When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience — and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life.
[TED]
The ‘Amazing Spiderman’ definitely has some unique tricks and abilities, but do any of them stand up to scientific realities? We’ll take a look at how some of Spiderman’s main attributes could legitimately happen, while others…not so much!
When small-time magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) pulls one flimflam too many, he finds himself hurled into the fantastical Land of Oz where he must somehow transform himself into the great and powerful Wizard—and just maybe into a better man as well.
The worlds of legitimate advertising and spam appear to have collided in a particularly unfortunate manner for Facebook.
An investigation suggests that companies who pay to attract followers on the site may be wasting their cash because many of the people who “Like” their page are simply computer-generated bogus accounts.
The BBC looked into the issue after being tipped off by a marketing consultant. It was specifically looking at targeted advertisements designed to attract users into clicking the Like button for the brand or company’s page. Getting people to Like you in this way is much more valuable than a simple ego trip: it gives companies the permission and power to send messages directly to the user’s news feed in the future.
According to the BBC, Facebook already concedes that around five percent of its users are likely to be bogus accounts. They are usually created automatically by spammers and are set-up to make mass friend requests. Even if only a small proportion of people accept these requests from fictional strangers, it can create a large audience that can then be bombarded with spam or malware.
The problem is that, for some reason, some of these bogus accounts are set to automatically “Like” as many company and brand pages as possible.
The BBC created a page for a non existent company called Virtual Bagel that offered a clearly fictional product (downloadable bagels.) It then placed ads around the world. One day later Virtual Bagel was liked by more than 1,600 people, almost entirely from four countries: Egypt, India, Indonesia and the Phillipines, with virtually no likes in the United Kingdom or United States.
Some of these were more clearly bogus accounts than others, such as a man claiming to live in Cairo but work for the Real Madrid football team who already “liked” 3,000 other pages, which would make his news feed unmanageable.
Facebook says it has “not seen evidence of a significant problem” when it comes to bogus accounts. It added that companies which don’t want to attract followers from particular countries can simply choose not to advertise to people in those locations.
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a live-action digital series that takes fans back to the terrifying beginning of the Human/Covenant war, when the Master Chief inspired a young cadet who would eventually become a leader aboard the UNSC’s greatest vessel: the UNSC Infinity.
Last year, we scoured flickr to search for creative commons pictures of, as our own Meredith would put it, the Geek Mecca of all geek conventions: San Diego Comic Con. But this year, two amazing photographers have volonteered themselves to hunt the floor of the convention for us: Bill Watters (Bill hasn’t sent us anything today) and Hayley Sargent. We’ve also thrown in a few pictures from our pals at Aggressive Comix and of San Diego Shooter in there. Enjoy!
Edit: Our gallery for day two is here, day three is here, and day four is here. If you’ve missed them, be sure to check ’em out!
[Hayley Sargent | Bill Watters | Aggressive Comix | San Diego Shooter]
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