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People who see the "glass as half empty" may be more willing to contribute to a common goal if they already identify with it, according to researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, University of Chicago and Sungkyunkwan University.

The joke was intended to be absurd, but the absurdity presumed a lack of seriousness in the whole matter. It was an attempt at post-serious humor - but most people with common sense agree that the struggles of Tibet still deserve respect and seriousness. The joke is on anyone who really cares. It came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overprivileged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as "douchebags") would come up with.

Liz Heron, the social media editor at The New York Times, is refreshingly honest about her paper's policies about Twitter and Facebook. Or lack thereof, as the case may be. "We don't really have any social media guidelines," she told the audience at the BBC's Social Media Summit. "We basically just tell people to use common sense and don't be stupid."

What superficially looks like shifts in the technological capabilities are really transformations in how businesses organize and execute. The fifth shift in this case-after the mainframe, the departmental computer, the PC, and the Internet-I will reiterate is social business. I would say what it has changed is the base nature of how humans interact with each other. These other technologies are certainly fantastic innovations that will accelerate how we get or deliver messages. But consider this: having common languages across cultures certainly accelerated how we communicated with each other, but as we can still see, the real trick is the ability to convey meaning.

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways? An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

After Local Motors won the XC2V competition, they were given a mere 14 weeks to build a prototype of their "FLYPMODE" concept, a vehicle built on a common chassis capable of performing both combat resupply and medical evacuation missions. As it turns out, they didn't even need all 14 weeks, and were able to complete the prototype ahead of schedule, no problem. Check out a bunch of pics of the not yet armed but otherwise fully operational XC2V vehicle in the gallery below. Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle. In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too.