prizes

Swag Bucks: Yeah, it's still a thing

It was just over three years ago that I first encountered (and wrote about) Swag Bucks, a service that rewards you for completing various online activities.

I used it pretty hot and heavy for about a year, eventually accumulating some downright decent prizes, but then it dropped off my radar. Way, way off -- I kind of forgot it existed.

Come to find out, though, that Swag Bucks is alive and well -- and still a rather interesting way to score freebies just for doing stuff you might already be doing anyway.

For example, you can earn points ("swag … Read more

Queen Elizabeth honors Marc Andreessen, others with engineering prize

Queen Elizabeth has honored five engineers who created the Internet and World Wide Web in her first Prize for Engineering.

Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreessen will share an award of 1 million pounds. They are credited for helping spawn the Internet, (Sorry, Al Gore. You didn't quite make the cut.), which the prize site said is "an engineering achievement that has changed the direction of the world."

"The Internet and WWW led to a communications revolution of unprecedented power and impact," the site said.

Pouzin, Kahn, and Cerf made … Read more

The Cheapskate Fifth-Anniversary Giveaway Spectacular, Round Three

Happy Black Friday, cheeps! (That's "cheapskates" plus "peeps" in case you're new around here.)

In honor of this crazy day of shopping madness, and to cap off the celebration of my fifth anniversary writing the Cheapskate blog, I've got one seriously killer contest for you.

Because it's a fifth anniversary, I decided one prize wouldn't do -- I needed five. And thanks to some very generous companies, that's what I ended up with. I'm overjoyed with this roster of goodies, which you can easily enter to win by following … Read more

Want a Nobel? Forgo glasses, shave, wait till you're 60

When I interviewed Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka back in 2008, I had an inkling he'd win the Nobel Prize one day for his work on stem cells. I didn't pay any mind to his appearance or background.

Yamanaka shared the Nobel in physiology or medicine this week with Britain's John Gurdon for their groundbreaking work on changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any type of cell in the body.

It turns out that Yamanaka defied the odds. He was born in September, he's 50, bespectacled, and Japanese. According to a historical survey of Nobel laureates by the BBC, which goes back to 1901, those aren't favorable characteristics. … Read more

Nobel Prize in physics awarded for work in quantum optics

Two researchers received the Nobel Prize in physics today for their work in manipulating single particles of light or matter -- advancements that could help build a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics.

Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the United States independently developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature. The Nobel citation said such advancements, which allow researchers to directly observe individual quantum particles without destroying them, were previously thought unattainable.

"For single particles of light or matter the laws of classical physics cease to apply … Read more

Grab your prize

The era of visiting carnivals and arcades may be over, but Prize Claw is a free iOS app that aims to re-create that old time feeling. The main problem is an overly cluttered interface that takes some time to figure out without delivering much of an incentive to keep playing (at least for free).

Prize Claw's interface is packed with ads and other information that made it hard to find the claw controller at first. There is a Help screen with instructions about the game, which helped us get oriented. Apart from the cluttered screen, we also weren't … Read more

Holy fail! Cecilia Prize crowdsources botched Jesus fresco

Oh, Internet! Is nothing, not even a prized fresco of Jesus, safe from your creative but snarky clutches?

Amateur art restorers the world over have taken to Twitter to share their digital restorations of "Ecce Home" (Behold the Man), a painting by Elias Garcia Martinez that's more than a century old. They have given the image googly eyes, bow ties, and sunglasses, and bestowed upon it the visage of a cat, a bear, Big Bird, Batman, and Susan Boyle, among others.

But which of these restorations will win the coveted Cecilia Prize? It's named after Cecilia Gimenez, who became famous (and infamous) when news broke recently that she took it upon herself to restore the deteriorating painting in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, Spain. … Read more

Texting isn't just for utility, it's a sport too

The Olympics aren't the only competition taking place this summer, there's also the U.S. LG National Texting Competition. And Austin Wierschke, 17, has become the reining champ for the second year in a row.

Wierschke, who hails from Rhinelander, Wis., is now deemed "the fastest texter in America," according to the Associated Press.

His secret? "Abnormally fast thumbs," he told the news source.

The competition, which takes place in New York's Times Square, tests texters on three skills: speed, accuracy, and dexterity. The thumb athletes must text blindfolded, know "text speak,&… Read more

How the White House is aiming the X Prize model at big problems

On October 4, 2004, the idea of incentive prizes hit the mainstream when Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites launched SpaceShip One into orbit for the second time and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Since then, prizes like that have become more and more common, and though the X Prizes are still the gold standard, there are now similar competitions from medical research to science to business, and beyond.

Not long ago, however, the U.S. government got into the business (PDF) of using competitions like these to come up with new ways to solve existing … Read more