AH HA!!! I knew there was something fishy about Facebook.com. This may be a little paranoid, and totally neurotic, but there are some pretty compelling cases out there for why we should all be a little worried by the growing size and connections at Facebook.com.

Facebook is a social-networking site, like MySpace or Friendster, but that is growing at an incredibly fast pace and with exactly the demographic advertisers want — college students. And received good and widespread press following the Virginia Tech shootings.

First, view this slideshow, which makes a good argument for the ties between Facebook, right wing funding sources, and even the CIA.

But also this blogger breaks down these connections and finds them to be both credible and suspicious.

It’s for that reason alone that if you log into Facebook and can’t find me anymore, it’s because I’ve cancelled my account.

(HT: Dave Farber’s IP listserv.)

I meant to post this yesterday, but didn’t get around to it. The NY Times reported that an academic study has found that white refs are more likely to call fouls on black players, and black refs are more likely (though slightly less so) to call fouls on white players.

Per the Times:

“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” [the study’s author] said.

The NBA, and NBA observers and reporters, are freaking out because of the study. The NBA, and uber-commish David Stern even conducted its own study (derided by academics as less scientific) that found no such racist correlation. The one NBA person, in this case team owner, that seems to be making intellectually honest statements about this whole thing, is Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban, when he said:

“We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.” Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”

Not surprisngly, sports-analysis-author-on-speed Michael Lewis reported that Cuban employs a whole room of geeks to analyze unexpected and unknown stats just like this.

But to my untrained, biased, anecdotally-focused eyes, the study that finds bias is only logical. We all have subconscious prejudices, and this study just seems to prove that.

What we really should be afraid of on the Internets. (Flickr thx: Steve the Engineer).

Internet2, the name of the supposed successor to the Internet, and what many academics and computer scientists see as the only hope to avoid the network overload that most see coming over the next decade as millions (maybe billions) more people start logging onto the Internet.

And so its kinda disheartening, and a bit scary, when the new supercalifragilistic Internet2 is crashed — by a homeless man and a cigarette.

Per TechDirt:

when it came to Internet2, apparently designers didn’t pay as much attention to that kind of stability. The news today is that a homeless man in Boston tossed a cigarette on a mattress, setting off a two-alarm fire that happened to knock out the Internet2 connection between New York and Boston. It’s true that Internet2 is supposed to be experimenting with different methods of building network infrastructure, but you would think that redundancy would have been considered a feature worth keeping.

Remember the first real Internet worm, the Morris Worm, that freaked out Internet users in the 1980s because it exposed some of the network’s major instabilities. This kinda reminds me of that — well, you know, minus the homeless man.

Berlin is full of artists, rebels, and general ne’er do wells. But who would have expected a bunch of “anarcho communists” intent on overthrowing global capitalism?

This weekend, on Marketplace Money, I looked at how several “revolutionaries” are making small advances for the cause, by printing alternative money in Germany.

According to Wikipedia, alternative currencies are:

Alternative currency is a term that refers to any currency used as an alternative to the dominant national or multinational currency systems (usually referred to as national or fiat money). Alternative currencies can be created by an individual, corporation, or organization, they can be created by national, state, or local governments, or they can arise naturally as people begin to use a certain commodity as a currency. Mutual credit is a form of alternative currency, and thus any form of lending that does not go through the banking system can be considered form of alternative currency.