Why are vinyl record sales up?
In the era when it seems like all of our music has gone digital, an interesting trend has been reported by Amazon: sales of vinyl records are up 745% since 2008.
Continue reading… “Amazon reports vinyl record sales are up 745% since 2008”
Digital music revenues grew 23.6% year-on-year.
For the first time the amount of money made from digital music services has outstripped the sale of traditional CDs and records, according to first quarter revenue figures from music industry trade body BPI.
Continue reading… “Digital music spending accounts for 55.5% of total music sales”
The red indicates weather stations where U.S. Daily Highest Min Temperature Records were set on July 21, 2011
The 21st of July, it was hotter than hell across much of the Eastern US. Nights, which tend to have the daily minimum, were especially unpleasant. Out of 5,569 daily minimums recorded on the 21st, 188 broke previous records and another 138 tied them (exceeding or equaling, respectively, the previous record for daily minimum temperature)…
Continue reading… “From hot nights To dusty days – broken weather records are the new normal”
The web never forgets.
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
The most comprehensive and technologically advanced survey of China’s Great Wall has discovered the ancient monument is much longer than previously estimated, state media reported.
Continue reading… “Great Wall of China Much Longer Than Previously Thought”
Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
Continue reading… “Filmmaker Plans To Install Camera In His Eye Socket”
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
Continue reading… “Scientific Blunder Raises Question About Alarm Over Global Warming”
I think I can, I think I can. Believe. You can fly if you just believe. I won’t die if you just believe.
Continue reading… “Until Age 8 Children’s Beliefs Have No Connection To Their Behavior”
It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.
Continue reading… “Insight Into Global Warming Through Weather History”
Around the time that the swimwear company Speedo was calling on NASA scientists to help create the now famous LZR Racer suit–an enhanced skin that many people credit for more than a dozen world records broken by swimmers so far this week in Beijing–a scientist in New York began working on a different tool for the swimmer’s armory.
Continue reading… “High Speed Tracking Techniques Help U.S. Swim Team”
The Washington Post reports on the booming business of selling your medical treatment records. Today these are mainly records of your prescriptions, but the data warehouses will soon have records of your lab tests, too. The companies selling these records make it easy for insurance companies to avoid risk by assigning each person a health score, similar to a credit score, or by flagging items in each person’s history that suggest chronic or potentially expensive health problems. It’s not just for insurers, either; employers who check applicants’ credit scores will surely be interested in their health scores as well.
Continue reading… “Your Medical Treatment History May Be For Sale”
The much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.
In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.
Continue reading… “Our Growing Fear of DNA Testing”
