There’s been a new study on you blog readers out there. The academic definition of a blog is a modified web page with dated entries in reverse chronological order. However, a UC of Irvine study found that participants considered many more things that needed to be present in blogs, such as RSS feeds, trackback and the presence of conversation like leaving comments after entries or polls.
Blog readers also become more consistent in their reading rather than subject matter oriented. The blogs people read become part of a person’s daily or weekly habit, like reading the paper was or will become.
Apparently, the timing of a story is not as important as is the position it is among other entries. As long as the story is near the top, readers are for the most part less concerned with the date the story was posted. This goes against the theory that blog readers have a constant need to be up to date.
The best part is that readers feel pressure and a responsibility to make “insightful contributions.” This pressure on themselves is as equal to the expectation they have on the bloggers to post frequent, high-quality posts.
The study was fun to read about, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Only 15 participants were used even though they were over various ages.
“This study is really just the beginning,” said Tomlinson, an ICS professor and affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “With the rapid expansion of online social media such as Flickr and YouTube, understanding how people consume these media will be vital to understanding their broader social impacts.”
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Smallest Space Vacuum Found Not Made by Hoover
Astronomers have found the smallest black hole yet. It is only 3.8 times the mass of our own sun with a diameter of 15 miles. This black hole is very close to the minimum size astronomers predict possible to even occur.
The two astronomers, Nikolai Shaposhikov and Lev Titarchuk work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. They found the black hole in the Milky Way in the binary system XTE J1650-500 (catchy name!).
According to Shaposhikov, "this black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."
The two figured out the size of the black hole by using a new technique. They used the relationship between a black hole and dust that surrounds it and swirls downward. This dust tends to pile up at the edges and turns into hot gas, which radiates X-rays. These X-rays have a pretty regular pattern of intensity that the astronomers can view.
It was previously thought that these oscillations depended on the size of the black hole. Titarchuk realized that the larger the hole, the further the hot gas is pushed out, so the oscillations go slower and slower. The two astronomers used a database of information of other black holes and their oscillations to calculate the size of this new, very small black hole.
Apparently small black holes can exert stronger tidal forces than the larger ones, so no black hole is a “safe” black hole. "If you ventured too close to J1650's black hole, its gravity would tidally stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," says Shaposhnikov.
The two astronomers, Nikolai Shaposhikov and Lev Titarchuk work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. They found the black hole in the Milky Way in the binary system XTE J1650-500 (catchy name!).
According to Shaposhikov, "this black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."
The two figured out the size of the black hole by using a new technique. They used the relationship between a black hole and dust that surrounds it and swirls downward. This dust tends to pile up at the edges and turns into hot gas, which radiates X-rays. These X-rays have a pretty regular pattern of intensity that the astronomers can view.
It was previously thought that these oscillations depended on the size of the black hole. Titarchuk realized that the larger the hole, the further the hot gas is pushed out, so the oscillations go slower and slower. The two astronomers used a database of information of other black holes and their oscillations to calculate the size of this new, very small black hole.
Apparently small black holes can exert stronger tidal forces than the larger ones, so no black hole is a “safe” black hole. "If you ventured too close to J1650's black hole, its gravity would tidally stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," says Shaposhnikov.
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