Photo by Ian Sane

On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks – This was the basis of a somewhat sensational WSJ article, but the original paper is interesting because it points out how standard web mechanisms like referer headers can be exploited now our Facebook ID numbers can be used to look up valuable information

This Week in Maps – Steve ‘OpenStreetMap’ Coast alerted me to his new podcast covering the wonderful world of geo. The latest episode with Matt Galligan even gets a bit feisty!

Large Scale Social Media Analysis with Hadoop – If you’re trying to do anything with even moderate amounts of data from networks like Twitter, using a MapReduce model for your processing will save you so much time and effort. This presentation is a great guide to getting started

Living in denial, why sensible people reject the truth – When I was young, there was a vaccination scare that led my parents to skip some of my shots. Sure enough I came down with Whooping Cough shortly afterward, so I’ve always had a personal fascination with how we can judge when something’s a real worry, and when it’s just pseudo-science. I loved this exploration into how harmful beliefs like those are started and sustained

The Dumbest Question – It’s standard for financial advisers to begin by asking their clients ‘How much risk are you comfortable with?’. This is a terrible starting point, nobody has a real idea of how much of an abstract ‘risk’ they want to take with their money, they just have goals, dreams and constraints