The White House has challenged developers to develop apps that help prevent abuse. The announcement at Challenge.gov is called Apps Against Abuse.
The challenge: Vice President Biden and Secretary Sebelius are honored to announce a challenge that encourages the development of applications that provide college students and young adults with the tools to help prevent dating violence and sexual assault. The application envisioned will offer individuals a way to connect with trusted friends in real-time to prevent abuse or violence from occurring. While the application will serve a social function of helping people stay in touch with their friends, it will also allow friends to keep track of each other’s whereabouts and check in frequently to avoid being isolated in vulnerable circumstances.
Information about the challenge, the prizes, the judges, and details for how to enter are all at the above URL.
Back when I lived in Austin, the live music capital of the world, I was doing some freelance web design. I made a number of sites for musicians. Among them was Mady Kaye, a jazz vocalist.
The Jazz
Mady has a solo career with 3 CDs under her own name. She’s part of a group called The Austin Carolers who wander Austin like minstrels during the Christmas holidays and sing carols. Mady is part of a trio called The Beat Divas, three fantastic singers who love to sing jazz and pop tunes, write original music, and cook.
Several months ago I told Mady I wanted to stop doing the maintenance on her web site, and asked her if she’d be willing to take over doing it herself if I switched her into a blog platform and taught her how to use WordPress. She said yes, and after a few tutoring sessions, she was running the blog like a pro.
The Food
One of the things The Beat Divas have been doing for years is teaching cooking classes at Austin’s Central Market cooking school. But they don’t just teach, they sing while they cook. They write their own songs about food and cooking. The Divas have 2 CDs, one of which is called “Dishin’ with the Divas: Songs of Food, Love & Mayhem.” Here’s one of the songs:
Here’s their first video, several years old and a clear demonstration of how much fun they have cooking and singing.
As you can see, the jazz and the food are whisked together a bit.
The Freedom
Since taking over the site herself, Mady and her various musical endeavors have really shown a burst of creativity. She’s always been creative, don’t misunderstand. But the Internet, social media, Facebook, YouTube, and a blog are types of creativity she’s never explored before. She used to say to me, “I’m a musician, I don’t want to know all that web stuff.” She learned, and she learned magnificently.
Give a woman a blog and just stand back and watch what happens, is what I say. She sings, she cooks, she blogs. It’s inspiring.
The GOP presidential contenders had a debate last night. Mashable talks Twitter stats about it. As the election season heats up, it’s going to be interesting to watch how and what both parties try to do with the Internet and social media to help advance their causes. If Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber can be brilliant with social media, then maybe the politicos can figure it out too. I know you’re sick of hearing about Anthony Weiner, but this post about his Twitter habits at Wired Pen is pretty interesting.
Open Culture is a great resource for all kinds of educational podcasts and videos. Check out the technology podcasts list. Some terrific programs there that you will enjoy.
Have you heard of rem? It means “root em” and is a new feature in CSS 3 that you can learn about from Jonathan Snook in Font-sizing with rem.
A great thing about Wired Pen is that everything is questioned and checked. Like an oft retweeted quote attributed to Mark Twain hiding among the 4000 tweets per second about Osama bin Laden on May 1. Chasing a Meme: The Twain Quote that Isn’t.
Visualizing First-Time Interactions at SXSW from Pleasure and Pain is another of those charts of hubs, connections, and connectors that is so fascinating. This time it uses contacts made via Hashable.