In May, Halsey Minor—the 43-year-old, San Francisco-based founder of CNET who has an estimated net worth of more than $300 million—bought Edward Hicks’s “The Peaceable Kingdom With the Leopard of Serenity” for $9.6 million. But while New York law requires auction houses to disclose any economic interests they have in artworks they sell, Minor’s attorneys tell the WSJ that he purchased the work on advice from a Sotheby’s specialist and didn’t realize the auction house was selling the work to recoup money owed it by another collector. Here’s the WSJ story, and here’s the complaint. Sotheby’s, which claims that Minor’s suit has no merit and is a “smokescreen” to cover up his failure to pay for art he agreed to purchase, filed a separate suit against Minor last month for failure to pay for the Hicks painting and two others. WSJ Law Blog October 3, 2008

Nonfarm payroll employment declined by 159,000 in September, and the unemployment rate held at 6.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported on October 3. Employment continued to fall in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade, while mining and health care continued to add jobs. The number of multiple jobholders fell by 398,000 in September to 7.7 million; multiple jobholders made up 5.3 percent of all employed persons.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Health Insurance Coverage: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, January - March 2008, by Robin A. Cohen, Ph.D.; Michael E. Martinez, M.P.H.; and Heather L. Free, M.P.H., Division of Health Interview Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics "From January-March 2008, 42.6 million persons of all ages (14.3%) were uninsured at the time of the interview, 55.3 million (18.5%) had been uninsured for at least part of the year prior to the interview, and 31.2 million (10.5%) had been uninsured for more than a year at the time of the interview."

Employee Tenure in 2008
The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008, little changed from 4.0 years in January 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor has reported.
Information on employee tenure has been obtained from supplemental questions to the Current Population Survey (CPS) every 2 years since 1996. The CPS is a monthly survey of about 60,000 households that provides information on the labor force status, demographics, and other characteristics of the civilian non-institutional population age 16 and over. Bureau of Labor Statistics

ACM award
Dr. Randy Pausch is probably best known for being the driving force behind the innovative virtual worlds programming environment Alice and its pedagogy of "playful learning." Alice lets students develop characters and their behaviors in 3D virtual worlds. Not only college students, but also high school and middle school students, learn to do this remarkably quickly using Alice's intuitive graphical user interface, rather than having to grapple with a textual syntax. Using Alice, he created the highly popular and successful course Building Virtual Worlds, in which students from diverse backgrounds learned to work in interdisciplinary teams to create interactive worlds and experiences. Dr. Pausch worked with his Ph.D. student Caitlin Kelleher in the creation and assessment of Storytelling Alice, in which the base technology was extended to provide support for storytelling to give middle school girls a positive first experience with computer programming. Learning to Program with Alice (2006), which he co-authored with Wanda Dann and Stephen Cooper, is in use in over 250 colleges and universities.
Among his other achievements, Dr. Pausch created SUIT, Simple User Interface Toolkit, and innovated formal user testing for theme park attractions and virtual reality. He tested major theme park attractions at DisneyQuest, EPCOT Center, and Disney's California Adventure. For his tools, pedagogy, mentoring, and inspiration not just to his students and colleagues but to our field, and indeed, through his landmark "Last Lecture," to the world at large, Randy Pausch is an exemplar for ACM’s Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

Last Lecture by Randy Pausch—please send home for viewing if you are at work.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=last+lecture+pausch&search_type=&aq=f

I before E,
Except after C
(Or when it's 'eigh',
As in 'neighbour' or 'weigh') The Writer’s Almanac

October 4 is the birthday of the man who said, "Language seems to me intrinsically comic—noises of the tongue, lips, larynx, and palate rendered in ink on paper with the deepest and airiest thoughts in mind and the harshest and tenderest feelings at heart." The humorist Roy Blount Jr., (books by this author) born in 1941 in Indianapolis.
October 4 is the birthday of Edward L. Stratemeyer, (books by this author) born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1862), who created the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and Nancy Drew. After writing about 150 books of his own, he created a team of ghostwriters to write books based on his outlines.
October 5 is birthday of architect Maya Lin, born in Athens, Ohio (1959), who was an architecture student at Yale when she entered the national competition for the design of a Vietnam Memorial, and won it. She beat out her own professor, who gave her a B- in his class.
On October 6, 1883 the Orient Express completed its first journey from Paris to Constantinople (now Istanbul.) It took less than 78 hours. The Orient Express is a luxury passenger train. It was made famous in part thanks to two novels: Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (1932) and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The Writer’s Almanac