App Spotlight: Pair

Will you take Jessica, in sickness and in health, till the Pair app doesn’t work and you can’t communicate anymore? I do. Assuming you’re able to get a girl or boyfriend, and assuming they somehow stay with you long enough to be in a committed relationship, and assuming they move to a different city and [...]

Weathering Google’s Control

An entry from a couple of weeks ago (http://jerkmag.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/face-recongizing-billboard/) featured a billboard which played advertisements based on the viewer’s gender. And now, Google is trying to implement a type of advertising based on weather. In order for this to work, Google would essentially have some sort of sensory control over your cell phone in order [...]

Face Recongizing Billboard

The latest in advertising technology: a billboard which recognizes your gender and plays custom advertisements. The billboard uses HD cameras to scan your face and recognize your gender, apparently, with a 90% success rate (you would hope). The billboard’s main message is to portray the lives of girls living in developing countries, and to show [...]

Locked up over Facebook? Really? Was it worth it?

“Haven’t showered in a week”…. “Positive for chlamydia”… “Wish I was a girl instead”… Once you see these as your friend’s status, you immediately know they left their Facebook profile unmanned and were the victim of a classic 21st century prank: the Facebook hack. Be careful what you call a hack though, as Glenn Mangham [...]

Normal Addiction: Siri

Please, give me another reason to be unhealthily attached to my cell phone. The newest model of the iPhone, the iPhone 4S—guess they didn’t make enough changes to call it the iPhone 5—includes a virtual personal assistant named Siri. As a grad student, I can’t actually afford the latest Apple product–shocker–but based on what I’ve [...]

Reading is so Old, I’d Much Rather Play My Literature

“Do you have what it takes to fight gangsters and advertisements and hobos?” Whether it’s because you’ve wondered how you’d stack up against the contenders in question, or really even how you would go about battling an ad (and yes, I mean actual battle and not some sort of philosophical conundrum), there is no way [...]

Finally: Tips to Using Facebook the Right Way

Recently, I decided to make a giant leap forward and do something I had been avoiding for at least five years: I decided to friend my mom on Facebook. Why? Maybe I could no longer ignore the fact that she also knew how to use a computer. Or maybe I just don’t care if she [...]

I, For One, Welcome Our Computer Overlords

In case you missed it (don’t worry, I did too), a game of Jeopardy was won by an IBM computer named ‘Watson’. While at first thought, to those of us who grew up with the internet and rely on Google for anything and everything we don’t know, this may sound trivial. It’s really not.  Watson [...]

The End of the Web as We Know it (Maybe)

We are running out of IP addresses. You know what this means? It’s all over. No more internet. No more tweets, Facebook statuses, or internet incited protests for democracy. I’m lying, of course.

Sony’s Next Combatant in the Handheld War

In case you’ve been trapped in a pit, or had no reason to pay attention, Sony has recently revealed its next handheld gaming system.  The only problem is that they still haven’t told us some key information, namely, price.