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Facebook recently unveiled a tool that assesses whether someone might be contemplating suicide or self injury ‚ these predictions are made using an individual's Facebook activity. As these new technologies and potentials emerge, questions also emerge about the methodologies these studies use as well as the ethical implications of such work.

Engineers are interested in solving some practical problem, such as capturing water vapor in arid regions. They intend to use biological analogs as a source of inspiration. Doing so, however, raises several problems. First, the biological literature is immense, and keyword-based search produces voluminous hits, but most of the retrieved documents are of no use. That is, there is a high recall but low precision. The second problem is that even when a document looks like it might be relevant, it is still burdensome for the engineer to make a determination.

Access granted by social media has been used to decontextualize and appropriate linguistic cultural artifacts, specifically, African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The purpose of this research is to investigate how social media affords for the appropriation and decontextualization of AAVE, how this impacts AAVE users, and what can be done to mitigate this phenomenon.