Last week a video showing 60-year-old Peter Abbott screaming abuse at TV producer Samantha Isaacs gained a viral audience, after Abbott was found guilty at Poole magistrates court of "using threatening words or behaviour to cause alarm, distress or fear of violence". In the phone-filmed video, Abbott is seen snarling and shouting as he presses his face up against Isaacs' car window. He looks as if he's channelling the Harry Enfield character Angry Frank, so cartoonishly aggressive are his contorted facial expressions and confrontational behaviour. Not only did he hammer on Isaacs' car but he also called her a "slag" and a "whore". When another male driver pointed out the terrible optics of bullying a woman, he replied: "She's a fucking bloody annoying woman."

Captain Picard: "How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?" At least, I've never known anyone who did." With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are introduced to one of their most formidable enemies: the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose minds are linked to a collective "hive mind" through sophisticated technology. The collective expands their civilization through a process of mental and physical "assimilation": They find new intelligent beings, like humans, implant them with Borg technology, and integrate them into the hive mind, erasing their previous identities. Individual Borg are not conscious in the way humans are, and they have no sense of individuality. The hive mind is a dictator, an unquestioned voice that commands each individual. The Borg nature is split in two, an executive called the collective and a follower called the drone. For the humans living in the Star Trek universe, the prospect of assimilation is terrifying. When asked why humans resist assimilation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge says, "For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying." In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that "good and evil are...READ MORE For many humans living in the real world, the fictional Borg are similarly unsettling.

During the three years I've spent researching and writing about shyness, one of the most common questions people ask is about the relationship between shyness and technology. Are the internet and the cellphone causing our social skills to atrophy? I often hear this from parents of shy teenagers, who are worried that their children are spending more time with their devices than with their peers. The shy aren't necessarily antisocial; they are just differently social. They learn to regulate their sociability and communicate in indirect or tangential ways.

Social media sites derive their value by providing a popular and dependable community for participants to engage, share, and interact. This community value and related services like search and advertising are threatened by spammers, content polluters, and malware disseminators. In an effort to preserve community value and ensure long-term success, we present a prototype system for automatically detecting and profiling destructive users in social media. We described the architecture of the system - inspired by the "broken windows" theory embraced by law enforcement - the results and insights gained from a preliminary study conducted to determine the efficacy of our approach, and a discussion of our ongoing research.