Mastering Box Shadows is from Sitepoint.
WTF QR Codes is a little fun giving you a laugh or two at high tech.
Doris Chen’s blog at MSDN is full of goodies. Just discovered her by accident. She’s very active with HTML5.
Author: vdebolt
Pew Study on Privacy Management on Social Media Sites
Sometimes it feels like most of the privacy issues on the Internet are women’s issues. The stalkers, the sexual wannabes, the trolls — they seem to prey mainly on women. But men have privacy issues, too. The most recent Pew Internet Study takes a look at privacy management practices among both sexes.
According to Pew, 63% of adults have some sort of online profile. That’s up about 20% from 2006. Of those online profiles, only about 20% are completely public. Most people (58%) have their profiles set to friends only. There’s also a percentage (19%) who use a setting that allows friends and friends of friends to see profiles. Out of that 19% who allow friends and friends of friends to see what they post, about 26% say they set privacy for individual posts that will bar some from seeing posts. Turn that around, it means 74% of that minority of users are allowing friends to spread around anything they want to share.
Women, however, are more careful. Pew identifies the habits of women as more “conservative in basic settings.” The following chart by Pew is labeled as privacy gender gap.
Image: Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project
As you can see, the majority of women (67%) restrict access to information to friends only.
Women are also the most likely to delete friends, remove comments, and–on sites where photos can be tagged–women are most likely to remove their name from tagged photos. The number of people who report culling friends, deleting comments, and removing a name from tagged photos is up in the last few years, but it still not a majority behavior in most age groups. However, in the 18-29 demographic, this kind of profile control is prevalent.
For the 18-29 demographic, the Pew study says,
Deleting social media comments is part of the reputation management work of being a young adult.
Removing comments and tags on photos is a way of managing what other people are posting. As for management of one’s own content, only 11% of the people in the study say they have posted something they regret. The percent of people posting things they regret are most often men or young adults, again supporting the idea that women are more careful and thoughtful about what they are putting on social media sites.
If these results seem Facebook-centric in terminology, that’s because Facebook remains huge. Fully 93% of people who do have an online profile are on Facebook. MySpace continues to lose, with only 23% of the surveyed users being there. Twitter users are up, but still only account for 11% of online profiles. Google+ wasn’t mentioned in the study that I could find.
Also interesting, many users (55%) maintain a profile on only one site.
Personal Reflections
I don’t fit anybody’s idea of demographics. My age, my gender, and my occupation are all way off the charts in terms of normal demographics. Nevertheless, I think a few personal reflections are in order, because I think I at least represent how women act online.
First, I have never deleted a friend on any social media site I belong to. That’s because I’m very picky about who I friend. If I don’t know you personally or have a good reason to want to friend you for professional purposes, you don’t make the cut. Does this describe you, too?
Secondly, I have multiple online profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Google +, BlogHer, and more at smaller and more specialized sites. Are you a single profile person, or a multiple profile person?
Finally, I think we all (but especially women) need to be vigilant about online profiles and behavior because the landscape changes constantly. New information about privacy violations appear in the news regularly. It falls to us, the users, to take frequent tours through the account settings of the sites we use to ensure good privacy control. We cannot depend on online sites to be careful for us.
Resources
Pew linked to some very interesting resources that are worth a look.
- The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
- How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?
Another resource, not mentioned by the Pew study, is danah boyd on Teen Privacy Strategies in Networked Publics.
Note: This article is cross-posted at BlogHer.
Finding the CSS3 possibilities in Dreamweaver 5.5
A brilliant examples of interface design that Dreamweaver designers use with some regularity is the CSS rule definition dialog window in Dreamweaver. This window has been approximately the same since the days of Macromedia when it was first instituted.
For many past versions of Dreamweaver, this dialog box covered the full range of what you could do to a generate a selector and write CSS for it. Since CSS3, it’s starting to show signs of age. Some of the new possibilities with CSS3 aren’t available in the options in the rule definition window.
That doesn’t mean Dreamweaver doesn’t have them. You just need to know where to find them.
Logically enough, the place to look is the CSS Panel. In the lower left corner of the CSS Panel, there are icons that allow you to look at CSS properties using either list view or category view. Here’s an example for a rule that uses border-radius to create rounded corners. Look at list view in the properties pane.
In list view, you see the list of potential properties that could be applied. The view shown is at the beginning of the alphabet. Those properties that have rule declarations assigned are indicated with information showing the value assigned. List view includes vendor prefix options listed in alphabetical order.
The other icon at the lower left of the CSS panel that will show you CSS3 possibilities is Category View. Here’s a look at the same rule with category view showing in the properties pane.
The categories are revealed using an accordion style slider to hide or show options. I have the Border category revealed here. Among other things, you see the CSS3 border-radius property. In Category view, Mozilla, Opera, Webkit, and Microsoft have individual category sections where you can find vendor prefix options. Scroll down to find the categories for various vendors to create rules for border-radius (or other properties) with vendor prefixes.
Useful links: WordPress mobile, KeneticsJS, Google History,
WordPress Goes Mobile: responsive design comes to CMSs is from Opera Dev.
KeneticsJS is a free HTML5 canvas library in JavaScript.
How to Delete your Google browsing history before the change. Do it today if you want to do it.
Useful links: responsive navigation, nerd love, Facebook Brand Pages, Hiding Content
Responsive navigation looks at the pros and cons of several types of responsive design navigation options.
Introducing Nerd Love. If you are a nerd with a love story to tell, you may be interested in this new project.
Facebook Brand Pages. An interesting look at eye tracking data on how the new Facebook Brand Pages are going to change things.
Places it’s Tempting to Use display: none, but Don’t. Good article about getting things out of sight without making them inaccessible.
iPhone 4S- How Does Siri Work?
It’s Monday morning and you get up from the bed to get ready to office. You wonder would it rain or not. You pick up your iPhone 4S, click on the microphone tab and ask the question-
‘Siri, Will I need an umbrella today?’
‘The weather is Sunny today in Sydney. Hence no need for the umbrella.’ Comes the prompt reply.
Welcome to the world of voice recognition and artificial intelligence. With the new iPhone 4S, the world of mobile phones has transformed how we use our electronic devices and has provided us with better productivity and convenience.
The Siri application has taken the world by storm by performing certain basic activities like taking notes, sending email, scheduling appointment and many more just by following voice commands. It is better than other speech recognition software we have encountered till now as instead of functioning on pre-determined words, Siri actually tries to understand what you speak and perform tasks accordingly. This leads to an important question- How does Siri work?
When a voice input is provided to Siri, a chain of algorithm is followed which tries to understand what the command means and accordingly produce the output. The following processes occur when you give a command to Siri-
How Does Siri Work?
- Your sound is channeled through the noise cancelling microphone of the iPhone and is encoded into digital format and stored temporarily.
- The digital data is then transferred via internet connection through your ISP to the Siri server located in cloud which is loaded with pre determined AI algorithms to understand the data and provide suitable feedback to your phone.
- Further, the digital data in your iPhone is analyzed locally by a built in recognizer (which communicates with the server) installed in your phone which tries to determine whether the command can be resolved locally (by creating contacts, schedules etc.) or it must connect to the internet for command execution. (For more sophisticated commands like weather report, sending an email etc.)
- The server compares the data with various statistical algorithms already provided and tries to understand the data based on the letters and order of the letters to come up with a solution for the command (voice command). Meanwhile the local recognizer in the phone also tries to compare the data with a shorter version of the statistical algorithm and comes up with a solution. Based on the highest probability between the two solutions, a go ahead signal is given to the corresponding channel.
- The response is then passed through a language model which then tries to compare it with a list of probable interpretations to further ensure accuracy of the response. Then the phone will produce a voice feedback to insure that the command was properly understood. If the program is convinced with the results, then it will execute the task corresponding to what it understood.
Image © Divya Rawat
For instance if it understands that you want to make an appointment with a certain contact, Jack, it will go ahead and ask the question ‘Do you want to make an appointment with Jack?’ to ensure that it properly understood your command.
If it receives a yes or a similar response to the question, (which will also be scrutinized in the same manner) then it will go ahead and create a new entry in the appointment folder with the appropriate note linking with the contact Jack.
The beauty of the program is that the whole process takes less than 3 seconds and can provide with instant feedback and solutions for your queries. Hence Siri can be regarded as a good start in field of Artificial intelligence and although it may not be perfect for now and make lot of mistakes, with further improvement in R&D, the future will be ruled by AI.
Guest author Divya Rawat is a mother and a self confessed SEO and tech-enthusiast. She works as a Writer @ iNetZeal (which offers variety of services including content wrting–click here to read more about their content writing service.)
Review: Head First Mobile Web
Head First Mobile Web (Brain-Friendly Guides)
Generally, I review books about topics I have some experience and expertise in–mostly HTML and CSS with a few general web categories thrown in. I may learn new things, but I’m mostly looking at what’s covered, how it’s handled, how clear the writing is, how clear the examples are, the overall tone of the writing, and the order in which information is delivered.
But I know little about building for the mobile web as a first (and perhaps only) step in creating a web site or app. Hence, excitement.
If you’ve never used a Head First book before, be prepared for different. There are a lot of images, jokes, exercises, quizzes, reminders, and other techniques you don’t normally see in technical writing. Head First books are written this way because of learning research into how best to help you, the reader, remember and use what you read. As you read, you are expected to work along with the text. Downloadable files are provided to help you put together the mobile web sites discussed in the examples. Here are the topics in the table of contents:
- Responsive web design
- Mobile first responsive web design
- A separate mobile website
- Device support
- Device databases and classes
- Frameworks for mobile (the book example uses jQuery Mobile)
- Progressive enhancement, offline mode, and geolocation. This is a very good chapter–the explanation of cache manifests is excellent.
- Hybrid mobile apps with PhoneGap
- Being future friendly
- Appendices include setting up a web server environment, installing WURFL and installing the Android SDK.
In going through these chapters you actually build more than one web site–a responsive one using media queries, a business oriented site with password sign in, and a mobile site with user input and offline uses. There is plenty of discussion about problems, pitfalls and ways to work around them.
I think you could get the information you need to get started building for the mobile web from this book and don’t hesitate to recommend it as a text.
Summary: Good hands-on experience while learning.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of Head First Mobile Web (rating: 5 stars)