Author Archives: shaun

Uncategorized

shared content

It used to be more common for a husband to have more education than his wife in America. But now, for the first time since Pew Research has tracked this trend over the past 50 years, the share of couples in which the wife is the one “marrying down” educationally is higher than those in which the husband has more education.

Among married women in 2012, 21% had spouses who were less educated than they were—a threefold increase from 1960, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.

The share of couples where the husband’s education exceeds his wife’s increased steadily from 1960 to 1990, but has fallen since then to 20% in 2012.

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

“

“If you want Google search, they’re going to shove Google Plus at you pretty hard, so the consumer’s forced to take the product they don’t want to get the product they want,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.

“That raises big questions under antitrust law,” he said. “It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their operating system.”

”

– http://ift.tt/1cIxDKD

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

“

Generally speaking, antitrust regulators are most worried about mergers that create monopolies that can raise the prices of goods and services when customers have few or no other choices. But officials should be just as concerned about deals that turn a business into a dominant buyer that can make or break its suppliers.

An all-powerful cable company, for example, would be able to influence and control what Americans could watch or read by refusing to carry channels or certain Internet services, or it could favor its own content. Comcast, for example, might find it tempting to treat programming from NBC Universal, which it owns, better than shows from rival networks and movie studios.

Officials at the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and the F.C.C., who have spoken recently about the importance of competition in the increasingly concentrated communications industry, need to study this deal closely. If they find that the merger would give Comcast too much power, the agencies can demand that the company make significant divestments (Comcast has offered to divest three million customers to get regulators to look upon the deal favorably) or they could sue to block the acquisition altogether.

”

– http://ift.tt/1dtqr9m

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

The U.S. cable-TV business, much like telephone and radio, has been consolidating from dozens of regional players to a handful of giants. Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable would unite the nation’s two biggest cable operators, giving Comcast roughly a third of the nation’s cable-TV subscribers. Below is a chart of major acquisitions (both partial and whole) by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter and Cox since the early ’90s.

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

“

In our multidevice world, Amazon’s media store functions as what I like to call a “connector” — it bridges the chasm between otherwise foreign technologies.

This gets to the most important principle for dealing with an uncertain future: Invest your time and money in connectors. For instance, store all your important documents on the cloud-storage service Dropbox, because its business model depends on it working everywhere. And it does: The documents you create on any single machine are replicated on all your other machines, instantly. Similarly, when someone hands you a business card, you can snap a photo of it on the note-taking app Evernote, which also functions as a connector, letting you get at your scribbles regardless of which machine you move to next.

”

– http://ift.tt/1mdy8WN

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

“

Paradoxically, however, as state governments increasingly make “medical” marijuana available to parents to give to their children, the federal government continues to label the nonpsychoactive CBD — as well as THC — as Schedule 1 drugs. Such drugs are said to have “no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.” This designation hamstrings doctors from performing controlled studies. While it is possible to study Schedule 1 drugs in a controlled laboratory setting, it is extremely difficult to study these substances in patients. For our study, we keep the CBD in a 1,200-pound safe in a locked room, in a building with an alarm system.

To foster research, we need to change compounds derived from marijuana from Schedule 1 to a less restrictive category. It is troubling that while few barriers exist for parents to give their children marijuana in Colorado, there are significant federal roadblocks preventing doctors from studying it in a rigorous scientific manner.

”

– http://ift.tt/1mdy8Gg

Standard
Uncategorized

shared content

The Pew report found that the wage premium for having a college degree was at a record high. The median annual wage for young college-educated workers now is $45,500, compared to $28,000 for high school graduates — a gap of $17,500. In 1965, the gap was much smaller: $7,400. (All the figures are in 2012 dollars.)

Standard