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Tuesday, 6 March 2012 |
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Everybody seems to be into social networking these days! That term has taken on new meaning in recent years with the emergence of social media, web-based and mobile phone based technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue. With the rapid spread of broadband internet and mobile phones, more and more people are within range of Social Media – and are only limited by their interest, imagination and enthusiasm. Social media have substantially changed the way organisations, communities and individuals share information, collaborate creatively and respond to ordinary or emergency situations. Today’s Wiz Quiz opens with a few questions on social networking enabled by social media.
1. He led the brainstorming that conceptualized what later became the micro-blogging service Twitter. According to a member of his team, while sitting on a slide in South Park, San Francisco, he came up with the idea of a short message service during a daylong brainstorming session. He and the team would eventually call this SMS Twitter. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. When he was 14, he developed a keen interest in how information was disbursed to public transportation and emergency vehicles. Who is this innovator? 2. Facebook is the world’s largest social networking portal. Originally it was called TheFacebook. According to the movie The Social Network, who suggested to the co-founders that they should make it simpler by dropping 'the' and make it just ‘Facebook’? This person learnt hard lessons from his own innovation Napster and from watching other entrepreneurs get taken advantage of. He negotiated deals in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg retained control of Facebook. 3. Napster was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, mostly music, encoded in MP3 format. Although there were already networks that supported the distribution of such files via the Internet (such as IRC, Hotline and USENET), Napster specialized in music in the form of MP3 files and had a user-friendly interface. The result was a robust system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download: at its peak, there were 25 million users and 80 million songs, but the system never crashed. The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringements, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. Napster was co-founded by three people and the name Napster was the nickname of which co-founder’s hair style?
4. Myspace (previously styled MySpace) is a social networking service launched in August 2003 and has headquarters in Beverly Hills, California, USA. Myspace offers online personal profiles and a public bulletin board that users and their friends can post on. Chris Dewolfe and Tom Anderson founded Myspace. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006, even surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. As of December 2011, Myspace had 30 million users and was ranked 138th by total web traffic. Name the pop star who partially owns Myspace, after he and Specific Media LLC bought it in 2011 from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation?
5. Founded in 2002, what business-related social network was created by Reid Hoffman? It is a business social network that allows users to search for jobs or post job openings and follow companies for which they would like to work. 6. Three months before she died, Whitney Houston had finished acting in what turned out to be her last feature film, which will is now in post-production and will be released in August 2012. Directed by Salim Akil, it is a remake of the 1976 film which centred on three singing teenage sisters from Harlem who form a girl group in the late 1950s. The remake places the story in Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s. What is this film, which will be dedicated to Houston’s memory? 7. With the latest census underway in March 2012, Sri Lanka is counting the number of people living on the island. Which famous scientific visionary once said: “Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted”? 8. Welikathara (118 mins, 1971) was a dramatic Sinhala feature film, which was the first in Sri Lanka (and South Asia) to be made in the Cinemascope large screen format. It starred leading actors Gamini Fonseka and Joe Abeywickrema and is widely believed to have been the turning point in the latter actor’s illustrious career. Welikathara was later selected as the 10th Best Sri Lankan film of the first 50 years by a Presidential council in 1997. Who directed and also served as cinematographer of this movie? 9. When Worlds Collide was a 1933 science fiction novel co-written by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. It described the mother of all disasters caused by a couple of ‘rogue planets’ entering the Solar System. It influenced many stories and movies that followed. Celebrated movie director Cecil B DeMille considered turning When Worlds Collide into a movie, but it was another director who finally made that film in 1951, which won an Oscar for special effects. Who was he?
10. More than 60 years after the original movie When Worlds Collide was made, DreamWorks have remade the same story into a blockbuster disaster film. The storyline is the same: a rogue planet is on a collision course with Earth, causing mass hysteria. An astronomer discovers that a second rogue planet accompanying the first can sustain life and plans to build a rocket to transport a small group of people there to ensure the human race survives. When Worlds Collide remake is produced by Steven Spielberg, it is due for release during 2012. Who has directed it this time? 11. According to the Sri Lanka Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2009/10 conducted by the Department of Census and Statistics covering 22,500 households, the average monthly household expenditure in Sri Lanka is LKR 31,331. Food ratio is defined as the proportion of household income spent on food and beverages. What is this value for an average Lankan household, expressed as a percentage? 12. Name the German philosopher who influenced Karl Marx and others with his resounding lectures at the University of Berlin and his books such as Phenomenology of the Mind. His dialectical method influenced Karl Marx’s thinking about human history and society. Marx was not old enough to attend this person’s lectures in person, but he learnt of his ideas from his disciples who were still active at the University of Berlin when he arrived there. 13. ‘Air Force One’ is the official air traffic control call sign of any United States Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States. In popular imagination, and in many movies, Air Force One is a specially fitted aircraft at the disposal of the sitting US President, but the name (and call sign) applies only when the President is actually on board. The name was first used officially in 1959, in connection with which American President? 14. The sitting American President also flies on helicopters operated by the US Marine Corps, for relatively short distances. This tradition also started in 1957. At the moment, such helicopters are operated by the HMX-1 'Nighthawks' squadron, either using the large VH-3D Sea King helicopter, or the newer and smaller VH-60N 'WhiteHawk' helicopter. What call sign is given to any Air Force helicopter when flying the US president? 15. He was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer (working in teams) of a record number of 12 new chemical elements in the periodic table. He invented various techniques and machines for isolating and identifying heavy elements atom-by-atom. Among the elements he helped discover were Americium (in 1945), Curium (1944), Berkelium (1949), Californium (1950), Einsteinium (1952) Fermium (1953), Mendelevium (1955), Nobelium (1958–59) (element 102) and Rutherfordium (1969). Most of these elements were named for great scientists or leading laboratories. Who was he? Last week’s answers1.The miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, in ‘A Christmas Carol’ |
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