We blogged here recently about Connsumer Reports study declaring that most infant car seats failed miserably in side-impact crash tests. Now comes word that Consumer Reports is retracting the study, an acknowledgment that the study’s methodology was flawed. According to this MSNBC report, the study was meant to test the seats in 38-mph crashes, whereas the actual speed of the . . .
Due to a busy day today, the best I can do here is link to a few noteworthy articles in this morning’s N.Y. Times: … a report by Denise Grady on a small but significant drop in cancer deaths, an article that includes a concise but very good rollup of the state of cancer in general. (Here, in a paragraph . . .
Richard Branson’s new Virgin America airline, that is. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation has rejected Virgin America’s application to fly domestically, on the basis of its foreign ownership. So Virgin is taking is plight straight to the people, with a tantalizing website replete with petition.
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Thurs., Jan. 18), sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. E.T., to talk about this stuff. Later in the day, I get to sit on an author’s panel at a conference that Google is holding on the digital future of book publishing.
Most people who need to have an MRI aren’t thrilled about it. It’s not a very pleasant experience, and it generally means that something’s wrong with you. A few years ago, however, I was clamoring to get my brain inside an fMRI machine (the “f” stands for “functional”; an fMRI is capable of measuring neural activity). I was about 18 . . .
This place claims to have invented the hamburger. This one claims to have invented the Bloody Mary, or at least introduced it to Americans. And this guy claims to have dropped nine pounds by playing the Wii for a half hour every day for 6 weeks. (He also broke his girlfriend’s laptop in the process.)
And a N.Y. State Supreme Court justice says so.
John Burns is a brilliant reporter and writer at the N.Y. Times, currently reporting from Iraq. Today he’s got the lead front-page article headlined “Second Hanging Also Went Awry, Iraq Tape Shows … One of 2 Men Decapitated.” The man in question is Saddam Hussein’s half-brother. The second paragraph begins like this: “An official video played to a small group . . .
Benjamin Hoffman has an article in today’s N.Y. Times about an investment banker named Gary Boren whom the Dallas Mavericks use as their free-throw guru. He films the players’ free-throw attempts, breaks down their mechanics, and then teaches them to improve. “Since he joined the Mavericks [in 1999],” Hoffman writes, “they have finished in the top six in the league . . .
There’s an article in today’s N.Y. Times about how many women buy luxury items with cash instead of a credit card so their boyfriends or husbands won’t find out and hassle them. “His tastes aren’t as expensive as mine, and he doesn’t understand the need to have so many pricey things,” says one woman who is paying cash for a . . .
From an article in today’s N.Y. Times about Manhattan’s eternal congestion woes: 35.1% of government workers drive to work instead of taking public transportation, second only to workers in “transportation, warehousing and utilities,” at 36.1%. Comparatively, only 15.1% of workers in the retail trade drive into the city, and 14% of finance workers. Now these numbers are not nearly as . . .
My favorite TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has finally come in No. 1 in some category: Time-Shifted Primetime TV Programs, as measured by Nielsen Media Research. This means shows that are watched, typically via a DVR, after they are broadcast live. I am not sure if it includes sales via iTunes (if anyone knows, please shout), which . . .
One of the most interesting reporting experiences I ever had was attending a four-day seminar that the National Football League runs each year for its incoming rookies, trying to prepare them for life in (and after) the N.F.L. Not the football part, but the life part: handling money, staying away from bad influences, etc. It soon emerged that, for a . . .
Not because higher gas prices will spur people to walk or ride bicycles instead of driving. No, I’m thinking it might work like this: — Notwithstanding the recent drop, high oil prices have driven a demand for ethanol made from corn. — Accordingly, the price of corn is rising fast, with July contracts at $4/bushel, about 60 percent higher than . . .
Plainly, a lot of people these days are interested in happiness — how to get happy, why some people are happier than others, etc. For example, there’s Dan Gilbert’s best-seller Stumbling on Happiness and, currently at No. 1 on the N.Y. Times‘s list of most e-mailed articles, a piece by Dan Max about university happiness studies. Among the most intriguing . . .
I blogged recently about a small controversy over the film Happy Feet. It was about whether the tap dancer Savion Glover (whose website has the best possible opening-title sequence) should have gotten more credit for doing the actual dancing that Mumble, the animated penguin, performs in the film. My wife and I took our kids to see the film for . . .
What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills, and a holiday gift card have in common? You’ll have to read our New York Times Magazine column to find out. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this site. You’re welcome to leave comments on this post. And thanks to Rory O’Connell, who . . .
There’s a fascinating article in today’s N.Y. Times about Blue Nile, an online diamond merchant that seems to be smoking its brick-and-mortar competitors. Five years ago, this would have seemed most unlikely. As the article’s author, Gary Rivlin, puts it: “People might be willing to buy a book online, or a CD, and maybe a toaster … but a $3,000 . . .
… you should probably reconsider, based on this abject failure.
There is a very disturbing report in the new Consumer Reports about child car seats. Here’s an excerpt: You’d think that in a car crash, infants in their cozy car seats would be the most protected passengers of all. But you’d be wrong, our tests reveal. Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal . . .
A few weeks ago, I posted here about James Altucher’s new website Stockpickr.com, a sort of stock-picking wiki. Jim Cramer, the mad genius behind Mad Money and TheStreet.com, where Altucher is a columnist, also likes Stockpickr — enough to take a piece of Stockpickr’s action. Congrats to James. (Hat tip: Matt Hertz)
Let me explain. First, here are the top ten Yahoo! search queries last year in Canada and in the U.S.: Yahoo! Canada 1. NHL 2. FIFA World Cup 3. American Idol 4. Rock Star Supernova 5. WWE 6. Neopets 7. Revenue Canada 8. Days of Our Lives 9. Environment Canada 10. Jessica Simpson Yahoo! U.S. 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE . . .
I would imagine that writers the world over, especially non-fiction writers, look back at their published work and think about what got left out. In my experience, there are two categories of omissions, and they are generally particular to their medium. The first category is in book writing. When writing a book, you aren’t all that limited by space. Even . . .
If you are a professional or college athlete, one of the worst things you can do is lose your playbook. This is also a really bad idea if you work for someone who’s trying to be president of the United States. But that’s what happened to Rudy Giuliani: someone left behind his master plan, and someone from a rival’s camp . . .
For those of you who like to play our quizzes (see here and here and here and here), here’s a new one. But there are a couple of caveats/rule changes. First I’ll give the quiz, and then I’ll explain the rules. The quiz: I will soon be appearing on a TV show that, if you think about it, fits pretty . . .
There’s an interesting news brief in today’s N.Y. Times about a report just issued by the Food Marketing Institute about shoplifting in supermarkets. In previous years, health and beauty products were the most frequently shoplifted items, making up 23% of all stolen items in 2000. But last year, the percentage of health and beauty products had fallen to 14% of . . .
The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a guest OpEd columnist in the N.Y. Times, has an interesting piece today (subscription required) about W.E.B. DuBois’s famous prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line. The prediction, Patterson writes, had two components to it: “One side was the near complete exclusion of African-Americans and other minorities from the . . .
John Rockwell wrote an impassioned essay in the N.Y. Times about how the tap-dancing master Savion Glover is the unsung hero of Happy Feet. It was Glover who wore a motion-capture bodysuit and performed all the dancing that was then turned into the animated dancing of Mumble, the film’s penguin star. While conceding that the film’s director, George Miller, has . . .
A few months back, we wrote about one hospital’s very creative effort to get its medical staff to do a better job of washing their hands. Because so many people die in hospitals each year from bacterial infections they acquire while being treated for something else, the Institute of Medicine had sounded a loud alarm, urging all hospitals to do . . .
As James Altucher reports on his daily blog watch on TheStreet.com, the sale of domain names remains a very big business. This year, Diamonds.com went for $7.5 million, Vodka.com for $3 million, and Cameras.com for $1.5 million. According to DNJournal‘s list of the top sales in 2006, the 23rd biggest sale, going for $242,400, was Mortage.com. Not Mortgage.com, mind you, . . .
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