Top Stories for the Week of January 24 - 28, 2011
“The war over Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother rages. It started when Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor who wrote the book, had an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal that the newspaper headlined Why Chinese Moms are Superior. It made people think she was saying something like Chinese moms are superior. Much backlash and link-baiting ensued in print and blogs, from "Amy Chua is a Wimp" in the NY Times to "Tiger Mother is a Scaredy Cat" on HuffPo. Others put it in context. Sandy Hingston at Philly Post writes: "We all want so badly to be good parents. We're all so scared we're not. Chua's child- rearing screed and the responses from her readers remind me: It's fear that makes us so adamant our way is the right way. We can't bear to think we might be wrong."
A contributor ar RedState defends Chua. "I congratulate her. I wish I was more like her and admire the tremendous success that her two daughters enjoy in their lives. Other people have different reactions and this, for America is unfortunate." On Tuesday Chua was the guest on The Colbert Report and explained, people, it's a memoir of her own life with her own strict mother and her daughter, not an advice book telling American parents they're screwing up. "To her credit she did not back down under Colbert's (rather serious) questioning - which is more than can be said about many a politician!!" says Business Insider. Meanwhile, a WSJ follow-up at its China RealTime blog says the book in China is being called "Being a Mom in America." And now there is talk of some sort of movie.
Meanwhile, over at Geekdad they've taken the strategy of most American dads and remained oblivious of the entire situation, with posts like What's New In Pokemon Black/White? In other China news, at the Australian Open on Thursday, Li Na beat Caroline Wozniacki to become the first Chinese player in history to advance to the finals of any Grand Slam tennis tournament. In her post-match interview, Li was all jokes. Her tiger mother must have forced her to be hilarious! Snoring husbands? Reluctant mothers? Jokes about playing only for prize money? That's fantastic stuff and funnier than anything I saw on Leno, Letterman or Stewart this week. A star is born," writes Busted Racquet.
It wouldn't be a week-in-review without some Facebook news that makes you wonder why you're using it. Here comes "Sponsored Stories," a new advertising feature in which can put your check-ins and "likes" into ads for companies, as the accompanying mock-up from Mashable illustrates. "Users seeing their friends "liking" or checking in to Whole Foods will drive increased trust and increased traffic," Mash explains. (Pause for cold shudder.) Concludes Faster Forward: "One aspect of this ad program should be easy to predict: People won't like it."
Apparently 1,800 people "liked" a message that hackers left on the Mark Zuckerberg fan page, according to TechChunks. "It wasn't just Zuckerberg's fan page which was affected. Facebook declined to say which other pages had been hit by hackers exploiting the vulnerability - but it appears that other 'high-profile' pages were also impacted," says Naked Security, where they explain "what really happened." On Wednesday Facebook announced new security features to protect accounts. "While the announcement isn't necessarily a result of [the Zuckerberg page breach]," says ReadWriteWeb. "It's a good reminder of the importance of always using a secure connection to access your accounts online."
President Obama had a TV show this week, and his State of the Union address got the usual 21st century treatment: rather than making an old- fashioned word cloud using the content of the speech, NPR asked its listeners to describe the speech using three words, then created a word cloud using just those words suggested. That's' why "salmon" came up large in all versions of the cloud, which NPR ran separately for Republicans, democrats and independents. I Hate The Media created a cloud of the actual words in the address, and less aquatic stuff like "new" and "people" and "American" dominates. "Funny thing, though," says IHTM. The words 'debt' and 'deficit' aren't even in the top fifty. You might even say we had a deficit deficit."
Obama made a lot of long-range promises, and Gizmodo takes us to a future state by analyzing what the speech means for the world of tomorrow: "The President of the United States just shouted out Facebook in the State of the Union address. Wow. Not particularly surprising, given that social media helped (in part) to push Obama into the White House. But still... Obama mentioned the Internet a whopping six times, as opposed to a whopping zero in last year's address. Could it be all that The Social Network Oscar buzz?"
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