Reading Diary I

Article 1: “Does Facebook Make Someone More Social Offline?” By Pamela Paul, NYT

This article, with its though provoking headline/question, touches on a very popular subject today, but in a different and more interesting way than all new outlets seem to be doing these days. Instead of siding with the naysayer as is customary of most contemporary culture critics Pamela Paul acknowledges that with the release of The Social Network, Facebook often makes one feel like a “soulless shut-in,” but with a new report from the University of Texas, Austin, results seem to say that Facebook makes one more sociable. Pamela Paul, with this article, will definitely capture ones attention, and she tackles the Facebook issue at a very different angle (example: Should Facebook be able to define the norm for social behavior?), but throughout the article there seem to be a lot of little details and statistics that aren’t really needed. Near the end Pamela Paul is just listing off the different Facebook habits between men and women and to conclude the article she gives us a quote about how Facebook users become more mature with their internet output as they get older, which isn’t very surprising because most people mature when they grow up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/fashion/30Studied.html?ref=technology

Article 2: “Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated” by Carl Zimmer, NYT

Vladimir Nabokov happens to have written one of my favorite books, so his reputation for excellence being upheld even in the scientific community was definitely worth a look at. This article seems to be very well rounded and aimed towards a very wide audience (both a man of letters and a man of bugs could very well be entertained by this story). The story touches on parts of Nabokov’s life that most might not know too much about, but when Carl Zimmer gets down to explaining how butterfly experts and lepidopterists realized Nabokov might be on to something Zimmer might lose some people in all the scientific jargon that gets thrown at the reader so that by the end of all the explaining one is not really sure how scientists figured out Nabokov’s hypothesis was accurate in the end. This article expertly joins two areas of academics; literature and science without favoring one over the other and giving the text of the story enough drive so that people will want to know how this scientific mishap happened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?ref=science

Article 3: “Anonymous Hacking Suspects Released on Bail” by Josh Halliday, The Guardian

This article could act as a sort of ‘cherry on top’ to the WikiLeaks story, with Julian Assange’s initial media buzz dying down for now, it seems that his anti-secrecy website has rattled the cage of many and paved the way for other ‘hacktivists’, this story being proof of that. Josh Halliday seems to not know what the actual topic of his article is at all for he centers in on the hacktivist group Anonymous’ “advice”/“statement”/ “declaration of war” / “serious warning” instead of the actual individuals who perpetrated the crime. The crime itself (cyber attacks of several credit card companies for cutting support to Wikileaks) is mentioned at least three times for some reason and the repetition is very noticeable. This story works well because the actual content seems to be a hot topic among newspapers today but it seems that the headline could misguide some readers and that some of the most important information like the fact that Anonymous “…is understood to have grown significantly in number and firepower since its support of WikiLeaks, with the overwhelming majority of users simply volunteering their computer to be used in the attacks,” is placedat the end of the article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/28/anonymous-suspects-police-bail-wikileaks?INTCMP=SRCH