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Researchers in Barcelona, Spain have developed a “boredom detector” that they plan to present at the UbiComp conference next week in Japan. The technology is based on an algorithm that looks at your mobile activity and determines your boredom levels. Because boredom leads to depression, the technology could essentially save lives. But it could be profitable too
Pew Research loves to poll people. The think tank has an impressive number of fact sheets regarding phone usage in countless scenarios, including one about public usage, which reveals some interesting particularities about us using our handsets on the street.
As you can imagine, people use their devices for a wide array of tasks, from socializing to finding their way around the city. But here are the actual usage patterns of Americans:
It’s important to know where you stand. Like people, companies can be delusional about their chance of success in a given market. In the cloud industry, it happens quite a lot. Having Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM as competitors leaves little room for success, which means you need to strategize the hell out of your business.
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Since emojis started flooding our Internet devices, we’ve adopted new ways of communicating. Whether we’re texting someone, sending an email, or leaving a comment on a site, we somehow can’t escape these giggly yellow faces that say so much with so little. However, there’s an even more popular form of expressing enjoyment online than emojis.
Research done by Facebook – based on a piece by Sarah Larson from The New Yorker – reveals that ‘haha’ is by far the most widely used form of expressing laughter online, followed by emojis (particularly those with tears of joy), ‘hehe,’ and finally ‘lol.’ Here are some numbers extracted by Moira Burke and the Core Data Science team:
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Let’s face it. We’ve all turned into a population of zombies thanks to our pesky smartphones. Whether it’s texting, tweeting, scrolling through Facebook or playing Candy Crush Saga, we somehow always find ourselves fiddling with our handheld devices on the go. That’s why they’re portable, right? Not quite.
New research suggests that smartphones – along with their versatile functions – are changing the way we walk on the street. It’s not invisible to the naked eye, granted. But apparently we do it so often that it’s beginning to change how we behave. So Bath University (UK) A&M University (TX, USA) went and conducted a joint study to take a closer look at the implications of texting and walking.
Humans are very specific in their needs. The less we have to work for something, the more spoiled we become. However, not all of our seemingly arrogant demands are the product of ignorance. The need for control, for example, has been rooted in our subconscious since the Stone Age.
Liraz Margalit, PhD, is resident psychologist at ClickTale. According to Margalit, our need for control has a subconscious impact on everything we do. And that includes web browsing.
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SDSN is out with its World Happiness Report for 2015, ranking the top happiest (and saddest) countries based on a distinct set of criteria. Feel grateful if you live in northern Europe, or anywhere above the Ecuator for that matter.