Brian Gongol
US unemployment sticks at 9.2%
It certainly appears as though the economy is growing without putting people into new jobs. That's because machines are relatively cheaper than employees right now, and that's not all that likely to change, even though that's going to be bad news for people who want jobs. This is an interesting situation to compare with that of Japan, where a declining birthrate and a national hostility to immigration have combined to artificially contract their available pool of workers, making the country eager to find ways to get machines to do human work.
Bad decisions kill a 168-year-old newspaper
Britain's "News of the World" has been around since before the American Civil War. Today, it's being shut down because reporters and editors apparently were hacking into the voice-mail accounts of thousands of people, including murdered teenagers and the British royal family. Stupid, short-sighted thinking is what brings companies (and other institutions) to their knees. Every organization should have a 100-year business plan to identify what it's going to do to stick around for the long haul. The News of the World may have been the best-selling newspaper in Britain, but a lack of scruples and vision killed it.
Google tweaks the look of Calendar and Gmail
They're making evolutionary changes to the interfaces to make them more consistent from site to site and (hypothetically) more useful and user-friendly.
This is why everyone should learn self-defense
(Video) A video shows a man being attacked, beaten, and stabbed by a mob in Chicago one recent night. There's no guarantee, of course, that any form of martial art or self-defense technique would have stopped the attack, but the video provides some startling evidence that mob attacks still happen from time to time, and one certainly doesn't want to become a victim without a fighting chance.
