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There’s this nagging question that just keeps coming back to me about the bailouts to all the ‘surviving’ Banks and especially Goldman Sachs, since they haven’t missed a beat. I keep asking, how the hell did they do this? Most of the increase in our federal deficit this past year is specifically due to bailing out all the banks and their Wall Street pals, (with our money)while trying to save what is left of our tanking economy that they nearly destroyed.
So when I think about Goldman Sachs raking in …

A researcher’s algorithm could teach computers a new privacy trick.

The computer science problems that earned Craig Gentry his job at IBM sound a bit like Zen koans. Could Google search the Web without knowing what it was looking for? Can an e-mail filter identify spam without reading it? Could an official count votes in an election without opening a ballot?
Those privacy puzzles, as Gentry has shown in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, aren’t as paradoxical as they seem. In a cryptographic epiphany last summer, the 35-year-old IBM ( IBM – …

If you think the Internet came out of Silicon Valley, that NASA planned the first satellite to orbit Earth, or that IBM created the modern computer—think again. Each one of these breakthroughs was conceived at RAND, a shadowy think tank in Santa Monica, California.

The Intimidation Factor
Rand rose out of the ashes of World War II. After witnessing the success of the Manhattan Project—the $2 billion initiative that created the first atomic bomb—a five-star Air Force general named Henry “Hap” Arnold (pictured) concluded that America needed a team of great …

Two blogs, Texts From Last Night and Look at this Fucking Hipster, scored contracts at Penguin’s Gotham Books imprint in the past week, the latest in an endless series of such deals. Shouldn’t you get a piece of the action?
It’s not like there’s any shame in aiming for a book deal right when you start your blog. As the New York Observer puts it:

These days it seems more and more like people start goofy Web sites practically counting on seeing their stuff between two covers.

If someone’s going pay $20 …

Feynman: Ways of thinking (Part One of Two)

Feynman: Ways of thinking (Part Two of Two)
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This is the email that Amazon.com is sending its Affiliates from North Carolina:

We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.
Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates …

Borrowing remains unusually cheap right now by historical standards, but government deficits and inflation will change that picture over the next few years.

Investors are kicking themselves for failing to spot the twin bubbles in the stock and housing markets when the laws of economic gravity for both became spectacularly unhinged. Now, America should be on red alert for another bubble that’s destined to pop — outrageously overpriced government bonds, the flipside being outrageously low interest rates.
Indeed, the trend towards far higher rates is already beginning: Since March, the yield …

Someday, when you ask your Twitter followers to recommend the most comfortable running shoe or the best digital camera, you might be able to go one step further and buy the product on the Twitter site.
E-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter, said Todd Chaffee, a Twitter board member and general partner at Institutional Venture Partners, which has invested in Twitter. That gives us one more hint about how Twitter will make money.
Mr. Chaffee said that we can also expect …

One’s happiness might seem like a personal subject, but a Kansas State University researcher says employers should be concerned about the well-being of their employees because it could be the underlying factor to success.

Thomas Wright, Jon Wefald Leadership Chair in Business Administration and professor of management at K-State, has found that when employees have high levels of psychological well-being and job satisfaction, they perform better and are less likely to leave their job — making happiness a valuable tool for maximizing organizational outcomes.
“The benefits of a psychologically well work …

How can color help you effectively market your product or service? The psychology of color is not a new concept, take a look in your refrigerator and you will see products by companies that have spent millions of dollars and man hours trying to establish the right color combination to get you to buy. So when you were choosing the colors for your company logo you probably thought a little about how color makes people feel, but do you extend that into your marketing campaigns?
If you look at multimillion …

Opera United is out!  I didn’t stay up till 3:00 AM EST, but first thing this morning I did check out what it was all about, and I watched the brief video explaining what the fuzz & buzz was all about: File Sharing, Photo Sharing, Fridge (think of Facebook’s Wall), Lounge (chat). Media Player as in “Access your completer home music library from wherever you are” and Web Server, WOW!
I have not yet downloaded, installed and played around with Opera Unite; but if Opera can deliver on these promises from …

The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by David Rosenhan in 1972. It was published in the journal Science under the title “On being sane in insane places.”
Rosenhan’s study consisted of two parts. The first involved the use of healthy associates or “pseudopatients,” who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. The second involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent …

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.
This is one reason the collapse of our financial system …

Harvard researchers say 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by health problems—and 78% of those filers had insurance

Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.
Medically related bankruptcies have been rising steadily for decades. In 1981, only 8% of …

The giant retailer’s low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart’s relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles …

Microsoft Corp’s chief software architect said on Thursday the profit margins on providing online services — broadly known as cloud computing — would likely yield a lower profit margin than the company’s existing software business.
“The margins on services are not like the margins on software, so it (cloud computing) will increase our profit and it will increase our revenue, but you won’t have that margin,” said Ray Ozzie on Thursday at a Silicon Valley technology event. (Read more at: Reuters)
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{Photography by Laffy4k}

After a factory had found a 40-million-year-old whale fossil in a limestone kitchen counter, researchers investigated the stone’s fossil-packed Egyptian quarry, which could shed light on the origins of African wildlife. (Read the transcript at: National Geographic)