Researchers turn to Twitter in the search for time travelers

Whether or not time travel is even physically possible remains to be seen. But researchers at Michigan Technological University have already started scouring the internet for evidence that we’ve been visited by tourists from the future. The theory is that anyone who has moved backwards through space-time may have left their mark by tweeting, updating Facebook or posting on Google+ (who knows, maybe it’s super popular in the future). The team began looking for mentions of two particular terms, “comet ISON” and “Pope Francis” before they would have entered our lexicon on September 21, 2012 and March 16, 2013, respectively. The ability to backdate Facebook posts and the fact that Google Trends only picks up popular terms limited he effectiveness of those particular tools, but that did not deter the researchers.

They also performed a version of an experiment first conducted by Stephen Hawking in 2012, who sent out an invitation to a party after he’d already thrown it. Not surprisingly, no one traveled back in time to attend after they’d received the invitation. The Michigan Tech team decided to use Twitter hastags instead. They asked people to tweet with #ICanChangeThePast2 and #ICannotChangeThePast2, then searched for messages including those tags that would have been sent before they put out the call to the would be time travelers. Unfortunately, none of their work turned up any evidence that there are currently people from the future in our midst. Of course, we already know they’re here — Nic Cage is the only evidence we need. The full academic paper awaits you at the source link.

Filed under: Science, Internet, Alt

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Via: The Daily Dot

Source: Searching the internet for evidence of time travelers

Vine truly comes to the web, with full screen TV mode

Vine certainly is taking its time fleshing out its feature set. Most surprisingly, you couldn’t actually browse the short video sharing service from the comfort of your desktop browser until now. Sure, you could follow a link that would lead you to a specific Vine, but couldn’t skim a feed of clips from people you follow or look through a user’s history. Thankfully that all changes today as the service finally embraces the web, and begins moving away from its entirely app-based existence. Now when you log in you’ll be presented with a scrolling list of six-second updates and you can click through to checkout those all important profiles. And, just so the company can’t be accused of being lazy, it’s bringing something a little special to the desktop — TV Mode. Click the TV icon in the upper right hand corner and you’ll be treated to a full screen presentation of Vines played in sequence. It’s a pretty easy way to catch up on all your friends’ travels, meals and petscapades (you know, pet escapades) without having to touch the scroll bar.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Vine

A first look at Carbon 2.0, a refresh on an awesome Twitter client

Carbon for twitter has been in the play store for a while, but hasn’t seen any revolutionary changes in a long time. Till yesterday, that is.

When Carbon first made its way into the Play Store, it was trying to do something different. Be a feature packed app, and have one of the most beautiful dark UIs in the store. I, for one, am a huge fan of the dark UI schemes in apps and ROMs. For me, it was like love at first sight. For a while, that is. After a little bit of using Carbon, the “new app smell” wore off, and I went back to other apps, like the Official Twitter app.

Yesterday, Carbon was updated. And I love it. I don’t think I’m going to be switching away from it for a while. They updated it with what they call “#C2PointOh”, or Carbon 2.0. It truly is worthy of the 2.0 tag, as it is a complete overhaul, in a good way. The new Carbon is elegant in every way, but lacking a few things that I think it really needs. Don’t get me wrong, like I said, I love it. But, there are a few simple things that I think the app should do, that it doesn’t. Well, ok, one. If you have a device with a built in menu button, like me, you get used to hitting that button in any app to bring up the menu, no matter where it’s located. Or, you get used to having some sort of indicator of where the menu would be located. Carbon is not that way. It took me a good 3-4 minutes of searching around the app to figure out where in the world the menu was, and where it was, kinda surprised me. You get to the menu by clicking on your profile picture in the bottom, which is also the button used to compose a new tweet. I would have liked to see these two separated a bit more, or at least have it mapped to the hardware menu button on devices that support it.

Besides that, I love the app. It has good notifications, a good UI, very fast, clean, everything I look for in a Twitter app. Some things that this app does that I really do like is the way it handles multi-touch. If you double tap on a tweet, it brings up a dialog for ReTweeting said tweet, which is an ingenious way to make things faster!

The developers, dots & lines, have this to say about the app:

All-new Carbon v2 with a new design and experience.

Carbon experience for Android Smartphones. No Tablet support yet.

Simple, Dark, and a dash of elegance for your Twitter day-to-day pleasure.

Carbon is a Twitter client, but unlike other Twitter clients. All of your Twitter content on one screen. A screen that doesn’t get you drilling down to many other screens to reach to what you want. Timelines, Lists, Favourites, Searches, Trends, Profiles, all there.

– Fresh new Design & Interface
– Brand new Timeline design & aesthetics
– Swipe-able Timeline, @Mentions, and Messages on Home.
– Quick Timeline, one Timeline for Searches, List, Favourites on your Home screen.
– Don’t Disturb Mode
– Oxide Mode for Grayscale Timeline experience
– Power Scroll: Scroll/Swipe up or down using Two fingers to jump to top or bottom of Timelines
– Tweet Quick Actions
– Configuratie Tweet Font Sizes
– Retweets Timeline
– In-App Browser
– In-App YouTube Player
– Vine Previews & Playback
– Rich Timelines with full inline images and videos
– Rich and elegant style for User Profiles
– Rich Conversation View
– Threaded Direct Messages
– Background updates with quick actions for Jelly Bean, per account
– Username Autocomplete
– Mutes/Filters for Hashtags, Users, and Keywords
– People Search
– Obviously Multi-account with simultaneous accounts tweets
– Profile Editor

What do you think of this massive update? Is it enough to sway you from your current go-to Twitter app, as it was for me? Let us know in the comments, and download below!