We at the H2O project are seeking a full-time Project Manager. H2O is an online platform for textbook development and distribution, currently in a pilot stage. H2O is based on the open source model – instead of locking down materials in formalized textbooks, we believe that course books can be free (as in free speech) [...] Read more »
Highly Religious People Are Less Motivated by Compassion Than Are Non-Believers
Via ScienceDaily:
Read more »“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.
“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional…
Forward! New Obama Slogan Has Long Ties to Marxism, Socialism
By Victor Morton | Washington Times May 1, 2012 The Obama campaign apparently didn't look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, "Forward" — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism. Many Communist and rad... Read more »
Slow Uptake of Windows 8 Preview Hints at Users’ Lack of Interest
Microsoft Windows 8 interfaceWindows users appear half as interested in trying out the new Windows 8 as they did three years ago when they jumped at the chance to test drive Windows 7, data shows. According to Web analytics company Net Applications, on... Read more »
Windows 8 is both more and less popular than Windows 7
Last week Microsoft put out an encouraging statistic about the popularity of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system: it's been downloaded twice as many times as Windows 7 had been at this point in its development. Happy news for proponents of the new ... Read more »
Foursquare v3.9 Adds NFC, Inbox Notifications, & More
Quite a few readers let us know that Foursquare has released a nice update to their BlackBerry app this weekend. The new update does improve the BlackBerry app experience with some nice tweaks along with improvements to make the app faster and improve ... Read more »
The Trust Molecule
Paul J. Zak, author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, asks "Could a single molecule—one chemical substance—lie at the very center of our moral lives?" in the Wall Street Journal:
Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large. Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor... Read more »
Anonymous Starts Social Music Platform: Anontune
Angela Watercutter writes on WIRED:
In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet. The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits. Reached by e-mail, one of the creators of Anontune told Wired the project was started by a group of anons who met online six years ago on what was then an underground hacking site. The group, mostly focused at the time on “cracking,” began discussing music, favorite artists and what they would do to fix current music business models...Read more »
Human Flesh Search Engines
Photo: Sylenius (CC)
Scott Smith writes at Current Intelligence:
Read more »Identifying alleged troublemakers is no longer just the job of the faceless men and women in dark operations rooms. The riots also made facial recognition more of a peer-to-peer activity, with online groups formed to weed through thousands of images to put names to allegedly offending faces. Members of one group even discussed collaboratively tapping an existing online service to facilitate use of Facebook photos to find rioters. This so-called crowdsourcing of facial recognition wasn’t new to the riots or the UK. Chinese citizens, for example, have taken it upon themselves to use the Internet, through China’s eerily named “Human Flesh Search Engine,” to highlight, locate, shame and even intimidate those deemed to have offended civic sensibilities. For Canadians upset at hockey riots, social groups have taken identification and occasionally retribution into their own hands. But with the riots happening in and among such a well-wired…
