From the Tampa Tribune, 50 Things We Know Now That We Didn't Know Last Year, including:
...3. Blue light fends off drowsiness in the middle of the night, which could be useful to people who work at night.
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15. Americans spent almost $32 billion on toys during 2005. About a third of that was spent on video games.
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21. Two previously unknown forms of ice - dubbed by researchers as ice XIII and XIV - were discovered frozen at temperatures of around minus 160 degrees Celsius, or minus 256 Fahrenheit.
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24. At least once a week, 28 percent of high school students fall asleep in school, 22 percent fall sleep while doing homework and 14 percent get to school late or miss school because they overslept.
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39. The common pigeon can memorize 1,200 pictures.
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49. One of the most effective ways for athletes to recover after exercise is to drink a glass of chocolate milk.
Jan Chipchase, an reasearcher for Nokia, has a fascinating article on the use of phones in Uganda. Although it's clear that people will move to individual phones if they're affordable, it's also clear that the benefits of having communication capabilities, even with shared phones, is very high. There have been other studies talking about the opportunities for microbusinesses as 'phone ladies' etc.
This article discusses some of the unique services that have arisen in Uganda:
Sente is the informal practices of sending and receiving money that leverages public phone kiosks and trusted networks. In Uganda the word Sente has two meanings the first being 'money' and the second 'the sending of money as airtime'. It works like this:
Joe lives in Kampala and wants to send his sister Vicky 10,000 Ugandan Shillings - about 4 Euros. He buys a pre-paid top up card for that amount but instead of topping up his own phone calls the local phone kiosk operator in Vicky's village. The phone kiosk operator uses the credit to top up his own phone, takes a commission of anywhere between 10 and 30% and passes the rest onto Vicky in cash. The kiosk operator then resells the airtime at a profit (it is after all his business).
Sente is particularly relevant in a country where there is limited access to formal banking infrastructure and is largely driven by necessity and convenience. The receiver doesn't need a bank account, merely access to a friendly phone kiosk, and the risk of theft is reduced because there is no need to carry cash. The Sente process can take as little as 5 minutes whereas using regular banking infrastructure can absorb a full day's time with additional travel costs (a comparison of costs between regular bank infrastructure and Sente are outlined on slide 29 of the accompanying presentation).
Password Tip of the Day: If you take the most common password in the world and put a '1' on the end of it, it doesn't suddenly become a good password.
That said, apparently MySpace users are doing better in the password protection arena than corporate computer users. From Bruce Schneier:
While 65 percent of passwords [from MySpace group] contain eight characters or less, 17 percent are made up of six characters or less. The average password is eight characters long.
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Character Mix: While 81 percent of passwords are alphanumeric, 28 percent are just lowercase letters plus a single final digit -- and two-thirds of those have the single digit 1. Only 3.8 percent of passwords are a single dictionary word, and another 12 percent are a single dictionary word plus a final digit -- once again, two-thirds of the time that digit is 1.
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Another password study (.pdf) in November looked at 200 corporate employee passwords: 20 percent letters only, 78 percent alphanumeric, 2.1 percent with non-alphanumeric characters, and a 7.8-character average length. Better than 15 years ago, but not as good as MySpace users. Kids really are the future.
Inveneo, which brings wireless networking to rural villages, is looking for people willing to donate old thumb drives they're no longer using.
Research indicates that thinking fast makes you feel better:
Research in an entirely different field, music, has found that the tempo of background music played during a test can affect performance in tests of spatial ability. The faster the music, the better the mood of the participants, and the better they performed.
Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner took a look at this and other evidence and began to wonder if the speed of thought itself could be what caused mood to improve. But how do you increase the speed of thought?
They devised a simple and elegant method: They simply asked volunteers to read words aloud as they scrolled onto a computer screen, one letter at a time. In the slow-thought condition, the words scrolled at a rate of about 6 letters per second. In the fast thought condition, the words scrolled at 20 letters per second. This compares to about 12 letters per second when people read aloud in a natural voice. After the test, the fast readers indicated that they felt they were thinking at a faster rate compared to the slow readers, and they indeed said they were generally in a better mood.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is giving away through Wikia, his for-profit company, everything someone needs (apps, space, network access, etc) to create and operate a community collaboration site:
"It is open-source software and open content," Wales said in a phone interview. "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue."
That could prove disruptive to business models of Web sites that provide free services to customers but require a cut of any resulting revenue in return.
Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. It requires only that sites built with the company's resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising.
Wikia calls the free-hosting service "OpenServing" (http://www.openserving.com). It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM.com, a sports fan community site Wikia recently acquired and plans to extend.