Labor force participation rate

A particularly striking graph showing the change in our country in the past fifty years is the percentage of males and females who are employed: There really is room to grow the economy a lot if we can just find work for that twenty percent of men who stopped working.

Unemployment by major.

I found an interesting page giving unemployment rate by major. Some are surprising, but for the most part it is what you would expect.

Rental Market

I have been looking for a new apartment. It really is striking how different things are than they were two years ago when I got my last one. At that time the apartments clearly were having to try hard to stay afloat. Now they all seem nearly filled up. Many large buildings we stopped at were in fact completely full.

This should drive construction soon. While few people want to buy a home these days they clearly still have interest in apartments. The slow climb out of our recession is underway.

Stray Voltage

While this isn't exactly what I work on, this article is about one of the problems which can develop when substation grounding goes wrong. Rarely do I find it makes the news.

Prison costs

I have known for quite some time that the war on drugs has been killing education. It is just too expensive to lock people in cages. In California prison guards make similar salaries to professors. I doubt prisons cost less than colleges to construct and unlike college time in prison makes it almost impossible for people to find jobs. So the long term economic damage is greater than the cost of locking prisoners away.

This article has some great statistics on this subject. For example, California spends seven times as much per year locking up someone than it would spend putting that same person through college.

I fixed Forbes!

On October 2nd after many months of being really annoyed with forbes.com's mobile version I sent them the following letter under the title "please fix your mobile site"

Your mobile site is completely inadequate and needs a major revamp. Please fix the following bugs:

It is impossible to send someone a link to a story on the mobile site. If you copy the url at the top of the page it sends the reciepient to the main forbes mobile page.

The back button does not work. On every other website in the world I hit the same button on my iphone to go back. On your site I must scroll to the top and hit your special button. This is annoying, let me use the normal back button.

Often I can only read the first page of an article. Then at the bottom there are words for pages 2,3, and so on. However these are just words, not hyperlinks. So there is no way to get to page 2.

There is no way to read user comments nor add my own comments on the mobile site. This feature needs added.

I am automatically redirected to the mobile site and there is no way to return to the full site. If you had a decent mobile site I would not need this feature, but the fact of the matter is the full site is less buggy than the mobile site. Let me access it without having to resort to a google cache!

Then today I went to forbes.com and for the first time in at least a year wasn't redirected to the mobile site! Coincidence? Maybe. As I made quite clear their mobile site was among the worst in the industry, someone else must have noticed. Still, I prefer to think my letter saved Forbes.

Kelvin Water Dropper video

It was easier to upload a video of my Kelvin Water Dropper than it was to get a picture on here. I haven't watched the videos off of by phone so I am unsure if formatting worked.

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Another Video