The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775

"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

Here's The Economist article on FB. The best quote: ...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are "broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.

the lack of any business model describes the Web 2.0 era

"Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch."

"Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. The number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought, and Silicon Valley seems to be entering another “nuclear winter”"

How to stop the drug wars

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193 Howtostopthedrugwars Economist 2

buéno

2009-06-04 IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

"Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas."

"As a first step, Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients being treated at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg who would have to volunteer to participate in the scheme. Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example."

"Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients. [They] will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population."

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas

F YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

Verschiedene Künstler zeigen ihren Arbeitsplatz

Super cool micro-site done in PV3D

@TheEconomist Enjoy Thinking Space. Visualize innovation's physicality.

ハーディのパラドクス cf.http://www.thevarsity.ca/article/18481-u-of-t-scientists-prove／論文http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/11/3/033011/njp9_3_033011.html

Since its birth in the 1920s, physicists and philosophers have grappled with the bizarre consequences that his theory has for reality, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world and, in fact, whether it really exists at all when it is not being observed. Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved. When no one is peeking, however, it acts in a really odd way.

Yet more proof that the stuff down at a quantum level makes no sense when thought about using metaphors derived at a human level.

Revista The Economista dedica seu dossiê às redes sociais.

Economist weighs in on web2.0

Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles (interviewed here)

How the Ecocn.org folks work

A description of a group of volunteers translating every article in the weekly Economist into Chinese.

"a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience. "

They call themselves The Eco Team, a group of about 240 passionate Economist fans led by a 39-year-old insurance broker named Shi Yi.

The list of sensitive subjects includes China-Taiwan's political relationship, Tibet, Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Cultural Revolution, discussions of freedom of the press or freedom of religion, and any discussion of the establishment of a new Chinese political party.

as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources.

"Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism." Via Mindhacks.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

The Economist | Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals

The Economist

8% wereldwijd is econoom; de meerderheid jurist

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

ter, Wen Jiabao, specialised in g

Economist article on the prevalence of lawyers in U.S. and U.K. politics.

Computing: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive sounds daft, but may help keep distractions at bay

Stay on target: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive. http://bit.ly/bK4SIq

Column - block web access to increase productivity

LeechBlock