A Contrarian reader recently added Pope Benedict XVI's new Twitter account to his Twitter feed. Whenever a user follows someone new, Twitter responds by suggesting a similar person they might also like to follow. Who is similar to His Holiness? Why Charlie Sheen, of course.   Ah the wonders of social technology. Twitter doesn't say exactly which qualities the pontiff and the thespian share. Surely not substance abuse or cohabitation with porn stars. Problems with anger management could be a possibility, but our money is on having children removed from your care for their own protection. H/T: SBD...

25 January, 2013

Locate your twitter contacts on an interactive world map with this simple mashup. Let your cursor hover over the bottom right corner of the map (not the one above, which is just a screenshot, but the interactive map linked to here) and a Twitter Account sign-in dialog will open. H/T: Nathan Yau...

23 February, 2012

Last Thursday, Contrarian got into a bit of a Twitter dustup with Alice Funke, whose blog, Pundits' Guide, features statistical analysis of Canadian election results. In a post titled, "Mommy, They Split My Vote," Funke purported to show that few if any of the 27 Liberal seats lost to Stephen Harper's Conservatives in the May 2 election had been lost due to vote-splitting. Her complicated argument defies succinct exegesis, but you can read it here. In response, I tweeted: This unleashed a torrent of counter-tweets that, for the time being at least, you can find here and here (by scrolling back to May 12). Funke followed...

16 May, 2011

Engineers from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, a voice messaging startup Google bought last week, put their technical chops to work over the weekend devising a way around the Egyptian government's Internet shutdown. From Google's Official Blog: Like many people, we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt, and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection...

01 February, 2011
Pamela Wilson, Special Needs Children Editor of the Bella Online website, which bills itself as the second-largest women's website in the world, offers a link to Down syndrome advocacy on Twitter, and further thoughts on our discussion of whether Down syndrome needs a "cure."
We really don't know what choices we would make if a safe, effective “cure” was developed for the range of intellectual disability found in most individuals with Down syndrome. Looking at the history of 'treatments' for children with Down syndrome concocted in the past quarter of a century would make any parent hesitant to embrace a new version of what 'scientists' call a cure. The thought of giving pharmaceuticals of any kind to newborns, young babies or children is distressing to most parents, especially since those being considered in current research are known to have serious side effects in teens and adults. Previous treatments with supplements considered helpful by sales representatives have not been shown to be effective. It’s likely that any “cure” will have one or two false starts — as one dad mentioned, these are probably the same folks who once thought LSD was a great treatment for people with schizophrenia. Most parents of individuals with Down syndrome do not share a culture of disability with their sons and daughters.
Continued after the jump
02 December, 2009