Measuring emotion? Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/meaning-is-healthier-than-happiness/278250/ Laughing with joy on a racing roller coaster? Pleeeease. Unless that ride comes with deep significance — ride for charity! ride to show your cousin a good time! ride to make someone else’s suffering less! — you are basically totally miserable, you just don’t know it, OK? Enjoyed the concept but are the questions … Read more

World, how does it feel to be XKeyscored? NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet' | World news | theguardian.com. I hereby most solemnly submit “XKeyscore” to the cultural lexicon for enshrinement as a verb. To XKeyscore a fellow human being is to place a recording device in their head that feeds footage of every activity and thought … Read more

Brilliant devs please augment this open source chart tool. How to turn everyone in your newsroom into a graphics editor » Nieman Journalism Lab

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/07/how-to-turn-everyone-in-your-newsroom-into-a-graphics-editor/ Next step: enable this chart builder to gather and analyze feeds of information and spew out feeds of charts. Example: count how many times the word “automated” appears in a stream of articles from tech news sites; do this for comparable date periods; draw the chart and bada boom. Any developers up for that? … Read more

See ya, Fourth Amendment: communicate and your location info is up for grabs. Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld – NYTimes

Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld – NYTimes.com. Down in the land of the 5th circuit, location information is “clearly a business record” and therefore exempt from protection under the Fourth Amendment? Are you kidding? The nature of a record (who decides this?) determines whether the law of the land can hold sway over it? What? … Read more

Let’s get invisible on the Internet with FreedomBox

About FreedomBox The urge to construct my own server grows daily. No idea how, but the idea of having my online activity in a lockbox under my control proves more and more tempting. Have you used DoNotTrackMe? Of course, no company providing Internet services wants any consumer anywhere near becoming a provider of any such … Read more