OK, I changed the code, and the captcha seems to be working for me in both Explorer and Chrome. Let me know if it is fixed for you. Thanks for letting me know about the troubles. I wish Typepad had sent around a notice.

Crap . . . and I think I just violated our own comment policy. I get the same result. The problem seems to be described here: http://help.typepad.com/captcha.html. I'll try to change some code and see if it fixes things. Thanks for helping me diagnose. On the Feedburner thing, I think it is a Typepad-specific problem and the tag Typepad uses to generate the author. I went around with their support as well as some forum posts. The RSS feed clearly has the author tag, and it shows up elsewhere -- Google Reader for example. It just does not come through in the e-mail.

Alas, now I need two hands to count. Thanks, Steevo, for the feedback. The author name already is in the RSS feed. It does not appear in the Feedburner e-mails. I spent hours on the issue a few months ago, and it is just a Feedburner issue. We'll switch away from Feedburner at some point. On the captcha, I don't know what could be going on. What browser are you using? Does it happen with a different browser? Send me an e-mail (rlawless-at-illinois-dot-edu) if you want to try to figure it out.

RSOs . . . nice, I'm going to remember that one.

A related point is the dilemma scholars face getting access to data. Getting access to data can require working with industry players, but the cooperation then makes readers wonder about about the scholar's independence. The main advantage university researchers have, at least in the social sciences, is that we're not being paid based on the views we express. If you have to "play ball" to get data, our independence is rightfully drawn into question.

Thanks, Sarah. I looked for the press release and could not find it. I understand that Equifax was probably referring to 500 million consumers tracked worldwide, but that is not what the article says. At the least, the figure is out of context in an article about U.S. student loan charge-offs.

This is interesting stuff, Nathalie, and certainly belongs in the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame. You write that "under applicable law," the commingled SSA funds may lose their protection. Can you expand on that a little bit?

To Stephen Brown: Our blog hosting service, Typepad, has been updating and improving its fight against comment spam. The amount of comment spam is a problem, and their efforts are welcome. According to Typepad, the performance of its new spam filters will improve over time and that should reduce the incidence of false positives.

And, of course, there are likely class issues. Credit report errors and debt buyer issuers are not probably spread equally across the socioeconomic strata.