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 Oxford Science reports on a study of the strategy of queen ants for surviving murderous mobs of workers. They are in danger because:
In some ant species, several queen ants work together to begin a new colony, each raising broods of workers until there are enough ants to form a viable colony. However, the worker ants cannot tolerate joint sovereignty and ultimately kill the queens until only one remains. . . . The article explains how the researchers looked at several possible strategies the queen ants might use. The conclusion drawn about the smart way to deal with a mob: . . . the scientists found...
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A Wired Campus article reports on a study of student usage of Wikipedia. The finding that the most common reason students go to Wikipedia is to begin research belies the frequent grousing that students probably do not get excellence in research because they rely too much on Wikipedia. The report begins: More than half of college students frequently or always consult Wikipedia for course-related research, according to a report published in First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal. Only 22 percent of respondents to the survey said they rarely or never use Wikipedia. The study is based on responses from 2,318 students and qualitative data from 86 who participated in focus groups. The most common reason that students reported using...
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BREAKING NEWS CNET by Daniel Terdiman @GreeterDan
Mashable ‘New Version of Digg Revealed’, by @BenParr RT gervis Unveiled at #SXSW Digg 2.0 , ‘faster,’ ‘instant’ http://tinyurl.com/ydhbmb8 more Buzzbox results http://www.buzzbox.com/topic/SXSW/ Just before Digg founder Kevin Rose and his Diggnation partner Alex Albrecht took the stage at Stubb’s BBQ here, CEO Jay Adelson got in front of the audience of hundreds and took the opportunity to introduce, for the first time, what he said was “five years” of major work on the popular headline aggregation system. Real-time results for #digg  
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Louis Gray reviews on Louisgray.com the presentation of Chris Messina at the South by Southwest Interactive event SXSW. Open source advocate Chris talked on how he and others in the community, both at Google and outside of it, are working to bring more meaning to our social networks, activity, and feeds, through extending today’s data portability standards to include more information and more relevance. Messina walked through a history of the Web’s publishing, from static portals of a decade ago, to today’s RSS and Atom-powered sites, and suggested a future with even more information, based on streams. By 2005, a new extension of RSS was promoted, called Atom, which was still the essential concept of syndicating data from...
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Social networking expert Danah Boyd keynoted the opening remarks at SXWS on Saturday, March 13 with a talk about privacy and publicity. Boyd said that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we donât have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. Boyd discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She said that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose. Boyd talked about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She said that just because people...
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The all-important literacy of determining the credibility of information found on the Internet, discussed, analyzed, and dissected in a 24 minute video. A companion to my blog post of the same title. (Voice-over interviewer in some sequences: Betsy Aoki)  
     
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The graph shows the burst of new Twitter accounts in 2009, and not so much in 2010. Mashable has a summary article, that includes the graph, of an new Barracuda Labs analysis of Twitter. Here are some key findings: 21% are active users, having tweeted in the past 10 days 26% have ten or more followers 40% following 10 or more users 73% tweeted less than ten minutes Mashable adds: In terms of tweets, the report estimates that 34% of Twitter users hadnât tweeted even once, while a whopping 73% of Twitterâs users tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets...
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It is not often one comes across a book which encourages an entire industry to reflect upon its essence and purpose. Ajit Jaokar and Anna Gatti have delivered a compelling treatise which challenges the core of the mobile industry to reflect on how “Open|Mobile” is impacting telecoms, and mobile device manufacturers and how it is reshaping the Internet, social networks, media and personal privacy. Smart Mobs encourages you to visit FUTURETEXT to download your “FREE” copy of the eBook: Open Mobile: Understanding the Impact of Open Mobile - Implications for Telecoms/Devices, Web, Social Networks, Media and Personal Privacy. 
Ebook Only - FREE DOWNLOAD ...
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An Associated Press story today is a roundup on classroom clickers: At universities, is better learning a click away? One of the article’s themes is the variety of the devices in use, and whether smartphones will eventually take over as the standard clicking devices: . . . CU-Boulder chose the device â which uses the same technology as a garage door opener and has five lettered buttons â because it’s simple and durable, Dubson said. One student’s stopped working when he spilled Coke on it. He cleaned it with soap and water and it worked fine. Students pay about $35 for them. More sophisticated clickers run in the $60 to $70 range. Some have gaming features that appeal to...
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What is traditional “media” and should it be given more access than bloggers? An article in SEED Magazine outlines the many aspects of this question. The opening and closing paragraphs follow. Between the two paragraphs is SEED’s analysis, with an emphasis on implications for science conferences, of credentialing bloggers as “press” along with journalists:
A long awaited breakthrough may be about to occur on the streets of New York City. On Tuesday, The New York Law Department released a proposed revision to its press credentialing rules that decreed âonline journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio...
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