Each inmate costs US taxpayers more than $22,000 a year
From the death penalty to “three strikes” laws, Americans love tough responses to crime—but not necessarily smart ones. Nils Christie has a better idea: Stop treating lawbreakers like criminals.
“I don’t like the term crime—it’s such a big, fat, imprecise word,” says the renowned University of Oslo [...]

This SHOULD be a headline in major newspapers, but due to big money manipulations it has not been picked up. Many communities have enacted smoking bans in public places, some of which have been in effect for several years. How is that affecting our overall health? According to an analysis of studies, the bans are significantly [...]

Cash-strapped Europeans are travelling to Britain to go bankrupt – then returning home debt-free. “Bankruptcy tourism” is becoming so popular that a company is now helping insolvent Europeans to travel and live temporarily in the UK.
Lenient laws mean that foreigners can live in Britain, file for bankruptcy and leave with the slate wiped clean after [...]

“We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”
7-Eleven Inc. said Thursday that its franchisees and store operators have collected 1.6 million signatures nationwide in its petition drive against what it calls unfair credit card fees.
The Dallas-based convenience store chain held the signature drive from June 22 through Aug. 10 at store counters [...]

scientists have developed a pair of glasses that receive visual data from a camera mounted on a them and send the images to a chip attatched on the side of the eyeball.

Inspired by the success of cochlear implants that can restore hearing to some deaf people, researchers at MIT are working on a retinal implant [...]

Privacy? What Privacy?

Princeton’s Paul Ohm writes about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to [...]

Hot money going out, even hotter coming back in
In September 2008, China witnessed a massive exodus of hot money due to the global financial crisis. However, with the Chinese economy showing signs of improvement in the second quarter of 2009, the situation reversed with a rush of hot money returning to China.
In late June 2009, [...]

For years the people in congress have ignored the outrageous
practices of banks and credit card companies
A backlash is brewing on Capitol Hill against banks that charge large fees for overdrafts without asking or telling customers, the latest sign that the financial crisis is shifting the balance of power from banks toward borrowers.
Banks struggling to survive [...]

Texting for Economic Improvement?

British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling could take a tip from his counterparts in the Philippines as he searches for money-saving ideas this weekend: a tax on text messages.
The parliament in Manila is planning to implement an excise tax on text messages in a desperate attempt to narrow the country’s budget [...]

Convenience vs Heath

Mobile phones may have become ubiquitous in rural areas of India and popular among farmers. But electromagnetic radiation emanating from them may be stunting the growth of agricultural crops and plants, preliminary research has revealed.
Studies carried out at Panjab University, Chandigarh, suggest that electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation from cell phones could choke seeds, [...]

Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown.
Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information [...]

McWhores

Product placement is to be allowed on British TV shows, in a move due to be announced this week.
Independent broadcasters will be allowed to take payments for displaying commercial products during shows.
The change is intended to bring in extra funds for commercial broadcasters.

Tough figures for this big state!

Out of a job? If you live in the Great State of California, you’re in good company: two out of five working-age Californians do not have a job!
“The current recession stands apart from prior downturns for both the depth and breadth of destruction in the job market,” the report says. [...]

The New “Sinless” Search Engine

Muslims will be able to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering what their relegion views as sinful material after a Dutch company launched the world’s first Islamic search engine.
The ImHalal service works like any other search facility until potentially illicit words are entered, when it rates the search [...]

When Senator Al Franken was confronted by an angry mob of teabagger(BTW-Look up Teabagging)/anti-healthcare-reform types, he calmly, rationally and intelligently talked them down, setting an example for how to conduct reasoned discourse that relies on facts and rationality rather than jingoism. Thanks Al!

A fun day at the beach..hmm I don’t think so.
SAINT-MICHEL-EN-GRÈVE, France — It should have been a perfect day for Vincent Petit, finishing an afternoon gallop on a wide expanse of beach along a pastel-colored bay. Instead, he and his mount were sucked into a hole of noxious black sludge.

Scientists have produced monkeys with genetic material from two mothers, an advance that could help women with some inherited diseases have healthy children but that would raise a host of safety, legal, ethical and social questions if attempted in people.

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…

Philipp Siebourg’s Induction Powered Vehicle (or IPV) isn’t just a concept for a new kind of car, it’s a complete transportation system designed to reduce congestion in big urban centers. Instead of bumper-to-bumper traffic in the heart of the city, Siebourg’s proposal calls for a car-free, magnetized area that is serviced exclusively by [...]

Now thats some pretty explosive gas
Gases trapped below the surface of a lake in eastern Congo could explode any day, threatening the lives of tens of thousands of locals, the country’s environment minister warned on Tuesday.

Gerd Leipold, the current Executive Director of Greenpeace, has just come out on the BBC program Hardtalk and admitted that they had ‘emotionalized’ issues surrounding the melting of the polar ice-caps in a report released on July 15th.

Could you handle this adorable creature as your pet?

Tamarins are considered highly endangered in the wild yet they are an increasingly popular pet amongst those who wish to purchase a NHP (Non-Human Primate).
Do you want to help save the Tamarins? Why not adopt one as a pet? Here’s the pros and cons:

Lack of labor produces a coconut picking dilemma.

India seeks innovative solution to coconut picker shortage A southern Indian state is offering 1m rupees (£12,500) to anyone who can invent a coconut-picking machine. A labour shortage in Kerala has reduced the size of the state’s once-bountiful coconut harvest. The offer of funding from Kerala’s industries department is [...]

2nd biggest unintentional killer in the US
At least in the United States the second biggest unintentional injury killer (leaving aside murders and suicides) is poisons. Deaths caused by car accidents are now down to only 34k per year, not all that much higher than the 23k unintentional poison deaths. Here are what you need to know about [...]

There are many people confused about how the Big Bang Theory works but after reading about how it happened in the middle of nothing even more people are scratching their heads.
If you’re having a hard time visualizing the Big Bang, let astronomy and physics professor Janna Levin show you how it all started. In this [...]

Oh what fun it appears that scientists are attempting to play God again
In what has been described as a step towards the creation of a synthetic cell, scientists have created a new “engineered” strain of bacteria.