My New Faculty office at the University of Louisville! You can't see the bookcases, and I have just moved in. The only thing I have had a chance to put up is the 'Angry Cardinal' that my sister Karla made for me! Isn't it fantastic?

Here is what I am reading today:

“Several Mashable staffers at our New York City headquarters felt tremors from the 5.9 magnitude earthquake Tuesday, but only after we saw tweets begin to roll in from Washington, D.C. Our counterparts in San Francisco, however, really couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. “

“Since it’s launch into the Apple store back in early October last year Instagram has exploded, reaching 1 million users in just over 2 months (something that took Twitter over 2 years). It’s now growing twice as fast as Flickr.”

“The location-based social networking platform Foursquare has been making a splash since its 2009 inception. In 2010 alone, the company grew an unprecedented 3,400 percent, with “check-ins” in every single country on the globe and even one from space, according to this infographic.

A few weeks ago, Foursquare rolled out a completely revamped version of its popular mobile app that works on virtually any smartphone device, making it extremely accessible to all smartphone users—a key move since global smartphone use is on the rise.”

“Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school “reputation” and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending. We try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would:  Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree?  “

 

“The researcher charged with being the most social person at Microsoft considers herself an outsider.

Lili Cheng, the head of Microsoft’s social-media research group, is an architect at a company of computer scientists. At her first job, she was the only woman and the only person who didn’t speak Japanese at a construction firm of 300 in Tokyo.

“It’s really easy for me to imagine the person who is left out,” said Cheng, who has 1,240 friends on Facebook. “I feel like I don’t always fit in, and I like that.”

Cheng is general manager of FUSE Lab, which stands for Future Social Experiences.”

“Now, Facebook has changed its Groups feature to make it easier to send messages, photos and updates to specific groups. For instance, Facebook has placed inline controls in every status message in a newsfeed, allowing you to  more easily broadcast the message to the appropriate group. Also, “Everyone” has been changed to “Public” to make the audience title more clear.”