Tag: INFORMATION

Much of the world's history may have been written by the victors, but Louisiana's historical record apparently hinges on the whims of lonely computer nerds. Case in point: the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, where a statue of the state's first governor is accompanied not by an official document or verified biography, but by a printout of the man's Wikipedia page. Yes, a printout -- from ...

To most people, Wikipedia represents the ultimate in egalitarian encyclopedias. It's a place where any Internet user can go to add their own knowledge on virtually any subject in the world, regardless of individual expertise or background. But recent statistics show that, in spite of its intrinsic openness, Wikipedia's playing ground may not be as level as it seems -- especially when it comes ...

Share Do you open your laptop as soon as you wake up? Do you sneak out of the office to tweet from your smartphone? Do you get the shakes if you go several hours without visiting Switched? If so, you're not alone, because, according to a new study, we're all physically addicted to the meth of new media. The study, titled 'Unplugged,' was undertaken by the University of Maryland's International ...

It's no secret that obesity levels in the U.S. have been rising over the years. But according to a new report, our consumption of information is on the rise, too, which isn't a bad thing. The New York Times reports that an average American consumes 34-gigabytes and roughly 100,000 words of information each day. In total, American households consumed 3.6-zettabytes of information last year (if ...

If you don't acknowledge that the speed at which information travels has drastically increased over the last two centuries, you're either painfully oblivious or dead. But have you ever wondered to what degree, exactly, we've become spoiled by instantaneous access to information from around the globe? Well, your answer might lie in a chart that Beebo has pulled from the book 'A Farewell to Alms.' ...

Dr. James Heilman of Moose Jaw, Canada recently created a stir in the psychology and psychiatry fields when he posted to Wikipedia 10 inkblot images used in the Rorschach test. Relying on how an interviewee describes what they see in the blots, the blotchy images can supposedly reveal the workings of a human mind. The copyright on the images (published in 1921 by a Swiss psychiatrist of the same ...