Sociology
Video-games help real football
via blogeek:
The english football club Everton signed a contract with Sports Interactive to access the football players statistics of over 20′000 fooball clubs. The rationale is that it may reduce the cost of filtering and detecting potential futur talents.
More interesting is that Marco Amelia recently declared that he was able to stop Ronaldinho’s penalty thanks [...]
The Perfect Mess
Luke Wroblewski makes an interesting point concerning how well should be a design organized and how much mess (or tolerence for mess) it should involve. He quotes A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman.
“Rather, we argue that there is an optimal level of mess for every aspect of every system. That is, in [...]
Trackable Rich Cyborgs
Through slashdot:
Because the number of abductions in Mexico has jumped almost 40% in the past 3 years, the wealthy are getting subcutaneous transmitters so they can be tracked when kidnapped. Xega, the Mexican security firm which makes the chips, has seen a sales jump of 13% this year. The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the [...]
an Attractive World
It came accross an ad on FaceBook directing me to a new on-line dating website with a kinda elitist approach inspired by the successful ASW (A Small World, the correspondance is obvious even in the sigle AW and Logo). What stroke me actually was that the facebook ad was in french and explicitly directed towards [...]
The Spoiler-Problem in MMORPG
The WoW-guild I’m part of has actually finished what is called in the jargon the “end-game” content of the World of Warcraft extension, Burning Crusade. For knowledgeable, we are actually “farming” mode in Black-Temple and there is no real new challenge for a PVE-HL guild in there. It’s why, as every ambitious hardcore-gamers guild, my [...]
Cognitive processes and mate Choices
Todd et al. asked participants to indicate their own self-perceived level on a variety of traits and the preferred level of the ideal partner before a speed-dating session and compared it to their actual choice. They then compared the preferred choice to the chosen mate’s self-perceived traits. The results showed
that although both men and women [...]
What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
in an interesting talk, Malcolm Gladwell follows the career of a food industry consultant who uncovered a key secret to what eaters like. Running huge focus groups to find customers’ truest tastes, Gladwell’s hero draws a radical conclusion, an epiphany that has defined food marketing ever since.
Why do I blog this? This is an [...]
Bias In Exposition To Personal Opinion
Reported here, a fascinating study that found that repeated exposure to one person’s viewpoint can have neerly as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people.
The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent opinions of members of a group. In some cases, they read statements attributed [...]
Google Eyebox
reported on Engadget , google announced a partnership with a company called Xuuk to distribute a device called Eyebox, a palm-sized cam that records how many time a object is viewed.
Xuuk says the EyeBox works up to 32 feet away and doesn’t require any sort of calibration, and that it collects no data other than [...]
Tell Me Your Name And I Will Tell You What You Are Doing
I found a funny post reporting a study stipulating that the first-name you give to your baby girl will predispose her to some professional (and probably social) orientation.
a femininity scale:
Isabella 1.21 Anna 1.04 Elizabeth 1.02 Emma 0.97 Jessica 0.93 Samantha 0.83 Sarah 0.78 Olivia 0.74 Hannah 0.70 Emily 0.68 Lauren 0.66 Ashley 0.63 Grace 0.50 [...]
