The AP today ran a story about how hard it is to get students to finish college. While for decades higher education leaders focused on getting more and more high schoolers to enroll in college, today, just 54% of them ever get a degree–six years later! The era of the […]
Steve stopped by Computer Cleaners yesterday. A shaggy haired fellow computer geek who owns a shop in Hadley, he was coming to visit his northern brethren, and he chatted for a while. He said that old style computer monitors use about 100 watts each, like a big lightbulb burning all […]
Pakistan’s leading human rights organisation, the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust, said jihadi groups fighting the Indian government were taking orphans off the streets and putting them in training camps. The Times on line and little green footballs had this story today. The organisation said it also had evidence that sympathetic […]
Woe to the shoemaker whose children have no shoes, or the baker who is without bread. I felt like this tonight when I stupidly clicked on an email claiming to be giving me a password and found my computer hijacked by the evil worm that turned out to be a […]
Bruce Wallace writes in the LA Times (thanks World Hum) about the trip of a lifetime–to North Korea–for a group of hard core world travelers, including Joe Walker, whose been nearly everywhere else on earch. “This is definitely the weirdest trip I’ve been on,” he said as the Ilyushin headed […]
Boy what a bad idea. I thought I’d save some money by switching my home internet to cheap Verizon DSL for $14.95. More than a few times I wondered if the $42.95 Comcast clipped me for each month was worth it…hey it’s all high speed, right? WRONG! Verizon suckers people […]
Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and publishes a blog called The Long Tail. Today he posted a grim list for Mainstream Media, showing all of the indices that are down and the ones that are up. Down: Box Office: down by 7% this year (tickets per capita have […]
Newsvine is a new way to look at the news, being developed for rollout early next year. The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that the company will be offering a news site with feeds from the AP, ESPN and other sources and users will be able to rate the importance of […]
Today is a lovely day. A day to rake leaves, or walk in the woods. Or play poker with my pals. I’ve opted for the latter, so today I will join Donny, Dave C, cousin Steve, and Eddy V over at Steves for some good old fashioned seven card stud. […]
Charles Cooper of CNET writes about blogs and newspapers and the clash of the two. “During a panel discussion on Internet versus traditional media that I attended this week in Santa Clara, tech columnist John Markoff of The New York Times and tech columnist Kara Swisher of The Wall Street […]
You know those books you keep trying to finish, that languish on your bedside? One of mine is Paul Theroux’ “The Pillars of Hercules,” about a journey around the Mediterranean. His observations of people are keen, below is a section about what he saw in Sardinia. “It was a marketplace […]
The most depressing thing, writes Tina Brown in the Wash Post, about the spat between Times reporter Judith Miller and her colleague/nemesis Maureen Dowd was the tired old debate it kicked off about who’s the bigger vamp, Mo or Judy? “According to Dowd in a lethal column that put her […]