If the Big 12 collapses it will not be for a lack of athletic competitiveness. Sure Colorado will probably be a ringer in the PAC-12 this year boosting the relative rankings of established teams in the conference, but it could be interesting seeing what happens when Nebraska hits perennial Big Ten favorites Michigan State, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.  Nebraska also lost its membership in the AAU which probably hits on the scholarly image of the Big Ten.

While a lot of editorial length goes towards hypothetical 14 and 16 team super conferences in the coming years. What happens if the Big 12 contracts to a Big 8 again, managing to keep its AQ status. If the two Oklahoma teams flee to the Pacific Coast while A&M jumps to an already overcrowded SEC and other defections happen from the Big 12, while the University of Texas tries to pull a Notre Dame there are still ways to keep the Big 12′s  AQ status alive.

Florida A&M represents the sort of academically and athletically competitive school that could thrive in a resurrected Big 8 or reconstituted Big 12, and it may be a better cultural fit than Houston or SMU around which speculation of Big 12 membership usually condenses. Then there’s the chance a few teams from the SEC or PAC may feel things are getting a bit  crowded, like Arkansas.

The last thing I would expect is a Texas departure from the Big 12. No other conference would let operate functionally as an independent.

I’m not going to wax contemplatively in this post on how social media brings people together, because other people are probably already doing that better and more articulately than I feel like trying to do right now. I just want to throw up some more pictures from Thursday’s walkabout.

Clicking on any of the below pictures will take you to the full resolution image.

The journalism corner of the Quad. The first J-School in the country even though Berkley and Columbia like to pretend they have a duopoly on graduate level journalism education.

Thomas Jefferson’s original grave marker sitting in from of the Residence on the Quad and covered in snow.

A view of the Lafferre Hall, the engineering building from the south.

Townsend Hall, home of the University’s School of Information Science and Leaning technology and the roads in front of it.

Here again is the picture of the columns that lead the post. License information for these pictures and those featured in the gallery at MyMissourian is below.

This Mizzou Snow Photo Gallery by Aaron Rogier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.aaronrogier.net/contact.

Pretty much feel free to use these as long as you attribute them to me, and ask politely before appropriating them for commercial use.

The first published at Ars Technica concerns a case of problematic interpretation. The setup seems very innovative, the results seem interesting, and then the investigator offers his interpretation involving an outmoded Lamarkian view of evolutionary biology. He devised an apparatus that allowed E. coli to be cultured over a gradient of differing concentrations of nutrients and antibiotics while being able to travel between these cells and observed rapid acquisition of resistance to ciprofloxacin, on the order of ten hours. And then he interprets his results through a pre-Darwinian lens. Presentation abstract available here.

The next is is from all of the way back in May, though I only recently ran into it. Darryl Cunningham offers a comic strip version of the MMR controversy and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield. In a hypothetical future in which I am responsible for children I might evaluate pediatricians based on the visible presence or absence of this in their office. Thankfully journalism on the subject is taking a positive turn if this NPR piece hoping for less parents to opt out of vaccinations is a sign.

Complementary to the first piece about problematic interpretation arrives this study from Michigan State concerning science illiteracy among college students, although this could probably be reproduced among many other populations. The university’s press release presents a nice summary.

These are just a few things I’ve been reading over the break between obligatory holiday gatherings and trying to put together some research of my own over the break. More than anything that first article has been sticking with me, the scientist interpreting an experiment he set up with what seems to be an innovative apparatus through assumptions a few hundred years behind the standards of the discipline he is writing on, makes me wonder what I as an aspiring librarian/educator can do to take steps to promote scientific literacy. Additionally to, in my work avoid lapses through which I may inadvertently promote poor research methods.

Any thoughts or comments?

Highland has a history of strong municipal utilities providing water and electricity to the city, and the new communications utility is positioned to serve Highland’s needs in ways that have been met by incumbent providers with often disappointing results. In the past it has been an infrequent but unfortunate reality that when the single cable providing Highland’s roughly 10,000 is damaged that phone service to the community has been interrupted for the several hours necessary for the cable to be repaired. After each of these incidents the city’s desire for a more robust connection to the national network the the redundancy to maintain connectivity in the event of damage to this single line has fallen of the indifferent ears of incumbents. In light of Frontier’s recent acquisition of Verizon’s telephone lines in Highland concern would not be unjustified considering Frontier’s history with smaller municipalities on the edges of metropolitan areas. The incumbent cable television provider has downsides as well.

The growing phenomenon of municipal broadband providers has attracted some attention in media including coverage of specific projects. Though Highland’s project hasn’t attracted much attention outside the local area, the city is on the leading edge of a growing movement to improve the quality of and access to internet services.

Highland Communication Services

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

seems like an anachronism given Facebook’s current business model that encourages sharing with Third-Party applications and sites. While Facebook’s future redefinitions of privacy may only be speculated by those outside of the company, the framework for the site’s ongoing reconstructions of privacy’s meaning comes through in the 2006 privacy policy.

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

The idea of reasonable community limitations is the key to understanding this shift, as is Facebook’s assertion that they will tell you what community limitations are. communities have always been the determining factor behind standards of privacy much as they are of obscenity. In much the same way that the standards for language in a kindergarten are more stringent from those in a bar, expectations of privacy vary between the relative anonymity a large city allows compared to the environment present in a college dormitory.

Google hasn’t been a force strengthening a strong concept of privacy online either, especially in light of the way that Buzz was rolled out or considering Eric Schmidt’s comments on the matter. In a piece highlighting aspects of life on the Google campus, Valleywag offers some of the more disturbing bits from a Googler’s blog. But are they intrinsically disturbing? My life and the community standards that I have picked up lead me to be put off by some aspects of the Google lifestyle, but I could probably adapt to them. Most people could. The question is should we? To what extent should we be adapting our standards of privacy? These aren’t empty questions as the people working to decide prevailing standards or privacy are in large part going to be working in environments like Google’s new implementation of the company town.

Links: [EFF Facebook Timeline] [Googleplex Life]

As an additional note for those wishing to opt out of Facebook’s Instant personalization feature the EFF has a guide to disabling it.

Connections

In a change announced earlier this week on the Facebook blog activities and interests listed on a user’s profile information will be linked to “community pages” centered around those interests. The EFF covers implications of this new connections system very well on their Deeplinks blog.

Facebook follows you on the internet

Thanks to Social Plugins website operators now have the ability to embed “like” buttons on their own websites. No longer do they need you to be on the actual Facebook site to like the wares that they pedal on Facebook. Prompted by a post on the Facebook blog I went to Levis.com in order to bring back evidence of the feral “like” buttons in the wild.

Exhibit A: Twelve pants each with a “like” button

Exhibit B: Product page for a pair of pants

Clicking any of these like buttons produces the same result as clicking a “like” button on the main Facebook site, which as it turns out does something differently now than it would have a week ago. Clicking a “like” button now does what becoming a fan of something of Facebook used to do. On Facebook Pages instead of displaying fans of the pages topic it displays people who like the page’s topic. It was announced a while ago that this change was happening, but now its in place and judging from how many times Facebook has reverted major changes this is how things are going to stay unless it gets replaced with something newer.

Facebook Applications Leave Facebook

Perhaps the biggest announcement at f8 was Microsoft’s new collaborative office web application Docs.com. This new application uses Facebook as its sign in rather than any of Microsoft’s existing sign in services and represents the most dangerous potential outcome for the Internet at large to arise from Facebook’s expansion, the possibility that Facebook could become the single sign on service for most of the internet’s largest sites.

Yelp and Pandora are also involved in this pilot effort to expand Facebook applications outside of Facebook, but the also appear to be maintaining their existing sign in systems, as is probably necessary to keep their user base intact. The move here though is to allow your signed in Facebook session to follow you across the internet to other sites which would interact with you information in the manner that existing applications for Facebook already do, but without being Facebook applications per se. Depending on how far this spreads beyond the three sites involved in this pilot this could make Facebook the big thing that Google has been afraid of. Considering that Google is beginning to be targeted with calls for anti-trust investigations. Facebook might not be far behind.

As far is I know Anil Dash’s question as to why the default privacy settings aren’t good enough for Mark Zuckerberg remains unanswered.

When Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed the restrictions from Glass-Steagall which prevented several different types of financial institutions from merging, each class of which performed different market functions, it removed and important barrier which served to assist in preventing bad transactions and toxic securities.  That barrier was the need to do business with other institutions to accomplish certain kinds of transactions. The merging of differing types of financial players into single businesses allowed internal transactions to take place which created securities that would not have been created had these securities had to have been created through the cooperation of several different businesses.

The collateralized debt obligations and mortgage backed securities which precipitated the crisis would have been much more difficult to craft had the transactions necessary to create then been made to go through outside firms rather than being crafted in house before being released for purchased by other firms. The necessity of dealing with an outsider to have individual mortgages and other debts repackaged makes it harder to include bad debts in the final securitized amalgamation of debt, because the other firm isn’t going to want to buy something that it can’t make money on.

Both parties to a transaction enter that transaction because they are under the impression that they are getting a good deal. The adversarial element that comes from the possibility of a transaction offering a lopsided benefit makes caution a virtue in deciding which transaction to enter. The diminished amount of trust involved in doing a transaction with an outside entity offers a check that isn’t present when a firm can produce a finished product internally.

The problem is one of balance.  Trust is what allows transactions to happen in a market economy, but caution is what allows for any level of market stability. The relations between different players on the market or lack thereof are the problem the meaningful stability related reforms are going to have to address as cleanup continues of the current financial mess and the economy migrates towards a more pleasant equilibrium.