NEW YORK (AP) — The goody-two-shoes among us say it’s better to give than to receive. That’s not true for the average Facebook user, though.

A new study out Friday found that the average user of the world’s biggest online social network gets more than they give. That means more messages, more “likes” and more comments. Yes, even more “pokes.”

Behind all that is Facebook’s relatively small group of “power users,” who do more than their share of tagging, liking and uploading. The report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project comes two days after Facebook filed for a $ 5 billion initial public offering of stock that could eventually value the company at $ 100 billion.

Key to that mammoth valuation will be Facebook’s ability to convince advertisers they can make money from the billons of connections and interactions that people partake in on its website and beyond. Though Pew’s findings don’t address the commercial side of people’s activities, they shed important light on how people use the site and what they get out of it.

The study is the product of Pew’s analysis of Facebook users’ activities in November 2010. It consisted of data that Facebook provided to Pew after 269 users gave their permission. Those users were identified through a random telephone survey about broader Internet issues.

The researchers found that about 20 percent to 30 percent of Facebook users fell into the “power user” category, though they tended to specialize in different types of activities on Facebook. Some of them sent a lot of friend requests, while others tagged more photos than the average user. Only 5 percent were power users in every activity that Pew logged.

The way this plays out is that the average user is more “liked” than they click “like” on other’s posts. They receive more friend requests than they send. On average, 63 percent of Facebook users studied received friend requests in the survey month while only 40 percent made a friend request.

The result? It feels good to be on Facebook. It might even feel better than life off Facebook. After all, there’s no dislike button, and friends are unlikely to post harsh comments on your page. Instead, people you might not have seen in years bombard you with positive affirmations day after day, year after year.

“You keep getting all these wonderful positive rewards,” said Keith Hampton, the study’s main author and a Rutgers University professor. “That’s pretty hard to give up.”

Getting more than you are giving, in terms of emotional support, “is kind of what you are looking for,” he added.

This might be the lure of Facebook, the reason it could be worth $ 100 billion and the reason it has 845 million users who are not leaving even if they’ve been on the site for years. The study found no evidence of “Facebook fatigue,” the idea that people get tired of Facebook after they’ve been on it for a long time.

In fact it was the opposite. The longer someone had been using Facebook, the more frequently they posted status updates, pressed “like” and commented on friends’ content.

“For most people, the longer they are on Facebook, the more they do on Facebook,” Hampton said.

The researchers also looked at poking, the weird, perhaps least-understood and easily joked-about activity on Facebook. They found that the “poke” button was among the least-practiced activities. Only 6 percent of users poked a friend, while 7 percent were poked during the month.

“While uncommon, some Facebook users are frequent pokers,” the report says. “Five participants from our sample poked nearly once a day, being poked themselves a nearly equal number of times.”

The original phone survey of 2,255 adults was done in October and November of 2010 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. At the end of that survey, users were asked for consent for Facebook to share data. Twelve percent of the survey participants agreed.

Between the kickoffs, beer and touchdowns, some viewers of Saturday night’s NFL divisional playoff game between the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots might have noticed a Focus on the Family ad highlighting the Bible verse John 3:16, noted Christian quarterback Tim Tebow’s favorite.

While Tebow and the Broncos didn’t advance to the AFC Championship game, the evangelical Focus on the Family hoped its ad would help extend the online curiosity about John 3:16. On the Monday following the Broncos’ unexpected win over the Pittsburgh Steelers a week ago, John 3:16 was the most-searched term online. In that game, Tebow passed for 316 yards and averaged 31.6 yards per completion.

The ad featured children reciting and elaborating on the verse, which reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Watch:

“There’s been a lot of buzz lately about what John 3:16 says, and we wanted to help people understand it without having to run to their computer to look it up,” said Focus on the Family President Jim Daly. “For Christians, the verse is the essence of the Good News of Jesus Christ, and when you have good news you want to share it with as many people as possible.”

In 2010 Focus on the Family used a Tebow-themed commercial to promote its pro-life views.

Both the John 3:16 commercial and the Super Bowl ad were paid for by earmarked donations, and not funded from the group’s general accounts.

“We hope this helps everyone understand some numbers are more important than the ones on the scoreboard,” added Daly.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers now think planets outnumber stars in our galaxy. And they’ve only begun to count.

Thanks to powerful telescopes and a better understanding of different solar systems scientists are finding new places to look for life beyond Earth.

Three studies released Wednesday shed new light on the diversity of planetary systems. One of the studies estimates that our Milky Way galaxy averages at least 1.6 large planets per star. The Milky Way has an estimated 100 billion stars.

Also, scientists once thought systems with two stars were just too chaotic to include planets. But so far astronomers have found three different systems where planets have two suns. Just a few years ago that idea seemed to be the stuff of science fiction.

JERUSALEM (AP) — A hacker claiming to be a 19-year-old Saudi posted thousands of Israeli credit card numbers and other personal data online — the hacker’s second politically motivated attack this week.

The hacker released the details of some 6,000 active accounts late Thursday, on top of the 15,000 made public earlier in the week, said Yoram Hacohen, the head of Israel’s data protection agency.

The hacker claims to have published details about 400,000 Israelis and blamed the “Zionist lobby” for covering up the size of the leak, in remarks published on the Internet on Thursday.

“I’ve hacked much more than you can imagine,” wrote the hacker, who goes by the pseudonym 0xOmar and affiliates himself with group-xp, a known Saudi hacking group.

He claimed that he collected close to a million Israeli credit card numbers and would soon publish them all.

Hacohen called it a “cyber crime,” and the head of the Israeli Visa CAL company, Israel David, told Israel Army radio it was a “technological terror attack on the citizens of Israel.”

Credit card companies say only a few hundred dollars had been fraudulently spent on the hacked cards. They said they swiftly closed affected accounts and were boosting their staff for the weekend in case more data is released.

The governmental data protection regulator was more worried about Israelis’ personal details, like ID numbers, email addresses and passwords, which were also posted online and that could be used by identity thieves.

Israelis weren’t the only ones affected. Hacohen said personal data belonging to a few hundred people around the world, who purchased Jewish art and objects on an online site, was also compromised.

Hacohen said his agency was investigating the case and was considering asking Interpol for assistance in apprehending the hacker. He also called on “good hackers” around the world to assist Israel in catching the offender.

Polling data suggests that GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is more popular in New Hampshire than the rest of the Republican field. But recent Google statistics indicate that Texas Rep. Ron Paul and even Kim Kardashian are piquing greater interest than Romney in the Granite State.

A recent RealClearPolitics polling average from Dec. 27, 2011, to Jan. 3, 2012, showed Romney crushing Paul, his closest competitor in New Hampshire, by a whopping 21.3-point margin. Romney governed the neighboring state of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007.

But despite Romney’s polling advantage, Internet interest in Paul among New Hampshire residents — gauged using search statistics from Google Insights for Search — steadily increased from the beginning of January 2011 to the beginning of January 2012, maintaining a lead in user interest over Romney since early June 2011.

New Hampshire Internet users exhibited significantly more interest in Paul than Romney through December, with Paul-related search queries increasing exponentially throughout the month.

The Google data “analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time,” according to the company

The search engine also eliminates ”repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, so that the level of interest isn’t artificially impacted by these type of queries.”

The number of news stories referencing Romney far outnumbered those mentioning Paul, Santorum and even Kim Kardashian in New Hampshire, but both Paul and Kardashian are more popular Internet searches than Romney, according to Google Trends.

When asked by The Daily Caller if Romney thought this would have any effect on the New Hampshire primary, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul declined to comment. (RELATED: More coverage of Kim Kardashian)

YouTube statistics tell a similar story. One of the most shared videos in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire is by Endorse Liberty PAC. The video, titled, “Ron Paul — Watch this presentation to see why so many people are endorsing Ron Paul for President,” already has over 96,000 views.

The Huffington Post reported Wednesday that Romney’s first post-Iowa event in New Hampshire opened with hostile questioning from attendees, offering “a rude awakening” to the former governor of Massachusetts.

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Since replacing Dick Ebersol in May, Lazarus has been part of the Comcast/NBC group that extended NBC’s long Olympic run from 2014 to 2020 for $ 4.38 billion; added Major League Soccer, primarily to benefit Versus; renewed the PGA Tour deal to benefit NBC and the Golf Channel; and renewed the “Sunday Night Football” contract last week for nine years at an average of $ 950 million annually.

A month before the N.F.L. deal was signed, Lazarus predicted that the league had to provide much more to NBC if the network was going to pay much more. And working with Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC Universal, he got a divisional playoff game, a Thanksgiving night game, three Super Bowls over nine years and video rights that will let Versus introduce two programs, one a Sunday pregame show.

Full Story: More low-key than his Predecessor, NBC Sports chief still aims high

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Tiger Woods is the best golfer Luke Donald has ever played against and Rory McIlroy is the most talented.

The top-ranked Englishman had compared the two players on Wednesday before the start of the Dubai World Championship. But he backtracked on his assessment a day later and said on Twitter that he had meant no “disrespect” to Woods.

“A few people aren’t understanding what I meant. The word ‘talent’ and Rory, to me, means a free-flowing swing who makes everything look so easy,” Donald tweeted. “TW (Woods) has always been the best at getting the ball in the hole when it mattered the most. That’s not just talent (that’s) something else, too.”

Donald tweeted again a short time later that Woods “is still the greatest player I played with.”

On Wednesday, when asked if McIlroy was the best player he ever played with, including Woods, Donald said the 22-year-old Northern Irishman topped the list.

“I believe so, yeah. Just in pure talent,” Donald said. “I think Tiger’s work ethic has always been tremendous and his mindset as well. I think his mindset is what has separated him from the field when he was really at the top of his game. But in terms of talent, I think Rory has more talent.”

Donald’s comments comes as Woods is enjoying a resurgence, having won the Chevron World Challenge on Sunday to end a two-year title drought that began shortly after his personal life imploded.

His victory was welcomed by many of the other top names in golf, including McIlroy. He said he would relish the chance to face Woods since showing signs of returning to his old form. The third-ranked Lee Westwood also welcomed back Woods, calling him “the biggest name in golf and probably one of the biggest names in world sports.”

Asked on Thursday about Donald’s comments, McIlroy smiled and said the Englishman “was maybe taken a little bit out of context.”

“Look, it’s one thing to have talent but it’s another to actually have the capacity of turning that talent into something productive,” McIlroy said. “I think what Luke was saying was golf comes as easy to me as it does for Tiger. I’ll never know but, look, Tiger’s won 90-whatever tournaments worldwide and 14 majors, and that’s definitely more of a talent than five wins.”

Donald and McIlroy are battling it out for the European money title. Trailing Donald by just under $ 1 million, McIlroy must win the Dubai World Championship and hope his rival finishes outside the top nine to capture the title.

Should Donald claim the title, he would be the first golfer to win both the European and American money titles.

After a week marked by the departure of four top officials, including its legendary football coach Joe Paterno, Penn State University will have to get back to the mundane task of hosting a football game on Saturday — albeit one that comes complete with death threats and legitimate fears that a student body enraged by Paterno’s dismissal might again riot in the streets.

This will not just be another Saturday in State College, Pennsylvania.

First, let’s talk about the death threats. One of the main players in the sexual assault allegations against former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is the team’s receivers coach, Mike McQueary. It was in 2002 that McQueary, then a graduate assistant, saw Sandusky sexually assault a 10-year-old boy in the team’s locker room shower. Instead of acting to protect the child or alerting police, McQueary left the facility. After conferring with his father, he arranged to meet in person with Paterno the next day to inform him directly of what he saw.

Since the allegations against Sandusky were first aired last weekend, McQueary has become the object of ire for many, with multiple voices wondering why he didn’t try to stop Sandusky or at least talk directly to police. Still others are wondering why the school was keeping him on the payroll when it seems as if he might be as guilty as Paterno when it came to looking the other way. Late Thursday night, the school announced that McQueary wouldn’t be at Saturday’s game after receiving multiple death threats.

While the university might be acting to protect McQueary, there’s far less it can do for the more than 100,000 fans who will be inside Beaver Stadium on Saturday, when the Nittany Lions take on the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. Nebraska officials have already expressed concern for the safety of the 20,000 Nebraska fans who will be traveling to Pennsylvania for the game, and have advised those fans to avoid wearing the team color of red inside the stadium.

Such warnings seem only prudent after the way thousands of students took to the streets late on Wednesday night as news of Paterno’s dismissal spread across campus. It didn’t take long for things to take a turn for the worse after a group of rioters overturned a remote truck from an Altoona television station, while others took to pelting police with rocks and bottles.

Add it all up, and there’s little doubt that millions will be watching this game from home when it airs on ESPN at noon on Saturday. Unfortunately, sitting in front of your television may be the only way to watch the game while guaranteeing your own safety.

Eric McErlain blogs at Off Wing Opinion, a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner. In 2006 he wrote a “bloggers bill of rights” to help integrate bloggers into the Washington Capitals’ press box. Eric has also written for Deadspin, NBC Sports and the Sporting News, and covers sports television for The TV News. Follow Eric on Twitter.

Late on Saturday night, there was a moment or two when I seriously considered plunking down $ 65 to watch the pay-per-view rematch between Manny Pacquaio and Juan Manuel Marquez. But in the end, thinking that I’d been had one too many times by professional boxing’s hype machine, I reluctantly switched off the television and put down the remote in favor of getting a full night’s sleep ahead of a Sunday morning business trip.

And while it’s clear now that I missed out by skipping the fight, it seems as if a whole lot of other Americans are making the same sort of choice. Why do I say that? Because while the Pacquiao-Marquez rematch was sitting behind a $ 65 firewall on cable and satellite, Fox was giving mixed marital arts an hour of prime-time exposure.

According to the network, its one-hour broadcast of a championship match-up between Cain Velasquez and Junior Dos Santos (a fight Dos Santos would win in a first-round technical knockout) generated 5.7 million viewers on Saturday night. According to Fox, that was 800,000 more viewers than a 2008 event that was aired by CBS and a record for any network broadcast of mixed martial arts.

So what set of fans got their money’s worth on Saturday night? It would be hard not to argue that boxing’s faithful came out ahead on points. Sure, they paid $ 65 per television set — and undoubtedly in many cases there were multiple viewers for each paid admission — but in exchange they got 12 rounds of championship boxing where the outcome was actually in doubt until the end. Meanwhile, UFC fans got a little more than a minute of action, a result that could hardly be termed as terribly satisfying.

Still, in the long run, it’s hard for me not to see UFC eventually eclipsing the boxing game. Simply put, I’ve been burned one too many times, walking away with the distinct impression that I should be asking for my money back. And while the pull of the sweet science remains powerful — if anyone asked me to attend a fight in Las Vegas in person, I might actually hitchhike my way West — that’s based on some ancient memories of a sport that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Eric McErlain blogs at Off Wing Opinion, a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner. In 2006 he wrote a “bloggers bill of rights” to help integrate bloggers into the Washington Capitals’ press box. Eric has also written for Deadspin, NBC Sports and the Sporting News, and covers sports television for The TV News. Follow Eric on Twitter.

Jimbo Fisher got a raise of roughly $ 950,000 after last season, his first as head football coach at Florida State, boosting his pay to about $ 2.8 million.

So, at a time of tightening budgets, how does a public employee get a 50% raise of nearly $ 1 million after one year on the job?

“You’re always looking at whether or not you have the potential to lose a good coach and end up having to pay more in order to get the next one,” Florida State President Eric Barron says.

That sort of inflationary reasoning is a factor in the rapid rise in salaries of major-college head football coaches. An analysis by USA TODAY found that in 2006 the average pay for major-college coaches was $ 950,000 — coincidentally, about the amount of Fisher’s raise after last season.

The average compensation in 2011 is $ 1.47 million, a jump of nearly 55% in six seasons.

In the six conferences with automatic Bowl Championship Series bids, the average salary rose from $ 1.4 million in 2006 to $ 2.125 million in 2011. That’s a jump of about 52% — meaning salaries at schools in the other five major conferences are going up at roughly the same rate as they are at higher-profile schools.

“The hell with gold,” higher education lawyer Sheldon Steinbach says. “I want to buy futures in coaches’ contracts.”

Full story: Salaries for college football coaches back on rise