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but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.

At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. But first, some definitions: every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments. Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm: First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years. Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example. And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.

Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed. It’s worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends’ feeds before anyone has interacted with them.

To quote, "most noteworthy was the shift in e-mail usage, particularly among young people. Total Web-based e-mail use was down eight percent last year, led by a walloping 59 percent drop among 12 to 17 year olds." I must reemphasize, the data is only for Web-based e-mail usage (think Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.) and that's an important distinction. A decline is a decline, but this certainly doesn't fully cover how e-mail is consumed in today's digital world.

Mark Zuckerberg offered this at the Facebook Messaging announcement: "High school kids don't use e-mail, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other."

There are two significant issues that must be added to the conversation though: Mobile's impact: The typical smartphone user spends almost half of her time on e-mail. This makes comScore's metrics marginal since it evaluated only Web-based e-mail usage. As e-Dialog CEO John Rizzi thoughtfully points out on a recent blog post: "In the 18-24 age group, unique visits increased 9%, while time spent decreased 10%. To me this points to the increasing use of mobile to triage inboxes on the go, and the desktop inbox being used to access specific e-mails and perform tasks like getting a code for a sale, or composing an e-mail reply that would be too onerous on a mobile phone. In fact, comScore found that 30% of respondents are viewing e-mail on their mobile phone, a 36% increase from 2009, and those using mobile e-mail daily increased 40% on average." Pew Internet recently evaluated how Internet users of different age groups spent their time online. Guess what? Even 90 to 100 percent of Millennials (ages 18-33) used e-mail. As you can see in the chart, below, e-mail was the top activity across all age groups.*

The past few years have seen a marked decline in the percentage of Americans who believe what scientists say about climate, with belief among conservatives falling especially fast. It's true that the science community has hit some bumps — the IPCC was revealed to have made a few dumb errors in its recent assessment, and the "Climategate" hacked emails showed scientists behaving badly. But nothing changed the essential truth that more man-made CO2 means more warming; in fact, the basic scientific case has only gotten stronger. Yet still, much of the American public remains unconvinced — and importantly, last November that public returned control of the House of Representatives to a Republican party that is absolutely hostile to the basic truths of climate science.

facts and authority alone may not shift people's opinions on climate science or many other topics. That was the conclusion I took from the Climate, Mind and Behavior conference, a meeting of environmentalists, neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists that I attended last week at the Garrison Institute in New York's Hudson Valley. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who select from the choices presented to us for maximum individual utility — indeed, that's the essential principle behind most modern economics. But when you do assume rationality, the politics of climate change get confusing. Why would so many supposedly rational human beings choose to ignore overwhelming scientific authority?

Maybe because we're not actually so rational after all, as research is increasingly showing. Emotions and values — not always fully conscious — play an enormous role in how we process information and make choices. We are beset by cognitive biases that throw what would be sound decision-making off-balance. Take loss aversion: psychologists have found that human beings tend to be more concerned about avoiding losses than achieving gains, holding onto what they have even when this is not in their best interests. That has a simple parallel to climate politics: environmentalists argue that the shift to a low-carbon economy will create abundant new green jobs, but for many people, that prospect of future gain — even if it comes with a safer planet — may not be worth the risk of losing the jobs and economy they have.

Extremists are increasingly turning to cyberspace to spread their message.Individuals who say they are affiliated with the Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan have started using Twitter. Several other Internet forums also operate in the UK for jihadist groups, such as Islamic Awakening. Many sites have been left alone so message traffic can be monitored.Governments around the world are now considering how cybercrimes can be prosecuted under existing international laws and whether a cyberattack could someday be considered an act of war.

"A recipe for cupcakes is better than a recipe for bombs, but it would been more productive if they had put up counter-arguments to al-Qaida," said James Brandon with the London-based Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremist organization. "They could have also attacked Awlaki himself. It should be about discrediting these individuals."

Q. The debate over climate science has involved very complex physical models and rarefied areas of scientific knowledge. What role do you think social scientists have to play, given the complexity of the actual physical science?

A. We have to think about the process by which something, an idea, develops scientific consensus and a second process by which is developed a social and political consensus. The first part is the domain of data and models and physical science. The second is very much a social and political process. And that brings to the fore a whole host of value-based, worldview-based, cognitive and cultural dimensions that need to be addressed.

Social scientists, beyond economists, have a lot to say on cognition, perceptions, values, social movements and political processes that are very important for understanding whether the public accepts the conclusions of a scientific body.

Being constantly reachable makes butler lies necessary to many people, and the Cornell researchers concluded in a subsequent study that ambiguities inherent in traditional texting also made them easier.

Yet technology is already laying siege to the butler lie. Services like BlackBerry Messenger enable mutual users to track when their texts are read, effectively torpedoing the “sorry, phone died last night” excuse. “Friend tracking” applications like Google Latitude allow people to geographically pinpoint their friends’ mobile phones. So much for “stuck in traffic” when you really overslept.

eople are already adapting, finding how to circumvent BlackBerry Messenger and read texts undetected, Dr. Birnholtz said. Others form “lie clubs,” groups who back up one another’s phony texts. But if technology has spawned new ruses, are we actually lying more? So far, researchers say no.

Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.

The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

Chinese citizens are busy dissecting and taunting the meeting on social media. While Premier Wen Jiabao was pledging that the government would “quickly” reverse the widening gap between rich and poor—last year he said it would do so “gradually”—Chinese Web users were scrutinizing photos of delegates arriving for the meeting, and posting photos of their nine-hundred dollar Hermès belts and Birkin and Celine and Louis Vuitton purses that retail for car prices. As Danwei points out, an image that has been making the rounds with particular relish shows the C.E.O. of China Power International Development Ltd, Li Xiaolin, in a salmon-colored suit from Emilio Pucci’s spring-summer 2012 collection—price: nearly two thousand dollars. Web user Cairangduoji paired her photo with the image of dirt-covered barefoot kids in the countryside and the comment: “That amount could help two hundred children wear warm clothes, and avoid the chilly attacks of winter.” And it appended a quote from Li, of the salmon suit, who purportedly once said, “I think we should open a morality file on all citizens to control everyone and give them a ‘sense of shame.’” (This is no ordinary delegate: Li Xiaolin happens to be the daughter of former Premier Li Peng, who oversaw the crackdown at Tiananmen Square.)

Another message making the rounds uses an official high-res photo of the gathering to zoom in on delegates who were captured fast asleep or typing on their smart phones.

Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be.

some people do feel that certain issues are so important that there should be cause in political debates to overlook lies or misrepresentations in service of a "larger truth" (Yellow cake, anyone?). I have seen this attitude for years in the climate change debate (hey look, just today), and often condoned by scientists and journalists alike.

the "global warming: yes or no?" debate has become an obstacle to effective policy action related to climate. Several of these colleagues suggested that I should downplay the policy implications of my work showing that for a range of phenomena and places, future climate impacts depend much more on growing human vulnerability to climate than on projected changes in climate itself (under the assumptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). One colleague wrote, "I think we have a professional (or moral?) obligation to be very careful what we say and how we say it when the stakes are so high." In effect, some of these colleagues were intimating that ends justify means or, in other words, doing the "right thing" for the wrong reasons is OK.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did.

American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.

Following the incident in which a student posted an ‘academic blacklist’ of international students, The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sent out an email warning to its students about the school’s regulatory guidelines on internet postings.

The email, titled “Message on Exercising Freedom of Expression Responsibility“, warned students in particular not to ‘make comments that cause hatred or dissatisfaction with the Singapore justice system’ and not to create ‘web pages/blogs containing information on religion or politics’ unless the student has ‘acquired proper licences from the Media Development Authority AND the written approval of the University.’

While the list of regulations has a few sound guidelines on exercising exercising free speech on the internet, it makes no case to explain why dissatisfaction with the Singapore Justice system, if there was ever one, could not be freely expressed by its students. At the same time, the insistence on a complete blanket ban on blogs that discuss politics or religion without acquiring ‘proper licenses’ from MDA and the school contravenes the very tenets of freedom of speech.