Each year, millions of dollars are funneled into administering the most popular personality assessment in the world: the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator Test. It’s used by dating sites, guidance counselors, pharmaceutical companies, and even the U.S. Department of Defense. Avery Hurt tries to figure out why in mental_floss.  

Hurt reports that the mother-daughter duo who came up with the questionnaire and scoring system in 1942 were basically dilettantes, and the only reason the test experienced sky-rocketing success was timing: Its release coincided with a surge of women entering the workforce (due to World War II), and industrial psychologists welcomed an instrument that could help them categorize, match, and direct these new workers into the appropriate fields. 

Today, the test is as pervasive as ever, even though most experts now dismiss it as worthless, “placing it only a step or two above astrology.” So why do huge corporations, government organizations, and even individuals continue to pour money into something so clearly based on nothing? Hurt submits: “We live in a culture where people seem willing to spend endless amounts of time and money to find themselves, and in that respect, it doesn’t look like the Myers-Briggs will be disappearing anytime soon.” 

Source: mental_floss   

Image by Casey Serin, licensed under Creative Commons .  

Finally, there is relief for women plagued by catcalls hollered from speeding car windows, unsolicited innuendos offered by complete strangers, and proverbial one-liners greasy enough to make you gag. Well, virtual relief that is, courtesy of the folks at the video game production company LadyKillas Inc.

In the recently released first-person shooter game Hey Baby, a lone female wields a loaded AK-47 as she walks along city streets à la Grand Theft Auto, ready to “pulverize the leering scumbags” that verbally and physically threaten her safety and security. The New Statesman picked up on this bizarre addition to the gaming world, noting that “video games have long been an acceptable outlet for men’s fantasies and everyday frustrations, however unpleasant. Hey Baby is similarly about familiar frustration—in this case, the kind of frustration that women feel when strangers treat them as sexual objects in a public space.”

So as much as Hey Baby is ostensibly a shoot ’em up gorefest, there’s way more to it than that. It’s art, activism, and social commentary operating under the novel guise of a recreational pastime, and despite its in-your-face presentation, its underlying message is meant to be discussed seriously—and it should be. 

Source: New Statesman 

Though the U.S. military has helped immensely in the recovery efforts in Pakistan, with food delivery and rescue services, during the flooding in that country, Wired reports they are a bit behind in their use of tech tools used for disaster relief and aid missions:

The U.S. military’s efforts to assist the 17 million victims of the Pakistan flood are still pretty tech-lite. So a group of civilian aid workers, Pakistani and international, have home-brewed a series of social media apps to help coordinate relief work — everything from crisis Wikis to crowd-sourced maps to SMS calls for help.

These civilian aid workers include a scientist who has created a widget using Google Earth and Google Maps that monitors flooding and the destruction it causes, and a group of Pakistani technologists and American academics who started an SMS system where people can send messages about what they need and where they are.  While these “home-brewed” efforts seem to be gaining a community of users, the U.S. military’s own online effort, HARMOINEweb, does not.

[S]o far, HARMONIEweb doesn’t seem to be building a community. Its chat archive is empty, as is its documents folder. The video page contains, bizarrely, four short news segments from the pro-Putin news service Russia Today. Its Wiki presents Excel spreadsheets filled with stats from the Prime Minister’s office on aid that’s been delivered. Its “Knowledge Management Collaboration” section largely consists of photos of U.S. aid — and even the U.S. relief effort’s own icons. It’s hard to see how the material on HARMONIEweb helps plan future aid missions.

Source: Wired

Image from Sohaib Khan’s Floodmaps.