First rule of being a university dean; you don't use grad students as slaves.    Instead, you wait until they get a Ph.D. and then pay them slave wages and call them post-doctoral fellows.  

Sheesh, everyone knows this, but St. John's University former dean Cecilia Chang was in charge of East Asian Studies so she knows more about Asians, namely that she could bully them into doing her laundry and whatever other menial jobs she had in mind and culturally they were going to have to take it.   Ahhhh, it's good to be in the humanities because you can show people your culture by exploiting them just like you would back home.

Rahm Emanuel, the Karl Rove of Democrats - though Democrats defend him as being aggressive, tenacious, etc. whereas the Republican Rove was evil incarnate for acting the exact same way - finally revealed the worse kept secret in America; he is leaving the Obama administration, presumably to run for mayor of Chicago, the city that helped steal the election of 1960 from Richard Nixon.

When Congress and the White House were insisting their government health care plan would be cheaper, they were the only ones who believed it.

Now it will be much more expensive - for employees.   Trade groups for restaurants and retailers say their employers might halt coverage if the government doesn't loosen the requirement for "mini-med" plans, which offer limited benefits to some 1.4 million Americans.   That means McDonald's, which has pretty good health benefits for low income earners, could be priced out of a good plan, forcing those people into government health care.

As in science, if the government wants to pay for it, private sector corporations will avoid the government paperwork and hassle and let them.   But it won't be cheap.

Chefs from 12 nations had been expected at a Chinese cooking competition that is to begin on Thursday in Duffy Square in Manhattan. But the Chinese-language television network, New Tang Dynasty Television, an independent network with its headquarters in New York, sponsoring the contest now says that only 11 nations will be represented — including France, Germany and Britain — because one country did not permit its chefs to leave for New York.

That country was China.

AOL announced plans to buy technology blog TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount.  AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington made the announcement onstage Tuesday at TechCrunch's Disrupt .  

Arrington and Armstrong signed the acquisition agreement in front of the audience.

Men, if you didn't already hate Chris Evans for his incredible physique and spot-on performance as the Human Torch in "Fantastic Four", see how he looks in "Captain America", which requires him to be a little bigger.

Well, he is bigger, but still looks limber enough to mix it up the way Captain America does.  

Is it a big role?  Sure.  "Thor" can be a flop and it won't impact "The Avengers" movie, just like "Hulk", but without a good Cap, there is little chance "Avengers" can work.

You've heard that classic public relations person rationalization that all publicity is good publicity.  I don't think so.   UN peacekeepers from Denmark trading food to kids for sex didn't do wonders for the credibility of peacekeeping operations by the European military, for example, and the owner of the Segway company driving one off a cliff won't do much for lifting restrictions that keep them off of sidewalks and bike lanes.   And instead on the private estates of kooks.

You didn't know this, but Science 2.0 as originally planned was going to be three people and almost was - a programmer, a graphics person and then a business guy.     But it didn't work out that way, for reasons that may seem obvious;  namely that 90% of people claim they would have joined Google for free when it had no revenue and 30 venture capitalists told them search engines were a dead area.    Yet 98% of those people wouldn't - they think they want to work in 'start ups' but they think that means making more than they make now and having no boss.   I live in an Intel town and the list of people I have met who claim they want to work at a company or start one is long.  They're mostly lying to themselves.

What if you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider?  It isn't the craziest question in the world, since birds are dropping bread in various parts and breaking things.   But the University of Nottingham, and their Sixty Symbols project, is on the case.  Sort of.  Turns out that even for LHC experts, the effects on human skin of 300,000,000,000,000 protons moving near the speed of light is unclear.