March 21, 2:40 p.m. EDT — Full Worm Moon. In this month the ground softens and the earthworm casts reappear, inviting the return of the robins.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22727948/
See dates and times for full moons in 2008 plus the names given them by Native American tribes.

The Borrowers
A secular love song was borrowed by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612), re-worked by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) at least five times, revived by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) in 1829, and recorded in many ways, including "American Tune" by Paul Simon.

Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator
http://www.irs.gov/app/espc/
Have your 2007 Form 1040, Form 1040EZ, or Form 1040A available. You will be entering information from one of these forms.

IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TAC) are your source for personal tax help when you believe your tax issue cannot be handled online or by phone, and you want face-to-face tax assistance.
http://www.irs.gov/localcontacts/index.html

ValueClick to Pay $2.9 Million to Settle FTC ChargesSource: Federal Trade Commission
Online advertiser ValueClick, Inc., will pay a record $2.9 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its advertising claims and e-mails were deceptive and violated federal law. The agency also charged that ValueClick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon failed to secure consumers’ sensitive financial information, despite their claims to do so. The settlement, filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, requires ValueClick to clearly and conspicuously disclose the costs and obligations consumers must incur to receive the products it touts as “free” and bars future violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. The settlement also bars deceptive claims about the security of the consumer information collected at its e-commerce Web sites.
+ United States of America (for the Federal Trade Commission), Plaintiff, v. ValueClick, Inc., Hi-Speed Media, Inc., and E-Babylon, Inc., Defendants
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Do Payday Loans Cause Bankruptcy? (PDF; 1.28 MB)Source: Paige Marta Skiba, Vanderbilt University Law School and Jeremy Tobacman, University of Oxford
An estimated ten million American households borrow on payday loans each year. Despite the prevalence of these loans, little is known about the effects of access to this form of short- term, high-cost credit. We match individual-level administrative records on payday borrowing to public records on personal bankruptcy, and we exploit a regression discontinuity to estimate the causal impact of access to payday loans on bankruptcy filings. Though the size of the typical payday loan is only $300, we find that loan approval for first-time applicants increases the two-year Chapter 13 bankruptcy filing rate by 2.48 percentage points. There appear to be two components driving this large effect. First, consumers are already financially stressed when they begin borrowing on payday loans. Second, approved applicants borrow repeatedly on payday loans and pawn loans, which carry very high interest rates. For the subsample that identifes our estimates, the cumulative interest burden from payday and pawn loans amounts to roughly 11% of the total liquid debt interest burden at the time of bankruptcy filing.
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NOAA: Coolest Winter Since 2001 for U.S., GlobeSource: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In terms of winter precipitation, Pacific storms, bringing heavy precipitation to large parts of the West, produced high snowpack that will provide welcome runoff this spring.
+ Complete analysis
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A group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to Wikipedia, blogs and other forums.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19726473.300-physicists-slam-publishers-over-wikipedia-ban.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
The physicists were upset after the American Physical Society withdrew its offer to publish two studies in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia. The APS asks scientists to transfer their copyright to the society before they can publish in an APS journal.

News release <http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2008/pr08_028.htm> : "Free and green. Those are the goals of a pilot program launched today by the U.S. Postal Service that allows customers to recycle small electronics and inkjet cartridges by mailing them free of charge. The “Mail Back” program helps consumers make more environmentally friendly choices, making it easier for customers to discard used or obsolete small electronics in an environmentally responsible way. Customers use free envelopes found in 1,500 Post Offices to mail back inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players – without having to pay for postage.
Postage is paid for by Clover Technologies Group <http://www.corerecycling.com/> , a nationally recognized company that recycles, remanufactures and remarkets inkjet cartridges, laser cartridges and small electronics. If the electronic item or cartridges cannot be refurbished and resold, its component parts are reused to refurbish other items, or the parts are broken down further and the materials are recycled. Clover Technologies Group has a “zero waste to landfill” policy: it does everything it can to avoid contributing any materials to the nation’s landfills.

karuna (KUH-roo-na) noun
Loving compassion.
[From Sanskrit karuna (compassion).]
A.Word.A.Day