Here are a few pointers and thoughts on what I've been reading this week on other blogs and elsewhere.

Women don't talk more than men. New research finds no statistical difference between the amount of words uttered by men and women. Previous research by Louann Brizendine had suggested women speak on average 20,000 words per day while men only speak, on average, 7,000. Wrong! (apparently).

There's loads more on this from the Language Log. 'Not Exactly Rocket Science' has a good write-up.

For me the most interesting thing is the variance between people in general rather than between men and women. They found that amongst the men, three of the most chatty uttered 47,000 in a day, while one man only said 500 words in a day. That is some variance.

The three grades of thinking. Pick the Brain points to a thought-provoking article by William Golding on the three grades of thinking. It's well worth reading Golding's full essay.

The Times (of London) has a piece on the netiquette of sites like Facebook and MySpace:

"Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, said that snubbing people on Facebook differs from real-world snubs because it takes place in a sharply defined moment. "We're used to snubbing people. We don't call them back. We don't answer their holiday postcards. We say we'll meet up with them for a drink when we have no intention of doing so. But here there is a very evident decision moment."

I still have mixed feelings about Facebook and MySpace. On one hand I can see it's useful for networking and keeping in touch. On the other it just looks like a competition to see who has the largest group of (virtual) friends. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I would guess that having too many 'friend requests' is only problematic for people like Stephen Fry (see the article). Disagree? Let me know below...