India finance minister UFO Facebook post angers "common men"

By Shyamantha Asokan

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - With many Indians worrying about the threat of tough measures in their new government's first budget next week, a Facebook post suggesting the finance minister might be pondering less earthly matters quickly roused anger on Wednesday.

Arun Jaitley, a key confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, published a message celebrating "World UFO Day" on his Facebook page, which is one of the main forums in which he publishes official information.

"This day is celebrated to raise awareness about the existence of UFO's (sic) and with that intelligent beings from outer space," said the post, which was followed by Jaitley's name and included a depiction of a flying saucer in a wheat field.

World UFO Day is a day dedicated to spotting and proving the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects. It was first celebrated in 2001, according to the website worldofuday.com.

A member of Jaitley's personal staff, who declined to be named, confirmed that their team had posted the message about World UFO Day and said the account had not been hacked. The post was deleted half an hour after Reuters contacted the team.

The post sparked a storm of criticism among his followers and was deleted after a few hours.

"Sir FM, today we the people of India are celebrating the price hike day instead of UFO day," a Facebook user called V Bhushan Bhushansharma said in a comment on Jaitley's post, referring to India's recent moves to raise rail fares and fuel prices.

Modi swept to power in May with a vow to revive India's economy after the longest spell of growth below 5 percent in a quarter of a century, and he has since warned that the turnaround will involve some "bitter medicine".

On July 10, Jaitley is expected to unveil a budget that will try to rein in a wide fiscal deficit partly by curbing the government's high subsidy bill in a country where 70 percent of people live on less than $2 a day. He said on Tuesday that "bold steps" were needed to ensure fiscal discipline.

"Sir instead of talking on outer space, please confine your discussion on the hardship faced by common men," a Facebook user called Ganesh Choudhary said in a comment on Wednesday.

"People are confused and scared about the undefined miseries which are going to heaped upon them in the names of restoring fiscal health of the country."

Officials in the finance ministry said they had seen the Facebook post and advised the minister's personal media team to be more careful about what is published on his Facebook account.

Investors have been impressed by Jaitley's hawkish tone. The benchmark BSE index rose as much as 1.1 percent to an all-time high of 25,810 on Wednesday, surpassing its previous record of 25,735.87 hit on June 11.

(Additional reporting by Manoj Kumar in NEW DELHI; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Jeremy Laurence)

Politics & GovernmentFacebookArun JaitleyNarendra Modi

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Blog attempts to answer when the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook

We're all going to die (hopefully not too soon). And that means that someday, everyone currently on Facebook will be six feet under (metaphorically speaking).

The blog What If? recently attempted to determine when (in ballpark figures) the number of dead people on Facebook will outnumber those who are alive.

It's a morbid but fascinating question, and the unidentified blogger behind What If? is more than up to the challenge.

The conclusion: Depending on whether Facebook stays popular, the answer is either in the 2060s or the 2130s.

The blogger writes, "Based on the site's growth rate, and the age breakdown of their users over time, there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died."

Looking down the road, the blogger writes, "About 290,000 US Facebook users will die (or have died) in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again."

The question, the blogger argues, is whether or not Facebook will continue to add more young users "to outrun this tide of death for a while."

If the social network can get young people to keep joining, the blogger estimates that the dead won't outnumber the living on Facebook until around 2130.

On the other hand, if Facebook face-plants and young people abandon the social networking site for something else, the crossover date will come much earlier, around 2065.

For more questions from What If?, check out the archives. There you'll learn how much Force power Yoda can output, the odds of correctly guessing every answer on the SAT, and what would happen if the sun suddenly shut off.

Social & Online MediaArts & EntertainmentFacebook

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Study sees relationship signals in Facebook data

Think your relationship is strong? Think there is nothing in this world that could possibly tear you and your beloved apart? Have a seat, grab a tissue. Facebook would like a word with you.

Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg and Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook, have written a research paper that explains how the giant social networking site can use its data to anticipate which personal relationships might fail.

The process is rather complicated, but The New York Times broke it down in an easy-to-understand blog post.

One might think that a relationship's strength is best illustrated by the number of friends two people have in common on Facebook. The new study say that isn't the case.

Using a data set of roughly 1.3 million Facebook users, all over the age of 20, all with a significant other and all with 50 to 2,000 friends, the researchers found that a network measure called "dispersion" is a better indicator of romantic relationships.

From the New York Times:

(Dispersion) measures mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person’s network neighborhood. High dispersion occurs when a couple’s mutual friends are not well connected to one another.

So when a couple has a high dispersion rate, their relationship is likely to be easier for an algorithm to identify and is probably stronger, the research suggested.

Via the New York Times:

Particularly intriguing is that when the algorithm fails, it looks as if the relationship is in trouble. A couple in a declared relationship and without a high dispersion on the site are 50 percent more likely to break up over the next two months than a couple with a high dispersion, the researchers found. (Their research tracked the users every two months for two years.)

Of course, Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on prophesy. Twitter has long been lauded for its ability to predict things like elections and flu outbreaks. Some computer scientists have even used the social network to predict where you are most likely to get food poisoning.

Arts & EntertainmentMediaFacebook

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Man jailed after Facebook shame over dine-and-dash

RENO, Nev. (AP) — A Reno man who skipped out on a $100 bill at a brewpub and then was publicly pilloried on Facebook was taken into custody on Thursday.

Saul Zelaznog was booked into the Washoe County Detention Center in northern Nevada on a probation violation, although officials at the jail couldn't provide specifics Friday on the circumstances of his arrest.

Zelaznog became an object of social media scorn after workers at the Brewer's Cabinet posted his picture on Facebook Tuesday, warning other restaurants to watch out for him and linking to his profile so others could "let him know he sucks."

"And, while you're at it, you could tell him that visiting restaurants with your friends, running up a huge bill, roughing up servers and then bailing is pretty uncool ... pathetic, really," the post reads. "Get a life, man."

The post had more than 800 shares on Facebook by Friday, with users helping identify him and voicing enthusiastic support for the business.

Chris Kahl, a co-owner of the Brewer's Cabinet in Reno, said he reported the incident to police after it happened on Tuesday.

"All his friends paid and left, and he was the last one," Kahl told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "The server needed to collect his money. He said he forgot his wallet."

Other restaurants and bars in the area — including Imperial, Campo and Chapel Tavern — told KRNV-TV they believe they've also been his victims.

When contacted by the newspaper, Zelaznog — who also goes by the name Saul Gonzalez, according to public records — said he had forgotten a method of payment when he visited Tuesday, but planned to return to pay the tab.

He said he was involved in a similar situation at another Reno-area restaurant, where he said he left a "nice watch" as collateral.

"I'm not trying to burn bridges around town," he told the paper. "This is a small little town."

Late Thursday, the brewpub posted on its Facebook to announce Zelaznog was nabbed on the probation violation and to thank users for their support.

"We hope that all of his outstanding debts are paid in time," the post reads, "but more importantly, that he makes wiser decisions in the future."

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Facebook video flip the parking ticket in Israel

Jerusalem (AP)-an Israeli woman has turned to Facebook to beat a parking ticket — and expose a crew of street in Tel Aviv.

Hila Ben Baruch says he has parked his car legally near his Tel Aviv home only to find that it's gone and replaced with a handicapped parking sign. Municipality of she slapped with more than $ 300 fine. Making matters worse, says that a city representative accused of lying when he called to complain.
Determined to prove his innocence, he obtained footage from a security camera showing municipal workers disabled symbol painted under his car, then via the towing vehicle.
She told Channel 2 that she was "distraught". The video, put it on Facebook, went viral.
The municipality of Tel Aviv has apologized and refunded fines.

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