Quoted: The best iPhone and iPod Touch Applications and Games of 2008iPhone and iPod Touch Best App Ever - Application Awards - Honor the Best, Not Just the Best Selling

click to play

----Track Listing--
There There
2+2=5
Lucky
The National Anthem
Talk Show Host
Where I End And You Begin
Climbing Up The Walls
The Gloaming
No Surprises
Fake Plastic Trees
Sit Down, Stand Up
Go To Sleep
Sail To The Moon
Paranoid Android
Idioteque
Everything In It's Right Place
Just
Karma Police
Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Quoted: threatened a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004. “The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

quoted: Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2. The letter also described studies showing that television exposure at ages 1 through 3 is associated with attention problems at age 7.

Quoted: Fighting heroically to the end while looking good was what it was all about, even if the end turned out to be seppuku — ritual suicide — one way to avoid humiliation or assuage shame. Regardless, arms and armor of suitable grandeur and efficiency were required, and it was by meeting these requirements that generations of artisans helped shape the defining opposition of centuries of Japanese aesthetics: utter, even hermetic simplicity versus off-the-charts ostentation.

Quoted: Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants.

Quoted: hired a bunch of “musicologists,” who sit at computers and listen to songs, one at a time, rating them element by element, separating out what sometimes comes to hundreds of data points for a three-minute tune... Over the previous six weeks or so, the Pandora analysts listened to 650 Indian pieces, and the session I observed was a refresher course. Steve Hogan, who oversees Pandora’s analyst squad, had given a half-dozen of its members the same two songs to analyze. The first was “Raga Ahir Bhairav,” recorded by Bismillah Khan in 1955. But the analysts had not been given this cultural information; all they had for the assignment was the music and their ears.

Quoted: we're focusing on apps that made an impact, whether by way of quality, innovation, popularity, or sheer chutzpah

Quoted: our picks for the coolest of the free programs

The prison industry is looking for inmates

Quoted: after many failed efforts to fill the $27 million jail they built two yeas ago hoping to create jobs, the economic development team of the small town of Hardin, Mont. did the logical thing — they turned their empty, 464-bed prison over to a shadowy private military contractor with a Serbian accent who promised to create jobs and make the town “the safest place in the United States to live