10 things to learn on June 8th

10 things to learn from the almighty WWW today:

Op-Ed Columnist – Rising Above I.Q. – NYTimes.com


Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.

As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.

10 Answers You Should Know Before Your Job Interview – Dumb Little Man


With the competition keener than ever and the economy in a slump, you need to prepare for your job interview thoroughly. It’s no longer enough to offer a firm handshake to your interviewer, make eye contact, and nod pleasantly now and then. You need to prepare a dynamic application letter and resume. You need to research the company. And you need to present a confident image and develop the ability to answer tough questions on the spot.

Although no one can predict the questions your potential employer will ask, you can think about how you’d answer some of the commonly asked ones. Here are ten questions for you to consider and a few hints about how to answer them:

Lifehacker – Five Best Alternative File Copiers – File Management


If you do any serious file copying on a Windows system, you'll quickly discover that there are substantial limitations to the default file copier. Ease your file copying frustrations with these five alternative copiers.

Copying a few documents from your hard drive to your flash drive doesn't stress out the default copier too much. If you're dumping gigabytes of data from one drive to another, however, you'll quickly find that the default copier is sluggish and unreliable. The pinnacle of frustration: When Microsoft's default copier putters out while you're transferring tons of files and you're left with no indication what was copied and what wasn't, leaving you to pick through the file lists on each end or starting from scratch to ensure a clean copy. The five excellent alternatives below all succeed at

PR 2.0: Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform?


In January 2009 I pondered whether or not Twitter was a viable conversation platform. After all, Twitter is one of the darlings of Social Media and it is conversations and the democratization of content that fuel the rapid expansion and adoption of social tools and services.

Just ask any social media "expert" and they'll tell you that you must absolutely establish a Twitter account and commence the process of responding to everyone who Tweets about your company, market, or competition. But the more I observe interaction on social networks, and in the this case Twitter, I believe that sometimes it's effective to also maintain a presence simply by reading, listening, and sharing relevant and timely information without yet having to directly respond to each and every tweet – perhaps replying to only the critical or influential individuals that may need immediate information or direction to steer strategic activity.

The 7 Biggest Food Product Flops at WomansDay.com


Thousands of new food products are introduced to American grocery shoppers every year, which makes us wonder: Which items are so wild that they’ve been removed from shelves permanently? We examined some of the biggest food flops over the last 40+ years. Some of the items lasted only a few weeks, while others were available for a few years, but they all have one thing in common: We guarantee you can’t find these items at a grocery store near you.

The 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic


LONDON – Revolution teamed up with i-level's social media agency Jam to reveal the 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter and how they are aiming to capitalise on the buzz.

Sara Ziff talks to Louise France about the world of teen modelling | Life and style | The Observer


A beautiful woman sits in front of a video camera. Her name is Sena Cech and she is a fashion model. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as though what she's about to describe is commonplace in the industry in which she works. The scene: a casting with a photographer, one of the top names in his profession. Halfway through the meeting Cech is asked to strip. She does as instructed and takes off her clothes. Then the photographer starts undressing as well. "Baby – can you do something a little sexy," he tells her. The photographer's assistant, who is watching, eggs her on. What's supposed to be the casting for a high-end fashion shoot turns into something more like an audition for a top-shelf magazine. The famous photographer demands to be touched sexually. "Sena – can you grab his cock and twist it real hard," his assistant tells her. "He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it."

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live – TIME


The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart, By Barry C. Lynn (Harper's Magazine)


There is an undeniable beauty to laissez-faire theory, with its promise that by struggling against one another, by grasping and elbowing and shouting and shoving, we create efficiency and satisfaction and progress for all. This concept has shaped, at the most fundamental levels, how we understand and engineer our basic freedoms—economic, political, and moral. Until recently, however, most politicians and economists accepted that freedom within the marketplace had to be limited, at least to some degree, by rules designed to ensure general economic and social outcomes.

From Adam Smith onward, almost all the great preachers of laissez-faire were tempered by a strain of deep realism. Most accepted that a national economy ultimately served a nation that had to survive in an often brutal world.

The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. – BusinessWeek


"We live in an era of rapid innovation." I'm sure you've heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google (GOOG), Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

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