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The Great Bubble Gum Caper When I was eight years old, I stole a pack of sour apple bubblegum from the grocery store, after my mom said she wouldn’t buy it for me. I, a budding Moriarty, took the gum out of the wrapper while she was turned around, and then slammed the sweet morsel into my mouth. I’ll never forget how the sharp flavor made my mouth water. Or how, in the final moments of parental prohibition, my mouth turned into a dastardly wrinkle of a smirk. My mother said “No,” and in response I fired the first shots […]

A variety of technologies are emerging for tracking emotions via the Internet using techniques such as text-analytics, speech analysis, and video analysis of the face. Better tools for tracking emotions holds promise for bringing awareness to our inner state through outside feedback. This kind of technology also promises to make it easier to understand how websites, mobile applications, and ads impact the emotional state of users. “The end goal should be to reengineer business to be truly customer-centric, which was infeasible until emotional analytics entered the picture,” said Armen Berjikly, Founder and CEO of Kanjoya, a sentiment analysis service. Ken […]

Earlier this year, a security vulnerability in WordPress and Drupal was discovered by a member of Salesforce’s security team, Nir Goldshlager. Goldshlager co-authored an article on Mashable about the vulnerability, which Mashable waited to publish until after the issue was patched in WordPress and Drupal. This is a great example of responsible disclosure of a security vulnerability in open source software. The issue itself was reported in private to those who could fix it. It was kept a secret only long enough for the affected software to be patched. Now the exploit (and how to fix it) is available for developers […]

The most troubling thing about the recent Facebook and OKCupid experiments may not be the experiments themselves. It may be the potential of the controversies surrounding their publication that discourages wider emotional experimentation. Ethical behavior implies acting in a way that cultivates the good life. Content providers and services that honestly seek to pursue this need to do more testing to see not only what sells products or engages users, but what leads toward the greater good. Until now, this kind of research has been impractical, but the rise of tools for automatically assessing emotions — like text analytics tools and […]

When you’re wandering (sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with a particular mission), around the internet, you will inevitably be bombarded with a slew of headlines and video titles. Some of these headlines are efficient and transparent, quickly telling you what you are about to read once you click through. They take a legitimate and journalistic approach to bringing readers in. There are other headlines, however, which will use manipulation to make readers feel supernaturally compelled to read the full article. This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. A tease is a tease. Don’t we all remember watching primetime television (back when people couldn’t […]