At the 2012-13 ASUCD budget hearings, senators agreed to give $500 to fund Safe Boats, a houseboat that provides first aid and contraceptives during the annual Memorial Day weekend celebration on Lake Shasta known as Houseboats. Three hundred seventy dollars will go towards Safe Boats itself and $130 will fund Safe Boats education, down from an original proposal of $1,120.

There are certainly valid reasons for ASUCD to not fund Safe Boats. It seems unfair for ASUCD, which is funded by all UC Davis students, to pay for a service that only a few thousand of those students will actually use. Houseboats primarily attracts those involved in the greek system, meaning that ASUCD is essentially funding an organization that many students have, for financial or personal reasons, made a conscious choice not to participate in.

Safe Boats may also unintentionally promote unsafe partying by providing an easy refuge for the reckless and irresponsible. Distributing condoms, granola bars and water bottles will not necessarily discourage attendees from making the decision to participate in unsafe sex, drinking and boat-hopping. The money spent providing these basic items would be better spent on services that will help improve students’ education, not their partying.

Rather than ask ASUCD to donate student fees to Safe Boats, it would be more fair for those who actually attend Houseboats to each donate a small amount, thereby eliminating the need for students who don’t even attend to pay, via ASUCD.

However, by funding other special-interest events such as ethnic graduations, ASUCD has set the precedent that it will not limit its funding to only services that all students participate in. If ASUCD is willing to donate money to small groups that do not necessarily service all students, then it naturally follows that it would fund an initiative like Safe Boats.

Ultimately, ASUCD opted to allot Safe Boats less than half the amount originally proposed, making it more of a symbolic support of safe partying than a burden on the ASUCD budget. If Safe Boats does prevent students from returning to Davis pregnant and suffering from alcohol poisoning, then it has proven itself useful.

Students will rush to Houseboats this weekend regardless of the safety procedures in place. They might as well be able to enjoy a free snack and condom during the festivities.

I hardly hesitate before agreeing to a product’s terms and conditions anymore. I can barely keep up with the reading in my own classes, let alone spare the time and energy to read a 6,500-word essay written in legalese.

But I’m trying to understand what it means to have good privacy hygiene — to know where my data is going and how it is being put to use. The amount of information that sites legally collect from you on a daily basis may come as a surprise.

For the most part, these collection processes are automated and done discreetly. Sites and mobile apps are said to be “harvesting” your data — in other words, fetching personal information from your browser or phone and using that information to tailor their services to you.

If you use Facebook, Twitter or nearly any Google product, you can be sure that data harvesting applies to you. We use these sites and their products for free and we pay the price by offering information about ourselves. But is it worth it?

Last Thursday, Twitter wrote a blog post about a new “experiment” they are conducting, which slyly hints at the very practice of data harvesting without ever explicitly explaining it. When you visit a site with a “Tweet This” button, Twitter not only knows you visited that site, but also how frequently you visit that site. Considering the ubiquity of the Twitter share button, Twitter essentially sees your browsing history and uses it to better suggest the kind of Twitter users you might like to follow. Influential tech blogger, Dustin Curtis called it “wrong” and “a violation of privacy and trust,” which is true, but also begs the question —  just how valuable is your web browsing history?

The average Joe probably cares about his fantasy baseball team a little too much and checks his Yahoo stats four, five, maybe forty-five times a day. So Twitter suggests he follow @YahooSports. Not too bad, right? But what if your web browsing history wasn’t used to better social media connections? What if it was sold to, say, advertisers? How would you feel then?

Twitter points out that LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube already engage in this practice, which is hardly reassuring. What’s even more disturbing is that data harvesting isn’t just limited to our computers — our phones are vulnerable as well.

Path, a mobile-based social networking app for smartphones, came under fire when a hacker discovered that the application was uploading their users’ address books to the company’s servers and recommending those users to add as contacts to their Path networks — all without their consent. The outrage revealed the lack of protections iPhones have over address books — an all-too-common loophole iOS developers use to mine data. Location and camera roll have far stronger security settings in iOS, while address book had virtually none. Both Apple and Path eventually changed their policy on the issue, but still left users unnerved about the security of the personal information they store on their phones.

Android users are not excluded, unfortunately, which was recently proven by security researcher Paul Brodeur who designed an app just to see how much data it could extract without permission from the Android phone’s owner. As it turns out, quite a bit. Brodeur’s app was able to procure photos stored on external SD cards and launch the phone’s browser to upload those photos to a server. And yes, the app did it all without consent.

It’s important, then, to reconcile how much your privacy means to you — and modify settings on all of your devices and social media accounts to reflect those concerns. It also stresses the significance of hackers in revealing such security breaches, and scaring companies away from data harvesting. Anybody can become a hacker by learning computer programming language – knowledge that I think is increasingly important in understanding this digitized world — but I’ll save that debate for another Monday.

NICOLE NGUYEN is wondering whether or not you people got a piece of the $14 billion Facebook pie. If you sold your soul and bought shares, e-mail niknguyen@ucdavis.edu.

Last week I told a story about my mother and it has come to my attention that we will not still be in school over Father’s Day and that this is unfair to my male parent. So I will tell an equally flattering story.

When I was little and a budding comedian I used to make jokes in which I would rib my pops (giving each other a hard time is basically a Hempstead family tradition), to which he would invariably reply, “That’s snot funny! It’s snot, it’s snot, it’s snot.” Upon which the aforementioned snot would fly out of my nose as I cackled uncontrollably in the passenger seat of his truck at what was definitely the funniest joke ever made. My dad is great.

Funniness is subjective. I’m into comedy in a big way and the thing is you can never tell exactly what will make someone laugh. In fact, you can’t even really tell what will make you laugh. It’s not like you’re sitting in front of an Apatow movie, saying to yourself, “that gentleman just referenced the act of coitus! How droll, I believe I shall laugh now. Hah! Hah!” It would be a very different kind of world if we thought that way.

So if you can never predict what people will find funny, how do you be funny on purpose? Don’t look at me, I don’t have a freaking clue.

Ok fiiiine, I’ll look into it.

Here’s something interesting. Did you know that your average baby laughs 15 times more per day that an adult? Which makes me question just what the duck is so funny that our babies are cracking up all day? What are these infants seeing that we’re not? Have we become so jaded to the wonderful funniness of the world that we’ve lost our ability to laugh? Or maybe their standards for what’s funny are just way lower than ours because babies are dumb. Either way.

Time for a science party! When you laugh, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lights up, which is the part that squirts out endorphins. But from the ridiculously tiny bit of research I’ve read on the subject, it’s not totally clear to me which happens first. That is to say, do you observe something, laugh at it and then receive a big endorphin boost, or are the endorphins the cause of the laughter? Does happiness make you laugh or does laughter make you happy? There’s probably an answer somewhere that I don’t know because I’m basically as dumb as a dumb, stupid baby.

So I did something in that last paragraph that comedy people term a “callback.” That’s when you reference something that happened earlier, funny or not, in the hopes that your audience will remember it and giggle. Callbacks are satisfying to hear because — even if they’re as cheap as mine just was — you feel smart for catching on. Which, of course, you are. You’re also very good looking and have perfect hands. Please keep reading my column?

Another thing comedy nerds talk about is the rule of three, in which you set up the premise for a joke, repeat it in a slightly different permutation and then defy the expectation you’ve just set up. I sort of did it when I was complimenting you. I called you smart (established that you are being complimented), called you pretty (a natural successor to “smart” that creates a pattern of flattery) and then said you have perfect hands, which was probably borderline creepy. Rule of three, bro.

Hey, here’s something I’ve been thinking about. Folklorists in a couple countries have demonstrated the existence of what they’re calling “joke cycles.” These are the kinds of jokes we all know and eye-roll at, dead baby jokes or dumb blonde jokes or those annoying “blank that blank people say” videos that have fortunately gone away.

They find these formulaic jokes everywhere and my hypothesis on why they’re so popular is that they’re both comfortable and rich with possibility. When someone says “why did Helen Keller’s dog run away” you know exactly what you’re about to get — namely something tasteless about an American hero. The jokes are simultaneously old and new, a gently surprising twist on a familiar recipe, transgressive but not too transgressive. And to our weird mammal brains, that feels nice.

It’s okay if you didn’t find this column funny, neither did KATELYN HEMPSTEAD, who can be reached at khempstead@ucdavis.edu.