And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.

“Here is evidence that suggests that when your football team does well, grades suffer,” said Dr. Waddell, who compared transcripts of over 29,700 students from 1999 to 2007 against Oregon’s win-loss record. For every three games won, grade-point average for men dropped 0.02, widening the G.P.A. gender gap by 9 percent. Women’s grades didn’t suffer. In a separate survey of 183 students, the success of the Ducks also seemed to cause slacking off: students reported studying less (24 percent of men, 9 percent of women), consuming more alcohol (28 percent, 20 percent) and partying more (47 percent, 28 percent).

Amazon Digital Books uses its proprietary format called MOBI (also called Kindle format), while Apple uses an open format called ePub

You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.

The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2--and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they'll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.

Bad nepotism promotes people above their abilities by virtue of connections, and it erodes rather than enhances economic productivity.

But there is even a larger cost. If the rich leverage economic power to gain political power they can also skew broader public policy choices—from the tax system to the education system—to the benefit of their offspring. This will surely start eroding the belief that labour markets are fair, and that anyone can aspire to the top.

Some of the answers to our innovation challenge will come from within the U.S. We remain in many ways the most dynamic country in the world, with more top universities and multinational corporations than any other nation. But it's foolish to imagine that the best innovation ideas in the world already have a home in policies coming from Washington, D.C. Here is a world-wide tour of the best ideas that our government should import to jump-start innovation.

The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for medical school fade. There is no doubt that the main majors are difficult and growing more complex. Some students still lack math preparation or aren’t willing to work hard enough.

It’s a fickle and false religion, used to replace the ideologies we (a country of immigrants) escaped. Random high priests lurk all over the Internet, ready to pounce. Below are the Ten Commandments of the American Religion, as I see them.

If you’re like me then you’ve probably listened to quite a few classical pieces, but haven’t ever really, really gotten into them — at least not in the same way as your favorite non-classical pieces of music. Here are 7 reasons why if you are a true nerd you should seriously consider giving classical music a more serious listen

For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival.

This year's Nobel peace prize was awarded this year to Chinese political activist Liu Xiaobo. The move angered Beijing, which warned of "consequences" for governments attending the ceremony. The BBC's Paul Reynolds looks at which countries are not going, and why.

Now, I know as a rule frugal people don't buy Starbucks drinks. But say you're in a hurry and you need a caffeine fix, or you're a tea junkie like me and couldn't wait for your kettle to boil some water before your class/work/whatever. Or maybe your with some friends who all want to go to Starbucks (Because, say what you will about Starbucks, but if you want a place to hang out with your friends other than your house, Starbucks is much cheaper than a restaurant or bar), how can you save money?

If you and a friend are out and want a Frappuccino, ask for a Venti split into two tall cups. Iced venti cups are 24 oz. Tall are 12. Viola. Two talls would cost you about 6 bucks, a venti, 4.

Beautiful parents tend to have more daughters than their homelier counterparts, according to a report by evolutionary psychologist Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics

In 2006 he published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring.[3][4] In a letter to the editors,[5] Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman points out that a correct interpretation of the regression coefficients in Kanazawa's analysis is that attractive people are 8% more likely to have girls, an error that Kanazawa acknowledges.[6] Gelman further argues that Kanazawa's analysis does not convincingly show causality, because of possible endogeneity as well as problematic interpretations of statistical significance in multiple comparisons. While Kanazawa claims that the former error is "merely linguistic" and that he addressed the latter two in his initial article,[7] Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.[8]"

Imagine you’re at the circus. On the ground is a poodle performing a stunt. Above the clown’s head, dangling from a thin wire, is a piano. The piano is teetering, tottering, looking as if at any moment it might slip, crash to earth, and crush the dog. Impossible not to watch, right? And that’s the Palin show, only this time with the party of Lincoln as the little dog, and Sarah Palin as the piano.

The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever.  For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights.  At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war.  We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.  

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough.

Social media is now routinely used to augment reporting of public events. There are entire units in news organizations dedicated to getting stories from the audience, often under the awkward rubric of “user-generated content.” But why sift for events online when you can give your audience the tools to give you the story directly? Right now if I see a plane land in a river, I tweet it. Wouldn’t a news organization prefer that I send my eye-witness photo to the UGC editor instead?

These apps are a mix of free and paid for software, and in order to provide you with as much information as possible, we’ve included multiple apps for similar tasks if available. This list is by no means complete, but it should help you to unlock some more of your Mac’s great potential!

When you want to check in on your living room, just call yourself on FaceTime from your iPhone or iPod touch, and your Mac will automatically answer the call. When you hang up the call, the script will close FaceTime and continue monitoring for incoming calls. When you get home, you can just quit the app to stop FaceTime from auto-answering everything that comes in.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success.

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith."

Here’s the question, though, for the rest of us: Why do Forbes (which presumably has many choices of cover material) and Gingrich imagine that such a message will resonate with their conservative audience? Nothing more offends conservatives than liberal accusations of racial animus. Yet here is racial animus, unconcealed and unapologetic, and it is seized by savvy editors and an ambitious politician as just the material to please a conservative audience. That’s an insult to every conservative in America.

Take a look at the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach expressed with chilling precision in the submission guidelines of the self-described “backbone of the world’s information system” – the Associated Press. On their website, the nation’s oldest news wire describes their mission “…to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability, and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed.”
Sounds great. The problem is the AP’s editorial submission guidelines are doomed to produce mind-numbing, paranoia-inducing stories that are neither informed nor newsworthy.

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

With each new product that Apple announces, including the revamped Apple TV and the new Ping social network, Steve Jobs reveals a little bit more of his plan to dominate the media universe. But I can summarize that plan’s fatal flaw in one word: iTunes.

A bigger worry is that jobseekers no longer have the skills demanded by employers. Half of the 8m jobs lost went in construction and manufacturing, and those departing these industries may struggle to adapt to jobs in more vibrant areas such as education and health services. The cost of this skills mismatch is compounded by America’s housing bust. Many owe more on mortgages than their homes are worth. Households often opt to stay put rather than default, leaving them trapped in places with high unemployment and unable to move to where jobs are plentiful. The rise of the two-income household has also made workers less mobile than they were: it is harder to move in search of jobs if there are two careers to consider.

The effects of immigration on the total output and income of the U.S. economy can be studied by comparing output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few new foreign-born workers. Statistical analysis of state-level data shows that immigrants expand the economy's productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers.

In the midst of the Afghan war, Indians have been conserving pre-Islamic art, Buddhist monuments and Mughal gardens, even tracing links back to the Bronze Age.

So when your Marathi friend emails you “You like orange pants with purple frill” – the odds are she only wants to know whether you do, and forgot to add the question mark. It’s less likely she’s accusing you of questionable taste. (Although what made her ask to begin with is something to think about.)

You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with?

That's right: Other people really can't stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The other Panvel, to my right as I get off the train, is, not unlike Mumbai, an old town in a new world. Historically both a port and a trading town, Panvel was once the rice bowl of the north Konkan, with its famous Bazaar Peth, Mirchi and Kapad Gallis. Panvel Gaon dates back to 1725, when the Bapat Wada was built. It was elevated in the 1800s, when migrants from the Konkan were populating Bombay, and Panvel Shahar was an alternate place to make a home. When you talk to old-timers, they tell you that a newcomer could always find home in Bapat Wada and a job in Dhootpapeshwar, the ayurvedic factory. While the factory is gone, the wada still shelters several hundred residents.

The claim that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And we’re supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.

The 19 suicide bombers didn’t come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong anti-American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al-Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.

Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

Some political analysts and consultants say Mr. Lazio’s critique of the planned project is designed in significant part to ward off an unexpectedly spirited challenger in Carl Paladino, a wealthy upstate conservative who has spoken out against the project in even blunter language than Mr. Lazio.

In his own commercial, Mr. Paladino vowed that, if elected, he would use the government’s power of eminent domain to force the center’s developers to find a different location.

Netbooks were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

US News & World Report produces the most widely-read college rankings, but Forbes, The Princeton Review, and several other publications have produced their own rankings. The problem is that every single one of these rankings is just absolutely, completely, and totally full of crap.

Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.

Indian-Americans, the fastest growing Asian group in the United States, make up a little over three million of the country’s population. But only two -- Jindal and Dalip Singh Saund, A Democrat who represented a California district from 1957 to 1963 -- have ever served in Congress. This year, though, there are an unprecedented six Indian-American candidates, all Democrats, are running for the House. And with Jindal and Haley generating national attention, the prominence of Indian-American politicians has never been greater.

And while one might assume that cultural conformity would be more important to Republicans, given the party’s conservative, tradition-minded base, Indian-American Democratic candidates can be just as quick to prove their American assimilation to voters.

Whether you’re a Starwars fanatic, Apple fanboy, social media addict or just a retro gaming activist, our nerdy list of product will give you some truly geek-themed design.