Facebook sting operation

http://mddailyrecord.com/ontherecord/2009/11/25/police-conducting-facebook-drinking-stings/

The article discusses police in Wisconsin ticketing college students by soliciting facebook friend status and going through pictures. I'm pretty sure that the ticket could not hold up in court, given there's no way to prove that it's an alcoholic drink. I'm curious if this is a real event, and will be researching the source and updating the blog with the results.


Update with original source:
http://www.lacrossetribune.com/news/local/article_0ff40f7a-d4d1-11de-afb3-001cc4c002e0.html?mode=comments
Updates with responses from someone claiming to be one of the girls charged;

thatgirl13 said on: November 23, 2009, 2:39 pm

Okay, so I am one of the girls in the article. And I just wanted to make a comment. As I read all of your comments I see some of you said well you shouldn’t have posted any pictures of you drinking or pictures you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Well funny thing is I didn’t. Those pictures were taken off another girls facebook album so I had absolutely NO control over those photos up there. I was never friends with the under-cover cop on facebook, simply because I do not accept people I do not know. The girl whose facebook he got those photos from never got a ticket or called down by the cop. This whole situation is outrageous.
The cop who called me down, Iverson, emailed me and asked me if I would come down and it’s not a big deal and he just has a few questions for me. As the good citizen I am I went right down approximately 8:30pm on a Sunday night. The cop pulls out two pictures of me and my friend with beer cans in our hands. He asked if that was me and I said yes. Because obviously it was. He never once asked if I was drinking nor did I tell him I was drinking in that picture. I asked where he got the pictures from and he asked if there was any one who was out to get me or asked if I made any enemies during Oktoberfest, I said no, which I haven’t confused… and he told me that someone turned in my pictures to him so he had to investigate it. Later on finding out that he got those off of facebook so he lied to me about that, then, he wrote a statement that was in my file when I went to court that said I openly admitted to drinking in those pictures, which I NEVER admitted. He has no proof that I was drinking or that I have ever drank in my life. I am overall very disappointed in the La Crosse Police Department. Those pictures were over a month old for one, two, those were private pictures in a private house. I could even understand if it was pictures of me in a public place like a bar or something drinking, but I wasn’t. I think they should get off their lazy butts and go OUT AND FIND PEOPLE IN THE ACTION. Not sit inside creeping on the internet all day long. Just my opinion.

Wikimapia.org

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=32.8828488&lon=-117.2461367&z=17&l=0&m=s&v=9

I've mostly used Google Maps or Google Earth by themselves, but came across this site when trying to find aerial pictures for my friend who's visiting where I used to go to school(UCSD).

It seems to be google maps, but with users able to outline areas and tag it with information. Most prominent areas and buildings are covered, including my favorite hidden trail. I wonder how many more tourists are going down that place now that it's listed on the web and easy to find. The entrance was hidden by bushes so only the surfers used it, but I'd imagine more curious ppl will go there now. The cliff's are eroding, so there will definitely be more lifeguard rescues when wanderers go down that place!

Twitter feed for what's happening at Fort Hood: Live

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22Fort%20Hood%22%20OR%20Hood

PR for BCS

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=4623676

Just a quick post from the phone. I thought ppl in PR might find this interesting.

Google Wave - New Collaborative Technology

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/28/google-wave-as-an-rp.html
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Google wave is a new online collaborative tool which combines the shared documents of google apps and google groups with the real time options of instant messenger and chat rooms. It is currently in the beta stage, and one of the first major uses for it among the tech savy beta testers is to organize for online RPGs.

People can get up to speed with what changes were made by playing document like a video. This could help with lack of thought process cues compared to face to face communication that I mentioned in my earlier blog about online communication in the design process.

The acceleration of time and space

Earlier in the course the theory that life appears to happen faster due to the increased rate at which information is available for processing. This can definitely apply to the design process in engineering projects and raises the issue of where to draw the line between one's professional and personal life.

With complex and multidisciplinary design projects, there is never truly a "final and correct" answer. The more time one has to put into the project, the more improvements can be made. If one is the leader of the project, prioritizing the time investment for each division can be very difficult and make or break the design. If the leaders are chosen for their experience and demand of success, they are more likely to be driven to know as much as possible about everything under their responsibility.

Technology has greatly assisted the ability to stay organized and bypass time and space constraints, but the managers now have so much available at all hours that their lives can disappear. Eventually a tipping point can be reached where the drive to succeed and overflow of information results in tunnel vision, decreased health, and much added stress that can greatly affect the ability to make effective decisions.

Cybervetting

http://www.management-issues.com/2007/10/18/research/cyber-vetting-managers-face-backlash.asp

The article is two years old and describes the developing hiring practice of cybervetting. This was one reason that people originally opposed the social networking site Facebook, becoming available to the general public. Facebook did add more privacy settings when going public, however many people fail to realize that there are many popular apps that are designed specifically for data mining. By participating in an application, you grant that application access to your information and it can be downloaded by the applications server without notifying you. This data can be used to target ads, study cultural trends, or allow easier identity theft. Over the last two years the idea of compiling a person's netprofile has expanded into these other realms quite a bit.