AssembleMe

I ran across this great inforgraphic comparing human traits to animal traits.  Very cool!

Panos Ipeirotis at NYU Stern (who gave a fascinating talk at New York Tech Meetup last month) has an interesting post about the amount of revenue being earned by Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

From his analysis they vary from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand on an average day. Check out the full post for more info.

Check out these beautiful faux visualizations, or "nonsense charts" by Chad Hagen. Great work!

(via changethethought.com)

There's a great cheat sheet for time-travelers floating around online.

If I was about to take a one-way trip back in time, the first thing I would do would be to print out Wikipedia, on acid-free paper, at Kinkos.  What about you?

I recently tried to purchase a Google Adword Ad that containted the word "iPod." Upon submitting the ad, I was told that the ad was not approved because I included the trademark term, "iPod."

What idiocy. Does Apple not want us to sell iPods for them? Frustrated, I Googled around and found out that a lot of other Apple resellers have had this problem. Tidbits has a comprehensive list of terms effected, including Apple, iPod, Shuffle, Mac, Mac Mini, iMac, iBook, PowerBook, Power Mac, iTunes, and iTMS.

Tidbits also has a work around, involving restricting your ad geographically and requesting an exception, so if you run into this problem, check it out.

A picture of a cup of coffee I uploaded to Wikipedia many years ago has become a feature picture!  Fantastic.  Here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

DATA: Facebook has an interesting post on interconnectivity among their users. Check it out.

With greater connectedness has come the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency. We've seen this lead to people spreading information and organizing events on a mass scale, often within days and weeks. For example, within weeks of T-Mobile airing an advertisement, Facebook users organized thousands of people to recreate the ad with a "Silent Dance" at the same station.

Read more.

I'm happy to announce that we're launching a public beta of Shopobot, a place to find deals online.  This site gives consumers and businesses data about how much consumer goods have cost previously, and how much they cost now.  It's a great resource, especially for bigger ticket items like cameras, mp3 players, and game systems.  Anyway, check it out - and don't forget our Shopobot Blog!  Feedback or bugs can be sent to us here on this blog or via the link in the footer of the website itself.

DATA: Sheesh, I'm starting to get dozens of spam messages a day now that have nothing but a link to a Google Group. Anyone else out there in the cloud dealing with this? Google, please crack down on the Google Spam Groups!

INFO SCIENCE: Technology Review reports:

An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.

The article's visualization is fascinating and gives me renewed respect for the people trying to reverse engineer the brain.