Current Affairs

The following tool lets you see what percentage of the news bandwidth a topic has compared to the rest of the week. For example, you can see that news articles about Bill Clinton have been growing in number all week – probably because of his book that’s about to come out. All items are in […]

John Kerry is proposing raising the federal minimum wage to $7/hour! While I still think it should be higher, that’s a big step. As the article says, it “would provide a family with enough money to buy 10 months of groceries or pay for eight months of rent.” I figure it would be about $320

Texas has a law that guarantees admission to public universities to the top 10% of any high school graduating class. While the law has a lot of critics, it sure has been a success from a diversity perspective. According to

We had an interesting after dinner conversation last night. Yet another new Super Walmart is moving into town and we were discussing if they were good or bad for the local economy. The majority of the room was in favor of Super Walmart saying it would bring cheap goods and lots of jobs to the

I knew it! Dogs can understand words. Yahoo! News – Research Shows Dogs Can Comprehend Words My dog knows all her toys and most of her human and dog friends by name. I’ve always said she got left behind at the level of a 1-2 year old human child. This article claims the border collie

I raise guide dog puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind, so I pay attention to any articles about raising service dogs. This

In this article, Census report: It pays to be a man, discussing the difference between men and women’s pay, the fact I found most interesting was the fact that women tend to earn the same as men in fields dominated by men such as hazardous waste removal. In fields dominated by women, such as nursing

I’ve seen and heard a lot of debate about private vs public schools and within private schools, coed vs single sex. There’s an interesting article,

Good news. If you’ve ever been frustrated by the check engine light in your car and paid $100+ to get it diagnosed. And probably gotten it diagnosed multiple times because you didn’t get any real info, there’s now a bill in Congress to require car companies to release those codes to the public. See Drivers

Foresight Exchange. Another site where you can bet on the future. A political options market. This one is much more active than the previous ones I wrote about. Bet on (or buy options) things like “GW Bush remains US Pres. ’04” or “US gasoline prices reach $3.00”.