U.S. Kids Bad at Geography. Really Bad.

MSNBC ran an AP story today about a recent Roper poll commissioned by National Geographic. Among 510 respondents, aged 18 to 24, 60% couldn’t find Iraq on a map.

Other major findings:

• One-third of respondents couldn’t pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
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The Internet Remote Control

The Center for the Digital Future has some interesting statistics about Internet usage in their recent five year report:

• 78.6 percent of Americans use the Internet and

• Nearly two thirds of Americans are connected at home (more have it at work)

More interesting to me is that Internet users are going online without a specific task or destination in mind....

Yahoo Mail Beta

I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account the other day and was presented with the option to test their new interface. Overall, Yahoo! Mail Beta is pleasant to use and feels like a regular desktop client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. You can read RSS feeds alongside your mail and have the option of forwarding stories to your friends....

Consumerist Empowers Shoppers

Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away”...

Our Hubris, Our Loss

Some of my colleagues and friends have called me ‘paranoid,’ ‘crazy,’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ but I continue to stick to my guns on the issue of America’s intellectual decay. Our economic and cultural dominance has always stemmed from our ability to attract and retain the best-of-the-best intellectuals from around the globe,...