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Every day, Google run a daily puzzle on Wired GeekDad challenging the geeky masses with a search puzzle. The previous day's answer is posted when the new puzzle is published. 

A new analysis by HP finds that old media has a decidedly greater impact on what becomes a trending topic on Twitter, a ranking which identifies what is "immediately popular." Rather than being driven by personality or frequency, the study found that "(t)he main determinant of whether an item trends - much more than who tweets about it or how often - was the specific subject of the tweet."

Wired interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book "Alone Together." What she is talking about here (though she does not say it explicitly) is the need for fluency - to know when and why to use digital technology as opposed to just how and what. 

At GeekDad we are always interested in the intersection where technology supports our children's learning and creativity. So, this new project that is taking

The world is a dazzling array of people, objects, sounds, smells and events: far too much for us to fully experience at any moment. So our attention may automatically be snagged by something startling, such as a slamming door, or we may deliberately focus on something that is important to us right then, such as locating our child among the happily screaming hordes on the school playground. We also know that people are hard-wired to seek out and pay attention to things that are rewarding, such as food when we are hungry, or water when we are thirsty

Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn't to prepare students for a career. It's to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point. Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it's easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. "Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?" he says. "If that's the role of universities, you'd have to be insane to go to universities."

Today, the amazing folk behind the Sesame Street twitter account treated us to an updated version of the much beloved story, The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover. The updated version is There Is a MONSTER at the End of This Twitter Conversation. The result, as you will soon see, was something very special, indeed.

"Australian-based collaboration design specialist Matt Cooperrider has begun to explore an idea that I think the GeekDad readership is more than well positioned to help with. As well as being one of those out-of-the-box thinkers and generally smart guys, Matt is also a role-player and geek at heart. He has begun a new project called Play to Decide which will research how role-playing games can be used to support organizations and communities in democratic decision-making and the collaboration that follows. "

Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it's something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford's Bandura put it, "People are proactive, aspiring organisms." Feedback taps into those aspirations. But maybe requiring people to do a little work-to stick accelerometers around their house or plug a device into a wall socket-is just enough of a nudge to get our brains engaged in the prospect for change.

We spend a large percentage of our lives at the office, engaged in the drudgery of work. Although we obsess over the medical benefits of various leisure activities - should I do yoga? take long walks? not watch television? - the amount of time we might spend in downward facing dog pose pales in comparison to the amount of time we spend seated in our chair, staring at the computer screen, surrounded by co-workers. A new study led by Arie Shirom at Tel Aviv University reveals the powerful impact of the workplace on longevity. The researchers tracked 820 adults for twenty years, starting with a routine health examination in 1988. The subjects worked in various professions, from finance to manufacturing to health care. They were interviewed repeatedly about conditions at their workplace, from the behavior of the boss to the niceness of their colleagues. Over the ensuing decades, their health was closely monitored, allowing the scientists to control for various medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, smoking and depression.