Over 40% of Twitter is pointless babble...

A study released by Pear Analytics, a research firm that specializes in website analysis, shows that 41% of all traffic on Twitter is pointless babble, as in “I just combed my hair.” But the more interesting statistic is by how little it actually won out. A very close second, at 38%, were conversational tweets, followed distantly by tweets that had information with real pass-along value (8.7%).

Among the surprises in the study were the low numbers for tweets labeled as corporate self-promotion (5.8%), spam (3.8%) and general news (3.6%). The results were eye opening for the researchers (pdf), who "thought the news category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the premier source of news and events.”  - Source ohmygov

How To Go To MIT For Free

The businessinsider has written before about the foolishness of pursuing a graduate degree during an economic recession. This popular move--waiting out a recession in school--is actually dumb (see above). Under no circumstances should anyone spend an economic downturn piling on more debt for a degree. 

But there's one exception to the No Graduate School Rule. And that is the Sloan School of Management, the business school of MIT. Actually, it's pretty much all of MIT.

The reason why Sloan is an exception is because you can take nearly every course offered at Sloan without paying a dime, without quitting your job, without finding a new place to live in ultra-expensive Cambridge.

And that's because MIT now gives away its curriculum to anyone smart enough to learn it. It has posted its curriculum on-line for free. These days, this means a staggering 1900 courses. This number will grow.

You are probably skeptical about this. The so-called "Open-Course Ware" doesn't grant any degrees, and MIT says it doesn't count as an "MIT Education." You won't be able to hang a diploma on your wall. But here's what you will be able to do: learn almost everything an MIT student is being taught.

But why are you after that? Is it because you think it's valuable to employers? That might be the case on a temporary basis. But this over-valuation of a degree will eventually be arbitraged away. The smartest employers will quickly figure out how valuable it is to hire an applicant who can demonstrate he took all the MIT Sloan Business School courses online, by himself, and mastered them.  And ten years from now, no one will know or care whether you got the degree.

Are you a follower or a leader? How you go to business school--paying through the nose or going for free--tells you all you need to know.

Read more at Business Insider

Average Gamer Is 35, Fat and Bummed

SLASHDOT - "According to a study published in the upcoming October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the average US video game player is 35 years old, overweight, and tends toward depression. Specifically, female video game players tended towards depression, while males tended towards large BMIs. While the study itself points to several conclusions, one researcher noted: '... habitual use of video games as a coping response may provide a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction.'" On the flip side, the Washington Post is running a story about the mental health benefits of playing video games.

The zune phone Microsoft's New Smart Phone

Worst at the skills we need the most... 75% not ready for college

WSJ: "We're not making the progress we need to be making," said Bob White, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on boosting high-school graduation rates. "The only way you improve these numbers and get them higher is by improving your secondary schools."

About 1.48 million of the 3.3 million members of the high school class of 2009 took the ACT, typically in their junior year. ACT said its report was based on comparing students' ACT test scores in English, reading, math and science with the grades they earned in related courses during their first year in college.

Of course, improving high schools (something that everyone's in favor of) is more easily said than done. The aversion to any kind of accountability in schools doesn't hep the matter. But until these numbers come up, it's premature to keep talking about expanding college opportunities, as politicians tend to do. Merely pushing them into secondary education just represents a waste of time and human capital.

IT Glory days over

"The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. '

All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.'

In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"

From SlashDot

Not your gen.. but grampa is a twit

How big is the internet?

News, Australia - internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.
But just how big is it?

Microsoft's Bing team puts the amount of web pages at "over one trillion".

And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.

There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.

That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.

Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you'd be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep. . .

Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.

"Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet. . . The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million - than there were people in the US.

However InternetWorldStats.com a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China's online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population. . .

Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It's an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.

IWS combines data from the UN's International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.

Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.

Read full from news.com.au