Posted 07/23/09 at 06:24:59 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a recent presentation by Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet’s delicate and vulnerable nature is held together by random acts of kindness.

As a key example, he cited when Pakistan’s government took YouTube offline in 2008. It wasn’t long before it was back, thanks to a largely unknown, unpaid and unauthorized team of volunteers. “It's like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call,” said Professor Zittrain.

The same social structure of those helping without any intention of compensation is clear on Wikipedia. “It's like dark matter in the universe. There's a lot of it, you don't see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place.”

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Posted 06/03/09 at 05:30:46 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a new study by the Harvard School of Business’ Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, men on Twitter are far more likely to follow other men over women.

According to the study, they “found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.”

What’s more interesting is that there are more women on Twitter than men. “Females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%.”

Though, I’d like to take this chance to say that I’m an equal opportunity follower. It doesn’t matter if you’re Will Smith or Veronica Belmont, I’ve got no problems following Twitterers of either gender. (Oh, and don’t let your gender deter you from following me!)

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Posted 11/07/08 at 02:57:26 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Harvard has fallen out with Google over the company’s recent announcement that it has reached an out-of-court settlement worth $125 million with authors and publishers. In view of the possible consequences of the settlement, Harvard has revoked its permission to Google to scan its in-copyright material for the Google Book Search service.

Harvard believes that the settlement will lend a commercial shade to the Google Book Search service and that “the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries.” However, Google can blithely continue to scan Harvard’s out-of-copyright material.

Although the $25 million settlement is yet to be ratified by a judge, the Author’s Guild delightfully labeled it the "the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history." The deal has opened the floodgates for millions of extra titles to be part of Google Book Search. Users will have the option of purchasing a book – the revenue will be split between Google, the publisher and the author – after previewing it; the service will allow them to preview 20 percent of the pages.

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