NeoAcademic

technology, education and training from an industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologist

Twitter Predicts Box Office Revenue

In the first paper I’ve seen using social media (like Twitter) to tie to a real world monetary outcome, Asur and Huberman (2010) at the Social Computing Labs in Palo Alto, CA use Twitter activity to predict film box office sales. Taking all 24 major film releases between November 2009 and January 2010, the number of tweets on new films predict sales even better than the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), an online prediction game (think fantasy football for film success) that is described as the “gold standard” for predicting box office revenues.

Blending Reality and the Virtual

Just imagine how memorable military training would be where getting shot in the simulator gave you a real physical reminder that you could have been dead in the real world.

Studying Virtual Economies

A recent article in Newsweek discussed the use of online games like Farmville and virtual worlds like Second Life for studying human behavior when buying and selling goods, a field called behavioral economics.  Consider...

College Courses as Live Games

An instructor at Indiana University has replaced the A-F grading system in the courses he is teaching with a point system based on experience points.

A Momentary Pause for Social Networks

One of the problems with having an active research program is that sometimes that program tries to smother you with work. A project that I am working on (determining the best use of online social networks in college classrooms) is suddenly requiring about 16 hours per day of my time (I have 17 meetings next week alone!), so it will be quiet here for the next week or two.