Facebook status updates analysed

People use status updates to share what’s on their minds, to tell others what they’re doing, and to gather feedback from friends. The different ways people use status updates form some interesting patterns. In this study, we looked at the usage of words in different “word categories” in status updates. This led us to discover some patterns in how people use status updates differently, and how their friends interact with different status updates.

via What’s on your mind? (56).

theory of free radical ageing debunked some more

Worms that were genetically modified by McGill University researchers not only survived exposure to a banned poison, they lived even longer than normal worms, challenging scientists’ understanding of the aging process.

Dr. Siegfried Hekimi and his student Dr. Wen Yang, who are in the Montreal university’s biology department, planned to test the so-called “free radical theory of aging” by genetically modifying wild worms in a lab to accelerate production of free radicals — toxic molecules generated as a byproduct of oxygen use.

Which basically means that using anti-oxidants probably won’t help you at all, when it comes to beating ageing.

via CBC News – Technology & Science – Mutant worms defy aging theory.

WakeMate

WakeMate is a wristband system you charge with USB which uses BlueTooth to connect with your iphone, android, blackberry. When you go to sleep, it monitors your sleep using actigraphy in order to wake you up during the REM portion of your sleep, or as close as possible to it, within the 20 minute band the system will wake you around your set alarm time. This should get you out of bed when you’re fittest.

It comes with loads of graphy analysis tools, which is fun, but best of all, only costs $49.99!

WakeMate–Wake up fresh; sleep smarter – WakeMate.

People ignore facts, opinions are based on beliefs

Not only that, but presenting people with facts can entrench them further in their beliefs. People willfully ignore facts that don’t correspond to their opinions.

“This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.”

A very good article

How facts backfire – The Boston Globe.

Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions — Ackerman et al. 328 (5986): 1712 — Science

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

via Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions — Ackerman et al. 328 (5986): 1712 — Science.

Stand up to child bullying – it’s good for you!

Children who returned hostility with hostility appeared to be the most mature, the researchers found.

Boys who stood up to bullies and schoolyard enemies were judged more socially competent by their teachers.

Girls who did the same were more popular and more admired by teachers and peers, the researchers found.

via Bullying ‘can be good for children’: Study finds those who fight back are more popular | Mail Online.

Gerald Blanchard: Masterthief

This guy started stealing at 6 and never looked back. Banks, jewelry, skimming, scamming, he’s done it all. Using high-tech gadgets and doing parachuting in or using air ducts, he got in anywhere. A gripping read of a real life Pink Panther style master thief, who made a few too many mistakes and got caught.

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief | Magazine.

A school with normal times gets impressive results.

A school that has allowed its pupils to start the day an hour later says it has seen absenteeism decline.At Monkseaton High School, in North Tyneside, 800 pupils aged 13-19 have started lessons at 10am since October.Early results indicates that general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.

via BBC News – Lie-in for teenagers has positive results.

Behavioral Game Design / How you get addicted to games

This article is a general primer on how to get players to continuously play your game, which in the world of the MMPORG is a very important element, using a behavioural model.

Gamasutra – Features – Behavioral Game Design.

This article is a bit more cynical and compares the above techniques to addiction creation and illustrates the theory with specific examples from World of Warcraft.

Cracked – 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out I created a “luck school” – a simple experiment that examined whether people s luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities listen to their intuition expect to be lucky and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic 80 per cent of people were now happier more satisfied with their lives and perhaps most important of all luckier. While lucky people became luckier the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school” she has passed her driving test after three years of trying was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

via Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn – Telegraph.

WWF finds vegetarianism is bad for the environment

Aside from vegetarians killing more animals than meat eaters (sounds strange? Consider how much random killing a combine harvester does), they are also worse for the environment as they require more arable land and the processing of  the foods creates way more greenhouse gasses.

Being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat | Mail Online.

British Airwars treats men like paedophiles

BA has implemented a policy whereby children are not allowed to sit next to men they don’t know. Flight attendants patrol the aisles and if they find a strange man they start shouting if he doesn’t want to change places. Not only is it sexist, it’s also extremely rude and embarrasing for the passenger.

Mirko Fischer had this happen to him when he was sitting next to his pregnant wife and has had enough, so he’s suing BA.

Bizarrely, BA can’t see the idiocy in their policy and won’t issue statements.

Businessman Mirko Fischer sues British Airwars ‘for treating men like perverts’ | Mail Online.