1/0s: What Facebook Knows About Us, Sweden's "Hitler," Turtle Power

Facebook possesses “the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior” and now they’re trying to make sense of it, reports MIT’s Technology Review. The effort is led by information geek Cameron Marlow who heads the company’s Data Science Team. Given the breadth and quality of Facebook’s information – like the 5 billion songs we’ve played this year – Marlow believes there’s plenty his team can learn about why people behave the way they do.

The days of free Wi-Fi are gone forever, laments PCMag’s John Dvorak:

I live on a hill where I can usually see about 20 Wi-Fi connections and none of them are open. A decade or so ago, at least half of these would have been open. This means if my Comcast connection goes down—which it does every few months—I cannot latch on to someone’s signal for a few minutes to get or send some e-mail. No matter what the absolutists think about this sort of activity, it is of zero consequence to the guy with the open connection.

There was an initiative in San Francisco some years back to encourage people to share open connections, but that was ruined by the newer lock down trend which only benefits the ISPs. The newest routers allow for you to spin off some of your connection for a guest network, sometimes with bandwidth limitation, but the public generally cannot even figure out how to make that work.

To prevent that sort of sharing from becoming prevalent, you’ll hear scary stories about creeps driving around to get a free connection and downloading porn on someone else’s account. Really? How many people are actually suckered into believing that sort of hokum? Whatever the case, I seriously do not think that this is a widespread problem.

Dvorak believes the Internet should be a readily available public utility, like water. But that doesn’t make me any more comfortable about unsecured networks.

One of the big new phases in computing is getting them to understand humans better, like IBM’s AI Jeopardy contestant Watson. This spring, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see if algorithms developed by data scientists could grade the written part of standardized as well as real people. The results were scary good.

Erik Martin is the general manager of one of the most visited (and beloved) sites on the web. Now averaging 2.5 billion pageviews a month, the narwhal-loving site is growing up.

Sweden has been conducting an ambitious experiment in free speech, entrusting the country’s official Twitter account @Sweden to a new citizen every week. The only requirement is “that they have to be interesting, Twitter-literate and happy to post in English,” reported the NYT recently — which is all well and good until you have a cute blonde nicknamed “Hitler” ranting about Jews, Africa, and gays.

Doing God’s work, Rob Lammle has compiled the complete history of Teenage Mutant Turtles.

The same things that make the Internet such an awesome and open place can also bring out the worst in us. Who needs Saw and Hostel, when you can watch people actually getting killed – or worse, cats tortured.

Follow Alec Liu on Twitter: @sfnuop.