If you think just keeping your Facebook page free of drunken photos will help you land a job, think again.

Facebook facts that make you look worldly and popular may say more about you to a hiring manager than anything else. Photos of your trip to Bali; status updates on how much you enjoyed reading “War and Peace”; and thousands of Facebook friends apparently translate into a job candidate who will do better on the job.

At least those are the findings of a new study by a trio of universities that looked at how Facebook profiles predict job success.

“We came up with a Facebook personality score and that correlates with job performance,” said Donald Kluemper, a management professor at Northern Illinois University, who, along with researchers at Auburn University and the University of Evansville, conducted the study that appeared in the recent issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

The researchers looked at five personality traits among Facebook users, including conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion and openness. The traits are known as the “Big Five” in psychological lingo and are often used in organizational studies, Kluemper said.

The Facebook users, 56 total, were given a personality score by independent evaluators and six months later those ratings were compared to evaluations completed by the supervisors who the users worked for. And guess what? The higher the Facebook personality score the higher the job performance rating by supervisors.

So what gets you a high personality rating exactly?

Here’s how Kluemper broke it down:

Conscientiousness: This is someone who appears to be well organized and hard-working, and that’s reflected in the way they set up their Facebook page. Maybe there are a lot of detailed posts and profile, or photos of the person working hard at something.

Emotional stability: You seem to be someone who looks at the glass as half full, and seem able to handle stress. That means your page is lacking lots of negative and down in the dumps type posts; and you’re not overly emotional in images or in what you write.

Agreeableness: This is all about someone who’s able to get along and doesn’t engage in Facebook conflicts, especially heated debates with friends.

Extraversion: Here’s where lots of Facebook friends come in handy because lots of friends is a predictor of extraversion. Also, photos of you in social situations with lots of people are a good thing, compared to pictures of you alone on your couch.

Openness: Travel and intellect play into this category. If you appear open to different experiences and viewpoints, then you’re viewed as open. If you’re posting stuff about classic literature you’ll probably score higher than if you’re dishing about the latest trashy novel. And photos of international travel are also a big plus.

Based on this research, scoring high in all these categories means you’re more likely to be an ideal employee. That kind of predictor would probably make any hiring manager salivate, especially in today’s tough job market where they have to weed through thousands of applicants.

Kluemper is not advocating that HR use his groundbreaking social-media research just yet. “This is one study and the sample size is not that large,” he explained. “A lot more studies need to be done.”

But, he admitted some ill-advised HR folks may try and hang their hats on this one study, and that worries him because using such personality tests could be on sketchy legal grounds.

Red Tape Chronicles: When it comes to online reputation, 'life's not fair, and companies aren't either'

Indeed, personality tests and a host of other pre-employment screenings, including everything from criminal to credit background checks, have come under fire when used in the hiring process because of privacy issues and also because some impact certain groups adversely. Social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have even made the problem biggerbecause so much information is now available online that the job seekers themselves put out there.

“We’re not advocating employers use this technique,” Kluemper said about the Facebook ratings.

Unfortunately, it may be hard to put the Facebook personality cat back in the hiring bag.

And speaking about cats, if you want to put those adorable videos of kittens on your Facebook page - a popular pastime for many users - keep in mind what you may be projecting into cyber space.

Research by University of Texas at Austin psychologist Sam Gosling found that "dog people are more extraverted, more agreeable and more conscientious than self-described cat people."  

http://babieswithipads.tumblr.com/

One of many babies from "Babies with iPads"

For some of my friends, the iPad is a must-have distraction (and educational tool) for their kids, who embraced it from the get-go. Now, a popular Tumblr blog has harnessed the unbearable cuteness of being that defines this youngest generation's instant comfort with the tablet.

"Babies with iPads" is a standout on Tumblr, which is saying something. After five years of existence, Tumblr has captivated 120 million users through 15 billion unique monthly page views.

Jeff Luppino-Esposito and Stelios Phili are the proud papas to the blog, which takes Tumblr's typical minimalist approach to curating, by inviting readers to send photos, which then gives them free rein to for use. They post the pictures with whip-smart captions using the babies' names. For the image above, for instance, they wrote: "Bennett gets his Yo Gabba Gabba fix on Spotify, but he still remembers the first Raffi track he bootlegged off Kazaa."

There are numerous other examples; but we won't deprive you of that fun. Just watch your sugar intake: it might go sky high with all the sweetness you're about to see.

But now we're wondering if "Babies with Kindle Fires" or "Babies with Nook Tablets" will be next, or if those tabs will catch on as quickly as the iPad has with that particular set. One thing we know for sure, tablets are the preferred medium for some babies, especially this one who thinks a magazine is a broken iPad:

 — via Mashable

More stories:

• How to baby-proof your home theater
• Tumblr boasts 120M users, and 15B page views monthly
• Tumblr infected with Justin Bieber-fueled rage 

On Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.

Anonymous

With Fridays on the Internet now a virtual Mad Libs game of which government website Anonymous will take down next, the director of the National Security Agency wants the White House (and no doubt anyone handling the NSA budget) to know that the hacker collective could very well cause at least a limited power outage in the next two years, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The article explains that the concern is real, but has not yet been expressed directly:

Gen. Keith Alexander, the director, provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to people familiar with the gatherings. While he hasn't publicly expressed his concerns about the potential for Anonymous to disrupt power supplies, he has warned publicly about an emerging ability by cyberattackers to disable or even damage computer networks.

*cough cough*

Boy Howdy! That'd be one heck of a DDoS assault!

DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks remain Anonymous' chief weapon in bringing down websites — generally achieved by overloading a website with access requests so that it no longer has the dedicated resources to function properly. Security experts believe this was the method behind a series of Friday attacks for which Anonymous claimed credit, including the Department of Justice, the U.S. Copyright Office, the FBI, the CIA and the Federal Trade Commission.

Even Anonymous will tell you that, unlike taking out a power grid, such takedowns are not that hard to do.

Speaking with Wired.com via an online chat as the February 14 attack on the FTC website commenced, an Anonymous source readily stated the whole operation was easy-peasy: "As one remarked, 'own & rm and move on.' (rm being a unix command to delete data.)"

Why so easy? Hmmmm ...

Well, there's this! Following that first  smackdown on a FTC website earlier this month, the PR firm in charge of that and other .gov sites never got around to safeguarding the rest, Ars Technica notes. Indeed, the U.S. government's public-facing websites have notoriously weak security — and that by comparison, no hacking collective has ever managed to take out a place where real coders work (such as, you know, Facebook) for any discernible amount of time.

And so, attacks on government sites "are going to happen more and more frequently — they’re unstoppable,"  Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force, told the New York Times following the CIA website attack.  "Why can’t they be stopped? Because security technologies have not kept up with the extent of the vulnerabilities that exist.”

But attacks on government sites are not the same as attacks on government networks. The real threats to the power grid are limited, according to U.S. intellegence officials, and not coming from Anonymous.

"The countries that could most quickly develop and use cyber means to destroy part of the grid — such as China and Russia — have little incentive to do it. Those who might have more incentive, like Iran or North Korea, don't have the capability," the Wall Street Journal reports. "Officials already have found what they say is evidence of Chinese and Russian cyberspies snooping in computer systems that run the electric grid, possibly in preparation for a conflict with the U.S. The governments of China and Russia have denied any involvement."

Anonymous, for its part, has never mentioned any threat against the power grid — just more website attacks each and every Friday, culminating in Operation Global Blackout on March 31, which is about shutting down the Internet, not the power grid. Such a plan may be over ambitious, but not without meaning.

"The Internet should be able to absorb the attack the group outlined, said Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer at computer-security company Mandiant," the Wall Street Journal reports. "The announcement, however, shows the network's intent to wage more destructive attacks."

More on the annoying way we live now:

• CIA site back up after Anonymous claims attacks on it and Alabama state sites
• How Facebook keeps the porn, gore and hate out of your News Feed
• Report: These tech companies sell spy tools to dictators
• 7 signs we're living in the post-privacy era

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.

Fine Brothers

Screenshot from "Teens React to Toddlers & Tiaras"

Thank you, Fine Brothers, for giving us hope for the future. Some of the children they've documented in the "Kids React" YouTube series have graduated into "Teens React" and shown us through how respond to the TLC show "Toddlers & Tiaras" that at least this sample of the next generation is thoughtful, compassionate and looking out for little kids!

Not only are they worried about the eating disorders the girls may develop later, and vehement that 4-year-olds are not supposed to look like 40-year-olds, but they're also idealistic: "At the end of the day, you're not going to get a job because you're beautiful, you're gonna get it because you have skills." (Hold on to that, hold on!)

They have this additional insight: that perhaps some of the parents are living vicariously through their dolled up daughters. Calling their clothes "inappropriate" (you think?), the teens lambast pageant culture, telling us, "It shows parents how not to act." (Especially those who give their kids "GoGo juice" — a concoction of Red Bull and Mountain Dew, which sounds more like something for college all-nighters than for wee ones who should still have nap times.)

Teens on the show must be at least 14 and in high school, and if any of them look familiar from the "Kids React" series, it's because they "graduate" to the teen show when they enter high school.

If there's one good thing about the show, they said, it could be a cautionary tale that would "hopefully stop them from putting their kids in pageants." Erin, 17, wished her parents had seen something like this before subjecting her to a life in which she was aware of "boobs" by the time she was six. (SIX!) In fact, it scarred her so badly, she said she did not even want to have kids.

When asked if child beauty pageants were wrong, nearly all the teens on the video answered that it was — if the parents were forcing them to do it. The lone holdouts said that if it was the child's choice, then it wasn't soooo bad. (Seventeen-year-old Jourdan, though, said that even if his kid wanted to, he'd "smack them upside the head." In a good way of course! We don't think he condones corporal punishment, per se.)

Overall, this video made us breathe a sigh — of relief. There really are some great kids out there, who are turning into young adults we'd like to see running the world. 

More stories:

• Kids on Internet medley: ’Like YouTube threw up’ 
• 50 viral videos spoiled in four minutes
• Kids react to planking: ’Why???’

On Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.

via BuzzFeed

Our pre-caffeine roundup is a collection of the hottest, strangest, and most amusing stories of the morning. Here's everything that you need to know before taking that first sip of coffee today.

Google is snooping in Internet Explorer as well as Apple, turns out!

Last week's revelations that Google , Twitter and other popular Internet companies have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the companies. So, you know, business as usual.

Sure enough, assessing the price of admission to join the super-networked, digital class is not so simple; even experts on the issue admit that they don't have a full picture of the way personal information is collected and used on the Internet. But here are some basic guidelines to keep in mind.

Iranians faced a second and more extensive disruption of Internet access Monday, just a week after email and social networking sites were blocked, raising concerns about state censorship ahead of parliamentary elections.

Protests against Europe's version of SOPA seem to be working.

Meanwhile, the chief of the NSA says Anonymous could totally crash the Internet.

And watch out, Amazon! Barnes & Noble has just announced an 8GB version of its Nook Tablet and priced it at $199 — which makes it very dangerous competition for the similarly-priced Kindle Fire.

While it seems like just about everyone has a smartphone now, a closer look by Nielsen finds that 66 percent of those in the 24- to 34-year-old age group have smartphones, representing "the greatest proportion of smartphone ownership" of any age group.

The first-ever hamburger to come from a lab instead of a dead animal is due to be served this fall after a $330,000 development effort. Delicious!

In closing: Pickles! The Etsy hat model pug!

—  compiled by Helen A.S. Popkin, who invites you to join her on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.  

By Sarah Cavill, Techlicious.com

We’ve all heard it: The clatter of the remote control hitting the hard wood floor. The grind of the disc tray on the DVD player being forcibly closed, often with something in it other than a disc. The gleeful laugh of a toddler that has our phone and is running away with it. Many issues, when it comes to protecting our technology or home theater systems are just annoyances, but others pose real danger — for your child and your electronics.

Fortunately, there are many easy to use baby-proofing measures you can take to keep your new crawler or worse, your new climber, safe and sound while also protecting your technology.

Safety 1st

1. Secure your TV
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, between 8,000 and 10,000 children are treated in emergency rooms each year because of tip-over injuries, and televisions are major offenders. Flat-screen televisions are front- heavy and often perched on small lightweight bases. To carefully secure your TV you can secure it with a Prograde Flat Screen TV Lock. ($29.32 on Amazon.com).

2. Protect your components
All those flashing lights, sliding trays, and buttons — how they love buttons — make components like Blu-ray players, DVRs, cable boxes and iPod docks very tempting for sticky fingers. You can get an entertainment unit that holds your TV and electronics, with glass or frosted doors that close, like the TOBO TV panel with media storage ($319 on Ikea.com). You can secure the doors with childproof locks and secure the unit to the wall. Most remotes will work through glass.

Sewell

For those that don’t work through glass, or if your unit has wooden doors, you can get an external remote sensor like the Sewell InjectIR ($44.95 on Amazon.com) that sees IR commands from all of your remotes and transmits them to your components via HDMI (see the illustration).

You can also get a clear plastic shield that covers the front of your components. The DVD/Stereo Guard by Parent Units ($12.74 on Amazon.com) keeps wee hands from pushing buttons, but is easily removable for adult access.

3. Cover your outlets and power strips
Though the standard plug covers are quite handy and inconspicuous for plugs you rarely use, they are finger-breaking to remove. A product like the Kidco Outlet Plug Cover ($7.25 on Amazon.com), keeps kids off of the plug, allows you to shorten the cord and it’s easily opened for use. Since most of us are plugging in our entire lives, power strips are an issue as well. A Power Strip Cover from Safety 1st ($7.99 on Amazon.com) keep curious hands from yanking at the plugs.

Wiremold

4. Organize your wires
Hide cords behind cord concealers like the Wiremold CordMate II Cord Organizer ($24.99 on Crutchfield.com) if you’re running cables along a wall. Directly behind the TV, manage cables with zip ties or cover them with a wrap like the Monster Cable-It Wire Management System, which comes in three colors and several lengths ($12.20 for 8 feet on Amazon.com).

5. Protect your remote control
The most oft-dropped item deserves a little protection too. A Remote Control Cover from Remote Wraps ($15.99 on RemoteWraps.com) protects the device, the device’s battery door, and your furniture from getting banged up.

There are many baby-proofing companies that will come in to your home and assess your needs. Make sure when researching a company that they provide full service for home theaters, and not just plugs and cords.

More stories on Techlicious:

• 5 Ways to Manage Your Home with a Smartphone
• Great Early Learning Apps for iPhone and iPad
• An Easy Way to Track Your Family’s Health

Chat with Techlicious on Facebook and get the free daily Techlicious Newsletter.

While many parents are trying to keep up with Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policies, their kids are quietly taking their private conversations to Twitter. They are using multiple and anonymous accounts to communicate unobserved.

Teenagers are increasingly using Twitter because, according to my own teenage son, “Adults aren’t on it.” A survey conducted in July 2011 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which explores the impact of the internet on families and civic life, found that the number of 12- to 17-year olds on Twitter doubled from 2008 to 2010.

Escape from parental monitoring  isn’t the only thing driving teens to Twitter. When celebrities adopted the micro-blogging platform kids followed. One can only hope all of Justin Bieber’s 17 million+ followers are all teenagers. Eminem has 8 million (including my privacy-seeking son), Katy Perry 14 million, and Taylor Swift nearly 11 million. The same Pew survey found that most teens are happy using Twitter for benign purposes like following their favorite artists, exploring adolescent angst, and passing along immature humor. If only all kids could be as good as yours and mine.  

Kids can be mean, in real life and online
Electronic communication offers a distance that can embolden mean kids. “No one is safe from this new approach to bullying,” says Dawn Spragg, a Licensed Counselor  working with teens and their families in Bentonville, Arkansas, where three high school students were issued citations in Juvenile Court recently for publishing nasty tweets about classmates in a virtual "slam book" on Twitter. Spragg says that the anonymity of online aliases allows kids to bully without having to "back it up" like the bullies of decades past.

The Pew study found that 15 percent of teens have been the target of online bullying. This so-called cyber-bullying has become so prevalent that school districts nationwide are adding “electronic act” clauses to their anti-bullying policies to help them punish kids who bully others via phone or Internet. However, as pointed out in Twitter’s Parent and Teen Safety Tips, online harassment is usually rooted in "real world" relationships.

Parental controls and cyber policing is a waste of time and money
While it is important for parents to be concerned about what kids create and consume, it is crucial to nurture the real world character of our children through our relationships with them. Technology moves too quickly for parents to police. Even if they could monitor every tweet and text keystroke, parents should resist the urge. Spragg says we empower teens by helping them work toward “independent management of self.”

That’s missing the point. The real danger for kids in our always-online world is becoming addicted to the media itself to the detriment of real-time face-to-face communication. The Guardian UK spoke to researchers of a study soon to be released in the Journal of Psychological Science. They claim that due to the perceived low cost and high availability of media, resisting the urge to use it is harder than saying no to stronger drives like sex, alcohol, and tobacco. The instant feedback of social media is addictive and continuous. In the words of my son, “You can’t just end a conversation.”  

Instead of freaking out, let’s help our kids navigate this brave new virtual world, by working on our real world relationships. Let’s ditch the ever-evolving electronic controls and teach them to be kind, safe, and healthy—online and off.

When it comes to your teen’s online social life, are you all in or hands off? Tell us on Facebook.

Lela Davidson blogs about marriage, motherhood and keeping the evidence of aging at bay at After The Bubbly. She shares more humorous observations on family life in her book,"Blacklisted from the PTA."  

Dan Russell-Pinson

By Heidi Leder, Techlicious.com

For parents looking for homework help, or to inspire kids with presidential examples beyond George Washington and Abraham Lincoln this Presidents' Day, you can take your young learner on a fun and educational meet-and-greet with the 44 U.S. presidents using these apps:

Presidents vs. Aliens
Who wouldn’t want the chance to defend the Earth from aliens? There’s a section for learning via flashcards about the presidents, but the real fun begins when quizzed about the material in order to earn president heads that you can fling at alien invaders a la "Angry Birds." There are two other gaming opportunities: “Heads of State” where you choose the correct president head floating in space to answer a question, and “Executive Order” where you put the presidents in correct order.
Price: 99 cents in iTunes

U.S. Presidents
Review each president's fact sheet with years in office, birthplace, trivia, party, vice presidents and more. Then test yourself with in quiz mode. There's also a slideshow of all of the U.S. Presidents.
Price: Free in Android Market

US Presidents (Match ‘em Up History and Geography)
This quick memory game has several different modes of play. Match sets of 8, 12 or 18 different presidential portraits with their names and chronological order across four rounds of play that speed up each round. You can play in word-only mode, or study the full gallery of portraits too. There are three levels of difficulty with an increased number of presidents in each set. Two players can play head-to-head. 
Price: 99 cents in iTunes

Encyclopædia Britannica

Brittanica Kids: US Presidents
Check out profile info for all presidents, quizzes to test your knowledge of the U.S. Presidents, and a “Hail To The Chief” sing-along with lyrics and music. It includes some fun facts about Mount Rushmore, The Oval Office and The White House Bowling Alley among other related topics. 
Price: $2.99 in iTunes

US Presidents Trivia
Do you know that Clintons' dog's name is Buddy and that James Buchanan was the only president who never married? This US Presidents trivia quiz game will test your knowledge of the presidents' histories, families, politics, names, and hobbies. The controls can be a little touchy, but it's still fun.
Price: Free on Android Market

More stories on Techlicious:

• Best tablets for kids books
• Finding the best local schools
• winter tech that keeps you warm and safe

Chat with Techlicious on Facebook and get the free daily Techlicious Newsletter.

A juror who sent a Facebook message to a defendant during a trial, then bragged on the social network about being kicked off the jury, is now himself in hot water — and in jail for contempt of court.

Jacob Jock, 29, was given a three-day jail sentence by a Florida judge Thursday.

Jock said the Facebook friend request he sent to Violeta Milerman, charged in an auto negligence case, was a mistake. When Milerman, charged in an auto negligence case, got the message, she notified her attorney, who notified the judge. The judge, in turn, took Jock off the jury.

After that, though, he bragged on Facebook about it, said the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, quoting his Facebook post: "Score ... I got dismissed!! apparently they frown upon sending a friend request to the defendant ... haha."

Circuit judge Nancy Donnellan was not laughing.

"I cannot think of a more insidious threat to the erosion of democracy than citizens who do not care," the judge said after the hearing, in which she found Jock guilty of the misdemeanor of contempt of court.

Related stories:

• Dad punishes Facebook post with 8 bullets to daughter's laptop
• Man jailed after Facebooking a store burglary
• Suspect posts Facebook updates during SWAT standoff

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

msnbc

"Pedophilia, Necrophilia. Beheadings, Suicides, etc."

Those are some examples of what Facebook's outsourced content monitors must endure while filtering the Internet viscera, according to one who spoke to Gawker's Adrian Chen.  Animal abuse, "bad fights, a man beating another," and "KKK cropping up everywhere," were other examples provided by employees of oDesk, a California-based content-moderation service staffed by employees in India, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey who look at Facebook content.

The Internet can be a dark and horrible place, on this we should all agree. Despite the short-lived exceptions, such as the coordinated spam attack that littered Facebook with porn and gore in November, the social network remains a comparatively clean, well-lighted place. Thanks to a few disgruntled and/or traumatized content monitors in those countries, we now get a peek at how Facebook protects us, and more importantly, itself.

For every photo of a breast-feeding mother or nude drawing clumsily removed from Facebook, content monitors slog through overwhelming evidence of humanity at low tide. For the dirty job of censoring content on the social network that just filed a $100 billion IPO, at least one former oDesk employee told Chen he earned $1 an hour. Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, vented to Chen about the oDesk job he describes as humiliating exploitation of workers, and let loose some long-held mysteries on the why and the how of Facebook's censoring process.

Derkaoui shared a one-page cheat sheet for moderators with categories such as "Sex and Nudity," "Hate Content," "Graphic Content" and "Bullying and Harassment." Chen notes:

When it comes to sex and nudity, Facebook is strictly PG-13, according to the guidelines. Obvious sexual activity, even clothed, is deleted, as are "naked ‘private parts' including female nipple bulges and naked butt cracks." But "male nipples are OK." Foreplay is allowed, "even for same sex (man-man/woman-woman)" Even the gays can grope each other on Facebook.

Facebook is more lenient when it comes to violence. Gory pictures are allowed, as long somebody's guts aren't spilling out. "Crushed heads, limbs etc are OK as long as no insides are showing," reads one guideline. "Deep flesh wounds are ok to show; excessive blood is ok to show."

Drugs are a mixed bag. Pictures of marijuana are explicitly allowed, though images of other illegal drugs "not in the context of medical, academic or scientific study" are deleted. As long as it doesn't appear you're a dealer, you can post as many pictures of your stash as you want.

Though the cheat sheet is marked current as of January, a Facebook spokesperson told Chen the cheat sheet "provided a snapshot in time of our standards with regards to [one of our] contractors," adding that up-to-date information could be found on the social network at www.facebook.com/CommunityStandards." 

Indeed, hours before Chen's original piece posted on Gawker, content monitors received an updated version of content monitor guidelines. Chen pointed out the prominent changes to the original:

In version 6.1, body fluids were banned. But in version 6.2, "bodily fluids (except semen) are ok to show unless a human being is captured in the process."

In version 6.1, all Photoshopped images of someone were banned, whether they were positive or negative. But in version 6.2, only photoshopped images that show someone in a negative light are banned.

All the pages now say "Proprietary and Confidential." Wonder why that is.

Here's what Facebook told msnbc.com in an official statement regarding its content-monitoring procedures:

"In an effort to quickly and efficiently process the millions of reports we receive every day, we have found it helpful to contract third parties to provide precursory classification of a small proportion of reported content. These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service. Additionally, no user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared.We have, and will continue, to escalate the most serious reports internally, and all decisions made by contractors are subject to extensive audits.  

Of course, most of us are too busy complaining about the latest design change to think about who's keeping that remaining bodily fluid blocked in our News Feed. Chen notes, that's most likely how Facebook wants it. "If users knew exactly what criteria (were) being used to judge their content, they could hold Facebook to them," he writes. "It would be clear what Facebook was choosing to censor according to its policies, and what amounted to arbitrary censorship."

Still, considering what one might find via an accidental click on say, social news site Reddit, the job of an oDesk content monitor is unenviable. As one monitor told Chen: "Think like that there is a sewer channel, and all of the mess/dirt/ waste/s*** of the world flow towards you and you have to clean it."

via Gawker

More on the annoying way we live now:

• Report: These tech companies sell spy tools to dictators
• 7 signs we're living in the post-privacy era
• Teens' Facebook pictures posted on porn site, cops warn

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.

usarmy.vo.llnwd.net via U.S. on Pinterest

It's not enough that Pinterest's traffic has grown 40-fold in 2011's last six months — now it's so irresistible even the U.S. Army has succumbed to the fast-growing addiction, with 24 boards and 580 pins ranging from basic training and soldiers to families, fashion and chow.

Showing that it's not just a man's army, or that only women enjoy Pinterest (despite figures that show women make up 97 percent of Pinterest's Facebook "likes"), the Army has amassed thousands of followers browsing boards labeled, "HOOAH!" "DIY & Decor" and "Good Morale."

Quoting from Wikipedia, the HOOAH! page defines the term: "Hooah ... is a U.S. Army battle cry used by soldiers and also in use by the U.S. Air Force airmen 'referring to or meaning anything and everything except no.' "

On this page, images of soldiers in action are found alongside Army versus Navy posters. On other pages, family homecoming photos and pictures of patriotic recipes adorn boards. 

The U.S. Army's Pinterest also pins most recent news stories, videos and photos (via the U.S. Army's Office of the Chief of Public Affairs). It offers as a disclaimer: "Repinning does not equal endorsement."

Pinterest allows users to share images and thoughts and add to Facebook "likes" as well as spread the joy via tweet. According to AppData, Pinterest has about 10.4 million registered members, with an average of 2 million daily users..

Other armed forces are on Pinterest, but aren't as robust as the Army's boards. In this battle, Army does beat Navy, which has only 12 boards and 140 pins. While most of the Navy's boards have followers that number in the hundreds, the Army's boards have 1,000-plus followers each.

The U.S. Marine Corps is also on Pinterest, and while it only has 16 boards and 201 pins, it does have some eye-catching titles: "Things that go BOOM!" "Semper Awesome" and "Devil Pup Swag," for instance.

The U.S. Air Force's Pinterest seems to be the only armed force that hasn't earned its pinning wings, with zero boards.

— via Mashable

More stories:

• How to use Pinterest: A step-by-step guide
• Pinterest: Where domestic divas hang out online 
• How Pinterest Is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business

On Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.