Current Affairs

Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs: Trick or Trend

March 12, 2012

  Thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s 8 Monday Morning Must Reads I discovered USA Today’s Older entrepreneurs find new niche in startups. This doesn’t surprise me at all, but it was good to see it in print. The quick summary: Over the past decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55 to [...]

Read the full article →

Is The Very Idea of Designing Tech Products for Women Insulting?

March 5, 2012

(note: I posted this on the Huffington Post first, just about 10 minutes ago) Maybe it’s because I’m father to four daughters, maybe because of simple fair play, but if you read my stuff I’ve been a chronic complainer about the relatively low numbers of women in high tech and tech in general. And I [...]

Read the full article →

Was it Social Media That Defeated that Bad SOPA/PIPA Bill?

January 26, 2012

I was delighted to read Vivek Wadhwa’s take on Social media’s role in politics on the Washington Post: To frame this battle properly, a loosely organized group of Internet leaders outwitted a well-funded lobbying organization. And they did so in grand style, convincing dozens of lawmakers to reverse their votes virtually overnight. he goes on to [...]

Read the full article →

Thanksgiving: Gratitude is Good for Your Health

November 24, 2011

Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. It’s supposed to be about getting together and giving thanks. My contribution to the Thanksgiving holiday is to recommend a Google search on the correlation between gratitude and health. It turns out that there are indications that being thankful is good for us all. Of course [...]

Read the full article →

Federal Charges For Fake Organic Corn

November 16, 2011

It’s interesting and reassuring to see that apparently somebody follows up on fake organic claims, according to a story in my local paper, the Eugene Register Guard. Register Guard regular Karen McCowan reported the man is charged with adding $193,169 to his profits by misrepresenting a conventional crop. He faces a federal wire fraud charge [...]

Read the full article →

Missing the Bonding Agent of Mainstream News

November 1, 2011

What an irony: when we all depended on a very few quasi-monopoly mainstream news media, news was more fact and less opinion. Who would have predicted that? I suppose this is hard to believe, but when I was in Journalism grad school a few decades ago teachers, students, and even practicing journalists believed in news [...]

Read the full article →

Education, Jobs, and the 99 percent. Who Occupies What? Who to Blame?

October 27, 2011

I’m visiting in New York this week, and yesterday I ran into two different “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations. And was sent by a friend to this we are the 99 Percent site, an eloquent and disturbing look at that movement. . I know I don’t know what’s really going on there. And I know that [...]

Read the full article →

New Game: Social Media Snooping vs. Social Media Cleansing

July 13, 2011

The other shoe dropping: Business Insider posted This Company Will Expose All Your Most Embarrassing Online Moments a few days ago. It’s about a service company that helps employers by doing a social-media online background check on a potential employee. It was more than two years ago that I first saw a business plan for [...]

Read the full article →

Disrupt Education. Save the World.

July 12, 2011

Is there any generalized institution in the world that needs disruption more badly than education? Right now there are more than a billion people under 10 years old. How well do you think we adults are doing with educating all those kids? You can’t have a leading economy and a lagging educational system I know [...]

Read the full article →

Celebrating Independence? Read the Document.

July 4, 2011

Today is Independence Day in the U.S. This holiday is all about The Declaration of Independence, which was signed on this day in 1776 by a couple dozen or so very brave people who were prepared to risk their lives for the political freedom they believed in. They were freedom fighters, fighting for their rights.  [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries