Several news sources have started reporting on a 2007 research project by a group of MIT students who found they could accurately predict Facebook users' sexual preferences based on the people they were friends with. The project, referred to as "Gaydar," sampled data from 1,600 men (only 33 of whom were out as gay on Facebook) to create an algorithm that supposedly predicts whether a user is gay or not. However, the research methodology behind this unpublished study seems a bit dubious to me.

The initial test of Gaydar correctly predicted that 10 of the researchers' friends - who weren't "out" on Facebook - were gay. That's a pretty decent success rate, but a tiny, tiny sample size. Only 33 gay men out 1600 total can't possibly be reflective of the entire population. According to Wikipedia, 4% of voters in the last US election self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Assuming that those numbers are pretty conservative, only 2% of the people in Gaydar's initial sample were gay. I'm not convinced it's really time to start panicking that you could be inadvertently outed based on your Facebook friend list.

Track Your Happiness is the front end of a research project that seeks to figure out which factors contribute most to our happiness. If you sign up, fill out a 10-minute questionnaire about your life situation, and let the researchers poll you about your mood a few times a day via iPhone, you'll eventually get back a personal report. At first, this seemed a bit intrusive to me, but iPhone users are pretty much glued to their devices anyway, and it's no more trouble than answering a few text messages every day. You can even specify your wake time, bedtime and time zone, so it won't poll you while you're asleep.

The most problematic about the iPhone as a platform is that the study will have no way of determining whether our iPhone contribute to our happiness. It does appear to focus on factors like diet, exercise, financial situation and relationships, though. Each poll is pretty brief. You just position a few sliders to indicate how happy you feel, how self-critical you feel, what you're doing at the moment. Yeah, "making love" is on there, but you'll probably want to wait until you're done to answer the poll, if you really value your happiness. I have yet to use the app long enough to generate a report (it takes 50 polls), but I'm looking forward to seeing what I might find out about myself.

Each Wednesday Download Squad takes a look at the weirdest software out there. From future tech being cooked up in the lab to bizarre shareware, we'll cover the offbeat and off-the-wall. If you have a suggestion for a strange application, leave it in the comments.

Scientists are working on ways to read your mind using software. It makes sense that if you know how to read brainwaves you'd be able to reconstruct what the eyes are seeing, right? But Yukiyasu Kamitani is taking it to another level: using a an MRI to scan your brain and recreate what you see in your mind on a computer screen. Ultimately the technology could be used to read your mind with enough fidelity to create a video of your thoughts or dreams.

As the article in New Scientist points out, all of this raises ethical concerns should the tech work from a distance. Do you want marketers to read your mind? What would Google do if they could put contextual ads in your life? Can you upload your brain to Flickr?

Of course, this is a long way off. Not only does the software need a lot of refinement, the hardware challenges of reading brainwaves with enough fidelity to recreate an image is a giant hurdle. In the meanwhile, keep buying Lightspeed Briefs to match your tin foil hats.

iBreadcrumbs is a browser toolbar you can use to record the websites you visit while you're working on a particular project, so you can find your research again or share your sources with someone else. Sure, you could do this manually, by posting your finds to del.icio.us or a similar bookmarking service, and giving them all the same tag, but iBreadcrumbs makes that look like way too much work. All you have to do is click start, and everything gets saved automatically.

Your sessions (Breadcrumbs) each get saved to their own dedicated page, where you can organize them and add additional notes. You can combine a new Breadcrumb with an existing one, which makes the service useful for longer research projects. There's also a social aspect to the site: you can add friends for easy collaboration. iBreadcrumbs is flexible enough that we're sure it can be applied to all sorts of non-research functions. Don't be put off by the "University" field in the sign-up process - this service isn't just for academics.

Will Smith and Kevin Bacon may both know that there's no more than six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet. But the folks at Microsoft's research division now have quantifiable proof. Well, sort of.

Microsoft Research did a bit of analysis with raw MSN messenger data. Without actually reading any private messages, (the data all remained anonymous) the team tracked the trajectory of 255 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006. Researchers were able to see where the message started and where it ended up.

In the end, you get a pretty map like the one above showing where MSN Messenger users are located. And you can also see which users are chatting it up with one another. And in the end, the team concluded that you could pretty much make a connection between any random MSN Messenger user and another with just 6.6 connections. In other words, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and a half of yours knows the person you may have just sent a message to.

Of course, the data only covers MSN Messenger statistics and doesn't take into account all the people using AOL, Yahoo!, or Google messengers, not to mention all the folks who don't IM or even have access to computers at all. But next time someone tells you that whole six degrees thing if bunk, now you can point them toward empircal(ish) proof.

[via Mashable and Nature]

Communiversity is a new site which allows students of various colleges to post pictures and comments on their own school. Though opinions on the site can vary greatly and maybe leave visitors more confused than informed, this new service is an interesting and creative way to find out a little more about your next potential college.

College.SparkNotes and Collegeboard are two other sites to visit if you're researching new places to get those degrees. These sites are great sources of concrete information like tuition estimates, average SAT scores of attending students, majors offered, etc, and SparkNotes even conducts surveys on the general experience. But the sites still lack in information on the real student experience.

That's why Communiversity exists. Every school's page is managed entirely by students, so future undergrads get the info right from the horses mouthes. The site also allows students to upload pictures, so it's likely visitors will see portions of the campus less advertised. Though the new site is still small relative to its potential, news of Communiversity is spreading fast.

Every now and again a study comes around that's so stunning it makes us wonder, "wait, somebody took the time to study this?" And now, for the findings from the Department of Obvious Research Pew Internet & American Life Project: girls who post photos online are more likely to be contacted by strangers than boys or girls without pictures. Shocking, but true.

We suppose it's important for objective researchers to test conventional and unconventional wisdom about the web in order to stave off fears that every child who ever goes online will become the victim of sexual predators. But seriously, did we need a study to let us know that dirty old men out there like to send inappropriate messages to girls online?

Other key findings include:

• Girls were more likely than boys to have been contacted by someone who made them feel scared or uncomfortable
• Teens who created profiles on social networking sites are more likely to have been contacted by strangers -- but they were no more likely to have been scared than other kids who have been contacted online

[via Mashable]

It's so easy to enter your search term in Google and see what shakes out. It's also a serious time waster and when you want results without culling though the spam links, it's better to go hunting with a rifle and get exactly what you want. Here are some reference sites Scholastici.us put together to help you be a sharpshooter and get the job done, hopefully a lot faster.

Bartleby - find fabulous quotes fast. Also contains poetry for easy reference.

Scholarpedia - articles written by experts and peer reviewed.

Citzendium - Still in beta, a wiki whose authors use their real names.

Wikiseek - a fast way to search Wikipedia.

Encyclopedia Brittanica - an oldie but still goodie. Authoritative texts you can rely on.

Fed Stats - full range of official statistical information produced by the Federal Government without having to know in advance which Federal agency produces which particular statistic.

Geo Hive - a statistic website filled mostly with population statistics of regions, countries, provinces and cities.


Math World - all things mathematics - billed as the web's most extensive math resource.

These should get you started on your journey to getting what you want fast, without wasting all your time in search mode. If you have other favorite resources, please share them with us in the comments section.

You know those 15,274 friends you have on Facebook, MySpace and other social networks? We know you're going to find this hard to believe. But they're not actually your friends. Well, not close friends anyway. We know, it's shocking, but it turns out that if you asked 15,268 of them if you could borrow a car, odds are they'd say no.

Well, while that may have seemed obvious to most of us, that didn't stop British psychologist Will Reader from conducting research on the topic. And he found that you probably have about the same number of close friends online as you do off. And 90 percent of your online friends will be people you've met in real life.

Where social networks excel is at making it easy to keep in touch with old friends and colleagues with whom you might otherwise lose touch. You might not send your casual acquaintance from 7th grade an email very often. But you might leave a message on his Facebook wall.

Reader found that face to face communication is essential in establishing trust in relationships. So even if you do make friends through social networks, often through friends of friends, you're only likely to become "close" friends if you meet in real life.

Keep in mind, this research relates to social networks. Reader's making no claims that you can't make good friends with people you meet online. He's just saying that it's unlikely you'll do it by frequenting MySpace.

Internet research firm comScore says the average U.S. computer had an average of 3GB worth of MP3 files, and over 300MB worth of WMV (Windows Media Video) files. The study looked at computer hardware and software configurations in April. Here are a few other interesting findings:

• Hard drive capacity is on the rise. Over the first four months of the year, the number of computers with hard drives under 30GB shrunk, while the percentage of computers with 100GB+ hard drives rose.
• Users with the largest MP3 collections are more likely to spend time online gambling, gaming, shopping, chatting, and doing just about any other kind of online leisure activity that was tracked
• Users with large collections of Microsoft Word Documents were more likely to spend time online in business related pursuits like travel, finance, and shipping.

So take a look at what's on your hard drive. If you've got too many Office documents and not enough MP3s, odds are you're spending too much time working. On the other hand, judging by the sheer number of MP3s taking up space on the average computer, it doesn't look like that's really much of a problem for most Americans.
[via Information Week]

WikiMindMap takes a pleasant visual approach to the text heavy Wikipedia, showcasing additional relevant content that you may have never searched for.

If you've been getting tired of entering a search term in for Wikipedia and feel like there might be additional information that you are missing out on, WikiMindMap will change that. This tool can help users browse Wiki content quickly and efficiently, giving a clean structured understandable overview of the search topic.

Start by specifying the version of Wiki, and then enter your topic. You will be presented with a 'mind map' of the topic that branches out each realm of the instance, clickable through to the Wikipedia entry. For instance, a search on 'California' returned some higher marked pages, along with breakdowns for additional sections such as history, economy, cities, towns, newspaper, and geography. This is extremely relevant when searching for such a broad term.

Zurfer is straight out of the Yahoo! Research Berkeley facility. This handheld application is a location based photo browser. What it is in basic terms is Flickr for your mobile device.

The Zurfer application is currently being developed in the Yahoo research labs, and will -- when loaded on mobile phones -- showcase photos taken around you based on current gps co-ordinates. You can also pull in the latest photos from friends, take photos and add them to your Flickr collection, and perform searches in Flickr for images using the mobile software.

The Zurfer application is in testing phases, and could quite possibly contain bugs, so download at your own risk. It is available, and has been tested on Nokia S60, Motorola RAZR V3X and a few other devices.

If you're looking to move your family to a new abode, an important consideration is often the quality of the schools in the areas you are looking for.

To help with the decision, Yahoo! Real Estate has added a nationwide school search feature to it's service. The schools are displayed on the embedded Y! Map, so you get all the zoom \ pan \ images that you'd expect.

Each school is linked to more information such as Student \ Teacher Ratio and even Parent Reviews. The data it uses comes from a partnership with GreatSchools.net and gives you the ability to search on District \ Level or Grade. Also, a neighborhood map of the school is displayed with easy access to local amenities - Grocery stores \ Parks \ Gas Stations, etc.

Combine this with the Zillow data that's available from the same service, you have a powerful way to research your next home.

From the Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day blog: Yahoo! Research continues working to merge several of it's social properties in interesting ways - this time with the upcoming release of Tagmaps. Tagmaps aim to integrate tags with Yahoo! Maps - with the tags overlaid on top of the map. As you Zoom/Pan the map, relevent tags get place on the display.

Yahoo! has created 3 demo apps:

• World Explorer - integrates Flickr Photos as well as tags to the map
• Night Explorer - similar to Worl Explorer, but the pictures are from nighttime
• Trip Explorer - instead of using Flickr Tags, this app pulls in from Y! Trip Planner

As well as these, you can also put the Flash component on your own page - pulling from your own data sources.

I'm a huge fan of tagging, and its great to see Yahoo! starting to pull all this together into some cool demos. Hopefully we'll see this rolled out at some time. For more information, here's the FAQ

Google and Nasa officially announced their special Space Act Agreement Monday. Through this new relationship, both companyies and government agency will work on technical problems that face large scale data management and human-computer interfaces. Google and NASA's Ames Research Center's first focus will be to make NASA's information readably available on the internet, namely real time weather tracking, high-res 3D maps of the moon and mars, and real time tracking of the International Space Station. This partnership, which began in September of last year, was a long while coming, but now that it's actually in the works, it's getting a lot of people excited at the possibilities that both organizations bring to the table in the long run.

[Update: Thanks to Jeremy for reminding me that NASA is still a government agency, and hasnt made the switch over to a company as of yet! ]