Is ChatRoulette the future of the Internet or its distant past?

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind.

Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

Is It Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts Without Consent? While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects.

When elites bash elitism As Broder and Klein proclaim Palin a political star, they show they’re out of touch with “real Americans.”

How the Latest Abstinence Findings Could Turn Into a Classic Sex-Ed ‘Bait and Switch’ The religious right is rallying around a study that supposedly proves their legitimacy. In reality, the findings just demonstrate how important comprehensive sexual education is.

BOLIVIA PLANNING REAL COCA IN COLA Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and known for chewing coca leaves at UN meetings, has launched a drink featuring the leaf called “Coca Colla.”

OBAMA SUPPORTS TRACKING YOUR MOVES BY CELLPHONE DATA Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.

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