Link: The best times to buy anything in 2011

Shoppers beware!

Link: Rogue Facebook apps can now access your home address and mobile phone number | Naked Security

In a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users, third party application developers are now able to access your home address and mobile phone number.

Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users.

Link: Short Sharp Science: Bat camp: orphaned critters nursed back to health

Link: List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia

This list of common or popular misconceptions describes documented, widespread ideas and beliefs which are fallacious, misleading, or otherwise flawed.

MUST READ!

Link: Intel’s upcoming Core chips to include copy-blocking system

Intel on Monday said that it was building a hardware security layer in its next-generation Core chips to prevent streaming movies from being copied.

I don’t like when *MY* hardware dictates what I can do with it.

Link: http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/cio_update.html

As a follow-up to last week’s outage, here is a detailed explanation of what transpired, the root cause, and plans to mitigate this from happening again in the future.

Link: The Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010 | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

fuckyeahtheuniverse:

tonight! tonight!

Link: A simple example of why correlation and causation should never be mistaken for the same thing

Mathematician finds a strong correlation between the presence of mobile phone masts and the number of children born

[…]

The match between mobile phone towers and birth rates is an extremely strong correlation and it is highly statistically significant. There is no doubting the mathematical finding that more mobile phone masts mean that there will also be more births. This is about as rigorous as statistics can get.

Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth.

I remember my economics and statistics teacher coming up with a similar example: it’s in towns that have the highest number of churches that you’ll find the highest number of alcoholics. Because those towns are bigger. Duh!

Interesting read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/dec/17/mobile-phone-masts-birth-rate

Link: Private Space Capsule Launch ‘Mind-Blowingly Awesome’

SpaceX’s first operational Dragon spacecraft launched aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket at 10:43 a.m. EST (1543 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 40.

The capsule made two orbits of the Earth at speeds greater than 17,000 mph (over 27,300 kilometers per hour), according to SpaceX officials. It then re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean shortly after 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT). The entire mission lasted almost 3 hours and 20 minutes.

This launch will make history! Congratulations to SpaceX!

Via space.com