Thank you!

(…) Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. (…)

And further down:

(…) As mentioned above, we do not own or operate Facebook-enhanced applications or websites. That means that when you visit Facebook-enhanced applications and websites you are making your Facebook information available to someone other than Facebook. To help those applications and sites operate, they receive publicly available information automatically when you visit them, (…)

This is just shocking to be honest. I knew Facebook was going this direction but it is still amazing when you actually read it in their official policy.

The information they make public is enough to develop detailed maps of their users’ social connections and obtain details on their interests. Let’s say a certain John Doe makes good use of his account’s privacy settings and switches them to the most restrictive level. Majority of the content he shares thus becomes available only to his friends. The problem is he has no control over his friends’ accounts and therefore if they are less concerned about what can be discovered about them and what they post on Facebook, additional information on John Doe may be available indirectly without his approval.

This is true especially when one takes into account the default settings which are set to allow search engines and everybody else see  substantial amount of user profile’s information. This, in turn, can have both personal and political ramifications if, for example, a user is a member of opposition movement in a country like Iran, where Twitter, Facebook and other web tools has already been used by the citizens to upload photographs, videos and other media inconvenient for present establishment or for taking part in politically sensitive debates. With current privacy setup, Facebook lost some of the networking appeal that could be harnessed by these people. It is just too risky now to try to network using the platform that allows everybody, including the state security apparatus, to easily gather information on one’s social circle.

More details can be found in the Privacy Policy text linked earlier and also here:

• Facebook privacy issue overview byKevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over” at ReadWriteWeb
• Privacy update on The Facebook Blog
• “Iran, Facebook and the Limits of Online Activism” at Foreign Policy.
  

[When playing video games] we do not think about moral consequences of killing a fictional character, only about the score and weapons we get from eliminating the enemy.

This is disputable, especially when taken in the context of video games that make moral choices part of their core mechanics. In classic titles like “Fallout” or more recent ones like “Mass Effect”, options offered to the player bring different sets of consequences. If you shoot somebody you can take the loot with you but obviously you will not be able to get any assistance or to obtain more well paying tasks from this person. Your reputation will also suffer, at least with characters that happened to like the poor bastard you have just killed. In “Fallout” players can basically try to eliminate everyone in sight or just talk their way out of trouble. In “Mass Effect” the freedom to act is much more restricted but there are situations in which it is upon the player to pick between survival or extinction of an entire alien race or life and death of an important member of the team.

This way a unique story unfolds each time the game is played. Since rewards and penalties vary from option to option, the choices players make have both ethical and practical meaning. Sometimes ethics is pushed aside for a hefty monetary reward and sometimes building reputation wins over seemingly easier solutions like taking everybody down just in case. It is true that in real life we face completely different set of problems but the very nature of making decisions remains the same - it is still a struggle between what is ethical, emotionally convenient, practical or just prudent. This is how we discover moral values in life and how engaging narratives are created in video games - by letting the person (or the player) feel the burden of his or her actions.

Gaming is still about having fun but it does not mean it has to be light and easy. Like with great books or memorable movies - a solid dose of entertainment tastes better when sprinkled with bits of something more serious. Just don’t tell me you haven’t spent some time deciding the fate of Urdnot Wrex, even after getting rid of tens of stock enemies of all races without second thought!

References

1. Fizek, Sonia. “Gry na poważnie, czyli na czym polega ‘serious gaming’?”. Technopolis, 22 March 2010.
   http://technopolis.polityka.pl/2010/gry-na-powaznie-czyli-na-czym-polega-serious-gaming. The article is written in Polish and discusses games focusing not on entertainment but on exposing themes like terrorism, flu epidemic or drug abuse.

Why do cop movies and TV shows so often begin with an older (and often jaded) officer that is just about to retire? It is quite astounding how often this unrealistic plot trick is employed, and the psychological grounding seems weak at best.

Tyler Cowen answers:

(…)
If the officer is near retirement, we know we are watching a very dramatic story which will define the life and career of that officer for ever and ever. It is harder for the viewer to have the same feeling if the officer has four years, three months remaining on the force. Failure would not mean final failure.
 (…)

My comment:

There is another reason - the dramaturgy of the officer being close to relative safety of a retired policeman’s life after years of dealing with society’s worst elements. Characters like these often wait for their retirement hoping that fortune does not involve them in a particularly difficult and dangerous case. This adds to the tension as we know that such case is coming and that this is exactly what the movie is going to be about. Think Fincher’s “Seven” and detective William R. Somerset (Morgan Freeman).

Other readers make their contributions, too. Worth checking out!

This is, however, not a “law” in any sense. There is no obvious reason why consumers should behave this way and there is a need for a theory to back this assumption:^[1]

If prices change over time, people may act differently for numerous reasons including reasons which are not at all connected to the demand for a particular good. Put differently, to be completely certain that demand schedules are downward sloping, we must be able to observe an individual, or individuals, acting at two points in time where the only thing different is the price. This is obviously impossible. We can try and estimate demand schedules empirically but as a schedule, they do not really exist. Therefore, we cannot be certain that demand schedules are always downward sloping and we must  be in a position where we can provide an explanation even if we come across an estimated upward sloping demand.

To put it simply, there is no such thing as “law of demand”. Economists do have a theory of individual choice that allows them to derive it from more basic assumptions but it is not by any means elementary and should not be treated as obvious and without a need for further explanation.

References

1. Witztum, A. (2005). Introduction to Economics, p. 59. London: University of London Press.

Stunning.

As we (meaning the society as a whole) increase the overall level of capital accumulation, human resources like actors become more and more expensive, at least in general. Processing power and digital storage, on the other hand, tend to move in the opposite direction and get cheaper on a constant basis.

I think we all suspect what the future of acting is going to look like if we take the above into account.

I have updated the About page accordingly.

(…)

Indeed, the record industry seems to have forgotten the lesson of 70 years’ worth of radio: people who hear songs they like often go on to acquire those songs for their personal collections. It’s amazing to hear record industry executives deny that this will be the case, especially given that this was the dominant sales strategy for their industry for most of a century. Collecting is easier than it has ever been: you can store more music in less space and organise it more readily than ever before.

People will go on using streaming services, of course. They may even pay for them. But people will also go on downloading. Streaming won’t decrease downloading. If streaming is successful – that is, if it succeeds in making music more important to more people – then downloading will increase too. With that increase will come a concomitant increase in Big Content’s attacks on the privacy and due process rights of internet users, which, these days, is pretty much everyone.

(…)

He also describes this unique emotional space books occupy in our lives, both private and social:

(…)

And it’s not just me. It’s social. It’s across our entire society. If you’re making a short film, and you want to illustrate a society that’s falling into tyranny, you can just cut away to a scene of a pile of books burning, and everyone will know exactly what you meant. If you want to indicate that a character in a book is very sympathetic, and you mention how much she loves reading and going to the library, then your readers will immediately show sympathy for her. Books have this penumbra of virtues, they ooze virtue, and it’s long beyond anything rational or reasonable, because all of you who are people of the book know that there are many books that are absolutely unworthy of that virtue, and yet—and yet—when I worked in a bookstore and had to strip paperbacks to send them back, it was painful to tear the covers off of books. I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book every year.

(…)

Both articles are worth reading. Enjoy!

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Please, read the whole article and form your own opinion. Maybe I am overreacting but I have already expressed my distaste in the comment I have written under an article on “Climate Feedback”, Nature’s blog covering the subject of climate change.

The comment

I cannot believe how tasteless this editorial is. Not only the zealous tone and derogatory words such as “denialist” are things that should never happen in a respected scientific publication, Nature completely missed some important issues.

1. Defending science is not synonymous with defending particular scientists. Science is a mode of discovery, a process that is designed specifically to minimize the influence of human faults and biases on final results. What this editorial shows is tribal mentality on the part of the editorial staff and in this community such behavior should be nothing to be proud of. CRU scientists have not only been extremely rude (politeness is helpful but not necessary to do good science), they have been also careless about archiving the raw data used in their research and indices (or “value-added” data) they produce. They even admit they erased parts of it for reasons that just do not add up.
2. The stolen (?) emails do reveal a conspiracy. Organized efforts to withhold release of data subject to FOIA based on the person who made the requests constitute a conspiracy even though it is not the kind of global all-encompassing plot some people would like to find in the material that has been leaked. The same goes for making sure that “improper” e-mails have been deleted by every person involved.
3. I am not sure whether “Mike’s trick” is something truly legitimate. There are “tricks” in mathematics but we know they are correct because they are proven mathematical procedures for solving particular problems. From what I understand about how folks at Real Climate and Climate Audit describe the problem, “Mike’s trick” is joining two data series coming from completely different sources (proxies vs. instrumental readings) and then smoothing them as one. Is this something that should be done? Shouldn’t they, for example, be compared as two distinct series instead?

I am truly agnostic about scientific basis on which the AGW theory is built. I am not a climatologist therefore I cannot asses this field but I am interested in economic and political implications of policies that take climate science as granted. Policy making has its own quirks with special interest groups, lobbying and rent seeking kicking in whenever there is substantial amount of wealth to be redistributed. I would like to be sure that at least what is preached as science is indeed science.

Please, correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.