Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them

• Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them

  tags: Facebook

  • Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary.
  • What do these changes mean? And what should you do if you don’t like the prospect of automatically sharing your activity with everyone you know on Facebook?

  • Liking without logging in:

    The biggest change Facebook has launched will let any website you visit display a simple “like” button, for example on a story at CNN.com — although CNN has decided to use the term “recommend” instead. If you click that button, it will show all of your friends back on Facebook that you liked that story, by posting it on your Facebook wall. It will also show you — in the same box on the CNN site that has the “recommend” button — how many of your friends liked that story.

  • Some sites will be allowed to take this ability even further, and show you personalized content based on the details of your public profile at Facebook, which they will be able to read and interpret without asking you.
  • The easiest way out of all of these new features, of course, is to simply not log in to Facebook, or to cancel your account. In order to do that, you have to go to this page, down at the bottom, and click “deactivate.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Korean woman climber's Himalayan record challenged

• Korean woman climber's Himalayan record challenged

  tags: no_tag

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  • A Korean climber may this weekend become the first woman to scale the world's 14 highest peaks. It's one of the most formidable feats in mountaineering - but doubts have been creeping in about her right to claim the glory.

    A year ago three European women were leading the race to conquer all 14 mountains in the world above 8,000m high - Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner of Austria, Nives Meroi of Italy and Edurne Pasaban of Spain.

    But over four months in 2009 two rival South Korean climbers scaled an astonishing four peaks each, catapulting one of them, Oh Eun-Sun, to the top of the league table.

    She is now on the slopes of her final mountain of the 14, Annapurna, with a Korean TV crew, which is planning a two-hour live broadcast on Sunday, when it estimates she will reach the summit.

    Nothing can be taken for granted. But if she succeeds it will be a bitter blow to Edurne Pasaban, her nearest rival in the race, who ascended Annapurna herself on Saturday and is about to leave for Tibet to tackle the last peak on her list, Shisha Pangma.

  • But this week, after Pasaban's descent from Annapurna to Kathmandu,
  • She began to voice doubts that Oh had reached the top of the world's third-highest mountain, Kangchenjunga, which both of them tackled in May last year.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Does Chaos Have Meaning?

take a moment and listen to this brilliant presentation

clipped from www.nyas.org Does Chaos Have Meaning? Award-winning filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and astrophysicist Piet Hut discuss what chaos is and what it means when it comes to the universe.

When Social Fear Is Missing . . .

. . . So Are Racial Stereotypes, Shows Study of Children With Williams Syndrome

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2010) — Children with the genetic condition known as Williams syndrome have unusually friendly natures because they lack the sense of fear that the rest of us feel in many social situations. Now, a study reported in the April 13th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, suggests that children with Williams Syndrome are missing something else the rest of us have from a very tender age: the proclivity to stereotype others based on their race. The findings support the notion that social fear is at the root of racial stereotypes. The researchers say the results might also aid in the development of interventions designed to reduce discriminatory attitudes and behavior towards vulnerable or marginalized groups of society. "This is the first study to report the absence of racial stereotypes in any human population," said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim/University of Heidelberg

How Not to Raise a Bully

clipped from www.time.com Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person's shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality. Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths.

Iceland's Erupting Volcano

clipped from edition.cnn.com CNN's Gary Tuchman flies close to Iceland's erupting volcano and sees lightning bolts and glass shards and boulders thrown in the air. FULL STORY

Breaking News

Sources: Sunanda to give up stake. Sources: Formal announcement soon. Sources: Possible reprieve for Tharoor. Tharoor meets PM at 7 RCR.