Infotrade

Keeping up with   our theme from yesterday’s post about how frictionless it has become for users to give unfamiliar apps broad and permanent access to their data, we stumbled on this interesting video about the personal information people unwittingly share with their mobile phone carriers. The   video comes from Michael Ringley , a graphic designer living in San Francisco. It tracks the life of an MMS message, 28,000 of which are sent every second, and shows how the average user will have 736 pieces of personal data collected every day. That includes details like your number, who you’re calling, the location, date and time, the duration, and the amount of data transmitted. Different service providers retain this data for different durations. Verizon holds onto it for twelve months, for example, while AT&T keeps it for a staggering 84 months. Ringley points out that most people will have more than a million pieces of information stored by their providers spanning acro...

Despite the claims of the MPAA and other supporters of SOPA and PIPA, file-sharing does not negatively impact box office sales in the U.S., according to a new study conducted by economists from Wellesley College and the University of Minnesota. The focus of the study is on lag times between U.S. release and foreign release. The study found that longer gaps between a movie’s release in America and its release in foreign countries led to increased piracy in those countries, and correspondingly lower box office sales. The study estimates that pre-release piracy impacted foreign box office sales by as much as 7% In the U.S., however, box office sales were not impacted by piracy at all. The study concludes that the impact of piracy is driven primarily by the lack of legal availability of content in foreign markets. The study was conducted by economists Brett Danaher and Joel Waldfogel. Danaher is an assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College. Waldfogel is a professor of...

If you've ever been convinced by a salesperson that you truly wanted a product, done something too instinctively, or made choices that seemed entirely out of character, then you've had an idea planted in your mind. Here's how it's done. Before we get started, it's worth noting that planting an idea in someone's mind without them knowing is a form of manipulation. We're not here to judge you, but this is the sort of thing most people consider   evil , so you probably shouldn't actually do anything you read here. Instead, use this information to stay sharp. If you've seen the film   Inception , you might think that planting an idea in someone's mind is a difficult thing to do. It's not. It's ridiculously easy and it's tough to avoid. We're going to take a look at some of the ways it can work. Reverse Psychology Actually Works Full size Reverse psychology has become an enormous cliché. I think this peaked in 1995...

The popular search engine often returns results beyond simple web pages: Google can translate different languages, convert between different measurement systems and more. And thanks to its ability to parse complex equations, Google can explain one of the most mysterious forces of all: Love. "You could say it expresses the sentiment 'You fill my heart' in mathematical terms," Robert Pego, professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie Mellon, told FoxNews.com. Thanks to the December addition of the ability to graph complex geometric formulas, Google is able to convert the following formula into the visual image shown above: sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5 The formula isn’t designed to reveal the area within a circle or right triangle but more an abstract space -- you could call it the bounds of the human heart. "The equation approximates a 'space-filling curve' that fills a heart-shaped ...

A simple initiative in the Philippines is bringing a bit of brightness into the lives of the country's poorest people. The project is called "Litre of Light", and the technology involved is just a plastic bottle filled with water. It's an environmentally-friendly alternative to an electric light bulb, and it's virtually free.

The mega-data center has become a staple of our global technology infrastructure, serving as the backbone of the digital economy. The growth of the Internet is driving an enormous appetite for network capacity and data storage, creating a new class of data centers that can scale along with the Internet. So who has the world’s largest data center? We’ve seen a lot of huge data centers in our travels, and have identified 10 that we believe are the largest found anywhere. These data fortresses range between 400,000 and 1.1 million square feet. We should note that there are many apples vs. oranges comparisons in the data center world. For this list, we’ve considered single-building facilities that are dedicated to data center use. We have not included multi-facility campuses or mixed-use buildings where data center space co-exists with large amounts of third-party office space (i.e. big-city carrier hotels). We also have not included facilities that are not yet open for business. For mo...