Facebook launches new service which will share your location to within half a mile

Nearby Friends will use your smartphone's GPS system to tell your Facebook friends you are nearby

Rather than share your exact location, it will show only that you are nearby, say, within half a mile

Feature must be turned on by the user, so people shouldn't expect to broadcast their location unknowingly

Launches amid the growing popularity of location-based mobile dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge

Most users won't have the feature available right away, but rather in the coming weeks and months and it won't be available to users under 18

Facebook users in the U.S. will soon be able to see which of their friends are nearby using a new feature that the company launched on Thursday.

The Nearby Friends feature must be turned on by the user, so people shouldn't expect to broadcast their location unknowingly.

It will use your smartphone's GPS system to tell your Facebook friends you are nearby - provided they have the feature turned on as well. Rather than share your exact location, it will show only that you are nearby, say, within half a mile.

Copy link to paste in your message

The Nearby Friends feature uses your smartphone's GPS system to tell your Facebook friends you are nearby - provided that you both have the new feature turned on

If you like, you can manually share a more precise location with a specific friend you'd like to meet up with. Friends can see where you're located in a particular park, airport or city block. By default, your exact location will be shared for only an hour, although you can change this.

Nearby Friends launches amid the growing popularity of location-based mobile dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge. But unlike those apps, Facebook's feature will let you meet up only with people who are already your friends.

 

Facebook, whose motto has long been ‘move fast and break things,’ built a lot of precautions in this new tool as it tries to avoid privacy fiascos that often bubble up when it makes changes to its service.

The new motto, ‘ship love,’ is evident in the cautious rollout of Nearby Friends, said Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed think tank in Washington. He has advised Facebook on privacy issues, including the latest feature.

Unless you manually share your location, as shown here, Nearby Friends will only show Facebook friends that you are in close proximity, say within half a mile

He believes Facebook is showing ‘a deeper appreciation that with a billion users, any change needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't surprise the audience.’ That's especially so when it comes to privacy, especially when it comes to location sharing.

‘Once you start bringing this to a mass audience, you need to be cautious,’ Polonetsky said, ‘so inadvertent oversharing is not possible.’

Nearby Friends also won't be available to users under 18, said Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at Facebook. He said the tool ‘makes it easy to join your friends in the real world.’

Of course, all the safeguards and slow rollout mean that most users won't have the feature available right away on Thursday but rather in the coming weeks and months. Initially it will go to people who are likely to appreciate it, Vaccari said, such as people who have ‘checked in’ to various restaurants, bars or other locations using Facebook.

Rather than share your exact location, though, Nearby Friends will only show friends that you are in close proximity, say within half a mile

Unlike with other features, Facebook isn't forcing people to use Nearby Friends. Therefore, there is a possibility it won't catch on widely.

Vaccari is optimistic that it will.

Vaccari joined Facebook in 2012, when the company acquired Glancee, his startup service for meeting nearby people who have friends and interests in common. He has been working on the new feature since then.

Facebook employees have been testing Nearby Friends, and Vaccari cites ways it has helped people get together:

• When two people landed at the airport at the same time from different flights, they saw that they did through Nearby Friends and shared a ride home together.
• When two people were out shopping alone in San Francisco, they joined forces after seeing each other nearby.

Nearby Friends, Vaccari said, isn't for the five to 10 close friends whom you feel comfortable texting or calling up to hang out.

Rather, he said, it's for the broader group of friends you enjoy spending time with but wouldn't necessarily call. Nearby Friends may provide that extra push. Users can limit whom they share their location with to smaller groups of friends.

Users who sign up will be shown a short tutorial on how the feature works. Besides seeing friends who are nearby, users can also see which of their friends are traveling, and in general which friends are using the feature even if they are not nearby.

Facebook says there are no current plans to draw advertising revenue from Nearby Friends.

The company says it does not currently target ads to users based on where they happen to be at the moment, but uses their stated ‘current city’ and the location of their computer based on its numeric Internet Protocol address.

Are Christian teens leaving the church because of unfulfilling youth groups?

Recent polls show Christian teenagers are turning away from the church – and some believe unfulfilling youth groups and parents' over-dependence on them may have something to do with it.

According to a survey sponsored by the US-based National Center for Family-Integrated Churches (NCFIC), 55% of American Christians are concerned that modern youth ministry is shallow and too entertainment focused.

Over a third (37%) even agreed that youth group programmes are not actually biblical.

The study asked the views of 290,000 Christians over the course of five weeks and made the following findings:

1. Are church "youth group" programmes a biblical way to reach young people?
• 37% said "No"
• 36% said "Yes"
• 26% said "It's complicated."
2. Does modern youth ministry concern you?
• 14% said "Yes, we are losing our kids and it's clearly not working to train mature believers."
• 9% said "Yes, it's too shallow and entertainment focused."
• 55% said "Yes, because of both A and B."
• 22% said "No. It's not perfect, but it's striving to relevantly communicate the Gospel."
3. Does the Bible give clear direction and boundaries for discipling youth in the church?
• 15% said "No, The Bible gives us the Gospel, but how to reach youth with it is up to us."
• 28% said, "Yes, but there is a lot of flexibility since it doesn't say much."
• 57% said "Yes, the Bible gives us all the direction we need to disciple youth and constrains us from using worldly innovations."

NCFIC spokesman Adam McManus is not surprised by the results. He believes they are evidence of teenagers in the church being "focused on their peers, not their parents or their pastors".

"Today's church has created peer dependency," he said.

"It's a foreign sociology that leads to immaturity, a greater likelihood of sexual activity, drug experimentation, and a rejection of the authority of the Word of God."

Mr McManus fears the teachings in Scripture are not being taught accurately enough in youth groups and that they are not engaging youth as a result.

The answer, he argues, to the challenge of raising young Christians into committed adult believers lies less with youth groups and more with parents.

He points to the words spoken by Moses in Deuteronomy 6:4-7, which instructs Christians to impress God's commandments on their children on a daily basis.

It reads: "Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."

Mr McManus went as far as to argue that the dependency on youth groups should be discarded entirely for the sake of young Christians and their spiritual transformation into adulthood.

"American Christians are finally waking up to the disconnect between the clear teaching in Scripture in favour of family-integration and the modern-day church's obsession with dividing the family at every turn.

"It's crippling the body of Christ. That's why it's time to return to the biblical paradigm and throw out the youth group structure entirely."

He added: "Frankly, I'm not as concerned about what happens in Sunday School in church, as I am with what happens in 'Monday School' and 'Tuesday School' at home with the family."

Youth group director at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham Alabama, Cameron Cole agrees, saying that parents should take more responsibility for the spiritual development of their children.

He said: "There is a propensity in our culture to outsource the development of our children. For intellectual development, we send them to school. For athletic development, we send them to Little League. And for spiritual formation, we send them to youth group.

"The church has done a poor job of communicating to the parents that they are the primary discipler of their children. Parents don't believe this, but the reality is that kids listen to their parents far more than they're going to listen to a youth minister."

The survey comes after the Barna research group found that 61% of people in their twenties who previously attended church are now spiritually disengaged.

It found that 59% of young Christians will disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from church life after the age of 15.

Barna suggested six reasons why young Christians are leaving the church:

• "Stifling", "fear-based", risk-averse" Christianity in which "Christians demonise everything outside of the church" and "church is ignoring the problems of the real world".
• "Shallow", "boring" Christianity that is not relevant to young people's career or interests, and inadequate or irregular Bible teaching. A fifth of young adults said God was "missing" from their experience of church.
• Churches being antagonistic to science with Christians being "too confident they know all the answers".
• Church experiences related to sexuality being "simplistic" and "judgemental".
• They struggle with the exclusive nature of Christianity
• They don't feel like church allows them to express their doubts or ask their most pressing life questions openly

Scientists who took chemistry into cyberspace win Nobel Prize

Three U.S. scientists won the Nobel chemistry prize on Wednesday for pioneering work on computer programs that simulate complex chemical processes and have revolutionised research in areas from drugs to solar energy. By Mia Shanley and Sven Nordenstam.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarding the prize of 8 million crowns ($1.25 million) to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, said their work had effectively taken chemistry into cyberspace. Long gone were the days of modelling reactions using plastic balls and sticks.

"Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube," the academy said in a statement. "Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today."

Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed as electrons jump between atomic nuclei, making it virtually impossible to map every separate step in chemical processes involving large molecules like proteins.

Powerful computer models, first developed by the three scientists in the 1970s, offer a new window onto such reactions and have become a mainstay for researchers in thousands of academic and industrial laboratories around the world.

'LIKE A MOVIE'

In drug design, for example, scientists can now use computers to calculate how an experimental medicine will react with a particular target protein in the body by working out the interplay of atoms.

"The field of computational modelling has revolutionised how we design new medicines by allowing us to accurately predict the behaviour of proteins," said Dominic Tildesley, president-elect of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry.

Today, all pharmaceutical companies use computational chemistry to screen experimental compounds for potential as medicines before further testing them on animals or people.

The ability to model chemical reactions has also grown as computers have become more powerful, while progress in biotechnology has produced ever more complex large molecules for use in treating diseases like cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.

"It has revolutionised chemistry," Kersti Hermansson, professor in organic chemistry at Uppsala University, said of the computer modelling. "When you solve equations on the computer, you obtain information that is at such detail it is almost impossible to get it from any other method."

"You can really follow like a movie, in time and in space. This is fantastic detail..."

Karplus, a U.S. and Austrian citizen, carries out research at the University of Strasbourg and Harvard University. Levitt, a U.S. and British citizen, is at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Warshel, a U.S. and Israeli citizen, is a professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The approach has applications in industrial processes, such as materials science, the design of solar cells or catalysts used in cars. For the former, programs can be used to mimic the process of photosynthesis by which green leaves absorb sunlight and produce oxygen.

EARLY SETBACKS

It was not an easy scientific journey, however. Warshel said he had been convinced of the case for using computers to simulate chemical reactions since 1975 but did not know if he would live to see it adopted.

"I always knew it was the right direction, but I had infinite difficulties and setbacks in the research. None of my papers were ever published without being rejected first," he told Reuters.

Karplus said his early work using computers was initially met coldly by many of his scientific colleagues in the '70s.

"My chemistry colleagues thought it was a waste of time," he told reporters at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adding that the next generation of scientists should be courageous and "not believe their colleagues necessarily if they say they can't do something."

Karplus's family brought him to the United States in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Austrian President Heinz Fischer said on Wednesday the Nobel Committee's decision to award the prize to Karplus "is gratifying and at the same time an occasion to reflect on Austria's responsibility."

A unique insight of the trio's work was to use computer simulations to combine quantum mechanics, which explains the making and breaking of chemical bonds, with classical Newtonian mechanics, which captures the movement of proteins.

Ultimately, the ability to computerise such complex chemical processes might make it possible to simulate a complete living organism at the molecular level - something Levitt has described as one of his dreams.

"I am a computer geek," Levitt told Reuters.

Back in the 1960s there were no personal computers, he said, so the only way for scientists to get their hands on a computer was to find ways to use it in their work.

"That's not to say that I became a computational chemist in order to play with computers, but a large part of any creative activity is to feel that you're playing."

"I think if everybody did everything with passion, the world would be a better place," he said.

Chemistry was the third of this year's Nobel prizes. The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of businessman and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. DM

Photo: Photos of Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, the three laureates of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is seen on a screen during the announcement of the winners at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm October 9, 2013. Karplus, Levitt and Warshel won the 2013 Nobel Prize for chemistry for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency