"Research from Rice University’s Department of Psychology finds that if you like what you’re watching, you’re less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip.

The findings come from the recently released study “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” authored by Philip Kortum, Rice professor-in-the-practice and faculty fellow. The study appears in the journal Human Factors.

Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego broke “the terabyte barrier” — and a world record — when they sorted more than one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes) in just 60 seconds. During this 2010 “Sort Benchmark” competition — the “World Cup of data sorting” — the computer scientists from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering also tied a world record for fastest data sorting rate.