Latest News On Ayodhya Verdict

Latest News On Ayodhya Verdict – Deferment Plea Rejected By Supreme Court, Verdict Date is Now 30th September

Babri Masjid Case-The latest news on the Ayodhya Verdict is followed closely as India prepares for the Babri Masjid Ayodya Verdict date that is now scheduled to be on the 30th of September 2010.

The Supreme Court of India has cleared the Lucknow bench of three judges of Allahabad High Court which will pronounce verdict on the Ayodhya case.

Zafaryab Jilani, Convenor of the Babri Masjid Action Committee has welcomed the Supreme Court order by saying

“All major litigants wanted this.”

The three man judges of the Supreme court rejected the petition after hearing it, the names of the judges are Chief Justice of India SH Kapadia, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice KS Radhakrishnan.

The verdict of the Babri Masjid Ayodya Verdict case will be given on 30th of September 2010 after 3pm IST. ( uktodaynews.com )

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Top Secret Jobs at the CIA

Top Secret Jobs at the CIA. If you were one of the thousands to receive an e-mail recently listing available jobs with the Central Intelligence Agency, you may have thought it was just another cyber scam.

Well, it turns out the e-mail wasn't spam after all but part of the agency's beefed up efforts to recruit new employees.

"We've really focused on upping our outreach," says CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf, about the agency's recruiting strategies. They include e-mails, TV and radio campaigns targeting college students, former Wall Street workers, and anyone with foreign language skills, especially Middle Eastern languages.

The CIA was plagued with low morale after failing to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then providing crummy intelligence that led to the Iraq War. But the agency has seen a bit of a bounce back in its reputation recently despite a report questioning its interrogation techniques. People seem to be clamoring to join. Last year, the agency received 120,000 job applications online and expects a 40 percent to 50 percent increase this year.

In the years following the Sept. 11 tragedy, the agency has hired about half of its overall work force. Currently, there are open positions in 90 different occupations from psychologist to software engineer.

Susan, a covert officer in the CIA who cannot even disclose her real name, applied for a job at the agency online last year while she was still in graduate school studying neuroscience. "The primary thing that attracted me was the impact I could make," says Susan, who is in her late 20s. "It puts you close to the forefront of the nation's defense."

She was hired in June of 2008 as a research scientist doing work on "biological issues" in a department that is similar to the gadget lab of "Q," the character in the James Bond movies.

More than just undercover agents

Indeed, a job at the CIA may conjure up images of spies in overcoats or 007 on a speedboat in Monte Carlo, but the majority of the jobs the agency is looking to fill are a bit more mundane. "We're looking for everything from analysts and operations officers to linguists, engineers and accountants," Harf says.

Becoming a CIA employee, especially if you're undercover, is not your typical suit-and-briefcase gig. Choosing such a career can be a difficult on you and your family – not to mention the hurdles you'll have to clear to land a job.

First off, if secrecy is not your thing, forget it.

No one knows Susan works for the CIA except her parents, and agency officials asked that she not disclose her exact age or anything about her background that could identify her. She's thought about the secrecy issues that could arise if and when she gets married and has kids and concluded she could live with it. "It's sort of exciting because I know it's for a higher purpose," she says.

Unfortunately, the life of an undercover agent can be tough on some families.

"You're asking your children to carry a heavy burden of secrecy and shame," says Martha Finney, whose father, Richard Finney, was an undercover case officer for the CIA throughout her life.

"I found out when I was 16, and then I had nightmares," explains Finney, author of "Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss."

Her family moved once or twice a year, and Finney says living in places such as Mexico City or Berlin was incredible global exposure. But, she adds, the isolation her family felt ended with tragedy.

"My mother died of alcoholism at 42, and it was primarily because she couldn't reach out for help because it would have compromised my dad's career," she says.

For workers who are not undercover, balancing work and family may be easier.

Jane, a 34-year-old employee at the agency who started in May 2008, was a stay-at-home mom before she applied. (Despite not being undercover, CIA officials did not want her real name used because when she travels abroad she may sometimes be undercover.)

"The CIA is very family friendly, offering flex schedules, and very accommodating if a child has an illness," explains Jane, who went to Harvard graduate school and spent 10 years in the military.

She's now a CIA military analyst covering Africa, preparing reports for the intelligence community, and she travels abroad two to three times a year. "I have a good family support base, and my husband has been excellent about being a single dad a bit," she says.

If you decide the CIA is right for you, expect a grueling interview process and lots of competition, especially in this economy.

All interested job seekers have to apply via the agency's Web site, www.cia.gov, and you must be a U.S. citizen. Most jobs require at least a bachelor's degree, but higher degrees are sought after.

If you make the initial cut, you'll then have to go through an exhaustive screening process over many months, since ultimately all CIA employees, no matter what department or level, require a government clearance.

Federal employees, or those coming out of the military or working for federal contractors, may already have such a clearance, says Evan Lesser, director of ClearanceJobs.com. But there are different levels of clearance, and what you need depends on what you will do.

A top secret clearance takes about a year, and a secret clearance averages about six to eight months, he says, adding that 70 percent of jobs at the CIA require a secret clearance or above.

The process includes a polygraph, psychological testing, medical evaluations, and credit and criminal background checks. Also, agency personnel will interview your friends, family and maybe even your neighbors.

Background checks go back seven to 10 years, Lesser adds, so anyone applying should have at least 11 years of history ready, including places you lived, names of employers, divorce papers or bankruptcies.

Internships at the CIA are a good way to get your foot in the door, he says, because younger people don't have as much history and can often get clearance more easily.

Life at the agency

Even if you get hired, the probing into your life won't end. "CIA officers undergo periodic security checks throughout their careers, which also may include a polygraph," Harf adds.

If you want to join the CIA to get rich, don't count on it.

"The starting salary for incoming agency officers is based on the education, work experience, and specialized skills that they bring with them," says CIA spokeswoman Harf. "Starting salaries generally range from about $40,000 to $100,000. Incoming officers can receive a hiring bonus of up to $35,000 for foreign language skills."

Steve Lee, who worked for the CIA as an analyst in the mid 1990s, eventually left because the pay wasn't enough and he was sick of the bureaucracy.

While he doesn't regret the stellar training he received at the agency, the exposure to the latest and greatest technologies, and the prestige his CIA experience has brought to his career, he stresses that anyone who decides to join the CIA definitely has to have a calling.

"Everyone that works there is going to go through intrusive investigations, and you have to be ready to live up to that," says Lee, author of "Super Secret Bungling and Crookery: National Security Drone," who blogs and writes under the name Frank Naif. "Young people ought to know, casual drug use will no longer be part of your life. And you have to watch who you associate with, in particular, foreigners."

For Lee, it wasn't the lifestyle he wanted to have.

"It's probably not a whole lot different than a lot of other federal workplaces, very Kafkaesque," he says. "A lot of absurdity."

Undercover analyst Susan, who loves her job and says it's just what she expected, doesn't see it like that.

"If the opportunity is there, I encourage anyone to apply," she says. "The CIA has always been my first choice. You need to have the skill set, and you need to have that commitment to want to do the right thing." ( msn.com )

READ MORE - Top Secret Jobs at the CIA

Does class decide online social networks?

Does class decide online social networks?. Like a lot of people, Anna Owens began using MySpace more than four years ago to keep in touch with friends who weren't in college.

But soon she felt too old for the social-networking site, and the customizable pages with music that were fun at first began to annoy her. By the time she graduated from the University of Puget Sound, Owens' classmates weren't on MySpace -- they were on Facebook.

Throughout graduate school and beyond, as her network began to expand, Owens ceased using MySpace altogether. Facebook had come to represent the whole of her social and professional universe.

"MySpace has one population, Facebook has another," said the 26-year-old, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit in San Francisco, California. "Blue-collar, part-time workers might like the appeal of MySpace more -- it definitely depends on who you meet and what they use; that's what motivates people to join and stay interested."

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes.

A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods," said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. "They're on their way up, or perhaps not college educated."

By contrast, Mancini said, "Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs," driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.

Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the microblogging site, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year.

Nielsen also found a strong overlap between those who use Facebook and those who use LinkedIn, Mancini said.

Nielsen isn't the first to find this trend. Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens' use of social networks in 2006.

When she began, she noticed the high school students all used MySpace, but by the end of the school year, they were switching to Facebook.

When boyd asked why, the students replied with reasons similar to Owens: "the features were better; MySpace is dangerous and Facebook is safe; my friends are here," boyd recalled.

And then, boyd said, "a young woman, living in a small historical town in Massachussetts said to me, 'I don't mean to be a racist or anything, but MySpace is like, ghetto.'"

For boyd, that's when it clicked.

"It's not a matter of choice between Facebook and MySpace, it was a movement to Facebook from MySpace," she said, a movement that largely included the educated and the upper-class.

So why do our online worlds, unencumbered by what separates us in daily life, reflect humans' tendency to stick with what -- and who -- they know? A lot of it has to do with the disparate beginnings of MySpace and Facebook, said Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of Mashable, a blog about social media.

Facebook originated at Harvard University and was limited at first to students at approved colleges before opening itself to the public in September 2006. MySpace, on the other hand, had a "come one, come all" policy and made a mad dash towards monetization, Ostrow said.

"They used a lot of banner ads without regard to the quality, and it really diminished the value [of the site] for the more tech-savvy demographic."

And while the Internet can build bridges between people on opposite sides of the globe, we still tend to connect with the same people through online social networks who we connect with offline, said technology writer and blogger Sarah Perez.

"It's effectively a mirror to our real world," she told CNN. "Social networks are the online version of what kids do after school."

These social-networking divides are worrisome to boyd, who wrote "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." Instead of allowing us to cross the boundaries that exist in our everyday lives, these online class differences threaten to carry those boundaries into the future.

"The social-network infrastructure is going to be a part of everything going forward, just like [Web] search is," boyd said. "The Internet is not this great equalizer that rids us of the problems of the physical world -- the Internet mirrors and magnifies them. The divisions that we have in everyday life are going to manifest themselves online."

Jason Kaufman, a research science fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, examined the Facebook profiles of a group of college students over four years and found that even within Facebook, there's evidence of self-segregation.

Multiracial students tended to have more Facebook friends than students of other backgrounds and were often the sole connection between white and black circles, Kaufman said.

Nonetheless, Kaufman feels that social networks may one day help us overcome our instinct to associate with those who share our income level, education, or racial background.

"I think it's fair to say that the Web has great potential to at least mitigate everyday tendencies towards self-segregation and social exclusion," Kaufman said.

"In some ways, [Facebook] levels the playing field of friendship stratification. In the real world, you have very close friends and then there are those you just say "Hi" to when you pass them on the street. "The playing field is a lot more level in that you can find yourself having a wall-to-wall exchange with just an acquaintance. If you pick up the unlikely friend, not of your race or income bracket, the network may [help you] establish a more active friendship than if you met them in real life."

But MySpace's users still find something appealing about MySpace that they don't about Facebook, and it may have nothing to do with class or race, blogger Perez said.

"It's not just the demographics that have people picking one over the other," Perez said. "It also comes down to what activities you like. If you like music, you'll still be on MySpace. If you're more into applications, then you might go to Facebook because you're addicted to Mafia Wars or whatever."

In the end, boyd isn't as concerned about the reasons behind these divisions online as she is about the consequences of people only networking within their chosen social-media groups.

"Friendships and family relationships are socially divided; people self-segregate to deal with racism sometimes," she said. "Okay, fine: We've made a decision to self-segregate, but what happens when politicians go on Facebook and think they're reaching the whole public? What happens when colleges only go on Facebook to promote?"

When and if that does happen, Mashable's Ostrow said, we'll know perhaps we've given social networks more credit than they're worth.

"When it comes to information, I don't think social networks are the best source for that. The Internet is so open," said Ostrow, who believes users would go beyond their networks to search out information online.

If you're looking to branch out of your social network box, your best option may be Twitter. Nielsen's survey didn't find a dominant social class on Twitter as much as they found a geographical one: Those who use Twitter are more likely to live in an urban area where there's greater access to wireless network coverage, Mancini said.

"The simplicity of Twitter definitely creates less of a divide, because it's not a relationship like it is on MySpace or Facebook," Ostrow said. "If you live in the middle of nowhere or you live in a city, you can follow anyone about anything.". CNN

READ MORE - Does class decide online social networks?

Obesity, STDs flow in social networks

Obesity, STDs flow in social networks. Meet "network man." He has basic desires of his own, but has many arbitrary preferences, such as in music or clothes, that have been influenced by the people he knows.

A new book finds that our likes and dislikes are influenced by our social networks, both online and off. Network man's likes and dislikes, in turn, affect the behavior of his friends, and their friends, and their friends. For example, when he gets into an obscure indie rock band, he shares an album with his friend, who likes it so much that he recommends it to his cousin, who spreads the word to her friends.

This is the view of human behavior put forth in "Connected," a new book by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, professor at Harvard University, and James Fowler, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Examining years of research of their own and from others, the authors conclude that social networks, both offline and online, are crucial in understanding everything from voting patterns to the spread of disease.

People have profound influences on each other's behavior within three degrees of separation, the authors find. That means that your friends, your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends may all affect your eating habits, voting preferences, happiness, and more. At the fourth degree, however, the influence substantially weakens

These are not small effects. "If a mutual friend becomes obese, it nearly triples a person's risk of becoming obese," the book said. Even geography doesn't matter; you're still at risk for gaining weight if a friend 1,000 miles away gets bigger

Why is that? Obesity seems to spread in networks because of behavioral imitation -- you copy what people close to you are doing -- and shared expectations called "norms," the authors said. When you see people close to you gaining weight, that makes you readjust your own idea of what is an acceptable body size

Still, this does not mean you should get rid of your overweight friends, Fowler said. In fact, the researchers re-examined the same data set and found that people who dumped their friends who gained weight were even more susceptible to obesity.

"On the one hand, yes, our work showed that if you keep your friend, you are going to be susceptible to their bad behaviors," he said. "On the other hand, time and again, what our work shows is that every friend makes you healthier and happier

Finding the hubs of social networks can be invaluable from a public health point of view, the authors say. For example, instead of vaccinating everyone in a population against a disease, it may be just as effective to choose people at random and ask them to name their closest friends, then vaccinate those friends.

The idea is that if someone names you as a friend, you are likely to be more central to the network than a participant chosen at random. That means you're probably less socially isolated, and more likely to come into contact with a lot of people, than someone randomly selected.

"You can achieve the same level of protection for the population at one-third the cost doing an intervention like this," Fowler said.

In fact, the authors hope to do a preliminary experiment monitoring the spread of the novel H1N1 virus on a college campus, Fowler said. Using the "friend" method for the vaccine against that virus, distributed for the first time this week, would not be a bad idea, although it is still a new concept that needs to be tested, Fowler said.

"What you are seeing is a lot of people who are experimenting with these ideas in trials, and trying to figure out how can we use all of this great new information about social networks to make everybody's life better," he said.

Social networks were crucial to understanding how sexually transmitted diseases broke out among teenagers in 1996 in Rockdale County, Georgia, a quiet upper-middle-class suburb near Atlanta.

An investigation found that a collection of young girls, mostly under 16, had been having sex with various clusters of boys, the book said. This epidemic of syphillis and other diseases stopped when the network changed, the authors argue.

"They actually figured out a good intervention there, which was to break apart this central group of girls that were essentially promoting the spread of this norm of a heightened sexuality at a very young age," Fowler said. "By essentially quarantining them, the norm couldn't spread anymore, and pretty soon they were able to get control of the epidemic."

It turns out online social networks haven't necessarily expanded the number of friends the average person has. Christakis and Fowler looked at all of the Facebook pages of students at a particular unnamed university and tried to figure out who was close friends with whom based on "picture friends." Their reasoning: Two people who post and "tag" each other in photos on Facebook are likely to be more socially close than those who do not.

They found that, on average, students had between six and seven close friends on Facebook, which is not far from sociologists' estimate that most people have four to six close friends in real life.

Moreover, the expected size of social groups in humans, based on their large brain size and the behavior of other primates, should be about 150, according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. At the time "Connected" was finalized, the average Facebook user had 110 registered friends on the site, Fowler said.

The "Three Degrees Rule" may have evolved with the human species, the authors argue. Having a social network in which influence spreads is useful, as is knowing who is a potential ally or enemy based on friends' associations. But humans evolved in small groups, not large collectives, so during early human history there may not have been people who were four degrees removed from anyone, they write.

The Iranian blogosphere, despite having a government that blocks access to several Web sites, expresses many viewpoints on the Internet. In June, Iranian citizens used Twitter to organize and protest against what they viewed as an unfair election.

"In closed societies, the sheer value of being able to spread information quickly is going to be the reason why social networks play such a strong role," Fowler said.

An important caveat is that political organizing through social networks, just like choosing financial investments, depends on what you believe other people believe, he said. Bubbles in the stock market. for example, are created when a lot of people believe a lot of other people highly value a company's stock.

"The same thing happens with these protests," he said. "You're kind of afraid to go out and do it yourself, but if you think that other people are going to go show up, then you're more likely to show up yourself."

While social networking sites such as Friendster have risen and fallen, online social networking in general is here to stay, Fowler said. He likened it to the introduction of the telephone, which had its initial skeptics too.

"This is just yet another way through which humans exert their inherent natural tendency to try to connect to other people that they care about," he said. CNN

READ MORE - Obesity, STDs flow in social networks

The most annoying Facebookers

The most annoying Facebookers -- Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers.

There are lots of fun, interesting people you're happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people.

Sure, Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with folks who are important to you. Take the status update, the 160-character message that users post in response to the question, "What's on your mind?" An artful, witty or newsy status update is a pleasure -- a real-time, tiny window into a friend's life.

But far more posts read like navel-gazing diary entries, or worse, spam. A recent study categorized 40 percent of Twitter tweets as "pointless babble," and it wouldn't be surprising if updates on Facebook, still a fast-growing social network, break down in a similar way.

Combine dull status updates with shameless self-promoters, "friend-padders" and that friend of a friend who sends you quizzes every day, and Facebook becomes a daily reminder of why some people can get on your nerves.

Here are 12 of the most annoying types of Facebook users:

The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore. "I'm waking up." "I had Wheaties for breakfast." "I'm bored at work." "I'm stuck in traffic." You're kidding! How fascinating! No moment is too mundane for some people to broadcast unsolicited to the world. Just because you have 432 Facebook friends doesn't mean we all want to know when you're waiting for the bus.

The Self-Promoter. OK, so we've probably all posted at least once about some achievement. And sure, maybe your friends really do want to read the fascinating article you wrote about beet farming. But when almost EVERY update is a link to your blog, your poetry reading, your 10k results or your art show, you sound like a bragger or a self-centered careerist.

The Friend-Padder. The average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site. Schmoozers and social butterflies -- you know, the ones who make lifelong pals on the subway -- might reasonably have 300 or 400. But 1,000 "friends?" Unless you're George Clooney or just won the lottery, no one has that many. That's just showing off.

The Town Crier. "Michael Jackson is dead!!!" You heard it from me first! Me, and the 213,000 other people who all saw it on TMZ. These Matt Drudge wannabes are the reason many of us learn of breaking news not from TV or news sites but from online social networks. In their rush to trumpet the news, these people also spread rumors, half-truths and innuendo. No, Jeff Goldblum did not plunge to his death from a New Zealand cliff.

The TMIer. "Brad is heading to Walgreens to buy something for these pesky hemorrhoids." Boundaries of privacy and decorum don't seem to exist for these too-much-information updaters, who unabashedly offer up details about their sex lives, marital troubles and bodily functions. Thanks for sharing.

The Bad Grammarian. "So sad about Fara Fauset but Im so gladd its friday yippe". Yes, I know the punctuation rules are different in the digital world. And, no, no one likes a spelling-Nazi schoolmarm. But you sound like a moron.

The Sympathy-Baiter. "Barbara is feeling sad today." "Man, am I glad that's over." "Jim could really use some good news about now." Like anglers hunting for fish, these sad sacks cast out their hooks -- baited with vague tales of woe -- in the hopes of landing concerned responses. Genuine bad news is one thing, but these manipulative posts are just pleas for attention.

The Lurker. The Peeping Toms of Facebook, these voyeurs are too cautious, or maybe too lazy, to update their status or write on your wall. But once in a while, you'll be talking to them and they'll mention something you posted, so you know they're on your page, hiding in the shadows. It's just a little creepy.

The Crank. These curmudgeons, like the trolls who spew hate in blog comments, never met something they couldn't complain about. "Carl isn't really that impressed with idiots who don't realize how idiotic they are." [Actual status update.] Keep spreading the love.

The Paparazzo. Ever visit your Facebook page and discover that someone's posted a photo of you from last weekend's party -- a photo you didn't authorize and haven't even seen? You'd really rather not have to explain to your mom why you were leering like a drunken hyena and French-kissing a bottle of Jagermeister.

The Obscurist. "If not now then when?" "You'll see..." "Grist for the mill." "John is, small world." "Dave thought he was immune, but no. No, he is not." [Actual status updates, all.] Sorry, but you're not being mysterious -- just nonsensical.

The Chronic Inviter. "Support my cause. Sign my petition. Play Mafia Wars with me. Which 'Star Trek' character are you? Here are the 'Top 5 cars I have personally owned.' Here are '25 Things About Me.' Here's a drink. What drink are you? We're related! I took the 'What President Are You?' quiz and found out I'm Millard Fillmore! What president are you?"

You probably mean well, but stop. Just stop. I don't care what president I am -- can't we simply be friends? Now excuse me while I go post the link to this story on my Facebook page. CNN

READ MORE - The most annoying Facebookers

Defriending can bruise your 'digital ego'

Defriending can bruise your 'digital ego'. If you harbor a bit of angst over Facebook friend requests gone unanswered, a surprise "defriending" or being deserted by your Twitter followers, you're not alone.

Elaine Fogel has amassed more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, a professional networking Web site, by extending invites to those who appear to fit her wide array of career interests.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, people just say yes," she said.

But then came "this one woman" who Fogel encountered on one of the 40-plus discussion groups she belongs to on LinkedIn. The woman offered interesting opinions, so Fogel sent her an invitation to join her network.

"She sent an e-mail saying, 'I only connect with people I know, and hopefully our paths will cross one day,' " said Fogel, of Phoenix, Arizona, her voice still carrying notes of disbelief. "I read that, and I said, 'Oh, my God, I've been rejected.' "

Fogel echoes other users who have felt the twinge of hurt and surprise from social media rejection. Some may think hers is an overreaction -- it happened online, with a woman she didn't know -- but recent research shows that our "digital egos" can bruise as easily as we do in person. In fact, rejection online may have the potential to sting even more.

"People tend to think that these relationships are trivial and not very deep, but this is what we're moving towards, having a lot of our communications play out over the Internet," Purdue University social psychologist Kip Williams said. "That's the way it's becoming; this is how we interpret our worth. People care how many [online] friends they have."

Or, increasingly, how many Twitter followers they have. This year, a third-party service launched Qwitter, which allows Twitter users to determine who's stopped following them and which tweet may have turned them off.

Experts say rejection on social networks can hurt worse than an in-person snub because people are usually more polite face-to-face than they are online.

"I think the thing that is often clearly worse online is when it's relatively anonymous, and people use that as a cover and are more cruel than they would be otherwise," said Jean Twenge, a San Diego State psychologist who has studied the way social networking affects personality development.

Online rejection also doesn't lessen the physical reaction we have to emotional pain.

"Pain is divided into two components," said Baldwin Way, a UCLA researcher who studies the way human brains respond to social rejection.

"If you put a red-hot poker on your arm, one part of your brain says, 'This pain is on your arm,' and the other part says, 'Ow, that hurts' and is less concerned with where it is and more concerned about the emotional meaning of it," he said. "That [second] part also seems to be activated when someone's left out or excluded and rejected."

To Way's surprise, that neurological reaction holds true even when the rejection comes in a digital form, lacking the real-world body language, vocal intonations and other aspects that can influence the way rejection is perceived and felt.

"If you'd asked me a few years ago if you'd get the same effect online as you would in person, I'd say no way," Way said. "I thought doing something in person would have stronger effects than doing something online, but interesting data has come out in the last few years that show mental representations are just as powerful as the real thing."

These data include Williams' "cyberball" studies, which ask a participant to play a virtual ball-tossing game with two other icons. In one study group, the participant plays the game for the entire six minutes, but in the second group, he or she is included for only a fraction of that time and then ignored. The second group reports feelings of anger and lower levels of self-esteem.

Whether participants believe they're playing with humans doesn't appear to affect their feelings of rejection.

"Even when people get rejected by the computer, they feel bad," Twenge said.

Kenneth Loflin, a student who participated in Williams' study, got so frustrated by his fellow players that he gave the computer screen an offensive gesture.

"I'm a people person, and I like people to like me," he said.

The study also affected the way Loflin interacts online. Out of the 1,200 friends he has on Facebook, 400 of them he doesn't really know, many of them being friends of friends.

"I thought about defriending them, but I didn't want them to feel how I felt" during the "cyberball" game, Loflin said.

By contrast, Bruce Hammond doesn't have a problem giving the rejection slip to Facebook hangers-on.

"For the most part, the people that I'm defriending are the people that I don't have a relationship with: the people I haven't talked to in 15 years," said Hammond, 30, of Chicago, Illinois. "I don't let someone know if I'm going to defriend them. I just do it."

Similarly, Hammond doesn't expect any of his Facebook contacts to let him know before giving him the ax. If someone rejected him in real life, he would ask why the person felt that way, but when the relationship is online, his thinking changes.

"If I come on [Facebook] tomorrow and see I have 425 friends instead of 426, I'm not going to go through my list and see who did it and be upset with them," he said.

Cecilia Sepp, a Washington, D.C.-area consultant, said she avoids the issue entirely by limiting her online network to about 100 friends.

"I don't have a problem with defriending because I don't accumulate [enough] to have a high number," Sepp said.

"When I first heard that defriending was beginning on social networks, it was through a blog post by someone who was shocked that this person had defriended them because they didn't understand why," she said. "The person wanted to know had they done something, had they said something, should they ask, 'What did [I] do?' "

Sepp believes that online "defrienders" should extend the courtesy that Fogel's LinkedIn rejecter gave her: an e-mail explanation.

"You have no facial expression online; you have no tone of voice online; it's very easy to misinterpret phrasing in an e-mail. You have to be very careful about your wording and be more explicit with people when you're making or removing connections," Sepp said. "That's why it's so important to connect with people that you actually know."

READ MORE - Defriending can bruise your 'digital ego'

A new way of looking at the world

A new way of looking at the world -- What's the first thing that goes through your mind when someone says the word "data"?

For many of us, the first image is line graphs, pie charts and spreadsheets with columns and rows full of numbers that leave you bleary-eyed and a bit dazed.

But what if someone were to say data can also mean what you post on Facebook and Twitter, the ratings you gave a restaurant, the photos you uploaded to Flickr or even, perhaps, what you feel.

A bit of a reach? Not anymore.

An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of "data" and display it in a way that's relatively easy to understand.

You can now point your mobile phone at a street and instantly get ratings for restaurants. Or type in your address and find reports of crimes that may have occurred in your neighborhood. It's even possible to track emotions on a national and global scale.

"Specialists from scientists to accountants have been dealing with data for decades," said Martin Wattenberg, a researcher at IBM's Center for Social Software. "What's new is that there's a whole lot more data of relevance to consumers.

"At the same time, people are generating a whole lot of data themselves."

There are several reasons why we're seeing more data visualization in popular culture and why it's becoming simpler and more innovative, experts say.

Computers and software have gotten cheaper during the past few decades, and the technology needed to build applications is now in the hands of more people.

Meanwhile, more data are becoming digital, making it easier to parse and catalog. "You have stuff available on government sites that would have only been available on paper a decade ago," Wattenberg said.

Finally, through the advent of social media applications like Facebook and Twitter, coupled with the rise of increasingly sophisticated mobile phones, a cultural shift is seemingly under way.

"People are sort of happily defining their own social networks for other people to see, and that has led people to become interested in exploring data in ways they weren't interested before," Wattenberg said.

Bruce Mau, a designer and author of several books on the subject, called the confluence of the technical and cultural changes nothing short of a "social revolution."

"We're putting tools into the hands of millions of people," he said. "More importantly, we're connecting those people."

From Darwin to health care legislation

Ben Fry's resume is a bit intimidating. He received his doctoral degree from the MIT Media Laboratory and has worked on developing visualization tools for genetic data. His Web site contains phrases like "bifurcation tool" and "microarray data."

But the work he and his peers are doing holds the possibility of clarifying difficult data. Take, for example, his project regarding Charles Darwin and the six editions of his famous book, "On the Origin of Species."

Through a visualization of carefully transcribed text from the different editions, he traced how Darwin's theory and ideas developed during his lifetime. The visualization challenges the notion that "scientific ideas ... are fixed notions," Fry wrote.

For example, Fry writes, "The phrase 'survival of the fittest' -- usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin -- instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn't appear until the fifth edition of the text."

The visualization project wouldn't have been possible if the text weren't digital. That progression -- of historic text becoming digital via projects like Google's scanning of books and people creating digital text every day -- is creating new possibilities.

"As we get away from the number stuff, it brings us closer to something that's a little more human," Fry said.

Consider the current debate about health care reform legislation, said Fernanda Viegas, also a researcher at IBM's Center for Social Software. She and Martin Wattenberg created Many Eyes, a social media Web site that focuses on data visualization.

The U.S. House has a bill. The Senate has several bills floating around. Many lawmakers have plenty of ideas on what kind of policies will work and what won't, and there are a range of numbers and statistics associated with each.

The challenge for media and designers is to "visualize those hundreds of pages of legislation, the kinds of changes people want to make, the different amendments and the different drafts," so that people can more easily understand the debate, Viegas said.

Referring to the launch of Web sites like data.gov and recovery.gov that are making heaps of data about the federal government available to anyone who wants to use it, Mau said data visualization could also help make government more transparent.

Such projects are taking root. The Dutch company Layar recently launched a smartphone application that tracks money from the nearly $800 billion Recovery Act that President Obama signed this year. It combines views of the real world with contract data provided by recovery.gov.

You, your neighborhood, your city

Meanwhile, Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer in combining data with maps, is much more occupied these days with neighborhoods, city blocks and ZIP codes.

His latest project, EveryBlock.com, provides a torrent of information culled from public databases, media sites and social media like Flickr for more than a dozen cities. It was recently acquired by MSNBC.com.

"The idea came about when I was living in Chicago and being in a very dense, thriving neighborhood and coming to the realization that there was no way of finding out everything that was happening," he said.

"That's what we set out to do: create an activity stream for your neighborhood."

Users go to the site, click on a city and filter the available information by typing in an address, ZIP code or neighborhood.

Depending on the data currently available for the area, users get everything from restaurant ratings and business reviews to crime data, real estate listings and Flickr photos of nearby residents.

Such local data is becoming increasingly available on mobile phones as well. Yelp's Monocle feature for the iPhone 3GS shows business ratings by simply having the user hold up their phone to the street.

Citysense, developed by Sense Networks, goes one step further. Currently available only in San Francisco, California, the mobile phone application captures signals transmitted by cell phones and and builds a "heat map" showing densities of people. The company has partnerships with several carriers, and the information is aggregated via GPS signals and cell phone tower transmissions.

Tony Jebara, Sense Networks' chief scientist, said the company wants to make the application more sophisticated by segmenting the heat map along social lines. For example, in the future, college students will be able to search a city for fellow students.

Nathan Yau, a graduate student at the University of California-Los Angeles, has an even more specific focus: the individual. He founded a Web site, Your Flowing Data, that helps people chart their lives using Twitter.

Using a Twitter account, you send a message to Flowing Data, and over time, you can visualize your choices, habits and behaviors. Essentially, Yau said, the project uses data as a personal narrative. "You're using visualization to show important parts of your life," he said.

Wattenberg says the new data visualization tools can help draw connections from the private narratives to the way the world behaves. "Personal data can be aggregated to form a global self-portrait," he said.

For instance, Facebook unveiled a "gross national happiness" index for the United States using users' status updates. Using two years worth of data, Facebook rated "positive" and "negative" words among American users' updates to come up with the measure.

The index said some of the happiest days for Americans during that period were holidays like Thanksgiving and July Fourth. Two of the unhappiest were the days Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson died.

"There's a nice of scaling that happens when you can zoom up from the personal level up to the level of looking at the globe as a single thing," Wattenberg said. "It's very powerful." CNN

READ MORE - A new way of looking at the world

Social networks and kids: How young is too young?

Social networks and kids: How young is too young ? -- Status updates, photo tagging and FarmVille aren't just for adults or even teenagers anymore.

Researchers say a growing number of children are flouting age requirements on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, or using social-networking sites designed just for them.

Facebook and MySpace require users to be at least 13. But they have no practical way to verify ages, and many young users pretend to be older when signing up.

Some scientists worry that pre-adolescent use of the sites, which some therapists have linked to Internet addiction among adults, could be damaging to children's relationships and brains.

But many other experts say there's not any solid research to back that up and that most children seem to use social-media sites in moderation, and in positive ways.

"For the most part, although there's so much press about all the bad things they're doing, much of what they do on these sites is stuff they would be doing anyway," said Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a professor of psychology at California State University-Los Angeles.

In two surveys reported this year by Pew Internet Research -- of 700 and 935 teens, respectively -- 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.

Sixty-one percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

The data in the study was from 2006, so it's not a stretch to assume those numbers are higher this year. Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

"Of course they are," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the report's authors. "They're using them because that's where their social world is. Because there's no effective way to age-verify ... children very quickly realize, 'I just say I'm 14 years old, and they'll let me use this.' "

Marc Bigbie, a software salesman who lives near Savannah, Georgia, said he has three children -- 14, 12 and 11 -- who all have accounts on at least one social-networking site.

His oldest daughter, then 11, was the first in the family to create an account, on MySpace. And it was without her parents' permission.

"It was kind of a negative thing at first," he said. "We kind of took it away from her. But, finally, we said, 'You can have it, but we need the password so we can be on there at any time.' "

Since then, all three of the kids have gotten Facebook accounts, with their parents even agreeing to fudge their ages.

Bigbie said he makes sure his children's accounts are set to provide as little personal information as possible, and they allow their activity to be seen only by confirmed friends. He and his wife monitor the pages to make sure they know the friends that their children have added.

He said the oldest daughter is the only one who uses the account almost every day, while the younger children log on briefly every now and then.

In the past couple of years, some scientists have voiced concerns that children are spending too much on these sites and that such online socializing could have lasting negative effects as they mature.

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment," Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neurocientist and director of Britain's Royal Institution, told London's Daily Mail in February.

"I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier [online] screen dialogues," she said.

Other scientists criticized Greenfield's comments, calling them speculation, not science.

Subrahmaynam said a study of high school students showed that in most cases, the people they interact with most often online are people they also socialize with in person.

Children today have spent their whole lives on computers, and their brains are better adapted than those of adults to integrate online activities with their offline lives, she said.

"You'll always have the small minority of kids who are not using it appropriately," she said. "I do think you're going to have a few people that are doing things that kids probably couldn't do with telephones a generation ago.

"But we don't want to get swept away by the general fear. It's here, and it's pretty harmless."

Many parents also worry that younger users of social sites could be targets for online predators. While there are some concerns that kids aren't mature enough to make good decisions about their privacy, Subrahmaynam and Lenhart said most are savvy enough by their early teens to know what, and who, to avoid. Younger children, they say, need more parental supervision.

Alternately, a growing number of networking sites are geared specifically toward younger users. Sites such as Disney's Club Penguin -- mainly a game site, but with limited social functions -- WebKinz and Whyville feature more restricted and supervised networking.

Such kids-oriented sites are "sort of a training ground" for future use of mainstream social networks, Lenhart said.

Children as young as 5 have accounts at KidSwirl, a kids' social-networking site patterned loosely on Facebook, said creator Toby Clark.

Clark said the average user spends about five minutes on the site per visit -- far less than Facebook's average of more than 20 minutes.

He said he limits the amount of time his two children, 9 and 6, spend on the site, but that any parent who bans their children from such sites isn't facing the facts.

"The reality is that we're a technology-driven generation," said Clark, who launched the site in February and said it has about 10,000 users. "That's not going to change."

So what long-term effect will social networking have on children? Scientists say it may be hard to know for sure.

"We've lost the control group," Subrahmanyam said. "How do you find a group of kids that are not using the computer?". CNN

READ MORE - Social networks and kids: How young is too young?

Do digital diaries mess up your brain?

Do digital diaries mess up your brain? -- The meal you ate the first day you started working. The first exam you aced in high school. The shoes you wore to the prom.

These minute details of life often fade into the abyss of memory, which is not a perfect scrapbook of every experience. Over time, we forget details of events that happened long ago or even mis-remember them.

But today's technology creates opportunities for greater, moment-by-moment record-keeping. Archives of your blog, Facebook or Twitter feed -- both in text and in pictures -- might reveal exactly what you ate on important occasions, the papers you were proud of and the outfits you wore.

Microsoft is developing a camera that takes this further: SenseCam, which automatically captures photos of everything you see and do all day. There are even people, such as Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, who go around with audio and video equipment to create a more complete supplement to biological memory.

If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information -- creating digital diaries, or "lifestreaming" -- what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we're headed.

Using computers to outsource many mental tasks isn't necessarily bad as long as the brain is being stimulated in other ways, said David Bucci, associate professor of psychology at Dartmouth College. With the advent of the calculator, the need to memorize multiplication tables became less important, and hand-held devices such as smart phones and PDAs have eliminated the need to remember phone numbers and to-do lists.

But none of these task-replacing devices has been shown to damage the mind. Rather, they allow people to devote more brain resources to other things, he said.

Learning how to use technologies is good for the brain, just like learning a language or doing puzzles, he said. There is also evidence that physical activity helps stave off dementia.

"The key thing is that the sedentary brain, just like the sedentary body, is going to atrophy," he said.

Although people may lose interest in services such as Twitter, one day, recording everything may take a lot less effort. In fact, it's not inconceivable that a microchip could be implanted in the brain that would be used to make external copies of memory, said Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging and co-author of the book "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind."

On the plus side, this would help patients with Alzheimer's disease who have begun to forget key elements of their existence, he said. Presenting them their own memories could add "another 10 years of cognitive life," he said.

This could work for those in the early stages of the disease, but eventually there comes a point where people with Alzheimer's no longer recognize their lives as their own, said Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Relying on digital documents, moreover, may take away from the learning process, Schwartz said.

For years, he gave take-home exams for which students could use any reference materials they wished, but it became apparent that they did not actually internalize the material.

These days, Schwartz gives exams that are closed-book. Students just have to remember what they learned.

"You can't walk around through life carrying all of your books under your arm," he said. "It's possible that these devices that people now rely on will discourage anyone from doing this disciplined learning that we always used to do."

Relying on the Internet for answers does have its advantages in terms of brain stimulation. A recent study from Small's group at UCLA found that Internet searching among middle-aged and elderly adults who don't have much experience with the Web had increased activity in key areas of the brain after searching the Web for an hour each day for two weeks.

But recording everything you do takes people out of the "here and now," psychologists say. Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they're doing because they are focused on the recording process, Schwartz said.

Moreover, if these documented memories are available to others, people may actually do things differently.

"If we have experiences with an eye toward the expectation that in the next five minutes, we're going to tweet them, we may choose difference experiences to have, ones that we can talk about rather than ones we have an interest in," he said.

Similarly, a 1993 study led by researchers at the University of Virginia found that undergraduate students who were asked to think about their reasons for choosing posters chose differently and reported less satisfaction than those who did not have to justify their choices.

Since memories are not perfectly accurate depictions of situations and get fuzzier over time, they may be problematic in situations such as being a witness at a trial, Schwartz said. But there are also benefits to this fuzziness: It helps people come up with coherent narratives about what their lives are about, he said.

Being able to compress a lot of experiences and summarize them well is part of the very nature of human intelligence, said Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."

"It's about finding the essence of things," he said. "It's not about restoring everything. It's about reducing things in complexity until they're manageable and understandable."

Hofstadter did keep a diary from age 19 to 25 and once in a while will go back and read a hundred handwritten pages. But each entry is short and does not capture life decades ago in real-time; it just sums it up.

"Are you likely to spend a week of your life when you're 60 looking at your life when you're 20? No," he said.CNN

READ MORE - Do digital diaries mess up your brain?