Financial aid per student has grown 37% (or $5,000) over the past decade

An interesting graphic from NPR’s Planet Money series on the cost of college. That’s a 37% increase in financial aid per student since the 2000-2001 school year. The increase is largely paid for by more federal loans, with smaller contributions from federal grants and private loans. Everything else seems unchanged.  

Cell phone recording of police is ok – says Washington D.C. police chief, Cathy Lanier

We’ve written a number of stories about police officers interfering with citizens who are trying to record the actions of police in public places. In some cases, cops have arrested citizens for making recordings in public. In others, they’ve seized cell phones and deleted the recordings. The courts and the Obama administration have both said that these activities violate the Constitution. And …

Unemployment rate at 8.1% – job growth seen in manufacturing, architecture, engineering, and computers

Hiring continued its slow pace in April as employers added a modest 115,000 jobs to their payrolls. The jobless rate inched down to 8.1% last month, the Labor Department said Friday, but that wasn’t because more people were employed. Rather, the rate fell as more workers dropped out of the labor force (about 342,000 workers). …

SpaceX introduces team to test Dragon for manned space flight

Recently, SpaceX “announced it has assembled a team of independent experts to help the company create a safe spacecraft for NASA astronauts.” And, one of them, Edward Lu, is on Google+: “I’m looking forward to peeking under the hood of the SpaceX Dragon, and helping them successfully launch humans into orbit!” More on the company’s …

Apple, changing its ways after Steve via private product briefings

“We’re starting to do some things differently,” Phil Schiller said to me. We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product briefing”. I had no idea heading into the meeting what it …