Tag: STUDIES

Katie, bar the door! By Microsoft's count, spam accounts for 97-percent of all e-mail! This is up from the 94-percent figure given recently by the New York Times, but we still couldn't be less surprised. This annoying news comes from a new security report issued by Microsoft. The biggest culprit, as usual, was pharmaceutical companies, whose unwanted crap mail was responsible for nearly half of ...

This morning, the National Consumers League released a statement claiming that 90-percent of PC-owning, U.S. consumers want the ability to save DVDs, as they would CDs, on their computers. The study was conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, and drawn from a survey of 1,000 consumers of varying ages. This should come as no surprise to those who have witnessed the gradual digitalization ...

If you've let your voicemail box clog up with messages that you've already returned, or that you know you don't need to check, you're not alone. As a result of several factors, including the ongoing text messaging boom and the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, voicemail use is on the wane may soon be as relevant as a cassette-tape answering machine or a ...

Now that we have more communication devices and methods than we can handle, perhaps we should look to the college kids to show us the way forward. Indiana's Ball State University recently surveyed about 300 college students, and found that text messaging is their favored form of telecommunication, becoming more popular than e-mail, instant messaging and calling. 94-percent of the students ...

A Nielsen report last month determined that, of all television and video mediums, mobile viewing witnessed the largest increase in users, experiencing a 9-percent jump in growth from the previous quarter. This week, comScore Inc., an Internet marketing research firm that studies Internet use and trends, released findings that demonstrate mobile Internet use, as a whole, is exploding in ...

ABC this week released a list of seven health risks associated with the use of mobile devices. Noticeably absent from the report was the risk of brain damage due to radiation emitted from cell phones. According to ABCNews.com, Food and Drug Administration spokesperson Peper Long said, "Current scientific evidence doesn't indicate any adverse health outcomes associated with exposure to ...

The video game controller is not your enemy, Mom. It's your friend. A recent survey published in GamesIndustry.biz shows that 60-percent of kids wish their parents would become more involved in their gaming pursuits; 47-percent said their parental units "never" took part in the gaming action. Oddly, this was the same percentage of parents (47-percent) who admitted that they sometimes allow ...

Privacy is a funny thing, isn't it? These days, it's fairly common to update your Facebook page with your likes and dislikes, taste in music, contact information, personal photos and who knows what else. This is information we give out consciously and willingly, and it all says something about the types of people we are. But what are we unconsciously saying about ourselves when we use the ...

For parents concerned about the sexual activity of their children, look no further than the playlists on their iPod. If you see one labeled with something to the extent of "Gettin' Freaky with Fitty" you may need to sit and have a talk. In a recent study led by Brian Primack of The University of Pittsburgh, researchers concluded that promiscuous teenagers more frequently listen to popular ...

The Nielsen Company released a report Monday revealing that (surprise!) Americans watch more TV than ever. But, terms such as couch potato and boob tube (does anyone even use that anymore?) may soon become quaint colloquialisms as viewers explore new mediums. The Nielsen report reveals that while the average American watches an all-time high of more than 151 hours of television per month (last ...

It turns out all those cliches about women being more expressive than men are true...kind of. Researchers at Indiana University studied 1,164 text messages posted on Italy's interactive television music channel Allmusic and found the texts sent from women were more expressive than those of their male counterparts. This came as a surprise, since research shows that, in social situations, men ...

In a newly published study, researchers at Texas A&M claim that playing violent video games has no correlation to school shootings, we learned today from Bit-Tech and GamePolitics. Professor and lead researcher Christopher Ferguson found the subject worthy of interrogation due to the popular trend of blaming violent video games for incidents such as the Columbine High School shooting. ...

While the iTunes store is doing better than, say, Tower Records, it's still getting a miniscule fraction of online music downloads. According to a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 95% of the music being downloaded online is illegal. The global music trade body said this is its biggest challenge as artists and record companies miss out on payments. ...

Big-time stat-tracker comScore has just released some numbers regarding how much video we watched online in November 2008. The conclusion? A lot more than November 2007; 34-percent more, to be precise, with YouTube being the number one video site by a ridiculous margin. Is this really shocking news? Not exactly. If you consider the number of companies and individuals spewing out video content ...

A new report released by anti-virus and security firm Sophos put 2008's online threats into perspective and give a hint of what 2009 may bring for all of us connected folks out there. Here are some of the reports biggest finds: The United States is still the source of most malware; current events like the election or financial crisis are the topics of most scam e-mail messages; and Apple ...