Cash for grades?

I’ve heard of bribing the teacher, but this is a bit much.
A school in North Carolina decided it needed to raise some money to buy some new technology.
So Rosewood Middle School came up with an idea where students can pay money to improve their grades. They can buy 20 points on a test for a $20 [...]

TV doesn’t make babies smarter

So apparently, having babies watch TV doesn’t make them smarter.
Neither does watching DVDs, no matter what the packaging says.
Disney found that out the hard way, as they need to start giving out refunds to parents who bought the Baby Einstein videos.
It could be a costly mistake for Disney. This is from a New York Times [...]

Should you get a swine flu shot?

The great debate of the past week has been whether or not people should be getting the H1N1 (swine flu) immunization. 
A lot of people are getting them. Here in Ottawa, the lineups yesterday were five hours longer, and that was early in the day.
*As a side note, can we stop showing pictures of needles, and [...]

Habs player in a sexist ad?

So Georges Laraque, a current member of the Montreal Canadiens (I think: can you be on a team if you play four minutes a game for 30 games a year?)….
Anyways, Laraque is apparently in a bit of hot water for an ad he appeared in to do with an energy drink.
But is it a sexist ad? [...]

Bicyclists vs drivers

One of the big debates this summer (at least here in Ottawa) has to do with drivers versus bicyclists.
It started a couple of months ago when a driver in Kanata hit five bicyclists, and then kept on driving.
It’s come up again now with the news that former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant is charged with criminal [...]

Not another election!

So Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff looks ready to topple the federal government this fall.
Ignatieff believes he can win an election, I guess, but odds are he won’t.
Why wouldn’t he be elected as prime minister?
First off, if he does force an election, it would turn a lot of people off. This would make our fourth federal [...]

Canada and the U.S. as one country?

I never knew this, but did you know that four years ago, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement to become one super country?

 
And they kept a secret from everybody?
Well, that’s the nonsense going on for this week.
Apparently, this American group sent a couple of girls (Brooke Kelley and Cat Pratt) to Ottawa to [...]

Things I don’t understand #4

There are plenty of things I don’t understand.
Some are things that I will never understand (how a car works, for example). Others are things I will never want to understand (such as the popularity of So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars).
And then there are things that really confuse me.
Like why [...]

Best Buy should honour deals

So Best Buy made a mistake on one of its online prices the other day.
They were selling a 52-inch television. Normal price: $3,400. But it went on sale, not for $1,799.99 as it was supposed to be, but $9.99.
So people started buying them. Of course, Best Buy didn’t honour it, as they should have.
I have [...]

Is blogging ruining journalism?

There’s a train of thought out there that the Internet in ruining journalism.
Or more specifically, blogging is ruining journalism.
Ian Shapira of the Washington Post had an interesting column about it last week.
In it, he mentions about how a story of his is condensed into a few paragraphs on a blogging site. At first, he says [...]