The Wikimedia foundation has announced that the organization completed the transfer of popular online repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia from GoDaddy hosting this past Friday. The move has been a long time coming, with several reasons motivating the change over — not the least of which was GoDaddy’s support of SOPA, which contrasted greatly to Wikipedia’s opposition of the proposed Internet regulation.

You can decry the vapid commercialism of the modern Valentine’s Day all you want, but it has got nothing on the bizarre Valentines of yesteryear. Back in the day, it apparently wasn’t all that unusual to express your affection with a card featuring images of violence, suicide, bondage, cannibalism, worm eating, and you don’t even want to know what else. Actually, having written that, I think we could afford to bring some of that hilarious weirdness back.

In an effort to retain new editors, Wikipedia is planning to launch a new system through which newbie editors can be praised for their work. The initiative is called Wikilove, will be rolling out as an experiment on the English version of the site on June 29. While most of us take Wikipedia for granted, we don’t always see the sometimes excruciating battle of wills that goes into most articles. For new editors, it can prove so daunting that they chose to leave the community.

Wikilove aims to make new editors feel valued and welcomed in the tight-knit and occasionally cut-throat world of Wikipedia. In their semi-annual review, Wikimedia discovered that the life of a new editor is primarily dominated by learning, criticism, and warnings. From the Wikipedia blog:

The drive for quality and reliability has led to the development of sophisticated automation mechanisms that aid in socializing new users to Wikipedia’s norms, policies and conventions. The act of expressing appreciation for other users, by contrast, is a largely manual effort.

With Wikilove, editors can send trophies like “barnstars” and notes of appreciation to other editors. Whether or not the system will be used, or sufficient to smooth over hurt feelings because of a brutal re-edit is yet to be seen.

(I Programmer via Slashdot)

No matter who the father figure is in your life may be, a Dad, an Uncle, a neighbor, a teacher, or  a coach, we’ve all experienced the most cringe worthy “Dad” moment. It can happen inconspicuously or right in front of you, but there is just no hiding when he insists on telling that joke that only he finds hilarious, mostly because its at your expense. So with Father’s Day right around the corner, and a heavy dose of Dad’s humor headed your way, take comfort in the fact that your Dad probably isn’t as bad as Troll Dad. If he is, well, you can at least get some tips on how to improve your rage-face.

Read on...

After Google announced Google Wallet yesterday, an NFC-based mobile payment system, PayPal sued Google and two of its executives for allegedly stealing trade secrets. The executives in question, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, led the launch of Google Wallet, but were formerly PayPal employees — Bedier having worked there for nine years and as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures, and Tilenius having worked at eBay, PayPal’s parent company, for eight years, then continuing to work as a consultant to the company for a little under half a year after that.

PayPal is making some serious claims in their suit, accusing Bedier of having “misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers,” accusing Tilenius of recruiting Bedier, thus breaking a contractual agreement she had with eBay, and also accusing Bedier of attempting to poach former colleagues who were still working at PayPal. If that weren’t enough, eBay claims PayPal and Google were working together for three years to develop a deal where PayPal would act as a payment option for mobile app purchases made on Android devices, and eBay claims Bedier was the senior PayPal executive in charge of the Android negotiations with Google, and that Bedier also uploaded up-to-date documents outlining PayPal’s mobile payment strategies to a non-PayPal computer days before he left PayPal to work for Google.

Like many of you, I use a stop watch to time all of my hugs. Emese Nagy from the U.K.’s University of Dundee is also interested in the duration of hugs, and decided to use the Olympic games as a testing ground. With the help of an independent observer, Nagy observed over 188 hugs during the 2008 Olympics. From this, she concluded that, on average, hugs last about three seconds.

Apparently this fits a larger pattern, with three seconds as a “basic temporal unit.” As surprising as this information is, it’s apparently not all that new.