Article Blog #13: Hooray for atom smashers

Large Hadron Collider progress delights researchers

I love science. I love reading about new discoveries. Even though it isn't my own field of study, I love physics. So naturally, I'm extremely excited that the Large Hadron Collider has been successfully restarted. Originally planned to start up in September last year, the collider suffered a failure in one of the giant superconducting magnets used to guide the stream of protons around the collider's 27 kilometer loop. An electrical fault caused a large amount of liquid helium, used to cool the magnets to their operating temperature of 1.9 K, to leak into the collider's tunnel. For the past fourteen months, scientists and engineers have been repairing the superconducting magnets, and taking advantage of the time to install upgrades on the instruments and software. CERN's (European Organization for Nuclear Research) director of accelerators , Steve Myers, reports that the project is now more advanced than it was after the first five days of experiments last year. But now, as of Friday, the enormous particle accelerator has been successfully restarted. On Friday, a single beam of protons was directed around the loop of the collider, and is now circulating inside the machine. Following the success of the clockwise beam, a counterclockwise beam was injected and successfully guided around the loop. As long as all continues to go well, scientists will direct the beams together in the next few days, producing low energy collisions. Provided that these experiments go well, the energy of the beams will be increased in early 2010, allowing experiments searching for the elusive Higgs boson to begin. The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle crucial to our current theories of physics. Current theories predict the existence of the Higgs boson, but we have yet to find one. The high energy collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider should, in theory, finally prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. This may not sound very exciting to those who aren't interested in physics, but to scientists and those who follow their research, this is the biggest news in physics right now. All things considered, these are very exciting times.

Additional sources:

Restarted LHC Now 2 Steps Closer to "Big Bang" Test

CERN Restarts Large Hadron Collider

Article Blog #11: Accidentally forgot about #10

Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers

Social gaming company Zynga has landed themselves in a bit of trouble over the third party offers in their popular games. But first, some background. Zynga is the company behind many of the popular games on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Farmville, Fishville, and Mafia Wars are just three of their creations. The reason Zynga has been getting in trouble is their business model. Players are encouraged to spend money in get in-game currency. This isn't an uncommon model, several games allow players to buy currency or reward players for donations. But Zynga allows users who don't want to pay cash to complete offers from third parties, and be rewarded with in-game currency upon completion of the offer. This isn't the problem either, per se, and it's also not unique to Zynga. The problem is that many of these third party offers are really just scams. Users who use the offers may end up paying more in cash than they would have to just buy the in-game currency. Technology blog TechCrunch accuses Zynga of taking advantage of its customers and forcing competitors out of business. Customers fall for the scams, Zynga gets paid and puts this money back into advertising on Facebook and MySpace, gaining more new users. Meanwhile, games without these third party offers fall behind in advertising because they aren't making as much money from their customers. The blog post also details how the system tends to force legitimate advertising offers out, making more room for scams.
To their credit, Zynga does seem to realize that this is a problem. They have taken steps to remove the scam ads from their games. After a rocky start to the removal process, they seem to be serious about the effort. Facebook's removal of their newest game, Fishville, because of the scams may have helped prompt swift action. Because third party offers comprise roughly a third of Zynga's income, the decision to remove ads couldn't have been an easy one. But their dependence on these offers should also serve as a catalyst, to encourage them to change their policies on scams quickly and put the offers back into the games.

Additional Sources:
"Horrible Things" Slink Back Into Zynga
Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell
Zynga Wikipedia article