WGBH News: Digital Life

Tweeting To Electoral Victory In China? Maybe Not

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:26:00 GMT

Liu Ping's phone is tapped. She's followed by men in black cars. Her electricity was cut off. And she was detained and held incommunicado in a hotel for four days.

Her crime? Trying to run for election to the local People's Congress in her hometown of Xinyu in China's southeastern Jiangxi province.

Her case has unleashed an electoral battle, which is being played out over Twitter — or, at least, its Chinese equivalent, Weibo. Today, 200 million Chinese are microblogging, and as local elections take place, a record number are using this platform to run campaigns as independent candidates. The official reaction has been swift and — in many cases — forceful.

More than 2 million lawmakers are being chosen at local levels in elections now under way across the nation. These elections take place every five years, and non-Communist Party members are allowed to stand.

But in Liu's case, her record of labor activism, sparked by being laid off after three decades at a state-run steel factory, means the odds may have been stacked against her. At first, no one would even tell her where to pick up the nomination form for days. She did manage to submit one at the last minute, but in vain.

"When the preliminary candidates were announced, my name was illegally kicked off the list," she says ruefully. "They told me, 'It is an election under the leadership of the Communist Party, not an election in the United States.' "

When she went to the local election office in person to ask why she hadn't been allowed to stand, she says she was told, "You want to be a people's deputy? You should be a prostitute." She cried on the way home.

But she still wanted to stand, this time as a write-in candidate. All along, she had been using Weibo to publicize her candidacy and the tactics used against her.

Five days before the election, police turned off her electricity. Two days later, they raided her house. The next day, she says, security officials took her to a hotel, confiscated her phone and held her there until after the poll was over.

Despite failing to stand, she still hasn't given up hope.

"The power of a single person is insignificant because we have been deceived for so long. But if other people dare to stand up, a day will come when we will see hope," Liu says.

Independent Candidates' Uphill Struggle

Her experience unleashed a wave of candidacies, with more than 100 people announcing campaigns on Weibo. Xu Yan, a candidate from the eastern city of Hangzhou, is even uploading campaign videos online.

But he too, like many others, is using the relative freedom of Weibo to document the harassment he has suffered. In his case, he quit his job after his employer was put under pressure by the tax, commercial and labor bureaus. Each candidate needs 10 nominations to stand in these elections, and many report that their nominators have been placed under pressure.

Liu Ping is not the only unsuccessful candidate so far. In Panyu, in southern China's Guangdong province, the founder of a grass-roots foundation, Liang Shuxin, also failed to make it on the ballot sheets after local authorities announced new guidelines only permitting female, non-Communist Party members to stand for election.

He is male and a Communist Party member, and although the restriction was removed the following day, he was not on the preliminary candidate list.

There have been signals the government will not tolerate candidates outside its control. One unnamed official told the state mouthpiece, the People's Daily, that there was no such phenomenon as an "independent candidate," as these are not recognized by law.

Internet Provides Soapbox, Protection

Yao Bo, for one, is undeterred. He's a writer, better known by his Weibo handle, Wuyuesanren. He wants to change the system from within.

"The process of democratizing China needs to take one step forward," he says, arguing that China's system of local assemblies is, in essence, not that different from a Western parliamentary system. "We do not want a revolution again, so there must be something that can replace revolution."

Yao says he feels protected by the 237,000 followers of his microblog. He sees the microblog as a soapbox, and a way of sourcing campaign help.

"I can find people who will nominate me online. I can find lawyers, volunteers, people who will design my election material, people who will print it and people who will canvass for me," he says.

He's hoping to stand in Beijing, where he believes the authorities have to play by the rules, and so far, he hasn't been harassed. He's already warned what action he'll take if he is, writing on his microblog: "I am announcing here that if anybody gives trouble to my nominators, I'll ask them to make recordings of it and upload it. If they want to play dirty in the dark, I'll let them see ultraviolet rays."

'A Single Spark Can Start A Prairie Fire'

Elsewhere, several candidates have already been disqualified for various reasons, and others have pulled out before the polls, under pressure.

Sheng Hong, a liberal intellectual from the Unirule Institute of Economics, who has been involved in independent election campaigns since the 1980s, describes the electoral trend as "regressive." He fears that the way local authorities are disregarding their own electoral regulations to disqualify candidates is part of a larger trend, signaling that the central government has lost control of local authorities.

"This is an extremely serious problem now, which I call the collapse of constitutionalism," he says. "Local officials are increasingly lacking in restraint; they abuse their powers and violate citizens' rights, and the central government seems to do nothing to restrain them."

Nonetheless, the woman who sparked this, Liu Ping, believes that in her case, the strategy of crushing her candidacy has backfired.

"They failed, and they failed badly. Excluding me from the election worked in my favor. A single spark can start a prairie fire, and the more they persecute me, the more resistance there will be," she says.

Local election timetables vary around the country, with polls set to run until the end of the year. But as yet, none of the Weibo candidates has been elected. The experience of past independent candidates shows that even if they were to be elected, their real impact on policymaking would be limited.

But the fact that their fate is a hot topic online shows a growing thirst for public participation in politics, and any government suppression of that will come at its own peril. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Comcast Offers A Digital Lifeline To The Disconnected

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:44:00 GMT

Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, has launched a new program aimed at reducing the digital divide, or the gap between high- and low-income communities in Internet accessibility and digital literacy.

The company says low-income families will now be able to get a fast Internet connection for $9.95 per month; the question now is whether the effort can overcome the many barriers that keep the poor from getting online.

Comcast announced the program, called "Internet Essentials," at a splashy event in the company's hometown of Philadelphia. Mayor Michael Nutter showed up along with city and state education officials as a sign that this program is aimed at an important problem: improving school performance.

The program will offer a big discount to low-income families, says Comcast Vice President David Cohen. Basic high-speed Internet, which normally would cost around $50 per month, will be available for the $9.95 rate.

To be eligible, families must have a child who qualifies for the free school lunch program — that means an income of less than $25,000 a year for a family of three. Because Internet access doesn't do much good without a computer, Comcast is also offering coupons that will allow these families to buy a basic PC for $150.

Will The Offer Stand?

Many customers have been offered cable deals that looked good at first, but disappeared in a few months. So Cohen bent over backwards to say that this program is for real.

"It is a permanent price, not a promotional price," he said. "You don't have to buy any other Comcast service to be eligible for that price."

Comcast is not doing this solely out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The company promised to come up with just such a plan in exchange for government approval of its merger with NBCUniversal earlier this year.

The question now is whether low income families will sign up. John Horrigan, who worked with the FCC on its National Broadband Plan, says that in surveys, non-users say that price is a big barrier, "but they also cited other reasons, such as digital skills, [and] lack of awareness of relevant content online."

That's why Horrigan, now with a political advocacy group called TechNet, says Comcast will have to do more than drop the price.

"You also have to offer additional support services, so that these families become sustainable broadband adopters," he says.

Comcast says it's offering digital literacy kits that will explain the basics, like setting up e-mail and preventing kids from accessing indecent content. Consumer groups will be watching to see whether the company keeps up this kind of support, and whether Comcast continues to offer this price, which is supposed to be good for as long as a family has a child that qualifies for free lunch.

Potential Effect On Student Achievement

The link between technology and school achievement is fairly complicated, so it will be hard to tie the Internet Essentials plan to test scores.

Educator Eric Leslie of the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School says Internet access is key to his school's most important goal: getting kids to college.

"To have that financial aid access information [and] to know your different options for college, you have to be able to navigate the Internet and have that access, and not be afraid of it," Leslie says.

While this could be an important step toward bridging the digital divide, it doesn't help customers outside Comcast's footprint, or those who don't have a child qualifying for a free lunch. Consumer groups say there's still little competition for broadband in many markets, so many would-be users must pay what their local phone or cable company demands, or remain disconnected. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Airbnb: Where Homeowners And Travelers Connect

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 08:00:00 GMT

With Starz Announcement, Netflix Takes A Hit

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Hybrid Books: 'Illuminations' And The Future Of The E-Reader

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:58:00 GMT

It is no secret to anyone at this point that e-books are here, they are real and, as reported this week, they are adding up to a sizable chunk (often 20% or more) of publishers' sales. With Amazon plotting to release its own tablet and the national book store chains struggling (or in the case of Borders, simply ceasing to exist), it seems like a real possibility that both paper books and the brick-and-mortar stores that sell them could become the next great endangered species in our media taxonomy.

Still, despite the dismay that so many feel when they imagine a generation of readers more comfortable staring at a screen than flipping pages, hoping to stem change through vehement objection is probably futile. This is the way the industry is shifting, the natural course it will run with new technologies, the manifest destiny of virtual ink. What is worth fighting for in the new landscape is not printed matter itself (which will likely survive a either way, as a rarified collectible even if nothing else), but the preservation of reading as a special act.

What's really in danger is the unique bond between book and reader; a pact that is sealed with an artifact to prove the connection — the creases and marginalia we leave on physical books show that we were there; a human touched and absorbed these words. What's lacking from the digital experience is this sense of ownership and a concrete relationship with the material. E-books lead to a grand flattening of the titles we read. War and Peace on a Kindle weighs as much to lug around as The Sun Also Rises. A reader takes the same clicking actions to purchase Danielle Steel as she does to buy Homer. The web is one big, fluorescent superstore where every title exists in equal and judgment-free aisles, and we have the whole store to ourselves.

This shift has, in many ways, infused democracy into the reading process. It allows for self-published authors to rise along with those minted by major houses, and it frees customers to stock up on the genre fiction that they might have otherwise been embarrassed to bring up to the counter at an indie bookstore. But what we sacrifice, that spark of excitement when opening a new book for the first time, that moment we seal the pact — it's that thrill that cements many a young reader's lifelong love of books, and it is a lot to lose.

So how do we make reading an extraordinary experience in the age of flattened text? This is a question that many publishers and authors are trying to answer right now, not only to keep up profit margins, but to preserve the energy that got them into the business in the first place.

One new idea, which comes from the Brooklyn independent publisher Melville House, is that of the "Hybrid Book." The idea, says publisher Dennis Johnson, is to both distinguish the Melville House e-reading experience from others, and also to push paper books by offering a little something extra on the top. The program, which launched in August, adds the equivalent of DVD extras to books in packages called "Illuminations."

Often the Illuminations are longer than the book itself, stuffed full of illustrations, maps, articles, photographs and historical documents. It's the kind of trove of information you might find if, after reading, you decided to Google everything you could about the author and the book's subject. Melville House has simply run the search for you, and is hoping you'll find their curated findings to be frosting on top of the text. They're offering the Illuminations via QR code, e-pub file, PDF — and if that doesn't work, you can e-mail a member of Melville House's staff. As Johnson says, "If you want to get the materials, we will find a way to get them to you."

The idea is interesting in that it provides a bridge between the e-book and print copies (both come with "Illuminations"), and gives booksellers on the frontlines more ammunition to use when trying to push physical books. But it's also meant to make the e-book experience feel differentiated, and to give the reader the sense that a person (in this case, one of Melville House's editorial staff) lovingly selected the companion materials and is presenting them directly to you. If it works, it can create another kind of pact.

"The best publishers going into this transition are the ones that are not trying to change the experience, but are going to create new delivery systems that enhance the experience," says Dennis Johnson. "Reading has always been a social act, has always been about influencing you as you go out into the world. The Hybrid Book is social as well. It's a person giving you a gift of extra information. There's nothing to be afraid of with digital media if you think of ways to maintain an organic experience."

The first set of Hybrid Books are five classic novellas, all with the title The Duel (from Chekhov, Conrad and others). One of the Illuminations is a list of "10 People You Would Have Never Wanted to Duel," which earned its own gallery on the Huffington Post. Perhaps the new business model — if books stop losing steam on their own account — is to provide complementary materials with the potential to go viral. Just as you have to buy the DVD to see the behind-the-scenes featurette, books could become vehicles for a bonus if the Hybrid Book catches on.

Melville is not the first publisher to infuse books with extras (the company Vook was built on the idea), but they see their Hybrid Books as an effort to maintain the magic of reading and to make their own enthusiasm for it into a selling point. "What we are sharing with people here is passion," says Johnson. "We didn't hire someone else to do this. The Illuminations really reflect the way we read and we feel about his particular text."

Johnson says that the company will be experimenting with guest curators soon, which is an idea that could pique the curiosity of both readers and publishers (what if Patti Smith provided her own Illuminations for Just Kids? Or if a certain copy of The Hunger Games came with insights from Suzanne Collins?).

This is the way of the future, or at least one way. Whether or not it can preserve the same effect that reading has had on us for hundreds of years remains to be seen. Perhaps it will even make the experience richer and more enlightening. What do you think? Will you combine cracking the spine of a new book with tearing into a PDF? Or are Illuminations not enough to turn your head from the traditional books you've lovingly dog-eared? [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

When (Dead) Writers Tweet: The Art of Concise Imitation

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:46:00 GMT

Twitter may seem like an annoying, hyperactive, self-important and cursory way to communicate, but you have to admit, it's addictive. And lately, it has become far more than a way to share your favorite VMA performance with 500 people at once (for the record: Beyonce baby bump!). Through Twitter, users have fomented revolutions, rallied around political candidates and broken news. Artists are also using the short format to express themselves: comedians use it as a wit stream, poets experiment with short verse and so on. But perhaps the most compelling use of Twitter comes from the performance artists — those users who take on new identities under the guise of an @ handle.

Among the new Twitter performers, the most popular seem to be those who have adopted the identities of famous authors, both living and dead. There is no pretense of reality in these imitations — it is a game, an inside joke — and people are really getting into it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all, and who better to flatter via the written word than one's favorite writers? It only makes sense that Twitter, with its text-based delivery formula, would become fertile ground for literary mockingbirds.

One of the first (and most popular) of the faux-author accounts to pop up, out of the hundreds that exist now, was @halfpintingalls, the "authentic" feed of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The user's bio read, "I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin." Her tweets tapped into a deep nostalgia that members of the Twitter generation could easily relate to (many read the Little House books obsessively as children). She tweeted irreverently about prairie life, with updates like, "Curling your bangs with a slate pencil works pretty well. Giving yourself a pedicure with a spinning wheel? Not so much." and "Anyone know how to pry loose a hoopskirt stuck in a privy doorway?! Asking for a friend."

HalfPintIngalls turned out to be the alter ego of Wendy McClure, whose book about Wilder, The Wilder Life, came out in April of this year. For McClure, playing Wilder was both book research and marketing scheme.

"It started for the same reason I have done anything on the Internet, which is just to amuse myself," said McClure when we caught up with her about her Twitter exploits. "HalfPint was a precursor to my book project, and it later became a testing ground for the kind of irreverence that Little House fans would put up with — turns out they all have a great sense of humor."

McClure says that she did not begin the account with subversive performance in mind. "I wouldn't go so far as to say it is art," she says. "It was just interesting to me. And I couldn't help but think that looking at the differences between the way we live now and the way they lived then, that you just have to do something absurd juxtaposed with modern technology."

@HalfPintIngalls did not lead McClure directly to her book deal (as several Twitter accounts have done for others, like @sh*tmydadsays), but she recognized the value of it when she was able to write The Wilder Life. "I didn't want to turn HalfPint into advertising for the book, but working on Twitter really helped me while I was writing to gauge the way people responded to her."

McClure is unique in that she is tweeting as Wilder at least semi-professionally, but most of the 140 character impersonators are not working with any kind of commercial imperative. They are simply trying to break down writers' iconic styles into 140 characters as a labor of love or comedy, often playing with the novelty of pairing an author's style with the technology of the modern age.

Some of the accounts are loving homages: See @billycollins, @flanneryoconnor, and @borgesknowsbest. Some are parodies: @shakespearesays, @hemingsteen. There's Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Didion. Melville, Plath, Salinger, Dorothy Parker.

For almost every author you can think of, someone is out there working a fake Twitter feed. It has become a club of obsession, a contest of one-upmanship based on insider knowledge of an author's tone, personal life, and historial era. The best accounts, like that of Samuel Johnson are successful research projects as well as gags.

What do you think? Are we entering a new age of literary knowledge and scholarship, played out one tweet at a time? Or are you sick of all the fake accounts trading on the reputation of great longform writers? Tell us what you think of this new trend. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Your Friends Are Not Your Audience: A Disturbing Internet Lesson In Perspective

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:22:00 GMT

It's a piece of necessary wisdom that will be shared with countless college students this fall by nervous parents: Tell a story at a party, and it's heard by a handful of people, whose reactions you perhaps have some ability to predict. Tell it on the internet, and it will be heard by the people you know and the people you don't — and the latter outnumber the former by several orders of magnitude. Don't put your picture on Facebook flashing the camera or looking drunk or kissing someone you might later regret kissing.

But for people trying to break into some kind of a creative field, the ability to broadcast your work is a blessing. Perhaps your stand-up video on YouTube will be the one that goes viral, or your blog post will be the one everyone reads. There are a million opportunities to be seen, and the best part is that you don't have to deal with so much "no."

"No, we won't publish your piece." "Okay, I'll put it on my blog."

"No, we won't give you a record deal." "Okay, I'll make YouTube videos."

"No, we won't publish your book." "That's okay; I can do it myself for e-readers."

The development of online writing and performance exposes new voices and lets those voices experiment with provocative, enormously creative content, and there are a thousand good things to say about that. Gatekeepers have traditionally been similar to each other in sensibility and demographics, often to the detriment of diverse content.

But who you are talking to no longer has anything to do with who you think you're talking to. You can tell a story to your narrow circle a hundred times and have nobody bat an eyelash, but the minute you step outside that circle, everything is completely different.

At an improv comedy show on August 14, audience members were invited to step up to the microphone and tell a story that would inspire an improv set. Partway through the performance, a man who identifies himself as "Eric" begins to tell his story. He explains that he was working as a host/cook at Second City in Chicago, and a drunk woman from out of town hit on a friend of his, but the friend had a girlfriend, so he effectively passed her number off to Eric. (Like ... a baseball card? If you already find this story creepy, rest assured that it's only getting started.)

In Eric's version of events, he goes to the woman's hotel room, and she tells him he's not the guy she invited. "Yeah," he says, "but I'm the guy who showed up." [Huge audience applause.] She tells him to leave, but he persists (with charming lines like "my friend said this was a sure deal"), and when that doesn't work, he asks to borrow her cell phone, telling her it's so he can get a ride and leave. When she goes into the room to get her phone, she leaves the door open. As he describes it, this made him think, "Bingo." (Be aware before you watch the video, where Eric begins speaking at about the 38-minute mark: It's upsetting and crude.) (And "Yowie.com," which hosts the video and offered it as an embed, has written to us to make sure we tell you that that's where the embedded video came from. So now you know: Get all your incredibly uncomfortable monologues from "Yowie.com.")

So he goes into the room and closes the door behind him. She tells him again that he needs to leave, and at that point — again, quoting Eric — his thought is, "It's now or never." So she asks him to leave again, and he says he doesn't think she really means it, and then they "end up on the bed ... making out." How exactly they "ended up on the bed" when she was just telling him to leave repeatedly is left unstated, but to cut to the chase, he winds up having sex with her, after which she tells him to get out. Asked if she was attractive, he gives a noncommittal "eh."

[I'll wait here while you take a hot shower and wash off that story.]

Predictably, the question arose pretty quickly, as Jezebel asked it, "Is This Comedy Monologue A Rape Confession?" Since then, there's been extensive discussion in various comment sections of the fine points of consent and law and intoxication, and since The Second City tweeted from its official account that it had "alerted the proper authorities," those questions will have to be answered by people who can figure out what really happened and whether all or any of this story is true.

Here's the thing, though. In the best case scenario — in the absolute sunniest way you can possibly look at this story — Eric is telling a story that he thinks is really funny about how he used an anonymous woman like a blow-up doll, doing whatever he had to in order to get in the door, ultimately persuading her to go along, caring not at all that she didn't want to have sex with him, having sex with her, and then leaving. He treats her like she's inhuman and valueless and gross and nasty but still fine for having sex with once, and he thinks he's the hero of this story.

What has stuck with me ever since I saw this video — what has really kept me restless and bothered — is that he has no idea what he's doing. He has no idea that anybody would object to this at all, while I'm over here barely being able to listen to it because it's so upsetting and it pings every instinct I have about creeps and The Gift Of Fear and RUN RUN RUN YELL FOR HELP. He told this story thinking maybe that it would get on YouTube and everyone would think it was hilarious ("No, but I'm the guy who showed up!"). He had no idea that Second City would wind up saying, in effect, "Uh, yeah, we ... called the cops."

If Eric thought telling this story in public would open up a serious public back-and-forth about whether this is a story of sexually assaulting this woman, he wouldn't have done it. He thinks he looks cool in this story, and indeed, a certain number of people in the audience keep laughing the whole time.

This is the curse and the blessing of the instantly multiplied audience, I suppose. Whoever has heard this story before apparently thought it was funny. It certainly doesn't seem to be the first time he's told it, considering that at one point he actually says he's speaking "the way I tell this story to my friends."

Maybe it's not true. Maybe it's part-true. That certainly matters to the police, and to the woman, and to him, and presumably to his family and friends. But whether he considers this a true story where everyone will be on his side or a comedy routine that will strike people as some kind of a hooray-for-the-underdog narrative, I find it profoundly upsetting. Having it be true is awful, but having it be something he would invent or embellish, either as comedy or as image management, also crawls across my skin like an entire army of cockroaches.

Certainly, the fact that he told this story may be a good thing if it gets somebody to deal with whatever is going on here, whether there's a crime to prosecute or not. But the idea that somewhere, there is a guy who thinks this story makes him look good, who apparently had no idea that it would make him look to a lot of other people like a criminal or at best a revolting heel, makes me wish the always-on video had never been invented, because part of me just didn't want to know.

[Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Apple's Secret Is In Our DNA

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:47:00 GMT

There is a lot of talk about DNA since Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple this week. Mostly in terms of what Jobs has infused into Apple's DNA: impeccable taste, innovation, persistence, attention-to-detail, hard work, different thinking.

All of this talk is great. It's reassurance to all of us Apple fanboys and girls that the company we idolize will continue to produce the products we love to love. Need to love. Can't not love, really, even if we try.

And why is that? Why are so many of us addicted to Apple products (and yes, I mean literally addicted)? What, when asked what she loves about her Macbook and iPhone and iPad, makes my friend Caren respond with: "When something is a prosthesis [an extension of one's body and mind], how can one begin to unravel it?" What makes my other friend, Supisa, carry her Macbook around with her everywhere, like a newborn baby, because she refuses to leave the house without it? What makes me sleep with my iPhone under my pillow?

Why do so many of us get so emotional about Steve Jobs, to the point of crying upon hearing he had cancer and tearing up last week while reading his poignant resignation letter? The answer to all of these questions, I think, lies in mathematics and our own DNA.

I've been researching design aesthetics recently, and in a nutshell here's what I've found: Beauty is more objective than you might think. It's based on numbers and proportions. As humans, we're biologically programmed to seek out and respond to these numbers and proportions because they indicate superiority, in everything from the human form, to great works of art, to musical patterns, to plants, to architecture and to product design. The screen of a Macbook, for example, is a Golden Rectangle, which is based on this magical number: 1.6178, also known as the Golden Ratio, the Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion.

And the pulsing light that softly undulates to indicate that your Macbook is asleep? Well, that mesmerizing light mimics the rhythm of a human heartbeat, a deeply resonating mathematical pattern which can also be found in tidal flows, DNA sequences and blissful cognitive states.

The inclusion of these patterns in Apple's designs is no accident. Steve Jobs knows better than any other modern-day CEO our biological attraction to beautiful things. With the help of Jonathan Ive, Apple's VP of industrial design, he exploits our biological tendencies to give us exactly what we want. He has an uncanny ability to tap into our genetic propensity toward beauty, seducing us through exquisite product design.

Additionally, humans are born to tell and listen to stories. We love myths and heroes and villains and protagonists. Stories are how we make sense of the world and of ourselves. When we purchase an Apple product, we're not only buying into the legendary story of how Steve founded, was kicked out, then saved Apple to make it the most valuable company in the world, but we're also buying elegant tools with which to tell our own meaningful stories and make our own beautiful things.

So, instead of our worrying about what's in Apple's DNA, I just hope Apple keeps worrying about what's in yours and mine. Then hopefully, everything will be OK, with or without Steve Jobs at the helm.

Callie Neylan is a former NPR designer and currently assistant design professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Farmville Burns, Is Saved; No Need To Panic

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:38:00 GMT

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's George Mathis may have started a panic earlier today, when he wrote the headline "Farmville is burning." But he quickly clarified that this was an actual, not a virtual, fire:

Before you rush off to rescue your Facebook plantation, know that this Farmville is an unincorporated area in Gordon County, located in northwest Georgia.

Mathis writes that local emergency management director Richard Cooper blamed a spark from a lawnmower for the fire — which spread to 150 acres, and required about 50 firefighters to contain.

Update at 10 p.m. ET: No Injuries, No House Damage.

We are happy to note that the wildfire did not damage any homes or cause any injuries, according to all available reports. Our original post continues:

As a colleague here at NPR notes, the actual blaze makes one wonder how many credits it would take to control a virtual blaze in the Zynga game.

A look into the trusty desk-reference Geographical Dictionary reveals that there are at least two other real Farmvilles, including towns in both North Carolina and Virginia.

And in another twist, Georgia's Farmville happens to be due west of a hamlet called Cash. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Security Firm Hacks A Car With A Text

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:00:00 GMT