The ‘Birds and Bees Text Line’, which the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, US, started on February 1, is sex education on cellphones—the latest effort by health educators to reach teenagers through technology. In many areas of Middle America, rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases remain constant or are even rising. As technology reduces the embarrassment of making enquiries, it also shortens the time spent by the teen agonising over a certain sexual issue. The Birds and Bees Text Line offers one-on-one exchanges that are private and anonymous. Most importantly, they are conducted free of parental scrutiny.

Barack Obama’s First 100 days: Interactive Timeline/ The Guardian

Mapping out Obama’s activities in his first 100 days in office, the interesting multi-media report card focuses on his economic policies and his designation of 2m acres of protected wilderness and improving the green economy.

Economy: Signed $787 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and spending; unveiled $ 275 billion plan to prop up the housing market International: Announced August 2010 as end of combat mission in Iraq; ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Environment: Moved towards stricter car exhaust emission standards; cancelled Bush oil lease sales.

An Invention That Could Change the Internet/ The Independent

A new system, called the Wolfram Alpha, takes the first step towards what many experts consider to be the Holy Grail of the Internet. Showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, the system is a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “How high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information, all properly sourced, such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts. The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram.

By Any Other Name/ The New Yorker

‘Swine’: a word that encompasses, in a single syllable, decades of greed and entitlement. “In darker psyches, the thought lurked: was the pandemic some sort of cosmic comeuppance for our collective swinishness, a funk for our profligate times?” asks Laura Collins as she charts the journey the hastily named Swine Flu made before it was officially christened ‘2009 H1N1 Flu’. An Israeli minister attempted to rename the virus ‘Mexican Flu’, but that wouldn’t have been a politically correct thing to do. Hog farmers and pork processors proposed the “North American Influenza”. Collins goes back to Chaucer’s time to trace the swine’s humble beginnings as it coursed through Shakespeare’s pages, idioms such as Swine Dining and Swine on Board and has now finally hit the highest point in it’s existence as a probable serial killer.

Blog: www.fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com

It takes some gumption to sit and write a blog in the middle of the IPL in South Africa. It makes for great entertainment as the ‘fake IPL player’ writes about the dirty secrets of the team (it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that it is the Kolkata Knight Riders) and names for the players are unprintable. But that is why the blog is such a hit.