Items tagged with Study
We all know that Google gathers a plethora of data on us as we surf the web and stay logged into Google accounts. You might think that Chrome's incognito mode allows you to surf the web anonymously where Google isn't tweaking results of your searches based on what it knows about you, but you would be wrong. You might even think that if you don't log into your Google account, you are anonymous; again that isn't the case according to a recent study. DuckDuckGo, a search company that competes with Google, conducted the study, and it aimed to see just how big of an issue Google's so-called "Filter...
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If Hasbro had any sense, it would an iPhone game piece to the board game Monopoly, and dip it in gold so that it stands out among the others. After all, owning an iPhone is top indicator of wealth, right? Right!? Hey, don't shoot the messenger, we're just passing along what the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago came up with in a new study. "Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time," the study states. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is...
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Creature comforts inside automobiles are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with a larger emphasis placed on the infotainment system. However, drivers should use caution when fiddling around with in-vehicle electronics. There have been numerous reports and studies of the ill effects of distracted driving, and it is no longer mostly relegated to texting. New research commissioned by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety underscores what previous studies have already indicated—that distracted driving is a growing problem. The study points out that it can take around...
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It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be made public no matter what the results were, but that certainly wasn't the case with an EC study conducted back in 2015 looking into a link between digital piracy and the decline in legal sales. Why was the report unpublished to the public for two years? The reason is simple: The...
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It's a funny thing, I've killed more people over the years than I care to remember. Some of them I shot down in the streets because they were invading my turf, and others I ran over with a car—it's hard to avoid plowing through pedestrians when driving on the sidewalk. Of course, all of this happened in a virtual landscape, and not once did I feel compelled to repeat my heinous actions in the real world. That's weird, because study have study have shown that in-game violence leads to real-world crimes. So, what gives? As absolutely shocking as this may sound, the studies were wrong. We'll give...
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You wouldn't know it by the way people with smartphones tend to ignore their physical surroundings in favor of whatever is on their digital screens, but use of social media apps is down. That's according to market research firm SimilarWeb, which compared data on Android apps over a yearlong period. What the study found was that in almost all countries, Android users are spending less time on all four major social media apps, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. In some territories, the drop was significant. That was the case for Twitter usage in France, which dropped from an average...
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Today's video games can cost more to make than a blockbuster movie. The level of graphical detail is pretty amazing in some cases, and when you throw in ambient sound effects and an engaging storyline, it's easy to be sucked into a virtual world. It shouldn't really be surprising, then, that college students enjoy being scared by horror games, according to a recent study.What's perhaps eye opening, however, is that researchers in the U.S. found that playing games scares people more than watching movies. That's based on the findings of assistant professor Nicole Martins and student Teresa Lynch...
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We always knew that watching videos of cats was good for a few laughs, hence why so many of our work days are interrupted by having to watching "just one more clip." If that sounds familiar, don't beat yourself up over it -- a new study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior suggests that watching videos of cats may also be good for your health. The study pinged nearly 7,000 people and asked them how viewing cat videos affected their moods. Of those surveyed, over a third (36 percent) described themselves as a "cat person" and nearly two-thirds (60 percent) said they have an affinity for both...
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Consider it an unfortunate sign of the times we live in that companies have to set aside enormous funds to contend with the cost of cyber related crimes. We're not talking chump change here -- according to a study by security firm Ponemon Institute that was funded by International Business Machines, the average cost of a data breach is now $3.8 million. That's up from $3.5 million a year ago and includes fees for investigating the breach, hiring experts to fix whatever security issue the hackers exploited, offering credit monitoring services for affected customers, and so forth. It adds up fast...
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At this point, the resetting of a mobile phone to a from-the-factory state is something we have all done, perhaps simply to get a fresh start with a device that has become sluggish and over-burdened with years of downloaded flotsam. But more likely, we do it for the purpose of selling the phone or passing it along to a friend or family member. We rely on such a reset to completely wipe the phone of any trace of our having used it, all settings and sensitive data. The results of a study performed in the UK by University of Cambridge researchers entitled Security Analysis of Android...
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For whatever reason, there are certain songs that, once heard, tend to play over and over again in your head. It's quite annoying, and try as you might, there's no easy way to purge the unwanted tune from memory, or so we've always thought. Well, guess what? Not only is it possible to get one of these so called "earworms" to wiggle on out, it's as simple as chewing on a stick of gum. So says a new study on the subject conducted by researchers at the University of Reading's Centre for Cognition Research and School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences. What the study found was that chewing...
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It's said that a single bad apple can ruin the whole bunch, but Internet trolls are even worse. They not only ruin what could have been an engaging discussion on an interesting topic with intelligent individuals, but they often manage to go undetected until that moment when all hell breaks loose. And then the ban hammer drops, sometimes taking out good members who got caught up in a flame war. Turns out this doesn't have to be the case. Researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University studied online discussions from news site CNN, political site Breitbart, and gaming...
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By now it's been beaten into all of our heads that text messaging or otherwise farting around on a mobile phone while driving is a bad idea. Study after study shows that bad things are prone to happen when we take our eyes off the road and fixate them on our phones or other objects, but according to research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the problem is worse than previously thought. Far worse. In what's being billed as the most comprehensive research ever conducted into crash videos of teen drivers, it was found that distraction as a whole was a factor in nearly 6 out of 10 moderate-to-severe...
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If you grew up watching The Jetsons like I did, you might have thought we'd all be commuting in flying cars by now. We're still a long ways from that kind of technology, though in its place are self-driving cars like the ones Google has been experimenting with. According to a new study, it won't be all that long before autonomous vehicles become a part of everyday life. Not only that, but we'll have lots of reasons to kick back and sing "Everything is Awesome" as our self-driving cars whiz through traffic and deliver us all to our destinations safely and more efficiently than we're currently able...
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