The Niche Beat

The Pitfalls of Vocational Tests

Beware of Experts In What Color Is Your Parachute, author Richard Bolles’s cautions readers about the consequences of good and bad vocational testing. He tells the story of a man who was given the Strong Inventory by a counselor then told that according to the test results he had no mechanical aptitude; zip, nada. Traumatized, […]

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The Help

When a Good Idea Doesn’t Sell The international best-selling book The Help by Kathryn Stockett is now a movie with a lot of media buzz, yet it was rejected 60 times before gaining acceptance. his latest literary piece about the civil rights era and the lives of black maids and their employers in the southernUnited […]

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Shepard Fairey And Fair-Use Law

Using Presidential Images In Product Design Street artist Shepard Fairey created the now famous Obama poster and used a photo taken by an Associated Press photographer for his illustration. Fairey believed that he was legally entitled to use the AP photograph under the concept of “fair use,” so he didn’t get permission from the actual […]

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Chesley Sullenberger

Smooth Sailing Sully Sullenberger knew he wanted to be a pilot from the time he was five years old. He built model airplanes and read everything about aviation that he could get his hands on. By his teens, he was flying. When Sullenberger became an adult pilot, and later experienced cuts in his salary and […]

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Time Masters

Watching the Market The Meylan Stopwatch Corporation started out selling ordinary watches via mail order in the 1920’s, until competition forced the company to venture into the stopwatch field, where they began selling their products to sports buffs and government workers. The following decade, Meylan began supplying precision timepieces to the educational, scientific, and industrial […]

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Hidden Talents

Aptitudes of Louis Armstrong & Theodore Geisel Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong is known internationally as a renowned jazz musician, but perhaps only diehard fans are aware that, despite his lack of formal schooling, he was a gifted writer, too. He penned his autobiography solo, without the use of the usual ghost writer or collaborator. Armstrong’s book is regarded as […]

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Einstein’s Smart Refrigerator

Killer Appliances Although many people know Albert Einstein as a scientist, many are probably not aware that he was also an inventor. After winning the Nobel Prize in the 1920s, he began looking for a solution to a deadly problem. Entire families were being poisoned to death in their sleep by the toxic ammonia coolant […]

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Gadget Trouble

Pitfalls of Product Invention A  meat probe allows a home chef to moniter cooking temperature to avoid serving undercooked or dried, tough, overcooked food. However, when the PBS program America’s Test Kitchen reviewed different brands of thermometers on the market, many had serious design flaws. For instance, one model had a cord which was too […]

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Why Teacher Jamal Roberts is the New American Idol

Updated June 3, 2025…originally published May 2012. This update also underscores two key issues: the importance of proper fact-checking and how faulty information can needlessly inflame… Good supplemental lesson for high school students. It’s not easy being green… On May 18, 2025, the second African American male to win American Idol in 22 years was […]

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Shark Tank

Just When you Thought it was Safe to Startup ABC TV’s Shark Tank returned to the airwaves. When this show debuted, I had misgivings about the concept because it seemed as if billionaires were profiting from the work of cash-strapped entrepreneurs, cornered into giving up large portions of their companies for operating capital or face […]

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