Subjective Well-Being and Online Social Networks

Fabio Sabatini at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and Francesco Sarracino at STATEC in Luxembourg have published a very interesting study on the use of online social networks and people's subjective sense of general well-being.

An article in MIT Tech Review, discusses the results published here


I would be curious to see what the impact of online social networking may be on such things as elections, marriages, geographic trends, etc. based on statistically valid data and analysis.


Further still, how online social networks are or are not manipulated and how feedback loops might cause types of self-reinforcing and/or self-magnifying effects

In Plain Sight

The wine press existed for over 5000 years before it inspired the printing press.

What technologies are we staring at in plain sight that might inspire the next great invention that will dramatically alter civilization as we know it?

Change Isn't Everything

Our attention and focus are often caught by movement and change. But often what is not changing, what is constant, what is immovable, is what is more important. Think of this as looking at the negative of a picture on film. Take for example fractals.

What's interesting about fractals are the repeating patterns. Patterns that appear at infinite scale within the pattern itself. In other words the unchanging aspect is more important than the changing. Or imagine an event where a crowd is being watched for threats. A few individuals in the crowd seem to have NOT moved throughout the day. The rest of the crowd has ebbed and flowed during the same time. What if those individuals are THE threat? Maybe they were preposition to do some harm. If you were only paying attention to what was changing you might have missed the threat. That could be categorized as pattern recognition but maybe the only "patterns" being tracked were change patterns. Sometimes constants can reveal underlying fundamental structures and lead to extensible truths concerning common phenomena. Some hidden aspects that might lead to a breakthrough.