links for 2009-06-09

A study released this week by a Harvard University professor and a graduate student told many who use Twitter what they may already know: The network is dominated by a few tweeters talking about themselves, much more so than other social networks.

Bad law. "It might help them to present some of the economic research on this, including the studies that have shown how much the lack of copyright has helped the industry to thrive, and how much harm the addition of copyright would do to the overall industry. This research has been out there for years, but apparently the folks writing the laws would rather hang out with celebrities like Tim Gunn than actually do some research around what such a law would really mean for the industry." This post has good links.

Full Exchange integration is what I need most. Good deal: $29 to upgrade from Leopard, down from their regular $129 upgrade price. $49 for a family pack. It comes out in September, before Windows 7, and a developer preview is available from today. Anyone who buys a new Mac from June 8th can upgrade for a nominal $10 handling fee.

Every tweet in Twitter’s system is uniquely identified by an integer value. For example, the system’s very first public tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is tweet number 20 (presumably tweets 0 through 19 were used for testing). The maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. This is a huge value, but the accelerating popularity of Twitter means has the amount of tweets is rapidly approaching this limit. If third party application developers haven’t designed their Twitter clients to store tweet IDs using something like the less restrictive unsigned 64-bit integer data structure, users might start seeing strange errors, such as tweets listed in the wrong order - or worse, applications not working at all.

Students at Georgia’s public colleges may have more lecturers teaching their classes this coming academic year under a change approved by the state Board of Regents.

The board changed its policy last month to raise the cap on lecturers from 10 percent to 20 percent of a college’s faculty. The amended rule allows all colleges to use lecturers, not just research institutions.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service—recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern—that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
The site promises that students can stop using "lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.

Gay male students have higher college grade point averages and perceive their academic work as more important.
Gay and bisexual males are more likely to report the presence of a faculty member or administrator with whom they could discuss a problem.
Gay and bisexual males place more importance on participating in student organizations, volunteer activities, the arts, and politics.