We’ve written in the past about the life-like struggles for resources and justice in online roleplaying games and universes. Now comes word that EVE Online, a sci-fi MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), has hired a full-time economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, to help manage the game’s virtual economy. Insert your own joke. (Hat tip: Derek Guder)
Via Wired: In addition to providing potential career-building skills, online gaming may be good for teens, according to a three-year study of adolescent gamers by researchers at Brunel University. The findings showed that teens who gamed could “establish their presence, identity and meaning in ways that might not be accessible or permissible in their everyday lives.” Though there’s also the . . .
A young woman in England wants to sell something unusual to fund her college education. We wrote in Freakonomics about how the increased access to information provided by the Internet has helped consumers overcome the historical information advantage that real estate agents and life insurance salespeople have had. This is one case, however, in which information asymmetry is alive and . . .
A reader named John Grund wrote in to lament the relative unpopularity of Paul McCartney — relative, that is, to John Lennon. Grund bases his assumption on a Google Trends search of the two men’s names. Indeed, aside from the occasional spike, McCartney lags behind his long-deceased mate (Lennon is in red): “You might think that if McCartney ever had . . .
New York Times writer Adam Liptak reports (TimesSelect membership required) that Avvo, a user-generated online rating system that allows clients to rate lawyers like Zagats rates restaurants, is being sued by none other than a group of lawyers with low ratings. More on the politics of online dating: Slate writer Seth Stevenson analyzes an ad campaign by Chemistry.com, a dating . . .
Here’s a twist in our discussion of specialized online dating: a 26-year-old Australian ad salesman has created a tongue-in-cheek site meant to “weed out” the “ugly, unattractive, desperate fatsos.” Called Darwin Dating, it has since gained popularity and led to several happy matches. Craigslist posters are selling their time this week by offering to stand in line to buy iPhones . . .
There’s been plenty of buzz this week over a paper by U.C. Berkeley PhD. student Danah Boyd, who argues that Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantaged than those on MySpace. According to Boyd, the Facebook crowd “tend[s] to come from families who emphasize education and going to college … They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors . . .
In light of our recent discussion of Internet Addiction Disorder, let it be known that the London Free Press reports that U.S. doctors are lobbying to have video game addiction classified as a psychiatric disorder. Online Gamer’s Anonymous, meanwhile, is packed with postings from gamers seeking control of their habits. Via the Wall Street Journal: Parents-to-be are putting more time . . .
Via the Wall Street Journal: Employers are starting to experiment with using Second Life to conduct job interviews. Candidates can create avatars and set up meetings at virtual job fairs in which they “communicate with executives of prospective employers as though they were instant-messaging.” Popular Science has released its annual “Ten Worst Jobs in Science” list, topped by Hazmat Diver, . . .
It seems that there are few things more fun than playing massive multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. I don’t play these games, but an incredible number of people do, investing significant amounts of time and money in them. Last week, the New York Times Magazine published an article on what it seems to consider the dark side . . .
Last week, I blogged about the conservative/Christian website Conservapedia, one of several Wikipedia copycats. Another of these sites is Uncyclopedia, which pokes fun at Wikipedia’s credibility issues by fudging practically every fact. The site is an impressive piece of mockery, perhaps best judged by its very excellent entry on Freakonomics — a book written, per Uncyclopedia, by “economist Bill Reichstag . . .
Google’s new Street View feature has caused a predictable sort of hubbub. Privacy advocates are upset; one woman freaked out when she could see her cat through the window of her house; one man was caught peeing by the side of the road. (We interviewed Google’s project manager on our site; his answers, hardly earth-shaking, were still interesting.) I understand . . .
In stark contrast to tales of 60-story homes being built in Mumbai, reader Aparna Vemuri wrote in with this story about the bootstrap entrepreneurship of Dharavi, the largest shantytown in Asia, in which nearly every resident produces a good. While the region’s poverty is undeniable, results are starting to show: as of 2006, all homes had 24-hour electricity and running . . .
In addition to their growing overlap with the laws and regulations of the physical world, virtual worlds are providing psychologists with new data sources and research for theories like Transformed Social Interaction, self-perception theory, and the Proteus Effect. Via TheStreet: In the wake of the Paris Hilton prison fiasco, financial blogger Eddy Elfenbein at Crossing Wall Street tracks the (continually . . .
Have you all heard of Conservapedia? It bills itself as “a conservative encyclopedia you can trust,” and it is pretty fascinating. It has a strong pro-Christian, anti-liberal (and especially anti-N.Y. Times) bent, and is just one of several user-run encyclopedias that have taken root in response (or tribute) to Wikipedia. (Here are our previous posts on Wikipedia). These also include . . .
Reader Sean Swanzy alerted us to Penny Postcards, a wonderful Web site that allows private collectors to share images of postcards from every county and state in the union, with mailing dates spanning the twentieth century. Not that we’re geographically biased, but the New York City collection is particularly impressive. From the Gainesville Sun via Consumerist: Florida’s Sun State Credit . . .
Last week was a busy one for the visual wizards at Google. First, the company launched Street View, which offers street-level photos of San Francisco, New York, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas; the remarkable new service promptly drew controversy as bloggers and surprised photo subjects raised privacy concerns. Then came word that the alleged JFK bombing suspects had used images . . .
I am probably like the other 98% of Americans who know almost nothing about the libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul, perhaps besides the fact that he’s running for President and that he seems to have a growing fringe following. So this e-mail, from a reader named Casey Hopkins, caught my eye: Why don’t you guys write about Ron Paul? 1. . . .
Back when I worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine, it was a pretty regular occurrence to send an article up to the legal department for vetting. One of the lawyers that I dealt with there was named Adam Liptak. I liked him a great deal for two reasons: as with the other lawyers there, he always . . .
If a genie came out of a bottle and gave me the choice between magically doing away with global warming or getting rid of the threat of global pandemics, I think I would choose the latter. I am probably in the minority on this one, but I think a pandemic might be the graver threat. A few years ago I . . .
From a recent N.Y. Times article by Michael Barbaro, headlined “Less Risk Seen in Purchasing Clothes Online”: For the first time since online retailing was born a decade ago, the sales of clothing have overtaken those of computer hardware and software, suggesting that consumers have reached a new level of comfort buying merchandise on the Web. One of the merchants . . .
A reader named Andrew Gendreau recently wrote in on the topic of distributed computing, which refers to a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers while they communicate with each other over a network. According to Wikipedia (whose reliability is imperfect but often commendable), distributed computing differs from networking . . .
As reported by Wired’s Regina Lynn: Controversy is brewing in virtual reality world Second Life over the occurrence and potential illegality of online rape. The 3-D virtual world, built and owned by its more than 6 million users, currently allows members to engage in a wide range of sexual activities. You can buy S&M gear and solicit strippers, escorts, and . . .
Several months ago, I got an e-mail from a money manager in Spain. He’d read a blog post here called “Will the High Price of Oil Make Americans Skinnier,” and decided to start trading (mostly agricultural stocks) based on the ideas mentioned therein. Good luck, I told him. Now my friend James Altucher at Stockpickr.com has had a similar idea, . . .
A while back, Levitt wondered why the Wall Street Journal charges for its online version while other papers generally offer their content ice for free. Sure enough, we have an answer. Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has an editorial in today’s Journal (available for free!) titled “How to Sink a Newspaper.” It offers a detailed explanation . . .
I was searching the internet, researching a blog post I had in mind about the Duke Business School cheating scandal, when I stumbled onto the online version of the Russian newspaper Pravda (in English). For those who may not remember, it used to be the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Here’s a link to the front page. I have to . . .
Tim Davis, an artist who teaches at Bard College in upstate New York, wanted to sculpt a life-size self-portrait out of album covers of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. But he’s been having trouble getting enough copies, as explained in an e-mail note he sent along to friends: “I’ve been buying them on eBay, but have artificially driven up the price . . .
In my research with Chad Syverson on real estate agents, which is also discussed in Freakonomics, we argue that the current system doesn’t do a great job of aligning the interests of the agent and the homeowner. Consequently, you may not want to believe what your real estate agent tells you. So how else are you going to figure out . . .
Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch, now attends Yale Law School, where she has learned to hate AutoAdmit, the online university blab shack. As with many online slanders, the ones on AutoAdmit tend to molder for a long time, which means that a newly minted lawyer may have to deal with an unseemly Google fingerprint (which, unlike . . .
If you are going to murder someone, be sure to not leave your fingerprints behind all over Google, as this woman apparently did. Her searches included “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses,” as well as searches on local gun laws. And while I don’t mean to heap even more dishonor on Walgreens, guess where she bought . . .