STEVEN CHARLES DODGE: September 2009 Archives

Students from MIT through the use of a computer program are able to predict if a person is gay or straight solely based on the gender and sexuality of a person's friends on Facebook.  The underlying principle is that similar people like to be around each other, so therefore, gay individuals will have a higher proportion of friends than those individuals who are straight.  The students have named their research under the code name of Project Gaydar.

What I find to be more surprising than the predictive power the study is that fact we as Internet users do not have as much control as we think we do.  This kind of data mining is remarkable as it is scary.  Project Gaydar is just another friendly reminder to be careful of what kind of information you are putting on the Internet while realizing that there is only so much you can do unless you stay offline.    

Using a helium filled weather balloon, a camera, a Styrofoam cooler, hand warmers, and GPS enabled cell phone, two students from MIT were able to take pictures from space for less than $150.  While this fact alone is pretty cool, the pictures are even better.  A sample picture of what the two students took can be found below:

Although clearly some technical knowledge is required, I think it is pretty cool that theoretically a person with $150 could take a picture from space.  Low cost experiments such as these would definitely motivate students to pursue careers in science.  Why look at pictures of space in a textbook when you can take a picture for yourself?  I wish they had an event like this at Science Olympiad.

Rocky Mountain Adventures has developed a creative way to make sure that the photographs of white water rafters make it back to the store for the rafters to purchase their memories after their trip.  The company uses homing pigeons to transport the memory sticks from the photographer to the store.  The owner of the company has stated that their pigeon method works 91 percent of the time.  According to the article, pigeons have an amazing ability to fly their way back home that is currently unexplained by science.

To me, while this method of transporting digital photographs is pretty cool, I was surprised to see that there was no mention of the possibility of using the Internet anywhere in the article.  However, I guess when you can use pigeons, why consider anything else?