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A button called "See Friendship" aggregates onto a single page all of the information that two friends share: photos both people have been tagged in, events they have attended or are planning to attend, comments they have exchanged, etc. To see this stuff, you need only be "friends" with one of the people. So let's say I've turned down an ex-boyfriend's request for friendship; he can still peruse my pictures or trace my whereabouts by viewing my interactions with our mutual pals.

The "See Friendship" feature was launched by Facebook developer Wayne Kao, who credited his inspiration to the joy of browsing through friends' photos. "A similarly magical experience was possible if all of the photos and posts between two friends were brought together," he wrote on the Facebook blog. "You may even see that moment when your favorite couple met at a party you all attended."

Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto professor who studies social networks and real-life relationships, thinks Facebook developers don't understand the fundamental difference between life online and offline. "We all live in segmented, diversified worlds. We might be juggling girlfriends, jobs or different groups of friends," he says. "But [Facebook thinks] we're in one integrated community."

two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.

There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.

t was the big news that wasn’t. Hyperbolic claims about the possible discovery of alien life, or a second branch of life on Earth, turned out to be nothing more than bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, using it in place of phosphorus in their DNA and other molecules. But after the initial layers of hype were peeled away, even this extraordinar

This is a chronological roundup of the criticism against the science in the paper itself, ending with some personal reflections on my own handling of the story (skip to Friday, December 10th for that bit).

Thursday, December 2nd: Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a paper in Science, claiming to have found bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that can grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Given that phosphorus is meant to be one of six irreplaceable elements, this would have been a big deal, not least because the bacteria apparently used arsenic to build the backbones of their DNA molecules.

what is climate change? From a scientific point of view, it is simply a statistical change in atmospheric variables (temperature, precipitation, humidity etc). It has been occurring ever since the Earth came into existence, far before humans even set foot on the planet: our climate has been fluctuating between warm periods and ice ages, with further variations within. In fact, we are living in a warm interglacial period in the middle of an ice age.

Global warming has often been portrayed in apocalyptic tones, whether from the mouth of the media or environmental groups: the daily news tell of natural disasters happening at a frightening pace, of crop failures due to strange weather, of mass extinctions and coral die-outs. When the devastating tsunami struck Southeast Asia years ago, some said it was the wrath of God against human mistreatment of the environment; when hurricane Katrina dealt out a catastrophe, others said it was because of (America’s) failure to deal with climate change. Science gives the figures and trends, and people take these to extremes.

One immediate problem with blaming climate change for every weather-related disaster or phenomenon is that it reduces humans’ responsibility of mitigating or preventing it. If natural disasters are already, as their name suggests, natural, adding the tag ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ emphasizes the dominance of natural forces, and our inability to do anything about it. Surely, humans cannot undo climate change? Even at Cancun, amid the carbon cuts that have been promised, questions are being brought up on whether they are sufficient to reverse our actions and ‘save’ the planet.  Yet the talk about this remote, omnipotent force known as climate change obscures the fact that, we can, and have always been, thinking of ways to reduce the impact of natural hazards. Forecasting, building better infrastructure and coordinating more efficient responses – all these are far more desirable to wading in woe. For example, we will do better at preventing floods in Singapore at tackling the problems rather than singing in praise of God.

I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback

clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping to space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.

A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid. It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy. They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to "create stress". The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption.

And tax accountants damage the country by devising schemes to cut the amount of money available to the government, the research suggests. By contrast, child minders and waste recyclers are also doing jobs that create net wealth to the country.

a new form of job evaluation to calculate the total contribution various jobs make to society, including for the first time the impact on communities and environment.

Few things are more crooked in India than the discourse on free speech and its relation to violence. Rather than focusing on the basic framework governing speech, the debate quickly descends into the politics of double standards.

The first is, could Husain have gotten away with taking artistic liberties with Islam the way he did with Hindu icons? On this view free speech cases are not about free speech. They are the tests of two things. Does the state favour one community over the other in the way it interprets what is offensive and what is permissible?

Second, what exactly are the protocols that govern offensive art? Are these standards applied uniformly across different domains? And third, whether Husain’s acceptance of Qatari citizenship is exactly a ringing endorsement of the values of a liberal democracy? These political questions will continue to cloud the fundamental issue: can India as a society handle freedom of expression in a way that befits a liberal democracy?

a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature.

THE primacy of this ideal is very recent. In the late 1970s, clearly a full thirty years after World War II, it all came about quite abruptly. And the ascendancy of rights as we now understand them came as a response, in part, to developments in the academy.

There were versions of utilitarianism, some scornful of rights (with Jeremy Bentham describing them as “nonsense upon stilts”), others that accepted that rights have important social functions (as in John Stuart Mill), but none of them asserted that rights were fundamental in ethical and political thinking.

There were various kinds of historicism—the English thinker Michael Oakeshott’s conservative traditionalism and the American scholar Richard Rorty’s postmodern liberalism, for example—that viewed human values as cultural creations, whose contents varied significantly from society to society. There was British theorist Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, which held that while some values are universally human, they conflict with one another in ways that do not always have a single rational solution. There were also varieties of Marxism which understood rights in explicitly historical terms.

I had the chance to sift through TIME's decades of environment coverage. I came to two conclusions: First, we were writing stories about virtually the same subjects 40 years ago as we do now. (Air pollution, endangered species, the polluted oceans, dwindling natural resources.) Second, our coverage of climate change has been really scary — by which I mean, we've emphasized the catastrophic threats of global warming in dire language.

Scientists were telling us that global warming really had the potential to wreck the future of the planet, and we wanted to get that message across to readers — even if it meant scaring the hell out of them.

According to forthcoming research by the Berkeley psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, when people are shown scientific evidence or news stories on climate change that emphasize the most negative aspects of warming — extinguished species, melting ice caps, serial natural disasters — they are actually more likely to dismiss or deny what they're seeing. Far from scaring people into taking action on climate change, such messages seem to scare them straight into denial.

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Why is it considered to be commendable?  Some claim that forgiveness is merely about ridding oneself of vengeful anger; do that, and you have forgiven.  But if you were able to banish anger from your soul simply by taking a pill, would the result really be forgiveness?

The timing of forgiveness is also disputed. Some say that it should wait for the offender to take responsibility and suffer due punishment, others hold that the victim must first overcome anger altogether, and still others that forgiveness should be unilaterally bestowed at the earliest possible moment.  But what if you have every good reason to be angry and even to take your sweet revenge as well?  Is forgiveness then really to be commended? Some object that it lets the offender off the hook, confesses to one’s own weakness and vulnerability, and papers over the legitimate demands of vengeful anger.  And yet, legions praise forgiveness and think of it as an indispensable virtue

Many people assume that the notion of forgiveness is Christian in origin, at least in the West, and that the contemporary understanding of interpersonal forgiveness has always been the core Christian teaching on the subject.  These contestable assumptions are explored by David Konstan in “Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea.”  Religious origins of the notion would not invalidate a secular philosophical approach to the topic, any more than a secular origin of some idea precludes a religious appropriation of it.  While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness.

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties.

the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Question #1: Does this mean I don’t have to believe in climate change? Me: I’m afraid not. One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims. In poll after poll, Americans have dismissed two of the most robust and widely tested theories of modern science: evolution by natural selection and climate change. These are theories that have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that such theories won’t change or get modified – the strength of science is that nothing is settled.) Instead of wasting public debate on creationism or the rhetoric of Senator Inhofe, I wish we’d spend more time considering the value of spinal fusion surgery, or second generation antipsychotics, or the verity of the latest gene association study. The larger point is that we need to be a better job of considering the context behind every claim. In 1952, the Harvard philosopher Willard Von Orman published “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In the essay, Quine compared the truths of science to a spider’s web, in which the strength of the lattice depends upon its interconnectedness. (Quine: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) One of the implications of Quine’s paper is that, when evaluating the power of a given study, we need to also consider the other studies and untested assumptions that it depends upon. Don’t just fixate on the effect size – look at the web. Unfortunately for the denialists, climate change and natural selection have very sturdy webs.

biases are not fraud. We sometimes forget that science is a human pursuit, mingled with all of our flaws and failings. (Perhaps that explains why an episode like Climategate gets so much attention.) If there’s a single theme that runs through the article it’s that finding the truth is really hard. It’s hard because reality is complicated, shaped by a surreal excess of variables. But it’s also hard because scientists aren’t robots: the act of observation is simultaneously an act of interpretation.

(As Paul Simon sang, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.”) Most of the time, these distortions are unconscious – we don’t know even we are misperceiving the data. However, even when the distortion is intentional it’s still rarely rises to the level of outright fraud. Consider the story of Mike Rossner. He’s executive director of the Rockefeller University Press, and helps oversee several scientific publications, including The Journal of Cell Biology.  In 2002, while trying to format a scientific image in Photoshop that was going to appear in one of the journals, Rossner noticed that the background of the image contained distinct intensities of pixels. “That’s a hallmark of image manipulation,” Rossner told me. “It means the scientist has gone in and deliberately changed what the data looks like. What’s disturbing is just how easy this is to do.” This led Rossner and his colleagues to begin analyzing every image in every accepted paper. They soon discovered that approximately 25 percent of all papers contained at least one “inappropriately manipulated” picture. Interestingly, the vast, vast majority of these manipulations (~99 percent) didn’t affect the interpretation of the results. Instead, the scientists seemed to be photoshopping the pictures for aesthetic reasons: perhaps a line on a gel was erased, or a background blur was deleted, or the contrast was exaggerated. In other words, they wanted to publish pretty images. That’s a perfectly understandable desire, but it gets problematic when that same basic instinct – we want our data to be neat, our pictures to be clean, our charts to be clear – is transposed across the entire scientific process.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

This year will fundamentally change how we think about and buy access to prospects, namely keywords. It is the dawn of paid search without keywords.

Google's search results were dominated by the "10 blue links" -- simple headlines, descriptions, and URLs to entice and satisfy searchers. Until it wasn't. Universal search wove in images, video, and real-time updates.

For most of its history, too, AdWords been presented in a text format even as the search results morphed into a multimedia experience. The result is that attention was pulled towards organic results at the expense of ads.

wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.

It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.

Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.

If you know only one language, you live only once. A man who knows two languages is worth two men. He who loses his language loses his world. (Czech, French and Gaelic proverbs.)

The hypothesis first put forward fifty years ago by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf—that our language significantly affects our experience of the world—is making a comeback in various forms, and with it no shortage of debate.

The idea that language shapes thought was taboo for a long time, said Dan Slobin, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the ice is breaking.” The taboo, according to Slobin, was largely due to the widespread acceptance of the ideas of Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. Chomsky proposed that the human brain comes equipped at birth with a set of rules—or universal grammar—that organizes language. As he likes to say, a visiting Martian would conclude that everyone on Earth speaks mutually unintelligible dialects of a single language.

A mere two years after the passage of the economic stimulus package, the now Republican-controlled House of Representatives have started swinging their budget cutting axe at scientific research and higher education.One point stood out in the midst of all this "fiscal responsibility" talk:The House bill does not specify cuts to five of the Office of Science's six programs, namely, basic energy sciences, high-energy physics, nuclear physics, fusion energy sciences, and advanced scientific computing. However, it explicitly whacks funding for the biological and environmental research program from $588 million to $302 million, a 49% reduction that would effectively zero out the program for the remainder of the year. The program supports much of DOE's climate and bioenergy research and in the past has funded much of the federal government's work on decoding the human genome. - Science , 25 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6020 pp. 997-998 DOI: 10.1126/science.331.6020.997 Do the terms Big Oil, Creationism/Intelligent Design come to your mind?

In other somewhat related news, tenure rights are being weakened in Louisiana and state legislatures are trying to have greater control over how colleges are run. It is hard not to see that there seems to be a coordinated assault on academia (presumably since many academics are seen by the Republican right as leftist liberals.)Lawmakers are inserting themselves even more directly into the classroom in South Carolina, where a proposal would require professors to teach a minimum of nine credit hours per semester."I think we need to have professors in the classroom and not on sabbatical and out researching and doing things to that effect," State Rep. Murrell G. Smith Jr., a Republican, told the Associated Press.I think they are attempting to turn research universities into trade/vocational schools.

Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, along with his students, has been studying the sex work industry since the 1990s. In a recent article for Wired, Venkatesh describes how the business has changed over the past couple of decades.

Technology has played a fundamental role in this change. No self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light. The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue. As the trade has grown less risky and more lucrative, it has attracted some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income.