It only took them seven years to make these changes, too. And what a coincidence that they roll these out right after G+ launches with these features out of the gate.

In terms of privacy, their problem is not a lack of features. Their problem is trust. And after years and years of hard work to make me never trust them they have succeeded. New privacy features just can't fix that. Too little, too late

Most "Duh" research isn't "Duh" at all. It only sounds that way because of the atrocious state of science reporting in the popular press. Challenging, technical research has to be translated into terms regular folks can understand, and that often means making ridiculous comparisons or analogies, or just giving an explanation of the research so dumbed down that the researchers themselves would hardly recognize it.

Another contributing factor is the political motivations of people with large audiences who don't know better. For example, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a "report" making fun of a number of studies supposedly representing wasting spending on stupid research. It turns out his examples are actually pretty nuanced and important after all--hardly "duh" science.

The general population just isn't equipped to judge which research is important and worth spending money on. That is exactly why we have organizations like the NSF to evaluate grant proposals for us.

This is completely Google's fault. Google Wave is a great product as it currently is, but Google completely failed to communicate to people why. But more to the point, Google itself failed miserably to leverage its own idea in the ways the first demo at Google I/O promised. Why can't I integrate gmail with Google Wave? Why after all this time does it still not work on my phone? Why doesn't it work with Google Docs? Why doesn't it work with Google Buzz?

More importantly, why would someone waste so much time, money, and manpower on a product they have no intention of supporting through interoperability with their own product line and through advertising and public exposure? What did they think would happen?

This is yet another huge screwup for Google indicative of their inability to build social networking products. Maybe it's time to sell my Google shares.

When that MIT/Wellesley Counterpoint survey came out, I had recently graduated from MIT and was still around campus working as a research assistant. To put it bluntly, most everyone I knew considered that article rather funny... (And Counterpoint is often looked at as an unintentional humor publication...) First off... two words: sample size. More specifically... it said that at one of the dorms at MIT there was a 100% rate of virginity. I knew people who could vouch otherwise. Going back to sample size, it turns out the survey had only been taken by 4 freshmen at that dorm. Secondly, the wording on many of the survey questions was apparently vague and open to interpretation. Lastly, it's also good to keep in mind that students at MIT often find it amusing to deliberately mess up statistics, particularly if it's for a campus publication.