch a video of intendiX in operation entitled Select words by thinking—world record on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlUPFpZswJk, accessed 03-16-2010).

Google announced in its blog that it stopped censoring search services on Google.cn, and moved its Chinese search business from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.

"Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, accessed 03-22-2010)

"An initiative of the Vatican Library Digital manuscripts

"by Cesare Pasini  

"The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.  

"And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.  

"The technological project of digitization with its various aspects is now ready. In the past two years, a technical feasibility study has been prepared with the contribution of the best experts, internal, external and also international. This resulted in a project of a great and innovative value from various points of view: the realization of the photography, the electronic formats for conservation, the guaranteed stability of photographs over time, the maintenance and management of the archives, and so forth.  

"This project may be achieved over a span of 10 years divided into three phases, with possible intervals between them. In a preliminary phase the involvement of 60 people is planned, including photographers and conservator-verifiers, in the second and third phases at least 120. Before being able to initiate an undertaking of this kind, which is causing some anxiety to those in charge of the library (and not only to them!), naturally it will be necessary to find the funds. Moves have already been made in this direction with some positive results.  

"The second announcement is that some weeks ago the “test bed” was set up; in other words the “bench test” that will make it possible to try out and examine the whole structure of the important project that has been studied and formulated so as to guarantee that it will function properly when undertaken in its full breadth.  

"The work of reproduction uses two different machines, depending on the different types of material to be reproduced: one is a Metis Systems scanner, kindly lent to us free of charge by the manufacturers, and a 50 megapixel Hasselblad digital camera. Digitized images will be converted to the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS), a non-proprietary format, is extremely simple, was developed a few decades ago by NASA. It has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.  

"In addition to the servers that collect the images in FITS format accumulated by the two machines mentioned, another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images both by the shelf mark and the manuscript's descriptive elements, and also and above all by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory.  

"The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican's manuscripts – only think of when it will be possible to do such research on the entire patrimony of manuscripts in the Library! – was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm in the field of computer science, to which, moreover, we owe the entire funding of the “test bed”.  

"For this “bench test”, set up in these weeks, 23 manuscripts are being used for a total of 7,500 digitized and indexed pages, with a mountain of computer data of about 5 terabytes (about 5,000 billion bytes).

"The image of the mustard seed springs to mind: the “text bed” is not much more in comparison with the immensity of the overall project. But we know well that this seed contains an immense energy that will enable it to grow, to become far larger than the other plants and to give hospitality to the birds of the air. In accepting the promise guaranteed in the parable, let us also give hope of it to those who await the results of this project's realization" (http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?, pag=newsletter_art_00087&BC=11, accessed 03-24-2010).

A superfine copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, which features the first appearance of Superman, the "Man of Steel," and graded 8.5 on the 10 point Fischler rating, was bought by an undisclosed buyer for a record $1.5 million on the online auction site ComicConnect.com, New York City.

" 'This is the Holy Grail of Holy Grails,' said Vincent Zurzolo, co-owner of the Web site.

"A copy of the same issue sold for $1 million in February, but this one fetched a higher price because it is in better condition. It was stored inside a movie magazine for the past 50 years, Zurzolo said. 

" 'The book looks like it just came off the presses yesterday,' said Zurzolo. 'The colors are extremely vivid, the whites behind the 'Action Comics' logo are snow white. It's just a stunning copy -- it almost looks brand new.' The sale of the Superman book marks the third time this year that a record was set for the sale of a comic book. The other copy of 'Action Comics' No. 1 held onto its record for only three days before a comic book featuring Batman's debut sold for $75,000 more at an auction in Dallas, Texas. 

"It's widely believed that there are 50 to 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 floating around, which makes it exceedingly rare. However, the copy sold Monday has received the highest rating to date from the Certified Guaranty Company, an independent comic grading company in Sarasota, Florida. The company inspects comic books for imperfections, ranging from yellowing to slight creases. J.C. Vaughn, the associate publisher of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, an annual publication considered the authority on comic book pricing, said the Action Comic No. 1 book sold Monday is worth every penny.

" 'The older any comic book gets, obviously the more unlikely you'll find it with a high rating,' said Vaughn.

" 'A book this old, featuring Superman's first appearance? I think this book warrants the price.' Back in 1938, there were 200,000 of these first editions printed and 130,000 sold, said Vaughn. The 70,000 other copies were destroyed.

"Zurzolo said it could be a while before another comic book sets a new mark, because only a few other comics have this type of value" (http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/03/30/superman.comic/, accessed 04-02-2010).

Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica, Popular Science columnist, and element collector, issued the ebook version of his 2009 printed book, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, for the Apple iPad.

Gray's ebook may be the first interactive book to take full advantage of the features of the iPad, including splendid high resolution graphics, the ability to rotate objects, the ability to visualize objects in 3-dimensions using inexpensive 3-D glasses, and full connectivity to the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine for additional data.

♦ Gray discusses the features, design, and production of the ebook, The Elements in a video at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/periodictabledotcom, accessed 06-04-2010.

"The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has today released its annual estimate of total book sales in the United States. The report, which uses data from the Bureau of the Census as well as sales data from eighty-six publishers inclusive of all major book publishing media market holders, estimates that U.S. publishers had net sales of $23.9 billion in 2009, down from $24.3 billion in 2008, representing a 1.8% decrease. In the last seven years the industry had a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.1%."

"Audio book sales for 2009 totaled $192 million, down 12.9% on the prior year, CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for this category is still healthy at 4.3%. E-books overtook audiobooks in 2009 with sales reaching $313 million in 2009, up 176.6%" (http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2010_April/BookSalesEstimatedat23.9Billionin2009.htm)

Sheri Fink, MD, PhD of New York-based ProPublica.org received the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for her story, The Deadly Choices at Memorial. The story was published on the Propublica website on August 27, 2009 and co-published in the New York Times Magazine on August 30, 2009.

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore, whose work appears on San Francisco-based SFGate.com, won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. Fiore produced animated editorial cartoons for publication on the Internet.

These were the first Pulitzer Prizes awarded for Internet-based journalism.

"Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.  

"With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant onlineconversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.  

"Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click 'Show options' on the search results page, then select 'Updates.' The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. . . ." (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/replay-it-google-search-across-twitter.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

Twitter announced in its blog that it would donate to the Library of Congress its archive of 10,000,000,000 text messages (tweets) accumulated since the founding of the company in October 2006:

"The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library's primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

"Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.  

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.  

"Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber's latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!"

Gary Wolf published "The Data-Driven Life" in The New York Times Magazine.

". . . . Another person I’m friendly with, Mark Carranza — he also makes his living with computers — has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.  

"These men all know that their behavior is abnormal. They are outliers. Geeks. But why does what they are doing seem so strange? In other contexts, it is normal to seek data. A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio. Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.

"Or, by another standard, you could say it got better. We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square. For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.  

"And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.  

"Two years ago, as I noticed that the daily habits of millions of people were starting to edge uncannily close to the experiments of the most extreme experimenters, I started a Web site called the Quantified Self with my colleague Kevin Kelly. We began holding regular meetings for people running interesting personal data projects. I had recently written a long article about a trend among Silicon Valley types who time their days in increments as small as two minutes, and I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?  

"But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

"Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.  

"UNTIL A FEW YEARS ago it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. Although sociologists could survey us in aggregate, and laboratory psychologists could do clever experiments with volunteer subjects, the real way we ate, played, talked and loved left only the faintest measurable trace. Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what we were doing and write it down. But even this written record couldn’t be analyzed objectively without laborious processing and analysis.  "Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.

"Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them."

". . . . Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different. Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?pagewanted=7&ref=magazine, accessed 05-07-2010).

"Over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about exactly what information Google Street View cars collect as they drive our streets. While we have talked about the collection of WiFi data a number of times before--and there have been stories published in the press--we thought a refresher FAQ pulling everything together in one place would be useful. This blog also addresses concerns raised by data protection authorities in Germany.

"What information are your cars collecting? 

"We collect the following information--photos, local WiFi network data and 3-D building imagery. This information enables us to build new services, and improve existing ones. Many other companies have been collecting data just like this for as long as, if not longer, than Google.

"♦Photos: so that we can build Street View, our 360 degree street level maps. Photos like these are also being taken by TeleAtlas and NavTeq for Bing maps. In addition, we use this imagery to improve the quality of our maps, for example by using shop, street and traffic signs to refine our local business listings and travel directions;

"♦WiFi network information: which we use to improve location-based services like search and maps. Organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute and Skyhook already collect this information globally;

"♦and 3-D building imagery: we collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners) which help us improve our maps. NavTeq also collects this information in partnership with Bing. As does TeleAtlas.

"What do you mean when you talk about WiFi network information?

"WiFi networks broadcast information that identifies the network and how that network operates. That includes SSID data (i.e. the network name) and MAC address (a unique number given to a device like a WiFi router).

"Networks also send information to other computers that are using the network, called payload data, but Google does not collect or store payload data.*  

"But doesn’t this information identify people? 

"MAC addresses are a simple hardware ID assigned by the manufacturer. And SSIDs are often just the name of the router manufacturer or ISP with numbers and letters added, though some people do also personalize them. However, we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars.  

"Is it, as the German DPA states, illegal to collect WiFi network information? 

"We do not believe it is illegal--this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a WiFi-enabled device. Companies like Skyhook have been collecting this data cross Europe for longer than Google, as well as organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute.  

"Why did you not tell the DPAs that you were collecting WiFi network information?

"Given it was unrelated to Street View, that it is accessible to any WiFi-enabled device and that other companies already collect it, we did not think it was necessary. However, it’s clear with hindsight that greater transparency would have been better.  

"Why is Google collecting this data?

"The data which we collect is used to improve Google’s location based services, as well as services provided by the Google Geo Location API. For example, users of Google Maps for Mobile can turn on “My Location” to identify their approximate location based on cell towers and WiFi access points which are visible to their device. Similarly, users of sites like Twitter can use location based services to add a geo location to give greater context to their messages.  

"Can this data be used by third parties? 

"Yes--but the only data which Google discloses to third parties through our Geo Location API is a triangulated geo code, which is an approximate location of the user’s device derived from all location data known about that point. At no point does Google publicly disclose MAC addresses from its database (in contrast with some other providers in Germany and elsewhere).

"Do you publish this information?

"No" (http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-google-cars.html, accessed 05-23-2012).

On June 9, 2010 Google announced in its Official Blog that it had "mistakenly included code" in its software that collected "samples of payload data" from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from encrypted WiFI networks.  It also announced that in response to requests from the Irish Data Protection Authority it was deleting payload data collected from Irish WiFi networks.

The New York Times published "When History is Compiled 140 Characters at a Time" from which I quote:

“ 'Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,' said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, 'Digital History.' What’s more, he said, 'Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.'  

"Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.  

"Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. 'My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. 'But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.' Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. 'I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,' she said.  

"The Twitter archive, which was 'born digital,' as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.  

"As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. 'Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,' Ms. Taylor said. 'And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.'  

"Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. 'In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,' said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 'But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.'  

"Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account 'protected,' so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.

"A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.  

"Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.  

"But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.  

"Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, 'From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.' Twitter’s privacy policy states: 'Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.  

"Mr. Macgillivray added, 'That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ' He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a 'privacy policy' labeled as such.  

"Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, 'There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.'  

"The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, 'We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.' The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”  

"BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.  

"Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on 'Show options,' then 'Updates,' then a particular place on the timeline.)  

"A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.  

"Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the 'staggeringly large historical record' of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward 'anecdotal history.' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02digi.html?scp=1&sq=twitter%20+%20history&st=cse, accessed 05-06-2010).

"The US book publishing industry consists of about 2,600 companies with combined annual revenue of about $27 billion. Major companies include John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Scholastic, as well as publishing units of large media companies such as HarperCollins (owned by News Corp); Random House (owned by Bertelsmann); and Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS). The industry is highly concentrated: the top 50 companies generate about 80 percent of revenue.

"Demand for books is driven by demographics and is largely resistant to economic cycles. The profitability of individual companies depends on product development and marketing. Large publishers have an advantage in bidding for new manuscripts or authors. Small and midsized publishers can succeed if they focus on a specific subject or market.

"Publishers produce books for general reading (adult "trade" books); text, professional, technical, children's, and reference books. Trade books account for 25 percent of the market, textbooks 25 percent, and professional books 20 percent.  "

"About 150,000 new books are published in the US every year; however, most are low-volume products. The number of books produced by major trade publishers and university presses is closer to 40,000" (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100506006043&newsLang=en, accessed 05-06-2010).

Google announced a translation feature for Google Goggles, image recognition and search feature available on Android-based mobile devices.

"Here’s how it works:

"Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words Press the shutter button

"If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate

"Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages."

"Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well."

"Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.  

"Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories on Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.

"Registrations for websites to use those names are to begin soon. On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix" (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_EGYPT_ARAB_DOMAIN_NAMES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT, accessed 05-16-2010).

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Holland, presented ‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers’, an exhibition of the famous forgeries of Han van Meegeren.

"Van Meegeren craftily exploited art historians’ desire to discover early works by Johannes Vermeer. During a famous court case in which Van Meegeren was accused of Nazi collaboration, he admitted that he had forged old master paintings, including several Vermeers. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen had acquired one of the fake Vermeers from Van Meegeren. The exhibition explores Van Meegeren’s technique, his masterpieces and his downfall. 

"The exhibition ‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers’ includes approximately ten forgeries by Han van Meegeren (1889-1947). Most are in the style of Johannes Vermeer, but the works also include forgeries of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch. Van Meegeren’s life as a forger is further illuminated through a documentary film and objects from his studio. A masterpiece In 1937 the director of Museum Boymans, Dirk Hannema, purchased ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ for 540,000 guilders. There was great interest in the painting, which most experts believed to be an early masterpiece by Vermeer. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam even offered Vermeer’s ‘The Love Letter’ in exchange for the painting, but Hannema rejected the offer. Museum Boymans exhibited the work as one of the highlights of its collection and art experts praised the work’s high quality. 

"Exposure  

"At the end of the Second World War a painting from the Netherlands was found in the collection of the Nazi minister, Hermann Göring. The painting was traced back to Han van Meegeren, who was immediately arrested on suspicion of collaboration. Van Meegeren admitted to having sold the work, but also claimed to have made the painting himself. He had sold Göring a forgery. Van Meegeren’s confession became worldwide news and he was hailed as a hero as ‘the man who swindled Göring’. Meanwhile the art world was thrown into disarray. Van Meegeren demonstrated his forgery techniques to an expert panel and during his trial his forgeries were hung in the courtroom, as can be seen in the documentary film included in the exhibition.

"Reassessment  

"Van Meegeren’s technique remains exceptional. For his masterpiece ‘The Supper at Emmaus’, Van Meegeren used a genuine seventeenth-century canvas and historical pigments. He bound the pigments with bakelite, which hardened when heated to produce a surface very similar to that of a seventeenth-century painting. This technique, combined with Van Meegeren’s choice of subject matter and composition, was an important factor in convincing so many people of the authenticity of his works. Van Meegeren created the missing link between Vermeer’s early and late works. The exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen sheds new light on Van Meegeren’s technique, resulting from new technical research undertaken by the Rijksmuseum" (http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2∫_new=38022, accessed 05-14-2010).

According to The New York Times, in May 2010 people were using their cell phones more for text messaging and data-processing than for speech. This should not come as a surprise to anyone with teen-age children.

". . . although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.  

"This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.  

"Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.  

"The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say. 'Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,' said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. 'But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.'  

"Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. 'Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,' said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.  

"But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html?hp, accessed 05-14-2010).

"Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.  

"Over time, these aspirations have created a vibrant and inspiring community that helped transform a murmur of interest into something far greater than any of us ever could have imagined. Today, thanks to you, our site has crossed another milestone: YouTube exceeds over two billion views a day. That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.  

"What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries. We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world" (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/, accessed 05-17-2010).

In June 2010 the Stuxnet computer worm, the first malware that spied on and subverted industrial systems, was discovered.  Stuxnet was also the first malware to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit. 

"The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes. Stuxnet infects PLCs by subverting the Step-7 software application that is used to reprogram these devices.

"Different variants of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organizations, with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in Iran; Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran. Siemens stated on 29 November that the worm has not caused any damage to its customers, but the Iran nuclear program, which uses embargoed Siemens equipment procured secretly, has been damaged by Stuxnet. Kaspersky Lab concluded that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted "with nation-state support". This was further supported by the F-Secure's chief researcher Mikko Hyppönen who commented in a Stuxnet FAQ, 'That's what it would look like, yes'. It has been speculated that Israel and the United States may have been involved. . . .

"Experts believe that Stuxnet required the largest and costliest development effort in malware history. Its many capabilities would have required a team of people to program, in-depth knowledge of industrial processes, and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure. Eric Byres, who has years of experience maintaining and troubleshooting Siemens systems, told Wired that writing the code would have taken many man-months, if not years. Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have consisted of anywhere from five to thirty people, and would have taken six months to prepare. The Guardian, the BBC and The New York Times all claimed that (unnamed) experts studying Stuxnet believe the complexity of the code indicates that only a nation-state would have the capabilities to produce it. The self-destruct and other safeguards within the code imply that a Western government was responsible, with lawyers evaluating the worm's ramifications. Software security expert Bruce Schneier condemned the 2010 news coverage of Stuxnet as hype, however, stating that it was almost entirely based on speculation. But after subsequent research, Schneier stated in 2012 that 'we can now conclusively link Stuxnet to the centrifuge structure at the Natanz nuclear enrichment lab in Iran' " (Wikipedia article on Stuxnet, accessed 05-30-2012).

The "popular highlights" feature of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader enabled readers to see which portions of books other readers considered noteworthy. It also suggested that Amazon may be collecting this information as possible marketing information for publishers. This feature could  be disabled by Kindle users.

Flipboard, "your personalized, social magazine," was launched for the iPad by Mike McCue and Evan Doll in Palo Alto, California.

The magazine collected the recommendations of user's friends on social network sites, and other websites and presented them in magazine format on the iPad. The application was designed specifically for the iPad's large touch screen and allowed users to "flip" through their social networking feeds and feeds from websites that partnered with Flipboard. The product was later ported to the iPhone.

"The high water mark for spam was reached in July 2010 when approximately 230 billion spam messages were in circulation each day, accounting for 90% of all email traffic. This has now declined to 39.2 billion messages per day, accounting for only 72.9% of all email. The question is why?

"There are many different factors that appear to be working together to make sending spam more difficult and less profitable for criminal gangs. In September 2010 the Spamit web site announced that it was ceasing operation due to “numerous negative events”. Spamit provided affiliate marketing services, allegedly helping to pay spammers for promoting many spam advertised web sites, notably the “Canadian Pharmacy” operation which was one of the most spam advertised brands.  

"The demise of Spamit corresponded with a large drop in spam volumes, from approximately 100 to 75 billion spam per day from the end of September to mid November 2010. It is not known exactly what the “negative events” are referred to by Spamit, but it is thought that these may be associated with increased attention by regulatory bodies and law enforcement in the activities of the group.  

"Nevertheless, spam had been dropping before this event. It may be that increased surveillance of spammers by authorities had pursuaded spammers to seek other economic activities legitimate or illicit. Or it may be that the peak of spamming in July 2010 was unsustainable for the spamming industry, there just weren't the number of customers to warrant such a high level of activity.

"A few months later, in December 2010, the largest botnet at the time, Rustock suddenly stopped sending spam. At the time, this single botnet was responsible for 47.5% of all spam, sending approximately 44.1 billion spams per day. The botnet soon resumed its activity in January in 2011, but in March it ceased operation entirely and was dismantled due to concerted action by a partnership of industry and law enforcement. Since then, the other botnets have not significantly increased their spamming activity to maintain the same total levels of spam. Indeed, one of the largest botnets, Bagle, has decreased the amount of spam that it sends from 8.31 billion spam per day in March 2011 to 1.60 billion spam per day in June 2011.

"This decrease in spamming activity may be evidence that increased investigation of the spam underworld has both disrupted the affiliate networks, such as Spamit, that pay for spam campaigns, and led to botnet controllers looking to keep their heads down to avoid the attention of the legal authorities. Interestingly, during the same period there has been a reported rise in distributed denial of service attacks, which can also be undertaken by botnets. It may be that the botnet owners are looking to other modes of operation to maintain their revenue, while moving away from the now less profitable and more risky business of spamming" (http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/why-my-email-went, accessed 07-04-2011).

From roughly 1,000,000 miles into space the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory took the first photograph of the entire universe.

"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete -- and books aren't doing much better.  

"In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.  

"The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves -- a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.  

"Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.  'As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form,' he says.  

"Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field -- particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.  

"Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.  

" 'It allows our faculty to change examples,' he says, 'to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way.'

For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.  

" 'They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online,' he says. 'I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.'

"And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books" (http://news.opb.org/article/8204-stanford_ushers_in_the_age_of_bookless_libraries/, accessed 07-10-2010).

During the months of April, May, and June 2010 sales of ebooks (e-books) exceeded sales of hardcover physical books at Amazon.com. "In that time Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition."

The New York Times online, which reported this information, did not compare Amazon's sales of e-books versus their sales of paperback books during the same period, but indicated that  "paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books."

"Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. 'This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,' he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.  

"Still, the hardcover book is far from extinct. Industrywide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association."

The shift at Amazon is "astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months," Amazon's chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a news release, published in Amazon.com's Media Room.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, in July 2010 Facebook had 500 million users.

For its special issue, "Shakespeare and the New Media," the scholarly humanities journal Shakespeare Quarterly published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.,  offered contributors the chance to take part in a partially open peer-review process conducted by MediaCommonspress.  

"Authors could opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final call about what to publish (hence the "partially open" label). As far as the editors know, it's the first time a traditional humanities journal has tried out a version of crowd-sourcing in lieu of double-blind review" (http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/, accessed 08-24-2010).

"On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "Insurance File" to the Afghan War Diary page. The file is AES encrypted and has been speculated to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published, similar to the concept of a dead man's switch. Following the first few days' release of the United States diplomatic cables starting 28 November 2010, the US television broadcaster CBS predicted that 'If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies.' CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh stated, 'What most folks are speculating is that the insurance file contains unreleased information that would be especially embarrassing to the US government if it were released' "(Wikipedia article on Wikileaks, accessed 12-08-2010).

"The volume of data on the world’s mobile networks is doubling each year, according to Cisco Systems, the U.S. maker of routers and networking equipment. By 2014, it estimates, the monthly data flow will increase about sixteenfold, to 3.6 billion gigabytes from 220.1 million" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02iht-NETPIPE02.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/business/global/index.jsonp, accessed 08-01-2010)

"Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, the first panel featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As moderator David Kirkpatrick was introducing him, he rattled off a massive stat.

"Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.  

Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.  

“ 'The real issue is user-generated content,' Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.  

"Naturally, all of this information helps Google. But he cautioned that just because companies like his can do all sorts of things with this information, the more pressing question now is if they should. Schmidt noted that while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming.  

Using an algorithm that combined book information from multiple sources including libraries, WorldCat (OCLC) national union catalogs and commercial providers, Google estimated that there were "129,864,880" different books in the world. This number was, of course, constantly increasing. 

Google's definition was inexact for various reasons including the detail that they "count hardcover and paperback books produced from the same text twice, but treat several pamphlets bound together by a library as a single book."

This information comes from Google's Inside Google Books blog, August 05, 2010.  That provided other interesting tidbits such as:

"We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries."

"Our handling of serials is still imperfect. Serials cataloging practices vary widely across institutions. The volume descriptions are free-form and are often entered as an afterthought. For example, “volume 325, number 6”, “no. 325 sec. 6”, and “V325NO6” all describe the same bound volume. The same can be said for the vast holdings of the government documents in US libraries. At the moment we estimate that we know of 16 million bound serial and government document volumes. This number is likely to rise as our disambiguating algorithms become smarter.

"After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday."

Ethan Bloch, founder of Flowtown.com, created the 2010 Social Networking Map.

This was intended as a tribute to XKCD’s ‘Map of Online Communities’ published in 2007. The differences between the two maps, reflective of extremely rapid changing in the social network world, were dramatic!

At a Google press event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Google founder Sergey Brin and Google vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer introduced Google Instant 

"which predicts Internet search queries and shows results as soon as someone begins to type, adjusting the results as each successive letter is typed."

"Google, which already handles more than a billion searches a day and has a billion users a week, had to figure out how to manage the load when suddenly each letter typed was a separate search query. The solution includes storing frequent searches and sending common ones, like 'Barack,' back more quickly than ones that are nearly impossible to predict, like 'Bill.' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/technology/techspecial/09google.html?hpw, accessed 09-09-210).

HarperCollins publishers released the ebook edition of Deepak Chopra's fictionalized biography of the Prophet Muhammed entititled Muhammad prior to the hardcover release on September 21.

This was the first time that HarperCollins released an ebook edition prior to a print edition.

The Tradional Crossroads label issued Immeasurable Light, the first recording of ancient (8th-12th centuries) Asian melodies "transnotated" from rare musical manuscripts.  

The recording was a partnership between Wu Man, a renowned virtuoso of the pipa, a 4-string lute-like Asian instrument for which the ancient melodies were written, the Kronos Quartet, and Rembrandt F. Wolpert, a professor of ethnomusicology at the Center for the Study of Early Asian and Middle Eastern Musics at Fulbright College, University of Arkansas.

"The ancient manuscripts, written in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, show only the tablature or finger positions for how to play the instrument, but do not include the actual pitches.  

"Professor Wolpert (who took the Chinese name 'Wu Ren Fan'—meaning a sailboat free from tasks) gave himself the job of musical archeologist. Joining 'translate' and 'notate,' he coined the term 'transnotate' to describe a unique process of translating these ancient Chinese and Japanese manuscripts written in characters into Western musical notation. He used a computer program and a musical grammatical system that he designed himself.

"Pipa virtuoso Wu Man then played the translated music and the results for the listener are to hear, as nearly as possible, those ancient melodies. The performance was further rounded out by the Kronos Quartet, Wu’s long-time collaborating team" (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/46618/, accessed 11-28-2010).

Inside Higher Ed.com reported that the University of Texas at San Antonio's Applied Engineering and Technology Library contained no physical books.

"The idea of a libraries with no bound books has been a recurring theme in conversations about the future of academe for a long time, and it has become common practice for academic libraries to store rarely used volumes in off-campus facilities. But there are few, if any, examples of libraries that actually have zero bound books in them.

"Some libraries, such as the main one at the University of California at Merced, and the engineering library at Stanford University, have drastically reduced the number of print volumes they keep in the actual library building, choosing to focus on beefing up their electronic resources. In fact, some overenthusiastic headline writers at one point dubbed Stanford’s library 'bookless.' But that is 'a vision statement, not a point of fact,' says Andrew Herkovic, the director of communications for Stanford’s libraries.  

"San Antonio says it now has the first actual bookless library. Students who stretch out in the library’s ample study spaces — which dominate the floor plan of the new building — and log on to its resource network using their laptops or the library’s 10 public computers will be able to access 425,000 e-books and 18,000 electronic journal articles. Librarians will have offices there and will be available for consultations" (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/17/libraries, accessed 09-19-2010).

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), introduced Images, an online database of more than 2.5 million images and figures from medical and life sciences journals. 

In October 2010 Kevin Systrom and Cheyenne Foster launched Instagram, an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enabled users to take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share on a variety of networking services, including its own. Instagram was purchased in April 2012 by Facebook for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.  After regulatory approval the deal closed in September 2012 by which time Instagram had over 100 million users. 

"On December 17, 2012, Instagram updated its Terms of Service to allow Instagram the right to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation after January 16, 2013. The criticism from privacy advocates, consumers and even National Geographic which suspended its Instagram account, prompted Instagram to issue a statement retracting the controversial terms. Instagram is currently working on developing new language to replace the disputed terms of use" (Wikipedia article on Instagram, accessed 12-22-2012).

The drama film, The Social Network, based on the book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, by Ben Mezrich, was released by Columbia Pictures.

The book was adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. Jesse Eisenberg portrayed the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, to considerable critical acclaim.

Zuckerberg has been widely acknowledged as a programming prodigy. The film portrays him not only in that way, but as so focused on programming, and so insensitive to other people's feelings as to be almost autistic. One can hardly imagine that anyone as overly focused on programming as Zuckerberg is portrayed in the film could have understood the social nuances sufficiently to build it into the world's top social media site. The Wikipedia article on Zuckerberg indicates that he is more well-rounded than characterized in the film, having a strong background in classics and fond of quoting from Greek and Latin literature, especially epic poetry. 

♦ On January 30, 2010 Jesse Eisenberg and Mark Zuckerberg appeared together on Saturday Night Live.  You may view a clip of that here: http://mashable.com/2011/01/30/zuckerberg-on-snl/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Mashable+(Mashable)

In a blog entitled "On the Future of Books" James Crawford, engineering director Google Books reported that Google Books had scanned, and made searchable, more than 15 million books from more than 100 countries in over 400 languages as part of the Google Books project initiated in 2004.

In response to the growth of digital information and the widely-felt desire to conserve natural resources, a website advertised the practical value and ecological properties of paper:

"All over the world, people use paper every day. From eco-friendly food packaging to recyclable newspapers and magazines, to office paper, printing paper and tissue paper, most people can’t get through the day without it. Paper makes our world better. And when we make the right paper choices, we get the chance to return the favor.

"So, why is it that so many people seem to have turned on paper? Through misleading environmental claims like deforestation, excessive energy consumption and crowded landfill sites, it’s been the source of recent bad publicity. However, with a little more information, it soon becomes clear that paper isn’t the cause of environmental destruction. In fact, it just may offer a solution. So we decided to clear up the confusion and turn a page in the way people see paper. Below are a few key reasons why paper is good — and why the right paper is even better.  

"For starters, making paper doesn’t destroy forests. In fact, the forest products industry plants more than 1.7 million trees per day. When you think about it, it just makes sense. After all, if we don’t ensure a steady supply of raw materials, how can we continue to provide the products that so many people rely on to communicate and store information each and every day? That’s why, for every tree we harvest, several more are planted or naturally regenerated in its place. And it’s not just about sustaining paper. It’s also about sustaining forest life. Domtar harvests trees from forests that are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC®) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI), ensuring environmental responsibility throughout the life cycle of our products. Domtar EarthChoice® papers are also supported by the Rainforest Alliance and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada, and we’re proud to play a part in ensuring our forests — and the wildlife within them — are well taken care of, for years to come.  

"Paper is portable, secure, consistent and permanent. It’s 100% recyclable. And the people who make it have made great strides in reducing overall energy consumption and protecting natural forests. Maybe that’s why there are nearly 750 million acres of forests in the U.S. — about the same as 100 years ago. Additionally, annual net growth of U.S. forests is 36 percent higher than the volume of annual tree removals, and total forest cover in the U.S. and Canada has basically remained the same from 1990 to 2005.1 By planting new seedlings, we help rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and replace it with fresh oxygen. As young trees grow, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. And as a wood-based product, paper continues to store carbon throughout its lifetime. Planting new trees can also combat global warming. For every ton of wood a forest produces, it removes 1.47 tons of CO2 from the air and replaces it with 1.07 ton of oxygen.2

"Like most industrial conversion processes, making paper does consume a lot of energy. However, Domtar and many other pulp and paper companies have made a serious commitment to reduced energy consumption and energy efficiency. In 2009, Domtar used an average of 78% renewable energy at its mill operations. Burning fossil fuels, such as natural gas, oil and coal is a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but the pulp and paper industry largely uses renewable energy sources that are considered carbon neutral to generate steam and electricity. By making paper using more renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency, Domtar mills continue to reduce their carbon footprint.  

"Paper has often been accused of taking up excessive landfill space. However, thanks to the success of neighborhood curbside recycling programs, increased community awareness and individual activism, recycling rates are now at an all-time high. In 2009, over 63 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling.3 To put it in perspective, the recovery rate for metal is 36 percent; glass is 22 percent; and plastic is only 7 percent" (http://www.paperbecause.com/Paper-is-Sustainable/Paper-is-Not-Bad, accessed 10-27-2010).

Wireless provider Ncell, Kathmandu, Nepal, launched 3G wireless telephony services in the Mount Everest area.

"This, of course, is not just so adventure seekers can live-tweet their ascent to the top of Everest. The 3G roll out will also provide residents in the area with much-needed access to advanced telecom services. By the end of 2011, Ncell will provide mobile coverage to more than 90 percent of the people in Nepal, according to TeliaSonera, which owns Ncell.

"The company's 3G base station is located at an altitude of about 17,000 feet and is the highest in the world, TeliaSonera said. It will enable locals, climbers, and trekkers to surf the Web, send video clips and e-mails, and make calls at rates cheaper than satellite phones" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371750,00.asp)

In October 2010 the social networking and brief messaging site, Twitter, based in San Francisco, had 175 million registered users, up from 503,000 in 2007 and 58 million in 2009. It was adding about 370,000 new users a day.

"It has helped transform the way that news is gathered and distributed, reshaped how public figures from celebrities to political leaders communicate, and played a role in popular protests in Iran, China and Moldova. It has become so muscular and ubiquitous that it now competes with the likes of Google and Facebook for users — and is beginning to compete with them for advertising dollars" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/technology/31ev.html?hp, accessed 10-30/2010).

In November 2010 there were approximately 8,900,000 robots operating in the world, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

In November 2010 the first video of a woman giving birth in an open MRI machine was taken at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany.  The team led by Christian Bamberg, M.D. first published the results as "Human birth observed in real-time open magnetic resonance imaging," in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in January 2012.  Supplementary material, including the video of the final 45 minutes of labor, was published  as Vol. 206, issue, pp. 505.e1-505e6, June 2012.

Microsoft introduced Kinect, a natural user interface providing full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition, for the Xbox 360 video game platform. The device featured an "RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software."  It enabled users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller.

"The system tracks 48 parts of your body in three-dimensional space. It doesn’t just know where your hand is, like the Wii. No, the Kinect tracks the motion of your head, hands, torso, waist, knees, feet and so on" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue.html?scp=1&sq=kinect&st=cse, accessed 11-04-2010).

John G. Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, proposed a new digital legal information environment for the future.

In a lecture summary published in his blog Palfrey wrote: 

"I propose a path toward a new legal information environment that is predominantly digital in nature. This new era grows out of a long history of growth and change in the publishing of legal information over more than nine hundred years years, from the early manuscripts at the roots of English common law in the reign of the Angevin King Henry II; through the early printed treatises of Littleton and Coke in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, (including those in the extraordinary collection of Henry N. Ess III); to the systemic improvements introduced by Blackstone in the late eighteenth century; to the modern period, ushered in by Langdell and West at the end of the nineteenth century. Now, we are embarking upon an equally ambitious venture to remake the legal information environment for the twenty-first century, in the digital era.  

"We should learn from advances in cloud computing, the digital naming systems, and youth media practices, as well as classical modes of librarianship, as we envision – and, together, build – a new system for recording, indexing, writing about, and teaching what we mean by the law. A new legal information environment, drawing comprehensively from contemporary technology, can improve access to justice by the traditionally disadvantaged, including persons with disabilities; enhance democracy; promote innovation and creativity in scholarship and teaching; and promote economic development. This new legal information architecture must be grounded in a reconceptualization of the public sector’s role and draw in private parties, such as Google, Amazon, Westlaw, and LexisNexis, as key intermediaries to legal information.  

"This new information environment will have unintended – and sometimes negative – consequences, too. This trajectory toward openness is likely to change the way that both professionals and the public view the law and the process of lawmaking. Hierarchies between those with specialized knowledge and power and those without will continue its erosion. Lawyers will have to rely upon an increasingly broad range of skills, rather than serving as gatekeepers to information, to command high wages, just as new gatekeepers emerge to play increasingly important roles in the legal process. The widespread availability of well-indexed digital copies of legal work-products will also affect the ways in which lawmakers of all types think and speak in ways that are hard to anticipate. One indirect effect of these changes, for instance, may be a greater receptivity on the part of lawmakers to calls for substantive information privacy rules for individuals in a digital age.  

"An effective new system will not emerge on its own; the digital environment, like the physical, is a built environment. As lawyers, teachers, researchers, and librarians, we share an interest in the way in which legal information is created, stored, accessed, manipulated, and preserved over the long term. We will have to work together to overcome several stumbling blocks, such as state-level assertions of copyright. As collaborators, we could design and develop it together over the next decade or so. The net result — if we get it right — will be improvements in the way we teach and learn about the law and how the system of justice functions" (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2010/11/09/henry-n-ess-iii-chair-lecture-notes/, accessed 12-10-2010).

An original Apple 1 personal computer in excellent condition but with a few later modifications, sold for 110,000 pounds or $174,000 hammer at a Christie's book and manuscript auction in London. (Christie's sale 7882, lot 65).

Associated Press reported that the purchaser was businessman and collector Marco Boglione of Torino, Italy, who bid by phone. His total cost came to 133,250 pounds or about $210,000 after the buyer's premium. Prior to the auction, Christie's estimated the computer would sell for between $160,000-$240,000. When it was released in 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66.

Only about 200 Apple 1's were built, of which perhaps "30 to 50" remain in existence. The auctioned example came in its original box with a signed letter from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who hand-built each of the Apple 1's, attended the auction, and offered to autograph the computer.  

See also: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_16695428?source=rss&nclick_check=1, accessed 11-23-2010.

At Sotheby's in 2012 another Apple 1 sold for $374,500. In November 2012 still another Apple 1 sold for $640,000 at Auction Team Breker in Cologne, Germany.

In U.S. Federal Court in Oakland, California Oracle Corporation, based in Redwood Shores, California, won a $1,300,000,000 copyright infringement judgment against SAP AG, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.

The judgment—an indication of the size and scale of the software industry— was a result of a lawsuit filed by Oracle in 2007 claiming that a unit of SAP U.S. made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees, and in an attempt to steal customers. 

"The verdict, which came after one day of deliberations, is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest U.S. jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. . . .

"The verdict is the 23rd-biggest jury award of all time, according to Bloomberg data. The largest jury award in a copyright-infringement case previously was $136 million verdict by a Los Angeles jury in 2002 in a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit against Media Group Inc. for copying and distributing 1,500 songs by artists including Elvis Presley, Madonna and James Brown, according to Bloomberg data" (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-24/oracle-wins-1-3-billion-from-sap-in-downloading-case.html, accessed 11-24-2010).

On July 13, 2011, SAP filed a motion seeking judgment that actual damages should not be based on hypothetical licenses, and for a new trial for the amount of damages.

"On September 1, 2011, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton granted the judgment as a matter of law on the hypothetical license damages, and vacated the $1.3 billion award amount. In her ruling Judge Hamilton stated:

" 'Oracle’s suggestion – that upon proof of infringement, copyright plaintiffs are automatically entitled to seek “hypothetical” license damages because they are presumed to have suffered harm in the form of lost license fees – has no support in the law.'

"SAP's motion for a new trial was granted, conditioned on Oracle rejecting a remittitur of $272 million, the 'maximum amount of lost profits and infringer’s profits sustainable by the proof.' Judge Hamilton further stated:

" 'Determining a hypothetical license price requires an 'objective, not a subjective” analysis, and '[e]xcessively speculative' claims must be rejected.' " (Wikipedia article on Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG, accessed 04-24-2013).

"The United States diplomatic cables leak began on 28 November 2010 when the website WikiLeaks and five major newspapers published confidential documents of detailed correspondences between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world. The publication of the U.S. embassy cables is the third in a series of U.S. classified document 'mega-leaks' distributed by WikiLeaks in 2010, following the Afghan War documents leak in July, and the Iraq War documents leak in October. The contents of the cables describe international affairs from 274 embassies dated from 1966–2010, containing diplomatic analysis of world leaders, an assessment of host countries, and a discussion about international and domestic issues.

"The first 291 of the 251,287 documents were published on 28 November, with simultaneous press coverage from El País (Spain), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and The New York Times (United States). Over 130,000 of the documents are unclassified; none are classified as 'top secret' on the classification scale; some 100,000 are labeled 'confidential'; and about 15,000 documents have the higher classification 'secret'. As of December 8, 2010 1060 individual cables had been released. WikiLeaks plans to release the entirety of the cables in phases over several months" (Wikipedia article on United States diplomatic cables leak, accessed 12-08-2010).

Google Earth 6 enabled the user to "fly from outer space down to the streets with the new Street View and easily navigate. . . . Switch to ground-level view to see the same location in 3D."  

The program also introduced 3D trees in locations all over the world, and a more user-friendly interface for the historical imagery enabling comparison of recent and historical satellite imagery when available.

Google introduced the Google Earth Engine.

(http://blog.google.org/2010/12/introducing-google-earth-engine.html)

"Google Earth Engine brings together the world's satellite imagery—trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years—and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the earth's surface" (http://earthengine.googlelabs.com/#intro).

As part of a description of a potential costly (1 billion euros) European scheme to simulate the entire planet earth, MIT's Technology Review published an article listing and describing the "The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet." These databases cover climate, health, finance, economics, traffic, and other topics. Only a few, such as the Wikipedia, Google Earth, the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and Wolfram Alpha, are widely known to generalists, such as the author of this database.

Google opened its online digital bookstore, Google ebooks.

"Google executives described the e-bookstore as an 'open ecosystem' that will offer more than three million books, including hundreds of thousands for sale and millions free.  

"More than 4,000 publishers, including large trade book companies like Random House, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, have made books available for sale through Google , many at prices that are identical to those of other e-bookstores.  

 " 'We really think it’s important that the book business have this open diversity of retail points, just like it does in print,' Tom Turvey, the director of strategic partnerships at Google, said in an interview. 'We want to make sure we maintain that and support that.' Customers can set up an account for buying books, store them in a central online, password-protected library and read them on personal computers, tablets, smartphones and e-readers. A Web connection will not be necessary to read a book, however; users can use a dedicated app that can be downloaded to an iPad, iPhone or Android phone.  

"A typical user could begin reading an e-book on an iPad at home, continue reading the same book on an Android phone on the subway and then pick it up again on a Web browser at the office, with the book opening each time to the place where the user left off.  

"The Google eBookstore could be a significant benefit to independent bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., that have signed on to sell Google e-books on their Web sites through Google — the first significant entry for independents into the e-book business.  

" 'This levels the playing field,' said Oren Teicher, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. 'If you want to buy e-books, you don’t just have to buy them from the big national outlets' (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/business/media/07ebookstore.html?hp

"The website of MasterCard has been hacked and partially paralysed in apparent revenge for the international credit card's decision to cease taking donations to WikiLeaks. A group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous appear to have orchestrated a DDOS ('distributed denial of service') attack on the site, bringing its service at www.mastercard.com to a halt for many users. " 'Operation: Payback' is the latest salvo in the increasingly febrile technological war over WikiLeaks. MasterCard announced on Monday that it would no longer process donations to the whistleblowing site, claiming it was engaged in illegal activity.  

"The group, which has been linked to the influential internet messageboard 4Chan, has been targeting commercial sites which have cut their ties with WikiLeaks. The Swiss bank PostFinance has already been targeted by Anonymous after it froze payments to WikiLeaks, and the group has vowed to target Paypal, which has also ceased processing payments to the site. Other possible targets are EveryDNS.net, which suspended dealings on 3 December, Amazon, which removed WikiLeaks content from its EC2 cloud on 1 December, and Visa, which suspended its own dealings yesterday.  

"The action was confirmed on Twitter at 9.39am by user @Anon_Operation, who later tweeted: 'WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT http://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT'S CONFIRMED! #ddos #wikileaks Operation:Payback(is a bitch!) #PAYBACK'

"No one from MasterCard could be reached for immediate comment, but a spokesman, Chris Monteiro, has said the site suspended dealings with WikiLeaks because 'MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal'.  

"DDOS attacks, which often involve flooding the target with requests so that it cannot cope with legitimate communication, are illegal" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/mastercard-hackers-wikileaks-revenge, accessed 12-08-2010).

According to an article published in The New York Times, at the end of 2010 one of the hottest selling fields in ebooks was romance novels, which were also top-sellers in paperback. It turns out that many buyers preferred ordering romance novels online in privacy to buying them in public locations such as drug stores where they might run into people they knew. Many also preferred to read these on an ebook reader, especially in public places like buses or trains, so they didn't have to expose the racy nature of the novels, typically advertised in the graphics on the covers of paperback editions.

American e-book sales will reach almost $1 billion by the end of 2010, according to new research.

"A report published by technology and market research company Forrester presented a five year forecast for e-books in the US. The firm surveyed 4,000 people for the report and found 2010 will end with $966m worth of e-books sold to consumers. By 2015 the industry will have nearly tripled to almost 3bn, a point at which Forrester said the industry will be 'forever altered'.

The study has also found e-book buying falls very low on the list of how people acquire books, with just 7% of adults who read books and are active online reading e-books. However, Forrester said this 7% 'read the most books and spend the most money on books'.

"A blog by Forrester researcher James McQuivey said: 'We have plenty of room to grow beyond the 7% that read e-books today and, once they get the hang of it, e-book readers quickly shift a majority of their book reading to a digital form. More e-book readers reading a greater percentage of their books in digital form means our nearly $3 billion figure in 2015 will be easy to hit, even if nothing else changes in the industry.'  

"McQuivey too urged publishers to take digital seriously in order to prepare for a day when 'physical book publishing is an adjunct activity that supports the digital publishing business' " (http://www.thebookseller.com/news/133944-us-e-book-sales-to-reach-1-billion.html, accessed 11-12-2010).

John Palfrey and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard announced that it would begin coordinating plans for a Digital Public Library of America.

This initiative was stimulated by an article published by Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books on on October 4, 2010 entitled "A Library Without Walls."

Related to the Berkman Center's announcement, an article appeared in Libraryjournal.com by Michael Kelly on December 15, 2010: "New Plan Seeks a 'Big Tent' for a National Digital Library." 

A highly interdisciplinary group of scientists, primarily from Harvard University: Jean-Baptiste Michel,Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva P. Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak and Erez Lieberman Aiden published "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books," Science, Published Online December 16 2010 Science 14 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6014 pp. 176-182 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644

The authors were associated with the following organizations: Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences Department of Psychology, Department of Systems Biology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Harvard College Google, Inc. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department of Mathematics, Broad Institute of Harvard and MITCambridge School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard Society of Fellows, Laboratory-at-Large.

This paper from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and collaborators represented the first major publication resulting from The Google Labs N-gram (Ngram) Viewer,

"the first tool of its kind, capable of precisely and rapidly quantifying cultural trends based on massive quantities of data. It is a gateway to culturomics! The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (banana) or phrases ('United States of America') in books over time. You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published" (http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/A-users-guide-to-culturomics, accessed 12-19-2010).

"We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities" (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644, accessed 12-19-2010).  

"The Cultural Observatory at Harvard is working to enable the quantitative study of human culture across societies and across centuries. We do this in three ways: Creating massive datasets relevant to human culture Using these datasets to power wholly new types of analysis Developing tools that enable researchers and the general public to query the data" (http://www.culturomics.org/cultural-observatory-at-harvard, accessed 12-19-2010).

Google announced Google Maps 5.0 for Android, with two significant new features: 3D interaction and offline reliability.

"In order to create these features, we rebuilt Maps using vector graphics to dynamically draw the map as you use it. Building a vector graphics engine capable of achieving the visual quality and performance level you expect from Google Maps was a major technical challenge and enables all sorts of future possibilities. So we wanted to give you a closer look under the hood at the technology driving the next generation of mobile maps.

". . . . Previously, Google Maps downloaded the map as sets of individual 256x256 pixel 'image tiles.'Each pre-rendered image tile was downloaded with its own section of map imagery, roads, labels and other features baked right in. Google Maps would download each tile as you needed it and then stitch sets together to form the map you see. It takes more than 360 billion tiles to cover the whole world at 20 zoom levels! Now, we use vector graphics to dynamically draw the map. Maps will download 'vector tiles' that describe the underlying geometry of the map. You can think of them as the blueprints needed to draw a map, instead of static map images. Because you only need to download the blueprints, the amount of data needed to draw maps from vector tiles is drastically less than when downloading pre-rendered image tiles. Google Maps isn’t the first mobile app to use vector graphics—in fact, Google Earth and our Navigation (Beta) feature do already. But a combination of modern device hardware and innovative engineering allow us to stream vector tiles efficiently and render them smoothly, while maintaining the speed and readability we require in Google Maps" (The Official Google Blog, 12-17-2010).

GameCollage.com, based in Seattle, issued Three Little Pigs and the Secrets of a Popup Book for iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad. 

The app, which cost $3.99, was an interactive children's book which allowed the reader to push, pull, spine, slide and explorer interactive pages, and to see, in a virtual way, how the mechanism of the book would work if it were an actual paper pop-up book. The art was adapted from original illustrations by L. Leslie Brooke.  The app included a "whimsical sound track with colorful sound effects." When apples fell out of the tree, they fell in the direction the iPad was tipped. 

Unlike an actual popup book printed on paper, which might feature high quality paper, paper engineering, printing, and binding,  the app featured "silky smooth animation running at constant 60 frames per second," and a "highly polished user interface."

A video ad for the app may be viewed on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uMavEEyrzs&feature=player_embedded, accessed 04-15-2011.

According to an article in The New York Times, in December 2010 ebooks represented 9 to 10 percent of trade-book sales.

To pay for ongoing defence costs, Australian journalist, publisher, and Internet activist Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, stated in December 2010 that he would release an autobiography next year, having signed publishing deals that he told a British newspaper might be worth $1.7 million. Apart from the censorship and political elements of this case, the book contract underlined the commercial distinctions between commercial book publishing and many websites which generate little or no revenue, as for example Wikileaks, which is intentionally non-profit.

"Mr. Assange told The Sunday Times of London that he had signed an $800,000 deal with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House, in the United States, and a $500,000 deal with Canongate books in Britain. With further rights and serialization, he told the newspaper, he expected his earnings to rise to $1.7 million.  

"Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Random House, said Monday that the book would be 'a complete account of his life through the present day, including the founding of WikiLeaks and the work he has done there.' The deal, Mr. Bogaards said, was initiated by one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers in mid-December and was signed in a matter of days. He would not discuss the financial terms. Canongate has not yet made a public comment but has spoken of its own deal in messages on Twitter.

“ 'I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,' Mr. Assange told the newspaper, explaining that his legal costs in fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct, have reached more than $300,000. 'I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat,' he said.  

"Mr. Assange is under what he has called 'high-tech house arrest' in an English mansion while he awaits hearings, beginning Jan. 11, regarding those allegations. Two women in Stockholm have accused him of rape, unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation over a four-day period last August. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the matter, and has called the case 'a smear campaign' led by those who seek to stop him from leaking classified government and corporate documents" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/europe/28wiki.html?_r=1&hpw, accessed 12-28-2010).

"Facebook was not only the most searched item of the year, but it passed Google as America’s most-visited website in 2010, according to a new report from Experian Hitwise.  

"For the second year in a row, 'facebook' was the top search term among U.S. Internet users. The search term accounted for 2.11% of all searches, according to Hitwise. Even more impressive is the fact that three other variations of Facebook made it into the top 10: “facebook login” at #2, 'facebook.com' at #6 and “www.facebook.com” at #9. Combined, they accounted for 3.48% of all searches, a 207% increase from Facebook’s position last year.  

"Rounding out the list of top search terms were YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, eBay, Yahoo and Mapquest. Other companies that made big moves in terms of searches include Hulu, Netflix, Verizon and ESPN. The search term “games” also made its first appearance in the list of Hitwise’s top 50 search terms.  

"More interesting though is Facebook’s ascension to number one on Hitwise’s list of most-visited websites. The social network accounted for 8.93% of all U.S. visits in 2010 (January-November), beating Google (7.19%), Yahoo Mail (3.52%), Yahoo (3.30%) and YouTube (2.65%). However, Facebook didn’t beat the traffic garnered by all of Google’s properties combined (9.85%).  

"It’s only a matter of time until Facebook topples the entire Google empire, though. We’ve seen the trend develop for months: Facebook is getting bigger than Google. According to comScore, Facebook’s U.S. traffic grew by 55% in the last year and has shown no sign of slowing down" (http://mashable.com/2010/12/29/2010-the-year-facebook-dethroned-google-as-king-of-the-web-stats/, accessed 12-31-2010).