Global warming over the next 40 years will cut through Arctic transportation networks like a double-edged sword, limiting access in certain areas and vastly increasing it in others, a new UCLA study predicts.
“As sea ice continues to melt, accessibility by sea will increase, but the viability of an important network of roads that depend on freezing temperatures is threatened by a warming climate,” said Scott Stephenson, a UCLA graduate student in geography and the study’s lead author. (more…)
*Hyves Maintains Position as Top Social Networking Site in the Netherlands Despite Facebook’s Rapid Advances*
London, UK, 26 April, 2011 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of social networking usage in the Netherlands based on the comScore Media Metrix service. The study reveals that the Dutch social networking market continues to grow strongly as sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin extend their respective footprints in the market.
“The social networking market in the Netherlands is really quite unique and full of interesting storylines,” said Mike Read, svp and managing director of comScore Europe. “It is one of the few markets remaining where a local social networking player [Hyves] continues to lead Facebook, but that lead is becoming increasingly tenuous. Another interesting facet to this market is that the Netherlands has the highest Internet penetration worldwide for two of the other key global social networking sites, Twitter and Linkedin. The Netherlands is in many ways a nexus of global social networking behavior.” (more…)
*Collaboration reveals results from 100-day experiment*
Today, scientists from the XENON collaboration announced the result from their search for the elusive component of our universe known as dark matter. After analyzing one hundred days of data taken with the XENON100 experiment, they see no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading candidates for the mysterious dark matter. The XENON100 experiment is operated deep underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian National Institute for Physics (INFN). (more…)
*U.K., France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands Lead in Retail Site Visitation and Engagement*
LONDON, UK, March 21, 2011 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released results from a study of online shopping in Europe. In January 2011, 270.6 million unique visitors in Europe visited sites in the Retail category, representing a market penetration of 74.5 percent of Internet users, up 8.5 percentage points versus last year. Retail sites also showed high penetration in individual markets, reaching at least 75 percent of the total online audience in 7 out of 18 European markets. In 2010, approximately one out of every ten Internet sessions in Europe included a visit to a retail site.
Retail Penetration and Engagement Growth in Europe
In the United Kingdom, the Retail category reached 89.4 percent of the total online audience (up 6.3 points from last year), the highest penetration of any European market. France ranked second with a reach of 87 percent (up 10.5 points), followed by Germany at 82.1 percent (up 9.0 points). Ireland and the Netherlands round out the list of markets with highest penetration, with Retail reaching 80.7 percent in Ireland (up 15.8 percentage points) and 80.2 percent in the Netherlands (up 4.9 percentage points).(more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A new University of Michigan study finds that Americans are much more likely to exaggerate their attendance at religious services than are people in many other countries.
“Americans have long been viewed as exceptionally religious compared to other nations in the developed world,” said Philip Brenner, a research fellow at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the author of the study. “But this study suggests that American religiosity may be exceptional not in terms of actual behavior, but rather in terms of identity. (more…)
You lose a lot due to stupidity, but when it comes to an accumulation of collective idiocy, we reach a critical mass and exponential results which we saw in Nelson Mandela Bay, where Brazil left the World Cup very early (for a 5-times-champion) simply because its players once again were convinced the game was in the bag.
