Sure, Google can map just about anything. But who knew it could actually influence geography from the ground up?
The French coastal town of Eu is getting no Internet love, and its mayor is about to do something about it. Marie-Françoise Gaouyer believes that the decline in tourism—down by as much as a third—is the result of the town’s poor standing in “Eu” Google searches. So, she’s advocating to change the name of the town on the belief that additional syllables will increase its Internet visibility. Her decision to act was triggered when even the French national railway’s computer system did not recognize Eu’s existence.
Instead of tourist accommodations, Google currently yields sites related to the European Union or, for French searches, to the past participle of the verb “avoir.” Gaouyer thinks that to increase awareness of Eu among potential tourists, she can either pay search engines like Google to place the town at the top of “Eu” searches, or simply change the town’s name.
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It’s not quite the gadget you see on Minority Report—but it’s close. MIT researchers have built a device that can turn any flat surface into a touchscreen for computing—and to surf the Web, all you have to do is move your hand.
Built with a Web cam, a mirror, a projector, and a smart phone, the device can be worn like a necklace, and can act like an omniscient personal assistant, letting you know if your flight is late, helping you shop, or even providing a phone number. But there’s one caveat: You have to wear color-coded finger gloves on your index finger and thumb, so the Web cam can pick up your hand movements.
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Lying is part of human nature: People spend 25 percent of their time doing it. But if you really need to lie, pick up the phone. In two separate studies, researchers have found that it’s easier for people to lie in an email than in any other written form of communication, including hand-written notes.
The researchers asked a group of 48 MBA students to divide $89 between themselves and an unspecified person in the class. The students were told that they had to make an offer their partner was willing to accept, and that their partner knew the pot was between $5 and $100. The MBA students were asked to disclose in writing the amount they were giving to their partner. The disclosures were shown only to the researchers. When the students used email to write the amount, they lied 92 percent of the time, as opposed to 64 percent of the time when they hand-write it.
On average, the emailers wrote that they were giving $29 out of a total amount of $56. Then ones who hand-wrote the responses, on average, said they were offering $34 out of a pot of $67.
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· The “Father of the internet” says the Web will run out of IP addresses in 2010.
· Chances are, if you’re reading this, you spend 25 percent of your time doing personal tasks online at work.
· Google’s Tenth Birthday contest: The five best ideas to help as many people around the world as possible will get a total of $10 million in funding. Hurry! Submissions are due by October 20th.
· Dear Sarah Palin: In case you hadn’t noticed, a village in Alaska is melting.
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• The hottest country code on teh Internets [sic]: .su—as in, the Soviet Union. Which, in case you somehow forgot, doesn’t exist anymore.
• Big prizes are spurring a new age in (and at least one blog about) space exploration. Now PETA hopes to do the same with a $1 million prize to the first mad scientists who can “produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012,” thereby sparing real animals from becoming meat. Note the stipulation about “commercially viable,” you home molecular gastronomists.
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