It’s Friday, and you know what the means: time to clear out the lunchtime news-chum links:
- Psychohistory. There have been a few interesting articles related to privacy this week. For example, a recent study has shown that personal log-in information often leaks to advertisers, especially as part of image retrieval. For example, trying to log on to the Wall Street Journal website and using the wrong password sent the user’s email address to seven companies. Changing user settings on the video sharing site Metacafe sent the person’s first name, last name, birthday, email address, physical address and phone numbers to two companies. Another interesting article talked about how IARPA (Intelligence ARPA) is funding a research proposal to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for “big data”. The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries. It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion, something that has been pursued independently by civilian researchers and by companies like Google.
- Saving Money. In a proposal that seems to come up every couple of years, lawmakers have proposed replacing the $1 bill with a $1 coin. If successful, this would actually save money, as coins last a lot longer, and are cheaper to handle. The LA Times is in favor of it. Of course, this seems to neglect the fact that the US is continually minting dollar coins, and no one is using them–in fact, it costing billions just to store them. Bright ideas don’t always work out.
- Purity of Essence. Those “Dr. Strangelove” fans will recognize the phrase, built out of a concern about floridation of water. It appears that all Dr. Strangelove needed was a bad economy. More and more cities are abandoning floridation of water because it is too expensive.
- Fighting Evil. A church in Kansas City is fighting evil in a different way. They are praying 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, continuously since 1999. It obviously hasn’t work; after all, we elected ____(insert_politician_name)_____.
- Going to the Hills. Those who live in LA know Bunker Hill. KCET has an interesting article on two other hills that no longer exist: Poundcake Hill and Ft. Moore Hill.
- Occupy …. Lastly, it appears the Occupy Movement has come to Northridge, CA.
