“On e-mail, people aren’t quite themselves,” they wrote. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.”

Oh, how times have changed. The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.

And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” ”” which means “let’s discuss live” ”” is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman, Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral. How do the pros use it? Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

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After a dramatic turnaround Wednesday in the House, the battle to win a prized tax incentive to lure Amazon.com moves to the state Senate, where the online retailer’s support has not been tested.

A 97-20 tally ”” aided by 49 legislators, mostly Republicans, who switched their vote ”” handed the Seattle-based company a real shot at receiving a five-year exemption from collecting state sales tax on each purchase by South Carolina shoppers. Last month, the House refused to grant the incentive on a 71-47 vote, which halted the project.

The vote came after Amazon sweetened its offer Tuesday night with an additional 751 jobs and $35 million more in investment, said Rep. Kenny Bingham, R-Lexington, who became the House point man in the high-stakes battle.

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The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment …[this month] unveiled a new website of over 10,000 rare historic sound recordings available to the public for the first time digitally. The site is called the “National Jukebox” [and it may be found here].

Developed by the Library of Congress, with assets provided by Sony Music Entertainment, the National Jukebox offers free online access to a vast selection of music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925.

The website was launched at a Library news conference featuring an appearance by Grammy-winning pianist, singer and actor Harry Connick, Jr. The Columbia recording artist performed the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which is on the site performed by composer Eubie Blake.

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In 2005, Pamela Paul coined the term “pornified” (in her book of the same name) to characterize the ubiquity and mainstreaming of pornography in contemporary American society, in large measure because of the Internet. Her book described the deleterious impact this phenomenon is having on marriage, women, young people and men.

Five years later, Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute has published this impressive collection of 11 papers from its 2008 conference, further detailing how corrosively widespread Internet pornography has become. The essays are divided into three main groups: evidence of the harm pornography causes (including a new essay by Pamela Paul); moral perspectives (including Roger Scruton’s thought-provoking essay busting various modern sex myths); and how public policy might combat this ill (including essays by James Stoner and Gerard Bradley discussing the very real impediments certain trends in contemporary constitutional jurisprudence could interpose).

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Some time after the dotcom boom turned into a spectacular bust in 2000, bumper stickers began appearing in Silicon Valley imploring: “Please God, just one more bubble.” That wish has now been granted. Compared with the rest of America, Silicon Valley feels like a boomtown. Corporate chefs are in demand again, office rents are soaring and the pay being offered to talented folk in fashionable fields like data science is reaching Hollywood levels. And no wonder, given the prices now being put on web companies.

Facebook and Twitter are not listed, but secondary-market trades value them at some $76 billion (more than Boeing or Ford) and $7.7 billion respectively. This week LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, said it hopes to be valued at up to $3.3 billion in an initial public offering (IPO). The next day Microsoft announced its purchase of Skype, an internet calling and video service, for a frothy-looking $8.5 billion””ten times its sales last year and 400 times its operating income. And those are all big-brand companies with customers around the world. Prices look even more excessive for fledgling firms in the private market (Color, a photo-sharing social network, was recently said to be worth $100m, even though it has an untested service) or for anything involving China. There has been a stampede for shares in Renren, hailed as “China’s Facebook”, and other Chinese web giants listed on American exchanges.

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[The running online commentary]…instead of being a distraction ”” an electronic version of note-passing ”” the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. [Erin] Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.

“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”

With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a “backchannel” in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else.

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What are the best *parish* websites in the Episcopal/Anglican realm do you think? The more specific you can be about why you like them the more helpful this will be–KSH.

Some things just can’t be done online. Like shake the hand of a blogging Benedictine nun (aka @Digitalnun on Twitter) and get her advice on how to create a profitable app with no start-up money.

Or drink prosecco, nibble on focaccia and discover while chatting with a scientist who blogs about biology and religion that he is a Protestant married to a Muslim and couldn’t believe he was invited to a Vatican event.

At a landmark “Blog Meet,” the pontifical councils for culture and for social communications brought together 150 bloggers — in the flesh — from all parts of the world May 2 to get a sense of their hopes and concerns. Once again, the church insisted the virtual world should only be a tool, not a substitute for, real human contact, even when the meeting underlines the extraordinary powers of new media.

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At an age when his parents won’t let him go to the mall alone and in an era when he would never open up to a stranger, [Scott] Fitzsimones, who lives in Phoenix, already has a growing dossier accumulating on the Web. And while Congress has passed laws to protect the youngest of Internet users from sharing much information about themselves, once those children become teens, the same privacy rules no longer apply.

“It’s the Wild West for teens when it comes to privacy online,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University.

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I have been a priest in the Episcopal church since March of 1999. I was introduced to a new word by Epsicopalians, “low Sunday” years ago. Low Sunday is the Sunday after Easter. While it is not on the calendar, it is engraved in the heart of many people. It is a long standing tradition that you simply blow off the Sunday after Easter.

This year we had some 450 attend Easter services. This weekend we probably saw less than 200. That makes me sick. Easter is a fifty day celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It ends on Pentecost. We Christians struggle to make it last for a week.

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A powerful arm of China’s government said Wednesday that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation’s vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics.

But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and other government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.

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Read the tweets here–fascinating.

A Pakistani computer programmer, startled by helicopters, took to Twitter to complain about the noise Sunday — but inadvertently gave a play-by-play of the high-stakes capture of the world’s most-wanted man.

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Distraction and extraction. These are the skills, timeless, of thousands of thieves who work in New York, without a weapon and without attracting notice.

Where in the city can such a thief visit dozens of happy hunting spots on an afternoon’s walk, finding rooms crowded with people staring at laptops or iPads, or texting or talking on phones, and ignoring their purses? A place so comfortable and familiar, with its jazz, leather chairs and Wi-Fi, that customers, otherwise savvy to the city’s dangers, do not think twice about saving a round blond-wood table with a bag or a laptop while they stand in line?

You may be there now, with a grande caffè mocha….

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Amazon all but told South Carolina goodbye Wednesday after the online retailer lost a legislative showdown on a sales tax collection exemption it wants to open a distribution center that would bring 1,249 jobs to the Midlands.

Company officials immediately halted plans to equip and staff the one million-square-foot building under construction at I-77 and 12th Street near Cayce.

“As a result of today’s unfortunate House vote, we’ve canceled $52 million in procurement contracts and removed all South Carolina fulfillment center job postings from our (Web) site,” said Paul Misener, Amazon vice president for global public policy.

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An intensely toxic court case which shattered Japanese society, ended today with a 30-month prison sentence for a man who was once the country’s most prominent entrepreneur….

Mr [Takafumi] Horie’s eradication as a political and corporate trailblazer also marked the beginning of the end of prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s supposedly reformist era.

It was a five-and-a-half year stint in which the charismatic politician persuaded both Japan and the outside world that he had placed the country on a new tack. Retrospective analysis of his period in power suggest his practical impact had been almost entirely undone by about 2009.

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We are interested in your theological as well as personal reflections–what is touching you most today where you live and move and have your being in terms of the significance of Easter.

The more specific you can be the better.

As is our custom, we aim to let go of the cares and concerns of this world until Monday and to focus on the great, awesome, solemn and holy events of the next three days. I would ask people to concentrate their comments on the personal, devotional, and theological aspects of these days which will be our focal point here. Many thanks–KSH.

China will implement a new regulation to further control the online industry after a dispute between two Chinese Internet giants, Tencent and Qihoo 360, caused harm to their users, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Wednesday.

Zhang Feng, director of the ministry’s Department of Communications Development, made the announcement at a press conference concerning China’s first-quarter industrial operations.

“We have finishing soliciting opinions for the new regulation and will publish it soon,” Zhang said.

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Authorities in South Korea are probing a large system failure at a popular bank, trying to determine whether the incident was an error or a cybercrime that could be repeated elsewhere in the country where business leans largely on electronic transactions.

Problems at the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation began on April 12 and lasted for several days. During that time, customers were blocked from online and automated teller machine transactions. While some services have returned, issues persist with access to credit card information.

The incident has generated 300,000 complaints and prompted pledges of compensation to the agricultural lender’s customers as its affected network gets up to speed again this week, local media said.

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Wow-simply stunning; check it out.

Keller did get his dander up after Assange said that watching the American news media cover international events is like watching a goldfish bowl where readers pay little attention to outside perspectives.

Keller seemed to take that as a slight against the prestigious New York Times overseas correspondents. “I have to object to the idea that we’re not interested in what happens outside the U.S.,” he said. “We have 40 correspondents and stringers overseas, and we have four people who have been killed covering the wars.”

Assange said he meant no disrespect to the work of Times correspondents living or dead. But he did get the last word on that topic.

“I say that 40 people covering the entire world in the New York Times, which is the opinion leader of the United States, is a state of desperation,” he said.

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While it’s accepted that women are watching ”“ and enjoying ”“ porn more and more, it’s less recognised that some are also finding it hard to stop. At Quit Porn Addiction, the UK’s main porn counselling service, almost one in three clients are women struggling with their own porn use, says founder and counsellor Jason Dean. Two years ago, there were none.While more than six out of 10 women say they view web porn, one study in 2006 by the Internet Filter Review found that 17% of women describe themselves as “addicted”.

Dean says: “I remember getting my first woman contacts about two years ago and thinking that was fairly unusual. Now I’m hearing from about 70 women a year who are coming for their own reasons, not because their male partners have a problem.”

There is little difference in the way the genders become hooked, says Jason. There is the same pattern of exposure, addiction, and desensitisation to increasingly hardcore images. The main contrast between male and female porn addicts is how much more guilty women feel. “Porn addiction is seen as a man’s problem ”“ and therefore not acceptable for women,” says Dean. “There’s a real sense among women that it’s bad, dirty, wrong and they’re often unable to get beyond that.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Hundreds of bloggers have already made enquires about attending a special meeting being arranged by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Social Communications on May 2nd, just after the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Officials say the meeting was proposed to establish a dialogue between the Church and the new media of blogging.

“If we look today where culture is strongly formed and shaped, it’s the blogosphere. Bloggers have an enormous influence, ties an important community, its an important category, so its right that there to be a meeting of bloggers within the Church in order for the Church to take account of this reality, to dialogue with it, to listen to it, to listen to it, to be aware of it,” says Dr. Richard Rouse, an official at the Pontifical Council for Culture.

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The line between cyberspace and the physical world is blurring with a new search technology being demonstrated by Autonomy, a British software publisher.

The firm is demonstrating a software-based machine-vision recognition system intended for smartphones and tablet computers that embeds images and videos directly on top of the image of a real object on the user’s display.

Today so-called augmented reality is already widely available on both iPhones and Android phones through software applications like Google Goggles. Hundreds of other apps overlay geographical information on smartphone displays.

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American composer Eric Whitacre is a rock star in choral circles. His music is performed by amateur and professional choirs alike, his chiseled good looks have earned him a modeling contract, and, Thursday night, he unveils his Virtual Choir 2.0 on YouTube. It features more than 2,000 singers from around the world, including this reporter.

I’ve been singing in real choirs since I was a kid, so I was intrigued to participate in a virtual one. I recently asked Whitacre how he came up with the concept.

“Well, it all started with this video ”” a young girl named Britlin Losee, who was 17 at the time, posted to YouTube a video of herself singing the soprano part to a piece of mine called ‘Sleep,’ ” Whitacre says.

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Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Mr. Hamilton, 18, is among the expanding ranks of students in kindergarten through grade 12 ”” more than one million in the United States, by one estimate ”” taking online courses.

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Hackers are following prey onto smartphones and social networking hotspots, according to reports released Tuesday by a pair of computer security firms.

Cyber criminals are also ramping up the sophistication and frequency of attacks on business and government networks, one of the companies, Symantec, said in the latest volume of its Internet Security Threat Report.

Symantec depicted a “massive” volume of more than 286 new computer threats on the Internet last year, continued growth in attacks at online social networks and “a notable shift in focus” by hackers to mobile devices.

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