links for 2010-01-05

Imagine going online to buy your next phone, and being able to browse a list of different carrier options to go with it.

Maybe you’d prefer to run it on the Verizon network. Or maybe Sprint (or Vodafone) offers a combination of subsidy and monthly pricing plan that best suits you. If these and other carriers all listed their offers in one place, it would change the experience of buying a phone.

It would be a true Nexus - a Website that sits at the centre, where all the options come together.

According to this year’s annual survey by the Campus Computing Project, far fewer community college students — 35 percent — own laptop computers than at other types of colleges, where the ownership rate averaged 70 percent. The overall rate at which colleges have or are currently phasing out their computer labs is still low, at 11 percent. But at community colleges it is less than 5 percent, with 11 percent expecting to review the existence of their labs in the coming year.

ChangeWave Research reports the public is more excited than ever to buy an Android based handset -- at the expense of Apple, Microsoft, and Palm.

While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

She's on Fox News several days a week. She's about to open up her own strategic communications shop. She's one of the last Bushies standing. And she was just nominated for a federal post by President Barack Obama. So what is it, exactly, that Dana Perino is trying to accomplish?