When the original Xbox video-game console went on sale in 2001, it wasn't clear why Microsoft, known for staid workplace software, was branching out into fast-paced action games. But Microsoft decided that capitalizing on the popularity of gaming could help the company position itself for the coming wave of home digital entertainment.

Panos Iperitos set out to study the dollar value of online reputation, and along the way he discovered the counter-intuitive ways that reviews inform it

Not surprisingly, people are willing to pay a premium (up to 5%) to buy a product for a seller with a good reputation, but interestingly, negative product reviews can lead to higher sales:

One reason is that buyers gain confidence that "if this is the worst this product will throw at me, it must be pretty good." "Negative reviews that are specific actually tend to serve as risk mitigators," says Ipeirotis On the other hand, the phrase "good packaging" makes it sound like there was nothing else in the transaction worth complimenting.

Though people with autism face many challenges because of their condition, they may have been capable hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times, according to a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in May.

The "autism advantage," a relatively new perspective, contends that sometimes autism has compensating benefits, including increased abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and memory. Although individuals with autism have trouble with social cognition, their other cognitive abilities are sometimes largely intact.

“The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed ‘Friday Night,’ that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality. And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.’ ”

Foursquare now provides its merchant platform to more than 300,000 businesses, which can track their customers through a newly launched analytics dashboard. Merchants can analyze various metrics over time, including how many check-ins are recorded each day, who the most recent and most frequent visitors are, how visitors who check in break down by gender, and what time of day the most people check in; businesses with multiple locations can aggregate statistics to fit their needs. Foursquare provides the same platform "for Joe's coffee shop and Starbucks," says Eric Friedman, Foursquare's director of business development, but companies use the tools and data in different ways, depending on their specific objectives. "Some people are using it directly to measure [differences between] top-performing stores and low-performing stores," Friedman says. Others might track geographic differences.

What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It’s happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog’s name to someone else.

And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them—and who does?—you’d learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more then they protect you.

For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man's anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address. From there, by cross-referencing this location with city records, they found his name. Using that information, the researchers went on to find his place of work, his wife's name, and information about his children.

The new C64 comes kitted out as a modern-day PC, running Linux but capable of handling the Windows 7 operating system. It's hardware has also been given a boost — it sports a 1.8 gigahertz processor (rather more powerful than the original's 1 megahertz), built in Wi-Fi, and a DVD player.

...The basic version is to be sold for $595, the same price as the original.

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers found that mobile media technologies such as smart phones aren't taking people away from relying on traditional media sources such as newspapers or television.

Instead, mobile media are filling the spaces in people's daily routine in which other media sources are either unavailable or inconvenient to use.

I argue that the organization's technology—the "secure drop box," which I call a "'platform' from which leaks cannot be traced and cannot be censored"—once imagined cannot be forgotten, and will be replicated by more conventional media organizations like the New York Times and Al Jazeera, as well as by other, less radically activist organizations dedicated to leaking.