We’ve got the best resource for you to discover the meaning behind every trend that hits Twitter’s front page, so you can chime in and shed some light on these trends for your fellow tweeters.
First thing’s first: bookmark What The Trend right now. This is the resource for discovering the meaning behind any and all trends on Twitter.
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If you’re interested in helping What The Trend curate Twitter trend definitions, you can create an account and earn reputation points with each action you do, such as voting for definitions. After you’ve accumulated enough points, you’ll get additional abilities on the site, such as the ability to edit other people’s posts.
via How To Find Out The Meaning Of Every Trending Topic On Twitter – AllTwitter.
pets, dogs, random: Who thinks of this stuff … but tomorrow I will watch for asymmetric tail-waggin.
Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings.
Right Brain, Left Brain The muscles on either side of the tail apparently reflect emotions like fear and love registering in the brain.
Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means “don’t mess with me.” Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means “I am sooo happy to see you!”
But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.
via If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail – New York Times.
Paris, hotels, travel, Mama Shelter: OK, I am really considering this …
Mama Shelter, Paris
Two French hospitality heavyweights, former Club Med chief executive Serge Trigano and legendary designer Philippe Starck, paired up to turn a dilapidated parking garage in the far-from-charming 20th Arrondissement into an impossibly hip 172-room hotel. Starck’s whimsical design touches are on full display in the lobby, from the gold-and-silver tree-stump stools and curtains dotted with four-leaf clovers and floating eyes to the chalkboard ceiling covered with phrases and diagrams.
via Coolest Hotel Lobbies- Page 11 – Articles | Travel + Leisure.
crime, FBI, media, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter: … sign of the times …
But in a sign that the online revolution is infiltrating that most traditional of agencies, the bureau unveiled Monday a publicity campaign featuring public service announcements in 14 cities and billboards in New York’s Times Square, along with a heavy dose of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The purpose: to help agents catch James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster and government informant who vanished 16 years ago.The 81-year-old is charged in 19 killings and has been on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list since 1999. Bul ger, an inspiration for the movie “The Departed,’’ has been called “Boston’s boogeyman” and has supposedly been “seen” in nearly every state and on at least five continents
via FBI uses social media in search for long-time fugitive – The Washington Post.
food – homemade, pizza: I love homemade pizza … I may try some of his suggestions.
There is nothing like pizza fresh out of a brick oven. That thin-yet-chewy crust blistered to perfection was one of those things I thought was utterly impossible to reproduce at home — until I met Andrew Feinberg.
women’s rights, abortion, global issues, provincial viewpoints: This is a very tough issue … but to me one of the most compelling points in this book review is this one: “Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue.” I hope n educating my children, I am able to give them a larger world view.
But oddly enough, Ms. Hvistendahl notes, it is usually a country’s rich, not its poor, who lead the way in choosing against girls. “Sex selection typically starts with the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” she writes. “Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines.” The behavior of elites then filters down until it becomes part of the broader culture. Even more unexpectedly, the decision to abort baby girls is usually made by women—either by the mother or, sometimes, the mother-in-law.
If you peer hard enough at the data, you can actually see parents demanding boys. Take South Korea. In 1989, the sex ratio for first births there was 104 boys for every 100 girls—perfectly normal. But couples who had a girl became increasingly desperate to acquire a boy. For second births, the male number climbed to 113; for third, to 185. Among fourth-born children, it was a mind-boggling 209. Even more alarming is that people maintain their cultural assumptions even in the diaspora; research shows a similar birth-preference pattern among couples of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent right here in America.
Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” she writes. “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.” As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China’s Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.
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It is telling that Ms. Hvistendahl identifies a ban on abortion—and not the killing of tens of millions of unborn girls—as the “worst nightmare” of feminism. Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue. Yet, while she is not willing to say that something has gone terribly wrong with the pro-abortion movement, she does recognize that two ideas are coming into conflict: “After decades of fighting for a woman’s right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right.”
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This is where choice leads. This is where choice has already led. Ms. Hvistendahl may wish the matter otherwise, but there are only two alternatives: Restrict abortion or accept the slaughter of millions of baby girls and the calamities that are likely to come with it.
apps, superlatives, lists: Enjoy … this list includes some of my favorites.
Life isn’t a beauty pageant, but that doesn’t mean your app collection shouldn’t be spiffy looking. When an iPad app blows us away with its graphics or interface it quickly becomes one of our most used apps. After toiling in the App Store for days, we’re proud to offer our roundup of 50 of the most beautiful apps available for the iPad.
tweet of the day, Great Recession, healthcare, desperation: More on this tomorrow …
 CBS News (@CBSNews)6/21/11 3:33 PM N.C. man admits to robbing $1 from bank to get free prison healthcare http://bit.ly/j1sZSS (via@crimesider) |
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