Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network–the simple act of “friending” someone online–might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden.

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Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley, Idaho, media fest got off to a gloomy start Wednesday, with downbeat panel discussions on the economy (getting worse) and the digital future (looking murky).

Erin Burnett of CNBC opened the conference by moderating a discussion between investor Wilbur Ross, MIT professor Simon Johnson and American Express (AXP) CEO Kenneth Chenault.

The prognosis for the economy from the experts was bearish, according to members of the audience. “It was interesting but gloomy,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who attended the meeting, closed to press.

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Last week, as physicist Stephen Wolfram was demonstrating his new Web-based “computation engine”–Wolfram Alpha–to the public, Google announced a data-centric service of its own. Alpha accesses databases that are maintained by Wolfram Research, or licensed from others, and deploys formulas and algorithms to compute answers for searchers.

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The Singularity–the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal–has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the wake of the Singularity, it will become possible not only to preserve living people for eternity (by uploading their minds into computers) but to resurrect the dead.

Kurzweil looks forward in particular to his reunion with his beloved father, Fredric, who died in 1970. “Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for after the Singularity,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Kushner, “is also his most personal”…

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Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at MIT female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?” that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.

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A member of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s board seized a report by three MIT students about flaws with the Boston subway’s fare collection system and delivered a scathing indictment of the subway system and its general manager, calling the system “a mess” and saying she had “lost all confidence” in the system’s general manager, Daniel A. Grabauskas.

The students, who were set to deliver a presentation last Sunday at the DefCon hacker conference about security vulnerabilities in the MBTA’s CharlieTicket and CharlieCard payment cards, were barred from speaking about the vulnerabilities at a hacker conference after the MBTA obtained a temporary restraining order last Saturday, gagging them for 10 days.

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A transit agency in New England has filed a federal lawsuit to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates from publicly presenting research at Defcon demonstrating gaping security holes in two of the agency’s electronic payment systems.

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) also named MIT in the 17-page complaint, which seeks unspecified monetary damages for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent supervision and other causes of action. It also requests a temporary order preventing the students from “publicly stating or indicating that the security or integrity” of the MBTA’s systems has been compromised.

The three speakers are Zack Anderson, 21; R.J. Ryan; 22 and Alessandro Chiesa, 20; who on Sunday were scheduled to present research into both of the MBTA’s automated payment systems.

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It’s difficult for us layfolk to gauge the real implications of breakthrough research announcements, but when the scientists start throwing around words like “nirvana,” it does catch the attention. And from the description of the latest work of MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy, it’s easy to get excited. Nocera and team say they’ve come up with an answer to the dark side of solar energy–the difficulty of storing it for when the sun isn’t shining.

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Some scientists see their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings.

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

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The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a global-positioning system receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coordinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.

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