Function words – those unassuming “filler” words like the, this, though, I, an, there, and, that – are mightier than you think. For one, they’re a very good predictor of sex and love.
Yes, sex and love. Now that I’ve got your attention, on to the story of how analyzing the patterns of the use of these words in speech between two strangers in a speed dating scenario can be a very good predictor of who will get the date…
Continue reading… “Word usage predicts dating success”
The Pebble
The Pebble has raised $7 million from nearly 50,000 strangers in a matter of weeks. That’s the power of a growing trend toward crowd funding, as demonstrated by the most successful Kickstarter campaign yet.
Continue reading… “The Pebble raises $7 million in Kickstarter’s most successful campaign ever”
iPavement
A Spanish tech company has developed a new piece of “street technology” known as iPavement. iPavement are sidewalk paving stones that double as WiFi hotspots.
Continue reading… “iPavement puts WiFi hotspots into the sidewalk”
New research indicates that large wind farms can cause local temperature increases.
New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, according to new research. It’s a phenomena that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.
Continue reading… “Wind farms might be warming the planet”
For every additional pound of passenger weight, the United States uses up another 39 million gallons of fuel each year.
Obesity raises health costs as we all know with more frequent visits to the hospital, more prescription drugs, and a greater risk for developing diseases like diabetes. What is less known are the economic costs of obesity. What are increased costs obesity puts on the public infrastructure, the GDP or on the federal deficit?
Continue reading… “Americans waste more than a billion gallons of gas every year because of obesity”
Sondra Eklund, a knitter, mathematician, and YA librarian, designed and crafted this sweater. It shows, in colors, the prime factorization of every number between 2 and 100…
Continue reading… “Mathematical sweater”
One billion dollars neatly stacked.
With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk — combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people’s minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is signaling an important shift in the way that enterprise software is built and sold. It also indicates that the subscription business model is here to stay. What does this shift towards a subscription economy means for startups, investors and the IPO landscape?
First of all – get Instagram out of your mind. The price it sold for is not relevant to us mere mortals who are building B2B software businesses. For all good, non-bubble reasons, SaaS companies need tens of millions in revenue, high growth, and solid business fundamentals. What you may notice though, is that revenue may be lower than what we’ve become accustomed to during the last few years of IPO drought…
Continue reading… “How much revenue does it take to be a $1B public company?”
Meet Steve Schutz. Some might say he’s very dedicated to his work. But others would call him downright crazy. You see Steve works in an insectarium, a place where mosquitos are born and raised. And to ensure its residents are well-fed and propagate, he serves up his bare arm once a week for dinner.
As a result, after a feeding the 50 red welts on his lower arm barely even register as a slight tingle since Steve has built up an immunity to the mosquito’s saliva…
This googly eyed gentleman is named Dan Considine, and he’d like to take you on a tour of accents from across the globe, starting with the Land of Blarney and ending in the good ol’ U.S. of A…
Continue reading… “Around the world in accents”
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/41038445[/vimeo]
The Higgs Boson is kind of a big deal. If it does exist, it could provide a key to unifying the standard and quantum models of physics. But what is a Higgs Boson, what does it do, and how does it work? With the help of this animated short, UCI physics professor Daniel Whiteson breaks down the basics of this mysterious particle (or is it a field?) in a way even your parents can understand.
[Vimeo via Open Culture]
The languages you know affect how you think.
Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don’t have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.
The classic example is to tell a subject that there’s going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn’t take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—”If you take this risk, 400 people will die”—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn’t always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory…
Continue reading… “Thinking in a different language affects how you make decisions”
It took four hours every week to wash her hair and an hour and a half to brush every day
There are certain drawbacks to having a five-foot-long mane of hair. Twelve-year-old Natasha Moraes de Andrade of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was proud of her hair, but it took hours to wash and comb it. Her family couldn’t turn on fans for fear of getting it caught. And riding a bicycle was out of the question. Still, getting her hair cut was a difficult decision.
‘I cried at first when I was at the hairdressers to get it cut,’ she says.
‘I was afraid I wouldn’t like it, and I was also scared I might not get the money I wanted for it…
Continue reading… “Girl cuts hair to buy house”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.