Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Shaking a baby to death on your iPhone

An iPhone app simulated a crying baby, which could only be quieted by physically shaking the smartphone.  After some amount of shaking, "Baby Shaker" would display the child's death.  Apple's Apps Store approved this macabre tagamochi spawn, but deleted it today.

Put it this way:

“Baby Shaker” challenges users to see how long they can withstand the cries of a baby before they shake it to death.

The app's developer now says "Yes, the Baby Shaker iPhone app was a bad idea."

Apple has remained immune from the fearsome digital media meme, for reasons worth exploring (the cult? lack of games? Steve Jobs' demonic marketing?), but perhaps this story will enter into the broader field of creepy mobile devices.

Criticism of Apple has arisen, aimed in part at the walled-garden promise of the Apps Store.  Consumerist:

Seriously, Apple rejects a jiggling boobs app for being "obscene" but lets an "abuse a baby to death" app through?

Click here if you want to see a video clip of Baby Shaker in action.  I can't bear to embed it.

(image via Boston Herald)

Facebook versus your good grades

Facebook has yet to acquire the bad reputation of other social networks, but its success makes it a juicy target for the fearsome Web meme.  Case in point: a claim that Facebook saps academic performance.

“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.

As usual with bad-media studies, the argument is for correlation, not causation.

Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.

There is room for causation, though, at least in terms of either opportunity cost or something like addiction:

In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.

FuturePundit notes that the opposite argument isn't raised, namely that social media can improve one's intellect and career.

(via Instapundit)

Another study claiming massive numbers of children addicted to gaming

Nearly 9 % of American children are "pathologically" addicted to computer gaming, according to a new Iowa study.

Gentile found that 8.5 per cent of the survey respondents were showing symptoms that would be classified by the manual as pathological if they had been gambling instead of playing video games.

Several problems come to mind with this account, even without access to the study itself.  For one, are those adult gamblers or children, with whom the comparison is being made?

Second, note the list of "symptoms":

* Spent 24 hours a week playing video games: about twice as much time as non-pathological gamers.
* Were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms.
* Were more likely to report having problems paying attention at school.
* Were more likely to have received a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
* Received poorer school grades.
* Had poorer health.
* Were more likely to say they felt "addicted" to their habit.
* Stole to support their habit.

What a farrago.  Having a game in one's room is a problem?  What makes playing twice as much as others a pathological sign? (And imagine how many of us thereby become "pathological readers")  Does anything connect the actual problems from this list in a causal way?

Ian Campbell puts it well:

No mention that quite a bit of this behavior is abnormal but related to childhood, no mention that adult addiction and childhood addiction are fairly separate phenomena. And there’s absolutely no reflection regarding cause and effect. The explicit premise here is that the video game addiction causes the above pathologies, and is not a symptom of an underlying problem.

Disturbing Strokes

A pleasantly sinister mashup, the Diff'rent Strokes credits with new music:

This is one way Infocult sees the world, o friends and readers.

(via MetaFilter, where someone points out the nifty source for the audio track)

Fearsome Twitter

Being creeped out by Twitter: one commentator describes her fears.

It's political, in part:

 I am now being followed by Karl Rove, and my local sheriff, and God knows how many other political pundits...
 I can’t shake the fact that Karl Rove is following me—it can be creepy. 

It's also local law enforcement (which is political, too), or law enforcement plus other stuff:

My local Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who, as the author of America’s Toughest Sheriff, is notorious in his own right) recently sent me a Tweet about an answer I gave a fellow Twitter follower. He tried to tell me to go easy on them. It’s really scary when the guy who houses his inmates in tents in the summer and whose most visible public-relations success involves pink underwear, boxers, and handcuffs tells you to tone it down. The sheriff also inexplicably Tweeted me to say my mother owes him $10. Say what?

Given Twitter's size and prominence, we should expect more of these stories.  Nothing on teen/child sex, given the demographics.  Probably eQaeda, Tweets from the dead, criminals using Twitter, copyright violation by Twitter.

A dozen decapitations in song: a new Gothic genre

More drug war Gothic: Mexican drug lords leave twelve severed heads in a sack as a warning to local cops.  Now there's a song about it.

We've been noting other stories of drug prohibition horror: eleven Z-marked bodies, Juarez becoming Dark City.

Lovecraftian Barcelona

Jack Womack tours Barcelona with a Lovecraftian gaze.

Or:

(thanks to Hugh for the poke)

The Blood Falls of Antarctica

Antarctica keeps emitting Gothic stories.  Today's it's the Blood Falls phenomenon.  This does not refer to a gore fountain, but rather to an unusual flow of water on the southernmost continent,

a rusty red discolouration on the face of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica, occasionally gushes forth a transparent, briny, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns red, staining the ice below.

Besides the appearance, how else could this be spooky?  Perhaps the age:

the liquid, which comes from a pool of seawater that has been trapped inside the glacier for at least 1.5 million years, is alive with around 30 different types of bacteria with some unique chemical moves.

And now scientists have released it.  Classic Polar Gothic.

More dark, darkly lovely notes here:

a new kind of microbial life flourishing in a dark, icy-cold pool underneath an Antarctic glacier. The finding has implications for how life might have survived on Earth during the coldest, grimmest epochs.

(via MetaFilter)

The Craigslist Killer

Yet another spin on fearing social media, as a murderer gets nicknamed "the Craigslist Killer." No, that's not a newspaper's fantasy about somehow returning to profitability.  The alleged killer has apparently used Craigslist to connect with one or two victims, and that has become his leading indicator.

The Boston Herald seems to be enjoying the story, based on the article's pulp prose:

The gun-toting savage has been targeting escorts and masseuses who advertise online and work out of pricey downtown Boston hotel rooms.

The stunning Brisman, 26, of New York, was shot to death Tuesday night in the Marriott Copley Place...

The story also dives into surveillance, publishing security cam photos of "a person of interest."

(thanks to Ian Campbell)

President Gothic villain: the Onion darkly dreams

The Onion pokes at favorable news media coverage of the Obama presidency, using classic American Gothic and true crime.

More than a week after President Barack Obama's cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.

"I know there's a story in there somewhere," said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama's home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8...

Leave it to the Onion to do a nice riff on serial killer lyricism, while parodying the Unabomber story:

The New York Times newsroom is reportedly still undecided on whether or not to print a recent letter received from Obama, in which the president threatens to kill another helpless citizen every Tuesday and "fill [his] heavenly palace with slaves for the afterlife" unless the police "stop the darkness from screaming."

I am pleased at the house in the photo, too.  Classic American version of Gothic haunted architecture.