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he three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group

“I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,”

Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror

“A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”

“If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.

“You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”

Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.

Commercial Spaceflight will see an increase of more than $150 million to a total of $848 million. That includes buying launches from commercial companies like SpaceX, and I’m all for that. That comes with a $300 million reduction to the Exploration Systems Development,

Earth Science: cut by $56 million (given that so many in Congress are climate change deniers who want to cut Earth-observing missions, I think this may be a mistake). Astrophysics: cut by $61 million (including mothballing the wonderful SOFIA aircraft unless a German partner can pony up the cash; see page 15 of the report). Planetary Science: cut by $65 million. That last one is almost a victory, given how the White House has tried to eviscerate planetary exploration over the past few years. But don’t be fooled; these cuts would hurt. A lot. (Note added after I wrote this article but before it was posted: Casey Dreier at The Planetary Society has more on this situation.)

Again, let me remind you that this is a budget request. Congress will have a different budget for NASA,

China is Africa’s top business partner, with trade exceeding $166 billion. But it is not all minerals.

Machinery makes up 29%.

Last summer China’s commerce minister, Chen Deming, said the number “exceeded $14.7 billion, up 60% from 2009”.

Until recently China concentrated on a few big resource-rich countries, including Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan and Zambia

Ethiopia and Congo, where minerals are scarce or hard to extract, are now getting more attention,

The first person to be expelled from Africa’s youngest country, South Sudan, was a Chinese: Liu Yingcai, the local head of Petrodar, a Chinese-Malaysian oil company and the government’s biggest customer, in connection with an alleged $815m oil “theft”.

Congo kicked out two rogue commodities traders in the Kivu region. Algerian courts have banned two Chinese firms from participating in a public tender, alleging corruption. Gabonese officials ditched an unfavourable resource deal. Kenyan and South African conservationists are asking China to stop the trade in ivory and rhino horn.

Yet a growing number of Africans say the Chinese create jobs, transfer skills and spend money in local economies.

Other popular fears triggered by China’s growing presence have also proved hollow. It has not stoked armed conflict. On the contrary, China has occasionally played peacemaker, although motivated by self-interest. Sudan and South Sudan are both big Chinese trade partners. When they hovered on the brink of war last year, China intervened diplomatically along with other powers.

Only in Africa’s largest economies has China become less popular. There it is increasingly seen as a competitor. Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president, who long cultivated Chinese contacts, was last year forced by domestic critics to change posture

This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post.

First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”

It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.

In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’

also wants to maintain the relationship.

When it was revealed that the NSA had inserted a ‘back door’ into the NIST standards to allow snooping, some of them felt betrayed. “We certainly had no idea that they were tampering with products or standards,” says Green.

“There was a sense of certain lines that NSA wouldn’t cross,” says Felten, “and now we’re not so sure about that.”

school and college students who checked Facebook at least once during a 15-minute study period achieved lower grades

Young adults who spend more time on Facebook are better at showing “virtual empathy” to their online friends. 

Online social networking can help introverted adolescents learn how to socialize behind the safety of various screens, ranging from a two-inch smartphone to a 17-inch laptop.

Social networking can provide tools for teaching in compelling ways that engage young students.

“Music collections always replace each other and radio always tends to be yet another choice,” he says. “Satellite didn’t kill FM. AM didn’t kill FM. (Streaming music) one more choice and one more device you can listen to the radio on.”

digital is an important growth area for the business, even if the $17 billion or so that advertisers spend on radio each year is slow to move over to the Web.

In 2012, Clear Channel made strange bedfellows when it joined forces with Pandora to lobby Congress to lower the rates their services were required to pay artists to stream their music online. The companies eventually backed down from that effort in order to focus on a different political tact.

Online, people “tend to have a favorite and then they bounce around a couple different services,”