A couple of months ago I posted some short videos I had taken of several London buskers. I continue to be fascinated and entertained by such performers, and I thought I would share a few more short videos I've taken of these street entertainers. Some bagpipe playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFpuo7v5Mxo A guitar player at midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RB1GiMVrZ8 Some … Continue reading More Buskers from London →

Today was a big day for many high school students around the country as they sat for the SAT exam. The results of the exam often play a significant, perhaps oversized role, in deciding what college a student attends. Standardized tests have come under a lot of fire in recent years, and come colleges have … Continue reading Dispelling Some Myths about the SAT and ACT – Taken with a Grain of Salt →

Shareholders at Disney voted down a nonbinding endorsement of the compensation given to Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Iger following an increase in December. About 52% of votes cast at the company’s annual meeting expressed displeasure with Mr. Iger’s new pay package. And how big was that pay package? Iger's new deal—tied to performance targets and … Continue reading What’s the Big Deal? It’s Only $100 Million… →

Joanna Stern had a fascinating, and helpful, article in today's Wall Street Journal. The article took a look at how much Facebook knows about you, and can then use that knowledge to push targeted ads to you on while you are online. One story she told was particularly intriguing. Most of us have experienced the … Continue reading Facebook Knows What You’re Doing, Even Offline →

As we are getting near the end of our time in London, we are trying to make sure we get in as many experiences as we can, and today was no exception. After waiting for the weather to clear up, our day started by taking a walk across the Golden Jubilee Bridge, heading towards Covent … Continue reading A Proper British Day →

Today's high school students are faced with a tough choice - to spend upwards of $250,000 to attend a four-year college, or choose another route, such as go to a trade/technical school for significantly less time and money, join the military, or start working. The traditional wisdom for the past few decades has been that … Continue reading To Go or Not to Go, That Is the Question →

Fascinating is the only word to describe this type of research and what it is finding. Computational biologist Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues have used crowdsourced data (from an online genealogy tool, Geni.com) to make a family tree that links 13 million people. The ancestry chart, described in Science, … Continue reading Data Shows That Environment>Genetics and That the World Is Shrinking →

One of the things I've become quite jealous of while in Europe, and particularly London, is the use of contactless cards by other people. Contactless cards are simply credit/debit cards that a shopper just taps on the contactless card reader at the checkout, and Bam! they are ready to go. The technology works in hundreds … Continue reading Hey, U.S.A., Let’s Get with the Contactless Card →

I'm hoping that those who know me would recognize that the question raised in the title to this post is one that would never even enter my mind. But it was the title of an article in today's Wall Street Journal. The article offered opposing points of view on the question (you can guess which … Continue reading Should I Splurge on $40 Hand Wash to Impress Guests? →

We'd been watching the forecasts closely all week. We had bought train tickets to travel from London to Paris this weekend, and because of some crazy weather, Eurostar was canceling some of its scheduled trains. As of yesterday, three of its trains traveling from London to Paris were cancelled for today, Friday, our planned day … Continue reading Going with the Flow Has Its Rewards, Literally →