Three days ago Jonathan MacDonald witnessed an altercation in the London Underground at the Holborn Station, between -- as Jonathan reports it -- a uniformed Underground staffer an elderly man whose arm had just been released from doors that had closed on it while he was leaving. The staffer was loud and rude, while the passenger was calm and gentlemanly. Jonathan also recorded the last of the event on video " and blogged the event, video and all.

Zeitoun is Dave Eggers' latest about a unique family from New Orleans and their Katrina experience. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant who settles in New Orleans in the mid-80s and builds his own painting and contracting business from the ground up. The book tells the story of how he ends up embroiled in a Kafka-esque nightmare that highlights everything that was wrong with the W. Bush era, and which was so poignantly exposed during the Katrina response.

Veggie Trader (veggietrader.com)envisions becoming a space where folks can share the respective bounty of their yards and gardens, trading with other growers or selling to those without a fertile patch of ground to call their own. It's the ultimate in local, that buzzword du jour, and is even a little subversive in its primarily barter-based economy. I like that"subversion can be at its most effective when it becomes commonplace, everyday. Policy change still needs to happen, but this is something you can do right now, without waiting for the creaky wheels of bureaucracy to turn.

New DNA sequencing technology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has identified several new unique genetic mutations in mesothelioma cancer cells that were previously unidentified. The findings serve as promising evidence that the improved sensitivity and effectiveness of DNA sequencing technology is providing more pertinent and rapid results in relation to cancer gene profiling.

President Obama announced plans to contribute $5 billion in medical research grants that the White House says will cumulatively provide "cutting-edge medical research in every state across America." The funds will be provided via Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus plan, and will largely be used to aid research into cancer, heart disease and autism. The president made the announcement while visiting the National institutes for Health on September 30.

Back in September, I posted a note about attacks on the two-factor authentication systems used by some online banking sites. One of my recommendations has always been to use a dedicated, carefully configured PC for this function; a PC that is not used for general Web browsing, iTunes, Facebook, and everything else under the sun. I've also suggested that using an OS other than Windows " specifically, Linux " is a useful additional precaution.

The thing that scares Murdoch and the like into wanting to move web content behind a paywall is not the ABC, nor bloggers, nor aggregators. What scares those moghuls most is firefox, or more accurately, the various browser add-ons that let you control what chews up your bandwidth, most notably AdBlock Plus.

One of the most important facets of business software development is for programmers and users to collaborate on the creation of an object model that encapsulates the work being performed, the people who perform it, and the information that's produced. Agile software development is a popular methodology to reach this lofty goal.

Now that teenage unemployment has reached 25 percent among those still actively seeking work (source), it seems like a good time to look at regulations that might discourage companies from hiring teenagers. Economists have traditionally said that the minimum wage law is the primary weapon wielded by older workers against the young.

In his "Security Fix" blog at the Washington Post, Brian Krebs has an article about a new service being tested by Comcast, which warns customers that the ISP thinks their PC may be infected with malware, by opening a notification windows while the customer is browsing the Web.

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