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For a while it seemed like the public cared about global warming and wanted to reduce what humans are doing to unbalance the worldwide ecosystem. Now that’s not a certain thing and Al Gore is fighting to reverse the trend. Most of that shift in public opinion is due to some unethical behavior by people close to global warming data which created a breach of trust.

Add some powerful interests to the mix like businesses who don’t want to see new legislation interfere with their current operating practices, or politicians who stand to gain from related lobbyists and we have a magnifying glass on the underbelly of Al Gore’s global warming campaign. But where did it begin?

President Obama's insistence, and for that matter persistence, to stick to his plan of reigniting the job market and stimulating the economy can certainly be admired by those finally back at work. Increased governmental intervention in unemployment, has perhaps, prevented an even more deflated job market than the 9.7% recently reported.

Although stabilizing, the unemployment percentage is still daunting and one question remains to be seen: Is President Obama's next step in his unemployment and stimulus plan finally going to turn the tides on the recession and unemployment?

As President Obama openly admits, the 9.7% unemployment is unacceptable. In Virginia on Friday he said, "Far too many Americans remain out of work, far too many families are still struggling in these difficult economic times."

Global warming is a contentious issue again because skeptics have pointed out inconsistencies with the data scientists are using to measure how much humans are impacting the environment. Setting that debate aside for a moment, scientists have discovered that somewhere around 7 teragrams of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, has been released each year from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. That’s around 7.7 million tons of methane, and the data was aggregated from 5,000 locations. Sound credible?

In a situation like this the argument over who is causing global warming – man or nature – becomes almost irrelevant. It’s important for us to understand how that much greenhouse gas drifting into the atmosphere will affect the climate. Our ability to adapt or prevent that shift in climate may determine the next step in our collective bloodline.

College curriculums and printed textbooks have gone hand-in-hand for a long time, and it looks like that will be the case for a while longer. Feedback was recently published from college students who participated in an experiment that replaced traditional textbooks with an Amazon Kindle DX. That would provide an obvious benefit of fewer things to carry around, and the potential of reducing how much paper is pushed through the education ecosystem.

To sum it up, the Kindle DX didn’t work well as a textbook replacement, primarily because of a loss in productivity and ease of use. Reading textbooks is a much different exercise than reading for leisure because it usually requires note taking. The Kindle DX allows for that through annotations in the margins but students complained that the keypad made for slow text entry.