Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a new study called “The tone of life on social networking sites” where they examine adult meanness and cruelty. This complements their piece on “Teens, kindness, and cruelty on social network sites.”
danah boyd Pew Internet research social networks teens youngAccording to research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, we think that 25% of tweets are not worth reading. The study found that, when asked to rate tweets by people they follow, only 36% of tweets were marked favourably, 25% were marked less favourably and the balance (39%) received no strong feeling either way.
content Matt Rhodes research social media TwitterAs a small business working in knowledge-intensive, research-driven areas, I've got first-hand experience of the frustrations caused by mainstream research publishing: you find a research paper that looks useful, but it costs $30 to read the 15 pages if you haven't got some kind of institutional subscription. These costs keep going up, and even institutions are having to look critically at what they can afford, in what is known as the serials crisis. Recently George Monbiot stirred up a small storm by drawing attention to this — see one angry reaction, for example.
David Jennings web resources digital living academia research open culture open accessThe possible discovery of neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light could not only change a hundred years of physics dogma, but it could make time travel possible...though one scientist comforted the world last week with the qualifier that "...it does not mean we'll be building time-machines anytime soon."
ROI research Jonathan Salem BaskinNielsen has published some data about the TV audiences in the US. The ‘average’ American watched 34 hours 39 minutes of TV per week in Q4 2010, a year-over-year increase of two minutes. Not 1 minute or 3 minutes but 2 minutes. Wow
audience Dick Stroud Nielsen research research methodology demographicsWith the launch of the Allen Human Brain Atlas - the first-ever 3D, interactive atlas of the anatomy and genes that comprise the human brain - is it possible that we've just entered a radically new Age of Discovery? Rather than discovering the unimagined riches of new continents, we may be on the cusp of unlocking the full potential of the human brain.
brain Dominic Basulto neuroscience researchI recently had a really interesting conversation with a favourite client. We “clashed” over a chart I produced saying that insight and data are what drives digital strategy. The client had recently attended a conference where big players such as Unilever were saying that data is killing marketing. Interesting.
social media research Matt Bamford-Bowes credibilityI'm weird. Chances are that you're weird. In fact the society you live in is probably weird too. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. It's an acronym that was new to me until I read this piece about the work of Joe Henrich, a professor in Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia.
cultural differences Neil Perkin people psychology research research methodology