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Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.

In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news.

The trite official theme of the movie - the evils of narrow-minded prejudice - could have sunk the whole project. But as in a lot of compelling fiction, the official theme of Crash contradicts the details of the story. If you are paying attention, it soon becomes obvious that virtually none of the characters suffer from "narrow-minded prejudice." No one makes up their grievances out of thin air. Instead, the characters mostly engage in statistical discrimination. They generalize from their experience to form stereotypes about the members of different ethnic groups (including their own!), and act on those stereotypes when it is costly to make case-by-case judgments (as it usually is). In the story, moreover, stereotypes are almost invariably depicted as statistically accurate. Young black men are more likely to be car thieves; white cops are more likely to abuse black suspects; and Persians have bad tempers. Of course, the story also makes the point that some members of these groups violate the stereotype. But that "insight" is basic to all statistical reasoning.

the rule in Crash is that busy people see others as average members of their groups until proven otherwise.

It is particularly interesting that Crash illustrates one of the deep truths of models of statistical discrimination: The real social conflict is not between groups, but within groups. People who are below-average for their group make life worse for people who are above-average for their group. Women who get job training and then quit to have children hurt the careers of single-minded career women, because they reduce the profitability of the average woman. This lesson is beautifully expressed in the scene where the successful black t.v. producer (Terrence Howard) chews out the black teen-ager (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who unsuccessfully tried to car-jack him: You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.

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.

There are two kinds of quan­ti­ties in the world. Stock is a sta­tic value: money in the bank, or trees in the for­est. Flow is a rate of change: fif­teen dol­lars an hour, or three-thousand tooth­picks a day.

stock and flow is the mas­ter metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascenascen­dant these days, for obvi­ous reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.

A recent editorial in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade raises some interesting points about the nature of basic science research – primarily that its’ risky.

As I have pointed out about the medical literature, researcher John Ioaniddis has explained why most published studies turn out in retrospect to be wrong. The same is true of most basic science research – and the underlying reason is the same. The world is complex, and most of our guesses about how it might work turn out to be either flat-out wrong, incomplete, or superficial. And so most of our probing and prodding of the natural world, looking for the path to the actual answer, turn out to miss the target.

research costs considerable resources of time, space, money, opportunity, and people-hours. There may also be some risk involved (such as to subjects in the clinical trial). Further, negative studies are actually valuable (more so than terrible pictures). They still teach us something about the world – they teach us what is not true. At the very least this narrows the field of possibilities. But the analogy holds in so far as the goal of scientific research is to improve our understanding of the world and to provide practical applications that make our lives better. Wade writes mostly about how we fund research, and this relates to our objectives. Most of the corporate research money is interested in the latter – practical (and profitable) applications. If this is your goal, than basic science research is a bad bet. Most investments will be losers, and for most companies this will not be offset by the big payoffs of the rare winners. So many companies will allow others to do the basic science (government, universities, start up companies) then raid the winners by using their resources to buy them out, and then bring them the final steps to a marketable application. There is nothing wrong or unethical about this. It’s a good business model.

most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.

In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.

Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. "Everybody has the ideas — don't stress, don't worry, don't work so hard, retire and go play golf," says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. "We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived."

At the core of their 20 years of research is a study started by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman died in 1956, but other researchers carried on the study. One participant was biologist Ancel Keys, whose life-long work helped popularize the Mediterranean diet. He died in 2004 at age 100. He enjoyed gardening as an activity much of his life.

if your activities rise or stay high in middle age, you definitely stay healthier and live longer," says Martin, a research psychologist at University of California-Riverside.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

With a strong focus on speed, the Chrome OS promises nearly instant boot times of about 7 seconds for users to login to their computers.

t will not be available as a download to run and install. Instead, Chrome OS is only shipping on specific hardware from manufacturers Google has partnered with. That means if you want Chrome OS, you’ll have to purchase a Chrome OS device.

Chrome OS netbooks will not have traditional hard disk drives — they will rely on non-volatile flash memory and internet-based storage for saving all of your data.

Popular Science explains the rationale: China and other regimes around the world inherently have an upper hand when it comes to cyber defense because their lack of civil liberty protections lets the government freely monitor online activity. Things like “deep packet inspection” (which gained notoriety during Iranian election protests back in 2009) that let governments monitor citizens traffic also let them monitor for unusual activity … The U.S. Internet, by virtue of its adherence civil liberties, is more like the wild west. Everyone does everything online anonymously, and while that’s great for liberties, it’s also dangerous when cyber criminals/foreign hackers are roaming the cyber countryside

The .secure zone would essentially mimic the way the internet is regulated in more oppressive regimes, creating a space where banks, government contractors and the government can do business without fear of being hacked. Keith Alexander, who has the totally not made-up title of Cyber Command Chief, and several lawmakers are pushing for the new infrastructure, saying it’s absolutely necessary for national security. While the vulnerability of our infrastructure is a major concern, we’d wager a lot of Americans might have a problem with a section of the internet where your right to privacy is nonexistent.

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)

Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

“It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

a New York Times article covered the stiff competition for entrance to public and private kindergartens in Manhattan for especially smart kids.  Whereas at one time teachers recommended students to these programs, today entrance to both public and private schools for gifted children is dependent entirely on test scores.

It’s unfair that entrance into kindergarten level programs is being gamed by people with resources, disadvantaging the most disadvantaged kids from the get go.  I think it’s egregious.  Many people will agree that this isn’t fair.

But the more insidious value, the one that almost no one would identify as problematic, is the idea that all parents should do everything they can to give their child advantages.  Even Ms. Stewart thinks so.  “They want to help their kids,” she said. “If I could buy it, I would, too.” Somehow, in the attachment to the idea that we should all help our kids get every advantage, the fact that advantaging your child disadvantages other people’s children gets lost.  If it advantages your child, it must be advantaging him over someone else; otherwise it’s not an advantage, you see?

According to the Basic Argument, it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. We can’t be ultimately morally responsible either way.

It may be that we stand condemned by Nietzsche: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far. It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness … (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 1886).

the novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote to me: “I see no necessary disjunction disjunction between having no free will (those arguments seem watertight) and assuming moral responsibility for myself. The point is ownership. I own my past, my beginnings, my perceptions. And just as I will make myself responsible if my dog or child bites someone, or my car rolls backwards down a hill and causes damage, so I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.”