Social Media in Space

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Government agencies need to explain and promote the value of their efforts to taxpayers. They’re in a constant fight for government tax dollars as surely as corporations are in competition for consumer dollars. An all-star social media user within the U.S. government is NASA. Let’s take a look at how they use social to their best advantage and contrast their efforts with two of their closest counterparts: the European Space Agency (ESA) and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX.

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The Ethnography of Online Communities

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In his book The Social Code, author Patrick Hanlon argues that social media communities can be characterized by seven distinct elements: a creation story, a creed, icons, rituals, sacred words or lexicons, non-believers, and a leader. In this post, I'm going to test his thesis by comparing his criteria to a Facebook interest group called “Space Hipsters.” 

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You say you want feedback…but do you really?

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In the age of the corporate intranet, one of the most obvious methods for taking the temperature of the staff is the online comment forum or discussion board. It is precisely because the solution seems so obvious that the decision to adopt it is usually made without a thoughtful consideration of the consequences. The manager who asks for employee feedback may get more than she bargained for. Save yourself some aggravation (and unpleasant surprises) by being honest about how much feedback you're really willing to accept.

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Your Driverless Car is (Almost) Ready

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People are the weak link in the automobile ecosystem. If we weren’t part of the control loop, things would be safer. A lot safer. It’s estimated that 94 percent of the world’s yearly 1.2 million automotive deaths involve human error. We’re uncorrectable bugs in the system, you and me. We get into accidents once every 500,000 miles, and cause fatalities once every 1.3 million miles. But the software that’s driving autonomous cars? It was performing at levels equal to or better than that error rate three years ago.

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