I cringed this morning when I read the piece in the Wall Street Journal about schools paying students to get good grades. The writer points out that such programs have had mixed results, and hangs his story on a new study of a 12-year-old Texas program. He writes: In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced [...]
Some folks from the Port of Long Beach stopped by this afternoon as part of an East Coast PR kick. They threw some pretty interesting stats my way, including this one: over a 24-hour period, a single cargo ship sitting at Long Beach with its engines running throws off more emissions than all the passenger [...]
Like most run-of-the-mill consumers, I did a little jig this morning when I read that the FTC would be banning prerecorded sales calls. I don’t care if advances in call-center telephony boost American productivity, picking up the receiver and being confronted with a prerecorded message is annoying. Sure, there are exceptions, the same exceptions there [...]
That’s one of the findings in a new piece of research out from the U.S. Census. The headline news from Fertility of American Women: 2006 is that 20% of women aged 40 to 44 have no children, twice the level of 30 years ago. But what was really surprising to me was that of the [...]
It must be some sort of indication of where we are in the economic cycle when major publications start doing big stories on the people who make the most pessimistic predictions. Anyone read the “Dr. Doom” profile of NYU economist Nouriel Roubini in the New York Times magazine over the weekend? It reminded me of [...]
I was in Chicago this weekend, and when I told my friend that I liked the t-shirt she was wearing, she mentioned that she’d bought it at Threadless. This caught my attention because Threadless was one of the companies Jeff Howe and I talked about on Friday. Threadless asks people to submit t-shirt designs online, [...]
And that’s interesting because he’s the one who coined the word crowdsourcing in the first place. In Wired magazine two years ago, he described how companies are harnessing big groups of people, like customers or the broader Internet-using public, to come up with marketing campaigns, solve tough R&D problems, even gin up ideas for new [...]
When Freddie Mac said that it would no longer buy subprime loans from New York because of a new homeowner-protection law there, I put in a call to Richard Neiman, superintendent of the New York State Banking Department. I thought to call him because just the week before we’d been talking about all the good [...]
Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at investment manager T. Rowe Price, stopped by and shared a cool chart showing how much more money you get in retirement if you keep working for even just a few more years. It wasn’t the first time she’s had this conversation, but I still thought it was interesting—perhaps [...]
UBS, which is among the banks most battered by the credit crunch, said today that it would separate its flailing investment bank from its lucrative business of managing money for rich people, and, adding in its asset management arm, now exist as three autonomous divisions. Writing down more than $42 billion in assets over the [...]
