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When downloading the new version of Google Earth, I came across this message. I don’t like when applications install background processes on your computer and when they don’t give you an option to not install it. Thankfully, if you do a little looking before you download, you come across a “Customize your installation with advanced setup” link that leads to another page with a checkbox that says “Allow Google Earth to automatically install recommended updates.” I turned that off and this dialog no longer came up with the new version. I’m sure this change officially happened a while ago, but it upsets me that most people will see this and think, “I have to install some background updater app or I can’t use this?”. It takes a little fishing to see that there actually is an option to not install it. I’d rather not have another background application.

Source: Boston.com
Two sports articles today, both related to the Patriots:

No New Defensive Coordinator for Pats
So apparently, Belichick won’t hire a defensive coordinator this year. It is true that Belichick is a defensive mastermind. But is it really to the team’s benefit if Belichick puts more work on himself? A boss or a manager is supposed to find talented people and delegate tasks to them, not take it all on himself. Is it that he trusts no one else to do this job? Or is it that he believes so much in his own system that he will not take any diversion of opinion? Either way, I think that Belichick or anyone putting that much extra work on themselves is a bad idea and, if not the cause of an eventual burnout, will be the reason the person would end up becoming the team scapegoat should things go wrong.

Manning > Brady?
Dan Shaughnessy thinks so. To be honest, I don’t think I ever believed that Tom Brady was better than Peyton Manning. I like the Patriots, but I don’t hate the Colts like most Pats fans do and I also respect Manning’s talent and awareness of his situation. And I’m not oodling over Brady like a lot of Pats fans do, either; Matt Cassell came in a year ago and put up some pretty good numbers himself. It was almost like we didn’t really need Brady to have a good year, as long as we had good coaching and good talent in the receiving corps and the offensive line. Brady is indeed an important player and he is the face of the team, but at the same time, he isn’t quite at godly status.

Source: The New Republic (tnr.com)
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Reid’s comment suggests that he associates Black English with lack of polish and low intelligence, okay. But before we burn him in effigy for it or ask “What’s that all about?” as if we don’t know, let’s admit that most Americans feel like Reid does. He wasn’t being a benighted “racist” holdout; he was speaking as an ordinary American person. We have caught him in nothing we don’t most of us feel ourselves.

John McWhorter delves into Harry Reid’s “no Negro dialect” comment. I love this analysis. While it is true that he should not have said this, we shouldn’t act like we don’t think this way ourselves. I had an argument over whether the African American Variant of English (as it’s officially called) should be discouraged. I really don’t think it should be. The problem isn’t that people speak this way; it’s how we react to it. AAVE has some very interesting, systematic constructions. For example, stated later in the article:

…Black English is as systematic as standard English, and what we hear as “mistakes” are just variations, not denigrations. Try telling a French person that double negatives are “illogical.” The “unconjugated” be in a sentence like Folks be tryin’ it out is used in a very particular way to indicate habits rather than current events, making explicit something that standard English leaves to context.

Constructions like this are quite interesting from a linguistic perspective (and having taken a linguistics class before, I definitely find it interesting myself). The proper English we speak today, of course, is the form accepted in regular society and formal interactions, and there’s no problem with that. But when people who speak AAVE are amongst themselves in informal settings, should we really look down upon their method of speech? Should we really judge them for it? Or should we try to understand their speech and see where they’re coming from? It’s controversial for sure.

Source: Boston.com
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[Arnold Schwarzenegger] said that in the last 30 years, prison spending increased from 3 percent of the state general fund to 11 percent while higher education spending declined from 10 percent to 7.5 percent.

“Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future,’’ he said.

This op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson brings up California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to bar the state from spending more on prisons than on higher education. I agree that we should not spend more money on prison than education. Perhaps this definition of “education” should extend beyond postsecondary education. How about all schools? Or, in general, how about we pay more attention to rehabilitating criminals than to just locking them up repeatedly? I agree with Jackson’s ending point regarding the cocaine laws:

The laws are so embarrassing that this week, in an interview with the Boston Globe editorial board, Democratic senatorial candidate and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley called the cocaine laws “crazy.’’ It is refreshing to hear a Democrat like her and a Republican like Schwarzenegger say that our criminal justice priorities are insane, with education always getting the strait-jacket. It is the first step out of the asylum.

Source: Wired.com
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Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of markeying profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set. Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests.

While that information isn’t available for all users, Facebook changed its privacy settings in early December so that certain information can’t be made private, including one’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and friend list (the latter can be somewhat hidden from public view).

Anyone with your e-mail address can harvest that information, the company admits.

This doesn’t sound good. I’m still on Facebook and I really do need to cut it from my list of social networks. Problem is, I do still use it for promoting events for my residents and keeping in touch with a few of them. But, I digress. Definitely give this report a read.

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