Researchers at Harvard and Northeastern say Google’s Flu Trends service, which tries to predict flu outbreaks based on search activity, has become less reliable over time. They say the effects of even small changes such as those to Google’s own autosuggest tool may have been allowed to mount up and call it a lesson for […]
Kim Novak’s appearance at the Oscars wearing no make up has led to a craze that’s raised more than $12 million for a cancer charity — and caused some confusion with polar bears. Novak’s appearance sparked some media criticism from folk who seemed confused that an 81-year-old without makeup looked different to how she once […]
Many of us spend hours a day on the Internet, and whenever we have a question, it’s easy to go to Google to quickly look up information. Is this changing the way our memory works? Anthony is here to explain how living in a world of constant information is affecting us. [DNews | Via LS]
One of the breakout stars from this year’s SXSW festival took his passion for music and his desire to create a new collaborative experience for musicians and the entire music industry to a deeper, more enriching level. MIT grad Philip Cohen has created a new cloud-based platform that transforms the way music is created. AudioCommon […]
A ruling this week means Google will have a much easier job of defending claims that it broke the law by scanning Gmail accounts. A range of people had looked to sue Google over the way it used automated scanning of messages both to produce targeted advertising that appears at the top of the inbox, […]
The American pay-TV industry as a whole has had an overall drop in subscribers for the first time. But even if it’s evidence of “cord-cutting,” the firms involved haven’t really lost out much. There have been a few cases before where individual cable firms have had a quarterly decline in pay-TV subscribers. Now Leichtman Research […]
The United States government says it wants to give up its regulatory powers over the Internet’s address system. It wants an independent body handling the coordination of DNS by September next year. The proposal comes from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the US Commerce Department. It still retains several key administrative […]
From the PBS Idea Channel: Old meme is old. But why is this such a bad thing? Once the height of internetiness, the sight of a LOLCat now is unforgivable. Memes become passé crazy fast: after just months or even WEEKS of a new meme, we tire of the once hugely popular. Why does this […]
Exactly 25 years after creating a technology now used by 40 percent of the human population, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has called for a bill of rights-style agreement for the world wide web. As we’ve covered elsewhere on Geeks Are Sexy, 12 March 1989 was the day Berners-Lee first wrote to other staff at CERN to […]
A transatlantic study has found that around a third of web domains that used to belong to now-defunct banks are now being used by other people. Thankfully only a handful are being used for outright malicious purposes, but the researchers say steps must be taken to minimize such abuse. Tyler Moore of Southern Methodist University […]