Eubie's notes

Boston.com: interesting story about editor who publishes old articles from famous authors that are now in the public domain.

Fortune Small Business The scant research that exists suggests that, as risky as starting an independent business is, buying a franchise is an even bigger roll of the dice. In the early ’90s Timothy Bates, a professor at Wayne State University, studied Census Bureau data on 20,000 new enterprises and found that 38% of franchise units failed over a four-year period, vs. 32% of independent startups.

If being an entrepreneur sounds appealing, try the tests at WSJ’s StartupJournal.

NY Times: An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as an epidemic.

Derek Rose: sago mine disaster/ media flubbub:

Looking back, I think we all did get caught up in the euphoria of the celebration, as Alexa told me. Perhaps we just put aside our natural skepticism for a bit.

But put aside journalism for a second … what kind of human beings would we be if we didn’t get overjoyed about the rescue of a dozen miners?

NY Times: The plan was for Spirit and Opportunity to explore for 90 Martian days, but the rovers have spent hundreds of days on the Red Planet.

Scientists thought the rovers’ solar panel would become covered in dust and become ineffective, but occasional mini-tornadoes on the surface clean the panels.

NY Times: Google Earth, software that marries satellite images and mapping capabilities, has caused alarm over its display of sensitive sites.

Media Photoshop Retouching. We wanted to show how easy it is to change someone’s appearance in this campaign. Interesting presentation of how photos are retouched to define beauty. Link from boingboing. Here’s a link to another piece on boingboing: Photograph retouching expert’s gallery about photo retoucher Glenn Feron.

Online Journalism Review: ‘Why do I love online publishing?’. Includes comments from the editor in chiefs of NY Times, Cleveland.com, Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org and others.

Interesting transcript with Robin Miller, author of “Point and Click: OpenOffice.org.” On the same day, another Washington Post transcript was with Tony Bove, author of “Just Say No to Microsoft How to Ditch Microsoft and Why It’s Not as Hard as You Think.”

Om Malik on Broadband: After years of being stuck in the slow lane, the US consumers are finally going to get a massive speed upgrade and taste the true broadband for the first time. From a 512 Kbps world to 6 Mbps, then 8 and soon 15 Mbps…. it seems the future has finally arrived. And with that, the question…. how much speed is enough? Can we the consumers really tell the difference between 15 and 30 Mbps? Or is it just a way for the broadband operators to get us to pay more… for something which we might use less.