Tag: CULTURE

Google's latest search tool may not be its most widely celebrated, but it could end up having a far greater cultural impact than anything else the company has ever done. The new Google Books Ngram Viewer, which launched last week, collects more than 500 billion words, from over 5.2 million digital books available for free download. Users can search for a specific word or phrase, and the viewer ...

Traditionally, the art of de-cluttering a house meant large garage sales, or, at least, finding friends to saddle with all of your needless junk. Now, sites like eBay have made the whole process easier, connecting you with millions of strangers... to saddle with all of your needless junk. Yet, as BBC reports, a select few people have found their traditional, analog lives too cumbersome, and ...

When recent Twitter convert Kanye West chose to follow the account of a kid named Steven Holmes, everyone struggled to comprehend why Mr. West would want to follow a relatively anonymous student -- and no one else. Surely this kid must be the world's most rabid Kanye fan, right? Or perhaps he's another struggling musician who's been chomping at the bit for his one shot at fame? Well, not ...

The year 2000 loomed over the world way before 1999 -- see Prince songs, Y2K concerns, and even hordes of science fiction movies set before the end of the millennium. But on January 1, 2000, nothing much changed, jet packs didn't suddenly appear, and we didn't all get rad Jetsons-style hair. While we can't speak for our readers, launch any member of the Switched staff through time from 1999 until ...

It's no secret that obesity levels in the U.S. have been rising over the years. But according to a new report, our consumption of information is on the rise, too, which isn't a bad thing. The New York Times reports that an average American consumes 34-gigabytes and roughly 100,000 words of information each day. In total, American households consumed 3.6-zettabytes of information last year (if ...

Outfits like Nokia have been just rolling in profits from selling oodles of low margin handsets in developing nations across the globe, so it's no shock at all to hear that those very countries have propelled the worldwide usage tally well above the 50 percent mark. According to a wide-ranging United Nations report, around six in ten people across the globe now use mobile phones, and as ...

While those of us in the United States might consider an iPhone or BlackBerry to be the ultimate mobile status symbol, Cubans are just now lusting after the most basic of cell phones, we learned from the Washington Post via Textually.org. Cuba's new president, Raul Castro, has introduced cell phones to the Cuban marketplace -- along with other formerly contraband devices like DVD players, ...

Google Maps' Street View is rife with interesting little Easter eggs, but most of the hidden gems are unintentional. We've gathered creepy invasions of privacy and seen the Google Street View team posing outside its Mountain View, California headquarters. Now, with the cooperation of the Street View team, Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley have turned Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh's Northside into a ...

No need to adjust your set -- the United Nations communications chief has boldly predicted that half of planet Earth's population will be hooked on some sort of mobile phone before 2009 dawns. Granted, the numbers he's talking about do look strictly at subscriptions, so a small percentage will be skewed by those with multiple accounts (and thus, multiple numbers), but really, the forecast isn't ...