Striped icebergs in Lake Michigan? No! An e-mail currently circulating says that there are striped icebergs in Lake Michigan. "The photos in the e-mail are incredible. Can they possibly be real?" The photos are real. But these bergs aren't anywhere near Lake Michigan. To be classified as an iceberg, the ice must originate from glaciers or the polar ice shelf, according to the National Ice Center, a joint venture of the Navy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Coast Guard. The NIC tracks Arctic, Antarctic, Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay ice conditions. The height of an iceberg must be greater than 5 meters above sea level, the thickness must be 30 to 50 meters and the area must cover at least 500 square meters, the NIC states. Ice often forms in heavy sheets along the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Sometimes, blocks break off, but they are not the Titanic-sinking icebergs with 7/8 of the mass below the surface that can be encountered in the North Atlantic. This e-mail first surfaced in 2008, according to Snopes.com, a nonpartisan, well-respected website that confirms or debunks rumors and urban legends. A version that popped up in January 2010 put the striped icebergs in Lake Michigan. http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-02-13/story/fact-check-icebergs-lake-michigan-no http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/stripedicebergs.asp

Whales in Lake Michigan? No! The whales in Lake Michigan began as a satirical website called Lake Michigan Whale Watching. The site is down now but caused an uproar when a Mormon-based "educational" publishing group in Utah apparently saw the site and did not understand it was a joke (although there was a disclaimer on the site). This group publishes "Studies Weekly" in most US states, and their Michigan version (I think in 2002) carried the story of whales in the lake. This was distributed in some Michigan public schools. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Discuss:Are_there_whales_in_lake_Michigan

Hipmunk is a new flight search site that makes it easy to find the right flight.
Q. How is your approach different from other flight search sites?
A. Other sites make you click through dozens of pages of results to get a feel for the interesting flights. Hipmunk shows you all the interesting results on one page. Hipmunk focuses on helping you find the right flight as quickly as possible—not bombarding you with distractions like ads.
Q. What is Agony, and why would I want to sort by it?
A. Agony is our way of sorting flights to take into account price, duration, and number of stops. There's more to a flight than its price, so we provide this sort to give you better all-around results. http://www.hipmunk.com/

Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library in Chicago, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras. The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages. The scribbler was Mark Twain. “People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.” These are the sorts of matters pondered by the Caxton Club, a literary group founded in 1895 by 15 Chicago bibliophiles. With the Newberry, it is sponsoring a symposium in March titled “Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell.” The symposium will feature a new volume of 52 essays about association copies—books once owned or annotated by the authors—and ruminations about how they enhance the reading experience. The essays touch on works that connect President Lincoln and Alexander Pope; Jane Austen and William Cowper; Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html?_r=1

The American literary tradition is filled with writers who have understood that the power of writing springs not only from the precision of sentences but from the feeling evoked by their rhythm. Here's F. Scott Fitzgerald in the brilliant last sentence of "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Note those effortful "b" sounds—the way they intensify the meaning. Rhythm isn't just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like "Moby-Dick," which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line "Call me Richard"—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn't sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence's strikingly stressed first word. What's more, "Call" and "el" chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that's as sonorous and inviting as "Call me Richard" plainly isn't. Ernest Hemingway developed his innovative style, which used few commas and lots of "ands" and one-syllable words. Consider this sentence—the opening line of his short story "In Another Country": "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more." by Meghan O'Rourke http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160322387772618.html

The Battle of the Titans by Katie Martin
The biggest banks believe the new competitors that have been grabbing their business and staff will soon start to find this battle too tough, particularly as they seek to excel in all areas. "It takes continuous investment," says Zar Amrolia, global head of foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank AG, which has held the top slot in the business for the past six years. Over the past 12 months, he says, the bank has added salespeople and increased technology spending. At UBS, which has the second-biggest market share in the business, a series of technological upgrades and new initiatives is due for release over the course of this year. Christopher Purves, global head of electronic trading in currencies at the bank in London, is circumspect about exactly what the new features will involve. Still, he says, "we have a whole list of things coming out that we think our clients will love," particularly in trading technology. "Competing with the top six is like setting up a burger shop over the road from McDonald's," says one senior executive at a large firm. "You might make a better burger on that street, but you will not compete on a global basis." "Banks want to get into foreign exchange because it's a flow business with a low usage of capital," says Mr. Boillereau at HSBC. "But it's not as easy as people think, and building up takes time. I think the next two years are going to be difficult for the newcomers. Some will give up, but some will carry on." This year will bring a key test of that theory. See table of 20 top-ranked banks in foreign exchange for 2010 at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031241782587256.html

Today, 7.2 million men and women are under correctional supervision. Of this total, five million are monitored in the community on probation or parole and 2.3 million are incarcerated in prisons or jails. As a result the nation maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world at 743 per 100,000 population. The scale of the correctional population results from a mix of crime rates and legislative and administrative policies that vary by state. In recent years, lawmakers have struggled to find the resources to maintain state correctional systems; 46 states are facing budget deficits in the current fiscal year, a situation that is likely to continue, according to the National Governors Association. Many states are looking closely at ways to reduce correctional costs as they seek to address limited resources. States like Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have successfully reduced their prison populations in recent years in an effort to control costs and effectively manage prison capacity. Overall, prison populations declined in 24 states during 2009, by 48,000 persons, or 0.7 percent. The State of Sentencing 2010: Developments in Policy and Practice by Nicole D. Porter February 2011
http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/publications/Final%20State%20of%20the%20Sentencing%202010.pdf