Society
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I was pointed to this interesting piece by Nicolas Carr providing an interesting (although wordy as stressed by Oleh Kovalchuke on the IxDA forum) food for thoughts. The main idea are quoted hereafter:
I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be [...]
Video-to-go: Watching the Watcher
In an interesting piece of paper a July 2006 issue of the Newsweek, Jonnie Roberts questioned the very new but still established (pardon me the oxymoron) of digital video consumption habits almost 2 years ago. The main impulse was probably given by the lunch of iTunes TV at that time making a lot of buzz. [...]
Blood and Agression in Violent Video Games
In a recent paper Barletta, Harris and Bruey reported 2 experimental studies (in the experimental social psychology tradition) exploring the effect of amount of blood on agression, feeling of agressivity and physiological arousal (heart-beat rates). Following the General Agression Model (GAM), they hypothesized that the amount of blood present in a video game should [...]
Science City: The importance of Proximity in Innovation
6.6°! The basic constant of social interaction
An interesting Nature.com news presented a study done by two Microsoft researchers on online-chats (MSN messenger). Gathering a very huge amount of data and testing the infamous 6 degrees of overall connectiveness (i.e. that we are only six steps away from anyone else on the planet), hypothesis presented formally by Stanley Milgram in the sixties. [...]
F**K Pineapple
Why do I blog this? This graph is awesome !!
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 [...]
Paul Barnett @ Lift
When we looked at the audience in the middle of Paul Barnett’s “show”, We did not see any of the lifter on their laptop. All heads were turned towards the scene where this talkative gesturing guy was talking about his trip to Las Vegas, slightly drawing parrallels with game industry. I was used to his [...]
Internet, creatives and gratuity
Interesting statement by Jarod Lanier in the N.Y. Times:
INTERNET idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!..That’s the line I spouted when [...]
