Eubie's notes

NY Times: Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles’ Foe, It’s Fuel — The notion that lactic acid was bad took hold more than a century ago, but more recent research suggests that it is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product.

NY Times: Honda to Drop a Hybrid and Eventually Offer a New One — Honda is dropping the Insight, a quirky two-seater that gets an estimated 66 miles a gallon, and is preparing to introduce a new hybrid in 2009.

NY Times: The Nitpicking Nation — Craigslist provides a view of what Americans look for. The operative word is “no”: for starters, no pets and no smoking.

NY Times: States Struggle to Computerize School Records — Efforts to collect attendance logs, test scores and other data have cost more or taken longer than expected.

Forbes: 15 Ways to Live Longer

CNN: ‘Green roofs’ growing more popular — Green roofs, first championed in Germany, have grown in popularity around the world, and experts predict more growth as the practice sprouts as far away as China. In North America, green roof space grew 70 percent last year.

NY Times: Living: Golfing and Gardening (and Working) in Retirement — Takeaway: A 2002 AARP study showed that 71 percent of workers age 45 to 56 plan to work into their retirement years. Thirty-five percent of that group planned to work part time for interest or enjoyment, 11 percent expected to start their own businesses, 7 percent planned to retire from their current jobs, but work full time at something else, and 18 percent planned to work part time mainly for the income.

NY Times: Times Are Tough for News Media, but Journalism Schools Are Still Booming — Demand for seats in the nation’s journalism schools and programs remains robust, and these schools and programs are expanding.

NY Times: At an Industry Media Lab, Close Views of Multitasking — In a sleek Los Angeles lab, advertisers and media companies are researching Americans’ propensity for “concurrent media usage.”

NY Times: Drilling Down: The Case of the Disappearing Cookies — Advertisers use “cookies” to track Web users, but concerns about privacy are causing more and more users to delete these tiny files.

Reuters: Da Vinci Code’s last secret: how did it succeed? — (H)is was a formula that mixed clumsy, forgettable sentences with breakneck pacing, lectures on art, history and religion, sinister conspiracies, evil villains, puzzles and cliffhanger chapter endings to produce literary gold.

Here’s mine. I was surprised to see the Yankee and Upper Midwesterns

Your Linguistic Profile

• 55% General American English
• 25% Dixie
• 10% Yankee
• 5% Upper Midwestern
• 0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

A beginner’s guide to eBay: Confessions from an eBay store worker – Part 1 — Lifehacker.com

Google Trends. Also NY Times: Google Shows New Services in Battle of Search Engines also about Google Co-op.

Box of Chocolates: Ten Smart Moves to Improve your Business — Lifehacker.com

NY Times: Good Times at a Backpackers’ Paradise — Damascus, Va.

NY Times: Whipping Up a Cookbook Empire With Meatloaf Instead of Sizzle — Phyllis Pellman Good’s cookbooks eschew photographs and chic recipes for simple and practical dishes.

NY Times: Freakonomics: A Star Is Made — Where does talent really come from? or practice, practice, practice …

Business 2.0: 5 ways to start a company (without quitting your day job — Lifehacker.com

Paul Graham: Great ideas for startups and The Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn — Lifehacker.com

Lifehacker.com — Getting To Done: Don’t be an employee

Raible Designs: Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work — Lifehacker.com

Christian Science Monitor: How $3 gas could push US drivers to shift — But consumption habits would only change if prices stay high, economists say.

WashingtonPost.com: Sites Let Amateurs Be Published Authors Without the Book Deal

NY Times: Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming — A study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer.

NY Times: Gas Guzzlers Find Price of Forgiveness — Groups on the Internet offer pain-free ways to assuage their guilt while promoting clean energy.

Federal Trade Commission: “Gas-Saving” Products: Fact or Fuelishness?.

Macworld: New life for old photos — How to rescue, restore, and reuse aging prints and negatives

NY Times: For Science’s Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap
— Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system.

Washingon Post: New Digital Books Offer Better Readability — Step onto a Metro train any given morning and it’s easy to find people feeding their appetites for information. Commuters regularly have their faces buried in newspapers, magazines, novels — and sometimes even Web-enabled cellphones — during the ride to and from work.

Wired News: Teeny Reactor Pumps Out Biodiesel

MSN Money: The ultimate tax shelter: Owning your own business

Yahoo! News — Top 10 Windows XP Tips Of All Time. Also Elder Geek’s Services Guide For Windows XP.

Washington Post — Doors Close for Real Estate Speculators: After Pushing Up Prices, Investors Are Left Holding Too Many Homes

Wikihow: How to Exercise Your Eyes, How to Exercise While Sitting at Your Computer and How to Exercise While Watching TV

Duct Tape Marketing: Take an SEO refresher course — Here’s my advice: Bookmark these sites, visit them, read the books the site authors have written and recommended and then make sure you take a refresher course every 6 months or so.

SearchEngineWatch: My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines by Danny Sullivan, who created Search Engine Watch. Includes recap of his significant articles and this summary:

The biggest overall theme in doing the recap is how that big old wheel keeps spinning around and around, with people often buying hype because they don’t remember things have come before — or marketers making errors because they don’t understand issues that were explored already in the past.

Christian Science Monitor: Download a tour, then tour downtown — Many young people are replacing traditional city and museum tours with downloadable ‘podcast walks.’

USA Today: CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character

Washington Post: Tithing Rewards Both Spiritual and Financial — LaVonne and Bernard Snowden have three children in private school, two flourishing careers and an elegant house in Mitchellville. As thanks for those blessings, the Snowdens say, they give 10 percent of everything they make to their church.

NY Times: Small Business: More Women Are Enjoying Being Their Own Bosses — Women are the fastest-growing demographic of entrepreneurs and more often than not they are going it alone.

Lifehacker: Freeware Heaven — “I Want A Freeware Utility To…” If you’ve ever spent more than five minutes searching for some good freeware, than have I got a site for you. eConsultant has a giant list of more freeware programs than you can shake a stick at, and did I mention they’re all free? Freeware? Yep – and they’re all “extremely useful free utilities that do specific jobs really well and save time and money.”

Lifehacker: Useful XP command line tools

Lifehacker: EveryStockPhoto free stock photography — Newly-launched web site EveryStockPhoto looks like a promising source of stock images for use in your blog, web site or presentation. EveryStockPhoto doesn’t host images – it aggregates them from other sites.

NY Times: This Boring Headline Is Written for Google — Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

NY Times: The DNA Age: Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests — Ethnic ancestry tests are spurring a thorough exploration of the question, What is in it for me?

Washington Post: Productivity Tip No. 1: Check Out the Blogs — For procrastinators and the easily distracted, Web logs can be best friends, indulging short attention spans with jolts of gossip, commentary and newsy tidbits. But a number of Web logs, or blogs, have emerged over the past year that offer a way out of a life of perpetually unfinished to-do lists.

NY Times: As Magazine Readers Increasingly Turn to the Web, So Does Condé Nast

NY Times: Spending: Low-Cost Workouts for Young Minds
— Like many activities for children, chess brings an associated cost, but it can be significantly lower than that of other popular pastimes.

Christian Science Monitor: How to beat the Midas curse — Nine out of 10 affluent families will lose their wealth by the end of the third generation. So how can families hang on to their money?

Washington Post: Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers — It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer: The sites will help consumers obtain more accurate real estate sales information and automate the bidding process for houses online.

Really?: The Claim: Baby Deliveries Are in Sync With the Moon: Many ancient cultures looked upon the moon as a sign of fertility.

What’s Online: Eyeballs Are Back, or Maybe Not: An article in Business 2.0 titled “The Return of Monetized Eyeballs” could send shivers down the spine of anyone who suffered through the Internet bubble’s half-decade of buzzwords.

NY Times: Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis

Software: Privacy for People Who Don’t Show Their Navels: More and more consumers are looking for ways to remain anonymous online and to foil hackers.

It May Look Authentic; Here’s How to Tell It Isn’t: Photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science. One journal is showing the way in a new offensive against fraud.

Digital Domain: How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web: Without intending to do so, Google set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only.

Basics: Deleted but Not Gone Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.

Timid Mice Made Daring by Removing One Gene: Scientists working with mice have found that by removing a single gene they can turn normally cautious animals into daring ones.

Short Cuts: Demystifying the eBay Selling Experience: Daylong seminars, held in different locations around the country, introduce people to “Selling Basics” or “Beyond the Basics” in eBay speak.

Your Money: Buying Used Just Could Turn Out to Be the Next New Thing: There are robust marketplaces for used products, which are just as good and significantly cheaper.

A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank: A joke ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia suffering a blow to its credibility.

The End of Pensions: Corporations were happy to offer rich retirement plans to their workers as long as accounting tricks and federal insurance made it easy to delay the day of reckoning. But now the game is up.

‘Blink’ Meets ‘Freakonomics’: The blog of the hot new book “Freakonomics,” which applies economic analysis to a range of human activity, picks up where the book leaves off.

Personal Data for the Taking: Students have proven that all it takes to obtain reams of personal data is Internet access, a few dollars and some spare time.

NY Times: As the job market tightens many owners of very small businesses find they cannot compete with the salaries and perks offered by larger companies.