Reportedly, new labor rules in France require workers to unplug from work when they go home.

Emma Green writes about office speak, and how a culture of efficiency can embrace inefficiency.

Breaking news: Kids think school is boring.

Scott Sumner looks at inequality among doctors, at least as measured by the recently released Medicare payments. One of the more sociologically interesting aspects of it is the gender gap.

According to this report (PDF), going to medical school may have been a bad move for Clancy and other female doctors. That’s kind of depressing.

Relatedly, American mothers would prefer to work part-time if they could, demonstrating the ongoing tension between flexible scheduling and the gender gap.

A man was found guilty of breaking an ecigarette law that doesn’t exist.

Banning chocolate milk from cafeterias resulted in less milk consumption, which has some nutrition folks concerned.

Silicon Valley startup Ploom is looking at blurring the distinctions between cigarettes, ecigarettes, and pot. This makes me uncomfortable.

According to Popular Mechanics, you’d need 10,000 people to colonize another planet.

Which would be easier to colonize, Mars or Venus?

Texas is notoriously stingy with its education spending, usually falling somewhere in the bottom of per-pupil spending. But not some districts and not when it comes to some things. Allen, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas, famously spent $60 million on a high school football stadium that’s larger than some college ones. What does $60,000,000 buy you? Not much, apparently:

Allen ISD officials said Monday that design flaws appear to have contributed to problems with cracking of concrete at the district’s new $60 million stadium, prompting them to close the stadium for the next football season.

Previously, PBK Architects, which designed the stadium, said the problems in the concourse level were probably caused by shrinkage in the concrete.

But an analysis commissioned by the district shows engineers have found design deficiencies at the concourse level, according to documents released to The Dallas Morning News.

Partial findings by Nelson Forensics indicate that some support structures were not designed in a way that would hold the weight anticipated on that level of the stadium.

The Allen Eagles are the state champions in their division.

Lest we think that this is about Texas and their love of football, the same school district is spending almost $40,000,000 on a bus barn.

Actor Michael Jace apparently killed his wife:

Michael Jace, who played a Los Angeles cop in TV’s “The Shield,” has been arrested in the fatal shooting of his wife, police said Tuesday.

Police found April Jace, 40, shot to death in her south Los Angeles home Monday night, Los Angeles Police Det. Lyman Doster said.

Michael Jace, 51, called 911 to report that his wife had been shot, Det. Dean Vinluan said, adding that he “was on the phone with the operator.” Neighbors who heard gunshots also called 911, he said.

Fans of The Shield will remember him as Julien Lowe, initially a beat cop who later moved on to become a member of Vic Mackey’s Strike Team. Lowe’s primary angle was that he was deeply religious and struggling with homosexuality. In the commentary, Jace departed from the other actors in a moderate endorsement of “pray the gay away” (which the Lowe character underwent, with at least temporary sorta-success) which sort of left Michael Chiklis (who played Mackey) trying to avoid saying “Wait. What?”

In any event, it wasn’t a particularly prominent part in the ensemble cast. If I were to write a list starting with the most prominent characters on the show, he’d make near the bottom of the top ten. Which actually make this tidbit kind of surprising:

Jace appeared to be suffering severe financial strain in recent years, according to court documents obtained by CNN. The actor filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in March 2011, citing $500,000 in debts and an annual income of around $80,000 from residuals from his TV and film work, the documents said.

Most of that had to come from The Shield, which is the most successful thing he’s ever been a part of. Which is pretty remarkable, considering that it was a cable show on which his part was not very prominent. That’s a nice chunk of annual change.

High school students are getting a lot of computer instruction, but not much computer science instruction.

In education, classroom time may not matter.

Workplace hierarchies are kind of important, contrary to the belief of some.

Nikil Saval writes about the importance of Office Space. It is unfortunate that a lot of the affection for the movie is reduced to one-liners, as it’s truly a movie of the age.

Natalie Dicou looks at the movement to ordain women in the LDS Chuch.

Bob Somerby weighs in on equal pay, looking at the 77% figure and adjustments for relevant factors.

With the internationalization of space travel, diplomacy can be tough.

Researchers whose work was cited to justify the EU’s more onerous regulation of ecigarettes say that they have been misinterpreted.

Reddit has become a location where men can more safely talk about girl-on-guy rape. Does anyone remember that episode of Picket Fences? It was pretty brilliant.

According to studies, circumcision’s benefits outweigh the risks. We don’t plan to circumcise #2 if it’s a son, though I’m open to the evidence.

New Jersey’s Attorney General’s office has unionized! Under the banner of… the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. (Via CGHill)

Michael Williams observes that Putin is conquering Ukraine by referendum, then asks whether or not this could happen in the United States.

The biggest danger would be Maine, I would guess, or possibly Vermont. That would, of course, require that Canada is actively interested in expanding into the US, and that Maine or Vermont would be worth it. North Dakota for the mineral wealth, perhaps?

I think this line of questioning is backwards, though. The real question is who they United States could conquer by way of this methodology. There could be some interested Mexican states, though there aren’t any states in Mexico that I think we are itching to bring into the US.

So, I nominate British Columbia and Alberta. A couple years ago, Vancouver sought to disavow national support for the Canucks hockey team, after all. And Albert is the only state that has elected senators-in-waiting for the sole purpose of making a statement that Canada’s upper house should look more like ours. I have a better solution…

All we’d have to do is convince them! Throw in Yukon, and we are contiguous with Alaska.

Is George W Bush experiencing a renaissance in time for his brother’s possible presidential campaign? For those of you who missed it, check out his paintings.

Are today’s ministries too focused on the family?

Gay marriage does not, in my view, weaken the institution. Some proposals, I believe, would.

Mark Kleiman writes up a potential hole in the lead-crime theory.

One way to reduce drunk driving may be to elongate pub hours.

Baylen Linnekin looks in on bans on sharing food with the homeless.

The Verge doesn’t let it’s writers look at the traffic numbers for fear that it will taint the process.

According to Matt Asay, more companies are using open source, and not because it’s free.

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at a Polish memorial and helped repair FRG/Polish relations. Should Japan’s Abe do the same? Alexander Lanoszka says not.

Simon and CGHill wonder why the Obama Administration wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, precisely:

If $10.10 is good wouldn’t $5,000.00 be 495 times better? And why stop at $5,000.00? Why not a $1,000,000.00 an hour minimum? Think of the economic improvement to our poorest workers that would give. A minimum wage of $1,000,000,000,000.00 an hour would allow the government to run a surplus with ridiculously low taxes.

Well, the reason why not $5,000 an hour is that most supporters of raising the minimum wage do recognize that there can be adverse effects. Economists all agree on that, though many economists believe that raising the minimum wage by a more modest amount either won’t have much of an effect or will have a marginal one. There are studies to support both arguments for smaller hikes, but a consensus on larger ones. Most of them probably think we could go above $10.10 an hour, but few are under delusion that you can go however high you want.

The interesting part to me is the extra ten cents an hour. Why? I suspect the answer is “thinking ahead.” A lot of supporters of a higher minimum wage will want to raise it again before too long and some states will want to raise it immediately. $10.00 is such an even number that there might be more psychological comfort with that number. It’s not unlike how some states are finding 10% to be the cap for sales taxes. There’s no particular reason why raising it from 9.5% to 10% should be different from 10% to 10.5%, but there is.

$10.10 isn’t as comfortable a stopping point as $10, and that’s a feature.

David Jarman looks at how the Daily Kos has changed congress. As interesting as that, however, is a look at the general shifts that have occurred in congress.

The Tea Party has a candidate selection problem, and the GOP establishment has figured out how to respond.

Market forces are an important factor in the marriage gap.

Scandal! On multiple levels! A homeopathic drug company was exposed when it was discovered they put actual drugs in their products.

Cuba is complaining that forcing plain tobacco packaging is anti-capitalist.

ArsTechnica looks at the first two Ubuntu smartphones.

According to Quartz, Dropbox wants to “own your phone.” I’m pretty sure Google already owns mine.

The crisis in Russia has spawned a (somewhat minor) identity crisis in Germany. My mind has replaced the old “West Germany” with “Germany”… which leads me to forget that it’s not quite that simple.

Germany is often hailed as the superstar of the European economy. It hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it wasn’t that way pretty recently.

Mashable has a great piece on the history of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which is a good read for those of you old enough to remember it and young enough to have used it.

AIM played a critical bridge in my life, in between the old BBS days and the Age of Facebook. When my friends all went off the college, instant messaging was the primary way that we stayed in touch. Or got back in touch, as there was a brief gap in between the BBS and ICQ. ICQ was what most of us used before AIM. It was superior in some respects like keeping automatic logs. But AIM understood the Instant in Instant Messaging, and became the default before too long.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my file server are mountains of old AIM chat logs, sitting next to old BBS logs and some ICQ ones. I was meticulous in my record-keeping. Countless early conversations with Eva, for example, are meticulously recorded. As is the heartbreak that followed. I don’t expect to ever read them, but they’re there for posterity.

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s really kind of surprising that AOL didn’t figure out how to make AIM work for them financially. It was a social network waiting to happen. One that, in my view, could have been strong enough to withstand MySpace and later Facebook had it been remotely well done. They had the userbase, which it turns out is worth quite a lot. There was, as the article says, some critical underinvestment because it didn’t turn around and make money right away for one of the few companies at the time that was used to making money.

Download AIM today! Wait, you can’t… (well, you probably can somewhere, but it won’t work.)[/caption]When Facebook came along, and texting became more prevalent instant messaging (as its own thing) started becoming largely redundant. It’s no coincidence that I discovered Facebook and stopped bothering to install IM apps within a year of one another. Not just because Facebook had its own messaging apparatus, but because it served as the bridge to regular chatting with people that AIM had been.

The company that really ought to be kicking itself is Yahoo. They also had a capable messenger program and a whole lot of the trappings of a social network without managing to put it all together in a Google+ fashion. Given that they were already dependent on advertising revenue, they would have been a natural fit to be a market leader, with comparatively little investment.

Which brings me to Google Plus. Google Plus has hit allegedly hit the skids. The showrunner for G+ has announced his departure and there are rumors that the project is being dismantled, at least somewhat. I personally find Google+ to be superior to Facebook in just about every way except that almost nobody uses. Like Yahoo of yesteryear, Google definitely has the customer base. They’ve got the messenger and more! So why hasn’t G+ succeeded? Timing, as they say, is everything. The key for AOL and Yahoo is that they had an opportunity to jump in the game before Facebook started dominating it. Google entered later.

Contra the doomsayers, though, I don’t see Google Plus going anywhere. The key to Google+ is that it is the unifier of the Google platform. It brings together various Google utilities, everything from Android phones to email to messaging to calendar. Where it hasn’t succeeded is as a social network (given that “nobody uses it” problem). But that’s probably okay.

The purpose of running a social network, from a business standpoint, is that you get to know the users better and can sell them more stuff by having a better idea of what they want, and that when they use your products you’re acting as a salesperson. Google owns so much of me and a lot of other people that it’s hardly necessary that I kvetch on G+ instead of Facebook. If Google Plus does pivot, they should actually make it more formally a “home base” and replace the feed streams with useful things. Of course, they’ve cancelled some of those “useful things” like Google Reader and iGoogle, but unless they can make progress on the social networking thing it makes sense to me to revive Reader in some way and transition the mobile Google Now onto the desktop.

Google, though, has lots of options. Yahoo, on the other hand, doesn’t. Their options are much more limited. But at least they’re not AOL, who had everything they needed to take off and didn’t see the money it.

Colleges are spending more on athletics than ever. The biggest increases, however, are occurring at the lower levels. My own take.

The football players at Northwestern got their union vote, though we won’t know the results for some time. Not all of the players were on board.

It would say something irredeemably ugly if having worked at McDonald’s hurt your career. Fortunately, despite the recent study, it’s not quite that simple.

The “zero hour contract” is definitely indicative of a problem in the labor market. It’s hard for me to see it as not revolving around a worker surplus.

Japan has taken to making killer single malts and weapons. And it’s not just alcohol and weapons.

Japan is reinstating its nuclear program.”

Even if we had an optimal immigration policy, city-based visas would still make sense.

Low-income kids thrive in Salt Lake City, though some are worried that’s changing.

I previously wrote about the phenonon of Hollywood-generated beefcakes. Logan Hill of the Men’s Journal has more.

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the first modern cop drama, Hill Street Blues.