Facebook’s Oldest Users Jostle for Title

Mark Zuckerberg likely never imagined this when he founded Facebook as an undergraduate in his Harvard dorm room.

The website he created as a social network for college students is now the site of a brewing battle between two centenarians over who can lay claim to being the oldest among Facebook’s more than 1 billion monthly users.

Logged on in one corner is Florence Detlor, the 101-year-old Californian who, in August, was designated Facebook’s oldest user by Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Detlor traveled to the social network’s Palo Alto campus for a personal tour.

READ MORE: Vest Promises a Hug Every Time You Get a ‘Like’ on Facebook

In the other corner is a New Mexico woman, Maria “Mary” Colunia Segura-Metzgar, who just celebrated her 105^th birthday on Tuesday and has her own Facebook page, complete with 86 friends.

Segura-Metzgar, however, is so far removed from the typical Facebook user that she had to shave a few years off her age in order to join the site, according to her 60-year-old grandson, Anthony Segura, who is responsible for signing her up.

“I tried to sign her up on Facebook a few months ago but it wouldn’t accept her birth date,” Segura told ABCNews.com today.  “Then I tried again and just put in 101 and it accepted it for the timeline, even though she was 104.”

“Now on Facebook it says she’s 102 when, in reality, she’s 105,” he said.

Segura, who said his grandmother is too hard of hearing to be interviewed by phone, said he has tried to reach Facebook to rectify the problem, but they have been unresponsive.  A call placed to Facebook by ABC News was not returned as of this writing.

Even though the title would be nice, Segura says it was a much more important reason why he got his grandmother to join Facebook.

“We want to let everybody know in the family that she’s still alive and kicking,” he said.

Segura-Metzgar, known as “Grandmother Mary” to her nearly 40 grandchildren, “too many to count” great-grandchildren and two new great-great-grandchildren born just this week, lives just a few miles away from Segura and his wife, Mayra, in Albuquerque.  They visit her frequently to let her use their iPad to log on and update her page, most recently with photos from her 105^th birthday party.

“She’s still very sharp and likes to tell stories of her life and we wanted to be able to record her life as a legacy,” said Segura.  “We’re a very large family and there’s a lot of stories that a lot of the family doesn’t know and we wanted to be able to capture those.  Since ‘Timeline’ came out we thought it was a good idea to put those [stories] on Facebook to have a timeline of her life.”

Segura is also tasked with keeping his grandmother’s friends list to just family and friends, no small task considering he had to deny more than 50 friend requests just Wednesday from curious onlookers.

That same fate befell Florence Detlor, Segura-Metzgar’s younger competition, who, after her personal visit with Zuckerberg and Sandberg was made public, had too many friend requests for the site to process new ones.

Segura-Metzgar, a twice-widowed mother of four, is one of 10 children whose 99-year-old and 97-year-old sisters and “a couple brothers” are still alive, according to Segura.  While she is the only one of her siblings to take on the World Wide Web, Segura-Metzgar hasn’t given up on the old-fashioned way of getting her news and staying in touch either.

“She loves to watch TV and read the newspaper, she’s always done that all her life and she still does it to this day,” Segura said.  ” She’s very involved in politics.  She won’t tell us who she’s going to vote for but she will be voting.”

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Dropbox offering up to 25GB free space for students competing in their Space Race

Dropbox has announced a new program called the Space Race meant for school and university students where you can earn up to 25GB for yourself and your schoolmates while competing against other schools in the program.

To be part of this program, you have to be from one of the eligible educational institutions and have their official email address. Once you create an account with this ID, you automatically get 3GB of space by default for two years. If you already have an account or want to register with some other email address you can but you still have to confirm your school ID with them.

Every time a student from your institution creates an account this way it gets 1 point. If you go through the Get Started page, your institution gets 2 points. If you refer someone, you get 500MB for free. The more points your institution earns, the more storage each of the registered members can get, up to 25GB in total for two years.

The program lasts for eight weeks and you can try to get as many points as you can by the end of it and see which of the institutions in the end got the most points.

To register or find out more about the Space Race, click on the source link below.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Frugality for the win: Amazon now offers textbook rentals

Amazon is introducing a Textbook Rental center to loan college students physical textbooks for up to 70 percent off the retail value.

Just in time before college begins, Amazon has launched a textbook rental program that will allow students to borrow physical books for periods of 30 to 360 days. Is there anything Amazon won’t do to become the online superstore?

Much like competitor textbook rental sites such as Chegg or Half.com, Amazon is offering book rentals for a fraction of the cost of actually buying the book. Take for example this Media and Culture textbook I remembered purchasing back in college (albeit a much older edition). Amazon currently sells it for $90 new, $62 used, or $29 to rent until mid-December. Surely this beats buying the book only to sell it back for 30 percent of what you originally paid, especially when Amazon only sells back in gift cards.

“College is expensive, and students are always looking for ways to save money on textbooks, which is why we’ve long offered great prices on both new and used textbooks,” said Ripley MacDonald, Director of Textbooks at Amazon.com. “With Textbook Rental, Amazon gives students yet another great option for saving money — it’s now easier than ever for students to get the books they need, in the format they want, at affordable prices.”

Amazon also pays for return shipping, meaning that students who have signed up for their free Amazon Prime membership can oftentimes get textbooks with a complimentary two-day shipping and pay nothing to send it back. Students will also get e-mail alerts of when their textbooks are close to their due dates to avoid any late fees. Alternatively, they can also extend the rental period if they want to bump the 30-day loan to a semester-long borrow. Depending on availability, renting textbooks could mean receiving new books if the version you need happens to have been recently published.

“All this means more money in your pocket for the things in life that can’t be learned from a book,” Amazon.com’s Textbook Rental FAQ reads.

Physical textbook rentals isn’t the first of Amazon’s efforts to help college students save money. For the tech-savvy, students have been able to loan Kindle e-books since last summer though textbook options may be limited in such format. The convenience there is, of course, not having to worry about shipping books back in time. Wonder if Amazon will get into game rentals in the near future as well?

Amazon’s Textbook Rental program is currently only available for students in the United States. If you want to stick with reading off your Kindle or e-reader of choice, check out our comparison guide to e-book rental services.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Do it yourself: Middle Tennessee State working on inexpensive retrofitting plug-in hybrid kit

A group of students at Middle Tennessee state are working on a plug-in hybrid electric kit that could cost as little as $3,000 and boost the fuel economy of your current vehicle by up to 100 percent.

We love electric vehicles, but with many battery-powered and plug-in hybrids sporting sticker prices north of $30,000, they have a tendency to be pretty darn expensive and out of reach for the average consumer. Throw in limited availability in many states and a growing but sparse network of charging stations, and so far the adoption of the modern EV has been slow to spark.

But while we wait for manufacturers to figure out how to drive production costs down and a more robust infrastructure begins to take shape, a group of students led by Dr. Charles Perry, a former IBM employer, at Middle Tennessee State University are taking matters into their own hands. That’s right; the industrious group is hard at work developing a plug-in electric hybrid kit that could ultimately cost consumers far less to convert their existing vehicles than it would to purchase a native EV and boost fuel economy by as much as 100 percent.

The entire system is currently being tested on a 1994 Honda station wagon and involves a trunk-mounted lithium-ion battery feeding power to an electric motor. In turn, this motor supplies power to both rear wheels while alleviating the gasoline engines workload up front, which, thanks to the aforementioned electric motor, is only tasked with sending power to the front two wheels of this veteran Honda.

According to the university, Perry and his students are currently pitching the idea to various companies in the hopes of getting additional funding for a production version of the plug-in hybrid kit that could cost as little as $3,000. In 2009, Perry won a green energy competition from the Tennessee Technology Development Corp., and was the recipient of a $50,000 grant along with a matching investment to spur the project forward.

Could utilizing a plug-in hybrid electric kit really take off and resonate with consumers looking to explore alternative drive trains? We think so. For that kind of money and boost in fuel economy, the idea of retrofitting your existing car becomes more than just attractive — it becomes possible.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com