by Andrew Beaujon Published May 23, 2012 7:49 am Updated May 23, 2012 7:55 am Fairleigh Dickinson University People who watch no news at all can answer more questions about international current events than people who watch cable news, a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds. NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge. People who watch MSNBC and CNN exclusively can answer more questions about domestic events than people who watch no news at all. People who only watch Fox did much worse. NPR listeners answered more questions correctly than people in any other category. The largest effect ... Continue reading →
Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post. The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them. The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, ... Continue reading →
Facebook's IPO: Great for Investors, Even Better for Its Tax Bill By Paula Dwyer 2012-05-17T21:32:19Z Facebook Inc.'s IPO will create billions in new wealth for its founders, employees and investors. It will also save the company billions -- about $16 billion, to be precise -- in taxes. That's the amount Facebook will be able to deduct from its tax bill for granting stock options to its owners and employees. The tax-break windfall, which will be the largest ever claimed by a company for stock option awards, is known by some critics as the "stock option tax loophole." Like it or not, it's a perfectly legal tax avoidance technique. Tax law says that if a company issues options to employees to buy stock in the future ... Continue reading →
Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York TimesIt’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data.Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if ... Continue reading →