We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it’s time for the next step.

Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.

At least that’s what Dr. Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communication at University of Texas Dallas, has shown in a research article published in the journal First Monday.

Examining an online community using social network analysis, Shen tested the social drivers that shaped the collaboration dynamics among a group of users from SourceForge, the largest open source community on the Web.

Who Connects with Whom? A Social Network Analysis of an Online Open Source Software Community co-written by Peter Monge shows that users in online communities choose which users to interact with, and that their choices reveal the motivations and processes that create collective networks.

The study, conducted by Linus Bengtsson and colleagues from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden and Columbia University, USA, finds that reports on the location of populations affected and in need of assistance can be generated within hours of receiving data.

Population movements after disasters make it difficult to deliver essential relief assistance to the right places and at the right scale. In this geospatial analysis, Bengtsson and colleagues investigate whether position data from mobile phone SIMs (subscriber identity modules) can be used to estimate the magnitude and trends of population movements. The authors collaborated with Digicel, the largest mobile phone operator in Haiti, to retrospectively follow the positions of 1.9 million SIMs in Haiti before and after the January 2010 earthquake, and found that the estimates of population movements using SIM cards were more accurate than ad hoc estimates generated immediately after the earthquake. The authors then tracked population movements by SIM positioning during the first few days of the cholera outbreak that occurred following the earthquake, showing that these estimates of population movements could be generated within 12 hours of receiving SIM positioning data.

Their findings show that routinely collected data on the movements of active SIM cards in a disaster-affected nation can provide estimates of the magnitude, distribution, and trends in population displacement, and that the method can be used for close to real-time monitoring of population movements during an infectious disease outbreak. Results of the study also suggest that this method could provide estimates on area-specific population sizes and could lead to important improvements in the allocation of relief supplies.

However, this approach may not be effective in all situations, since disasters can destroy mobile phone towers and some areas have sparse network coverage. Additionally, mobile use may be lower in some population groups such as children or the elderly.

Paper on the study

Scrabble

In a series of two experiments, the authors showed participants words presented both vertically and horizontally, as well as common concrete (e.g. truck) and abstract (e.g. truth) words and measured how quickly, and how, they made judgements about those words.

Competitive Scrabble players’ visual word recognition behavior differed significantly from non-experts’ for letter-prompted verbal fluency (coming up with words beginning with a specific letter) and anagramming accuracy, two Scrabble-specific skills. Competitive players were faster to judge whether or not a word was real. They also judged the validity of vertical words faster than non-experts and were quicker at picking up abstract words than non-competitive players. These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information.

The authors conclude: “Our results suggest that visual word recognition is shaped by experience and, that with experience, there are efficiencies to be had even in the adult world recognition system. Competitive Scrabble players are visual word recognition experts and their skill pushes the bounds of what we previously considered the end-point of development of the word recognition system.”

But we’re wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don’t spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment.

Even ironic-twist and mystery stories – which you’d be forgiven for assuming absolutely depend on suspense or surprise for success – aren’t spoiled by spoilers, according to a study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego’s psychology department, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Christenfeld and Leavitt ran three experiments with a total of 12 short stories. Three types of stories were studied: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each story – classics by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver – was presented as-is (without a spoiler), with a prefatory spoiler paragraph or with that same paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it. Each version of each story was read by at least 30 subjects. Data from subjects who had read the stories previously were excluded.

Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck.

The same held true for mysteries. Knowing ahead of time that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is, in fact, the perpetrator not only didn’t hurt enjoyment of the story but actually improved it.

Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones.

Why? The answers go beyond the scope of the study, but one possibility is perhaps the simplest one: that plot is overrated.

“Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,” said Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology.

“Monet’s paintings aren’t really about water lilies,” he said.

It’s also possible that it’s “easier” to read a spoiled story. Other psychological studies have shown that people have an aesthetic preference for objects that are perceptually easy to process.

“So it could be,” said Leavitt, a psychology doctoral student at UC San Diego, “that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.”

But the researchers are careful to note that they do not have a new recipe for writers to follow. After all, spoilers helped only when presented in advance, outside of the piece. When the researchers inserted a spoiler directly into a story, it didn’t go over quite as well.

The overall findings are consistent with the experience most of us have had: A favorite tale can be re-read multiple times with undiminished pleasure. A beloved movie can be watched again and again.

“Stories are a universal element of human culture, the backbone of the billion-dollar entertainment industry, and the medium through which religion and societal values are transmitted,” the researchers write. In other words, narratives are incredibly important. But their success doesn’t seem to hinge on simple suspense.

Christenfeld and Leavitt conclude the paper by saying that perhaps some of our “other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong.”

“Perhaps,” they write, “birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings are better when not concealed in chocolate mousse.”

We might be also well-advised to reconsider surprise parties, Christenfeld said. Meanwhile, he and Leavitt continue to investigate what makes stories work – or not. Numerous recent scandals about fictionalized memoirs have inspired them to explore why it matters that a story be true. “Why does it matter,” Christenfeld said, “whether something happened to one person in five billion or to no one? If the story is still a good story, why do we care?”

The breakthrough is a method for creating and attaching the tiny wires that will connect molecular components, reports a new study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The wiring method can be used to connect molecular switches, memory bits, and transistors. The scientists say their technique “will enable us to develop cheaper, higher-performance, and more ecological alternatives to conventional silicon-based devices.”

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

Researchers have created a memory device with the physical properties of jelly and that functions well in wet environments. (photo: Michael Dickey, North Carolina State University)

Prototypes of the device have not yet been optimized to hold significant amounts of memory, but work well in environments that would be hostile to traditional electronics. The devices are made using a liquid alloy of gallium and indium metals set into water-based gels, similar to gels used in biological research.

The device’s ability to function in wet environments, and the biocompatibility of the gels, mean that this technology holds promise for interfacing electronics with biological systems – such as cells, enzymes or tissue.

The device functions much like so-called “memristors,” which are vaunted as a possible next-generation memory technology. The individual components of the “mushy” memory device have two states: one that conducts electricity and one that does not. These two states can be used to represent the 1s and 0s used in binary language. Most conventional electronics use electrons to create these 1s and 0s in computer chips. The mushy memory device uses charged molecules called ions to do the same thing.

In each of the memory device’s circuits, the metal alloy is the circuit’s electrode and sits on either side of a conductive piece of gel. When the alloy electrode is exposed to a positive charge it creates an oxidized skin that makes it resistive to electricity. We’ll call that the 0. When the electrode is exposed to a negative charge, the oxidized skin disappears, and it becomes conducive to electricity. We’ll call that the 1.

Normally, whenever a negative charge is applied to one side of the electrode, the positive charge would move to the other side and create another oxidized skin – meaning the electrode would always be resistive. To solve that problem, the researchers “doped” one side of the gel slab with a polymer that prevents the formation of a stable oxidized skin. That way one electrode is always conducive – giving the device the 1s and 0s it needs for electronic memory.

Source: Towards All-Soft Matter Circuits: Prototypes of Quasi-Liquid Devices with Memristor Characteristics. 2011. Published by Advanced Materials. The paper was co-authored by NC State Ph.D. students Hyung-Jun Koo and Ju-Hee So, and NC State INVISTA Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Orlin Velev. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

If you read a number of positive reviews for a product or restaurant and one negative one it might actually boost your regard for that particular product or service, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. This is true as long as the negative information only creates a minor blemish and if you don’t think deeply about it.

The authors found that when consumers receive negative information after receiving positive information, especially if that negative information is relatively minor and just “blemishes” the product or service, it accentuates the positive information. The information must be encountered after the positives and the consumers must be somewhat distracted.

[Danit Ein-Gar, Baba Shiv, and Zakary L. Tormala. "When Blemishing Leads to Blossoming: The Positive Effect of Negative Information." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2012 (published online May 13, 2011)]

iriver Story HD

The iriver Story HD is a thin, lightweight reader with a high-resolution e-ink screen and a QWERTY keyboard. The device allows you access to a few hundred thousand Google eBooks for sale and 3 million + for free. Apart from browsing, buying and reading Google eBooks through Wi-Fi, you can store your ebooks in the cloud and access them there with your computer, mobile phone, tablet or e-reader.

The iriver Story HD retails for $139.99 at Target.com.

PS Definitely more pleasing to the eye than the Kindle.