Everyone’s a researcher, whether you realize it or not. When you buy a new car (or computer, or house, or pair of shoes) you research the options, the prices, the best place to shop. When you go to college, you research the school’s reputation for your field of interest, overall academics and, of course, its [more...]
You’ve got a killer idea! A catchy new jingle for your favorite restaurant chain. A totally cool social networking scheme that will launch Web 3.0. A must-have feature for new cars. A game concept that will make Angry Birds look like chickenfeed. So, how do you contact Burger King, or Facebook, or Yahoo or any [more...]
Get real! No one’s going to sell you a house for a measley buck. Right? Wrong! It’s actually possible, in the U.S. at least, to purchase a house for one dollar. Not only is it possible, but you’d be buying the house from your Uncle Sam — the federal government — so you at least [more...]
What is the future of the Internet? If you were to put any stock in my predictions of the future, we’d all have flying cars and robot butlers by now. So far be it from me to make any guesses what the Internet will look like years or decades from now. But when some of [more...]
From the 1960′s to the 1980′s, the divorce rate in the United States doubled and has remained consistently high since then. Every year, there are about two million marriages in the U.S, and about a million divorces, leading to the much-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce. You might be shocked to [more...]
What, I ask you, could be more alluring than investing in cloud computing? Who wouldn’t want to own a piece of a lovely, white, fluffy cumulus that’s been harnessed to a computer to…wait a minute!…exactly how do you get a cloud to do your computing? Actually, cloud computing is a catchy phrase for what is sometimes [more...]
Whoa boy! Those pictures you posted all over Facebook from your college party days…you kind of wish they weren’t viewable by the whole world now that you’re doing some serious career networking, right? And those angry exes of yours? It’s really not fair, all the nasty things they are posting about you all over the [more...]
Ahh…the dreaded anthology. A piece written by one author and published by one company gets re-published in a book compiled by another author and published by a different company. To make matters worse, the second author retitled the original piece. How, exactly is one supposed to cite an anthology like that in the references for [more...]
We tend to think of URLs — Universal Resource Locators — as a website’s address on the internet, and I suppose that’s the case. But if you look at the strings of text in an address bar, there’s often a lot more going on than just an address. For example, here’s a string that pops [more...]
There’s nothing quite like a good obituary. In a concise and usually heartfelt manner, you get a wonderful overview of the highlights and accomplishments of a person’s life, their important relationships, information on schools and careers, and perhaps just a hint of some of the darker aspects of their time here on Earth. There isn’t [more...]
Finding a list of, say, the Top 500 European Companies is a little trickier than you might suppose. In general, there just isn’t as much freely-available financial information in Europe as you find in the U.S. When you do come across a list, you have to be a bit careful. Which Europe is covered in [more...]
The federal government gives away hundreds of billions of dollars in grant programs every year and you’d better believe that some of those dollars go toward building athletic programs for kids, adults, men and women. Very little of this federal largess goes to individuals, so the very first thing you need to do if you [more...]
It’s very easy to get free magazines, as long as you’re not too choosy. But even if there’s a particular magazine that you’d like to have a free subscription for, you may be able to make it happen. One of my favorite search tools on the internet, Google Books, has tons of online magazines available. [more...]
I have good news and bad news. There are millions of records of World War I soldiers available on the internet…enlistment records, unit musters and roll calls, reports of actions, lists of wounded and dead, commendations and much more. That’s the good news. The bad news is that WWI military information is scattered all over the danged place [more...]
So … your professor/teacher/boss/jedi master has made it known that she wants you to write an abstract with your research paper. Fine. Dandy. Just how does one go about writing an abstract, you wonder? Don’t worry. If you’ve got the research paper (or lab report) done already, an abstract’s not too tough. Most abstracts are [more...]
Good question. Let’s start with what a trademark is. In essence, it’s a brand name for a product or a service. It can also apply to company name if that name is associated with a product or service. For instance, Hertz is a company that rents cars and the company name is strongly associated with [more...]
Oh…so sorry, but you can’t. Copyright your business name, that is. Copyright applies only to so-called creative works and while I know you put a great deal of creativity into your business name, that still doesn’t cut it as far as the law is concerned (and just so there’s no mistake, I’m talking about U.S. [more...]
They say you can’t get something for nothing, and usually they (whoever they are) are right. But occasionally, there is a real deal to be had…something for free that does exactly what you want it to do with no strings attached. You can get a free website and domain name without having to carry any [more...]
The odd thing about an awful lot of sites promising that they can make you money online is that they want your money first! You have to pay to play if you want to learn the secrets of earning an internet income — or so they want you to believe. I’m not saying that there [more...]
I finally got it! A great idea for the Next Big Thing. A toilet seat with a built-in wireless keyboard so you can text and…er, you know…at the same time. Don’t tell anyone, though. It’s a secret. Thing is, how do I find the right people to sell my invention to? I need to find [more...]