Even if they used it now, I'm not sure they'd sue. It would make them look pretty crappy. As it is, they got a request to use their logo on a statue of a murdered child, and they were like, "Eh... we'd rather not." It's really not that hard to understand why DC wouldn't want to be strongly linked to child abuse and murder in such a potentially long-lasting medium, given the choice. How much trouble they'd go through to stop it, though, is another issue.

Part of the question, I'd imagine, is whether they're denying the use of the logo via copyright protection or trademark protection. I'm not sure it makes sense for them to claim trademark protection here, but if so, there are some legal requirements for them to protect their trademark, so they might need to at least send a cease and desist letter. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.

Isn't part of the problem caused by checked baggage? They don't like when you check baggage and then decide not to get on the plane.

Whenever you set off to do something like "setting up an internal corporate Intranet site", you should always be very clear about your answer to this question: "Why are we doing this?" As in, what problem are we solving? How do we actually imagine this being used?

Lots of people will start something like this and think, "This application looks cool. It's like Facebook, but private and we can control it." And yeah, it may be fun to set up, but why are you doing it? What problem does it solve? Does it serve a purpose in disseminating information in a way that a normal website or email mailing list would be less effective? Does it aid in collaboration somehow? Once you have a clear answer, then you have to have a plan on how to get buy-in from employees. How are you going to get them to think it's a good way of accomplishing whatever it is that you hope it'll accomplish? Why should they bother with it at all? You need to convince them and then remind them to follow through.

But none of that works if there's no purpose in the first place. Is the intention just to socialize? First, they can do that in Facebook. If they want a more professional setting, that's what LinkedIn is for. Beyond that, lots of those people are sitting in the same office building anyway, so they can meet face to face. Throw them a little cupcake party on the first Friday of every month. It'll be cheaper, and people will like it more.

Sure it can't be all human experimentation, or else ad agencies couldn't attempt to measure the effectiveness of their ads. Parents couldn't raise their children (e.g. "Let's try withholding cookies and see if that works!").

There must be specific parameters under which human experimentation is illegal.

I feel like I'm being a little paranoid, but I had the same thought. And after all the NSA revelations and whatnot, I feel like paranoia is justified.

It's an industry that has always tacked on weird semi-fraudulent charges to your bill. The industry has always tried to hide what you're actually being charged for, advertised different prices than what you're actually charged, charged you for add-on services without consent, and charged for unexpected overages without warning. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has been shaking up the industry with simpler billing, making their charges more clear, and doing away with overages. Why would the FTC be going after them specifically?

Being unhappy tends to lead to increased awareness of details and a more cautious/pessimistic approach to problems. While that can be a handicap in many situations, it can be helpful when the shit hits the fan. "Stress" is itself a biological state that is priming us for bad situations. Stress can be helpful in dangerous situations. The problem is, in our relatively safe modern society, we have a tendency to enter a state of stress, and then never leave.

I agree, up to a point. We worship happiness a little too much and fail to see the value of other emotions.

It's not just about putting in more effort to stay with the company, or putting in more effort out of loyalty. Both of those can play a role in increase efficiency, but it's also the fact that your brain's ability to function is impacted by mood. You will think differently when you're under stress, panicked, depressed, worried, happy, horny, angry, or hungry. Being in a "happy" state is often good for solving the kinds of problems that present themselves at work.

Some people make the mistake of saying something like, "You make better decisions when you're happy." That's not altogether true. Being in a different state of mind will alter your thinking in ways that may be useful for certain situations. Being angry might make you more ready for a physical fight. Being hungry might distract you from other concerns in favor of finding food, which can be useful in keeping you from starving. These are useful things until you're in the wrong state of mind for the things you want to get done.

Is economics considered a science now? I thought it was one of those "soft sciences" or like sociology, psychology, or medicine where it's not practiced with any rigor, and nobody trusts it anyway.

Still, it's not just a case of the "Upgrade Treadmill". Windows 8 was not the typical Microsoft move of "rearrange all the buttons, slap on a new theme, create incompatibility with old versions for no reason, and drop support on the old software to force people to upgrade." They actually made improvements for once.

Well honestly, if you ignore the whole Metro UI fiasco, Windows 8 is a nice update to Windows 7. There a lots of little improvements. It may sound silly, but I think the dialog boxes for copying/moving files alone would be worth a $20 upgrade for my own use.

My two main qualms with Windows at this point are (a) forcing users to use a touchscreen UI on the desktop; and (b) the requirement of stupid/annoying copyright protection schemes. I don't pirate and I don't have any problem paying for software, but product activation needs to go.

It really makes me wonder if Ballmer was somehow the source of the problem. I feel like Microsoft has been a little less evil since the new guy took over.

I'm not sure how you think they changed the tone, timing, delivery, or emphasis of the messages. Apparently they used real posts and posted the entire content of each post without alteration. From what I understand, though I'm interpreting from a few different stories that I read, all they did was to alter the algorithm that Facebook already uses to choose which posts to show in your feed. They didn't insert or remove words from the posts. They didn't do anything to really re-contextualize them.

Whether people realize it or not, Facebook already filters and resorts your feed to emphasize posts that they think you're interested in. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when you have a friend that you "Like" a lot of their posts, then more of their posts will show up in your feed, and they'll appear higher up. I suspect that they also do things like prioritize posts with links from friends who you follow their links. I think they probably even do things like, if you've looked at a persons' profile a lot, or perhaps even if they look at yours a lot, the posts will be more likely to show up. I doubt that Facebook has made this algorithm clear, but it's clear that they're doing things like this.

So it seems that all they did was to add into the algorithm for some users to favor posts with happy words, and for other users posts with unhappy words. I don't think they're altering anything about the tone or emphasis of any individual message. I don't say this to really defend them.

Maybe Google should be working with a company like Tesla instead. It seems like Google would need to find a partner that a background in manufacturing cars, but was a little more innovative and forward-thinking than the big guys in Detroit have historically been.

Along with everything else, my guess is that if this technology really becomes commonplace, it will be disruptive and it will likely result in fewer people actually owning cars. In cases like this, sometimes getting businesses with entrenched interests onboard is not only difficult, but counter productive.

As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.

Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)

The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.

So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.

It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.