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One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup.

Both surveys asked similar questions, however, including whether climate change has occurred and whether humans were likely to be the primary cause. The scientific community, including all the major scientific organizations that have issued statements on the matter, has said yes to both of these questions, and the authors interpret their findings in light of that.

The UNH poll shows that a strong majority—in the 80-90 percent range—accepts that climate change is happening. The Gallup polls explicitly asked about global warming and got lower percentages, although it still found that a majority of the US thinks the climate is changing. Those who label themselves conservatives, however, are notably less likely to even accept that basic point; less than half of them do, while the majority of liberals and independents do.

Technology, of course, is playing a role both in recruiting members to extremist groups, as well as fueling pro-democracy and other movements--and that’s where Google’s interest lies. "Technology is a part of every challenge in the world, and a part of every solution,” Cohen tells Fast Company. "To the extent that we can bring that technology expertise, and mesh it with the Council on Foreign Relations’ academic expertise--and mesh all of that with the expertise of those who have had these experiences--that's a valuable network to explore these questions."

Cohen is the former State Department staffer who is best known for his efforts to bring technology into the country’s diplomatic efforts. But he was originally hired by Condaleezza Rice back in 2006 for a different--though related--purpose: to help Foggy Bottom better understand Middle Eastern youths (many of whom were big technology adopters) and how they could best "deradicalized." Last fall, Cohen joined Google as head of its nascent Google Ideas, which the company is labeling a "think/do tank."

This summer’s conference, "Summit Against Violent Extremism," takes place June 26-29 and will bring together about 50 former members of extremist groups--including former neo-Nazis, Muslim fundamentalists, and U.S. gang members--along with another 200 representatives from civil society organizations, academia, private corporations, and victims groups. The hope is to identify some common factors that cause young people to join violent organizations, and to form a network of people working on the issue who can collaborate going forward.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

the UK phone-hacking scandal is of a piece with the Murdochs’ transformation of news into propaganda: both reflect an assault on democracy’s essential walls of separation between media, the state, and political parties. The Murdochs are fusing these entities into a single unaccountable power that, as we see in Britain today, lacks any restraint or scruple.

too many people want what the News Corporation has been offering. And what too many people want can be dangerous to a civilized, law-based society.

As many of our readers and podcast listeners have now learned, author, colleague and friend Jennifer Michael Hecht has started an internet campaign on June 22nd using social media to accuse us of plagiarism.

Jennifer apparently believes that we in some form stole her ideas, as presented in her 2008 book, The Happiness Myth

We protested our innocence, emphasizing that the only areas of overlap between her book and our podcast concern a few very common topics about happiness (its treatment by Aristotle and Epicurus, so-called happiness “set points,” and the question of whether wealth is connected to happiness). These, we pointed out, are so fundamental to a discussion of happiness that they are practically mandatory in any treatment of it. It would be odd indeed to have a show on happiness and not mention the research on set points, or on income and happiness — sort of like talking about evolution without mentioning Darwin and natural selection. We also pointed out that said topics make up only a small fraction of those we discussed in the podcast, and of her book for that matter. These ideas are certainly not Jennifer’s original contributions (of which there are many genuine examples in her book); rather, they have been widely discussed in the media, academic journals, and in many popular press books, such as Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert, Authentic Happiness by Martin E. P. Seligman, and The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt.

The study aims to calculate the costs incurred as a consequence of crime, which includes "monetary loss in traditional terms" and "monetising the loss of life and trauma suffered by victims".Costs of crime prevention and enforcement will also be tallied. The study seeks to find out costs borne by private entities - such as security expenditure and insurance - as well as costs borne by public bodies such as proactive police patrols in anticipation of crime.The police also intend to calculate the costs incurred in response to crime - investigating cases, apprehending suspects as well as the costs expended by the State in prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating suspects.

While costs of crime prevention - such as installing alarm systems - and the State's response to crime could be measured, sociologist Paulin Straughan felt it might be "impossible" to measure the social costs of a spate of violence on a community. Social isolation and mistrust from these crimes would impact social capital on a community which would be difficult to estimate, she argued.However, the former Nominated Member of Parliament felt calculating the cost of crime would serve as "a reality check" for any society.

"We live in a world that is driven by economics," Associate Professor Straughan said. "We can't understand or appreciate unless it is documented in dollars and cents. So, this is one way of documenting it (crime) in dollars and cents to show you that every burglary cost you this (amount) … and highlight the importance of crime prevention."

The state-of-the-art data centers, meant to make Chongqing a big player in the cloud computing game, might attract business, but the locals certainly aren’t too happy about it [via IT World]: That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of “No dogs and no Chinese allowed,”a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities

A recent article in The New York Times reported that over 100 studies show a relationship between genes and criminality but that the environment plays a key role in the effects of this relationship: “Kevin Beaver, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said genetics may account for, say, half of a person’s aggressive behavior, but that 50 percent comprises hundreds or thousands of genes that express themselves differently depending on the environment. He has tried to measure which circumstances — having delinquent friends, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood — influence whether a predisposition to violence surfaces. After studying twins and siblings, he came up with an astonishing result: In boys not exposed to the risk factors, genetics played no role in any of their violent behavior. The positive environment had prevented the genetic switches — to use Mr. Pinker’s word — that affect aggression from being turned on. In boys with eight or more risk factors, however, genes explained 80 percent of their violence. Their switches had been flipped.”

“This idea that if something is genetic it’s deterministic is a misconception that we have to get over because saying that genes are involved in depression does not necessarily mean that someone who has certain genetic variants is doomed to become depressed, it just means that under certain circumstances, he or she may have to do certain things to help alleviate it, but it’s not unchangeable. You can change your brain, you can change your brain in many different ways and genetics is just one of many of these ways.”

In fact, environment plays the same crucial role for criminality as it does for obesity and depression. In an interview I did for a story in The Michigan Daily on depression research, Dr. Margit Burmeister, a professor of human genetics and a researcher in the Molecular and Biological Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan, explained the dangers the public oversimplifying the link between genetics and depression:

TOC, Mr Brown, Leong Sze Hian and other bloggers received the information from Tan’s office yesterday and honoured the embargo on the news.

As the presumptive government-endorsed candidate, Tan's move can be seen as a landmark in relations between the state and Singapore’s intrepid and often unruly alternative online media. Until now, the government has refused to treat any of these sites as engaging in bona fide journalism. Bloggers have long complained that government departments do not respond to requests for information. When The Online Citizen organised a pre-election forum for all political parties to share their ideas last December, the People’s Action Party would have nothing to do with it. TOC highlighted the ruling party’s conspicuous absence by leaving an empty chair on stage. The election regulations’ ban on campaigning on the “cooling off” day and polling day also discriminate against citizen journalism: only licenced news organisations are exempted.

The sudden change of heart is undoubtedly one result of May’s groundbreaking general election. Online media were obviously influential, and the government may have decided that it has no choice but to do business with them.

But some lines do have to be drawn if good government is to be possible, just as a zone of privacy in our personal and family lives is crucial to sustaining the relationships that matter most to us.

Some of WikiLeaks’ releases of sensitive material have been perfectly defensible on classic freedom-of-information grounds, exposing abuses that might otherwise have remained concealed. The helicopter gunship killings in Iraq, the corruption of former Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s family, and the paucity of progress in Afghanistan are, by this standard, fair game. None of this makes Julian Assange a Daniel Ellsberg (who 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US-government thinking on Vietnam). Nor does it put him in the same league with Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist who was murdered after refusing to stop investigating Russian human rights abuses. His stated motives seem too anarchic for that. Sometimes, however, whistles do need to be blown.

But some leaks are indefensible, and at least the sources must expect some punitive reckoning. This category includes leaks that put intelligence sources or other individuals at physical risk (as did some of WikiLeaks’ early releases on Afghanistan and Zimbabwe). It also includes leaks that genuinely prejudice intelligence methods and military operational effectiveness; expose exploratory positions in peace negotiations (invariably helping only spoilers); or disclose bottom lines in trade talks. What is clear in all of these cases is that the stakes are so high that it simply cannot be left to the judgment of WikiLeaks and media outlets to make the necessary calls without consulting relevant officials. Sensibly, US officials facilitated such consultations, on a “without prejudice” basis, in some of the early WikiLeaks cases.

The AMA this week formally denounced retouching pictures and asked ad agencies to consider setting stricter guidelines for how photos are manipulated before becoming advertisements.

Last year in France, members of parliament advocated attaching warning labels to imagery that had been digitally enhanced; lawmakers in England have also dabbled with the idea. Perhaps the AMA's new stance will be the nudge America needs to follow our European friends' lead. Unfortunately, our staggering eating disorder statistics seem to not be enough.

Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it. Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

“Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you,” Mansour told me in an e-mail. “Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.”

As CNET points out, Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. Section 3.2 states the following: You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. Mansour doesn’t care about this, as he says in the extension’s description: Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends.