By James Temple


Shortly after Carol Bartz took over as chief executive of Yahoo Inc. early last year, she met with Prabhakar Raghavan for an overview of the Sunnyvale Web giant's research division. As the head of Yahoo Labs ran through the catalog of computer scientists on staff, Bartz turned to him and asked: "Where are your psychologists?"

Raghavan was stunned the newly installed CEO had so quickly gotten to a question he'd been asking for years. His answer was they didn't have enough.

That's changing. In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it's still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can't answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications - and dismiss others out of hand.

Yahoo Labs is taking a scientific approach to these questions, leveraging its massive window onto user behavior to set up a series of controlled experiments (identifying information is always masked) and employing classic ethnography techniques like participant observation and interviews.

The insights have been published in academic journals and have already changed how the company organizes search results, sets reserve prices in ad auctions and leverages human politeness to keep people glued to Yahoo.

By Joe McKendrick


A new study released by Sybase found that businesses can save significant amounts of money simply by increasing the usability and accessibility of enterprise data.

How?

The study, underwritten by Sybase and conducted by researchers from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas and Indian School of Business, connected the dots between what they called “data usability” and corporate financial performance. This takes into consideration the additional processing time required to make data valuable for the business. Improve data usability, and the subsequent processing time can be reduced by as much as 10 percent, the researchers say. And this translates into potentially billions saved.

Researchers say data usability can be improved by focusing on the following factors:

- Intelligence of data “can be improved through the accuracy of the prediction, trends analysis, recommendations and profile matching /associations made by the associated applications. For example, what percentage of recommendations made by a business intelligence application results in cross-selling?”
- Remote access to data and applications is essential in an increasingly mobile workforce.
- Sales mobility “involves the ability of salespersons to use portable devices and applications to exchange information related to all aspects of a deal or transaction with a customer.”
- Improvements in data quality will result in improvements that “may come through better and timely decisions (which may increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and hence revenues), as well as fewer errors and rework, lower working capital requirements, faster receivables, etc. (which will lower costs).”

A 10 percent improvement in any one or two of these attributes affects common business metrics, the study says. A 10 percent improvement can add up to big dollars. Researchers determined that if a median Fortune 1000 business (36,000 employees and $388,000 in sales per employee) increased the usability of its data by just 10 percent, it would translate to an increase in $2.01 billion in total revenue every year, or $55,900 in additional sales per employee annually.

by Les Blumenthal

WASHINGTON — Twenty years after northern spotted owls were protected under the Endangered Species Act, their numbers continue to decline, and scientists aren't certain whether the birds will survive even though logging was banned on much of the old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest where they live in order to save them.

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by Raj Patel

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming.

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by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

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Two Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip, medics and security sources say. Another person has been critically injured.

The Israeli army launched three raids in the south of Gaza on Saturday after Palestinian fighters fired a rocket over the border.

The flare-up of violence on the Israel-Gaza border came just two days after the relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the US.

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by David Smith and agencies

The UN has called an urgent meeting on rising global food prices in an attempt to head off a repeat of the 2008 crisis that sparked riots around the world.

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by Henry MacDonald and agencies

DUBLIN - Violent skirmishes broke out between protesters and police at the first public signing for Tony Blair's memoirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Three men were arrested after they broke through a security barrier at around 10.45am today outside Eason's bookshop on O'Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland.

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by Rupert CornwellWith the permanent sealing of its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico perhaps just days away, BP is warning that it may not have the money to pay the colossal clean-up bill if Congress passes a law that would stop it obtaining permits for offshore drilling in US waters.

The new confrontation emerged yesterday as BP announced that total costs arising from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April, in which 11 workers died in one the worst environmental disasters in US history, rose by a further $2bn last month to around $8bn.

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by Robert Reich

The Great Jobs Depression continues to worsen.

The Labor Department reports this morning that companies created ony 67,000 new jobs in August. That's down from the 107,000 they created in July. And because the government laid off temporary Census workers, the economy as a whole lost 54,000 jobs.

To put this into perspective, we need 125,000 net new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population and the potential workforce.

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by Matthew Berger

WASHINGTON - A surprisingly small number of scientists have studied the impacts of the oil spill resulting from the 1979 blowout at the Ixtoc I oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Wes Tunnell, who first studied the spill's effects in July and August of 1980 and has returned many times since, is one of the few exceptions.

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by Bridie SmithThe impact of screen culture on the human brain merits the same public debate and funding for research as climate change, says one of the world's most eminent neuroscientists.

As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University's Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired.

The effect of screen culture on the brain is not dissimilar to symptoms associated with attention deficit disorder, such as a shorter attention span and decline in empathy.

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(New York) - Jordan's military prosecutor at the State Security Court should immediately order the release of Hatim al-Shuli, a university student, and rescind charges against him, Human Rights Watch said today.

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by Amie Newman, Managing Editor, RH Reality CheckLive in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arizona, Missouri or Louisiana? The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) wants you to know that, with the implementation of health care reform in 2014, you will not have access to abortion coverage in your state's health exchanges. These states have enacted insurance bans on abortion coverage. Five other states considered the bans and the CRR expects more to do so in 2011. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

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(Cairo) - Egyptian authorities should immediately disclose the fate and whereabouts of Mohamed Saad Tork, who disappeared in July 2009 with strong indications that he was being held by the authorities, and prosecute those responsible, Human Rights Watch said today. Tork's case highlights the continuing practice of enforced disappearances by Egypt's State Security Investigations agency.

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Vera Johnson's fifth-graders barely noticed as visitors walked into their classroom this week, reports the Dallas Morning News: They were far too focused on the disembodied head that seemed to float in the front of the room.

The head of the internet's leading standards body said Sept. 2 that it is "misleading" for AT&T to claim that its push to charge customers for high-priority service is technically justified, CNET reports.

Officials from open-license textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge say more than 1,300 instructors at 800 colleges and universities will use their books this fall semester—doubling the 400 institutions that used Flat World texts a year ago.

The social-networking giant Facebook is rolling out a new security feature that lets users see which computers and devices are logged into their Facebook accounts, then remove the ones that they don't want to have access, PC World reports.

Texting among adults is on the rise, with more than 72 percent of those over 18 using the technology—but their usage still pales in comparison to texting among teenagers, who send an average of five times as many texts as their adult counterparts, PC Magazine reports.