Several months ago, Sharon Begley of Newsweek magazine wrote a quick article describing the inaccurate predictions and comments of online and cable political pundits. Begley discusses the reason why so many "experts" are wrong so often and cites research by Phillip Tetlock of Standford University. Being "right" has everything to do with whether the expert is a hedgehog or a fox.

As a self-employed person running a business out of my home, I've
been looking for a way to get faxes at any time without adding the
expense of another phone line.

British banks are talking more and more about introducing charges for basic accounts, even where the account holder is in credit. They justify this on two grounds: first, that Britain is practically unique in having any form of free banking; and second, that they have to do this to pay for the cost of running the banks. I'd like to point out a few other facts.

A new study concludes that elevated levels of phosphorus are necessary for adequate growth of some types of cancers. This rise in phosphorus, the team hypothesizes, is due to heightened requirements of protein synthesis needed during accelerated cell growth.

An organization that arbitrated credit-card disputes has decided to get out of the consumer business after being sued last week by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson. The Minneapolis-based National Arbitration Forum (NAF), in an announcement made yesterday, has reached a settlement where it will stop consumer-credit arbitrations by the end of this week. This is a major national story, but you probably haven't read about it in your local newspaper.

The Citigroup pricing anomaly may be in its final days. Investors must submit their offers to exchange preferred shares for common shares by this Friday (which may require contacting your broker several days earlier). The common shares will then be delivered to investors on July 30. The pricing gap between the common and preferred shares remains large (about 10% at the close on Monday), but has narrowed as the exchange date has drawn near.

SUSE Studio, now in beta, allows you to build custom versions of our Linux distribution via a slick and easy web interface. This is good for nerds who want to impress their girlfriends* with portable versions of SLES on a USB stick. It's better for ISVs (independent software vendors) who want to create appliance versions of their applications.

On Saturday, an ocean away, the world lost a man whom you probably had never hear of until this moment. His name was Henry Allingham, a World War I and World War II veteran, who passed in his sleep at the age of 113. After living through 12 decades on this earth, his life story is unmatched. It is amazing to read that he could have left us during an attack in the trenches of the Great War, nearly a century ago.

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (affectionately known as SIGTARP), is making headlines with his estimate that the government has provided "potential support totaling more than $23.7 trillion" in fighting the financial crisis. That estimate will be officially released on Tuesday morning in the SIGTARP's latest quarterly report.

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War". It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa's grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation's "great mission" were dispensed. These included tributes to the "exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives" in Vietnam, where they were "determined to stop communist expansion". In Iraq, other true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision". What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.

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