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America: Like It Or Unfriend It

Posted by timothy on from the please-extend-below dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "As we celebrate America's birthday today, head over the to the NY Times and take a look at a very clever 'op-art' creation, 'Like it or Unfriend It' by Teddy Wayne, Mike Sacks, and Thomas Ng, that represents what 'America's Wall' would look like through our history. Beginning with 'Christopher Columbus wrote on America's wall: 'This IS India, right?,' through 'America added Great Britain to Kingdoms I am Fighting With,' through 'The South has changed its privacy settings to accept carpetbaggers,' and finishing with 'America stopped playing the game Wild-Goose Chase While Nation-Building,' and 'America has joined the China Network' the wall includes dozens of invitations, likes, posts and changes to privacy settings that shows a summary of American history as seen from a Facebook perspective. Our favorite from the 1980s: 'Ronald Reagan created a page: "Trickle-Down Economics" followed by "Half a million upper-income people like this.'" For another take on 4th of July data visualization, Tim O'Reilly points out flag.codeforamerica.org, which aggregates twitter posts tagged #July4 into an evolving flag tapestry.

7 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. You know... that might not be a bad idea... by mark-t · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... as a means of teaching history. This particular "wall" is a bit too brief to be useful for most purposes, but a more detailed one could probably be contrived to describe the activities surround noteworthy events in history.

    If it helps kids learn, then that's a good thing... right?

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    1. Re:You know... that might not be a bad idea... by lexsird · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Blame parents indeed. Humans on Earth really need to adopt a policy that only the best are allowed to have children. Bad parents = more bad people on the planet. And sadly there are more bad parents than good ones.

      Look at how coddled American children are. They are treated like little fairy prince and princesses until they turn of age and realize that their life so far has been a big lie and they have absolutely no skills to offer the world. Our public schools are a complete joke and Bush's "no child left behind" is another antonym like "patriot act". It should have been "all kids left behind".

      Teacher: Mr & Mrs Jones, I hate to tell you that your little Johnny is going to fail.
      Mr & Mrs Jones: We will sue you if you flunk our precious little Johnny!
      Principle: Oh fuck! We can't have that! Pass the little brat!
      Johnny: Nothing matters! I can be a fuck off tool and nothing happens!
      Society: We are crushed by the influx of douchebags of all these "little johnny" bastards coming of age!

      Indeed, blame the piece of shit parents. If perhaps they didn't aspire to a standard of living that was so far beyond them, one of them could stay at home and BE A FUCKING PARENT. You know who raises kids? The internet. Behold as computer games become the new babysetters, and your World of Warcraft community and it's ilk has to take on dealing with people's malcontent, need of attention brats. This is where punks from hacker groups like Lulsec and others draw from to fill their ranks.

      Kids need to be in school. Who the fuck cares if they are "entertained"? If we don't start acting like responsible adults and start hammering an education into these kids, who will? These slacker, retard parents? I don't think so, they just want quiet after they have been slaving for their masters, they don't have time for parenting. Please, the next time some idiot wants to placate kiddies and entertain them instead of educating them, take a fucking ball-bat to their head. Do it for the children.

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    2. Re:You know... that might not be a bad idea... by lexsird · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, fuck all of those tough subjects like math, science and history. Things that require "study", what a complete waste of time "study" is. We just need to please little Johnny so he will take his nose out of his texting to give a nod at some Facebook page. That will solve our education problems and why we are collectively becoming the dumbest fucking people on the planet.

      Do you seriously know just how far down the toilet our education system has slid in the past 50 years? An 8th grade test from that era would make an 4.0 AA graduate feel like a retard. How about we try to go back to when education was working first before we try to improve on the complete disaster that we are using now? This is the one problem with a free society, any idiot can open their mouth with an idea, and there are more idiots than non-idiots, hence the idiots can have their way.

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    3. Re:You know... that might not be a bad idea... by Minupla · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not sure you actually read my post before you replied, or the GGP for that matter. The point was not "let's teach facebook" the point was "Children respond well to material when presented in a format which they associate to (e.g. schoolhouse rock cartoons) therefore, let's present one of the "tough subjects" in a manner that will get their attention."

      While we're on the subject though, it should be noted that in the past (my parents' generation) not everyone went to school. Farmers tended to keep their children at the farms because they needed the help getting the harvest in. Therefore you had a self selected population from which you were obtaining your statistics. Your sampling methodology then would not be uniform when comparing grades and such between then and now. If you include those farmers who didn't go to school (my father was a 3rd grade dropout) I think you'll find they'd drop down your average at the 8th grade level dramatically (means disliking values of 0 as they do).

      If you consider that IQ tests tend to require an element of knowledge (language for the vast majority of them, and a cognitive framework around math for the non-linguistic ones), and you couple that with the fact that IQ tests need to be re-normed back to 100=average every few years, it rather argues that when you take an aggregate measure of human "intelligence" we're getting "smarter" (doing better on the tests). In the time frame we're speaking of, and assuming the current model of evolution holds, it seems unlikely that's due to the actual substantial increase in the collective human intellect, therefore the knowledge portion of the equation is the only element that can be improving.

      There is a well known cognitive predisposition to view the past as being better then the present, and it's easy to fall victim to this tenancy when you don't stop to do your analysis.

      Now I realize I've probably just fed the troll, but felt it important enough to make my arguments for the other non-trolls who might be reading this thread, as troll or no, we (as a society) can do damage when we think in the way the parent is exemplifying. Ideally the people represented in forums such as this one (generally forward thinking folks) should be the check against these tendencies.

      Are there issues in the education system? Hell ya. NCLB is a prime example, it rewards all sorts of bad teaching habits, incentizes behaviors like teaching the test, etc. In my field of work (Corporate Infosec) we pay a lot of attention to ensuring that reward/punishment systems are in line with the behaviors we're attempting to reinforce, rather then unaligned. I could wish that law makers would spend similar amounts of effort thinking about such things before passing broken legislation. Education budgets are drastically under prioritized (if you doubt this, look at defense budgets vs education in the G20.) All these are points where we can have a useful discussion. A new technique for speaking to children in a manner in which they might absorb some information isn't to my way of thinking one of them.

      Min

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  2. Totally off topic here by OzPeter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had a bit of an epiphany today about date formats. Any other day of the year and this would be known as July 4th, 2011 (ie Sept 11th), and any attempt by other people to say "why are you using such a dumb arsed date format?" would be met by jeers of "It's our date format and we'll do what we like with it". However, today, on what is probably the most venerable US national holiday its known as "4th of July" .. just like it would be known in pretty well every other country in the world. I can't say that I know the history of why this is, but I do find it curious.

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  3. Re:Birthday? by Dunbal · · Score: 1, Interesting

    So what does the spirit of the revolution have to say about the American media obsession with the British royal family? Cake and eat it too?

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  4. Re:Ronald Reagan by Rockoon · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Oh how cute.. another slashdotter that doesnt understand where United States spending bills originate.

    Debt to GDP ratio uncorrelated with president, but highly correlated with House and Senate

    End of debate. You lose.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."