1. The occult phone.

"The key to the telephone as miracle, metaphor, and medium for ghosts lay in what Hubert and Mauss called the 'numerous slits' in reality and rationalism that allow the mundane to commingle with the mystical, and mortal matter to be infused with a spirit which lures our fancy with the prospect of something eternal. 'Many steps in the last few years have been taken upward toward the boundary line that separates the spirit from matter,' Isaac K. Funk wrote in 1911. 'The phonograph that photographs the voice, the long-distance telephone which enables us to hear the voice of a friend tho the ocean intervenes, the wireless telegraph which by waves of ether is a prophecy of conversation with the inhabitants on other planets, the x-ray giving us power to look through solids, the kinetoscope that helps us to see events of the past in action—where is the end?'"

2. 3-D technologies have a rather sad consumer history.

"Amazon announced its first-ever smartphone. The phone's killer feature, as was widely rumored before the event, will be a 3-D display enabled by four front-facing infrared cameras that can detect a user's head movements and rearrange screen elements accordingly... Perhaps that's because 3-D imaging is the ultimate technologist fantasy — a futuristic gimmick that often almost works, but rarely makes it to the mainstream."

3. Linux for lettuce: the Open Source Seed Initiative. 

"One fateful morning in Minneapolis, Michaels awoke with a Linux-inspired epiphany:What if we did the same thing with our seeds? Just like hackers, he and his colleagues would make their germplasm 'free' by attaching a license that kept it in the public domain. No one could patent or otherwise restrict it or its offspring. Over time, Jack Kloppenburg and others heard about the idea, and together they honed it into the shrewdly elegant concept of open-source seed."

4. A special section of the International Journal of Communication on BIG DATA, edited by Kate Crawford, Mary L. Gray, and Kate Miltner.

"Why now? This is the first question we might ask of the big data phenomenon. Why has it gained such remarkable purchase in a range of industries and across academia, at this point in the 21st century? Big data as a term has spread like kudzu in a few short years, ranging across a vast terrain that spans health care, astronomy, policing, city planning, and advertising. From the RNA bacteriophages in our bodies to the Kepler Space Telescope, searching for terrorists or predicting cereal preferences, big data is deployed as the term of art to encompass all the techniques used to analyze data at scale. But why has the concept gained such traction now?"

5. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Mozilla are trying to make comments better. Good luck.

"As described by its developers, the as-yet-unnamed system aims to standardize the many different 'community engagement' systems that Web sites now use to collect and publish outside contributions, especially reader comments and photos. The most ambitious aim of the project is to create a feature that would efficiently highlight the most relevant and pertinent reader comments on an article, perhaps through word-recognition software. Another feature would categorize and rank commenters according to their previous postings."

Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip

buncombe, bunkum. Although the COD prefers the shorter spelling, the first, from an American place name, is the original and is preferred in the US. The word was first used in the 16th Congress: he was bound to make a speech for Buncombe (a county in his district in N.C.). Hence the meaning, anything done for mere show; insincere publication, nonsense; the shorter form, bunk, is slang. 

I only have one thing to say about this one: !!!

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Telephone as Miracle, Metaphor, and Medium