January 28 is Data Privacy Day in North America and Europe. The day was created to bring attention to online privacy.

“Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information,” according to The Privacy Projects, a non-profit think tank dedicated to privacy and data protection.

Back when people first began using the Web, there was a lot of public concern about safety. Remember the early days of e-commerce, when putting a credit card number out there in cyberspace was something you hesitated to do? Going back even further, were the initial passwords you used (Prodigy or AOL logins, first email account) more complex than the new ones you use today?

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Research by the Naval Department of Research indicates that video games can help make better soldiers and, in general, make people smarter.

“We have discovered that video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players,” said Ray Perez, a program officer at the ONR’s warfighter performance department.

“Our concern is developing training technologies and training methods to improve performance on the battlefield,” said Perez, who holds a PhD in educational psychology.

Perez says that gamers have “fluid intelligence,” an ability to adapt, meet and solve new problems without prior knowledge or experience and develop new tactics and counter-tactics. This type of intelligence is vital for soldiers who need to react to new situations on the ground and develop their tactics accordingly.

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Fifty-seven percent of workers polled by IDC use social media at least once weekly for business purposes.

Generally, the tools are being used to acquire knowledge and ask questions of the community.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed use consumer social tools instead of corporate-sponsored social tools because of their ease of use, familiarity due to personal use and low cost.

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Over 4.6 million students took online courses in fall 2008, a 17 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report from the Sloan Consortium with research undertaken by Babson.

This increase is more than 10 times the growth of the entire higher education population, which increased only 1.2 percent during that period.

“Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies,” said Frank Mayadas, special advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funded the study.

“We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance,” Mayadas said.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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Kids between the ages of 8-18 spend 7 hours and 38 minutes a day using entertainment media (computer, video games, television), an increase of more than an hour over five years ago.

This averages out to more than 53 hours per week, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, authors of the report.

“The amount of time young people spend with media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time work week,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.  “When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it’s affecting them – for good and bad.”

The amount of daily media time per day has increased an hour and seventeen minutes per day since 2004.

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So far, mobile subscribers have donated $27 million via Mobile Accord’s mGive micro-giving platform. The rate picked up over the holiday weekend, as $7 million was donated yesterday.

In the largest mobile-donation movement in history, around 25 percent of all money donated to Haitian relief efforts were done by mobile. At peak periods, more than $10,000 per minute was donated.

“People are increasingly doing more than just talking on their mobile phones,” said Mobile Accord Chairman James Eberhard. “Since it is one of the few items people always carry with them, the power of mobile giving is hard to overestimate.”

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The National Safety Council estimates that 28 percent of all auto accidents are caused by drivers talking or texting on cell phones.

To put that into perspective – if a figure that large really needs to be put into perspective – in 2006, 9 percent of auto accidents were caused by alcohol or drugs, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Cell phone use causes 1.4 million crashes per year, and at least 200,000 additional accidents are caused by texting.

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Indiana University and Rutgers medical and engineering professors have had success in using virtual-reality video games as remote therapy – tele-rehab – for teens with hemiplegic cerebral palsy.

“While these initial encouraging results were in teens with limited hand and arm function due to perinatal brain injury, we suspect using these games could similarly benefit individuals with other illness that affect movement, such as multiple sclerosis, stroke, arthritis and even those with orthopedic injuries affecting the arm or hand,” said Meredith R. Golomb, Indiana University School of Medicine associate professor of neurology.

Participants in the study used “a specially fitted sensor glove linked to a remotely monitored videogame console installed in their home” to play games such as making images appear onscreen. Patients did this for 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

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Image via CrunchBase

You know what sort of fell off in the second half of 2009? Twitter stories.

It seemed like once the mass adoption phase of the microblogging service in the first half of the year quieted down, Twitter use plateaued in the second half of the year, giving us a fairly good idea of what the service’s reach would ultimately be.

In social networking news, Facebook’s steady growth overtook Twitter’s headlines, and while Twitter remained one of the year’s top stories, it appeared to hit its peak. Which was kind of disappointing as its competitor continued to pass milestone after milestone .

Twitter usage is notoriously difficult to put into metrics; unlike Facebook, much Twitter activity occurs on third-party apps that make up the rich Twitter ecosystem.

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