Interesting stuff (2009-12-08)

With Lure of Cash, M.I.T. Group Builds a Balloon-Finding Team to Take Pentagon Prize – NYTimes.com
MIT research team edged out 4,300 other teams in a Pentagon-sponsored contest to identify the location of 10 red balloons distributed around the United States. The contest featured a $40,000 prize and was organized by DARPA in an effort to develop new ways to understand how information is disseminated through social networks. The winning team (Media Laboratory Human Dynamics Group) led by a physicist, Riley Crane, took less than 9 hours to complete the challenge! The winning researchers set up a Web site asking people to join their team. They relied on visitors to the Web site to invite their friends. They said that they would dole out the prize money both to chains of individuals who referred people who had correct information on the balloons’ locations and to charities. They described their method as a “recursive incentive structure.” The researchers said they had received contributions from 4,665 participants.

(tags: social, network, mit, darpa, research, human, dynamics, sonet, twit)
Hide Find Bar with Ctrl+F :: Add-ons for Firefox
On Firefox, you type "ctrl+f" and you get the find bar for searching text in the current Web page. Very handy, yeeeeh! But there is no keys combination to hide the text field when you’re done with searching, booooo! So, with this Firefox extension, you type again "ctrl+f" and the find bar disappears, yeeeeh!

(tags: firefox, extension, find, hide, twit)