Brian Gongol
The East Coast snowstorm fails to impress Midwesterners
Today is self-exam day
Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.
42" water main breaks in Baltimore and leaves a bunch of damage behind
Des Moines named "best city for business" in 2009
And neighboring Omaha takes third place. Any ranking of this type should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but once in a while it's nice to get some good publicity. Neither city is out to set the fashion world on fire, but both are pretty good places for people who like to see the important things get done consistently and right.
Sticker price for a Metrodome replacement: $870 million
It's a huge amount of money to replace a facility that only lasted about three decades.
NOAA touts improvements in tsunami warnings since 2004
The five-year anniversary of the catastrophic south Asian tsunami is almost here, so it's a top-of-mind matter
Church takes billboard advertising to a whole different level
House of Representatives increases Federal debt limit by $290 billion
Really? $290 billion? Isn't anyone even the least bit outraged anymore? That's about the size of the Department of Defense budget back in 2001. This kind of borrowing cannot go on forever. They're pouring money into $174 billion packages for "job creation" without acknowledging that the spending has to come back around and pay off to the tune of $300 billion in tax payments sooner or later, just to pay down the debt it creates.
McDonald's will start offering free WiFi access at 11,000 of its US locations next year
That's out of a total of about 13,000 restaurants. It will make for a huge network of free hotspots around the country, and the company is probably just hoping that it'll pay for itself in sales of coffee and McRibs. They're probably right; the power of reciprocity is pretty enormous.
How can AT&T screw up a smash hit?
"Fake Steve Jobs" fakes a talk with the boss at AT&T -- in which he rightly tears into the cell-phone provider for looking at the resonant success of the iPhone as though it's a problem, rather than a grand slam. As Fake Steve points out, it's this kind of stupid thinking that's probably ruined a lot of other industries, too.
"Teach a man to fish...feed him for a lifetime"
The Acumen Fund is a rare organization that takes charitable donations and turns them into funds for businesses in poor places that will make life better through jobs and economic growth
Logo Tournament
A website offering a contest-style approach to producing business logos. The buyer posts a prize -- starting at $250 -- and contestants submit their logo ideas. The winner gets the prize money; everyone else goes home. It's an inevitable that this kind of service would emerge in the era of eBay, but it's a mixed bag for the industry: Great for new and emerging designers, or people who might just like to design logos as a hobby. But it's pretty bad news for designers who want their work to be treated like a profession. When everything becomes a contest, then the whole notion of a relationship-based profession is out the window. Then again, there are a lot of people and businesses for whom a contest-based logo would be a hundred times better than the detritus they use today -- and those people would include a lot of political candidates.
Old Radio Shack catalogs
A flashback to the days when people built radios for themselves -- like some people build their own computers today
How China's economic policy upsets the neighbors
As the United States loses some of its capacity to import voraciously from the rest of the world, China reaches a supply glut in some products -- making it difficult for neighboring countries to compete, especially as the Chinese government continues to keep a tight control on the value of its currency. An excellent illustration of how esoteric-sounding matters like currency flotation can decide whether lots of people in developing countries go jobless.
"Google Goggles" combines cell-phone cameras with image search
The tool is supposedly being launched through Google Labs first, for rollout to the rest of the world after a public testing period