Utopian Trace

A long-term study has found that children who scored lower on measures of self-control as young as age 3 were more likely to have health problems, substance dependence, financial troubles and a criminal record by the time they reached age 32.

Concrete megacities are not an obvious place to look for green citizens. Yet a new survey shows that, in China, the urban elite is most likely to get environmental gold stars. Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues quizzed 5073 people living in Chinese urban centres ranging from small country towns to Beijing and Shanghai. They asked about six “green” activities like recycling, and found that people in larger cities were most likely to engage in them – the bigger the city, the greater the engagement. City-dwellers tend to be better educated and suffer more pollution, so may be more aware of the issues involved, says Liu.

“It’s always nice to have a personal sense of home, but that aside - the internet has replaced my need for an address,” the 27-year-old said. Since boxing up his physical possessions and getting rid of his home, Mr Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value. The American University graduate, who spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one.

This list of common or popular misconceptions describes documented, widespread ideas and beliefs which are fallacious, misleading, or otherwise flawed.

Today, Google announced it is omitting H.264 support from its Chrome browser, in favor of free and patent-unencumbered VP8 (via the WebM container) and OGG Theora codecs. Simply put, it’s the biggest victory the open video camp has gotten in a landscape that has largely seemed tilted against them. The long-term outcome is, fairly, anyone’s guess. But you can at least mark one in the column of open video advocates, if you’re keeping score.

Touchscreens? So two years ago. Gesture recognition? How 2010. Everyone knows the future lies in thought-controlled interfaces. At least that’s what InteraXon, a tiny Toronto startup, is hoping to convince attendees of at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The company, which made waves at the 2010 winter Olympics by allowing users in Vancouver to control the lights on the CN Tower in Toronto with mere thought, will be showing off two new applications for its mind-control technology at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Sources close to the sagging social-networking company, which has been battered by the meteoric rise of one-time rival Facebook, say the cutbacks are imminent but had no other specifics. The sources asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of Myspace.

The amount of junk e-mail being sent across the globe has seen a dramatic fall in recent months. The volume of spam has dropped steadily since August, but the Christmas period saw a precipitous decline. One security firm detected around 200 billion spam messages being sent each day in August, but just 50 billion in December.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines.