A poster is seen below a message board announcing Facebook's IPO price in Times Square in New York City on May 17.
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Facebook Monitors Your Posts and Chats To Catch Sexual Predators

Ever wonder if Facebook is reading your posts? Well, it is—or, its computers are, at least. And if you say the wrong thing, you could be locked up.

Autodesk to buy Facebook favorite Socialcam for $60M

The 3D software company will acquire the social video sharing app for $60 million.

Autodesk has signed an agreement to acquire Socialcam, the popular Facebook video-sharing app, for approximately $60 million, the two companies revealed today.

Autodesk, a company that creates 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, will focus on helping the startup grow. This transaction is expected to close soon.

"Autodesk will prioritize support for the existing Socialcam community, while investing in scaling the platform and developing a more comprehensive set of tools for Socialcam users," the company said in a press release.

"Autodesk also plans to use the Socialcam platform to help make its Academy Award-winning technology for professional film and video creators more accessible to a broader audience."

F.D.A. Bans BPA From Baby Bottles and Sippy Cups

WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that baby bottles and children’s drinking cups could no longer contain bisphenol A, or BPA, an estrogen-mimicking industrial chemical used in some plastic bottles and food packaging.  

Universities Reshaping Education on the Web

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times

Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Stanford are adding 12 universities to Coursera, the online education venture they founded.

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

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About two-thirds of Coursera’s students are from overseas, and most courses attract tens of thousands of students, an irresistible draw for many professors. “Every academic has a little soapbox, and most of the time we have five people listening to us,” said Scott E. Page, a University of Michigan professor who taught Coursera’s model thinking course and was thrilled when 40,000 students downloaded his videos. “By most calculations, I had about 200 years’ worth of students in my class.” 

Professors say their in-class students benefit from the online materials. Some have rearranged their courses so that students do the online lesson first, then come to class for interactive projects and help with problem areas.

Publisher's Note:

I like to believe that I've done my due diligence to make public, via my blog, about 'Coursera,' and the FREE courses this fantastic program offers.  When I read that at least two-thirds of Coursera students hail from overseas, I was not surprised.  However, I am glad to know that, presumably, the remaining one-third of students hails from the United States.  More importantly, I am hoping that many Black, Hispanic, Native American, and poor Caucasian folks, especially the younger generation of post-secondary aged students took advantage of signing-up for these courses. 

Why the Mortgage Interest Deduction is Terrible

There are few tax breaks more beloved than the mortgage interest deduction. It's the IRS's way of paying you to buy a house -- by letting you deduct your mortgage interest payments from your taxable income. There are also few tax breaks more wasteful than the mortgage interest deduction.

The chart below, numbers courtesy of the Tax Policy Center, puts the mortgage-interest deduction into nice pictorial perspective. It shows what percent of the total dollar value of the deduction goes to different income groups. Although it's debatable how many "different" groups really benefit. A whopping 75 percent of this 12-figure deduction goes to the top 20 percent of earners.

(Note: I calculated which income groups fit into which percentile with this handy calculator from Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal. In dollar figures, the bottom 56 percent make $50,000 and less; the 57-80 percent make between $50,000-$100,000; the 81-94 percent make $100,000-$200,000; the 95-98 percent make $200,000-$500,000; and the 1 percent make $500,000 and up.)

This is a great deal if you're at least upper middle class. For everyone else, not so much. It isn't even a deal. The bottom half of households get less than 5 percent of the money. The top 1 percent alone take home more than that.