The Order of the Spork

Gamification of the news industry

Ushahidi's new hosting option makes it even simpler to set up a site with the crowdsourcing software.

Positive government transparency or a "D'oh!" moment for the intelligence community (starting to think that's an oxymoron).

Which? "government transparency" or "intelligence community" ?

Awesome videos - "Unlike many of Festo's flying robots, SmartBird doesn't appear to rely on lifting gas at all. It weighs less than half a kilo, and is capable of autonomous take-off, flight, and landing using just its two meter-long wings. SmartBird is modeled very closely on the herring gull, and controls itself the same way birds do, by twisting its body, wings, and tail. For example, if you look closely in the video, you can see SmartBird turning its head to steer."

This app will scan shelves to find books that are out of order and provide a visual indication as to where they should go.  It will also generate an inventory of what is on the shelf.  

"Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site."

When it comes to survival of the fittest, it's sometimes better to be an adaptable tortoise than a fitness-oriented hare, a Michigan State University evolutionary biologist says. In this week's Science magazine, Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and colleagues show that more adaptable bacteria oriented toward long-term improvement prevailed over competitors that held a short-term advantage.

"Lockheed Martin's approach does include a sort of basic theory of mind, in the sense that the robot makes assumptions about how to act covertly in the presence of humans," says Alan Wagner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who works on artificial intelligence and robot deception.

 Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you-and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one 

At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), the company announced that it has released a beta of a tool to let IT manage iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Symbian devices, and Windows Phone 7 devices in the enterprise. Up until now, the tool only worked for Windows Mobile. The tool is called System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and it's designed to deploy and update servers, clients, and devices across an enterprise's entire computing and network infrastructure.

Interesting Google Labs app for viewing new stories on a timeline

"Welcome to TikiToki, a web app that makes it dead easy to make stunning, animated timelines that work in your browser. Our basic account is completely free.'

Nearly 80% of children between the ages of 0 and 5 who use the Internet in the United States, do so on at least a weekly basis, according to a report released Monday from education non-profit organizations Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop. The report, which was assembled using data from seven recent studies, indicates that young children are increasingly consuming all types of digital media, in many cases consuming more than one type at once. Television use dwarfs internet use in both the number of children who surf the web and the amount of time they spend on it. The analysis found that during the week, most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, and that television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years. Of the time that children spend on all types of media, television accounts for a whopping 47%. Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older (the report suggests this is because school-age children have less time at home), but even 8- to 18-year-old children reported in another study that they consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods. Internet and television use among children has become entwined in other ways as well. A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children between the ages of 2 and 11 use both mediums simultaneously. Altogether, children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media - eight hours if you count the additional media consumed while multitasking. The report doesn't attempt to solve the more-than-decade-old debate of whether all of this screen time is good for children. Instead, it preaches balance: "My mother used to say that too much of anything isn't good fo