Submission + - How did WordPress win? (majordojo.com)
jamie writes: Byrne Reese discusses why WordPress beat Movable Type, and offers some insightful thoughts about licensing and the perception of "free." (I hope his impression that people think perl is "scary" isn't as common as he thinks.)
Submission + - isolani - Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-b (isolani.co.uk)
Submission + - Visceral Games hears disabled gamer, adding custom (joystiq.com)
Submission + - Adactio: Journalâ"Erase and rewind (adactio.com)
jamie writes: The BBC is planning to delete 172 websites.
Submission + - NASA - NASA Finds Earth-Size Planet Candidates In (nasa.gov)
jamie writes: NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.
Google Adds To Mozilla's Push For 'Do Not Track' 128
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "In a morning blog post, Google announced the release of a Chrome plug-in called 'Keep My Opt-Outs,' which hopes to block all tracking cookies. Interestingly, it is released as open-source with the hopes that it will gain quick deployment on non-Chrome browsers and find a robust foothold against ads. The story is also covered at Computerworld, which has broader insight into the issue, looking at Google, Mozilla and Firefox, and seems to indicate more rapid change is looming — potentially from the FCC itself."
Submission + - The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tuni (theatlantic.com)
jamie writes: "Facebook's security team opens up, shedding light on a revolution that could become a parable for Internet activism"
Submission + - RealClimate: Getting things right (realclimate.org)
jamie writes: "'Last Monday, I was asked by a journalist whether a claim in a new report from a small NGO made any sense. ... The press response to their study has therefore been almost totally dominated by the error at the beginning of the report, rather than the substance of their work on the impacts. This public relations debacle has lessons for NGOs, the press, and the public.'"
Submission + - Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind (arstechnica.com)
jamie writes: "StarCraft, one of the most popular games ever made, also serves as the perfect proving ground for artificial intelligence. Here's the inside story of how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players."
Submission + - Tunisian dissident blogger takes job as minister | (guardian.co.uk)
jamie writes: "Slim Amamou and his fellow bloggers circulated news and videos in the name of protesting against the repressive regime"
Submission + - Turns out that music really is intoxicating, after (arstechnica.com)
jamie writes: "Our reaction to the music that we love stimulates the flow of dopamine into certain sections of the brain, concludes a new study out of McGill University. The findings "help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies," the scientists note."
Submission + - How long before apps overtake physical video game (asymco.com)
jamie writes: "Horace Dediu crunches some numbers and comes to a startling conclusion: 'If you look at the red line above and its slope, it would indicate that, given time, the App store will overtake the entire physical media gaming industry. The time when that happens will depend a lot on the growth or decline of the physical game media business, but another four years seems a safe bet.' This follows on the heels of some earlier analysis of apps per iOS device and what that steady upward growth means."
New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems 306
eldavojohn writes "A new study published today in Pediatrics Journal conducted in Singapore on three thousand children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that one in ten are video game addicts and almost all of those suffer mental health problems. This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer. Among the accusations from the study are that playing video games leads to lower school performance and fewer social skills while exacerbating existing depression, anxiety and social phobias. Gamasutra reports that the Entertainment Software Alliance is already criticizing this study, saying, 'Its definition of "pathological gaming" is neither scientifically nor medically accepted and the type of measure used has been criticized by other scholars. Other outcomes are also measured using dubious instruments when well-validated tools are readily available. In addition, because the effect sizes of the outcomes are mainly trivial, it leaves open the possibility the author is simply interpreting things as negatively as possible.' It seems that the doctors are still disagreeing on whether or not gaming causes problems."
