A random roundup is what happens when I’m so busy (or lazy, or disorganized) that I start a number of blog posts over a period of several days, but never seem to finish or post any of them. So instead, I slam them together into one big one and pretend like I’m being conscientious. The latest crop includes some notes about Twitter, Facebook, Roadrunner and my old employer the Democrat & Chronicle.

Twitter is bad for you

In other news – if you can call it that – Twitter makes us less moral. Really. Scientists said so (Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass). Apparently, someone thinks that the stream of consciousness that characterizes much Twitter content is too fast to allow people to reflect on other people’s feelings. Do we need to use more smileys? Can you do smileys on Twitter? Having never used a smiley anywhere, I wouldn’t know. But surely those will make us more moral by putting our feelings out there for others to see, right?

Actually, the research seems to imply that Twitter is not good for teaching morality and that someone brought up on 140 character or less communication may have some deficiencies. So when raising children, remember to talk to them sometimes, not just Tweet at them.

Do I need to go into a rant about the poor quality of most science reporting now or can I get away with something under 140 characters, like “Are they kidding?”

Roadrunner updates

I warned in The Roadrunner Rip-off that Time Warner was running the risk of provoking government regulation by instituting completely unnecessary use caps on consumers. Some evidence begins to emerge to support that: New York Representative Goes After Time Warner’s Metered Broadband (Thanks to the hard Twtter work of Susan Beebe for bringing that to my attention). The rep in question is Eric Massa.

Now we have New York Senator Charles Schumer jumping on the anti-TW bandwagon (see Sen. Schumer to Get Involved in Bandwidth Battle? – again noticed in Susan Beebe’s Twitter stream!). While Senator Schumer does not appear to have promised anything, he is a powerful man and TW would be foolish not to take notice.

At the time, I wrote about TW’s plan, I wasn’t even thinking of individual reps grand standing for attention (or responding to constituent concerns, if you prefer). I was thinking that Internet service has become a utility, like the phone or electricity. New York state regulates utilities heavily. This alone indicates a willingness to put a lid on companies like Time Warner that they should have considered before moving toward instituting caps.

A very smart comment at TechDirt (Law To Ban Broadband Caps Moves Forward) points out that, rather than regulating caps away, it would be better to improve competition so that companies like TW would think twice before handing their competitors issues to use against them. And if politicians were that smart, cable executives might be too!

Update

You gotta love this: Time Warner Cable tells FCC to shut up about net neutrality. Apparently they’re feeling a little heat and rather than respond to customer rage by playing nicer, they’ve brought out the lawyers.  The bad news is, that approach sometimes works, though usually only in the short term.

Bigger update 4/6/2009 2:07 PM

Time Warner appears to have backed down. This was announced by Senator Schumer. I warned them not to get the politicians involved! See Time Warner Cable cancels Internet tier pricing plan. I’d be doing a victory dance except I figure this just means an across the board rate hike will be hitting any minute. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. The good guys won this one. Thanks to Ceejayoz of the fabulous Democrat & Chronicle IT department for getting this up on Twitter so fast.

Facebook Bad, too

Somewhat better reporting here from Jeremy Hsu at LiveScience.com about the correlation between Facebook use, reduced study times and reduced grades among college students. I say this one is better because the article (Facebook Users Get Worse Grades in College) points out that correlation is not causation, meaning in this case that no one is claiming that Facebook use is what causes the students who use it to get lower grades.

What no one covering this study seems to have noticed is that the “lower” grades of Facebook users averaged between 3.0 and 3.5. Those are passing grades. The high end of that range is roughly a B+. That’s not exactly terrible. So maybe Facebook isn’t as evil as Twitter after all. Of course, I use both of them so I guess I’m doomed to both immorality and passing but unspectacular grades.

Here’s Hoping I’m Wrong

News leaked this weak (Rochester: Bauer confirms for-pay website ‘option’) that the newspaper I used to work for, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is soon to launch a pay web site with premium multimedia content. I still know quite a few very good people at the D&C and, for their sakes, I hope this works out well for the paper.

Realistically, though, I think it’s about 5 years and a lot of layoffs too late. Pay-walls rarely work. In those instances when they do (The Wall Street Journal is the only one I can think of offhand) the product as a whole has a reputation for high quality niche content that attracts a wide audience with a fair amount of disposable income.

That doesn’t describe the D&C. Sorry folks but it really doesn’t. Even if the paper once had a rep for exceptional content (and those of us who remember the afternoon Times Union might dispute even that),what’s the niche? Rochester? Sorry but there are weekly papers in most of the suburbs and several TV stations covering the same area. It’s not “nichy” enough. Besides, the layoffs I mentioned above have likely gutted the ability to not only keep it up but add enough value to a pay site to attract more than a few die-hard D&C fans.

For a hint of the long-term prospects of walled off online newspaper content, see Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds.

This is one time where I wish I had something more positive to say than, “Good luck with that!”

Where I make snide – I mean informative – comments about stuff that caught my attention, instead of the usual long-winded ranting. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because often I see something, think of a paragraph or two, then get bored and wander away. But maybe sometimes a paragraph or two is enough! First up:

New Test For Detecting Fake Organic Milk

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this one. You mean there’s a problem with knock-offs of organic milk? Of course there is! Damn that supply and demand! People are willing to pay extra for a product they can’t identify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when there are distortions in the market. That’s what art fraud is all about, after all. Tell a collector you’ve discovered a brand new Vermeer, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in because even the experts can’t tell the difference! (It happened during World War 2. See The Forger’s Spell)

Here’s a thought: If you can’t tell the difference, then maybe it’s not worth the extra money.  (The milk, anyway. The fake Vermeer’s in the book I referenced were terrible. The experts were idiots, which is a lesson we’ll go into at great length some other time)

Martian Volcano Could Harbor Primitive Life

So could my septic tank. How does this kind of empty speculation get to be news? That’s one of my big complaints about science reporting and even a lot of so-called scientific studies. This is nothing! Anyone can have just as profound a thought as this after a couple beers! So what?

Patrick McGovern, one of the scientists whose study of Olympus Mons (that’s the volcano referred to in the headline) is discussed in the article, should be given credit for saying that the implication that life is possible there is the kind of thing that goes at the end of the paper, meaning it’s not the actual point of what he was studying. The point was to figure out the history of that monster volcano, in order to understand Mars better.

So why did the possibility of life get into the headline? Apparently because whatever editor wrote it didn’t think extra-terrestrial volcanoes were cool enough by themselves. That’s weird.

Google’s Eric Schmidt looks down his nose at Twitter

My first reaction was: so? He doesn’t have to use it if he doesn’t want to.

Then I thought, what are the odds this means that Google is going to roll out their own version of Twitter in about 2 weeks?

Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?

Wow. For those who don’t know, the detection of gravity waves is a BIG DEAL. Because until gravity waves are detected, we don’t really know if gravity is a wave (like we know sound and light are) or not. It makes sense, in the current state of physics knowledge for it to be so but that’s the thing about science: If you don’t have actual evidence, there’s still the chance you could be wrong. Even assuming it’s not wrong and gravity is a wave, detecting that wave would make it much easier to measure and develop better models of how it works.

Anyway, the story says that a physicist named Joe Weber claimed in 1987 to have detected gravity waves but no one believed him. The most likely source of the waves was a supernova that was detected around that time but other scientists calculated that gravity produced by that supernova would have been much too weak for Weber to detect.

Now a Pakistani physicist (they have nukes. You knew that meant they would also have physicists, right?) named Asghar Qadir says there were factors that no one was considering back then that modify the math. He says the whole world may owe Weber an apology (not that he’ll hear it – he died in 2000).

Here’s the thing though: Before anyone can prove Weber was right or wrong, they have to detect gravity waves again. The math can only be validated by actual measurement. There are efforts underway to do the measurement but they haven’t had any luck so far. For my book, the more time goes by without detecting gravity waves, the harder it is to believe that Weber did it in the first place.

The best part is that this article had a headline that made sense, rather than making me laugh or cringe.