PUBLIC MARKS from jeanruaud with tag us

. In a year that brought us vuvuzelas (the dronelike plastic horns at the World Cup in South Africa) and mama grizzlies (Sarah Palin’s cadre of fierce women in the midterm elections), there’s no obvious front-runner in the sweepstakes for WOTY (pronounced “WOE-tee”). But for my money, the one word that sums up the scrapheap of the past year is junk.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited. Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50. What’s more, contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit.

"President Obama is more concerned at “whether there’s an Afghan partner” worth defending, than with the politically fraught question of how many more troops to send, said Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff and a central figure in White House deliberations on Afghanistan."

A Los Angeles woman is suing Toyota for $10 million over a marketing campaign that she claims "punked" her into incorrectly believing she was being stalked.

[US demographics]