Farmville Meets Mint.com

Unlike other games (educational and otherwise) that use virtual currency, Zindagi will use real money. “The concept is really simple - instead of trying to make games more life-like, Zindagi makes use of the fact that real-life is already one big game.” As kids master concepts like budgeting and saving, they accrue financial rewards themselves. The ultimate goal of the game will be to help kids start their own businesses.

— via RWW

For your health

Last week, in what may be the biggest medical breakthrough of its kind in years, a group of scientists published results in The Lancet describing a completely new type of anti-viral treatment that appears to cure Ebola. They report a 100% success rate, although admittedly the test group was very small, just 4 rhesus monkeys.

This is a breakthrough not only because it may give us a cure for an uncurable, incredibly nasty virus, but also because the same method might work for other viruses, and because we have woefully few effective antiviral treatments.

• via fieldofscience.com

Noticed: The Privacy Arms Race

Charlotte Kaye, who went to the Brearley School in Manhattan, did not take any chances. To avoid detection, Ms. Kaye, now a freshman at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said she and others began changing their names on Facebook beginning in their junior year of high school.

New spellings are standard: Amy is now Aim E, and Ms. Kaye became Charlotte K. A nickname will also do. At the Ramaz School in Manhattan, Amanda Uziel changed her Facebook name to Uzi Shmuzi. Puns and wordplay are held in higher esteem.

At the Collegiate School in Manhattan, Al Isin Wonderland is also known as Albert F. Mendia, a senior; at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Audri Augenbraum, a senior, is Audri Eyebrows, the translation of her German surname. And at the Spence School in Manhattan, Haley Markbreiter, a senior, is Haley Go Lightly.

At the Fieldston School in the Bronx, a class on Tolstoy resulted in some students adding Russian patronymics like -ovich and -ovna to their names.

• via nytimes.com

There’s clearly a latent demand for students to manage their academic and personal identities. Look for a mandatory facebook profile url field on next year’s college applications.

WTFID

I find it endlessly intriguing that Facebook, a company I think of as cautious and conservative in many respects, would choose RFID over the more obvious choices for its LBS technology.

Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree

Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree. It’s a unique program the Ivy League institution hopes will produce cross-disciplinary ninjas prepared to develop the newsrooms of the future.

The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: Users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.

• via wired

For all the talk about the digital divide…

For all the talk about the digital divide, a lot of educators work hard to keep computers out of the classroom at an early age, to help kids develop skills without them.

This is a topic we think about a lot in my home. We have a 9-year-old son who uses his computer for all kinds of stuff — games and sport fantasy leagues, yes, but also reading the news and looking up whatever his brain latches onto: volcanoes, Hitler, left-handed presidents, etc. He also happens to read a lot of books — but would he read more if there were no computer in the house? And would there be a great benefit in that? And will his computer literacy yield greater unforeseen benefits down the road?

• via the Freakonomics Blog