It was like a weather forecaster in Houston last weekend talking about the onset of Hurricane Ike by giving the average wind speed for the previous month.

But many on Wall Street did even worse, as Mr. Berman describes it. They continued to trade very complex securities concocted by their most creative bankers even though their risk management systems weren’t able to understand the details of what they owned.

Quoted: Amidst Wall Street Woes, Labor Activist & Writer Bill Fletcher on “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice”

While the press has extensively covered the Wall Street meltdown, little attention has been paid to what this means to the American worker. We speak to longtime labor activist and writer Bill Fletcher, co-author with Fernando Gapasin of the new book Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice. Fletcher is the executive editor of BlackCommentator.com and the former president of TransAfrica Forum.

For more than 20 years, my mother has worked with computers at NASA. So, when she developed a pain in her hands the diagnosis seemed easy -- Repetitive Stress Injury. Except that it wasn't so easy. As her mysterious symptoms progressed it varied -- RSI, fibromyalgia (unexplained pain), Lyme Disease, and so forth. It was only after visits to many specialists over a number of years that the diagnosis settled -- Parkinson's Disease. Since there is no clear test for Parkinson's -- it is defined by its symptoms -- we only grew certain as those symptoms developed and as her medications began to alleviate them.

KurzweilAI.net features the big thoughts of today's big thinkers examining the confluence of accelerating revolutions that are shaping our future world, and the inside story on new technological and social realities from the pioneers actively working in these arenas.

Quoted: Investors jumped back into the stock market Thursday afternoon after the world's central banks embarked on a coordinated effort to ease the fear coursing through the global financial system, sending the Dow industrials up more than 400 points.

Quoted: What's Snackr? It's an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

Quoted: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney on behalf of AT&T's customers to fight illegal wiretapping: ...

Quoted: Shortly after Tesla held a press conference Wednesday morning touting its $250 million planned plant in San Jose, Calif., Tesla chairman Elon Musk presented his vision of Tesla’s leadership role in the auto industry at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference. Musk said that Tesla has the ability to accelerate the auto industry’s progress toward the adoption of electric vehicles by 5 to 10 years. Lighting even that small fire could be very important if you consider what a decade of delay can do for climate change, he said.

Quoted: TThe brawl between Telsa and Fisker Automotive, the two electric-car startups backed by Silicon Valley’s most well-known cleantech VCs, is heading to arbitration, according to San Mateo court records (hat tip CNET). The court records say that Fisker’s request to take the issue to arbitration has been granted, and CNET quotes a statement from Fisker founder Henrik Fisker that says his company is “extremely pleased” with the court’s decision.