Techcordance

Tweets

Every 140-character snippet of info you’ve ever shared publicly on Twitter will soon have a home next to the Declaration of Independence.Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.The purpose, according to a blog post by Library of Congress communications director Matt Raymond, is to document “important tweets” as well as gather information about the way we live through the sheer masses of tweets on the site.”I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” Raymond said in the post. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.”Twitter says it receives about 55 million tweets every day — amounting to billions of them since its inception.Only tweets from public Twitter feeds will be included, not those that have been set as private.

Promotion Denied

Dr. Mike Adams was on the academic fast track while serving the University of North Carolina-Wilmington as an atheist, but after the professor converted to Christianity in 2000, he alleges, the college put the clamps on his career.In a lawsuit against the university, Adams claims he was subject to unmerited complaints and “invasive” investigations following his conversion. Furthermore, he believes his application for promotion from associate professor to a tenured full professor was denied because his nationally syndicated columns were deemed too politically conservative by his leftist peers.”Christian professors should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs,” said David French, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Adams in the case. “Disagreeing with an accomplished professor’s religious and political views is no grounds for refusing him promotion.”U.S. District Judge Malcolm J. Howard, however, ruled against Adams last month, quoting a fellow professor’s claims that Adams hadn’t met minimum research and writing requirements and that his Christian, conservative writings were not “scholarly work by the measures of our discipline.”But Adams contends his scholarly output surpassed that of almost all of his colleagues and that the senior faculty’s real beef with him lies in the content of his convictions.