Adam Levine to Fox News: Stop Playing My Music

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Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine went on Twitter earlier this afternoon to demand that Fox News stop playing his band’s music. “Dear Fox News, don’t play our music on your evil fucking channel ever again. Thank you,” he wrote. It is unclear what exactly prompted this public outburst. When reached by Rolling Stone, Levine’s representative declined to comment.

Though it’s very common for musicians to ask politicians to stop using their songs in campaigns – Tom Petty, Katrina and the Waves and David Byrne all dealt with this earlier this year – it’s unusual to see an artist make this demand of a network, even one as highly politicized as Fox News. While musicians very seldom get paid performance royalties when their music is used on campaign stops, television networks are obligated to pay out royalties every time a song is used in a broadcast.

Related
• Michele Bachmann Defies Tom Petty’s Cease-and-Desist
• Katrina and the Waves Join Tom Petty’s Fight Against Michele Bachmann

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/adam-levine-to-fox-news-stop-playing-my-music-20111019

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First Lady Michelle Obama Sends First Tweet (Video)

By Lyneka Little

First Lady Michelle Obama has sent her first tweet. Obama used Twitter from @JoiningForces, an initiative to help support military veterans and their families. In a video circulating on the Web, Obama is seen staring intently at a Mac screen before asking the people in the room, “So this is how you Tweet, huh? So now I just press Tweet?” The message sent by the First Lady says, “Military Families serve our nation too. Let’s all show our appreciation by #JoiningForces with them. Get involved: JoiningForces.gov-mo.” [All Things D]

Article source: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/10/21/first-lady-michelle-obama-sends-first-tweet-video/

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Oklahoma State stars use Twitter to interact with fans

By Matt Owings, USA TODAY

Oklahoma State quarterback Brandon Weeden and wide receiver Justin Blackmon took a break from the practice field to answer midseason questions from fans via Twitter this week, using the account @Weeden2Blackmon.

On Wednesday, Blackmon, the 2010 Biletnikoff winner as the nation’s top receiver, took his turn. When asked what has stood out most about the team’s performance this year, Blackmon said, “I’m really impressed on how focused everyone is.”

One fan asked him to name his favorite receiver: “Jerry Rice of course.”

Weeden, the reigning first-team all-Big 12 quarterback, went Thursday. He was asked about his relationship with his star wide receiver.

“Very good. On and off the field. Blackmon is a great dude fun to be around. Everyone in our locker room wants to be around him,” Weeden said.

Fans were given the opportunity to ask questions beyond football, such as favorite athletes or music. Weeden was asked what his favorite food was that he makes at home: “My wife’s taco salad. Pretty simple but always a good choice.”

Blackmon, a native of Ardmore, Okla., located just under 120 miles north of Arlington, Texas, was asked for his World Series pick: “Rangers of course.”

Fans also learned that Blackmon listens to all different kinds of music before games, and Weeden loves playing at Texas AM, “Especially when you win!”

The No. 6 Cowboys (6-0, 3-0), sit atop the Big 12 standings with rival Oklahoma. Weeden is 189-for-260 for 2,088 yards, with 16 touchdowns and six interceptions on the season. Blackmon has 53 receptions for 608 yards and seven scores. Only Oklahoma’s Ryan Broyles (nine), Baylor’s Kendall Wright (nine) and Clemson’s Sammy Watkins (eight) have more touchdown catches than Blackmon.

Oklahoma State will travel to Columbia Saturday to play Missouri (3-3, 1-2).

Article source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/campusrivalry/post/2011/10/oklahoma-state-cowboys-brandon-weeden-justin-blackmon-twitter/1

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Mo. Repeals Law Banning Teacher-Student Contact On Facebook

Today, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed into a law a bill that effectively repeals one passed earlier this year that barred teachers from having contact with any student on Facebook or any social media site that enabled private messaging.

We reported on SB54, when it was passed. We reported that the law had been opposed by some teachers and the ACLU of Easter Missouri, which said it placed an “unconstitutional restriction on freedoms of speech and association.”

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports on the repeal:

The legislation directs school districts to develop a social media policy by March 1, 2012. Those policies must include “the use of electronic media and other mechanisms to prevent improper communications between staff members and students.”

…

In calling the legislature back into special session, Nixon said lawmakers could only repeal the electronic communications provision, not revise it. The state constitution gives the governor the authority to determine which subjects lawmakers can consider during a special session.

Noting that lawmakers had gone further than he had directed, Nixon said the new legislation contains several provisions that he considers troubling. But he signed the bill because “to veto it would return us to a bill that would be far worse.”

The AP reports that the ACLU of Eastern Missouri still objects to the new law. John Chasnoff, its program director, said it just “passes the buck” and that “there will still be districts out there that say you can’t use Facebook no matter what, or you can’t use this type of social media regardless of whether you’re using it in the classroom or outside the classroom.”

Article source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/21/141601093/mo-repeals-law-banning-teacher-student-contact-on-facebook

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Facebook partners with US government to reduce unemployment

Facebook has teamed up with the US Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), DirectEmployers Association (DE), and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA). The five groups announced a joint commitment to create the Social Jobs Partnership, which aims to facilitate employment for America’s jobless by leveraging the social network.

More than 70 percent of college career centers have a Facebook Page according to an independent survey by NACE, and 92 percent of respondents have recruited or plan to recruit via social networks according to a Jobvite poll conducted in 2010. In other words, the partners in this initiative realize people and companies are already using social networks to find jobs and recruit candidates, respectively. They want to encourage the practice in order to reduce the national unemployment rate.

In order to get people back to work, the partnership will pursue a number of initiatives designed to more effectively leverage the social network in the job market:

• Launch a central Facebook Page at facebook.com/socialjobs that hosts resources and content designed to help job seekers and employers. Facebook will launch public service announcements on Facebook to promote the Page in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rate, as well as Puerto Rico, which has an unemployment rate of 16 percent.
• Conduct an in-depth survey research about the ways in which job seekers, college career centers, and workforce recruiters are using the social web.
• Explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through Facebook at no charge.
• Promote existing government programs and resources for job hunters.
• Distribute educational materials about leveraging the power of the social web to recruiters, government agencies, and job seekers.

“Facebook is about connecting people so that they can share what’s important to them, and that is the driving force behind the Social Jobs Partnership,” Marne Levine, Facebook vice president of Global Public Policy, said in a statement. “We’ve brought employers, recruiters, college career services and government agencies together to help the millions of Americans who use Facebook find jobs.”

“Linking American job seekers with the resources they need to get back to work is a top priority of the Obama Administration and my department,” US Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said in a statement. “By leveraging the power of the social web, this initiative will provide immediate, meaningful and ready-to-use information for job seekers and employers, and a modern platform to better connect them.”

See also:

• More than 100 new Facebook cases under NLRB review
• Facebook apps have created 200,000 US jobs (study)
• Judge: fired for complaining on Facebook? You’re rehired!
• Job recruiters increasingly using Facebook to find candidates
• When Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire you, he takes you to the woods
• Employer demands Facebook login credentials during interview

Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-partners-with-us-government-to-reduce-unemployment/4782

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Facebook’s Privacy Policy Under Scrutiny In Europe, Partly Because Students …

While researching a paper on privacy law this summer, Max Schrems, a 24-year-old law student in Austria, asked Facebook to turn over all the data the social networking site had collected on him. In response, Facebook sent him a detailed dossier of his activity for the past three years: a CD containing more than 1,200 pages of Facebook wall posts, messages, removed friends and “pokes,” among other things. Schrems thought he had deleted most of that activity, but Facebook had stored it, he said.

So Schrems and some fellow law students who also request their data filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner over how Facebook stores its users’ information. (The complaints were filed in Ireland because Facebook’s Dublin office handles issues outside the U.S. and Canada.)

Now, those complaints are part an investigation by Irish authorities that could have implications for the way Facebook collects and stores information on millions of users. Next week, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner will conduct an audit to determine whether Facebook has violated Ireland’s data protection laws. A spokeswoman for the commissioner said the students’ complaints will be part of the audit, which is expected to take several days. Its findings will be published by the end of the year.

“Facebook is cooperating fully with the audit and we would anticipate that it will implement any necessary changes to comply with any requirements identified,” said Ciara O’Sullivan, the commissioner’s spokeswoman, by email.

The investigation is just the latest example of the growing scrutiny of Facebook’s privacy practices. Last month, a coalition of privacy, consumer and civil liberties groups asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for secretly tracking users after they logged off Facebook.

In August, German state official Thilo Weichert said Facebook’s “Like” button violated German and European law because it allowed Facebook to track users’ interests without their consent and send that information to servers in the United States, according to the Associated Press. On Friday, German media reported that Facebook had offered to exempt users in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein — where Weichert is data protection commissioner — from having their “Like” choices sent to Facebook’s U.S. servers.

Schrems and his fellow law students at the University of Vienna were able to access their data because of a European law requiring organizations to disclose information about users upon request. Facebook users in the United States do not have that same right. But Schrems admitted being surprised that Facebook sent him the CD.

“I would never have known this data was not deleted if they had not sent it to me,” Schrems said in a phone interview. “I’m convinced it was just a mistake.”

Schrems has created a website, Europe-v-Facebook.org, where he has posted copies of the group’s complaints against Facebook and detailed steps that European Facebook users can take to request their data.

“A company that constantly asks its costumers to be as transparent as possible should be equally transparent when it comes to the use of its costumers’ personal data,” the site says. “Transparency is not only a question of fairness, but it is also a principle of European data protection law. It is time that the biggest social network worldwide sticks to these legal principles.”

In one complaint, the students allege that Facebook creates “shadow profiles” of non-users by collecting their email addresses when members invite them to join the site.

In an email, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the site only keeps invitees’ email addresses to let members know if and when they join. “The assertion that Facebook is doing some sort of nefarious profiling is simply wrong,” he said.

“We look forward to making these and other clarifications to the Irish [Data Protection Commissioner],” added Noyes.

Schrems said the data on the CD were divided into 57 categories. But he said he believes that still more information was not turned over by Facebook, including data about the site’s “Like” button and facial recognition software, which automatically tags people in photos.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said her organization has been pushing Facebook to be more clear about its data retention policies, which are “very confusing and difficult” for users to understand. As a result, she said, “people are sharing more information on Facebook than they think they are.”

If found guilty of violating Irish law, Facebook could be fined about $140,000, O’Sullivan said. That’s a small sum for a company that has been valued at more than $100 billion.

Still, Schrems’ efforts have turned him into a celebrity of sorts, generating widespread media coverage in Germany and praise from privacy experts around the world.

On his blog, Kim Cameron, former chief architect of identity at Microsoft, said
Schrems has cast a spotlight on Facebook’s opaque methods of collecting user information.

“It will be absolutely amazing to watch how this issue plays out, and see just what someone with Max’s media talent is able to do with the answers once they become public,” Cameron wrote. “The result may well impact the whole industry for a long time to come.”

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/facebook-privacy-policy-europe-student-complaints_n_1022988.html

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Mother of Toddler Who Was Run Over Says Microblog Is a Fake

A screen grab from China’s Sina Weibo shows a Twitter-like account started in the name of the toddler’s mother. She told local media that she was not responsible for it.

A 2-year-old girl who was hit by a van and then ignored as she lay writhing in the middle of a busy market street in China died on Friday of her injuries, as my colleague Michael Wines reports.

The accident in the city of Foshan last Thursday had set off rounds of soul-searching by many in China who took to the country’s freewheeling Twitter-like microblogs to debate the episode and whether it exposed a lack compassion in their country.

The family of the girl, Wang Yueyue, has received more than $40,000 in donations from concerned Chinese, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Within hours of the accident, Xinhua reported, there were nearly 2 million posts related to the toddler on Sina Weibo, a popular microblog platform similar to Twitter. By the middle of this week, there were nearly 10 million. A horrific video of the accident, contained in a news report, has been viewed 2.8 million times on Youku, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

Among the most closely watched accounts on Sina Weibo related to the accident was one said to belong to the mother of the toddler, also named Wang Yueyue. The four short messages posted to the account have been commented on and passed along to other readers of the site tens of thousands of times.

According to a translation by the English-language Shanghaiist blog, the most shared post read:

To all the kindhearted friends in the world, I am Yueyue’s dad. Thank you all for your attention, I bow to all of you. Yueyue’s medical condition was announced earlier today at a news conference at the military hospital. Yueyue is still in critical condition and is still under intensive care. Thank you all for your attention once again. I bow to you. Wang Chichang.

The only problem: the post was not from the toddler’s father, according to her mother.

Ms. Wang told local media in China that they had been too distraught after the accident to think about posting updates to a microblog and were angered by the appearance of posts in their name, according to Shanghaiist. The blog reported that the girl’s mother, who apparently did not understand the microblogging service, had said yes when called and asked by an unidentified person whether it would be O.K. to start a Sina Weibo account for her.

The account, called Yueyue’s Mother, was still live as of Friday morning. It includes a verification icon from Sina Weibo meant to signal to readers of the site that the company has confirmed that the person posting with a specific identity is who she says she is. In this case, she was not.

A company spokesman, Mao Taotao, said that “some miscommunications occurred” but that Yueyue’s Mother account was now being controlled by the toddler’s father. For proof he pointed to the post — above — that was written in the father’s name on Tuesday. When asked whether the family was in control of the account before that, he repeated that there had been a miscommunication. He called accident “a regrettable incident,” and said the company would not comment further on it.

The account is latest example the microblogging service appearing to attach its “verified” stamp to a blog that is not in fact official. Another belongs to The New York Times.

That account, according to its accompanying text, describes itself as the CFP visual products group of China’s “official New York Times photo microblog.” Despite the blue tag with a “V” at the top, the account is, needless to say, not official.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing.

Article source: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/mother-of-toddler-who-was-run-over-says-microblog-is-a-fake/

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The Twitter feed from World Series Game 2

By harnessing the power of social gaming, a new coalition hopes to become the Farmville of home energy conservation.

The average American spends just six minutes a year thinking about their energy consumption, a statistic that Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and energy management firm Opower hope to change through a new social energy app. 

“Social networking represents the next frontier in delivering consumer energy savings,” Dan Yates, co-founder and chief executive officer of Opower, said in a statement. The group is hoping to reach a broader segment of the population, one that may have had little interest in energy efficiency to date.

The app will combine the competitiveness of a game with real-world data. Facebookers  can benchmark their home’s energy usage against a national average of similar homes, compare their energy use with friends, enter energy-saving competitions, and share tips on how to become more energy efficient.

According to NRDC, improvements in energy efficiency  have the potential to deliver more than $700 billion in cost savings in the United States.

The key to the new app is Opower’s network of more than 60 utility partners who will make customer data available for use in the app. Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the City of Palo Alto (in California), and Glendale Water Power (GWP) will be the first U.S. utilities to participate, representing around 4 million customers when the app launches in early 2012.

The power of peer pressure

The app is built around the idea of competition. People will be able to invite friends to compare their energy use against their own and show how energy efficient they are. In the absence of a network of energy-conscious friends, the app will provide national data as a substitute. Players can also manually upload data from their monthly bill if their utility is not participating.

Communities of people will be able to form teams to help each other achieve collective goals, as well as compete against other groups. Teams will be rewarded and incentivized by their utility or other network partners.

The new app is being promoted by Facebook  on its Facebook Green page, a resource for people interested in learning more about Facebook’s commitment to environmental stewardship. Currently, Green has garnered more than 95,000 “likes” by users.

  *   7 iPhone Apps that Help Save the Planet
  *   What to Do Before You Get Your Facebook Timeline
  *   Electrical Bloodsuckers: How to Slay ‘Energy Vampires’ in Your Home

Copyright 2011 TechNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/21/new-facebook-app-highlights-energy-conservation/

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