Social media may be dismissed by some as being a waste of time but there has been recent twittering that Facebook, YouTube and even texting could save thousands of threatened languages from extinction.
And you may have assumed that only so-called developed nations in the thick of state of the art technology let their fingers do the talking through digital media. But this is far from the case. For example, nomadic tribes in Mongolia and Siberia have an iPhone app to teach pronunciation of the ‘minority language’ Tuvan.
Linguist K David Harrison is an intrepid tracker of disappearing languages – it is believed that around half of the world’s 7,000 tongues are at risk by being lost by the end of the century. The associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting that small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence. Languages spoken in just a tiny geographical area are being sent around the world.
Ironically he describes this phenomenon as the flipside of globalisation. A positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now through digital technology that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience, he says.
His work sounds crucial in saving these languages. With National Geographic, he has just helped produce eight talking dictionaries. These dictionaries contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. All the audio recordings have been made by native speakers.
One of them, Alfred Bud Lane speaks a language known as Siletz Dee-ni, which is restricted to a small area on the central Oregon coast. He recorded 14,000 words and said that his community and tribe are determined that their language will survive.
It’s sad to say, but not all languages can survive as speakers die but the digital technology is helping to save a precious few. They are threatened by cultural changes, ethnic shame and government repression.
The National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices project to prevent these ancient languages being forgotten has also produced dictionaries of languages in north-eastern India, Matukar Panau, an Oceanic language from Papua New Guinea which has only 600 surviving speakers, Chamacoco, from Paraguay’s remote northern desert, Remo, Sora, and Ho, from India, Tuvan, from Siberia and Mongolia and Celtic tongues
It’s funny because we so often here that language is being lost through texting, but this is a case of the opposite.
Businesses which use Orkney.com – a site designed, developed and produced by Copla – can now have their logo and images uploaded to feature on the front page of the site’s business directory. These mini adverts are just one of the latest features we have introduced to the essential one-stop site for business.
Anyone searching for businesses, including potential clients, will have their attention alerted by the eye-catching features.
Copla has also introduced special save icons; an innovative feature which shows an image for your links. This smart-looking addition draws the eye to links to your business profile pages or other links.
The Copla designed Orkney.com website continues to go from strength to strength with new features which businesses are tapping into to promote services.
The whole site is engineered to provide all the information about what is happening in business and every other aspect of Orkney life. And as the site is interactive, viewers can easily click onto your other pages, your website and social media links such as Facebook and Twitter.
These are just a few of the new features which together make Orkney.com a vibrant, interactive and up to the minute one-stop shop for Orkney as a place to do business, live or visit.
Visit the Orkney.com Business Directory here.
The Copla designed Orkney.com website continues to go from strength to strength with new features which businesses are tapping into to promote services and attract clients and business.
The Today page is the essential one-stop shop for locals, businesses and visitors to discover what is going on in Orkney today.
There is no need to search any further as we have introduced news from Google, the Orcadian newspaper, Orkney Islands Council, BBC Radio Orkney’s Facebook page, the latest travel news and even showcase available local properties, business special offers and job adverts.
And interactive features mean property being marketed by local agents, for instance, can be searched by price, location and even the number of bedrooms.
The whole site is engineered to provide all the information about what is happening in business and every other aspect of Orkney life.
Our information pages reveal the background to the county’s business sectors as well as heritage, wildlife, attractions and communities.
The site is used by many local businesses to promote Orkney and its commerce and services to a wide range of users from locals to businesses further afield, the Orkney diaspora and casual browser, as well as tourists.
These are just a few of the new features which together make Orkney.com a vibrant, interactive and up to the minute one-stop shop for Orkney as a place to do business, live or visit.
Visit the orkney.com Today page here
Rock band Duran Duran started out thirty years ago when our modern age of communication could never have been imagined. But for their latest album they have embraced the technologies of today and yesterday by releasing ‘All You Need is Now’ on vinyl and as a download, while their classic videos have prolonged life on YouTube.
The band recently added an online experiment with the “Here Right Now“, data visualization project which prompts their fans to interconnect and share an online experience. On the website fans around the world are prompted to upload impression of their needs and views by using simple generic keywords. .
Duran Duran’s bass guitarist John Taylor has been speaking about how this creative approach is reaching out to audiences and to deliver music. He is also an avid Twitter user.
Here Right Now is a partnership between Duran Duran and San Francisco-based Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) that aims to display people’s perception of ‘Now’ from around the world. A series of word prompts — the first set inspired by words used in “All You Need Is Now” — runs along the top of the screen, inviting users to submit their vision of the world and contribute to the project by uploading a photo of Now on the globe. Keyword prompts such as ‘sunrise’ have resulted in users posting sunrises from areas right around the world.
The result is a series of narrative postcards, each representing a unique interpretation of a simple, shared idea or experience. The postcards can be accessed on the site by anyone in the world, and include information about who shared the image and where they’re located. Fans can also be able to share their postcards on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter using the hashtag #rightnow.
Duran Duran keyboardist, Nick Rhodes, said the idea evolved from some discussions within the band about how to visually represent what different people around the world thought about certain things at different times – what they needed, what they wanted and how that changed over time. Ultimately it is hoped the experiment will become a shared, global initiative that will be constantly evolving.
As the collection grows, GAFFTA will also be encouraging coders to create their own visualisations with the projects public API. And the possibilities of social media have helped Duran Duran restart through more direct contact to its audience. It’s a good example of how people respond to sharing
We have introduced new and exciting features to the orkney.com website which we designed and produced. The site is already being used by many local businesses to promote Orkney and its commerce and services to a wide range of users from locals to businesses further afield, the Orkney diaspora and casual browser, as well as tourists.
Now, in addition to the Twitter, Facebook and Flickr integration and email provision offered to businesses – free of charge – there are great new features to display on the individual’s profile page.
These include the ability to display the Facebook and Twitter profiles. You can even advertise job vacancies on the profile. Visitors to the site are also alerted to the vacancies on the live Today page on Orkney.com which certainly gains more attention.
And when business special offers are advertised on a profile page, they are automatically featured on the Business Directory home page, as well as the live Today page.
These are just a few of the new features which together make Orkney.com a vibrant, interactive and up to the minute one-stop shop for Orkney as a place to do business, live or visit.
The battle to combat spam and email phishing is hotting up as 15 major technology and financial companies have recent opened up to the industry an organisation to design a system for authenticating emails from legitimate senders and weed out fakes.
The system is called DMARC – short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. Snappy title, eh?
Anyone with email is bombarded by fraudsters trying to trick people into giving away passwords and other personal information by sending emails that look as if they come from a legitimate bank, retailer or even the tax office. The unwary might enter personal details, which scam artists can capture and use for fraud.
To combat that DMARC builds upon existing techniques used to combat spam. Those techniques are designed to verify that an email actually came from the sender in question. The problem is there are multiple approaches to achieve that and no standard way of dealing with emails believed to be fake.
The new system asks email senders and the companies that provide email services to share information about the email messages they send and receive. In addition to authenticating their legitimate emails using the existing systems, companies can receive alerts from email providers every time their domain name is used in a fake message. They can then ask the email providers to move such messages to spam folder or block them outright.
Work on DMARC started about 18 months ago. But now other companies can sign up with the organisation, whether they send emails or provide email services. For email users, the group hopes DMARC will mean fewer fraudulent messages and scams reaching their inbox.
The group’s founders are email providers Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc. and Google Inc.; financial service providers Bank of America Corp., Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.’s PayPal; online service companies Facebook, LinkedIn Corp. and American Greetings Corp. and security companies Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain Project. Google uses it already, both in its email sender and email provider capacities.
“Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet as a whole,” said Brett McDowell, Chair of DMARC.org and Senior Manager of Customer Security Initiatives at PayPal. “Industry cooperation – combined with technology and consumer education – is crucial to fight phishing.”
The DMARC specification addresses concerns that have traditionally hindered widespread deployment of an authenticated, trusted email ecosystem, the group says in a press release. It continues that email receivers lack a reliable way to know the extent to which an email sender uses standards like SPF and DKIM for authenticating their messages. As a result, providers must rely on complex and imperfect measurements to separate legitimate unauthenticated messages sent by the domain owner from fraudulent phishing messages sent by a scammer.
By introducing a standards-based framework, DMARC has defined a more comprehensive and integrated way for email senders to introduce email authentication technologies into their infrastructure. For example, a sender could set policies to easily request a provider to discard unauthenticated email in order to block phishing attacks.
The specification also creates a mechanism for email providers to send detailed reports back to email senders to help catch any gaps in the authentication system. This feedback loop raises the trust level within the email ecosystem and makes it easier to detect and stop phishing attempts.
The mystery of a savage murder has been told tweet by tweet.
Agatha Christie’s murder-mystery, The Body in the Library, was revealed– a tiny chunk at a time – through Twitter.
With permission from Agatha Christie Ltd, Stewart Bain, library assistant at the Orkney Library and Archive, has adapted the original text so it could be tweeted in 140-character nuggets from Twitter accounts specially set up for Miss Marple and each of the other main protagonists.
The first mini instalment went out at 7.15am last Friday – the moment in the book when the body is discovered – with the plot unfolding over the rest of the day and on Saturday until a cliff hanger moment was reached.
At that point followers can guess whodunnit – or go to their local library and pick up a copy of the book to find out.
Stewart, winner of two Golden twit awards last year, works in Orkney, where Copla is based.
He has worked closely with publishers HarperCollins and Agatha Christie Ltd, the company that owns and manages the literary estate of Agatha Christie – the world’s best-selling novelist of all time.
The serialisation was timed as a novel way to celebrate National Libraries Day last Saturday.
He hopes people enjoy following The Body in the Library on Twitter and that it encourages those who’ve never read Agatha Christie before to check out their local library and take a fresh look at her novels.
He is a fan of Twitter and has pioneered the way libraries can use Twitter and Facebook to highlight what they have to offer. He has attracted over 4,500 followers on Twitter, from all parts of the UK, and many countries worldwide. And he hopes they will be joined by many more as Agatha Christie’s characters interact with each other over the Twittersphere.
And perhaps some of the library’s crime writing twitter followers will particularly enjoy the tweets. Fans of the @OrkneyLibrary Twitter feed include Val McDermid and Anne Cleeves.
Freedom of information groups have been on the warpath recently over what they see as injustices in cyberspace.
First up for attack was Twitter after it announced that it has the technology to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. And it can delete content from view in a specific country while the rest of the world can see it.
The freedom of information advocacy group Reporters Without Borders hit out at the news, saying it would have a negative impact on free speech and that freedom of information and the press cannot be compromised.
But in a blog post Twitter has defended giving itself the ability to withhold information as countries differ in terms of freedom of expression. They cited an example that France and Germany ban pro-Nazi content. It stated Twitter has to balance local laws with free speech.
Twitter hasn’t withheld any tweets yet and has pledged to advise the user if it does.
Many Twitter users have expressed dismay over the move, with some pointing out the adverse impact it would have on free speech, especially outside the US. Other commentators have suggested Twitter is leaving itself wide open for lawsuits by taking on an editing role. And they question how a computer system will be able to recognise negative or positive spins in tweets.
Meanwhile there were protests in Poland where thousands of marchers took to the streets over the signing of an international treaty that activists say amounts to internet censorship. Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government, along with the UK, among 22 EU member states, signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Tokyo.
ACTA aims to establish international standards to enforce intellectual property right, but critics say it could curb freedom of expression, and Polish government websites have been hacked in protest. But like the US anti-piracy bills, SOPA and PIPA, which saw websites such as Wikipedia and WordPress, shut down for the day in protest, ACTA has courted controversy.
Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA, resigned over how the treaty had been too speedily drawn up. The treaty still needs to be ratified by the European Parliament before it can be enacted. A debate is scheduled to take place in June.