I specialize in the study of synthetic worlds: massively multi-user spaces on the internet. People in these worlds create virtual items to use there – magic wands and whatnot – and they’ve begun buying and selling them on eBay. eBay’s category 1654, 'Internet Games' includes most of the non-Asian trade in virtual items and currency, and as you can see, this is a very active market. (If you are not familiar with virtual item trading, please see this introduction.)

Based on these auction data, I've been able to estimate that the global online sales volume in virtual items is at least $100 million annually and quite probably much more. This external, internet-based trade volume seems to be only about 1/20th of the trade volume within the worlds, meaning that the in-world trade probably amounts to more than $2 billion annually. At that level, it is comparable to economic activity in many small regions, provinces, and even a few countries. Synthetic worlds have even been colonized, effectively, by independent companies, that do nothing but farm items and gold pieces for sale to third parties. At least one such company is known to maintain a low-wage workshop in Hong Kong, to manage a high volume of sales and deliveries of farmed items.

The videogame companies that operate the most popular synthetic worlds – some of which have millions of users – are currently deliberating how to respond: should they try to capitalize on this money flow, or shut it down? If they encourage virtual item trading in real currencies, if only to take a slice off the top, their virtual economies will merge into the real-world economy, with real-world taxation, regulation, and legal obligation being an unavoidable consequence. If they shut down the eBay trade (which, after all, is against the rules of these places as games), they close off a revenue source as well as a part of the game that many users think is great fun.

The lesson for serious people outside the videogame industry is this: like it or not, real life is genuinely and observably migrating online for many millions of people, in its personal, social, economic, and even political aspects. In the new frontier, the features of the real body or the ability to do real-world work are no longer important. What matters is that you can get along with others while doing quite fantastical, quite fun things – slaying dragons, casting spells, performing resurrections, building castles. New frontier, new rules.

At this point we do not know how many people will eventually find a fantastical society preferable to our own. It could be hundreds of millions. If so, we are in for some fairly dramatic changes in society, economy, and politics over the next few generations.

Second Life allows users to collaborate and teach each other. Learning scripting: it’s easy, you have immediate feedback, and other people are willing to help. People spread knowledge and do FAQs. SL really encourages this. As an example: skydiving classes, ingame. Players sell lessons and parachutes. Skydiving became a huge fad in SL for a while. Abbot’s Skydiving sells equipment and airplanes to go up in. An elevator to 4000 feet. Total freedom to create. A service.

Another example of collaborative business: VERTU is a group in RL. They contacted the EFF and wanted to do a fundraise in SL. They raised 1700 bucks. Next month (for Charity X) they did 1900. Then for Hurricane Relief = 2000 US. People in these spaces recognise the virtual currency has value. Philanthropy, giving .. having an impact back on the RL is a real possibility.

Tringo, the current SL fad. A cross between tetris and bingo. Someone in SL wanted a fun social game to play ingame. He created Tringo. In the 3 months since, he’s generated the equivalent of 4000 US in Tringo. He just licensed the realworld distribution rights to Tringo to a mobile game company. Because SL lets him maintain the rights to his IP, he can distribute said rights in the real world, although apparently part of the deal is that he continues to manage the rights individually ingame.

The best time to ask someone for a favour is at least several weeks in advance, a new study suggests. The research finds that people consistently over-commit because they expect to have more time in the future than they do right now.

Previous studies have shown that people generally "value things less in the future than now", says Gal Zauberman, a consumer-behaviour researcher at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, US. For example, many people prefer to pay for something in a week's time rather than today - even if it costs slightly more.

Now, Zauberman and colleague John Lynch at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have found that this tendency is even stronger for time than for money.

"When asked to do something far in the future, we usually say 'yes'. Sure, I'll be happy to help you write a paper or move apartments," Zauberman told New Scientist. "People always like to delay things, but they are more optimistic about changes in time than in money."

A billboard appears near a Melbourne freeway entrance inviting people to "Get out of their mind". "Those who follow the instructions on the neurocam website are assigned missions, with the threat of grave consequences should these tasks not be carried out. Individuals prove their mettle by completing progressively more complex, riskier assignments - possibly of questionable legality."

Is it an art project, a cult, a marketing ploy, a game or a psychological experiment? Neurocam says none of these. Melbourne's Age newspaper investigates (free reg sometimes req'd). You can also read some blogs from participants here and here. Plus it seems to have something to do with this place dealing in Human Possibility(TM), which makes as little sense as the rest of it.

• apun: snow
• apingaut: first snowfall
• aput: spread-out snow
• kanik: frost
• kanigruak: frost on a living surface
• ayak: snow on clothes
• kannik: snowflake
• nutagak: powder snow
• aniu: packed snow
• aniuvak: snowbank
• natigvik: snowdrift
• kimaugruk: snowdrift that blocks something
• perksertok: drifting snow
• akelrorak: newly drifting snow
• mavsa: snowdrift overhead and about to fall
• kaiyuglak: rippled surface of snow
• pukak: sugar snow
• pokaktok: salt-like snow
• miulik: sleet
• massak: snow mixed with water
• auksalak: melting snow
• aniuk: snow for melting into water
• akillukkak: soft snow
• milik: very soft snow
• mitailak: soft snow covering an opening in an ice floe
• sillik: hard, crusty snow
• kiksrukak: glazed snow in a thaw
• mauya: snow that can be broken through
• katiksunik: light snow
• katiksugnik: light snow deep enough for walking
• apuuak: snow patch
• sisuuk: avalanche

You say that self-deceived people are often mentally healthier than those who are honest with themselves.

Yes, lying to oneself promotes psychological well-being. Research shows that depressed people deceive themselves less than those who are mentally healthy. Frankly, if we did not deceive ourselves, I think we would go mad from distress. For example, the simple fact that we're all going to die, that there are various people in the world out to get us, that a good deal of the world lives in unrelenting misery and hunger-it's all enough to drive everyone bonkers. Unless we are capable of shielding ourselves from that, we would be constantly disturbed. It's why we worry more about missing our favorite TV show than about a dirty bomb going off in a terrorist attack.

Also, self-deception relieves us from a sense that we're constantly living in contradiction. We each have a set of values that we constantly violate. When you're aware of transgressing one of those values that you hold dear, you tend to feel bad about yourself. In deceiving ourselves, we relieve ourselves of that burden, making life a lot easier and lot more pleasant for ourselves. It's quite wonderful.

Finally, if we convince ourselves we're not really lying, we can lie far more effectively than might otherwise be the case. All of our social lies, like the fake smile, involve the manipulation of how others see us. Our lives are saturated with pretense and dishonesty. Although we claim to value truth above all else, we are also at least dimly aware that there is something antisocial about too much honesty.

So should we value lying more than telling the truth, especially since you said that good liars have an advantage in life?

When I'm talking about advantage, I'm talking about what gives an individual organism success. But all sorts of things can give individual success. Killing one's rivals is an example, but just because it gives you an advantage doesn't morally justify it. Put it this way: If one thinks that individual advantage is the ultimate value in life, it would follow that one should work at becoming a very good, calculating liar. But encouraging lying to one's individual advantage will always receive social disapproval, because if you are taught to lie better, that's against everyone's interest. Just as it might be advantageous for each of us to lie, it's disadvantageous for each of us to be lied to. For lying to be advantageous, society has to place an emphasis on honesty. Unless we have a sense that there's truthfulness enough of the time, lying ceases to function. That's illustrated in the old story about the boy who cried wolf. If we get a situation where we're all cold-bloodedly out to lie to each other, we will lose trust in each other, lying will stop working, and the world would collapse under the weight of too much lying.

The International Monetary Fund might have to move some time in the next four years, according to Clyde Prestowitz, on the November 12, 2004 evening edition of public radio's Marketplace.

The development agency's charter dictates that it be located in the member country with the largest economy, and the IMF HQ has been in Washington, DC for nearly 60 years.

But the current U.S. federal deficit, as well as trade imbalances that have Americans consuming $600 billion more than they save or produce, may cause some international banks to reconsider their investments in the U.S., which could drop us down to second - or maybe further. Says Prestowitz:

We consider ourselves the unchallenged leader, the best ever, but the ground is really shifting beneath our feet...if one of the central banks of China, or Japan, or Korea, Taiwan or Singapore, decides that we're not such a hot investment anymore, the dollar will fall like a rock. In fact, some time in the next four years, the dollar is almost certain to drop by as much as 50% or even more against some key currencies...the E.U. is only a 10% drop away in the dollar's value from being the world's biggest economy, and Asia is on the march.

The U.S. will soon no longer have the highest per capita income or be the biggest market in the world for most products. It will no longer set all the standards. Our technological leadership will diminish.

Think about it. If we don't get our act together, it really won't take much to get those moving trucks rolling.

A specter is haunting America, and it ain't the specter of communism (however much George W. Bush and company might like to describe it that way). Barely a decade after the definitive collapse of the Soviet bloc, the United States finds itself in a new cold war, one being fought simultaneously on economic, political and cultural fronts, and one it is by no means certain to win. The unipolar world of uncontested American hegemony that we were told to expect into the indefinite future has come to an end; it lasted just about long enough for us to scratch our heads and wonder what was happening next.

Yes, "Old Europe," to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's famous quip, is back, and it's looking pretty spry for its age. As Americans are finally beginning to notice, Europeans (or most of them, anyway) have reconstituted themselves into an enormous transnational superstate of 25 nations, 455 million people and an $11 trillion economy. This is, of course, the European Union, and its aims have become much broader and deeper than the stuff you've probably heard about, like allowing citizens to drive from Seville to Sicily without a passport, or to use the same anonymous-looking currency to buy a pint of Guinness in Cork and a glass of ouzo in Crete.

If the EU has no intention of confronting America's military supremacy, that, Rifkin and Reid would agree, is actually Europe's ace in the hole. Let the Americans pour endless billions in taxpayer dollars down the Pentagon's money sink, the Europeans reason. As they see it, the key to future peace and prosperity lies elsewhere, in constructing complex webs of social interaction and economic cooperation that will undermine nationalism and fundamentalism of all stripes. While the United States foots the bill for the intractable conflict in Iraq and piles up huge budget and trade deficits, Europe has spent money on other priorities. ...

The U.S. has fallen significantly behind the EU's Western European nations in infant mortality and life expectancy, despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any of them. (While 40 million Americans are uninsured, no one in Europe -- I repeat, not a single person -- lacks some form of healthcare coverage.)

European children are consistently better educated; the United States would rank ninth in the EU in reading, ninth in scientific literacy, and 13th in math. Twenty-two percent of American children grow up in poverty, which means that our country ranks 22nd out of the 23 industrialized nations, ahead of only Mexico and behind all 15 of the pre-2004 EU countries. What's more horrifying: the statistic itself or the fact that no American politician to the right of Dennis Kucinich would ever address it?

Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Europe has surpassed the United States in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology, grid computing and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher.

...there is another dimension to the sharing phenomenon that is not as widely discussed — and which suggests an unexplored opportunity for developers, providers, and consumers of digital media: the strong human desire to give, whether it is advice/assistance (newsgroups), digital goods (music, literature, software), or other resources (bandwidth, processing cycles). Much sharing is almost certainly motivated by reciprocity in one form or another; many times people clearly do "give in order to receive." But there are significant indications that some acts of sharing are difficult to explain easily in terms of reciprocity: it seems that some people simply enjoy non–reciprocal giving.

The number of non-entertainment games under development is rapidly increasing and demand for the ideas, skills and techniques used in commercial entertainment games is at an all time high. As a result, an entirely new market has emerged.

Serious Games are applications of interactive technology that extend far beyond the traditional videogame market, including: training, policy exploration, analytics, visualization, simulation, education and health and therapy.

The Serious Games Summit gives professionals from the public and private sectors, policymakers, contractors, military personnel, government administrators, educators and experts in the game development arena an opportunity to meet and learn from successful serious games applications, as well as forge links between the traditional videogame industry and program managers for homeland security, state and local governments, military agencies, and educational institutions.

I Love Bees is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of the growing genre known as alternate-reality games. In it, widely dispersed players coordinate to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions.

When all the answers have been supplied, the latest episode in an internet-based War of the Worlds-esque radio serial is unlocked and made available to its rabid fans.

"I think it's a new form of interactive entertainment that is still in its infancy," Steve Peters, who runs ARGN, the leading clearinghouse for information and discussion about alternate-reality games, said of I Love Bees. "It's a new way of storytelling. We've had novels and movies, and these things kind of blur the lines of fiction and in some ways invade the real world."

For those who obsessively play I Love Bees, the point is to take part in the creation and distribution of the radio drama. To do so, players log onto the game's website each week to find the latest clues and a list of the pay phones that will be called."

The site lists the GPS coordinates for each phone and the time it will be called. More than a million unique visitors have come to the I Love Bees website, the game's designers said.

Six main characters from the year 2552 prepare for a great war in the storyline. Each time a player correctly answers a pay-phone question, he or she is treated to 30 seconds of new material. Over the course of the game, the plot unfolds, revealing a menacing alien army that threatens 26th-century Earth and only intervention from the past can help.

The most exciting element of the game for some players is the possibility that they will get one of the rare live calls in which the drama's actors talk to whoever answers the phone and then incorporate the conversation into the show itself.

Researchers have managed to grow this square bacterium in the laboratory for the first time. The square bacteria was first discovered twenty-five years ago near the ultra-salty Red Sea. To grow it in the lab, the scientists used a culture with the salt concentration of soy sauce.

More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Luckily for us, the bacteria are on the whole commensal, sharing our food but doing no real harm. (The word derives from the Latin meaning to share a table for dinner.) In fact, they are often beneficial: Our commensal bacteria protect us from potentially dangerous infections. They do this through close interaction with our immune systems.

[F]or one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration - even though they're fair and important considerations - and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!

... We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren't passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist's hands and enters our lives. And that's not a betrayal of the work. That's its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That's artistic success, although it's a branding failure.

About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction.

Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all.

In the end change is constant and Burning Man will inevitably fade, hopefully to be replaced by another similar current, appropriately occulted from dilution and evolved to bring newer generations closer to the utopic ideals of it's founders - ideals that are really the same ideals shared by all of us since the infancy of humanity: warm companionship and community, expression and creativity, freedom from meaningless routine, and a communion with the ineffable and un-namable mysteries of creation. Burning Man is simply one point in time carrying the current onward, sustaining and nurturing the human spirit as it blossoms into hyperspace.

The cinema, with restaurant and bar annexe, was open for a seven-week season this summer, showing a suitably subversive programme which included works by Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas' Dark City, Coppola's Rumble Fish, David Lynch's Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

It was constructed in a series of interconnected caves totalling some 400 square metres beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower. Former quarries, they were partly refurbished during the 1900 Universal Exposition when one of the galleries was clad with concrete to represent a future Channel tunnel and a wall was artfully terraced.

But the caves were sealed off for the last time at least 20 years ago and subsequently "ceased to exist officially", Lazar said. "We knew them well because we used them to get into the Palais de Chaillot every Bastille Day. The roof is the perfect place from which to watch the fireworks."

Indeed most of the LMDP's underground happenings are organised in places the city authorities are not aware of, he added. "There are so many underground networks - the quarries, the metro, the collective heating, the electricity, the sewers - and each is the responsibility of a different bureaucracy," he said.

"Urban explorers are the only people who, between us, know it all. We move between each network. We know where they link up - often, it's us who made the link. The authorities, the police, town hall, they don't know a hundredth, a thousandth, of what's down there."

Parts of the French capital are riddled with around 250 kilometres (150 miles) of underground tunnels, some of them dating from mediaeval times, and adepts who call themselves "cataphiles" are known to frequent them illegally and occasionally decorate galleries to hold parties or meetings.

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.

Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called "linguistic determinism" was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since.