Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

Real life real estate agency to sell virtual real estate

The internet has now begun blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality. It started with people spending large part of their lives (over 14 hours per day in some cases) inside the virtual worlds created by massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, or Second Life. Second Life has for a while been attracting a bunch of non-gamers too, because it it not really a game. It is just a virtual world where people hang out, and in some cases, run businesses.

According to wikipedia Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007. Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables its users, called “Residents“, to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.

Soon, real life began intruding into Second Life. For example, the announcement of the release of Sun Open Java was also done inside Second Life in the form of a Press Conference. In early 2007 the Swedish Institute stated it was about to set up an Embassy in Second Life. Now, Coldwell Banker, a real estate agency in the US has bought a large tract of land inside Second Life. It plans on re-selling half of it and renting out the other half.

Coldwell, which employs over 120,000 real-world sales agents in the United States and operates in a total of 45 countries, isn’t in Second Life to make money, says Charlie Young, the company’s senior vice president for marketing. “In the end this is about buying and selling homes in the real world,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out how to reach what we call the ‘new consumer’.” Executives insist that any profits will be reinvested in Second Life real estate.

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How Police Interrogation Works

This is an interesting, and very detailed article on the techniques used these days by police to get confessions out of suspects. I believe the author is mostly referring to interrogations in the US, but in any case, it is rather interesting.

In looking for a replacement for illegal forms of coercion, police turned to fairly basic psychological techniques like the time-honored “good cop bad cop” routine, in which one detective browbeats the suspect and the other pretends to be looking out for him. People tend to trust and talk to someone they perceive as their protector. Another basic technique is maximization, in which the police try to scare the suspect into talking by telling him all of the horrible things he’ll face if he’s convicted of the crime in a court of law. Fear tends to make people talk. For a while, police tried such things as polygraphs to determine if the suspect was being deceptive, but polygraphs and polygraph training are expensive, and the results are almost never admissible in court. But some polygraph analysts, including a man named John Reid, began noticing that subjects exhibited certain outward, consistent physical signs that coincided with the polygraph’s determination of untruthfulness. Reid went on to develop a non-machine-based system of interrogation based on specific types of questions and answers that uncover weaknesses the interrogator can use against a suspect to obtain a confession. Reid’s “Nine Steps” of psychological manipulation is one of the most popular interrogation systems in the United States today.

See full article.