Technology Archive | Page 91

If your kids' grades are not improving but falling tremendously, maybe you should consider having them to spend lesser time on the world's most popular platform - Facebook. According to a new study conducted by Ohio State University, it says that those students who use Facebook frequently will tend to spend less time on their schoolwork, hence resulting in lower grades. It seems that these young kids aren't admitting the truth as the study noted that more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn’t interfere with their studies. This two statements are so contradicting. “We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University. Additional information includes Facebook users had GPAs a full grade lower than non-users. Facebook users also studied on average one to five hours a week, compared to 11 to 15 hours for non-users." title="Study Shows That Kids Who Use Facebook Are Dumb" />

URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly and come in handy especially when when want to share links with super long URLs on Twitter which has a limitation of only 140 characters per tweet. Although shortened URLs are really useful and of course indeed a brilliant creation, however, there are some limitations. For example, since these services create shortened URLs using a random alphabet or number, hence, it's impossible to know where it links to or even unaware that you've actually been there before. This is when Longr.us, a free URL enlarging service can help us to eliminate these serious and irritating issues. Having a similar domain name and logo as US-based toy store chain Toys "R" US, this useful tool converts a shortened URL to another long URL that contains the page's domain name and title. To start, simply copy a URL from the source and paste it into the form. Then, it'll expands it. Also, http://longr.us/books.slashdot.org/collective-intelligence-in-action is much more useful to your friends than http://books.slashdot.org/books/09/02/18/1423251.shtml if you want to share that page" title="Longr.us Helps You Enlarge URLs Quickly" />

If you're a Twitterer, I'm sure that you've came across Twitterholic before. Well, if you don't, it's actually a robot which scans Twitter's public timeline and ranks the users based on the number of followers they have. Besides that, it even offers rankings based on several categories which includes location, number of friends and updates. On the other hand, TwitterScore, a web app that tells users how well they score for their profile out of 10, has also released a similar ranking as Twitterholic. But in this case, it has made use of an algorithm that calculates the popularity of each Twitter user based on several factors and rank them according to their locations. According to TwitterScore, United States tops the list of "Top Users By Locations" with an astounding 63.21% of the entire Twitter population and the average score is 3.94 out of a maximum 10. The top Twitter users in the United States are CNN, Britney Spears and Barack Obama. All have managed to clinch the maximum score of 10." title="TwitterScore Challenge Twitterholic By Releasing A New Feature: Top Users by Location" />