Smartphones have changed the way we travel

Business traveler Mike Monroe no longer rummages through his bag at the airline counter fishing for his flight ticket or confirmation number.

The consultant from Lakeland, Fla., has gone paperless, thanks to Continental Airlines' electronic boarding passes. Once he checks in online, the carrier e-mails a bar code to his phone. That code is scanned at security checkpoints and gates instead of a boarding pass. "It takes away a lot of annoyances."


USA Today

Postmaster delivers bundle of bad news

The U.S. Postal Service estimates $238 billion in losses in the next 10 years if lawmakers, postal regulators and unions don't give the mail agency more flexibility in setting delivery schedules, price increases and labor costs.
Estimates released Tuesday also predict that letter carriers will deliver just 150 billion pieces of mail in 2020, a drop of about 26 billion pieces from 2009. Customers will continue to migrate to the Internet and to cheaper standard-mail options, and away from the Postal Service's signature product, first-class mail, Postmaster General John E. Potter reported Tuesday to a Washington meeting of congressional staffers, government watchdogs, postal union officials and major postal customers. Mounting labor costs are also complicating the agency's path to firm fiscal footing.


The Washington Post

Chile earthquake may have shortened days

The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth's rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday.

The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth's axis," NASA officials said in a Monday update.


MSNBC

Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop

A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.

ReadWriteWeb

Italian verdict on Google privacy sets dangerous precedent

An Italian court has convicted three former Google executives of violations to Italy's privacy code early Wednesday morning. The decision comes after months of back and forth on the case, all of which began with a video uploaded by some delinquent teenagers of themselves beating on a classmate with Down Syndrome. Though the judge in the case absolved the executives of defamation charges (and a fourth was found not guilty of all charges), the verdict is shocking and is likely to have serious repercussions for sites that host user-generated content in Italy.

ars technica

Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault

I am on the old side of the generation that grew up with video games as a ubiquitous presence in their life. I clearly recall the world's worst Atari port of one of the greatest game of all time—Pac Man—and I even remember playing what is widely considered to be the worst game of all time, the Atari 2600's E.T. (I still clearly recall how hard it was). Today, video games focus less on forcing you to pump more and more quarters into an arcade machine punishing difficulty and more on telling a story and making the experience a bit gentler on the novice gamer.

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.

ars technica

The Human Shuffle

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.


New York Mag

Thanks, Melvillian.

FutureWorld

Pope asks priests to become more Web savvy

The Pope is asking priests to become more media savvy by preaching to the faithful from the Internet as well as the pulpit.

In his message for the Catholic Church's 2010 World Day for Social Communications, Pope Benedict XVI called on the ministry to use the latest technologies, such as Web sites and blogs, to preach the gospel and encourage a dialogue with their practitioners.

Scheduled for May 16, the theme of the World Day will be "The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word." In his message released Sunday, Pope Benedict told people that church communities have traditionally relied on modern media to open the lines of communication. And as the culture changes, the church needs to use the latest technologies, especially if it wants to reach younger people.


cnet news

Brain Scans Reveal Video Gamers' Secrets

How adeptly you play a video game may indicate how big some parts of your brain are, the authors of a new study report.

Researchers found that certain regions of the brain are larger in young people who do a better job of playing a specially designed video game.

In other words, all those people who devote their days to their Wiis and XBoxes may be packing some cerebral heat, at least when it comes to the sheer size of what's inside their skulls.

Business Week