Interesting psychology experiment has shown that people are less likely to help others if they are made to think about money! (“The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, Miranda R. Goode, Science, November 17, 2006.) Stanford GSB professor, Jennifer Aaker, comes to a similar conclusion as seen in her 2008 paper, The Happiness of Giving: The Time-Ask Effect.
(via Stanford social innovation review)
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Jane McGonigal, director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, makes a passionate case for online games in which players, by playing, help in saving the world (‘Gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change.‘) At the end of her TED talk, she mention her last effort: Evoke, a crash course in changing the world. (‘This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game you will be certified by the World Bank Institute., as a Social Innovator, class of 2010.‘). Whatever it means, you have to admit that it is clever giving the possibily of calling yourself “World Bank Institute Certified Social Innovator”!
Google talks directly to everyone via Youtube blog to stop Viacom lawsuit against Youtube (owned by Google).
We ask the judge to rule that the safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”) protect YouTube from the plaintiffs’ claims.
And then after some blabla, the final attack:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento has 70 open PhD positions in the ICT area, almost all of them covered by scholarship.
The deadline for applications is April 20, 2010, before 12 noon, local time.
The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science is one of the leading and faster-growing research institutions, characterized by a young and international faculty and by a large, international student population. Indicators for scientific production put the department among the very top in Europe. The successful candidate will therefore have the opportunity to work in a dynamic and exciting environment. Trento is a vibrant city with a beautifully preserved historic center, consistently ranked at the top for quality of life in Italy. It offers a variety of cultural and sports opportunities all year around, as well as excellent food and wine.
IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, another US agency) has a 5 years project for finding “Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness (TRUST) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)“.
The overarching goal for the IARPA TRUST Program is to significantly advance the IC’s capabilities to assess whom can be trusted under certain conditions and in contexts relevant to the IC, potentially even in the presence of stress and/or deception. The TRUST Program seeks to conduct high-risk, high-payoff research that will bring together sensing AND validated protocols to develop tools for assessing trustworthiness by using one’s own (“Self”) signals to assess another’s (“Other”) trustworthiness under certain conditions and in specific contexts, which can be measured in ecologically-valid, scientifically-credible experimental protocols.
(via Bruce Schneier)
One more example of what free availability of data about human activities can produce!
A water utility company in Canada published the above graph, comparing the consumption of water of 27th and 28th February. Why every Canadian flushed the water together on the 27th February?
Well, it seems 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game.
And they’d all go pee between periods.
It is amazing how water consumption correlates with the game!
(via patspapers)
Interesting statistics based on a web survey with more than 130,000 Wikipedians responding (data from the working draft).
Well in fact it is well acknowledged that Wikipedia suffers some systemic biases: The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is (1) a man, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) white, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a majority-Christian country, (8) from a developed nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a labourer (from a previous survey).
Interesting are also the following facts:
According to stats published by Facebook, Facebook has currently 400,000,000 active users. This would make it the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.
Do you bet it will overtake India’s population (1,166,900,000)? In how many months?
(picture adapted from this image)