Tag: STUDY

Twitter may be growing in population and volume, but, according to a new study from Cornell University and Yahoo Research, the site still relies upon a small fraction of its users to churn out the majority of its tweets. The site currently boasts around 200 million users and sees about 140 million tweets per day. Half of those, however, are generated by less than 0.05-percent of all Twitter ...

LOL captain! My captain! A sociable and "human" Twitter account may be a fast way to inculcate young minds, according to a new study in Learning, Media, and Technology. Hoping to give some advice to the many befuddled professors attempting to craft public social media personae, the study set out to test what impact different types of tweets had on a professor's perceived credibility. Students ...

If you're over the age of 12 and not on Facebook, you're in the (slight) minority. According to a soon-to-be-published report from Edison Research, 51-percent of all American "adults" (i.e., ages 12 and up) have an account on the social networking site. Just three years ago, that figure was only 8-percent. There are also plenty of 12-year olds using the site, but Facebook is exterminating those ...

Call it. Time of death: 2010. For the first time, online news readership and ad revenue has surpassed its print counterpart in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center. Released today, the fact-tank's State of the News Media report noted that 41-percent of Americans get "most of their news about national and international issues" from the Internet -- a 17-percent jump from last year. ...

If it takes hours to download files on your Wi-Fi network, you might want to try clearing out some of your furniture and turning off your radios. According to a new study from Bristol University in the U.K., wireless connections can be "significantly slowed" by interference from electronic devices, or by physical barriers, like walls, doors, and other household items. The study, led by Prof. ...

Ever wonder how all those insipid rumors about Barack Obama's citizenship became so ridiculously virulent? According to a recent study from researcher R. Kelly Garrett, e-mail is to blame. Blogs? Not so much. Though the Internet can expose us to a wider array of rumors, it can also expose us to a variety of counter-arguments, effectively neutralizing the blogsophere's rumor-mongering potency. ...

Looking for a legitimate excuse to play video games instead of going to the gym? Bill Bailey has it. Bailey, a professor of Exercise Science at BYU, recently discovered that kids who play physically intensive video games can actually get enough exercise to meet federally recommended requirements for physical activity. In his study, Bailey examined 39 middle school-aged children, of various ...

Lying about your age is a time-honored Internet tradition, which is why it should come as no real surprise that plenty of preteens are on Facebook nowadays. Facebook officially forbids children under the age of 13 from using the site but, according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, there are plenty that do. About 46-percent of all American 12-year-olds use social ...

In a recent survery released by J.D. Power, customers named Verizon Wireless the service provider with the best call quality in four of six regions across America. Verizon tied with AT&T for best customer satisfaction in another region, and U.S. Cellular was named the best carrier in the other. The survey, which canvassed 26,000 cell phone owners between July and December 2010, used seven ...

It looks like the iPhone 4 isn't the only smartphone that's susceptible to the so-called 'death grip.' A recent study from the University of Bristol found that placing your thumb over any smartphone's antenna can reduce the device's sensitivity by up to 100 fold. The researchers also found that placing a buffer between your thumb and the antenna doesn't mitigate this signal-reducing effect. It ...

It's commonly held that America's youth are largely apolitical, apathetic and increasingly antisocial, thanks in part to the Web. But a new study from the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning is challenging that assumption. The study followed some 2,500 students from California schools, with 400 of them being studied over the course of three years. ...

A new study from the National Institutes of Health suggests that using cell phones can change the way our brains behave, though it remains unclear whether these changes can be harmful. The study, published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that just 50 minutes of cell phone use can noticeably speed up brain activity in the region closest to the phone's antenna. ...

Some Facebook users may enjoy collecting hundreds of virtual friends, but it turns out that those online relationships can cause a lot of stress, as well. That's what researchers at Edinburgh Napier University discovered after conducting a survey of 200 students who regularly use the social networking site. Among the students who were surveyed, 12-percent said they actually dislike receiving ...

Scientists have already discovered a variety of health benefits that video games offer to elderly gamers, including heightened mental acuity and vision restoration. After performing a 10-week observational study, Dr. Patricia Kahlbaugh of Southern Connecticut State University now believes that motion control gaming alleviates other afflictions that commonly plague senior citizens, including ...

Today's high-end prostitutes book their own appointments on BlackBerrys and rely on Facebook, rather than pimps or madams, for self-promotion. That, in a nutshell, is what Columbia sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh discovered while doing research for a Wired report on New York's sex workers. Venkatesh spent a full year following some 290 sex workers in the city, and made careful observations on ...