The Foursquare Minefield

What's the best thing about social networking in the digital age?  Ease of stalking!

Let's take a look at Jessica G. and her Foursquare profile.  She has provided a photo, so I can recognize her should I see her.  She's the current mayor of the Boston University College of Communications, likely a student based on her age.  She's the mayor of 646 E. Brookside Lane,  a residential area in New Jersey (where she's also the major of a bagel shop), so this is likely her hometown and her family house.  Finally, she's the Mayor of "The 157," another residential area in Brookline, Massachusetts, much closer to school.  This is probably where she's living now.  Furthermore, she's listed it as a "gay bar," suggesting that the girl hugging her in her profile photo is probably her girlfriend.  

Scientists Study Dog Anxiety, Everyone Makes Same Joke

If you’ve got a canine friend, you may ascribe to the belief that your dog feels happy when you come home, depressed when you leave, or sympathetic when you’re feeling down. Well, you may be right. Recent science suggests that dogs may be prone to optimistic and pessimistic tendencies, and researchers used principles from human psychology to test this hypothesis. In the words of dozens of like-minded news writers, for some dogs “the bowl is half-empty.”

In the study, headed by a team at Bristol University, test-dogs were trained with two food bowls, one empty and one full. The bowls were always kept in the same place in the test room, so that the dog learned to expect a full bowl in one corner and an empty one in the other corner. After the dogs had formed these expectations, they were placed in the room with bowls arranged at random locations. Based on how enthusiastically the dogs checked the bowls, researchers classified which dogs were more optimistic decision-makers. Basically, being excited, rather than indifferent, about an unknown element belies a tendency to expect a positive outcome, rather than a negative one.

From Emoticon to Emoti-bot

Mid-August of this year, the news feeds exploded with stories about the Nao robot and its ability to use emotional responses to interact with people. The little humanoid robot displays its feelings through physical postures, hunching its shoulders when it’s sad or opening up its arms for hugs when it’s happy.

It’s a fantastic technological development, and some would say a terrifying portent of our impending machine-based doom. But despite the promising work that the robot is doing with autistic children and the potential aid for the disabled, all I could think about while reading these articles what do they mean by emotions?

Live and Streaming - The Top 5 Science Streams

The internet age has given us access to so many vectors of useless information that some really amazing science sites go unnoticed. Luckily, I have noticed them for you.

These are the five coolest online scientific data streams, brought to you by Zu.

5. Ground Control to Major Tom

Space exploration may seem alien to you (ha!), but NASA’s Human Space Flight tracker brings it home by showing you the precise location of the International Space Station (ISS). If there were any manned (personned?) shuttles in orbit right now, you’d be able to track those too. The site provides you with the status of the ISS, as well as who’s on board and your next chance to catch a glimpse of it in the sky over your town.

Keeping Score: Games of the Future and the Future of Gaming (extra points for comments)

Games are successful if they can achieve one vital goal: to keep you interested. Loyalty is priceless in the game world, and it’s achieved via reward systems that give you just enough satisfaction to keep you engaged.

But reward systems aren’t isolated to games. They have played a part in our consumer reality for a long time. Jesse Schell, game designer and teacher at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Center, is waiting for a game revolution to take over even the mundane aspects of our everyday lives.

He envisions a world where your toothbrush gives you points every time you brush, and a bonus for brushing for the recommended three minutes. Your health insurance can read your digital shoes for how much you’ve walked in a day, and gives you points for getting your heart-rate up. Your cereal box has digital games on the back, instead of word-searches or mazes, and the games link up through Facebook to rate you against your friends.