For those travelers who like to pilfer "souvenirs" from hotels, beware: some chains are starting to track their linens with RFID chips to catch you in the act ( Read more... )

Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has a plan to eliminate all fossil fuels and move to producing 100% of our energy from renewable sources. It is important to keep in mind that the most progressive state in the U.S., California, has a goal of producing 33% of energy from renewables within 20 years. The European Union, on the other ( Read more... )

I have been thinking a lot recently about issues surrounding the media and a question occurs to me. Does it even make sense to talk about a publishing industry anymore? After all, the problem that big publishing houses were supposed to solve was the difficulty and expense of producing information and distributing that information to the public as a ( Read more... )

Here's another good idea from the UK that we could use here in the US. A new website is making an effort to track churning, which is when media outlets simply copy and paste the text of corporate press releases without any checking and run it as news. This interview from NPR's On the Media has a lot of amusing anecdotes, such as the creators of ( Read more... )

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other ( Read more... )

You know all those economic indicators that get so much press? Things like employment reports, housing starts, the consumer price index, the producer price index, GDP and so forth? Well, NPR's Marketplace had a segment today--part of their "Economy 4.0" series--that questions whether these indicators are as relevant as they should be to the lives ( Read more... )

It's being reported today that Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, which has received a metric assload of federal bailout money, took a private jet from BoA headquarters in Charlotte to a meeting with the New York attorney-general. The plane is a state of the art Gulfstream V that is one of BoA's nine (count them, nine) corporate jets. The ( Read more... )

The BBC's Katty Kay interviewed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about how the new Kindle is starting to change the way we use books. But the real story about how books will change in the electronic age isn't the Kindle--which is, after all, just a consumer gadget riding a new trend. The New York Times Magazine is way ahead of Mr. Bezos--having published ( Read more... )

Time magazine has an interesting article called "How to save your newspaper" which proposes a novel idea for helping newspapers and magazines on the verge of going out of business: charging for content. And as much as my natural tendency is to lead toward the "Information wants to be free" way of looking at things, the article does bring up some ( Read more... )

It is common in business, academia and many other organizations to not bother to reply to people who apply for jobs or other roles with the organization. Or if the organization does send out a rejection, it is vague and unhelpful, leaving the applicant to wonder why he or she was rejected and or whether it would be worth their while to apply again ( Read more... )