Does Facebook Make Someone Social Offline?

THE GIST Facebook makes people more social in their lives offline.

THE SOURCE “Got Facebook? Investigating What’s Social About Social Media,” by S. Craig Watkins and H. Erin Lee, the University of Texas, Austin.

Were you creeped out by the ominous trailer for “The Social Network” (“I want you to notice, when I’m not around …”) and what it may say about you? Does logging on to Facebook for the fourth time today make you feel like a soulless shut-in?

If so, fear not: According to a cheery report out of the University of Texas, Austin, Facebook actually makes us more sociable. Surveying 900 current and recent college graduates nationwide, Craig Watkins and Erin Lee of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas examined the impact of Facebook on users’ social lives, concluding that “social media afford opportunities for new expressions of friendship, intimacy and community.”

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Wikipedia Seeking Female Contributors After Finding 85% Male Authorship

“The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that administers Wikipedia, has now set itself a target of 25 per cent female contributors by 2015. The initiative is not about gender equality, the Foundation says, but is an effort to improve the quality of Wikipedia.

“This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the New York Times.” Full Story

(pictured right: Jimmy Wales in Kimono showing his feminine side)

A Blot on Lincoln Historians

These facts remain true: on April 14, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln sent a routine, one-sentence, handwritten order to Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general, pardoning a California soldier, Private Patrick Murphy, who had been sentenced to be shot for desertion. “This man is pardoned, and hereby ordered to be discharged from the service,” the president wrote.

The original manuscript was never a secret, nor, until recently, a particularly well-known document. It has long resided at the National Archives in Washington, and it appeared in print more than half a century ago as part of the eight-volume “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln” (Volume 7, Page 298, to be exact). It is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pardons Lincoln issued during the Civil War to commute the death sentences of accused deserters, sleeping sentries and other offenders.

Yet for the last decade, the Murphy order has been just about the most famous Lincoln pardon of all, because its apparent date, April 14, 1865, made it one of the last things Lincoln wrote before his assassination at Ford’s Theater. Its significance was pointed out in 1998 by Thomas Lowry, a Virginia psychiatrist, who was immediately lauded as a leading Lincoln scholar. But in the last two days the document has become even more famous — as an egregious fake, or more accurately, an authentic document allegedly “doctored” to make it seem more than it really was.

Yesterday, the National Archives announced that Dr. Lowry had admitted that he had used ink to change the date “1864” to the more dramatic “1865.” Dr. Lowry, it seems, simply wanted the publicity for “unearthing” a relic testifying to Lincoln’s compassion and reverence for life even hours before his own death.

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Amazon Sells More ebooks than Hardcover and Paperbacks

“July 19, 2010 marked the day that Amazon’s digital book sales eclipsed the sales of hardcover books, and it barely took half a year for those e-book sales to also overtake the sales of paperbacks. According to the ouftit’s latest earnings release, “Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.” The company had surmised that this would happen by Q2 of this year, but it clearly went down a lot earlier than even it expected. Bezos and co. also sold through $12.95 billion worth of goods, representing The Jungle’s first $10 billion quarter.”  Story

Stanley Fish’s Top Five Sentences

“In his new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, literary critic, legal scholar, and New York Times online columnist Stanley Fish offers readers a guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.  Here’s the first of his five favorites:

John Bunyan (from The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678): “Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began crying after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! Life! eternal life.”

In this sentence, Bunyan makes us feel the cost paid by someone (anyone) who turns his back on the human ties that bind and surrenders to the pull of a glory he cannot even see.”  Full List

More Privacy Coming to a Browser Near You

“Following increased pressure from the FTC, Google and Mozilla are introducing opt-out features to their Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Soon, users will have the option to stop personalized advertisements, ads tailored to your Web-surfing habits that have sparked significant privacy concerns.

Last month, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection proposed a “Do Not Track” tool to curb concerns over personalized or behavioral advertising. The FTC hoped the tool might be similar to the “Do Not Call” registry — the system that deterred telemarketers from causing so many headaches — but offered very few technical details.”  Story

Let’s Make January 24, Clean Your Hedgehog Day!

The iPad Now Can Take Command of Computers

“It has long been possible to control one PC or Mac from another, legally and with permission. Though the process can be tricky to set up, companies often use it as a maintenance and training tool, and some consumers use it to help others solve computer problems, or to reach back to their home or office machines while on the road to access information. But what about remotely controlling a PC or Mac from the newest category of digital device, a multitouch tablet? Well, it turns out there are apps for that.” Full article

Drug to Fight Melanoma Prolonged Life in Trial

“Advanced melanoma patients taking an experimental drug aimed at a particular mutation in their tumors lived longer than patients who did not receive the drug in a decisive clinical trial, the drug’s manufacturer, Roche, said Wednesday. The results pave the way for Roche to seek approval to market the drug, which shrank tumors for an average of six months in earlier trials but had not yet been proven to prolong survival. Developed by Plexxikon, a small biotechnology company in Berkeley, Calif., it is based on an understanding of cancer’s most basic molecular workings that is seen as a potential key to providing more lasting treatments for melanoma and other cancers.” Continued.

Happy birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

“This is the 202nd anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most posthumously celebrated authors. When he was 40, Poe was found disheveled and ranting in Baltimore and was taken to a hospital, where he died broke and drunk — or poisoned, or of a brain tumor, or of rabies, depending on which account you prefer.

He left behind lasting short stories — “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Purloined Letter” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” — as well as a legacy that credits his mysterious and macabre oeuvre as being the beginning of American detective fiction and helping to create science fiction. He was also a poet.” Continue.