If 18 large organizations installed, customized and rolled out new complicated software systems, how many rollouts would be relatively glitch free? Ask any experienced information technology (IT) consultant and they’ll likely answer, “About 50%,” without blinking an eye. That’s based…

We got another reminder of the failure of much privatization of government functions in a Wall Street Journal article detailing the woes that the state of Idaho has had since it privatized its state prisons in 2000. The current vendor…

A rhetorical device is a technique that a writer or speaker uses to create a literary effect, often without regard for the literal significance of the words. For example, a simile is when the writer makes a comparison, “He dances…

Page A9 of today’s New York Times is entirely blank. So is page A10, with the exception of a cryptic website address at the bottom of the page: wordsarelife.com. What could “words are life” mean? And where will the URL…

The luxury apartment building at 740 Park Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side is so famous that it even has a book dedicated to its history. Now lots of churches and castles have volumes describing their history and residents,…

It doesn’t surprise me that somebody figured out how to prove that public schools outperform private schools. And it doesn’t surprise me that this seminal study is being ignored by the mainstream news media. As of one day after Atlantic…

Perhaps the best characterization of the U.S. political scene since the turn of the 21st century is to say that we have been ruled primarily by an incompetent minority. Let’s face it. The victory this week over the economic know-nothing…

Your Big Mac and Baconator aren’t as cheap as you think they are. In fact, every time you bite into a burger or other fast food concoction, the federal government subsidizes your meal—and the profit made by the fast food…

If even just half of what Lisa-ann Gershwin reports in Stung! is true, then many younger readers may be telling their grandchildren stories about the long ago days when humans caught ocean fish and ate them. Stung! gives the depressing…

Congratulations to Karl Rove for joining the “reality based community,” which comprises you and me and other lesser mortals who look to empirical reality when analyzing and acting in the world. Remember it was Rove who, when referring to the…