The FREAKest Links: “MySpace 101” and Home-Cooked Samosas Edition

Looks like all that time spent on MySpace could start earning you college credits. Via Andrew Lavallee at the Wall Street Journal: More and more universities are incorporating curricula on social computing, allowing students to study subjects like online communities, social networking and user-contributed content as part of graduate and undergrad programs.

This month in Scientific American, Cornell economics professor Kaushik Basu revisits his twist on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. Called the Traveler’s Dilemma, the game involves two travelers who find that identical belongings of theirs have been damaged by an airline. The airline manager agrees to compensate both, but first asks them separately to write down the object’s price as any dollar integer between 2 and 100. If both write the same number, he’ll pay each that amount, but if they write different numbers, he’ll assume the lower is the actual price.

Saritha Rai at the New York Times profiles India’s now-booming business for dabbawallas, local delivery men who have joined up with Web service providers to form an extensive network in which they deliver home-cooked lunches to thousands of busy professionals — a nice example of traditional customs merging with modern technology to confer a public benefit.