Herd Mentality: The Science of Hit SongsWhen Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critically acclaimed ex-Beatle's album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world.
So what makes a hit?
A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.
Popularity contest
Researchers created an artificial "music market" of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study's Internet ... (more)
|
|
Meet Our New StormtroopersWill this be the face of our new Imperial Army? Time will tell...
From Mtek Weapon Systems:
The Latest in Facial Protection
... (more)
|
|
US wins WTO backing in war over GM foodThe World Trade Organisation on Tuesday night ruled that Europe had broken international trade rules by blocking the import of genetically modified food, in a decision United States trade officials hailed as a victory.
The WTO found that Europe had imposed a de facto ban on GM food imports for six years from 1998 which violated trade agreements, and that Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Luxembourg also had no legal grounds to impose their own unilateral import bans.
... (more)
|
|
Election officials fear '06 season of the glitchWASHINGTON — More than 30 million Americans will be looking at new and unfamiliar voting machines when they cast their ballots this year, perhaps the most rapid changeover of voting equipment in history. With that change comes an increased risk of errors and confusion, election officials say.
"When you look at disaster stories, it is usually that first time using a new piece of equipment that something is going to fall apart," says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data S... (more)
|
|
The New Chip-erati Artists and hackers have begun implanting RFID chips under their skin. It's a cool way to play with technology. Will it lead to a system of universal implanted ID?
Facial piercings and full-body tattoos used to be signifiers for those who saw themselves as social outlaws. Now, bank tellers and high school kids have pierced lips and inked skin. Today a few cutting-edge nerds sport chips under their skin, a melding of technological experimentation and body modification. Will the m... (more)
|
|
Hitachi advances paper-thin RFID chipTOKYO — Targeting radio-frequency identification, Hitachi Ltd. has developed what it says is the smallest and thinnest IC in the world for those applications.
Hitachi was due to present details of the 0.15-millimeter by 0.15-millimeter, 7.5-micron-thick chip on Sunday (Feb. 5) at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.
Paper is typically 80 microns to 100 microns thick, and the chip substrate has been made small and thi... (more)
|
|
Gallup: Blogs Catching On With Web Users In the Web universe, how popular are blogs? A report today by The Gallup Poll organization on its latest surveys could be interpreted two ways.
On the one hand, asked to rank their most frequent online activity, Americans who use the Web (now 73% of the population) placed "reading blogs" at the bottom of its list of 13 choices.
But on the other hand: blogs barely existed until recently and now fully one in five Americans say they consult blogs "frequently" or at le... (more)
|
|
Google's 'death penalty' for BMWGoogle confirmed today that it has applied its own version of a "death penalty" to BMW's German website, after the carmaker apparently attempted to boost its popularity ranking artificially on the internet search engine.
A Google spokesman told Times Online: "We cannot tolerate websites trying to manipulate search results as we aim to provide users with relevant and objective search results.
"Google may temporarily or permanently ban any site or site authors that e... (more)
|
|
EU backs pandemic Tamiflu for childrenA cough syrup containing the antiviral drug Tamiflu would be available to children during a bird flu pandemic, a European Union regulator has ruled.
If a bird flu virus was circulating in Britain, healthy children aged between one and 12 would be able to get a preventative dose of the Tamiflu cough syrup.
Previously, healthy children could be given Tamiflu only if they developed flu symptoms, but last week, the European Medicines Evaluation Agency (EMEA) altered the... (more)
|
|
Rumours mount over Google's internet planGoogle is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol (IP) network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company.
Last month, Google placed job advertisements in America and the British national press for "Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fibre contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long d... (more)
|
|
Robot special: Almost humanRobots are on the march. Already, 1.5 million Roomba vacuum-cleaning bots are crawling the globe, and autonomous planetary rovers are working overtime on Mars. But this is only the start of what engineers are hoping to achieve.
The goal is to build robots that can be let loose in our world, where they will learn to interact with humans in a messy and unpredictable environment, not just in the lab. These robots need to be able to get around in the same places we do, manipulate obje... (more)
|
|
Scientist: Bird flu not biological weaponThe avian influenza virus originated naturally and is not a biological weapon, a senior Russian scientist has said.
Oleg Kiselyov, director of the Russian Influenza Research Institute, said Thursday, "We have not advanced enough to create such a genetic machine," the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
If the bird flu virus had been created artificially in order to be used as a biological weapon, scientists would have discovered this, he said.
Kisely... (more)
|
|
Solar system '10th planet' is bigger than PlutoClaims that the Solar System has a 10th planet are bolstered by the announcement today that an icy body at its fringes is bigger than Pluto.
Scientists have made the first accurate measurement of the size of this putative planet, announced last summer, tentatively called 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena before it gets an official name.
A group led by Prof Frank Bertoldi from the University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy has estimated the size by me... (more)
|
|
AT&T calls for end to free internet: People should pay for the use of our pipesAT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has called for an end to the free Internet which he says is costing coms companies a fortune.
According to the Financial Times, Whitacre said that content providers should be paying for the use of the network which is effectively being delivered for free by the coms companies.
He said that web providers could pay the comms companies by charging their customers for visiting their pages. "That ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They sh... (more)
|
|
Bedroom TVs for seven out of 10 childrenSeven out of 10 children have a television set in their bedrooms, while half have their own DVD player, according to a study that highlights the disintegration of communal family life.
A survey of more than 1,300 families found that children's rooms were becoming cluttered with entertainment gadgets that kept them away from their parents and siblings.
The findings have disturbed some psychologists who believe children are missing out on the more social outdoor activ... (more)
|
|
Google challenges EU plan to regulate the internetGoogle, the giant internet search company, is to lead industry opposition to new proposals from the European Commission to regulate online content.
The company, which last week said it would self-censor its Chinese search engine to appease the country's government, objects to the commission's proposals to extend regulations in the Television Without Frontiers directive (TWFD) to cover video content shown on the internet.
James Purnell, the minister for creative indu... (more)
|
|
Scientists discover chemical link that may explain the 'placebo effect'Scientists may have discovered a possible cause of the "placebo effect", where a sham medical treatment results in a genuine benefit to the patient. A study has found production of a chemical "messenger" in the brain appears to play a critical role.
Jon Stoessl, professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, believes the placebo effect could be caused by the production of a chemical in the brain called dopamine, which is involved in triggering the expe... (more)
|
|
Internet, Web, E-mail security update: ZoneAlarm comes with two spy dlls 'to measure actual Internet and digital media audience user behaviour in real-time - click-by-click, page-by-page, second-by-second.'Regular readers will know that we take Internet, web and e-mail security seriously and have always used ZoneAlarm, Norton Anti-virus and AdSubtract. This way in the past we have been able to stop our computers from being attacked and infected. BUT.
Things change.
The other day we were going over one of our computers and found in the Windows Internet Logs folder a file that we had never seen before and was growing at an alarming rate. We used all our skills and knowl... (more)
|
|
CIA Expanding Use Of Drone-Fired Missiles For Suspected Terrorist Assassinations…WASHINGTON — Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.
The CIA's failed Jan. 13 attempt to assassinate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri in Pakistan was the latest strike in the "targeted killing" program, a highly classified initiative that officials say has broadened as the network splintere... (more)
|
|
US plans to 'fight the net' revealedA newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network a... (more)
|
|
Wash clothes with thin air IT COULD be a godsend for drought-stricken communities -- a washing machine that needs no water or powder yet cleans clothes in a jiffy.
Scientists in Singapore have invented the revolutionary appliance called the Airwash and it has already caught the eye of one major manufacturer.
The machine works by blasting dirty clothes with jets of air primed with negative ions, which have the effect of clumping dust together, deactivating bacteria and neutralising odours.... (more)
|
|
Internet serves as 'social glue'The internet has played an important role in the life decisions of 60 million Americans, research shows.
Whether it be career advice, helping people through an illness or finding a new house, 45% of Americans turn to the web for help, a survey by US-based Pew Internet think-tank has found.
It set out to find out whether the web and e-mail strengthen social ties.
The answer seems to be yes, especially in times of crisis when people use it to mobilise t... (more)
|
|
'Suicide Seeds' Could Spell Death of Peasant Agriculture, UN Meeting ToldUNITED NATIONS, Jan 25 (OneWorld) - Groups fighting for the rights of peasant communities are stepping up pressure on governments to ban the use of genetically modified ''suicide seeds'' at UN-sponsored talks on biodiversity in Spain this week.
''This technology is an assault on the traditional knowledge, innovation, and practices of local and indigenous communities,'' said Debra Harry, executive director of the U.S.-based Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism.
... (more)
|
|
New 'ray gun' weapon could save innocent livesA new weapon that uses nonlethal force that might decrease the number of innocent casualties in Iraq, which some US commanders want "rushed" to the battlefield is still "under review" by the Pentagon, RAW STORY has learned.
The "Active Denial System" is a gun that emits an invisible ray which can stop the target without causing any serious pain or harming any bystanders.
Others aren't sure if the ray is so "harmless." Details of tests acquired via the FOIA act s... (more)
|
|
| 
