Is Facebook good?

“What is so bad about Facebook?” Whenever I hear this question, I usually start a – seemingly – never-ending, heated discussion about why Facebook is bad and how stupid it is to use Facebook.

The more you know about the hidden costs (e.g. giving up privacy and private conversation) of the so called “free” social network, the more the cost-benefit function gets out of proportion.

From my point of view there are millions of very good reasons to stop using Facebook immediately. However many of the reasons stated below are not only valid for Facebook, but for other closed and centralized social networks as well, espcially Twitter.

Political Reasons to quit Facebook

• Facebook is based, registered and run in the United States of America.
  This is bad because of the “Patriot Act”. Even if Facebook starts respecting your privacy, your data is still easily available to every governmental institution in the Country through open backdoors or requests, as this Facebook.pdf-file documents. Think about what this means to your freedom.
• Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation.
  Facebook and Government institutions have a history. Since the article was released in 2008 it got a lot worse. In 2010 the U.S. Government started developing and using a software which creates fake profiles on social networks to spread messages and to spy on people.
• Facebook wants to go public.
  When the time comes, everything that counts is money. They will try everything to make money out of Facebook, thus you, your friends, your communication, everything. At least, I bet on it.

Technical Reasons & Internet Politics

• Facebook is a centralized social network. It is run by Facebook alone.
  Not only does this contradict reality (you do not meet all your real-life friends only (!) in the same, single real-life place) it also makes the whole network prone to attacks and breakdowns. Think hacking attacks or software failures. The real-life complement would be destroying the one, single place where you meet all your friends making impossible to contact them anymore.
• Facebook adds an unnecessary layer to the Internet.
  Facebook hasn’t introduced anything new, apart from being able to “like” something. Facebook Mail resembles Email, Facebook Chat resembles chat software, Facebook Threads resemble forums, Facebook Pages resemble normal web sites, galleries, videos, links…they all have an equivalent in the regular Internet world. Why put all of this in the hands of a privately owned company like Facebook?
• Facebook and the Open Social Web.
  There are plenty of people working on the idea of an open social network, which would work decentralized, with whichever social network you prefer. For example Open Social. Instead of joing these people, like Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning, and Yahoo!, Facebook decided to present something stupid, called “the Open Graph API”. Facebooks idea with this is to use it’s market power to install a Facebook-owned pseudo web standard. The name just disguises its fundamentally closed nature.
• Facebook Like-Buttons on External Web Sites – I can only warn you about the everywhere emerging Facebook Like-buttons on external (non-Facebook) web sites. When you are logged in to Facebook while browing the Internet. Due to the fact that the buttons are loaded through an embedded iframe (the non-Facebook web site embeds a Facebook web site), these buttons provide your personal browing habits to Facebook, even without you clicking on them.
• Mark Zuckerberg is an evil hacker.
  When Mark Suckerberg started Facebook he scraped student’s profiles (names, images and other personal information) from several University websites to get his network – The Facebook – started. That is only one aspect of unethical behavior in his “sketchy” past. The question you have to ask yourself is: “Do I want to entrust a hacker like Mark Zuckerberg with personal information of myself and my friends and our communication?” Let me help you out: No!
• Even if you want, you cannot protect your privacy.
  You automatically entrust all your Facebook friends with your personal information, even against third-parties (like web applications (web apps) and data-sharing partners of Facebook). You would never do this in real life, maybe not even with your closest friends. On Facebook you even let the least tech-savvy person you know (or maybe do not even know) manage your online privacy issues. How sick is that?
• Data-sharing deals.
  Anyone who connects the American Amazon web site with his or her Facebook account, gives Amazon not only his own personal data but also the data of all his / her Facebook friends. There are other, similar data-sharing deals.
• Datasharing for personal purposes.
  I do not understand why Facebook allows everyone to access and import my personal data, contacts, chats, etc. but me. Why can’t I export my Facebook address book but only parts of it? I do not like that kind of “nannyism”, at least, I do not need it. Do you?
• Constantly changing privacy and account settings are annoying.
  The Electronic Fountier Foundation has a nice chart, you might be interested in. Time tells: What’s private now, will be open in the future. You have to constantly re-read the changes Facebooks settings. Those changes used to be communicated to every memeber up until 2010 (I believe). This is when Facebook started to have you join the Facebook Fan-Page to be informed about TOC changes. Fail.
• “The default is now social…”
  Mark Zuckerberg says. Meaning, we will share all your information, there is no more private, learn to live with it. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” No, it just made your business model work.

Personal & Social Reasons to quit Facebook

• Facebook doesn’t let you delete all your data.
  When I tried to edit or delete my checkins to the newly introduced Facebook Places in Q1 2011, I realized, there is no way functionality for this. The Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities reads: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. As sharing data you and your friends upload to Facebook is what all the fun is about, this actually translates into “We will never delete anything”. Think about this.
• Facial Recognition
  Facebook’s facial-recognition feature – or “tag suggestions” – which allow users to identify people across multiple photos at once using facial-recognition software invades my privacy. The more photos of me are tagged with my name, the better the software works, the lesser privacy I get.
• Facebook takes too much of my time.
  I have better things to do than wasting my time on Facebook.
• Broken Social Circle.
  I have a huge friend list full of people who are not actual friends. I don’t know how that happened but my real-life social circle looks kind of different.
• Friend or Foe?
  People whom you would rather not like to be connected with, find and contact you. It is hard not to accept friendship requests.
• You are being stalked.
  Generally speaking, Facebook is not really helpful when it comes to relationships. It usually just causes ridiculous jealousy.
• It just feels bad.
  I live my life in a free world with plenty of freedoms. They range from free thinking, free software, freedom of speech, …simply freedom in all my decisions. Why would I want to be stuck in a walled garden like Facebook?
• Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to really delete an account.
  It is easy to find the “deactivate” option, but deactivation is not the same as deletion.

Personally,I don’t Use Facebook.

What is Evolution?

Do you know what is evolution? If NO! than this is for you.

Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

One of the earliest defining human traits, bipedalism — the ability to walk on two legs — evolved over 4 million years ago. Other important human characteristics — such as a large and complex brain, the ability to make and use tools, and the capacity for language — developed more recently. Many advanced traits — including complex symbolic expression, art, and elaborate cultural diversity — emerged mainly during the past 100,000 years.

Humans are primates. Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species, Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa — chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas — share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa.

Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans. Scientists do not all agree, however, about how these species are related or which ones simply died out. Many early human species — certainly the majority of them – left no living descendants. Scientists also debate over how to identify and classify particular species of early humans, and about what factors influenced the evolution and extinction of each species.

Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 30,000 years or so. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations occurred within the past 12,000 years.

Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology is the scientific study of human evolution. Paleoanthropology is a subfield of anthropology, the study of human culture, society, and biology. The field involves an understanding of the similarities and differences between humans and other species in their genes, body form, physiology, and behavior. Paleoanthropologists search for the roots of human physical traits and behavior. They seek to discover how evolution has shaped the potentials, tendencies, and limitations of all people. For many people, paleoanthropology is an exciting scientific field because it investigates the origin, over millions of years, of the universal and defining traits of our species. However, some people find the concept of human evolution troubling because it can seem not to fit with religious and other traditional beliefs about how people, other living things, and the world came to be. Nevertheless, many people have come to reconcile their beliefs with the scientific evidence.

Early human fossils and archeological remains offer the most important clues about this ancient past. These remains include bones, tools and any other evidence (such as footprints, evidence of hearths, or butchery marks on animal bones) left by earlier people. Usually, the remains were buried and preserved naturally. They are then found either on the surface (exposed by rain, rivers, and wind erosion) or by digging in the ground. By studying fossilized bones, scientists learn about the physical appearance of earlier humans and how it changed. Bone size, shape, and markings left by muscles tell us how those predecessors moved around, held tools, and how the size of their brains changed over a long time. Archeological evidence refers to the things earlier people made and the places where scientists find them. By studying this type of evidence, archeologists can understand how early humans made and used tools and lived in their environments.

The process of evolution

The process of evolution involves a series of natural changes that cause species (populations of different organisms) to arise, adapt to the environment, and become extinct. All species or organisms have originated through the process of biological evolution. In animals that reproduce sexually, including humans, the term species refers to a group whose adult members regularly interbreed, resulting in fertile offspring — that is, offspring themselves capable of reproducing. Scientists classify each species with a unique, two-part scientific name. In this system, modern humans are classified as Homo sapiens.

Evolution occurs when there is change in the genetic material — the chemical molecule, DNA — which is inherited from the parents, and especially in the proportions of different genes in a population. Genes represent the segments of DNA that provide the chemical code for producing proteins. Information contained in the DNA can change by a process known as mutation. The way particular genes are expressed – that is, how they influence the body or behavior of an organism — can also change. Genes affect how the body and behavior of an organism develop during its life, and this is why genetically inherited characteristics can influence the likelihood of an organism’s survival and reproduction.

Evolution does not change any single individual. Instead, it changes the inherited means of growth and development that typify a population (a group of individuals of the same species living in a particular habitat). Parents pass adaptive genetic changes to their offspring, and ultimately these changes become common throughout a population. As a result, the offspring inherit those genetic characteristics that enhance their chances of survival and ability to give birth, which may work well until the environment changes. Over time, genetic change can alter a species’ overall way of life, such as what it eats, how it grows, and where it can live. Human evolution took place as new genetic variations in early ancestor populations favored new abilities to adapt to environmental change and so altered the human way of life.

Why Water?

We all know that water is good for us, but often the reasons are a little fuzzy. And even if we know why we should drink water, it’s not a habit that many people form.

But there are some very powerful reasons to drink lots of water every day, and forming the habit isn’t hard, with a little focus.

The thing about it is, we don’t often focus on this habit. We end up drinking coffee, and lots of soda, and alcohol, not to mention fruit juices and teas and milk and a bunch of other possibilities. Or just as often, we don’t drink enough fluids, and we become dehydrated — and that isn’t good for our health.

I’ve made drinking water a daily habit, although I will admit that a couple of years ago I was more likely to drink anything but water. Now I don’t drink anything but water, except for a cup of coffee in the morning and once in awhile a beer with dinner. I love it.

Here are 9 powerful reasons to drink water (with tips on how to form the water habit afterwards):
Weight loss
Water is one of the best tools for weight loss, first of all because it often replaces high-calorie drinks like soda and juice and alcohol with a drink that doesn’t have any calories. But it’s also a great appetite suppressant, and often when we think we’re hungry, we’re actually just thirsty. Water has no fat, no calories, no carbs, no sugar. Drink plenty to help your weight-loss regimen.

Heart healthy
Drinking a good amount of water could lower your risks of a heart attack. A six-year study published in the May 1, 2002 American Journal of Epidemiology found that those who drink more than 5 glasses of water a day were 41% less likely to die from a heart attack during the study period than those who drank less than two glasses.

Energy
Being dehydrated can sap your energy and make you feel tired — even mild dehydration of as little as 1 or 2 percent of your body weight. If you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated — and this can lead to fatigue, muscle weakness, dizziness and other symptoms.

Headache cure
Another symptom of dehydration is headaches. In fact, often when we have headaches it’s simply a matter of not drinking enough water. There are lots of other causes of headaches of course, but dehydration is a common one.

Healthy skin
Drinking water can clear up your skin and people often report a healthy glow after drinking water. It won’t happen overnight, of course, but just a week of drinking a healthy amount of water can have good effects on your skin.

Digestive problems
Our digestive systems need a good amount of water to digest food properly. Often water can help cure stomach acid problems, and water along with fiber can cure constipation (often a result of dehydration).

Cleansing
Water is used by the body to help flush out toxins and waste products from the body.

Cancer risk
Related to the digestive system item above, drinking a healthy amount of water has also been found to reduce the risk of colon cancer by 45%. Drinking lots of water can also reduce the risk of bladder cancer by 50% and potentially reduce the risk of breast cancer.

Better exerciseBeing dehydrated can severely hamper your athletic activities, slowing you down and making it harder to lift weights. Exercise requires additional water, so be sure to hydrate before, during and after exercise.