links for 2009-02-17

"Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their asses against overzealous privacy claims or their right to hang on to data under some jurisdiction’s stringent laws instead. If I really wanted to know, I’d ask Facebook, which nobody, including the authors of the article above, seems to have bothered doing.

"Treat Facebook with some caution, people. But you should be treating every web site, particularly free/ad-supported sites, that has your personal with that kind of caution. if the advantages of using the site outweigh the privacy risks, enjoy Facebook or Livejournal or whatever. If not, don’t set up an account. It’s that simple."

"MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math’s ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality?"

"It’s hard to know what that means, exactly, to "believe in" or "not believe in" evolution. It’s like not believing in Missouri, or not believing in thermal conduction. Those two examples are a bit different from one another, but they both get at aspects of what this odd sort of disbelief entails."

"That the “business model” works for business if of course an arguable proposition. One might well ask “Which business model are we talking about?” Is it the Enron model? Adelphia? Lehman Brothers? You get the idea. As academics we owe it to ourselves to be more precise about the terms we use.

"We should stop our unexamined admiration for something we do not understand and concentrate on the “education model.” The “business model” is the wrong model for education. We need to reaffirm what it is, beyond “technical” knowledge of a subject, that we wish our students to learn."

"It struck me though, that asking questions of total strangers is both a distinctively journalistic activity and one that implies and requires a special kind of professional license. In fact, “Journalists do interviews” comes much closer to a definition of what is distinctive about journalism than formulations like “journalists report news, bloggers do opinion”."

You’re not really saving money if the cheaper flight includes a layover at O’Hare.

"One quick clue that the criminal justice system is probably not the best venue for addressing the sexting crisis? A survey of the charges brought in the cases reflects that—depending on the jurisdiction—prosecutors have charged the senders of smutty photos, the recipients of smutty photos, those who save the smutty photos, and the hapless forwarders of smutty photos with the same crime: child pornography. Who is the victim here and who is the perpetrator? Everybody and nobody."

George W. Bush: the seventh worst President.